James.galbraith

President Trump and Vice President Pence appear on stage together during the first day of the Republican National Convention. | Logan Cyrus/AFP via Getty Images

The party’s true priority is supporting Donald Trump.

The Republican Party took an unusual approach to writing its convention platform for 2020: It decided not to write one.

Rather, the GOP is reusing its platform from four years ago, which was written before Donald Trump became president. That means Republican delegates will not go through the usual process of deliberating over policies and principles to determine what the party stands for in 2020, as Democrats recently did.

A Republican National Committee (RNC) resolution on the topic says the reason the party has no new platform is the Covid-19 pandemic, which has necessitated a scaled-back convention this year. Since all the delegates couldn’t gather in person, they claim, they’re not doing a platform.

But that’s not all there is to the story. Just a few months ago, word leaked out that Trump’s team, led by his son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, had big plans to shake up the platform by dramatically shortening it — plans that drew the ire of some conservative activists, who were used to exerting their influence on the lengthy document.

So, back in June, the party made the decision to skip platform-drafting entirely and just reuse the 2016 document, citing the pandemic as the reason. It’s unclear if this was done deliberately to avoid messy party infighting over the platform, but it certainly had that effect.

After all, it would have been possible to draft a platform virtually; Democrats just did so. Republicans weren’t prevented from doing the same, but they chose not to bother. Instead of policy, the RNC’s brief resolution on the topic repeatedly cites one major organizing principle that the Republican Party will adhere to for the next four years: support of President Trump.

Why Trump’s team initially wanted to rethink the GOP platform this year

Back in 2016, most of the delegates to the Republican National Convention were chosen while Trump’s hostile takeover of the party was still in progress. And as Trump started to clinch the nomination, he mostly ceded the platform-drafting task to those delegates, a process that was dominated by conservative activists.

This resulted in embarrassing stories about how, for instance, the Republican platform had language signaling support for “conversion therapy” — sending a child to therapy to try to change their sexual orientation. There was also a messy controversy involving a proposed amendment in support of providing lethal aid to Ukraine. Trump advisers helped defeat the amendment, and critics argued that showed they were too supportive of Russia.

Overall, Republicans had a fairly typical platform-drafting process, one in which various delegates are named to a committee and negotiations take place in a way that’s guided but not always controlled by the presidential campaign. It’s a process that seems a bit antiquated. The end product is certainly not optimally designed to serve the interests of the presidential candidate or to speak to voters.

So this May, Axios’s Jonathan Swan reported that Kushner wanted to change all that.

Kushner had been supervising a six-month effort to rethink the platform, Swan reported. One of his main goals was to drastically shorten the lengthy document (“down to a single card that fits in people’s pockets”). He also wanted to ditch some language and policies designed to appeal to conservative activists that he thought could alienate ordinary voters.

Kushner was probably acting at Trump’s behest, if this later tweet from the president is any indication:

But Swan’s story heavily emphasized Kushner’s role in reshaping the platform — one that was guaranteed to be controversial among conservatives, considering that Kushner is a former Democrat and is disdained particularly by cultural conservatives as a New York liberal.

And indeed, the New York Times’s Reid Epstein and Annie Karni later reported that “grass-roots activists were livid” about Swan’s report, and that “some of those discussed organizing an effort to resist what they viewed as [Kushner’s] changes.”

How Kushner’s platform became no platform

As all this was unfolding, so was the Covid-19 pandemic. Until June, Republicans were still hoping to hold a full-blown convention and to bring 50,000 people to Charlotte, North Carolina. The state’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, said this would not be acceptable due to public health concerns. But Trump badly wanted to give his convention speech to a full crowd, so he declared in June that he’d skip Charlotte and have his speech in Jacksonville, Florida.

Republicans weren’t abandoning Charlotte entirely; they still planned to hold some convention events there. But with the president’s change of venue, delegates who made the trip to Charlotte wouldn’t even get to see Trump speak.

So Republican officials announced in late June that they would scale back convention proceedings after all and that part of this effort would involve ditching platform-drafting entirely. The party would just reuse its 2016 platform rather than write a new one.

Republican officials claimed to Epstein and Karni that the final decision was “driven by logistics” and not the controversy over Kushner’s proposed changes. “Republican officials decided it did not make sense to ask about 5,000 delegates and alternates to pay to fly to Charlotte” when the main convention speeches were happening elsewhere, they wrote.

Still, this isn’t entirely convincing. Democrats managed to craft their platform through remote gatherings and calls, and Republicans surely could have done the same if they so desired. The party made a deliberate choice to pull the plug on the platform process entirely rather than try to make it work virtually.

How the RNC is explaining the decision

Some Trump critics have found it amusing that the GOP’s reused 2016 platform has language that now can be read as criticizing President Trump himself.

The platform complains, for instance, that “for the past 8 years America has been led in the wrong direction” and that “our standing in world affairs has declined significantly.” It also declares that “the President has been regulating to death a free market economy that he does not like and does not understand” and that “he defies the laws of the United States.” (All of those were meant to refer to President Barack Obama.)

Of course, read more generously, much of the old platform does remain relevant, like support for the Second Amendment, less regulation, and cracking down on unauthorized immigration. Republicans still believe all these things and haven’t changed their views in the past four years.

Even so, perhaps in response to negative coverage about the lack of a new platform, the Trump campaign released a “second-term agenda” that currently is composed of a few dozen bullet points, like “Create 1 Million New Small Businesses,” without further elaboration or complete sentences. (This may be where the Kushner effort to revamp the platform ended up.)

Meanwhile, the RNC released a resolution about the platform decision which itself makes for somewhat interesting reading.

For one, the RNC says it’s not writing a new platform “in appreciation of the fact that it did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform without the breadth of perspectives within the ever-growing Republican movement.”

That is: They’re saying they’d never want to exclude conservative activists from the platform-drafting process, as the stories about Kushner might suggest was happening. Rather, they claim, they want to be extremely inclusive, but Covid-19 sadly makes that impossible. (Except by doing it virtually, which they’re not even trying.)

The rest of the resolution contains two main themes: proclamations of support for Trump and criticism of the media. Again, this is just from a brief one-page document:

WHEREAS, The RNC, had the Platform Committee been able to convene in 2020, would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party’s strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration ...

WHEREAS, The media has outrageously misrepresented the implications of the RNC not adopting a new platform in 2020 ...

WHEREAS, The RNC enthusiastically supports President Trump and continues to reject the policy positions of the Obama-Biden Administration ...

RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda ...

RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention calls on the media to engage in accurate and unbiased reporting, especially as it relates to the strong support of the RNC for President Trump and his Administration ...

In effect, they’re formalizing what’s been apparent for years now, that the main political imperative of the Republican Party is to support Donald Trump, with some media-bashing thrown in.

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Trump’s magical thinking couldn’t beat the coronavirus. America is stuck with the consequences.

As America, and even his own administration, woke up to the threat of Covid-19, President Donald Trump still didn’t seem to get it. Within weeks of suggesting that people social distance in mid-March, the president went on national TV to argue that the US could reopen by Easter Sunday in April. “You’ll have packed churches all over our country,” Trump said in March. “I think it’ll be a beautiful time.”

The US wasn’t able to fully and safely reopen in April. It isn’t able to fully and safely reopen in September.

The virus rages on, affecting every aspect of American life, from the economy to education to entertainment. More than 200,000 Americans are confirmed dead. Many schools are closing down again after botched attempts to reopen — with outbreaks in universities and K-12 settings. America now has one of the worst ongoing epidemics in the world, with the second most daily new Covid-19 deaths among developed nations, surpassed only by Spain.

America does not have the most Covid-19 deaths per capita of any rich country, but it’s doing worse than most. The US reports about seven times the Covid-19 deaths as the median developed country, ranking in the bottom 20 percent for coronavirus deaths among wealthy nations. Tens of thousands of lives have been needlessly lost as a result: If America had the same death rate as, for example, Canada, about 120,000 more Americans would likely be alive today.

Our World in Data

The Easter episode, experts said, exemplified the magical thinking that has animated Trump’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic before and after the novel coronavirus reached the US. It’s a problem that’s continued through September — with Trump and those under him flat-out denying the existence of a resurgence in Covid-19, falsely claiming rising cases were a result of more tests. With every day, week, and month that the Trump administration has tried to spin a positive story, it’s also resisted stronger action, allowing the epidemic to drag on.

A pandemic was always likely to be a challenge for the US, given the country’s large size, fragmented federalist system, and libertarian streak. The public health system was already underfunded and underprepared for a major disease outbreak before Trump.

Yet many other developed countries dealt with these kinds of problems too. Public health systems are notoriously underfunded worldwide. Australia, Canada, and Germany, among others, also have federalist systems of government, individualistic societies, or both — and they’ve all fared much better.

Instead, experts said, it’s Trump’s leadership, or lack thereof, that really sets the US apart. Before Covid-19, Trump and his administration undermined preparedness — eliminating a White House office set up by the previous administration to combat pandemics, making cuts across other key parts of the federal government, and proposing further cuts.

Once the coronavirus arrived, Trump downplayed the threat, suggesting that it would soon disappear “like a miracle.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) took weeks to fix botched tests, and the administration actively abdicated control of issues to local, state, and private actors.

“There was a failure to realize what an efficiently spreading respiratory virus for which we have no vaccine and no antiviral meant,” Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. “From the very beginning, that minimization … set a tone that reverberated from the highest levels of government to what the average person believes about the virus.”

Several developed countries — including Belgium, France, Italy, and Spain — were caught off-guard by the pandemic and were hit hard early, suffering massive early outbreaks with enormous death tolls. But most developed countries took these crises seriously: adopting lengthy and strict lockdowns, widespread testing and contact tracing, masking mandates, and consistent public messaging about the virus. (Though parts of Europe are now seeing second waves, seemingly because they prematurely relaxed social distancing measures.)

America did not take the steps necessary, even after an outbreak spiraled out of control in New York. So the US suffered a wave of huge cases over the summer that other developed nations generally avoided, leading to new and continued surges in both cases and deaths. And while other developed countries have seen spikes in cases as fall neared, America also has seen cases start to rise once again.

“If George W. Bush had been president, if John McCain had been president, if Mitt Romney had been president, this would have looked very different,” Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me, emphasizing the failure to act after Covid-19 hit the US hard was a phenomenon driven by Trump.

Experts worry that things will again get worse: Colder weather is coming, forcing people back into risky indoor environments. So are holiday celebrations, when families and friends will gather from across the country. Another flu season looms. And Trump, experts lamented, is still not ready to do much, if anything, about it.

The White House disputes the criticisms. Spokesperson Sarah Matthews claimed Trump “has led an historic, whole-of-America coronavirus response” that followed experts’ advice, boosted testing rates, delivered equipment to health care workers, and remains focused on expediting a vaccine.

She added, “This strong leadership will continue.”

The US wasn’t prepared for a pandemic — and Trump made it worse

During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, President Barack Obama’s administration realized that the US wasn’t prepared for a pandemic. Jeremy Konyndyk, who served in the Obama administration’s Ebola response, said he “came away from that experience just completely horrified at how unready we would be for something more dangerous than Ebola,” which has a high fatality rate but did not spread easily in the US and other developed nations.

The Obama administration responded by setting up the White House National Security Council’s Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, which was meant to coordinate the many agencies, from the CDC to the Department of Health and Human Services to the Pentagon, involved in contagion response.

But when John Bolton became Trump’s national security adviser in 2018, he moved to disband the office. In April 2018, Bolton fired Tom Bossert, then the homeland security adviser, who, the Washington Post reported, “had called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks.” Then in May, Bolton let go the head of pandemic response, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, and dismantled his global health security team. Bolton claimed that the cuts were needed to streamline the National Security Council, and the team was never replaced.

In the months before the coronavirus arrived, the Trump administration also cut a public health position meant to detect outbreaks in China and another program, called Predict, that tracked emerging pathogens around the globe, including coronaviruses. And Trump has repeatedly called for further cuts to the CDC and National Institutes of Health, both on the front lines of the federal response to disease outbreaks; the administration stood by the proposed cuts after the pandemic began, though Congress has largely rejected the proposals.

The Trump administration pushed for the cuts despite multiple, clear warnings that the US was not prepared for a pandemic. A 2019 ranking of countries’ disaster preparedness from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and Nuclear Threat Initiative had the US at the top of the list, but still warned that “no country is fully prepared for epidemics or pandemics.”

A federal simulation prior to the Covid-19 pandemic also predicted problems the US eventually faced, from a collapse in coordination and communication to shortages in personal protective equipment for health care workers.

John Moore/Getty Images

Bill Gates, who’s dedicated much of his Microsoft fortune to fighting infectious diseases, warned in 2017, “The impact of a huge epidemic, like a flu epidemic, would be phenomenal because all the supply chains would break down. There’d be a lot of panic. Many of our systems would be overloaded.”

Gates told the Washington Post in 2018 he had raised his concerns in meetings with Trump. But the president, it’s now clear, didn’t listen.

There are limitations to better preparedness, too. “If you take what assets the United States had and you use them poorly the way we did, it doesn’t matter what the report says,” Adalja said, referring to the 2019 ranking. “If you don’t have the leadership to execute, then it makes no difference.”

As Covid-19 spread, Trump downplayed the threat

On February 25, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters that Americans should prepare for community spread of the coronavirus, social distancing, and the possibility that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.”

Six months later, Messonnier’s comments seem prescient. But soon after the briefing, she was pushed out of the spotlight — though she’s still on the job, her press appearances have been limited — reportedly because her negative outlook angered Trump. (Messonnier didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The CDC as a whole has been pushed to the sidelines with her. The agency is supposed to play a leading role in America’s fight against pandemics, but it’s invisible in press briefings led by Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, advisers, and health officials like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx who are not part of the organization. CDC Director Robert Redfield acknowledged as much: “You may see [the CDC] as invisible on the nightly news, but it’s sure not invisible in terms of operationalizing this response.”

University of Michigan medical historian Howard Markel put it in blunter terms, telling me the US has “benched one of the greatest fighting forces against infectious diseases ever created.”

Meanwhile, the president downplayed the virus. The day after Messonnier’s warning, Trump said that “you have 15 people [with the coronavirus], and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” This type of magical thinking appears to have driven Trump’s response to Covid-19 from the start, from his conviction that cases would disappear to his proclamation that the country would reopen by Easter.

This was deliberate. As Trump later acknowledged in recorded interviews with journalist Bob Woodward, he knew that the coronavirus was “deadly stuff,” airborne, more dangerous than the flu, and could afflict both the young and old. Yet he deliberately downplayed the threat: “I wanted to always play it down,” he told Woodward on March 19. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

Trump has long said he believes in the power of positive thinking. “I’ve been given a lot of credit for positive thinking,” he told Axios reporter Jonathan Swan during a wide-ranging discussion about Covid-19 in July. “But I also think about downside, because only a fool doesn’t.” Pressed further, he added, “I think you have to have a positive outlook. Otherwise, you have nothing.”

The concern, experts said, is the signal this messaging sends. It tells the staffers under Trump that this issue isn’t a priority, and things are fine as they are. And it suggests to the public that the virus is under control, so they don’t have to make annoying, uncomfortable changes to their lives, from physical distancing to wearing masks.

It creates the perfect conditions for a slow and inadequate response.

The CDC botched the initial test kits it sent out, and it took weeks to fix the errors. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also took weeks to approve other tests from private labs. As supply problems came up with testing kits, swabs, reagents, machines, and more, the Trump administration resisted taking significant action — claiming it’s up to local, state, and private actors to solve the problems and that the federal government is merely a “supplier of last resort.”

South Korea, which has been widely praised for its response to coronavirus, tested more than 66,000 people within a week of the first community transmission within its borders. By comparison, the US took roughly three weeks to complete that many tests — in a country with more than six times the population.

Asked about testing problems in March, Trump responded, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” In June, Trump claimed that “testing is a double-edged sword,” adding that “when you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people — you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’”

The testing shortfall was a problem few thought possible in the wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth. “We all kind of knew if a biological event hit during this administration, it wasn’t going to be good,” Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist, told me. “But I don’t think anyone ever anticipated it could be this bad.”

Trump also consistently undermined the advice of experts, including those in his administration. When the CDC released reopening guidelines, Trump effectively told states to ignore the guidance and reopen prematurely — to “LIBERATE” their economies. When the CDC recommended masks for public use, Trump described masking as a personal choice, refused to wear one in public for months, and even suggested that people wear masks to spite him. (He’s changed his tone recently.) While federal agencies and researchers work diligently to find effective treatments for Covid-19, Trump has promoted unproven and even dangerous approaches, at one point advocating for injecting bleach. Trump’s allies have even held up CDC studies that could contradict the president’s overly optimistic outlook.

Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images

The most aggressive steps Trump took to halt the virus — travel restrictions on China and Europe imposed in February and March, respectively — were likely too limited and too late. And to the extent these measures bought time, it wasn’t properly used.

The federal government is the only entity that can solve many of the problems the country is facing. If testing supply shortfalls in Maine are slowing down testing in Arizona or Florida, the federal government has the resources and the legal jurisdiction to quickly act. Local or state offices looking for advice on how to react to a national crisis will typically turn to the federal government for guidance.

But the inaction, contradictions, and counterproductive messaging created a vacuum in federal leadership.

In the months after Trump’s prediction that coronavirus cases would go down to zero, confirmed cases in the US grew to more than 160,000. As of September 22, they stand at more than 6.8 million.

Months into the pandemic, Trump has continued to flail

After the initial wave of coronavirus cases began to subside in April, the White House stopped its daily press briefings on the topic. By June, Trump’s tweets and public appearances focused on Black Lives Matter protests and the 2020 election — part of what Politico reporter Dan Diamond described, based on discussions with administration officials, as an “apparent eagerness to change the subject.”

Then another wave of coronavirus infections hit beginning in June, peaking with more than 70,000 daily new cases, a new high, and more than 1,000 daily deaths.

America’s response to the initial rise of infections was slow and inadequate. But other developed countries also struggled with the sudden arrival of a disease brand new to humans. The second surge, experts said, was when the scope of Trump’s failure became more apparent.

By pushing states to open prematurely, failing to set up national infrastructure for testing and tracing, and downplaying masks, Trump put many states under enormous pressure to reopen before the virus was under control nationwide. Many quickly did — and over time suffered the consequences.

Rather than create a new strategy, Trump and his administration returned to magical thinking. Pence, head of the White House’s coronavirus task force, wrote an op-ed titled “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave’” in mid-June, as cases started to increase again. Internally, some of Trump’s experts seemed to believe this; Birx, once a widely respected infectious disease expert, reportedly told the president and White House staff that the US was likely following the path of Italy: Cases hit a huge high but would steadily decline.

Trump trotted out optimistic, but misleading, claims and statistics. He told Axios reporter Jonathan Swan in July that the US was doing well because it had few deaths relative to the number of cases. When Swan, clearly baffled, clarified he was asking about deaths as a proportion of population — a standard metric for an epidemic’s deadliness — Trump said, “You can’t do that.” He gave no further explanation.

Seemingly believing its coronavirus mission accomplished, the Trump administration, the New York Times reported, moved to relinquish responsibility for the pandemic and leave the response to the states — in what the Times called “perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.”

“The biggest problem in the US response is there is not a US response,” Konyndyk, now a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told me. “There is a New York response. There’s a Florida response. There’s a Montana response. There’s a California response. There’s a Michigan response. There’s a Georgia response. But there is not a US response.”

When the coronavirus first hit the US, the country struggled with testing enough people, contact tracing, getting the public to follow recommendations such as physical distancing and masking, delivering enough equipment for health care workers, and hospital capacity. In the second wave, these problems have by and large repeated themselves.

Consider testing: It has significantly improved, but some parts of the country have reported weeks-long delays in getting test results, and the percentage of tests coming back positive has risen above the recommended 5 percent in most states — a sign of insufficient testing. The system once again appeared to collapse under the weight of too much demand, while the federal government failed to solve continuing problems with supply chains. Months after Congress approved billions of dollars in spending to deal with testing problems, the Trump administration has not spent much of it.

Some of Trump’s people seemed to listen to his calls to slow down testing: On August 24, the CDC updated its guidelines to suggest people exposed to others with Covid-19 don’t necessarily have to get tested — a move for effectively less testing that experts described as “dangerous” and “irresponsible.” Only after weeks of criticism did the CDC back down and, on September 18, once again call for testing people without symptoms.

Mask-wearing also remains polarized. While surveys show that the vast majority of Americans have worn masks in the past week, there’s a strong partisan divide. According to Gallup’s surveys, 99 percent of Democrats say they’ve gone out with a mask in the previous week, compared to 80 percent of Republicans. Leveraging surveys on mask use, the New York Times estimated that the percentage of people using masks in public can fall to as low as 20, 10, or the single digits — even in some communities that have been hit hard. Anti-mask protests have popped up around the country.

Karen Ducey/Getty Images

Testing and mask-wearing are two of the strongest weapons against Covid-19. Testing, paired with contact tracing, lets officials track the scale of an outbreak, isolate those who are sick, quarantine their contacts, and deploy community-wide efforts as necessary to contain the disease — as successfully demonstrated in Germany, New Zealand, and South Korea, among others. There’s also growing scientific evidence supporting widespread and even mandated mask use, with experts citing it as crucial to the success of nations like Japan and Slovakia in containing the virus.

It’s not that other developed nations did everything perfectly. New Zealand has contained Covid-19 without widespread masking, and Japan has done so without widespread testing. But both took at least one aggressive action the US hasn’t. “While there’s variation across many countries, the thing that distinguishes the countries doing well is they took something seriously,” Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, an epidemiologist at the University of California San Francisco, told me.

One explanation for the shortfalls in the US response is Trump’s obsession with getting America, particularly the economy, back to normal in the short term, seemingly before Election Day this November. It’s why he’s called on governors to “LIBERATE” states. It’s why he’s repeatedly said that “the Cure can’t be worse than the problem itself.” It’s one reason, perhaps, he resisted embracing even very minor lifestyle changes such as wearing a mask.

The reality is that life will only get closer to normal once the virus is suppressed. That’s what’s working for other countries that are more earnestly reopening, from Taiwan to Germany. It’s what a preliminary study on the 1918 flu found, as US cities that emerged economically stronger back then took more aggressive action that hindered economies in the short term but better kept infections and deaths down overall.

“Dead people don’t shop,” Jade Pagkas-Bather, an infectious diseases expert and doctor at the University of Chicago, told me. “They can’t stimulate economies.”

The window to avert further catastrophe may be closing

As cases and deaths climbed over the summer, and as the November election neared, Trump at times appeared to spring back into action — bringing back coronavirus press conferences and briefly changing his tone on masks (before going back to mocking them).

But Trump still seems resistant to focusing too much on the issue. He’s tried to change the subject to former Vice President Joe Biden’s supposed plans to destroy the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” He’s continued to downplay the crisis, saying on July 28, as daily Covid-19 deaths once again topped 1,000, “It is what it is.” His Republican convention continued to diminish the risks of Covid-19 and exaggerate Trump’s successes in fighting the virus. At a campaign rally in Ohio on September 21, Trump claimed the virus “affects virtually nobody.”

So while combating Covid-19 aligns with Trump’s political incentives (it remains Americans’ top priority), he and his administration continue to flounder. And White House officials stand by their response so far, continually pushing blame to local and state governments.

“There’s no national plan to combat the worst pandemic that we’ve seen in a century,” Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me.

The summer surge of Covid-19 has calmed now, although cases across the US flattened out at a much higher level than they were in the spring, likely a result of cities, counties, states, and the public taking action as the federal government didn’t. Still, cases have started to pick back up again.

Experts now worry that the country could be setting itself up for another wave of Covid-19. Schools reopening across the country could create new vectors of transmission. The winter will force many Americans indoors to avoid the cold, while being outdoors in the open air can hinder the spread of the disease. Families and friends will come together from across the country to celebrate the holidays, creating new possibilities for superspreading events. And in the background, another flu season looms — which could limit health care capacity further just as Covid-19 cases spike.

“The virus spreads when a large number of people gather indoors,” Jha said. “That’s going to happen more in December than it did in July — and July was a pretty awful month.”

There are reasons to believe it might not get so bad. Since so many people in the US have gotten sick, that could offer some element of population immunity in some places as long as people continue social distancing and masking. After seeing two large waves of the coronavirus across the country, the public could act cautiously and slow the disease, even if local, state, and federal governments don’t. Social distancing due to Covid-19 could keep the spread of the flu down too (which seemed to happen in the Southern Hemisphere).

But the federal government could do much more to push the nation in the right direction. Experts have urged the federal government to provide clear, consistent guidance and deploy stronger policies, encouraging people to take Covid-19 as a serious threat — now, not later.

“I’m really concerned that the window might be closing,” Kates said.

Without that federal action, the US could remain stuck in a cycle of ups and downs with Covid-19, forcing the public to double down on social distancing and other measures with each new wave. As cases and deaths continue to climb, America will become even more of an outlier as much of the developed world inches back to normal. And the “beautiful time” Trump imagined for Easter will remain out of reach.

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US President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at The Defense Contractor Complex on August 18, 2020, in Yuma, Arizona. | Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

“The hallmark of the Republican Party is cowardice.”

Of all the “Never Trumpers,” Stuart Stevens might be the most interesting.

Stevens is one of the most successful GOP operatives in the last couple of decades. He helped lead several presidential campaigns (notably George W. Bush’s two campaigns and Mitt Romney’s failed bid in 2012) and multiple gubernatorial and congressional races. He’s as seasoned as they come in Republican politics.

But Stevens stands out among Trump’s conservative critics because of his candor about the deeper rot at the core of the GOP. And in a new tell-all book, called It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, he offers a grand mea culpa for his own role in paving the way for Trumpism. “It is a strange, melancholy feeling to turn sixty-five, and realize that what you have spent a good portion of your life working for and toward was not only meritless but also destructive,” Stevens writes.

Stevens isn’t the only Republican who has criticized the GOP’s capitulation to Trump. He’s part of the Lincoln Project, a group of former Republicans who are spending a ton of money pushing anti-Trump ads. But he is somewhat unique for openly implicating himself and apologizing for his role in the party’s open embrace of nativism and bigotry.

I spoke to Stevens by phone about the story he wanted to tell in this book and why he insists that “Donald Trump did not change the Republican Party as much as he gave the party permission to reveal its true self.” Then we discuss which Republicans, in his words, “bamboozled” him by pretending to care about conservative principles only to toss them out the window the second it was convenient to do so.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

You call yourself a “fool” in the book for believing all those years that the GOP was based on a “core set of values.” What did you think the GOP was all about? And what is it actually about?

Stuart Stevens

Well, I would’ve said back in the Dark Ages, like four years ago, that 90 percent of the party would agree on some core principles. We could differ on issues here and there, but we all mostly believed in the importance of character, in personal responsibility, in free trade, in being tough on Russia, in fiscal sanity and legal immigration.

What gets me is not just that the party has drifted away from all of those things, because sometimes parties do that. It’s that we’re actively against all these things now. I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like that in modern politics and I really don’t think we’ve seen anything like it in American politics. Just a complete moral and policy collapse of a party.

Sean Illing

Let me run something by you. You say “It was all a lie” and that’s a great title, but I look at all this and I say that the lie was the strategy and therefore not really a betrayal in the way you imply.

Here’s what I mean: For several decades, the party has worked hard to keep lower- and middle-class white voters drunk on grievances so that they don’t wake up one day and realize their pockets are being picked by plutocrats, and all that rhetoric about “family values” and “personal responsibility” and “states rights” was always a bait-and-switch designed to obscure the party’s real reasons for existing.

Am I wrong?

Stuart Stevens

It certainly isn’t what I believe, and I think it’s complicated. So you take the Bush era. We thought that it was an admirable policy that fewer people pay taxes. So it was a goal that if you were a family of four and you made $40,000 a year, you wouldn’t pay federal income tax. We thought that was the right way to go. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the right way to go. It’s probably better if everybody pays lower taxes. But I don’t think the people that I worked with — from Bill Weld to Tom Ridge to George Bush to Mitt Romney — thought they were lying when they spoke for those core values. I think they believed it.

I don’t go through the book pointing fingers at this person or that person. I didn’t want to write that book. I think it’s more a collective failure, that if we really believed this stuff, the party would fight for it, but that simply didn’t happen. So that’s the conclusion that I come to in the book.

Sean Illing

You also come to the conclusion that it was always about race.

Stuart Stevens

Yeah, and this stuff goes all the way back to the “Southern Strategy” in the Nixon White House. Race is the original sin of the Republican Party and, again, you can see how this stretches back to 1964. There was obviously a racist element to the party before. I mean, now we view William Buckley as this lost erudite voice, but we forget that Buckley started out as a stone-cold racist defending segregation. His second book was defending McCarthyism. He later recanted and wrote eloquent stuff about why he was wrong. But that element was always there.

I never thought the party was perfect. I freely admit that I was a campaign guy. I admit it, it’s just the truth. I never worked in government. I never really thought a lot about it. I was always in the business of electing candidates and thought of my role like a defense lawyer. In retrospect, I wish had thought about it more.

Sean Illing

I guess my point is that there’s a tendency — one you mostly avoid — to say that the Republican Party lost its soul. But I don’t think that’s true, or at least it hasn’t been true since Barry Goldwater. It’s just the pursuit of power all the way down. Hell, the line from Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump is pretty straight.

Stuart Stevens

Well, I would look at Newt Gingrich as part of the dark side, but I don’t think that was true of George Bush. I really don’t. I think that he felt very passionately about expanding the party. He felt very passionately about the party appealing more to Hispanics. He really cared about education.

If you go back and you read his acceptance speech in 2000, it reads like a document from a lost civilization. It really is about humility and service and helping others. And I don’t think that was phony. I think Bush is incapable of phoniness. I think what you see is what you get with him. And that’s I think what he believed, and I think he believed he could take the party in that direction.

Look, I’ll be the first to say we weren’t perfect in Bush world. I mean, we played too much to the dark side. My biggest regret is signing the traditional marriage amendment in 2004. But that was a different era. I mean, in 2008, every presidential candidate, Democrat and Republican, was against same-sex marriage.

Sean Illing

There’s another way to read the history of the Bush years, but I take your larger point about his disposition. I want to push a little more on this idea that the hypocrisy of the Republican Party “should have been obvious” to people like you but wasn’t. I don’t believe that you were too naive or that you couldn’t see the hollowness of those “marketing slogans” you were peddling.

Was it really just the intoxication of winning?

Stuart Stevens

I was always optimistic to a fault. What I say is that I believed the better angels of the party would win, and I wanted to believe this. Now, how much of my believing it was because I wanted to believe it? I don’t know. I look back at 2016 and see that a lot of people were wrong about Trump. It’s very hard to find anybody who was more wrong than me. I didn’t think he’d win the primary, I didn’t think he’d win the general. And I realized in retrospect it’s because I didn’t want to believe that. I didn’t want to believe this party that I’ve worked in would nominate this guy who’s talking about having sex with his daughter in public. I didn’t think the party would do that. I was an idiot, but I didn’t. And Trump made all of this impossible to ignore.

So then there was the stage that a lot of people went through, and I went through for a while I guess, saying this isn’t really the Republican Party. But I don’t see how you can sustain that. It’s like trying to pretend that the Confederacy wasn’t about slavery. The party has abandoned any positive aspirations or values it might have had.

Sean Illing

The thing about Trump is that he’s so easy to understand. I mean, he’s a tiny tyrant and an emotional toddler.

But I’m dying to understand the political cowardice of Republicans who you say know better but can’t do what they know they ought to do. Are you sure that these people are actually morally conflicted about what they’re doing?

Stuart Stevens

I don’t think they’re morally conflicted. They all believe that Donald Trump is uniquely unqualified to be president of the United States. And they’ve come to grips with that. So I don’t think that they see that as a moral test, because they don’t see any of this as a moral test.

To me, Trump is a mirror image of segregation. I grew up in Mississippi and knew a lot of people that were really nice people. They wouldn’t have used a racist slur any more than cut off their right hand. But they were for segregation more than they were not. They were segregationists, and Trump is very much like that. You can’t negotiate with him or what he represents, in my opinion. What struck me is that maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at this. I mean, I think they’re cowards, but maybe cowardice is the norm, and we should be surprised and shocked by bravery.

I think the cowardice is contagious and courage is far less contagious. And I think the hallmark of the Republican Party is cowardice. No one can tell me that if these Republicans had been in power in 1775, we wouldn’t still be celebrating the Queen’s birthday. You can hear what they’d say: “We’re going to fight the King? Are you out of your mind? The most powerful army in the world? We’re going to work this out.”

Sean Illing

You say in the book that you were bamboozled by Republican politicians you worked with. Give me some examples. I want names, Stuart.

Stuart Stevens

I don’t want to get into naming names, because I think there’s a genre of books settling scores. And I think it invariably gets away from me taking responsibility for myself, because ultimately it’s up to me.

Sean Illing

Explain someone like Lindsey Graham or Susan Collins to me. In some ways, I feel like calling these people cowards lets them off the hook because it implies that they don’t actually believe in the terrible things they’re supporting, that they’re somehow complicit by dint of their circumstances. But I think the most charitable thing you can say about them is that they’re nihilists, and the least charitable thing you can say is that they’re far uglier than they’re pretending to be.

Stuart Stevens

I think they’re just interested in power and don’t care about anything else.

Sean Illing

I mean, isn’t that ... nihilism?

Stuart Stevens

Yeah, that’s the conclusion I come to. That’s why I say the Republican Party really isn’t a political party. It’s a cartel. Why do cartels exist? Why does OPEC exist? To sell oil. Nobody says, “What is the moral purpose of OPEC?”

What does the Republican Party exist for now at the federal level? To beat Democrats —that’s it. There’s nothing else. There is no policy.

Say what you will about Elizabeth Warren, she can at least articulate a theory of government. You can hate it or you can love it, but you can argue with it and she’ll defend it. Can anybody do that on the right with any credibility?

I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it. I compare it to the collapse of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, where the gap between reality and what the party was saying was so massive that it collapsed. I think we’re watching the collapse of the Republican Party. Actually, I know we are.

Sean Illing

You talk a lot about the redemptive power of leaders in the book, but here’s a deeper problem no one has a solution for. The Republican Party is essentially the conservative media universe now. You don’t have voters so much as customers, who’ve marinated for years in a carefully curated unreality where the only unifying principle is owning the libs, and no one can lead this party now without bowing to this element.

What the hell do we do about that?

Stuart Stevens

I actually have a darker view of things.

Sean Illing

Really?

Stuart Stevens

The Republican Party created Fox News. Fox News didn’t create the Republican Party. Roger Ailes just realized this. He didn’t make people like Italian food, he just opened up an Italian restaurant, and it became really popular. And I think that’s more damning because it means Fox only exists because there’s a market for it. So getting rid of it won’t solve any problems. Something else will emerge to take the place of Fox.

Sean Illing

Can there be any accountability for the GOP after Trump? You say the party should be burned to the ground, but what does that even look like?

Stuart Stevens

Well, is it going to be 1964? That’s definitely accountability. Listen, this is why we’re called the Lincoln Project. We have some skills, and we’re doing everything we can to try to beat Trump and Trumpism. I mean, Trump’s out there attacking us, all these people attack us. It’s like, “Are you kidding? We’re political consultants. Attack us all you want.”

We’re not confusing this with any kind of personal nobility. We’re just like carpenters and we can build these things. So I don’t know what else to do. I wake up every day trying to beat this guy.

Sean Illing

You know how it will play out, Stuart. If Trump gets destroyed in November, all of these spineless Republicans will wake up the next day and pretend that none of this shit happened.

Stuart Stevens

Oh, no question about it. I think we’re in for a long period of Democratic government. The country’s future will be decided inside the Democratic Party. The Republican Party won’t have anything to do with it. They can’t come up with an alternative. They don’t want to come up with an alternative. So the battle within the Democratic Party between the AOC or Bernie Sanders wing and the Biden wing, or whatever you want to call them, that’s the debate now.

I don’t see how the Republican Party comes back from this. I think they’ll lose and lose big moving forward. What Hemingway said about going bankrupt also applies to the death of political parties: It happens slowly and then all at once. And as I keep saying, once you have a major political party that validates hate, it’s very hard to undo. And that’s what the Republican Party has done.

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phalse phace writes: Researchers in Hong Kong on Monday reported what appears to be the first confirmed case of Covid-19 reinfection, a 33-year-old man who was first infected by SARS-CoV-2 in late March and then, four and a half months later, seemingly contracted the virus again while traveling in Europe. The case raises questions about the durability of immune protection from the coronavirus. There have been scattered reports of cases of Covid-19 reinfection. Those reports, though, have been based on anecdotal evidence and largely attributed to flaws in testing. But in this case, researchers at the University of Hong Kong sequenced the virus from the patient's two infections and found that they did not match, indicating the second infection was not tied to the first. There was a difference of 24 nucleotides -- the 'letters' that make up the virus' RNA -- between the two infections. Experts cautioned that this patient's case could be an outlier among the tens of millions of cases around the world and that immune protection may generally last longer than just a few months.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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41-year-old Rudy Ferretti "was known in the male-dominated retro gaming community as a champion gamer — and as a raging misogynist who ferociously harassed women," writes blogger David Futrelle. "He once made a homebrew game in which the goal was to kill women. "Last week, he allegedly gunned down his former girlfriend Amy Molter before turning his gun on himself." Wired reports: Longtime members of the retro and arcade gaming scene say they warned community leaders and even police about Ferretti's threatening behavior for years. For close to a decade, they say, Ferretti had harassed, stalked, and threatened gamers, particularly women, pushing some out of the niche gaming scene entirely... Arcade game collector and researcher Catherine DeSpira and video game historian and storage auction buyer Patrick Scott Patterson — two of Ferretti's most public targets — say they collectively contacted police in different states a half-dozen times to report Ferretti's threats against themselves and others. They say those attempts ultimately had no effect. All the while, clusters of retro gamers across the country egged Ferretti on in private messages and on forums, leveraging his apparent instability and misogynist inclinations against women they didn't want in the scene... "They were emboldening it, pushing him, giving him a support system," says Patterson.... The rise of the GamerGate campaign in 2014 gave Ferretti new fodder to fuel his idea that women — specifically "radical feminists," as he wrote in multiple blog posts and said in YouTube videos — were out to destroy the purity of the arcade gaming scene... Ferretti believed that his gaming acumen justified his stewardship of the community. "I can be an asshole. You know why? Because I'm a world champion. I'm a gamer," he once said in a video. As recently as April 2020, Ferretti described himself in a YouTube video as "the savior of the community..." [I]t was a network of institutional failures — from forums to expos to law enforcement — that allowed Ferretti to continue his campaigns for over a decade. "I was trying to tell people this guy Rudy was dangerous and capable of doing exactly what he ended up doing," says Patrick Scott Patterson.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As a reality TV star, Donald Trump seized the White House with an unusual slate of Republican pledges: take on China, tear up trade deals, restrict immigration. But as president, Trump has faced warnings from a long line of GOP stalwarts that he can’t win in 2020 by offering more of the same.

So, as the Republican National Convention looms, Trump and his team have scrambled to find new twists on old favorites to quell concerns about the question that has bedeviled him for months: What would he do with four more years?

A working group of top aides spent the past several weeks reviewing proposals attempting to answer that very question. They’ve discussed ideas to lower capital gains and income taxes, adopt new immigration measures, strike new trade deals and ax additional regulations. And on Thursday, the president is likely to speak about these ideas and more during his convention speech as he tries to draw a sharp contrast with the agenda of former Vice President Joe Biden. On Sunday night, the campaign released the broad outlines of its second-term goals — eradicating Covid-19, creating jobs, ending America's reliance on China, cutting drug prices, expanding school choice and defending the police — and promised to tease them out further over the next week.

Senior administration officials concede the second-term agenda will lean more toward pledges to continue Trump hallmarks than it will toward presenting entirely new ideas, creating a high-wire act for a president trying to both appeal to his base’s long-favored themes while also responding to criticism from within his own party. Looming over his speech is the pandemic and the way it has upended life and decimated the economy — Trump frequently boasts that he can resurrect America’s finances but is evasive about the rising coronavirus caseload, insisting Americans should start to resume their lives.

“No president is reelected on the basis of saying, ‘I’ve done a good job. Reelect me,’” said Karl Rove said, a former senior adviser to President George W. Bush. “They have to say, ‘I’ve got a second act in me.’”

Informal Trump advisers like Rove and former Gov. Chris Christie have been telling Trumpworld both publicly and privately for months that the president must develop more serious second-term plans in order to win reelection. Christie sent Trump a memo in June critiquing the campaign so far, part of which argued Trump needed to articulate his vision for four more years.

And to Trump’s critics, the president’s squishy plans up to this point highlight what they view as his flaws as a politician: a leader more interested in marketing and salesmanship than governing.

“He is a producer of a reality show, and he is a guy who looks for wedges, so this idea of, ‘What would you do with the next four years?’ You might as well ask that question in Greek,” said David Axelrod, the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns. “They can create a working group in the White House, but there is a working group between Trump’s left and right ears and that generally wins out in these discussions.”

Trump officials and allies say any delay in articulating a second-term agenda stems more from the unexpected pandemic and economic downturn than the president’s level of interest in policy or his desire to beat Biden in November.

“He has been so intensely focused on all of the implications of coronavirus and the economic problems that he frankly had not thought about it,” said Newt Gingrich, a longtime Trump adviser and former Republican speaker of the House, when asked about a second-term agenda. “He had a checklist and this came up in late August. You end up with only so much brain space and adrenaline and that is what happened.”

Trump has been given several chances to address the second-term question on friendly terrain but has yet to offer much. Trump essentially avoided the question in June with Fox's Sean Hannity — mentioning “experience” but not naming a single second-term goal. When Hannity gave him a second chance in July, Trump listed a few stock items: coronavirus, bolstering the economy, appointing judges.

So as Trump and Republicans gear up to make their case to the American people this week, questions remain about whether the president, who is running on a platform of “promises kept,” will also be able to define new “promises made.” The Republican National Committee simply rolled over its platform from 2016 saying the president will win with it again in the next election. Fallout from the coronavirus, which has put millions of people out of work, is taking away the president’s plan to campaign on declining unemployment, a focus that helped incumbents like Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush win reelection.

With a struggling economy, the president has struggled to paint a distinct vision for his next four years at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. In speeches and on Twitter, Trump has remained focused on relitigating the past election, the potential perils of mail-in ballots and attacking Biden, even as aides cull through policy ideas.

Inside the White House, a working group that includes chief of staff Mark Meadows, Trump’s policy coordinator Chris Liddell, National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow and aides from the Domestic Policy Council have been working on his second-term agenda — and they have settled on a raft of ideas even as Trump and his team continue to work on his Thursday speech. Campaign officials say Americans should expect the president to roll out his agenda over the course of the GOP convention.

Historically, incumbent president’s second-term plans involve a continuation of existing policies paired with one new big idea, said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. George W. Bush, for instance, pushed to privatize Social Security at the start of his second term, a plan that quickly died once he was reelected. Obama continued to tackle progressive ideas like climate change and immigration, while emphasizing more executive actions, given the Republican-controlled Congress. Reagan spent his second term on an immigration reform package and additional tax cuts, while also focusing on negotiating a major arms agreement with the Soviet Union.

“I assume Trump will continue with deregulation, another round of tax cuts and immigration policy, with one big thing to boast about after reelection,” Zelizer said. “People running for president for the first time have great ambitions, but normally after four years, an administration is more seasoned and has a better idea of how Congress will react, and in some ways, is more prepared.”

White House spokesman Judd Deere said the administration “is engaged in an ongoing policy process for a bold second-term agenda” that moves the country past the coronavirus pandemic and “ensures we are a safer, stronger, more prosperous America.”

Trump campaign spokeswoman Courtney Parella added that Trump will also focus on “reducing taxes and cutting regulations, appointing solid conservative judges to our federal benches and the Supreme Court, protecting health care for people with pre-existing conditions, securing our borders and ensuring we have a reliable coronavirus vaccine to keep Americans safe.”

Trump himself has vaguely teased some lofty foreign policy goals, pushing the questionable argument that countries like China and Iran will be more willing to negotiate with him if Biden loses. Trump recently struck a phase one trade deal with China, but further negotiations have been cut off as relations between the two countries deteriorate. With Iran, Trump has pledged to get Tehran back to the negotiating table by imposing crippling sanctions on the country, although Iranian leaders have shown little interest in talking.

“Trump feels the [Iran] regime is getting desperate, but they know they can’t survive a second term and will have to negotiate on his terms,” said Rich Goldberg, a former Trump national security official working on Iran.

Administration officials said Trump is also aiming to hold a series of meetings with world leaders at the White House in coming months to emphasize his foreign policy credentials. The United States recently announced a deal it had helped negotiate that will establish full diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. And the White House has signaled it may try to get Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin together as part of negotiations over the soon-to-expire New START nuclear weapons treaty.

Yet there has been frustration among some Trump allies that the president remains too focused on things not related to the coronavirus or the economy, like his ongoing fixation with the Russia probe and evidence-free allegations of a government plot to undermine his campaign.

“We’re running out of time to refocus messaging properly,” said a top Republican fundraiser and Trump supporter. “The voters we want to reach in swing states and the Rust Belt are primarily concerned with how we will get their jobs back from China and keep their streets safe.”

Earlier this month, while speaking via Zoom to a promising group of politically inclined high school students, I was met with an abrupt line of inquiry. “I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand,” said one young man, his pitch a blend of curiosity and exasperation. “What do Republicans believe? What does it mean to be a Republican?”

You could forgive a 17-year-old, who has come of age during Donald Trump’s reign, for failing to recognize a cohesive doctrine that guides the president’s party. The supposed canons of GOP orthodoxy—limited government, free enterprise, institutional conservation, moral rectitude, fiscal restraint, global leadership—have in recent years gone from elastic to expendable. Identifying this intellectual vacuum is easy enough. Far more difficult is answering the question of what, quite specifically, has filled it.

Bumbling through a homily about the “culture wars,” a horribly overused cliché, I felt exposed. Despite spending more than a decade studying the Republican Party, embedding myself both with its generals and its foot soldiers, reporting on the right as closely as anyone, I did not have a good answer to the student’s question. Vexed, I began to wonder who might. Not an elected official; that would result in a rhetorical exercise devoid of introspection. Not a Never Trumper; they would have as much reason to answer disingenuously as the most fervent MAGA follower.

I decided to call Frank Luntz. Perhaps no person alive has spent more time polling Republican voters and counseling Republican politicians than Luntz, the 58-year-old focus group guru. His research on policy and messaging has informed a generation of GOP lawmakers. His ability to translate between D.C. and the provinces—connecting the concerns of everyday people to their representatives in power—has been unsurpassed. If anyone had an answer, it would be Luntz.

“You know, I don’t have a history of dodging questions. But I don’t know how to answer that. There is no consistent philosophy,” Luntz responded. “You can’t say it’s about making America great again at a time of Covid and economic distress and social unrest. It’s just not credible.”

Luntz thought for a moment. “I think it’s about promoting—” he stopped suddenly. “But I can’t, I don’t—” he took a pause. “That’s the best I can do.”

When I pressed, Luntz sounded as exasperated as the student whose question I was relaying. “Look, I’m the one guy who’s going to give you a straight answer. I don’t give a shit—I had a stroke in January, so there’s nothing anyone can do to me to make my life suck,” he said. “I’ve tried to give you an answer and I can’t do it. You can ask it any different way. But I don’t know the answer. For the first time in my life, I don’t know the answer.”

Every fourth summer, a presidential nominating convention gives occasion to appraise a party for its ideas, its principles, its vision for governing. Recent iterations of the GOP have been easily and expertly defined. Ronald Reagan’s party wanted to end the scourge of communism and slay the bureaucratic dragons of Big Government. George W. Bush’s party aimed to project compassion and fortitude, educating poor Americans and treating AIDS-stricken Africans, while simultaneously confronting the advance of Islamic terrorism. However flawed the policies, however unsuccessful their execution, a tone was set in these parties from the top-down. They stood for something manifest, even if that something was not always (or even usually) practiced by members of the party.

“If you think about the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution—they’re all about ideas. Parties were supposed to be about ideas,” said Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor and congressman who ran a short-lived primary against Trump in 2020. “John Adams was an ornery guy, but he believed in his ideas. On the other side, Thomas Jefferson, he certainly didn’t live up to the ideas he espoused, but shoot, at least he talked about them. Nowadays, it’s just regression to the lowest common denominator on everything. It scares me. You keep going this way of cult of personality, you will kill our Republic.”

It can now safely be said, as his first term in the White House draws toward closure, that Donald Trump’s party is the very definition of a cult of personality. It stands for no special ideal. It possesses no organizing principle. It represents no detailed vision for governing. Filling the vacuum is a lazy, identity-based populism that draws from that lowest common denominator Sanford alluded to. If it agitates the base, if it lights up a Fox News chyron, if it serves to alienate sturdy real Americans from delicate coastal elites, then it’s got a place in the Grand Old Party.

“Owning the libs and pissing off the media,” shrugs Brendan Buck, a longtime senior congressional aide and imperturbable party veteran if ever there was one. “That’s what we believe in now. There’s really not much more to it.”

With Election Day just a few months away, I was genuinely surprised, in the course of recent conversations with a great many Republicans, at their inability to articulate a purpose, a designation, a raison d'être for their party. Everyone understands that Trump is a big-picture sloganeer—“Build the wall!” “Make America Great Again!”—rather than a policy aficionado. Even so, it’s astonishing how conceptually lifeless the party has become on his watch. There is no blueprint to fix what is understood to be a broken immigration system. There is no grand design to modernize the nation’s infrastructure. There is no creative thinking about a conservative, market-based solution to climate change. There is no meaningful effort to address the cost of housing or childcare or college tuition. None of the erstwhile bold ideas proposed by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan—term limits, a balanced budget amendment, reforms to Social Security and Medicare, anti-poverty programs—have survived as serious proposals. Heck, even after a decade spent trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Republicans still have no plan to replace it. (Trust me: If they did, you’d hear about it.)

Is the cupboard totally bare? Of course not. Members of Congress employ legislative personnel for a purpose; there will always be paper packets gathering dust in subcommittee offices to ward off accusations of intellectual complacency. Some of these efforts are more earnest than others. These days, GOP lawmakers would point to bills touching on areas such as military readiness and intellectual property, which they consider pieces of a coherent and forward-looking national security policy. They would also admit, however, that these measures, which tend to attract bipartisan interest, are hardly the stuff of TV commercials and five-point campaign plans.

When I called one party elder, he joked that it’s a good thing Republicans decided not to write a new platform for the 2020 convention—because they have produced nothing novel since the last one was written. Trump and his party have relied more on squabbles than solutions in delivering for their base. Even some of the president’s staunchest supporters concede Buck’s point in this regard: The party is now defined primarily by its appetite for conflict, even when that conflict serves no obvious policy goal.

The result is political anarchy. Traditionally, the run-up to a convention sees a party attempting to tame rival factions and unite around a dynamic vision for the future. Instead, Republicans have spent the summer in a self-immolating downward spiral.

On Capitol Hill, several House Republicans berated a member of their leadership for defending the integrity of the nation’s top infectious disease expert amid a raging pandemic; one of them, days later, accosted a young Democratic congresswoman on the steps of the House, allegedly calling her a “fucking bitch,” while another one, who had proudly refused to wear a face covering around the Capitol, contracted Covid-19. Things weren’t much sunnier on the Senate side, where one Republican touted a new investigation that would “certainly help Donald Trump win reelection” while his GOP colleague concluded that a separate probe exonerated Trump’s campaign of wrongdoing in 2016 when it did precisely the opposite. Meanwhile, as party operatives worked feverishly to win ballot access for Kanye West, a bipolar Black celebrity who could ostensibly draw votes from Joe Biden, emerging victorious from at least three GOP primaries were congressional candidates who have expressed support for QAnon, the psychotic conspiracy theory that accuses Democrats and Hollywood elites of trafficking and cannibalizing young children. Given a chance to disavow this nascent movement, the president pleaded ignorance and, along with other party officials, embraced these candidates, even the self-described “proud Islamophobe” who has fantasized about immigrants dying en masse.

All the while, Trump kept busy suggesting a delay to the November election and predicting that the only way he will lose is if ballots are rigged against him. He repeatedly misstated the key statistics of the coronavirus and misled citizens about its scale; condemned American cities to “rot” amid continued social unrest and violence; defended the Confederate flag and suggested that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake; promised a “full and complete health care plan” that never materialized; declined to attend the Capitol funeral of civil rights icon and beloved congressman John Lewis; dog-whistled to white suburbanites that Black and brown people are readying an “invasion” of their neighborhoods if Biden wins; extended well-wishes to Ghislaine Maxwell, who stands accused of running Jeffrey Epstein’s underage sex-trafficking ring; pondered a sabotage of the U.S. Postal Service for the purpose of suppressing absentee votes; warned that Biden, a lifelong Roman Catholic, is “against God” and will “hurt God” if elected; indulged an encore presentation of birther speculation, this time with regards to Kamala Harris, the California-born Democratic VP nominee; and, naturally, pressured the governor of South Dakota to make room for him on Mount Rushmore.

This is not a party struggling to find its identity. This is a party in the middle of a meltdown.

The verdict I’m rendering here is both observable in plain sight and breathtakingly obvious to anyone who has experienced the carnage up close. Some Republicans don’t want to see the wheels coming off and therefore insist that everything is fine; others are not only comfortable with the chaos but believe it to be their salvation. In either case, these groups are the minority. Most of the party’s governing class sees perfectly well what is going on. They know exactly how bad things are and how much worse they could yet be. Even as they attempt to distract from the wreckage, redirecting voters’ gaze toward those dastardly Democratic socialists and reminding them of the binary choice before them, these Republicans rue their predicament but see no way out of it. Like riders on a derailing roller coaster, they brace for a crash but dare not get off.

Having written the book on the making of the modern Republican Party, having spent hundreds of hours with its most powerful officials in public and private settings, I cannot possibly exaggerate the number of party leaders who have told me they worry both about Trump’s instability and its long-term implication for the GOP. Not that any of this should come as a surprise. There’s a reason Lindsey Graham called Trump “crazy,” a “bigot” and a “kook” who’s “unfit for office.” There’s a reason Ted Cruz called Trump “a pathological liar” and “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen.” There’s a reason Marco Rubio observed that, “Every movement in human history that has been built on a foundation of anger and fear has been cataclysmic,” and warned of Trump’s rise, “This isn’t going to end well.”

Of course, these are the “before” photos. The “after” shots reflect only the slightest hints of skepticism from these and other Republicans who once denounced Trump but now strain to avoid the wrath of the president and his minions. The rest of the right-wing universe—conservative media, think tanks, activist organizations, financial networks, civic groups, voters themselves—has largely gone along for the ride, and for the same reason: “What about the Democrats?” It’s true that the post-Obama party has stretched its ideological spectrum; it’s also true that Biden’s nomination, on top of the 2018 election results, revealed a Democratic coalition still anchored by the center-left. Not that any such nuance matters. To be a Republican today requires you to exist in a constant state of moral relativism, turning every chance at self-analysis into an assault on the other side, pretending the petting zoo next door is comparable to the three-ring circus on your front lawn.

The spectacle is unceasing. One day, it’s a former top administration official going public with Trump’s stated unwillingness to extend humanitarian aid to California because it’s politically blue and Puerto Rico because it’s “poor” and “dirty.” The next day, it’s Trump launching a boycott of Goodyear, a storied American company that employs 65,000 people, for one store’s uneven ban on political apparel in the workplace. A day later, it’s Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, getting rung up on charges of swindling donors out of money for the private construction of a border wall, money he allegedly spent on yachts and luxury living. It was just the latest in a string of arrests that leave Trump looking eerily similar to the head of a criminal enterprise. What all of these incidents and so many more have in common is that not a single American’s life has been improved; not a single little guy has been helped. Just as with the forceful dispersing of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park—done so he could hold up a prop Bible for flashing cameras—Trump and his allies continue to wage symbolic battles whose principal casualties are ordinary people.

How to process such nihilism? It can be tempting, given that Trump is the fount from which so much of the madness flows, to draw a distinction between the president and his party, between Trumpism and Republicanism. It is also fair to examine the difference between local party politics and national party politics. But these distinctions grow blurrier by the day. At issue is not simply the constant enabling and justifying of the president’s conduct by GOP officials at every level of government, but also the rate at which copycats and clones are emerging. Sure, moderate governors like Larry Hogan of Maryland and Charlie Baker of Massachusetts prove the truism that all politics are local, but so do radical state party chairs like Kelli Ward of Arizona and Allen West of Texas. Unsavory fringe characters have always looked for ways to penetrate the mainstream of major parties—and mostly, they have failed. What would result from a fringe character leading a party always remained an open question. It has now been asked and answered: Some in the party have embraced the extreme, others in the party have blushed at it, but all of them have subjugated themselves to it. The same way a hothead coach stirs indiscipline in his players, the same way a renegade commander invites misconduct from his troops, a kamikaze president inspires his party to pursue martyrdom.

That is precisely what will be on display at this week’s Republican convention—martyrdom, grievance, victimhood. Oh, there will be touting of tax cuts, celebrating of conservative judges, boasting of border security. But accomplishment will not be the sole undertone of the proceedings. The party of rugged individualism will spend as much time whining as reveling. Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters, will be given precious speaking time, as will Nick Sandmann, the MAGA-clad high school kid who was defamed after a confrontation on the National Mall went viral. Other headliners will take turns bemoaning media bias, denouncing the obstructionist Democrats, cursing the unfair timing of the coronavirus, decrying their loss of culture, rebuking corporate America for kneeling at the altar of social justice and accusing the Deep State of stacking the deck against them.

It’s not that America won’t hear from serious Republicans who have real substance to offer, people like Senator Tim Scott and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. It’s that these two, along with the remnant of other sober-minded Republicans, are the new sideshow at a time when the old sideshow has moved to center stage.

Similarly, the problem for the party isn’t that the aforementioned complaints are entirely without merit. It’s that they form no part of a broader construct on which voters can be sold. This continues to be the bane of the GOP’s existence: The party is so obsessed with fighting that it has lost sight of what it’s fighting for.

“I think I have brought tremendous strength back to the party,” the president told me last year, arguing that previous GOP leaders lacked the stomach for gruesome political combat. There is no denying Trump has transformed the party from a country club debater into a barroom brawler. But to what end?

Consider the case of Goodyear. The tire company recently came under fire after one of its locations introduced a policy that allowed employees to wear apparel with slogans supporting Black Lives Matter but not Blue Lives Matter. Also banned, in addition to the pro-police attire, was any Trump gear, including Make America Great Again hats. With the outcry swelling on social media, the president couldn’t resist jumping in. “Don’t buy GOODYEAR TIRES - They announced a BAN ON MAGA HATS. Get better tires for far less!” Trump tweeted.

The silliness of this defies description. For one thing, using the bully pulpit some 70 days before the election to blackball an iconic American brand—one headquartered in the swing state of Ohio—is political malpractice, particularly given this year’s sweeping economic disruption. (Goodyear shares fell 6 percent the day of Trump’s tweet.) Moreover, Trump missed the point of the uproar. Instead of seizing on the chance to affirm his support for law enforcement, wielding the incident as proof of a creeping anti-police prejudice, he made it all about himself. When Goodyear’s corporate office intervened, reversing the store’s policy to allow Blue Lives Matter apparel (but not Trump wear), it was celebrated as a triumph by conservatives. “Goodyear Caves to President Trump, Reverses Ban on Blue Lives Matter at Workplace,” read a headline from The Gateway Pundit, a far-right blog that posted at least four stories about the tire tiff.

But where, exactly, was the victory? Some mechanics in Topeka can once again wear their preferred shirts. But no progress was made on the underlying problem of race relations. Nothing was done to strengthen the trust between law enforcement and their communities. Nowhere was a policy remedy advanced or a cultural reconciliation advocated. It was simply another political hit-and-run, Republicans fighting cancel culture with cancel culture, satisfied to cater to the few rather than build a coalition around the many.

“I think to myself in situations like this, what would Ronald Reagan do?” said Chip Roy, a freshman congressman from Texas. “The difference is, he would have a speech somewhere at some rally or some event. He would make a joke, some Reaganesque quip, that would put Goodyear in their place while making a larger point. But I don’t believe for a minute that he would ignore it, either. He wouldn’t be OK with corporate warlords bending us to their will.”

Roy’s point—that Reagan would have kept the matter in perspective, wielding it subtly to advance his loftier aims—is probably right. Still, that no Republicans seemed upset with Trump for bullying yet another business was stunning. What happened to not picking winners and losers? This was why I’d called Roy. He occupies a unique space inside the party—a lawyer and fiery constitutionalist who was Cruz’s Senate chief of staff and a fierce Trump critic in 2016 but now a congressman in a purple district who can’t afford to alienate the president’s supporters. Still, Roy is as close to a plainspoken conservative Republican as there is in Congress. I was curious to know how he would define today’s GOP.

“Our central mission is to stand up for America. It’s to say loudly and proudly that we choose America. When I go around talking to Texans every single day, what I hear is that they’re proud of this country. And they want us to fight for this country. That’s what ties it all together for Republicans,” Roy said. “The people I talk to—even the ones who maybe get a little frustrated with the president—they look at him as someone who fights for this country.”

There is a place in politics for fighting—and, yes, for culture wars. Some of the great policy debates of this century, from abortion to same-sex marriage to marijuana legalization, were shaped more by social movements than policy debates. The problem for Republicans is that most of the fights they’re picking nowadays are futile at best and foolhardy at worst. NASCAR? Confederate flags? Goya beans? Face masks? To the degree any of these issues move the needle politically, Republicans are on the wrong side of them. What’s worse, there is no connective tissue. There is no focus to the GOP’s incessant appetite for fighting. That’s how they wound up with Trump in the first place. That’s how they’re winding up with people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Laura Loomer. When your war is boundless and undefined, you end up sharing foxholes with some pretty weird allies.

“The GOP has been here before with John Birchers and it didn’t end well,” said Ben Sasse, the Nebraska senator who has been a vocal if terribly inconsistent Trump critic. “The party of Lincoln and Reagan ought to have something big and bold to offer the country, but it’s got way too many grifters selling grievance politics.”

To be clear, these grifters aren’t just shady party operatives and obscure congressional candidates. They are some of the president’s closest allies, people like Matt Gaetz, the cartoonish Florida congressman who is self-grooming as an heir to the MAGA empire. Gaetz knows there is no downside, at least not in his district, to embracing the likes of Greene and Loomer. These candidates didn’t win primaries in spite of their absurdity; they won because of their absurdity.

Whenever I watch Gaetz—who has used his platform to publicly intimidate a federal witness, to host a Holocaust denier as his State of the Union guest, to wear a gas mask around Capitol Hill in a mockery of the Covid-19 threat—I am reminded of the admonition offered by his father, longtime Florida state Senator Don Gaetz, at Jeb Bush’s campaign launch in July 2015. “We cannot save this country,” the elder Gaetz declared, “with politicians who have no principles.”

If there is one principle driving Republican politicians today, it is that traditional American values—faith, patriotism, modesty, the nuclear family—are under siege. There is no use adjudicating this dispute or enumerating the ways in which Trump has himself undermined these ethics. Rather, what’s fascinating to observe is the shift in priorities and proportionality. What was once a source of annoyance and frustration for one sect of the party, social conservatives, has turned into the dominant life force for the GOP. The good news for Republicans is that “grievance politics,” as Sasse describes it, continues to be highly effective in motivating their base. The bad news? It has diminishing returns when it comes to the many millions of persuadable voters in the middle. It’s also especially difficult for an incumbent party to sell grievance to the masses, as it amounts to a tacit acknowledgment of powerlessness. This is perhaps the most baffling aspect of the GOP’s approach to 2020: Instead of downplaying the social upheaval, treating it as a fleeting phenomenon that will pass with time and promising better days ahead, they are highlighting it at every turn, claiming it’s a sneak preview of Biden’s America when it is, factually speaking, the feature presentation of Trump’s America.

“This election feels to me a lot like 1980,” said Whit Ayres, one of the country’s best Republican pollsters. “We had the Iranian hostage crisis, double digit inflation and unemployment. It just felt like events were spinning out of control and the president had little ability to effect positive outcomes.”

Ayres added, “There were doubts about whether Reagan was a credible alternative. They had one debate and Reagan came across as credible—and the dam broke. There are similar doubts about Joe Biden now; not his experience, but his ability to do the job. Can he persuade voters that he is up to the challenge?”

The Democratic nominee took a giant step in that direction last week, capping his party’s impressive virtual convention with easily the finest speech of his entire 2020 campaign. Having soared over the pathetically low bar Trump and his fellow savants set with allegations of senility, Biden has enhanced his credibility and kept the election, for now, a referendum on the beleaguered incumbent.

The pressure is now entirely on Trump. And he won’t have much help. Unlike his opponent, who enlisted a number of broadly popular advocates to vouch for him during the Democratic convention, the president has a thin roster of speakers who can appeal beyond the party base. People like Gaetz and Trump’s kids and the St. Louis artillerists have little capacity to calm a shaken electorate. That sort of reassurance could come from party elders, authority figures such as John Kasich, John Boehner, Mitt Romney and Jeb and George W. Bush.

But those leading Republicans won’t be speaking on behalf of their party this week. Kasich already defected, endorsing Biden during a dramatic speech to the Democratic convention. And neither Romney nor Boehner nor either of the Bushes would speak even if asked. From what I’ve been told, none of them plan to vote for Trump this fall, and the chief reason they won’t say so publicly is they fear it would diminish their influence over the party moving forward.

That might sound strange, a bunch of Republican graybeards past their primes yet still playing the long game. Then again, the future of the party could arrive very soon. A Republican collapse this fall—Biden wins the White House, Democrats flip the Senate and hold the House—would trigger a reckoning within the GOP every bit as sharp as the one associated with Obama’s takeover of Washington in 2008. If that occurs, much of the party’s pent-up irritation with Trump (which often masks long-simmering disgust with themselves) will spill over, and the efforts to expunge this ugly chapter of GOP history could commence with stunning ferocity.

“We have an amazing ability to forget the past and to renew politically. And part of the reason is because we just love to kick out the losers,” said Arthur Brooks, the longtime American Enterprise Institute president who now teaches classes on leadership, business and happiness at Harvard. “So, if Trump loses, a lot of the people who were like, ‘We love Trump!’ are now like, “I never really liked them.’ And that’s just who we really are—political shape-shifters.”

There is no guarantee of this, however. Trump claims an intensity among his following that stacks up against any leader in American history. (“We’ve never seen anything like it,” Luntz said. “It’s like Elvis and the Beatles wrapped up in one.”) At the same time, a Democratic rout in November would come at the expense of Congress’ most moderate Republicans, leaving the GOP ranks smaller but far more concentrated with Trump loyalists. There would be little incentive for these politicians, hailing from the reddest areas on the map, to turn on a president their constituents adore—no matter how badly he loses the popular vote or Electoral College.

Overlooked is the real possibility that Trump could win. That Biden has not built a runaway lead despite enormous advantages—chief among them, the president’s poor playing of a terrible election-year hand—speaks to the effectiveness of Trump’s slash-and-burn mentality. Even as he has failed to win over a majority of voters, he has succeeded in giving them pause about his opponent. It is no small irony that while Trump’s party has no big ideas of its own to peddle, he relies heavily on the bold progressive plans of the left to caricature Biden—all while the Democratic nominee distances himself from ideas like "Medicare for All" and a "Green New Deal."

Brooks, who has so often been a lonely beacon of intellectualism on the American right, advocating a moral politics that emphasizes helping the vulnerable instead of wrestling the left, remains sanguine about the situation. However long Trump remains in office, whatever damage he does to the GOP, Brooks believes it will be temporary. It’s the “fundamental truth” of a two-party system, he said, that coalitions are constantly shifting, parties are continually renewing, politicians are eternally looking for ways to adapt and survive.

“I actually find it kind of reassuring. With [George] McGovern in 1972, it was a colossal wipeout with a hugely mistaken candidate who was completely out of step with mainstream public opinion. Then in 1976, Jimmy Carter, an honest-to-goodness progressive, wins,” Brooks said. “I mean, Richard Nixon gets tossed out of office for blatant corruption. Everybody’s heading for the hills saying, ‘I never voted for him! I’m not a Republican!’ And six years later, Ronald Reagan wins and then gets reelected in one of the biggest landslides in history. These things can heal really, really fast.”

For Republicans, this might be the only silver lining of the summer of 2020. The meltdown we’re witnessing is foul and frightening. It could result in catastrophic losses up and down the ballot this fall. It could also result in Trump’s reelection. In either case, Republicans would do well to remember that he won’t be president forever, that his grip on the base will come and go, that win or lose there is urgent and essential work to do if the party is to be rescued from itself.

“Healthy parties need to build coalitions around a shared vision that speaks to all Americans,” Sasse told me. “Our current course is unsustainable. We’ve got a hell of a rebuilding ahead of us, whatever happens in November.”

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy faced a House Oversight Committee Monday in an often contentious and frustrating hearing during which he repeatedly insisted that the only change he was responsible for at the U.S. Postal Service was making the trucks run on time. He refused to acknowledge that sorting machines have been removed on his watch, that overtime got cut on his watch, and that all the mail deliveries that have been slowed down were a result of these cuts that he's not responsible for and not interested in finding out who is.

That was actually the response from DeJoy to Rep. Katie Porter from California in one line of questioning. She outlined all the changes which he says either didn't happen or he didn't order, and asked, "If you did not order these actions to be taken, please tell the committee who did." DeJoy then said, "I do not know," acknowledging that yes, all this stuff actually happened. Porter then asked, "Will you commit to reversing these changes?" and DeJoy says "No." So it's sort of "nothing to see here, no changes and if there are any they're meaningless," to "I refuse to reverse these changes." That double-speak from DeJoy was the undercurrent of the entire hearing.

The Democrats entered with a smoking gun: the Postal Service report showing that the delays in mail delivery started in July, after DeJoy had begun his changes, and not earlier in the year because of the onset of coronavirus. It’s a report DeJoy had not released to Congress ahead of this hearing as he was required to; the report instead came from a whistleblower. "Mr. DeJoy, you're withholding information from us," Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, the chair of the committee, said in her opening statement, "concealing documents and downplaying the damage that you’re causing." She promised that if the panel doesn't receive all of the documents requested prior to and during the hearing by Wednesday,  "you can expect a subpoena." That includes a request from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for DeJoy's personal calendar, suggesting that AOC and the Democrats might know something about some of the meetings DeJoy has been having that he isn't making public.

There's also more than a hint that Democrats were setting DeJoy up for his fairly obvious lies, like the one about how he's not responsible for any of the changes that he says haven’t occurred—except for making the trucks run on time!—but that he's not going to do anything about. This exchange with Maloney is particularly telling. She reminds him that he testified in the Senate on Friday, and was asked by Sen. Gary Peters if he had discussed any of these changes with Trump, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, or anyone on the Trump campaign, "and you said no." But, she continued, "I believe Mark Meadows has accompanied you to meetings on Capitol Hill, and for the record, do you stand by your statement?”

"I'm trying to remember the answer I gave," DeJoy answered. Which is as big a tell that he's lied to Congress as it gets. Because if you're telling the truth, then you don't have to try to remember what you said. There's definitely going to be follow up to this hearing.

There's more information today about one of the apparently eleventy thousand separate investigations into Donald Trump's personal business dealings, this time from the New York Attorney General's office. And mainly what we now know is that Trump's second favorite son, Eric Trump, is refusing to even be interviewed by investigators probing the Trump Organization's apparent pattern of lying to lenders about their financial condition.

As reported by The Washington Post, Eric's lawyers are citing "the Constitution" as the reason he won't give testimony. That's right, the president of the United States' son is invoking the Fifth Amendment to dodge a law enforcement subpoena investigating President Crimesalot's corporate finances. And the attorney general's office is now going to court to force him to comply.

The Trump Organization and its legal team "have stalled, withheld documents, and instructed witnesses, including Eric Trump, to refuse to answer questions under oath," announced New York Attorney General Letitia James. "That's why we've filed a motion to compel the Trump Organization to comply."

The allegation that the Trump Organization, Trump's personal business and one also employing the rest of Trump's nonprofit-embezzling family, inflated their alleged assets in order to secure new loans, have been credibly swirling for years. The accusations gained new potency when longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified to Congress that yes, actually, Trump had very much been doing exactly that. Attorney General James tells the court in her filing that the OAG "determined that Eric Trump likely possessed information relevant to OAG's inquiry"—followed by several blacked-out lines—and served a subpoena to Eric in late May. Eric originally agreed to be interviewed, only to later change his mind; that, too, might have been intended as a stalling tactic.

To clarify, note again that this is a New York state investigation. It's separate from the unknown Trump-linked investigations still percolating inside the Department of Justice, in the Southern District of New York, the ones William Barr has dedicated himself to tamping out as apparent top leadership priority. Presidents cannot pardon state crimes.

Each day after Louisiana police fired at a Black man 11 times, killing him as he walked away from them, protesters took to the streets of Lafayette in peaceful demonstration, but one protest on Saturday ended with even more police violence, CNN affiliate KATC reported. Protesters blocked traffic near a police precinct, and officers in riot gear released flares and smoke canisters after first warning the crowd. Interim Lafayette Police Chief Scott Morgan said the protesters who organized the demonstration during the day were not the same people there Saturday night who "choose to be malicious." "Our intent is not going to be to just let people disrupt our town and put our citizens and our motorists and our neighborhood in danger,” Morgan said. “We're going to use those resources that we have and those other agencies and we're going to enforce these laws.”

By Sunday, nearly 200 protesters had returned frustrated that police don’t seem to have the same commitment to ruling out police brutality. Many of the demonstrators in the city about 55 miles west of Baton Rouge were there demanding accountability after the death of 31-year-old Trayford Pellerin Friday outside of a gas station, according to The Daily Advertiser. Police claimed Pellerin was carrying a knife when they initially shot a Taser at him then fired at him. Video of the incident showed more than eight officers on the scene. Three officers have been placed on leave since the shooting, but it’s unclear if they were involved in the shooting, KATC reported.

Mayor-President Josh Guillory released a statement The Daily Advertiser obtained Saturday alleging Pellerin was "threatening the lives of the customers and workers inside."While the incident has drawn significant media attention and protests, our personnel won’t be distracted," Guillory said in his statement. "They remain focused on ensuring the health and safety of our people."

The incident is the third Lafayette police shooting in five weeks, The Daily Advertiser reported. Activist Jamal Taylor called for Guillory to resign on the day of Pellerin's vigil Saturday. "When he will not resign because he's arrogant, we have decided to establish a team of people to look at recalling him from office,” Taylor said. “We will not tolerate lackluster leadership from a failed politician who ran for office three times." Marja Broussard, who leads the local NAACP chapter, said the mayor "released a statement that convicted that young man, and the verdict is death."

The ACLU of Louisiana is calling for an independent investigation into Pellerin’s death. “Mr. Pellerin's family and the people of Lafayette deserve answers and an independent investigation of what was clearly an inappropriate and excessive use of force by these officers,” the nonprofit said in a statement. “None of our communities are safe when the police can murder people with impunity or when routine encounters escalate into deadly shooting sprees.”

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One of the nervous tics of the Donald Trump "administration" is a seeming obsession with new arms sales. Trump himself has boasted of and promoted the sales, and began doing so early on; he seems to regard weapons sales as something in his Professional Businessguy comfort zone, something with numbers attached, and hardball negotiations needed, and lots of opportunities for grifting around the edges. Because Donald does best with autocrats (and is generally contemptuous of, for example, NATO), most of the deals have targeted (sorry, bad turn of phrase there) the Middle East.

The latest is a Trump administration plan to sell F-35 stealth fighters to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Yeah, go figure. No, Israel doesn't seem to be too happy about it—but nor are they objecting too strenuously, so we can presume a deal is afoot.

From The New York Times, the rough outline is this: Team Trump wants to sell F-35s and armed drones to the Emirati military, and in an eyebrow-raising move, evidently already "gave a classified briefing" about the stealth fighters to UAE military officials. Among other issues, the UAE's involvement in the Saudi-led and atrocity-filled Yemen war resulted in Congress temporarily blocking further arms sales to both nations; the Trump initiative to sell one of America's most advanced weapons is, to put it mildly, not consistent with that ban.

The initiative also involves a White House-based Army officer who left his position as defense attache in the UAE under murky circumstances. And Jared Kushner, of course. And seems to be, behind the scenes, a negotiated quid pro quo of sorts, with the weapons sales linked to the UAE agreeing to recognize Israel, and Israel being a little less vigorous about opposing the deal than they have been in the past.

The larger strategic premise seems to be that an armed-to-the-teeth UAE would help act as a military counterbalance to Iran, part of the Trump team's moves to turn all policy into a simpler-to-understand "Iran" versus "not Iran" playbook.

So ... hmm. It must be pointed out that so far Trump's team has been relentlessly crooked in seemingly every dealing, large and small, in every agency, from border wall "construction" to post offices to lands management to Trump's private club grift-o-ramas. It seems that by the end of Trump's term everyone within two degrees of separation from the man will be tied up in at least one scandal directly related to trying to siphon money out of the government and into associates' hands.

It would be stranger if the Trump team's drive to make high-level arms deals in seeming opposition to longstanding U.S. policies were not resulting in somebody in this crew making a bit of side coin by facilitating those deals. So that'll be something to watch.

When Sen. Elizabeth Warren virtually addressed the 2020 Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Wednesday night, her message centered mostly on child care affordability and access. Given that she spoke to viewers from the Early Childhood Education Center in Springfield, Massachusetts (which has been closed for months during the novel coronavirus pandemic), that focus makes sense. The senator also talked about Donald Trump’s pandemic failures, as well as the reality that COVID-19 disproportionately impacts Black and brown families. And of course, she addressed fighting Washington corruption.

At the end of her speech, Warren told viewers, "We all need to be in the fight to get Joe and Kamala elected. And after November, we all need to stay in the fight to get big things done. We stay in this fight so that when our children and our grandchildren ask what we did during this dark chapter in our nation’s history, we will be able to look them squarely in the eye and say: We organized, we persisted, and we changed America." Her full speech is well worth a watch for its content—and all of the hidden “Easter egg” symbols and messages hidden in the background.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) acronym spelled out went viral on Twitter, and at a glance, is the easiest Easter egg to notice.

The Dream Big, Fight Hard (DBFH) acronym also got some attention, especially from Warren voters.

With the number you can use to text support for Joe Biden (30330) behind it.

A United States Postal Service (USPS) jacket hanging in one corner feels painfully relevant as people fight to keep the USPS alive in general, and especially with more people shifting to mail-in voting because of the pandemic.

There Statue of Liberty over her shoulder, along with a reminder to vote in the upcoming election on Nov. 3, got some nods from Twitter sleuths. 

Perhaps the least subtle, of course, is JOE.

And don’t miss the hanging pair of Converse sneakers, which the Warren Democrats account identifies as a Massachusetts company. Sen. Kamala Harris also reportedly loves Converse sneakers, adding an extra layer of meaning.

You can watch her full speech below. Do you notice any other hidden Easter eggs?

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Hovertext:
I am prepared to vote for this form of government.

Today's News:

By Amanda Mannen  Published: August 23rd, 2020 

By Daniel Dockery  Published: August 22nd, 2020 

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The kids once created a practically unwinnable version of Candyland and played joyously for most of a day. How I envy them.

Today's News:

Tennessee isn’t making a big deal about it. During a three day special session, the Republican-dominated state legislature passed a new bill last week without making the usual announcement, and Republican governor Bill Lee “quietly” signed it into law on Friday. But despite the way the bill was tiptoed across the finish line, the results are anything but small — because they could make many forms of protest illegal in Tennessee, and threaten protesters with the loss of voting rights.

Since the First Amendment includes “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” it might seem that turning protests into a felony would be not just difficult, but unconstitutional. But Tennessee Republicans aren’t really saying that protesters can’t protest — they’re just making sure that they don’t do anywhere that people can see them or hear them. Or else.

As the Associated Press reports, the bill does a number of things including: 

• Institutes a mandatory 45 day sentence for “rioting”
• Increases fines for blocking highways
• requires that protesters pay for any damage to state property
• makes assaulting a “first responder” a Class C felony with a 90 day mandatory sentence

Most of these changes seem to be addressing events that supposedly occurred in other states, and which have been at the center a “cities in chaos” theme pushed by Donald Trump and Fox News. But the biggest change in the bill is that makes “illegally camping” on state property a Class E felony.

What constitutes “illegal camping?” That’s left up to “the discretion of judges.” This charge was formerly a misdemeanor, generally resulting in a small fine. But under the new law, any protesters staying in the area around the capitol in Nashville could face up to six years in jail. More than that, Tennessee is one of the few states where committing a felony removes the right to vote. So anyone who pitches a tent on state land without permission, or who stays in an area past a curfew, or fails to leave promptly when ordered, could find themselves permanently locked out of democracy.

This last part isn’t theoretical. It’s aimed directly at mostly young, mostly Black protesters who have regularly appeared outside the state capitol in Nashville in the weeks following the police murder of George Floyd. This bill is intended to remove those protesters from the sight of Tennessee legislators. Lee defended the bill as being necessary because of a damage at a state court house back in May, even though no such event has happened in the three  months of protests that have followed. 

How this new law will be enforced is unclear, but it appears to offer numerous opportunities for abuse that would result in protesters facing mandatory sentences, long jail terms, and loss of voting rights even if being completely peaceful.

The National Weather Service is predicting that two hurricanes, Laura and Marco, could both arrive in the Gulf of Mexico during the same period next week.

USA Today reports: If that forecast holds true, it would be the first time in recorded history that two hurricanes muscled through the Gulf’s warm waters simultaneously, according to Colorado State University researcher Phil Klotzbach. It could also be another record breaker for 2020 with the potential for seven tropical cyclone landfalls in the continental U.S. before the end of August. … This hurricane season has lived up to forecasts that called for above-normal activity. The Climate Prediction Center’s most recent estimate was for up to 25 named storms, which would require using the Greek alphabet.

More from the Weather Channel: Throughout the Atlantic Basin, from the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea to the coast of West Africa, it’s common, particularly during the peak of the hurricane season, for multiple storms and hurricanes to be in progress. … However, there was one documented case of two mainland U.S. landfalls happening at the exact same time, and in the Gulf of Mexico, no less. On Sept. 5, 1933, a Category 3 hurricane made landfall at Brownsville, Texas. At the same hour, 12 a.m. ET, a tropical storm moved ashore at Cedar Key, Florida, according to Colorado State University tropical scientist Phil Klotzbach. … So we may witness something exceedingly rare in the U.S. next week. Perhaps it will be yet another oddity to add to the list for 2020.

It’s potentially unprecedented, and #Totally2020: two hurricanes impacting the Gulf Of Mexico early next weekNow is the time to prepare, and trust @weatherchannel to keep you fully informed on track, intensity, flood threat, etc. #HurricaneSeason pic.twitter.com/k1D7Rax6QQ

— Justin Michaels (@JMichaelsNews) August 21, 2020

The shortest time between two separate #hurricane landfalls to hit the United States (not including overseas territories) is 23 hours between the Treasure Coast Hurricane and the Cuba/Brownsville Hurricane on September 4-5, 1933. #Hanna #Douglas pic.twitter.com/8dNqxD6E5j

— Philip Klotzbach (@philklotzbach) July 27, 2020

Since weather records began in 1851, there has never been two simultaneous hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico.

Of course, this being 2020, that's now the forecast for Monday. The names would be Laura and Marco.

We are in a climate emergency. https://t.co/aod6hSoDC3

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) August 21, 2020

Going to be an interesting virtual RNC which Donald Trump purportedly wants to be live more than the #dnc2020 broadcasts, right when two tropical cyclones could be making landfall.

Bring your paper towels! https://t.co/g5ENBqKQ8b

— Grant Stern (@grantstern) August 21, 2020

Unprecedented: Two hurricanes expected in Gulf.

White House announces plan to allow new Oil & Natural gas drilling in Alaska

Trump:”we need some more global warming.”#VoteOrDie https://t.co/V1Y5RhqPny

— Chip Franklin (@chipfranklin) August 21, 2020

The post Because 2020: ‘Very Rare, Very Dangerous’ Twin Hurricanes Expected in Gulf of Mexico Next Week appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

It couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of grifters.

Electric trucks have the potential to displace enough oil to make a "significant dent" in transportation sector CO2 emissions, per a Rhodium Group analysis. Axios reports: There's lots of buzz -- and a lot of money -- around electric trucks these days. It estimates the long-term effects of a recent 15-state nonbinding pact (PDF) to bolster the use of zero-emissions heavy trucks and other medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. California, one of the states, also recently approved mandatory regulations on greatly increasing zero-emissions truck sales between 2024 and 2045. The study also explores the impact if these state efforts were transformed into a nationwide mandate, which would mean more than half the U.S. medium- and heavy-duty fleet would be electric by 2045. "If the [15-state] MOU were expanded nationally, the impact would increase six-fold. By 2035, cumulative oil demand would fall by 806 to 843 million barrels, expanding to 4.6 to 4.9 billion barrels by 2045," Rhodium finds. "The long-term effect of expanding California's approach nationally would reduce oil consumption in 2045 by 16 to 17%," the Aug. 13 analysis notes.

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Leading immigrant rights organizations have filed a lawsuit against acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf and his acting deputy Ken Cuccinelli over their finalized rule that jacks up U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) naturalization fees and shamefully makes the U.S. one of the handful of countries forcing asylum-seekers fleeing for their lives to pay a fee for protections, and seek an emergency block before it goes into effect in October.

The groups say that the rule is not just cruel, it’s been unlawful from the get-go because of a recent report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) finding both Wolf and Cuccinelli, who remain unconfirmed, were unlawfully installed in their positions at DHS. Which means that since they’re not even supposed to be there in the first place, their unlawful policies should be thrown out as well.

Naturally for this administration, the rule is devastating to families: “The rule raises fees for many essential immigration benefit requests by 30 to 266 percent, while eliminating most fee waivers for qualifying low-income immigrants,” said the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) and law firm of Sidley Austin LPP, which sued on behalf of a number of organizations. 

“DHS’s Fee Rule has been widely condemned for its exclusionary impact on vulnerable immigrant families, and particularly people of color. DHS has made the cost of obtaining citizenship prohibitively high for millions of eligible permanent residents,” the groups continued. But the cruelty doesn’t end there: “Through establishing the nation’s first-ever fee for asylum seekers, the Trump administration has also made the United States just one of four countries in the world to impose such a fee on people fleeing dangerous situations.”

The USCIS rule, the groups write in the lawsuit, “is unlawful because it was proposed under Kevin McAleenan and issued under Chad Wolf, both of whom assumed the title of Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security without constitutional or statutory authority. The Final Rule is therefore void and without effect under the Homeland Security Act, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 and the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution. It is also procedurally invalid and contrary to law under the APA. On this basis alone, the Final Rule should be set aside.”

But unlawful Chad and Ken have defiantly refused to budge from the positions they’re not supposed to be in, even as the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) has called for their resignations. “President Trump illegally appointed anti-immigrant white nationalists to run @DHSgov by going around Congress,” tweeted chair Joaquin Castro. “From dismantling the immigration system to tear-gassing peaceful protestors, their authority is illegitimate. Wolf and Cuccinelli must be removed immediately.” In any other job, they would have been dragged out by security. But in a Trump administration, unconfirmed officials get to accuse others of lawlessness while tweeting from their unlawfully designated positions.

Unlawful Chad and Ken must go. So must any unlawful policies they implemented under their unlawful tenure. The administration’s “dramatic fee increases will immediately devastate vulnerable populations and our organizational plaintiffs who serve them,” said AILA’s Jesse Bless. “The planned fee hikes and unprecedented fee to apply for asylum, including an 83% increase for naturalization applications, place an unlawful barrier in the way of individuals eligible for immigration benefits. These wealth tests belong in the dustbin of history.”

In a private meeting inside Trump Tower days before his inauguration, Donald Trump told a group of civil rights leaders something most Republicans wouldn’t dare publicly acknowledge: lower turnout among Black voters did, in fact, benefit him in the 2016 presidential election.

“Many Blacks didn’t go out to vote for Hillary ‘cause they liked me. That was almost as good as getting the vote, you know, and it was great,” the president-elect said, according to an audio recording of the meeting shared with POLITICO.

Three-and-a-half years later, those comments take on new weight, as Democrats and Republicans battle over restrictions on voting amid an historic pandemic.

Trump has repeatedly alleged, without evidence, that expanding mail-in voting will lead to massive fraud, and Republicans have filed lawsuits against a number of states attempting to do so. Higher voter turnout tends to benefit Democrats — low turnout among Black voters in key states is one of the reasons Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016. And voting rights activists have warned that GOP efforts to limit access to absentee ballots could keep many from voting this fall, particularly Black people, seniors and others at high risk from Covid-19.

The coronavirus pandemic was not on anyone’s radar on Jan. 16, 2017, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, when Trump hosted the meeting with leaders from the Drum Major Institute, a voting rights group founded by King and fellow civil rights leader Harry Wachtel. But voting access was. The meeting was requested to lobby Trump on a proposal to put photo identification on Social Security cards to combat voter ID laws.

Attendees included Martin Luther King III, William Wachtel, James Forbes, Johnny Mack and Scott Rechler. Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young briefly spoke to Trump by phone during the meeting.

Wachtel’s then-chief of staff Tootsie Warhol provided the audio to POLITICO this week. The lawyer-turned-activist attended the sit-down and surreptitiously recorded it from his iPhone. Born Theodore Mukamal, he said his motivation for sharing the recording now is that he is in the process of reinventing himself as Warhol, an artist and activist, since leaving his law firm in November.

Warhol has filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for president in 2020, though he described his independent campaign as a new way to engage voters and said he hopes former Vice President Joe Biden wins the November election.

He told POLITICO, “The first thing that I can never forget was how when you walked in, [Trump] name-drops all these Black celebrities and tries to give the illusion that they’re his friends.”

Inside Trump Tower, Trump told the group that he had “so many” Black friends who “are so incredible, and everyone knows that.” At the top of the meeting, he showed off NBA Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal’s sneaker, world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson’s belt and Sugar Ray Leonard’s boxing glove. (He also flaunted Tom Brady’s Super Bowl helmet and his own chair from “The Apprentice.”)

And during the 45-minute meeting, Trump asked the attendees if they were “surprised that Hillary lost so badly” and boasted that he won 11 percent of the Black vote in 2016. Trump lost the national popular vote by nearly 3 million and only won 8 percent of Black voters, according to exit polls, 81 percentage points behind Clinton. Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, and John McCain, the 2008 GOP standard-bearer, won 6 percent and 4 percent of Black voters, respectively.

“Sounds lousy, but Romney was 4 percent; McCain was 3 percent,” Trump said, misstating both candidates’ support from Black voters. “And we did well with the Hispanics, and we did well with women. You know, the women were gonna abandon me, but we did well with them.”

Incoming White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, senior adviser Jared Kushner and two other aides appeared throughout the meeting. Omarosa Manigault, a prominent Black Trump aide who left the administration a year later, was present the entire time.

At one point, Trump left the room to take a call. “Off the record, that was your friend Barack (Obama),” he told attendees upon his return. “We actually have a very good relationship. I said he did a great job last night on ‘60 Minutes,’ and, uh, we actually have a very good relationship.”

Manigault told Trump the group had talked about what the incoming administration could do to reduce crime in Chicago while he was out of the room. Soon after, Trump asked: “Do you know John Lewis? What do you think?”

Days earlier, in an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press,” Lewis said he didn’t see Trump “as a legitimate president” because Russia helped him get elected.

“It really backfired on him because he’s really, you know, it’s what he said is very bad in terms of a democracy,” Trump said. “You run. You win. They even gave me that, right? They gave me the Man of the Year stuff in Time. And then he says, ‘Oh, it’s not legitimate.’ That’s really against a democracy, like or not like.”

Despite that, the president-elect was complimentary of the civil rights icon. “I didn’t know him personally, but I always liked him,” Trump said then of the Georgia Democrat. “I thought he was a good guy, a good icon.”

But when Lewis died last month, after a battle with pancreatic cancer, Trump declined to visit the Capitol to pay his respects, and he was the only living U.S. president not represented at Lewis’ funeral in Atlanta, where former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton delivered eulogies. Former President Jimmy Carter didn’t attend but sent his condolences in a brief letter that was read aloud during the service.

In an interview with Axios’ Jonathan Swan published this month, Trump repeatedly highlighted that Lewis chose not to attend his inauguration in 2017. The president said he didn’t know how history would remember Lewis and that he couldn’t “say one way or the other” whether he personally found Lewis impressive.

“I find a lot of people impressive,” Trump said. “I find many people not impressive.”

In the 2017 meeting with civil rights leaders, Trump criticized the state of America’s inner cities, which he said are in bad shape — a recurring theme of his presidency. And he went on to claim that he listens “better to the African American people than anybody else,” including those in the room, and pledge to “work on the inner cities.”

Trump floated the possibility of another meeting at the White House in one or two months, but Warhol said it never materialized. The White House invited Young to accept a Presidential Medal of Freedom, Warhol said, but Young had already been awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor by Carter in 1981.

“The President is grateful for his support among Black Americans, and their many contributions to helping make America great,” deputy White House press secretary Judd Deere said in a statement Friday. “Donald Trump’s record as a private citizen and as president has been one of fighting for inclusion and advocating for the equal treatment of all. Anyone who suggests otherwise is only seeking to sew (sic) division and ignore the President’s work for underserved communities.”

Former national security adviser Susan Rice argued that she is qualified to hold a variety of Cabinet-level positions in Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s potential administration, including secretary of State and secretary of Defense.

In an interview with American Urban Radio Networks’ April Ryan released on Friday, Rice also contended she had the requisite experience to become secretary of Homeland Security or director of national intelligence, saying: “Do I have the experience to do those jobs? ... Yes.”

Rice noted that she had already led former President Barack Obama’s National Security Council and served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, but she said her involvement in a future administration “is not up to me.”

“This is up to the next president of the United States and the Senate, if these are going to be Senate-confirmed positions,” she said. “So, let’s just hold our horses here. Job one … is we’ve got to get Joe Biden and Kamala Harris elected.”

Rice emphasized that Democrats also must take back the Republican-controlled Senate in the November election, “and then Joe Biden needs to decide what team he wants around him in what constellation.”

Rice was reportedly among the top tier of female candidates under consideration to become Biden’s running mate, a role that ultimately went to California Sen. Kamala Harris. Harris formally accepted the Democratic vice presidential nomination on Wednesday at the party’s convention.

Rice’s name is now often mentioned as a likely pick for secretary of State should Biden win office. In 2012, she memorably took herself out of the running to succeed Hillary Clinton atop the State Department amid criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of the terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

Instead, Obama tapped her to become his national security adviser, a position that does not require Senate approval. Her potential confirmation process for a role in a future Biden administration would face obstacles should Republicans maintain control of the Senate after 2020.

Rice enjoys a familiar working relationship with Biden, her former Obama administration colleague, and she is widely respected within the Democratic Party for her vast knowledge of international politics, diplomatic savvy and extensive executive branch experience.

Rice’s career in public service began on former President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, where she served from 1993-1997 as director for International Organizations and Peacekeeping, as well as special assistant to the president and senior director for African Affairs.

Clinton then appointed Rice as assistant secretary of State for African Affairs, a role she served in from 1997-2001. Rice served under the next Democratic administration as Obama’s U.N. envoy from 2009-2013, and she went on to become his top national security aide from 2013-2017.

Last week, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis stood in an almost empty room, his sign language interpreter no fewer than six feet away from him, and told Floridians that reopening schools was analogous to the Navy Seal operation that killed Osama bin Laden. Gov. DeSantis took this comparison about as far as that last sentence and then talked about how Florida schools would still be reopening. Go fight international terrorism, kids! Schools across the country are trying to figure out ways to open and whether entirely virtual, entirely in-person, or a hybrid of the two are best for the safety of kids and staff. Their personal networks of family and friends are all anxious.

According to the Miami Herald, Miami-Dade County Public Schools has almost 600 employees who have tested positive for COVID-19. This number is about 600% larger than the figure that Superintendent Alberto Carvalho’s chief of staff at Miami-Dade Schools gave the press in July. Separately, Miami-Dade Schools Police Department Union President Al Pacio says that at least seven officers have reported positive tests. Whether or not any of these staff members or police personnel came into contact with the state’s most dangerous COVID-19 spreader, Gov. DeSantis, is unknown.

These numbers come on the heels of July data showing escalating cases of COVID-19 in children. On Friday, the Sunshine State reported 4,684 new coronavirus cases and 119 deaths due to COVID-19. Officials say that “positivity rates” have been going down, and that it’s a good sign. Of course, positivity rates are entirely connected to testing, and we have seen that Florida—like many American municipalities—has been woefully behind on the kind of robust and speedy testing needed to make real sense of positivity rates.

Miami-Dade County has had almost 150,000 COVID-19 cases, with 2,185 deaths related to COVID-19. Because Florida officials were some of the earliest to try to obfuscate the true nature of the virus in their state, the likelihood that the officials’ numbers are woefully short of the actual numbers is very high.

We need to turn out Democratic voters to defeat Trump in November, even during a pandemic. You can help out from home, no matter where you live, by writing personalized letters to infrequent, but Democratic-leaning, voters in swing states. Click here to set up an account with Vote Forward, the most popular get-out-the-vote activity among Daily Kos activists.

It’s clear that Covid-19 has affected groups differently across the United States. By geography. By education level. By income. The Marshall Project breaks down excess deaths by race:

Earlier data on cases, hospitalizations and deaths revealed the especially heavy toll on Black, Hispanic and Native Americans, a disparity attributed to unequal access to health care and economic opportunities. But the increases in total deaths by race were not reported until now; nor was the disproportionate burden of the disease on Asian Americans.

With this new data, Asian Americans join Blacks and Hispanics among the hardest-hit communities, with deaths in each group up at least 30 percent this year compared with the average over the last five years, the analysis found. Deaths among Native Americans rose more than 20 percent, though that is probably a severe undercount because of a lack of data. Deaths among Whites were up 9 percent.

Difference charts are used to show deaths above (red) or below (turquoise) normal counts, but of course, it’s mostly red.

See the piece for an additional categorization by state.

Tags: coronavirus, Marshall Project, race

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has emerged as a central figure in basically everything that's gone wrong at the U.S. Postal Service (USPS)—from selection of an unqualified postmaster general right down to the mysterious removal of mailboxes across the country. As leader of the White House task force to overhaul the agency, Mnuchin's role appears to be total.

The latest piece of information came from former USPS Inspector General David Williams, who told the Congressional Progressive Caucus at a hearing Thursday that Mnuchin had a hand in the recent removal of iconic blue mailboxes across the country.

Williams called removal of the blue boxes "the most interesting of all," saying his understanding was that "Secretary Mnuchin wanted that done." Williams said: "I asked the Postal Service about it, and they said it wouldn't save anything. And there would be no reason to remove those. I'm not sure how it went from that, several weeks ago, to where they're being uprooted from all over."

Williams also explained that the agency saved absolutely no money by dismantling the mail sorting machines, but it did sacrifice its capacity to deal with high-volume surges. 

"You don't save money by breaking down machines and putting them away and storing them," he said, calling it a "very odd action" to take. Williams noted the reason to keep those sorting machines up and running is specifically to deal with something like a Hurricane Katrina, a 9/11, a pandemic, or an election. "Removing those is thinning out the Postal Service's ability to redirect mail in an incident like that."

So in essence, there was no financial benefit to removing mailboxes or dismantling sorting machines—the only upside is the downside of making USPS less efficient.

And that appears to be the motivation behind just about every change Mnuchin has pushed for and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has implemented. According to information uncovered by Citizens for the Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Mnuchin's goal was to make USPS less competitive in relation to UPS and FedEx.

In Mnuchin’s letter to the board of governors, he had requested an analysis of USPS’s “pricing structure in the e-commerce ground package delivery market.” He mentioned that FedEx experienced a decline in operating results because of the competitive pricing environment. It seems that Mnuchin was angling for higher USPS prices, not just to keep the agency solvent but also to give a boost to UPS and FedEx, companies with close ties to the Trump administration.

Naturally, USPS is supposed to be an independent, apolitical organization, as stated in its charter. So any involvement by Mnuchin or the White House in decisions at the agency is a violation of its charter.

But Williams said Mnuchin has taken an active role in decisions at the agency right from the start, beginning with Donald Trump's four Republican appointees to the agency's board of governors having to meet with Mnuchin before confirmation in order to "kiss the ring." The board now includes six Trump appointees overall: four Republicans and two Democrats.

But following confirmation, Williams said Mnuchin stayed in active contact with the GOP board members, relaying either his approval or disappointment with their performance, according to NBC News.  

"I've never seen anything like that," said Williams, who offered his resignation several days before DeJoy was named due to politicization of the agency.

Mnuchin also recruited DeJoy—a major GOP donor with close ties to Trump himself—and pushed for his installation as postmaster general despite the fact that he would be the first postmaster in two decades with no agency experience. DeJoy also has massive financial conflicts of interest, including $30 million and $75 million in assets in other USPS contractors and competitors, according to CREW.

In fact, DeJoy's financial conflicts and intimate knowledge of the logistics industry he's worked in for most of his adult life were surely an asset in the mind of Mnuchin, who has also acted very curiously in regard to congressional efforts to shore up USPS financially in the wake of the coronavirus.

Although Congress included a $10 million loan to USPS in the several-trillion-dollar CARES Act approved last spring, Mnuchin personally blocked lawmakers’ efforts to simply grant the money to agency, and then for months he stalled release of the money. When Mnuchin finally did release the funding late last month, he only did so according to terms that required the Postal Service to disclose its proprietary service agreements with Amazon and other companies to the Treasury Department. In other words, Mnuchin held the funding hostage until he could get the proprietary information he wanted from the Postal Service.

Wow. That seems completely legit for a guy who's obviously intent on kneecapping the agency's market position and a postmaster general who has every reason to dismantle USPS from top to bottom.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
That's just professor hair, not an affectation.

Today's News:

Synology today added a new NAS to its lineup: "DiskStation DS1520+," with five bays. It also has two NVMe PCIe SSD slots for cache. From a report: "Featuring the Intel Celeron Processor J4125, DS1520+ provides a performance boost that sees a 126 percent increase in website responsiveness and a 19.8 percent increase in compute-tasks. The DS1520+ provides dual M.2 2280 NVMe SSD cache slots, along with four 1GbE network ports. DS1520+ comes equipped with five bays that support HDDs and SSDs of up to 16TB. If the need for storage grows, users can expand their DS1520+ using Synology expansion units (purchased separately), giving users a maximum raw capacity of 240TB," says Synology. It's priced at $700, but BetaNews, which has listed the full specs and other details, says Amazon is already selling it at $650.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.