James.galbraith

Defense Secretary Mark Esper told lawmakers on Thursday he has launched an investigation into leaks across the Pentagon, in response to a series of "bad" disclosures of sensitive information to the news media over the past year and amid reports that Russians paid militants in Afghanistan to kill U.S. troops.

"We are aggressively pursuing leaks within the Defense Department," Esper told the House Armed Services Committee during a hearing about the military's role in civil law enforcement, adding that leaks are a problem across the U.S. government. "It's bad and it's unlawful and it needs to stop."

Esper's comments echoed President Donald Trump's repeated rants against the press and vows to go after people who leak to the media. In 2018, he tweeted that "leakers are traitors and cowards, and we will find out who they are!" Trump has denied being briefed on the Russian bounty program.

Esper also told lawmakers on Thursday that he never received any intelligence briefing that included the word "bounty," in response to a carefully worded question about the reports.

The narrow remarks left open the possibility that intelligence officers briefed Esper and other Pentagon leaders on the issue, but did not use that particular wording.

"To the best of my recollection I have not received a briefing that included the word bounty," Esper said in response to questions from Republican Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio). "If it was a credible report — that’s important, a credible corroborated report — that used those words, certainly it would have been brought to my attention."

In response to additional questioning later, Esper acknowledged that he was in fact briefed on intelligence reports that Russia made "payments" to militants to kill American troops in Afghanistan.

Esper added that the intelligence reports on the bounty program was not produced by the Defense Department, and defense intelligence agencies have been unable to corroborate them.

Lawmakers have expressed outrage at reporting that the administration knew about the alleged Russia bounty program and failed to respond. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on Thursday sent a letter to Esper requesting he investigate U.S. troop casualties in Afghanistan to determine whether any deaths are connected to the program.

She also expressed frustration that the closed briefing provided to the committee on July 1 did not include any member of the intelligence community.

“It is unacceptable that to date, the Trump administration appears to be ignoring a matter of great importance to Gold Star Family members whose loved ones were killed while serving in Afghanistan: were any U.S. troop casualties in Afghanistan connected with the alleged GRU bounty payments to Taliban-linked militants?" Duckworth asked in a statement. "Gold Star Families deserve an answer to this question."

The debate over what it takes to be safe during the COVID-19 pandemic continues, with many researchers worried that the social distancing guidelines now in place are insufficient in light of  evidence the disease can be spread by smaller aerosol particles. But as experts debate the relative safety of various locations and activities, one things has remained clear: The absolute worst situation is a large number of people, for a sustained period of time, in an indoor location. 

That’s why Donald Trump’s announcement that he was holding an indoor rally in Tulsa back on June 21 was so irresponsible. And it’s why the willingness of some area Republicans to go along with, or even encourage, Trump’s action was such a betrayal of the local citizens. About the only thing that can be said on a positive note is that the rally was sparsely attended, with the arena at less than a third of capacity and the outside areas for “overflow” completely empty. That’s particularly good now that, as many predicted, Trump’s rally has turned out to be a spreading event that has generated hundreds of cases in the Tulsa area.

Since the Trump rally, Oklahoma has experienced a doubling of new cases. That includes hitting the peak number of new cases in the state just two days ago. But while cases are up across the state, there’s a particular surge in Tulsa, and as CNN reports, health officials there have tied this surge directly to Trump’s visit.

Despite a growth of cases in many parts of the country, the city of Tulsa has actually been in a slow decline. That ended abruptly a week after Trump’s traveling circus came to town, with 500 new cases and counting. Rather than seeing a decline, Tulsa is now a hot spot for the region.

With an incubation period of two to 14 days, Tulsa is only now getting a count of those infected in the first wave of post-rally disease. It’s still to be determined whether or not the rally will be a so-called super spreader event, as has been seen with some church services that have been directly connected to hundreds, or even thousands, of new cases.

The best thing about the Trump rally was the low attendance. The worst thing was … everything else. Not only did Trump decide to hold the rally at an indoor location against all medical advice, he also made it clear that he regarded wearing a mask as an insult. And even when the area had plenty of seats, Trump’s team crowded everyone together.

Expect to hear the results from Trump’s visit to Phoenix in about seven days. And Rushmore a week after that.

Google's Android adoption chart. Android 10's "300 day" mark was 10 days ago. (credit: Google)

Google today dropped a blog post detailing its progress on improving the Android ecosystem's update speed. The company has been hard at work for the past few years modularizing Android, with the hope that making Android easier to update would result in device manufacturers pushing out updates faster. Google's efforts have been paying off, with the company announcing Android 10 has had the fastest rollout ever.

The last few versions of Android have each brought a major improvement to Android's update system. Android 8 introduced Project Treble, which separated the OS from the hardware support, enabling easier porting of Android across devices. In Android 9 Pie, Google completed its work on Treble and started publishing Generic System Images (GSIs): drop-in versions of Android that work on any Project Treble-compatible device. Android 10 introduced Project Mainline and the new APEX file type designed for updatable lower-level system components, delivered through the Play Store.

Google's stats show that all this work is actually improving the ecosystem. "Thanks to these efforts," Google writes, "the adoption of Android 10 has been faster than any previous versions of Android. Android 10 was running on 100 million devices 5 months post launch—28% faster than Android Pie."

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Donald Trump's annual financial disclosure report—really the only regular glimpse the public gets of a president's finances—was due in May. He and other White House employees received a 45-day pandemic extension that came due last week, according to The New York Times.

Guess what? Trump's financial report still hasn't been filed.

Trump originally complained the report was "complicated" and said he was far too busy "addressing the coronavirus crisis and other matters" to meet the May deadline, as if he himself was filling it out. Apparently, his rigorous tweet schedule is inhibiting the ability of his accountants to complete the report.

Now the White House says Trump "intends to file as soon as possible.” Of course, no one is more conscientious about public disclosures than Trump.

Filing the report is legally mandated by federal ethics rules, but neither the White House nor Office of Government Ethics made so much as a peep when Trump blew past the second deadline last week. The Times requested comment from the ethics office and the Trump Organization and came up dry.

Trump has sometimes used the disclosures to brag about his wealth, documenting assets worth north of $1 billion. But last year, he ran into a little trouble when he coincidentally left all the free consultations he got from legal eagle Rudy Giuliani off the ledger.

It's safe to say Trump's got something to hide because he always has something to hide. But what it is isn't exactly clear.

I’ve been saying Alaska is a competitive presidential battleground state, and Public Policy Polling (PPP) just confirmed it. 

Trump only got 51% in Alaska in 2016, with Libertarian Gary Johnson getting 19% of the vote. Couldn’t vote for that woman. But with boring, safe, and very white and male Joe Biden on the ticket, it’s much easier for people to vote Democratic this year. Having Trump go from 51% to 48% is very plausible. 

I’ve noted in the past that there is close correlation between Trump’s job approval number and his share of the Trump versus Biden vote. Here are the Civiqs’ Alaska numbers for Trump:

Our 47% Trump approval rating closely matches the 48% he’s getting in the PPP poll. We’re seeing that in every state in which Trump is underwater—if voters have turned against him, he’s in danger of losing that state’s electoral votes. 

Montana is in the same boat. 

Now, Biden doesn’t need Alaska’s three electoral votes. They’re not going to make or break the presidential election. And while having that big ass state painted blue on a results map is nice, really, it doesn’t have much of a practical benefit. As previously noted, if Biden wins Alaska, he’s already flipped (in order) Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Iowa, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Montana. Does it really matter if the final tally is 376-162 or 379-159?

Here’s where it matters:   

That’s a whole lot of shoulder shrugging, but for an incumbent to be under 40% is danger-danger-Will-Robinson territory. Gross might be running as an independent, but he’s the de facto Democrat in the race. 

According to PPP, 72% of voters still don’t know who he is. I saw an earlier internal poll that had that number at 90%. Alaskan voters don’t seem to realize there’s a Senate race this fall. Democrats need to change that ASAP, and Alaska is a dirt cheap state to advertise in. Not sure what the hold up is. 

But here’s the thing: The bigger Trump’s victory margin, the harder it is for Gross to get the crossover votes he needs to pick up another Senate seat for Team Blue. So while Biden doesn’t need the state, the Democrats do. And the Senate race isn’t the only one impacted: 

And woah. Young has been a perennial target in the state’s single at-large House district, but always manages to come through. PPP writes: “It’s worth noting though that the undecideds in the House race are supporting Trump for President by 26 points- if they ended up voting the same party for House it would easily push Young back into the lead.” Clearly Alaskan Republicans are tired of Young’s history of bizarre antics. The only question is whether they, as usual, send him back to Washington, D.C. But again, the narrower the margin at the top, the easier it becomes for Galvin to pull off the upset. 

Enlarge / A Frontier Communications service van. (credit: Mike Mozart / Flickr)

Frontier Communications misled thousands of customers about the prices it charges and about the speeds its broadband network can provide, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson's office has found.

The state's investigation of Frontier's business practices found evidence of the telecom "failing to adequately disclose taxes and fees during sales of cable, Internet, and telephone services; failing to adequately disclose its Internet Infrastructure Surcharge fee in advertising; misleading consumers by implying that the Internet Infrastructure Surcharge and other fees are mandatory and/or government-related fees; and misleading consumers as to Internet speeds it could offer, and failing to deliver speeds and service as advertised."

The findings are described in a settlement that will force Frontier Communications to pay a $900,000 fine and force the new owner of Frontier's network in Washington state to change its business practices. Among other things, the settlement requires Frontier's current owner in Washington to stop charging the $3.99-per-month Internet Infrastructure Surcharge. The company "neither admits nor denies the State's findings." The settlement still needs court approval before it can take effect.

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I'm informed this also works excellently for The Hobbit.

Donald Trump is running for the presidency of an America that no longer exists.

Trump in recent weeks has repeatedly reprised two of Richard Nixon’s most memorable rallying cries, promising to deliver “law and order” for the “silent majority.” But in almost every meaningful way, America today is a radically different country than it was when Nixon rode those arguments to win the presidency in 1968 amid widespread anti-war protests, massive civil unrest following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., white flight from major cities, and rising crime rates. Trump’s attempt to emulate that strategy may only prove how much the country has changed since it succeeded.

Americans today are far more racially diverse, less Christian, better educated, more urbanized, and less likely to be married. In polls, they are more tolerant of interracial and same-sex relationships, more likely to acknowledge the existence of racial discrimination, and less concerned about crime.

Almost all of these changes complicate Trump’s task in trying to rally a winning electoral coalition behind his alarms against marauding “angry mobs,” “far-left fascism,” and “the violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats.” The Americans he is targeting with his messages of racial resentment and cultural backlash are uniformly a smaller share of American society now than they were then.

Not all of the country’s changes present headwinds for Trump. The population is older now, and older white voters in particular remain a receptive audience for Trump’s messages of cultural and racial division (even if his mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak has notably softened his support among them). Fifty years ago, southern evangelicals still mostly leaned toward the Democratic Party; now they have become a pillar of the Republican coalition. And while many northern white Catholics back then might have recoiled from Trump-style attacks on immigrants as a smear on their own heritage, now “when Trump talks about making America great again,” more of them “see themselves as part of that country that is getting protected,” says Robert P. Jones, the founder and chief executive of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute and the author of White Too Long, a new book on Christian churches and white supremacy.

[Read: Trump’s blank vision for a second term]

Together, those shifts have solidified for Republicans a much more reliable advantage among white voters without a college education than they enjoyed in Nixon’s era. Like Trump, who once declared “I love the poorly educated,” Nixon recognized that he was shifting the GOP’s traditional class basis. On “tough problems, the uneducated are the ones that are with us,” Nixon told his White House advisers, according to David Paul Kuhn’s vivid new book about the blue-collar backlash in that era, The Hardhat Riot. “The educated people and the leader class,” Nixon continued, “no longer have any character, and you can’t count on them.”

Trump might echo both of those assessments. But he is offering them to a very different audience. The demographic shifts that have most reshaped politics since Nixon’s day sit at the crossroads of race, education, and religion.

From the 2016 GOP primaries forward, white voters without a college education have provided Trump’s largest group of loyalists. In the 1968 presidential election, that group comprised nearly 80 percent of all voters, according to post-election surveys by both the Census Bureau and the University of Michigan’s American National Election Studies. White Americans holding at least a four-year college degree represented about 15 percent of voters, with nonwhite Americans, almost all of them Black, comprising the remainder, at just under 10 percent. (The Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz analyzed the ANES data for me.)

That electorate is unrecognizable now. The nonpartisan States of Change project has forecast that non-college-educated white Americans will likely constitute 42 percent of voters in November, slightly more than half their share in 1968. States of Change anticipates that both college-educated white voters and voters of color will represent about 30 percent of voters in 2020. For the former group, that’s about twice their share in 1968; for the latter, that’s somewhere between a three- and fourfold increase.

The change is just as dramatic when looking at the nation’s religious composition. White Christians comprised fully 85 percent of all American adults in 1968, according to figures from Gallup, provided to me by the senior editor Jeffrey M. Jones. They now represent only half as much of the population, 42 percent, according to PRRI’s latest national figures.

The groups that have grown since then reflect the nation’s increasing racial and religious diversity. In 1968, nonwhite Christians represented only 8 percent of Americans; now that’s tripled to just more than 24 percent in the PRRI study. Most explosive has been the growth of those who identify as secular or unaffiliated with any religious tradition. They represented just 3 percent of Americans in 1968; now it’s 24 percent.

Other shifts in society’s structure since that era are equally profound. Census Bureau reports show that a much smaller share of adults are married now than they were then. Only about half as many Americans live in small-town or rural communities outside of major metropolitan areas. The portion with at least some college experience is about triple its level then.

Across all of these dimensions, the consistent pattern is this: The groups Trump hopes to mobilize—non-college-educated, nonurban, married, and Christian white voters—have significantly shrunk as a share of the overall society in the past 50 years. The groups most alienated from him include many of the ones that have grown over those decades: college-educated white people, people of color, seculars, singles, and residents of the large metro areas.

Trump faces two other big challenges in channeling Nixon. One is that the crime rate, especially the rate of violent crime, doesn’t provide as compelling a backdrop for a law-and-order message as it did during the 1960s. The overall violent-crime rate increased by more than 50 percent just from 1964 to 1968, en route to doubling by the early 1970s. Robberies per person more than doubled from 1960 to 1968. The murder rate soared by 40 percent from 1964 to 1968; by 1972, it was nearly 85 percent higher than in 1964. In Gallup surveys from September 1968, 13 percent of college-educated white voters, 11 percent of non-college-educated white voters, and 9 percent of nonwhite voters identified crime as the biggest problem facing the nation.

Today, overall crime rates are much lower, a change that’s made possible the revival of central cities around the country. After violent crime peaked in 1991, it declined fairly steadily for about 15 years. It’s proved more volatile over the past decade: The violent-crime rate fell from 2008 to 2014, then rose through 2016 and has dipped again since. As Trump did in 2016, with his dark warnings about “American carnage” following the uptick in crime late in Barack Obama’s second term, he is again using recent findings of elevated murder rates in some cities to raise the specter of Democrats unleashing a new crime surge. “Despite the left-wing sowing chaos in communities all across the country … and the heart breaking murders in Democrat controlled cities like Chicago, New York City, and Atlanta, Joe Biden has turned his back on any semblance of law and order,” the Republican National Committee warned in a press release yesterday morning.

But James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, said that any crime spikes this year amount to “short-term fluctuation [in] a long-term trend” toward greater safety. “We’ve enjoyed, really since the early 1990s, a decline in crime,” he told me. “From year to year, some cities see decreases, some see increases, [but] there’s no crime wave … although Trump may want to construct one—a trumped-up one.”

Though polls generally show that concern about crime hasn’t fallen as fast as crime itself, Americans haven’t entirely missed this long-term trajectory: In June Gallup polling, just 3 percent of adults cited crime as the nation’s top problem, far less than in 1968.

Trump’s other big obstacle is that racial attitudes have shifted since then. That’s partly because people of color represent such a larger share of American society. But it’s also because college-educated and secular white Americans, who tend to hold more inclusive views on racial issues than non-college-educated and Christian white Americans, are also a bigger portion of the white population. Gallup polling in 1968 consistently documented a high level of white anxiety about the pace of racial change: Almost half of white Americans said the federal government was moving too fast to promote integration; two-thirds said Black people did not face discrimination in hiring; and, most striking, a bristling three-fifths majority supported a policy of shooting looters on sight during riots. On each front, college-educated white people were less likely to express conservative views than those without degrees, but even they split about evenly on these questions.

[Read: The rage unifying boomers and Gen Z]

A half century later, racism remains ever present in America. But many more white people appear willing to acknowledge its persistence, especially in the national debate that has followed the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. A recent Monmouth poll found that most white people now agree police are more likely to use deadly force against Black people, while CNN found that most white people agree that the criminal-justice system is biased. And although Trump has called Black Lives Matter “a symbol of hate,” three-fifths of white people expressed support for the movement in a June Pew Research Center poll. White people with a college degree were consistently more likely than those without one to express such liberal views on race, but these perspectives claimed significant support among non-college-educated white Americans as well.

Those attitudes point toward a final key difference from 1968. Back then, many anxious white voters genuinely believed Nixon could deliver law and order; but today, many white Americans, especially those with degrees, have concluded that Trump himself is increasing the risk of lawlessness and disorder. In one particularly striking result, Quinnipiac University last month found that college-educated white people were twice as likely to say that having Trump as president made them feel less safe rather than more safe. That’s a very different equation than Nixon faced: Though he may have considered “the uneducated” the most receptive audience for his hard-line messages, he overwhelmingly won college-educated white voters too, carrying about two-thirds of them in both of his victories, according to the ANES. Some recent polls have shown Trump carrying only one-third of them now.

Trump still has an audience for his neo-Nixonian warnings about an approaching wave of disorder: In that same Quinnipiac survey, a solid plurality of white voters without a degree said they feel safer with Trump as president (even though many blue-collar white people have also expressed unease about his response to the protests). In a PRRI poll last year, majorities of white Protestants, Catholics, and especially evangelicals said discrimination against white people was as big a problem as bias against minorities. Yet both of these groups—working-class and Christian white voters—will each likely comprise only about half as many of the voters in November as they did when Nixon prevailed five decades ago.

Those numbers won’t become any more favorable for Republicans in the years ahead: Although white Americans accounted for four-fifths of the nation’s total population growth from 1960 through 1968, the demographer William Frey noted in a recent report that all of the nation’s population growth since 2010 has been among people of color; the final 2020 Census, he concludes, will likely find that this has been the first decade ever when the absolute number of white people in the country declines. The shift in the nation’s religious composition is as unrelenting: Jones says that the share of adults in their 20s who identify as secular grew from 10 percent in 1986 to 20 percent in 1996 to nearly 40 percent in PRRI’s latest study. Only one-fourth of adults younger than 30 now identify as white Christians.

Trump hopes that reprising Nixon-style messages about disorder will allow him to mobilize massive margins and turnout among the white voters who feel threatened by these changes. But the country’s underlying evolution shows how narrow a path Trump has chosen. He is betting the Republican future on resurrecting a past that is dissolving before his eyes.

An anti-gay, anti-choice Republican state lawmaker from Louisiana has produced a campaign ad in which he pretends to light a mask on fire with a blowtorch and cut it with a chainsaw.

“Your body is your private property,” Rep. Danny McCormick says in the video, which he posted to his Facebook page. “If the government has the power to force you to wear a mask they can force you to stick a needle in your arm against your will. They can put a microchip in you. They can even make you take the mark. After all, it’s for the greater good.”

“Government needed a villain,” McCormick adds. “People who don’t wear masks will be soon painted as the enemy just as they did to Jews in Nazi Germany. Now is the time to push back before it’s too late. We can preserve America.”

The Friendly Atheist reports: As you’d expect from someone this blatantly ignorant, he’s a Christian Nationalist too. Besides his campaign website including a separate page for those who wanted to join his prayer team, he filled out a questionnaire declaring that we were founded on “Judeo-Christian values” and that the LGBTQ “agenda” is a “threat to First Amendment freedoms of speech, expression and religious exercise.” The irony is that this guy is so “pro-life” — in all cases, except maybe to save a mother’s life — yet his actions now are contributing to more virus-related deaths. And of course, McCormick is a hypocrite. In the video, he denounces mask mandates because “your body is your private property.” So the government telling people to wear masks is a violation of their civil liberties… but the government forcing women to give birth against their will is just fine.

McCormick, who hails from Oil City, Louisiana, told the USA Today Network that constituents have been praising the ad.

“It’s a tremendous response,” he said. “The liberty message is strong. It’s amazing more politicians don’t take on the liberty movement because it’s so popular.”

Watch it below.

The post GOP Lawmaker Takes Chainsaw to Mask in Campaign Ad, Compares Self to ‘Jews in Nazi Germany’: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

A religious historian explains why Trump wasn’t a trade-off for American evangelicals.

In early June, President Donald Trump had federal officers use tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse a peaceful protest so he could stage a photo op outside St. John’s Church, which sits across from the White House.

The image, now infamous, shows Trump awkwardly holding up the Bible as though he’s never held a book in his life. It’s a surreal shot that somehow captures the performative dimension of his entire presidency.

But why the Bible? And why go through all that trouble to do the photo op in front of a church?

It’s well-known that evangelicals are one of Trump’s most loyal constituencies, but it’s still not clear why. Conventional wisdom says that evangelicals held their noses and voted for Trump purely for pragmatic purposes — the biggest reason being the Supreme Court. They may not like him, the argument goes, but he’s a useful political vehicle. (See, for example, the Court’s decision on Wednesday that allows the Trump administration to expand religious exemptions for employers who object to the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate.)

But what if Trump wasn’t a trade-off for evangelicals? What if an obsession with manhood and toughness made a figure like Trump the natural fulfillment of their political evolution?

This is the argument Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian at Calvin University, makes in her new book Jesus and John Wayne. According to Du Mez, evangelical leaders have spent decades using the tools of pop culture — films, music, television, and the internet — to grow the movement. The result, she says, is a Christianity that mirrors that culture. Instead of modeling their lives on Christ, evangelicals have made heroes of people like John Wayne and Mel Gibson, people who project a more militant and more nationalist image. In that sense, Trump’s strongman shtick is a near-perfect expression of their values.

To be candid, I wasn’t sure what to make of this thesis, but I’m also not an authority on American evangelicalism. So I contacted Du Mez, who teaches at a Christian college and has spent 15 years studying evangelicals, to talk about the direction of the movement and how it led to Trump and what she calls our “fractured political moment.”

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

The contrarian argument at the core of your book is that the relationship between Trump and (mostly white) evangelicals is more harmonious than most people suggest. Can you sum up your thesis?

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Well, there are all these theories that evangelicals were holding their noses when they voted for Trump, that they were somehow betraying their values. But I’ve studied evangelicals for a long time and I was watching them very closely during the election and in the aftermath, and I just didn’t see any regrets at all. There was no angst or no sense that this was somehow a difficult trade-off. In fact, what I saw was a bunch of enthusiasm. There were some evangelical leaders who were expressing caution about Trump, but most of the rank and file had zero difficulty supporting Trump.

Sean Illing

And when did that become clear to you?

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

I’d say right around the time the Access Hollywood tapes were released — that’s when it crystallized for me. So we had these tapes where Trump is talking about sexually assaulting women in such crass terms. And the media really homed in on white evangelicals at that moment, asking if this was a bridge too far. Although there was a little hesitation here and there from evangelicals, about a week later they were all back on board.

Sean Illing

I know you teach at a Christian university, but did you grow up in the evangelical world? Do you know it from personal experience?

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

I didn’t identify as an evangelical growing up, but most evangelicals don’t. We tend to identify as Christians. Looking back, though, I would probably define myself as evangelical-adjacent. I grew up in a small town in Iowa, and this was very much a part of my world.

As I grew up, I was exposed to this evangelical popular culture through our local bookstore, the only bookstore in town. The shelves were filled with these evangelical books, with Christian contemporary music and Christian movies. I was in a Christian youth group. And so my experience with evangelicalism was through the popular culture.

Sean Illing

Help me understand why masculinity and nationalism are so foundational to the contemporary evangelical worldview.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

What I look to as a historian is this critical period in the post-World War II era when these gender ideals fuse with anti-communist ideology and this overarching desire to defend Christian America. The idea that takes root during this period is that Christian masculinity, Christian men, are the only thing that can protect America from godless communism.

At the same time, you have the civil rights movement destabilizing white evangelicalism and conceptions of white masculinity. Then you have feminism destabilizing traditional masculinity. And all of this comes together for evangelicals, who see their place in the culture slipping away, and they see their political power starting to erode because of this cultural displacement. That’s the moment when you see Christian nationalism linking together with a very militant conception of Christian manhood, because it’s up to the Christian man to defend his family against all sorts of domestic dangers in the culture wars, and also to defend Christian America against communists and against military threats.

Sean Illing

So the idea is that Christian masculinity is the only thing that can preserve traditional American culture, and that belief is what precipitates the turn toward a more muscular Christianity?

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

That’s exactly right. So when you think of evangelicals, a lot of people think of the term “family values.” But I actually went back to the origins of family values evangelicalism and I was really surprised just how much it was placed in the context of foreign policy, how much it was in the service of defending the American nation. If you go back and listen to James Dobson of Focus on the Family and read the books that emerged during this period, this is all very clear.

Sean Illing

The phrase “family values” is typically hurled at evangelicals in order to call out their hypocrisy, but I think your book makes pretty clear that they’re not hypocrites at all. They only appear hypocritical if you misunderstand what they actually value.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Exactly. If you understand what family values evangelicalism has always entailed — and at the very heart of it is white patriarchy, and often a militant white patriarchy — then suddenly, all sorts of evangelical political positions and cultural positions fall into place.

So evangelicals are not acting against their deeply held values when they elect Trump; they’re affirming them. Their actual views on immigration policy, on torture, on gun control, on Black Lives Matter and police brutality — they all line up pretty closely with Trump’s. These are their values, and Trump represents them.

Sean Illing

I’d like to steelman the evangelical perspective, so can you tell me what cultural forces they’re reacting against?

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Well, it changes over time. In the ’40s and ’50s, it’s all about anti-communism. But once the civil rights revolution takes hold, it becomes about defending the stability of the traditional social order against all the cultural revolutions of the ’60s. But the really interesting moment for me is in the early ’90s when the Cold War comes to an end. You would think there would be a kind of resetting after the great enemy had been vanquished, but that’s not what happened.

Instead, we get the modern culture wars over sex and gender identity and all the rest. And then 9/11 happens and Islam becomes the new major threat. So it’s always shifting, and at a certain point I started asking the question, particularly post-9/11, what comes first here? Is it the fear of modern change, of whatever’s happening in the moment? Or were evangelical leaders actively seeking out those threats and stoking fear in order to maintain their militancy, to maintain their power?

Sean Illing

So this drift into a more militant and nationalist Christianity leads to this obsession with toughness and machismo. The way you put it is that evangelicals are looking for “spiritual badasses.” They don’t want gentle Jesus, they want William Wallace or John Wayne.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Yeah, these are their role models. Most white evangelical men that I knew during the height of this movement, which is really the early 2000s, were very militant. They were buying these hypermasculine books and taking part in these men’s reading groups. They weren’t living out this rugged, violent lifestyle, except maybe at weekend retreats where they role-played this stuff. But in real life, they were still walking around in khakis and polo shirts, but these were the values that were really animating their worldview.

Sean Illing

Wait, are there weekend retreats where evangelical men are role-playing Braveheart?

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

I don’t know about that in particular, but this is very much a thing. The success of John Eldredge’s book Wild at Heart [a huge bestseller that urged young Christian men to reclaim their masculinity] was a big deal in the evangelical world, and it sold millions of copies just in the US. Every college Christian men’s group was reading this. It was everywhere in the early 2000s.

There were lots of conferences celebrating this version of a rugged Christianity. It was big business, and there were lots of weekend retreats where men could go out into the wilderness and practice their masculinity. Local churches invented their own versions of this. One church I know in Washington had their own local Braveheart games that involves wrestling with pigs or something. It was all weird and different, but the point was to prove and express your masculinity.

Sean Illing

Is this fascination with manhood unique to evangelical culture in particular? Or is this something you find in other Christian subcultures?

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

The emphasis on strict “gender difference” and perceived need to “define” Christian manhood is far greater in conservative white evangelicalism than in other Christian subcultures. White evangelicals also stand out in terms of their emphasis on militancy and their conceptions of masculinity, and in how that militant masculinity is connected to Christian nationalism.

In Black Protestantism, for example, you may find an emphasis on Christian manhood, but you’re much more likely to encounter discussions of fatherhood rather than a militant warrior masculinity. In mainline Protestantism you’ll be more likely to encounter a kinder, gentler masculinity — more of the Mr. Rogers sort. (Militant white evangelical masculinity explicitly denounces Mr. Rogers’s model of manhood.)

That said, evangelical constructions of masculinity have made inroads into mainline circles largely via popular culture (many mainline churches use evangelical literature in their small-group Bible studies, for example), so the lines between white evangelical and mainline Christianity are not always all that clearly drawn.

Sean Illing

There’s a lot going on there, but I’ll bring this back to Trump. Do most evangelicals consider him a spiritual badass?

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

For many he’s not, but he is their great protector. He’s their strongman that God has given them to protect them. So, again, the ends justify the means here. But I think it’s important to understand that the appeal of Trump to evangelicals isn’t surprising at all, because their own faith tradition has long embraced this idea of a ruthless masculine protector.

This is just the way that God works and the way that God has designed men. He filled them with testosterone so that they can fight. So there’s just much less of a conflict there. The most common thing that I hear from white evangelicals defending Trump is that they just wish he would tweet less. I don’t find a lot of concern about his actual policies or what’s in his heart.

Sean Illing

I don’t understand how a draft-dodging, spray-tanned hypochondriac has become a hypermasculine protector for militant evangelicals —

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

I mean, that’s fair, but you have to remember that their whole idea of militant masculinity was formed in reaction against feminism and more recently against so-called political correctness. That has been just such a powerful enemy for white evangelicals who feel oppressed by these new standards of behavior. And I think Trump really succeeds by not following any of those rules of civil discourse.

Sean Illing

If most evangelicals are taking their moral and political cues from Trump or the Duck Dynasty clan or from Christian radio and television, haven’t we crossed over into something post-religious, something closer to a lifestyle or a cultural pose?

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

I think we have. But I will say there is still diversity within evangelical churches, communities, and families. There are so many evangelicals who read their Bible every morning, who hold to scriptural teachings as they understand them. But for many of them, the Bible is a complicated book. Which verses do you hold on to as formative for your life, and which do you dismiss? Many are reading through the filter of this ideology now.

But I’ve encountered lots of evangelicals who don’t want to speak out, who feel a lot of pressure within their own communities. This is not what their faith means to them, this is not what Christianity is to them. So when we talk about white evangelicals, we should acknowledge that there is disagreement within churches and communities and families, but it’s true that a solid majority of white evangelicals have bought into this ideology.

Sean Illing

One of the most interesting threads in your book is this story about how evangelical leaders have tried to modernize the church by using pop culture to lure people in, but over time the pop culture has completely supplanted the theology and all that’s left is the vacuous political brand.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

I teach at a Christian university, so the majority of my students would fit into this category of white evangelicals. And just this past year, I was teaching a course where it involved reading the first three chapters of Genesis. It was about biblical gender roles and taking a critical look.

And at one point during our discussion, one woman raised her hand and said, “I have a confession to make. I think this is the first time I’ve actually read the first three chapters of Genesis ... I’ve been working with the VeggieTales stories and I assumed I knew this, so I didn’t bother with the Bible.” [VeggieTales is a Christian animated series for kids that uses pop culture to retell biblical stories.] She was so embarrassed to confess that, but then several other students confessed to the same thing.

So this is the evangelical culture these kids have been raised in. They listen to pop Christian music on the radio. They read the pop Christian books. They watch Focus on the Family children’s programming. They watch VeggieTales cartoons. And Christian parents are told to keep their kids away from the broader secular culture, so it’s also very insular. They stick to the Christian version of it. That’s the only theology they know.

Sean Illing

This is really a story about a religious movement getting entangled with politics and consumerism and being bastardized as a result of the collision.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

I think that’s right, and there’s a lot of money to be made through the book sales, the advertising, and the connections between the political strategists and some of the folks behind this consumer market. What I really tried to do here is just understand the networks behind American evangelicalism. Who is publishing what? What are the distribution networks?

It’s critical to understand evangelicalism through this lens. Even when someone walks into a Christian book store or goes online and orders a Christian product, that feels like an authentic expression of their faith to them.

Sean Illing

I hear people say all the time that Trump’s election was a tragedy for evangelicals, but after reading your book, I wonder if it isn’t their greatest victory.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

It depends on your vantage point, right? I’ve been studying evangelical masculinity for almost 15 years, and seeing the veil ripped off in this way was almost cathartic for me. I was able to see the nature of the movement with even more clarity. This is what “family values” evangelicalism looks like, and now it’s apparent to everyone.

But for evangelical dissenters, this is indeed a tragedy. And yet I think even those who are resisting, or who are calling this out and who are struggling with the direction that evangelicalism has taken, still need to reckon with the ways in which they, too, as part of this tradition, have been complicit in this ideology. The Trump era didn’t just happen. We’ve been moving in this direction for a long time.

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The news that Russia was paying Taliban militia a bounty to kill American soldiers was shocking. The idea that Donald Trump had known about it for a matter of months and not only failed to take action, but pressured the G7 to readmit Russia was even more so. But since that initial story broke, the date of Trump’s knowledge keeps moving back and the extent of Trump’s actions in support of Vladimir Putin keeps getting underlined. Trump wasn’t just briefed in February, he was given a personal briefing by John Bolton over a year ago. Even with that knowledge, Trump has repeatedly supported Russia and made an unprecedented series of private, unrecorded calls to Putin—at least five just in the last few months.

But now it seems that even Trump’s briefing in 2019 was very late in the game. Just Security is reporting that Pentagon officials became aware of Russian efforts to fund the Taliban two years earlier, in 2017. This transfer of funds helped not just to fund attacks on individual U.S. troops, but to disrupt attempts to secure a lasting peace agreement. Through it all, Trump took no action. Actually, that’s not true—through it all, Trump insisted that the Pentagon share information with the people who were behind the murder of U.S. troops. And that action gave Putin and the Kremlin a very good picture of Trump: A weak man who was in their pocket.

Since the story of the Russian bounties first broke in The New York Times at the end of June, the White House has been passing it off as “another Russian hoax.” Considering that the nation is currently in the midst of an unnecessary disaster that is taking the equivalent of a 9/11 in lives every three days, the media has also given the story a lot less attention than it might have otherwise received.

Inconveniently for Trump, the White House, and Republicans who have been eager to either dismiss or ignore this story, the Just Security report comes with sources. Named sources, speaking on the record. That includes former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Carpenter, who described how Trump’s failure to respond to Russia’s interference in Afghanistan was a signal to Putin that “he could press further.” Trump failed to offer any resistance to Kremlin efforts, so Russia never had any reason to stop conducting a proxy war. For Russia, the cost was minimal—a few million paid to fighters they didn’t have to train or support—and the benefits were enormous. By keeping Afghanistan at a low boil, thousands of United States forces, and many billions of dollars, were trapped in a situation that was under Putin’s control.

Also on the record is former senior CIA official Marc Polymeropoulos, who described the “constant push” from the White House to cooperate with Russia and provide intelligence to the Kremlin even as a long line of officials from the State Department and Pentagon were testifying to Russia providing money and arms to the Taliban. As Polymeropoulos makes clear, this intelligence-sharing was entirely “one sided.” The United States was giving something of value to Russia, but getting nothing in return either in the form of intelligence or in a slowing of Russia’s efforts to disrupt U.S. operations. Those statements were echoed by another senior CIA officer who complained of being pressured to provide information to Moscow even in the face of overwhelming evidence of Russian support for the Taliban.

One thing that made all this especially frustrating to these men is that a large amount of the information they were being forced to send was intelligence aimed at counterterrorism. But at the same time, officials across U.S. intelligence and the military were testifying that Russia was supporting the terrorists. It was as if Trump was forcing the FBI to send the Mafia everything that was known about their activities.

Polymeropoulos also made it clear that this pressure from the White House to send counterterrorism information to Russia began very early, during the very brief tenure of National Security Advisor Micheal Flynn. That would be the same Michael Flynn who spent the transition period making calls to the Russian ambassador. Calls that he later lied about to the FBI.

The article from Just Security, well laid out and thoroughly researched by co-founder Ryan Goodman, makes it clear that Russia is not only a state sponsor of terrorism, but that the current level of support for the Taliban, including the bounty program, is the result of the way that Trump has repeatedly failed to challenge any action by Putin. Russia has tested the United States over and over since Trump took power, and at every turn, Trump hasn’t just failed to push back—he’s offered more gifts to Putin.

Whatever the reason for this weakness, the results are obvious: American and allied troops have been killed, negotiations to reach an agreement to remove the remaining U.S. forces have been disrupted, and the U.S. military has remained bogged down in a costly, unwinnable situation. And Vladimir Putin is extremely happy.

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As the United States surpasses 3 million coronavirus infections, forecasters are updating their models to account for the recent resurgence and reaching a grim consensus: the next few months are going to be bad.

The national death toll is now expected eclipse 200,000 by Election Day, according to the latest models.

It’s a clear signal that, six months into the worst public health crisis in a century, the coronavirus pandemic remains as disruptive as ever. The disease has tested American leaders’ patience and political will, and outlasted efforts to contain it — swamping any hopes of a summer lull and leaving the nation’s top public health experts resigned to several more months of crushing outbreaks.

“I am despairing for the future,” said David Eisenman, the director of the UCLA Center for Public Health and Disasters. “I don’t see anything happening to indicate that [the future] will be much better.”

It took just four weeks for the U.S. to jump from 2 million coronavirus infections to the 3 million mark. Most forecasters now say that, as case counts accelerate at a record pace, it will likely take even less time to surpass 4 million.

The dubious milestone comes a week after President Donald Trump again said coronavirus would just disappear and on the day that he threatened to cut federal funding to states that don’t fully reopen schools in a matter of weeks.

During Wednesday’s briefing with the White House coronavirus task force, Vice President Mike Pence acknowledged the severe spikes across the South and West but nevertheless offered an optimistic view of the weeks to come.

“We are encouraged that the average fatality rate continues to be low and steady,” he said, adding that he saw evidence that the resurgence is beginning to crest. “We believe the takeaway from this for every American, particularly in those states that are impacted, is keep doing what you're doing."

While the mortality rate has decreased since April as testing has improved and older Americans are more likely to remain cautious, Pence’s outlook runs counter to the growing ranks of health researchers and scientists who have charted the pandemic’s progression across the U.S. for months, and concluded that the nation’s attempts to rein in the virus have fallen well short of what was needed to secure any significant and lasting progress.

Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, on Tuesday predicted more than 208,000 people could be dead from the virus by November. The IHME model, favored by the White House, has generally offered rosier forecasts than most, but Murray now is factoring in a greater reluctance to impose new restrictions and increased transmissions from having schools and universities reopen in the fall.

“Many states are expected to experience significant increases in cases and deaths in September and October,” he said of his modeling.

With the nation now reporting more than 50,000 new infections every day, most experts say the concept of a second wave is outdated. The first wave is likely to continue for months, with spikes popping up in various states. That could be followed by a possible surge in the fall when the weather turns, Murray said.

“It’s a much less meaningful distinction to talk about a first and second wave because, at least in our model, it seems unlikely we will get to zero levels,” he said.

Public health modelers initially envisioned a summer of progress, where tools refined during the nation’s lockdown — testing, contact tracing, social distancing — would be widely used, and Americans chastened by the severity of the pandemic’s early months would collectively work toward keeping the virus in check.

Yet little of that has happened. The Trump administration failed to take advantage of the time to ramp up its defenses, public health experts said — and instead of becoming a moment of national solidarity, the pandemic response has been fractured and disorganized.

Contact tracing remains woefully inadequate and mask use has become politicized. Three-quarters of Democrats who responded to a recent Pew poll said they wore masks most or all of the time in public, while just 53 percent of Republicans did the same.

“We just didn’t reopen smartly,” said David Rubin, the PolicyLab director at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “The nature of the response and what it takes to actually keep this thing at bay is fairly straightforward — and we could not agree as a country to those basic responses.”

Rubin, who heads a team modeling the virus’ spread on a county-by-county level, told POLITICO that the nation’s outlook is worsening far faster than anticipated, making it difficult to keep up with the mushrooming hotspots.

The deterioration in places like Arizona and Texas has also raised new questions about how much of the spread states are actually capturing amid severe testing backlogs. CDC Director Robert Redfield has suggested that the U.S.'s actual case count could be 10 times the number that officials have confirmed.

And as much of the nation reopened, forecasters fear that people seeded new outbreaks not just in their own states but in neighboring ones as well.

“We did not have sufficient protections in place to assure that as people traveled you wouldn’t see spread,” he said. “These hotspots have now grown into regions. It’s not just Arizona anymore, it’s the entire Southwest. It’s not just Texas, it’s moving into the heartland.”

Inside the PolicyLab, Rubin’s team recently discussed whether something as extreme as another national lockdown would even be enough at this point to get the U.S. back on track ahead of a fall that’s expected to bring both the coronavirus and seasonal flu.

“Everything is upside down right now,” he said. “We’re at a place where many of us didn’t think we’d be by the beginning of July.”

Lily Wang, an associate professor of statistics at Iowa State University, said that at the end of April after most of the country had locked down, her models suggested that some states could see almost no new infections in the summer. But that would have required the nation stay home far longer than it did.

Now, she predicts 50,000 more deaths by the beginning of September, 80,000 additional deaths by the end of October, and says the United States could hit 4 million infections before the end of July.

Quanquan Gu, an assistant professor of computer science at UCLA, also said his models look very different today than they did a couple months ago. Back then, Gu thought there could be 131,000 deaths by October. The U.S. has already surpassed that total, and now Gu believes it could see 162,000 deaths by October.

“The good news is, for many states, including California, we have already started talking about shutting down non-essential businesses like bars and restaurants,” he said. “If we do that, we will be able to flatten the curve again.”

Models are only as good as their assumptions and human behavior; political changes and dumb luck are all variables that could affect the outcome. IHME’s Murray believes that high levels of mask wearing, for example, could save more than 45,000 lives over the next four months.

The University of Texas' model predicts another 15,000 people will die in July but what happens beyond that depends on whether people follow CDC guidelines, socially distance and wear a face covering, said Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the University of Texas’s Covid-19 modeling consortium.

Government policies will also play a crucial role, but even as the projections have become increasingly dire, Trump administration officials continued to downplay the crisis, insisting that the virus should not disrupt daily life across much of the nation.

On a private call with governors on Monday, coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx acknowledged “significant issues” in Arizona, California, Florida and Texas — which account for about 50 percent of new cases — according to notes of the call obtained by POLITICO.

The administration is also keeping a close eye on growing caseloads in South Carolina and Georgia, with Birx planning a tour next week through parts of the deep South.

Still, top officials have focused their efforts largely on reviving the economy and encouraging Americans to learn to live with an ever-present pandemic.

"As the President has said, the cure cannot be worse than the disease," White House spokesperson Judd Deere said in an email. "The United States will not be shut down again."

The White House has also demanded that schools reopen fully in the fall. While it is unknown how much children spread the virus it’s a stretch to think that reopening schools won’t have at least some impact on transmission, said Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Yet Trump remains adamant that the U.S. seek a return to normalcy in spite of warnings from public health experts and even some of his own advisers that it may be dangerous to do so.

The White House's dismissals have prompted “anger, fury and rage” among scientists and health researchers who specialize in fighting these kinds of public health crises, said Mark Rosenberg, a longtime former senior CDC official based in the Atlanta area.

“It’s tantalizing because you can see how easy it would be to do so much better, and yet we can’t seem to reach in this state the critical decisionmakers, and nationally, the critical decisionmakers,” he said.

Still, he argued that there is still time to correct course and salvage what’s left of the summer months to prepare for new threats in the fall — as long as federal and state leaders are willing to confront the hard work that needs to be done.

“We can change, and we’re not going to give up,” Rosenberg said. “The worst thing is fatalism.”

The Supreme Court has delivered a split decision on subpoenas for President Donald Trump’s tax returns and personal financial records, unanimously rejecting his broadest claims of “absolute” immunity in a New York state criminal investigation, but ruling that lower courts did not do enough to scrutinize congressional subpoenas for similar records.

The pair of highly-anticipated decisions likely mean more delays and court proceedings on both subpoenas, increasing the odds that Trump makes it to the November election without releasing his tax and financial details to the prosecutors and Congressional committees demanding them.

More significantly, the rulings could permanently curb Congress’s formidable subpoena power against the Executive Branch, which lawmakers have wielded as a cudgel for information for decades. All the justices said Congress has deployed an overbroad interpretation of its own power.

Ruling on several House subpoenas issued to Trump’s accountants and banks, a seven-justice majority said courts did not do enough to examine Democratic lawmakers claims that they needed the records as part of inquiries aimed at strengthening laws combating a wide range of ills including money laundering, official conflicts of interest and foreign influence in U.S. elections.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the majority opinions Thursday in both of the politically-sensitive subpoena disputes, said lower-court judges needed to take “a balanced approach” to the Congressional subpoenas, closely examining Congress’ need for the information, ensuring that the subpoenas are tailored to those purposes and considering whether there might be alternate sources of information.

“Without limits on its subpoena powers, Congress could ‘exert an imperious controul’ over the Executive Branch and aggrandize itself at the President’s expense, just as the Framers feared,” Roberts wrote for a seven-justice majority, citing the Federalist Papers. “Congressional subpoenas for information from the President...implicate special concerns regarding the separation of powers. The courts below did not take adequate account of those concerns.”

Two of the court’s Republican appointees were even more skeptical of the Congressional effort. Justice Samuel Alito said the court’s majority did not impose enough of a burden on lawmakers to demonstrate need for the records, while Justice Clarence Thomas said Congress lacks the power to subpoena private records from anyone outside the context of an impeachment battle.

In the case involving a probe a local prosecutor in Manhattan is conducting into Trump’s businesses, all the justices rebuffed claims by Trump’s attorneys that he is absolutely immune from criminal subpoenas while in office.

In the majority opinion, Roberts rebuffed the president by joining the court’s four Democratic appointees to also reject the Justice Department’s narrower argument that prosecutors should be required to show a “heightened need” to get the records.

Roberts said the fact that the records sought are not official, but pertain to the president’s personal and business affairs, meant that requiring a special demonstration of need by prosecutors would be unwise.

“In the absence of a need to protect the Executive, the public interest in fair and effective law enforcement cuts in favor of comprehensive access to evidence. Requiring a state grand jury to meet a heightened standard of need would hobble the grand jury’s ability to acquire ‘all information that might possibly bear on its investigation,” Roberts wrote.

However, even as the high court turned down Trump’s arguments, the justices seemed to ensure weeks or months of ongoing litigation, because Trump will now be able to make other legal arguments that the records are legally privileged.

If lower courts deliver any adverse rulings between now and November, Trump’s lawyers could make another bid to have the Supreme Court freeze the process, effectively postponing action until after the election.

Despite the inconclusive nature of the rulings, Trump reacted angrily to the decisions, apparently treating the prospect of ongoing litigation as a humiliation and a defeat.

“The Supreme Court sends case back to Lower Court, arguments to continue. This is all a political prosecution. I won the Mueller Witch Hunt, and others, and now I have to keep fighting in a politically corrupt New York. Not fair to this Presidency or Administration!” Trump wrote on Twitter within minutes of the decisions. “Courts in the past have given ‘broad deference.’ BUT NOT ME!”

The final decisions of the Supreme Court’s term came after Trump bitterly complained of losses last month in cases involving LGBTQ rights in the workplace and the administration’s effort to end protections for so-called Dreamers. Those setbacks led Trump to invoke unusually violent imagery, lashing out at the court and trying to turn the defeats into a campaign issue.

“These horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “We need more Justices or we will lose our 2nd. Amendment & everything else. Vote Trump 2020! “

The pair of subpoena rulings Thursday leave up in the air whether voters will get to see the tax returns he has resisted disclosing since launching his presidential campaign in 2015, despite promising at one point to make them public.

At the heart of both cases are questions about whether third-party companies, like Trump’s accounting firm Mazars USA, can be compelled to produce the president’s personal documents while he’s in office.

By releasing decisions into July, the Supreme Court has parted with its usual practice over the last few decades of issuing its final — and most controversial — opinions of the term on one of the last days of June, a departure that coincides with broader delays resulting from the coronavirus pandemic.

Covid-19 outbreaks in the United States led the court to suspend in-person arguments, hold its first-ever telephone arguments and push some cases into the fall. The Trump subpoena cases were originally set to be heard on March 31, but the actual, virtual arguments were conducted on May 12.

The justices left only one other case to their final opinion day: a dispute over whether a large swath of eastern Oklahoma is actually an Indian reservation.

While the New York prosecutor’s investigation could be considered more urgent legally, since it involves a criminal investigation, the House inquiries may pack more of a political punch. That’s because while records turned over under a grand jury subpoena are required to be kept secret at least until charges are filed, lawmakers are under no such obligation and could release the Trump financial files in the lead-up to the election.

At issue in the House case are subpoenas that House committees issued last year to Mazars USA, as well as major Trump lenders Deutsche Bank and Capital One. All the queries, according to lawmakers, are intended to inform efforts to update ethics, disclosure and money laundering laws, as well as those pertaining to foreign influence in elections and government.

But Trump’s legal team argued that the demands were tantamount to political harassment, and that the House’s claims of a “legislative purpose” were a pretense to simply investigate the president.

When arguments were eventually held on the disputes almost two months ago, Thomas and Alito sounded highly sympathetic to the president’s arguments and hostile to the House’s.

The court’s other three Republican appointees — Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — were more equivocal and did not sound like certain votes for Trump’s stance. Most of the court’s liberal justices seemed to favor some authority for the House to get the information it is seeking.

Trump’s legal challenge questions lawmakers’ long-held principle that Congress has broad authority to seek documents it needs to support its constitutional lawmaking power, as well as the duty to oversee the executive branch’s implementation of the laws it has passed. But the justices repeatedly questioned House Counsel Douglas Letter about the limits to Congress’ investigative power and the outer edge of what might be considered a “legitimate legislative purpose” for its investigations.

At its core, the president’s legal fight with Congress is over how close a link the courts will require between House committees’ investigative efforts aimed at allegations of presidential misconduct and lawmakers’ specific plans to pass legislation.

Before Thursday’s ruling, lower courts agreed that a broad interest in government oversight and the possibility of changes to mundane legislation like financial disclosure laws is enough to justify congressional subpoenas — and that history has shown this was the precise intent of the framers of the Constitution.

Trump’s lawyers, though, contended that investigating whether a president broke the law in his financial dealings is beyond Congress’ legislative powers and that, outside of an impeachment inquiry, no congressional action to pursue such allegations is legitimate.

That would appear to leave Congress with only a few options for reining in a president who is defying the law: withholding approval of legislation, funding or presidential nominees. Criminal law enforcement is also a possibility, but that is unlikely at the federal level because of a Justice Department opinion barring indictment of a sitting president.

One central point of discussion by the lawyers and the justices during oral arguments was the 1997 Supreme Court decision that rejected similar immunity claims from President Bill Clinton’s lawyers and allowed a sexual-harassment civil suit against him by an Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones, to proceed.

Clinton’s statements in his subsequent deposition in that suit prolonged the Whitewater independent counsel investigation and led to his impeachment by the House.

Several justices said Trump’s lawyers were ignoring or downplaying Clinton v. Jones, which green-lighted civil litigation that many would consider less weighty than a congressional subpoena or a criminal investigation.

“The aura of this case is really: Sauce for the goose serves the gander, as well,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was appointed by Clinton, said during the arguments.

The other case considered by the justices stemmed from a drive by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., to use state-level grand jury subpoenas to get eight years of Trump’s tax returns and other financial records.

Trump’s personal lawyers said permitting such prospecting would lead to a flurry of similar requests, potentially unleashing 2,300 local prosecutors to target the president.

Last September, Trump sued Vance to try to block grand jury subpoenas as part of an investigation into alleged fraud by the Trump Organization and other matters.

Trump’s attorneys made a sweeping argument that presidents are completely immune from all concrete steps in the criminal justice process —ranging from subpoena to arrest and prosecution — while in office.

Despite more than a year of litigation, precisely what Trump-related tax and financial records the accounting firm and the banks have and would turn over in response to the subpoenas remains somewhat murky. Mazars is believed to have the president’s tax returns dating back more than a decade. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s subpoena to that firm demands a wide array of financial records spanning eight years, but doesn’t explicitly seek tax returns.

Last August, in response to an order from a federal appeals court in New York, Capital One said it had no tax returns from Trump or his family. Deutsche Bank said it does not have the president’s returns but has some for two people linked to Trump, believed to be family members.

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Robert Reich, writing for The Guardian, weighs in on the fairy tale that our country is somehow “roaring back,” as Donald Trump characterized it when he hawked a report last week based on misleading unemployment statistics—numbers that were already woefully out of date at the time they were released.

The US economy isn’t roaring back. Just over half of Americans have jobs now, the lowest figure in more than 70 years. What’s roaring back is Covid-19. Until it’s tamed, the American economy doesn’t stand a chance.

As former Labor Secretary Reich notes: “The uptick in jobs in June was due almost entirely to the hasty reopening, which is now being reversed.”

Last month, many businesses rehired previously laid-off employees based on cues they received from state governors assuring them the crisis had passed and that it was “time to reopen.” Those governors and Republicans in their legislatures in turn took their cues from a political imperative pushed relentlessly by the White House. But, as most of these governors well knew, that wasn’t the reality at all. It was simply a story spun out of thin air by an administration growing increasingly desperate about its reelection chances; a story to mollify a restless public grown increasingly frustrated at the endless lockdowns; a story to provide temporary cover for Republicans at the state and federal level who had absolutely no clue how to handle this pandemic.

But mostly it was a story to satisfy their donors, who were seeing their corporate profits evaporate and taking it out on their paid stooges in Congress and the states. The GOP jumped to the task, bailing out businesses as much as they possibly could—namely with hundreds of billions of dollars—without ever telling the American public where those funds were actually going. (Hint: It was to their donors.) But it wasn’t done out of any concern for American workers. If it had been, the GOP would have come up with a game plan that didn’t simply involve waving some fairy dust at the end of May and telling people it was now suddenly safe to go back to work.

This was effectively an untested medical experiment on a grand scale, collectively embraced by Republicans, with ordinary Americans as its unwitting subjects. The reopening push was not based on any scientific or medical planning to address the pandemic but wholly on “feel-good” politics designed to satisfy donors for a few months. 

So when those June unemployment numbers trumpeted by Trump and his state media last Thursday were actually compiled, reported COVID-19 cases in this country were averaging 25,000 daily because all those reopenings in late May were only just beginning to register a corresponding spike in infections. Since that report, cases have now jumped drastically to an average of 55,000 per day or more, forcing many states that had prematurely reopened to reverse course, shutting down businesses once again in a desperate attempt to prevent the virus from spiraling out of control and overwhelming their state’s medical capabilities. Late in June, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci warned that we were likely to see 100,000 cases of new infections every day thanks to inadequate efforts to contain the virus and these misguided reopenings.

Republican state legislators from Texas to Arizona to Wisconsin, where COVID-19 cases are now shooting through the roof, all rode the reopening bandwagon for months. They pounded their chests on their Facebook pages about their “patriotism,” attended rallies in support of gun-toting Neo-Nazi militias, and brought frivolous lawsuits to force businesses to reopen. In most Republican-led states (and some Democratic-run ones as well), the GOP’s blind push—and often violent agitation—to force accelerated reopenings caused several states to issue blanket, credulous edicts to reopen long before it was safe to do so. In states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin where they did not control the governor’s mansion, GOP-controlled legislatures introduced articles of impeachment to try to force their states to reopen, or petitioned like-minded judges to overrule the lockdown measures.

In less than a week since those new job numbers were released, instead of a nation “roaring back,” we are now witnessing an embarrassing and hasty Republican retreat from everything they and Trump assured us of with such certainty. Meanwhile, as Reich painstakingly points out, the pandemic hasn’t gone anywhere in the last four months. It still hangs around, strong as ever, like a voracious beast, ready to devour anyone foolish enough to try to defy it.

Now, Reich explains, all of those efforts are proving to be disastrous.

Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, initially refused to order masks and even barred local officials from doing so. This week he closed all gyms, bars and movie theaters in the state. The governors of Florida, Texas and California have also reimposed restrictions. Officials in Florida’s Miami-Dade county recently approved the reopening of movie theaters, arcades, casinos, concert halls, bowling halls and adult entertainment venues. They have now re-closed them.

And so on across America. A vast re-closing is under way, as haphazard as was the reopening. In the biggest public health emergency in US history, in which nearly 130,000 have already lost their lives, still no one is in charge.

You’d think some Republicans would have the decency to apologize. But none have as of this writing. Meanwhile, as a result of Republican dithering and inaction, millions of Americans are now finding themselves teetering on the edge of a financial abyss thanks to the complete lack of a coherent national response to this crisis by this president, and thanks to the Republican officials at all levels who abetted him. Reich plainly lays out what is coming in the next few weeks, all Republican “magical thinking” and fantasy-spinning to the contrary.

Brace yourself. Not only will the virus take many more lives in the months ahead, but millions of Americans are in danger of becoming destitute. Extra unemployment benefits enacted by Congress in March are set to end on 31 July. About one in five people in renter households are at risk of eviction by 30 September. Delinquency rates on mortgages have more than doubled since March.

An estimated 25 million Americans have lost or will lose employer-provided health insurance. America’s fragile childcare system is in danger of collapse, with the result that hundreds of thousands of working parents will not be able to return to work even if jobs are available.

The GOP-controlled U.S. Senate has all but abandoned the field in this pandemic, blocking attempts by Democratic lawmakers in the House to provide additional emergency aid to suffering Americans, and instead going on vacation throughout the entire month of June. In this conscious act of cowardice, they deliberately left Americans to their fate. Sen. Mitch McConnell and his colleagues have long since exhausted their quiver of phony, supply-side, “market-based” solutions and are now willingly leaving millions to be crushed by an ongoing economic catastrophe that is only now beginning to reveal its full ferocity.

As the true, stunning magnitude of this crisis finally hits home for Americans, the Republican Party will be offering no solutions—because they have none. Helping Americans in a crisis like this is not in their playbook, and they have no point of reference even if they had the inclination to do anything. In the end, they will be only too happy to scamper away to whatever gated communities continue to offer them shelter, muttering their worthless platitudes as Americans collapse into economic hardship, hunger, and in many cases, homelessness.

By late summer, all people of voting age in this country are going to be forced to make brutal, existential decisions about their futures and those of their families, and none of Trump’s hysterical babbling about Confederate statues or other race-baiting dogwhistles is going to make one whit of difference. This crisis is about to go into overdrive, far beyond any Republican attempts to “wish it away.” Millions of peoples’ lives are about to come alive with a fierce urgency that may well consign the Republican Party to the sorry trash bin of history, as Americans realize just how badly they’ve been screwed and lied to.

Two weeks ago we were told that the Trump administration was allegedly attempting to replenish basic medical supplies in the Strategic National Stockpile, building up supplies of masks and other equipment before an expected fall "second wave" of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The not-terribly-urgent-seeming stockpile effort, however, was based on a few key Trump Team assumptions. One: They were planning to build up a "90-day supply" of medical equipment based on "the worst 30 days" of the pandemic so far, meaning so far as in the first pandemic peak in April and May. Two: It would take until October to get that 90-day supply assuming nothing happened in, say, July to screw up those plans. Yeah, oops.

The Associated Press is now reporting that protective equipment such as masks is "running low again" as cases in hospitals in Arizona, Texas, California, Florida, and most places between escalate in an exponential fashion. The president of National Nurses United told AP that there are "still shortages" of gowns, masks, and other equipment, and nurses are "still being told to reuse them." And the Trump official in charge of procuring those supplies told Congress only last week that a quarter of U.S. states have less than a 30-day supply.

Any casual look at the latest charts shows that the pandemic has now escalated far above what officials were counting as a "worst" scenario back in June. And it's looking increasingly unlikely that the Strategic National Stockpile isn't going to be needed, on a large scale, before October.

For those of you in the back rows: That means we're boned.

Enlarge / Schoolchildren wearing protective mouth masks and face shields attend a course in their classroom at Claude Debussy college in Angers, western France, on May 18, 2020, after France eased lockdown measures to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the novel coronavirus. (credit: Damien Meyer / AFP / Getty Images)

On the heels of criticism from President Trump, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is planning to release updated guidance documents outlining how schools can safely reopen amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vice President Mike Pence announced the upcoming documents Wednesday, just hours after Trump took to Twitter to blast the agency’s current guidelines.

“Well, the president said today, we just don’t want the guidance to be too tough,” Pence said in a press briefing for the White House Coronavirus Task Force. “That’s the reason why next week, the CDC is going to be issuing a new set of tools, five different documents that will be giving even more clarity on the guidance going forward.”

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This is, sadly enough, not a news story. Instead, it’s a tale of speculative fiction. However, it’s not “high fantasy.” There are no elves or dragons to be found, and the setting isn’t in some mythical land. Neither is it science fiction, because it doesn’t call for any technology or discovery not all in evidence. It’s more a story out of alternative history—alternative present, really—with a focus on what could have been. 

This is a grand “what if” of a United States that isn’t trailing the globe in its response to the COVID-19 crisis. A United States that hasn’t racked up a disproportionate, and still growing, portion of the world’s deaths. A United States that hasn’t treated a pandemic as an “opportunity” to punish states that elected Democratic governors, and Black communities, and immigrants. A United States that hasn’t come to live with scorn for science, medicine, expertise of all types, and plain old common sense. It’s an image of what could have been. With images.

Back in mid-May, The New York Times looked at the success of women leaders in dealing with the COVID-19 crisis. Whether it was Angela Merkel in Germany running up a far lower death rate than neighbors in France or Italy; 34-year-old Prime Minster Sanna Marin in Finland whose all-women-led coalition came up with a plan leading to just 6% of the deaths in Sweden; President Tsai Ing-wen leading Taiwan through a plan so successful that the total number of deaths for the whole event to date is 7; or all-star Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, who was proclaimed the most effective leader on Earth in uniting her country to completely eradicate the disease there. Women: They got the job done.

As of Monday, New Zealand had 23 cases of COVID-19, all of them being carefully monitored in isolation. The United States had 1,620,520, and states were waving the white flag on even attempting to conduct contact tracing or case management. While these women-led nations show the world that dedicated leadership on testing, contact tracing, case management, social distancing, and protective measures can successfully reduce the death rate and contain the disease, the United States has become the poster child for how to do every possible thing absolutely wrong.

How might things have been different? Well … 

On December 31, 2019, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission in Hubei Province, China, informed the World Health Organization (WHO) that there was a suspicious cluster of pneumonia cases in the area. This information was immediately passed on to WHO members, and in the United States it was brought to the attention of the Global Health Security and Biodefense unit under Navy Rear Admiral R. Timothy Ziemer. On New Year’s Day, Ziemer briefed Clinton, who authorized a U.S. team to join the WHO Incident Management Support Team as they evaluated this new disease. Two weeks later, the virus has been sequenced, WHO has issued technical guidance warning of potential for spread, and the first case has appeared in Taiwan. Public health experts are in place in airports in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles to screen incoming passengers from China. (Believe it or not, almost all of this happened under … that other guy, other than the biodefense team, because they no longer exist.)

It’s what happens next that really changes things. Because when the first case appears in the United States, Clinton is ready with thousands of test kits obtained from overseas in advance of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) kits becoming available. As recommended by numerous exercises, she has already created a central authority for dispatching personal protective equipment (PPE) to states. In fact, almost half of the available PPE and ventilators have already been sent to states before that first case is confirmed, and more equipment has already been ordered to restock the national supply.

With that first case, testing sites are set up and Clinton announces a national effort to distribute tests, provide rules for isolation and quarantine, and ensure prompt results. 

Even as these test stations are being established, it’s clear that the freshly named COVID-19 has spread further and faster than expected. Cases have appeared on both coasts. But with tests available and a team focused on delivering them to the sites of identified cases, initial outbreaks are much more contained. A national program of sampling begins, with random tests looking out for community spread in unexpected areas.

New York emerges as a hot spot but never runs out of hospital space thanks to focused efforts to get tests where they’re needed and conduct early regional quarantines. By the first week of March, Clinton announces that both the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Census Bureau have been given a new assignment, with their normal functions placed on hold. These massive number-crunching agencies are enlisted in contact tracing and case management. Working with state and local officials, it’s their task to see that every identified case of COVID-19 is being handled through proper isolation and receiving follow-up testing. In addition, they direct a growing number of mobile testing teams to track down potential contacts and enforce a 14-day quarantine period. Over the objection of Republicans in the Senate, Clinton calls for a nationwide stay-at-home order while working with Congress to secure protective gear and bonus payments for essential workers and Emergency Basic Income for the remainder of the nation. 

By the end of April, the U.S. passes a sad milestone with 90,000 confirmed cases and over 9,000 Americans dead. However, widespread testing is in place across the country, case counts are dropping, and the percentage of tests coming back positive is below 1%. By mid-May, the storm has passed. Clinton announces that fewer than 100 positive tests have been determined in the last week. The nation begins to reopen on a regional basis, with clear guidelines and strict enforcement of rules for distancing and crowd-size.

Meanwhile, Sen. Mitch McConnell announces that Republicans in the Senate are launching a series of investigations into “the largest disaster in American history.” Ted Cruz calls it “Benghazi times 3,000” and Fox News declares that every warning they gave about Clinton is absolutely right. Frequent guest Donald Trump appears to explain how if he had been president, everything would have been so much better. In a national speech, Clinton thanks the citizens of the nation for their unity and fortitude, and ends by saying: “I accept full responsibility.”

The end.

The purpose of this extended sigh is simply this: Trump wants to declare a “win” by comparing the current results of the pandemic against simply allowing the virus to run wild. But that’s not the right measure. The measure is competent leadership. Could anyone have really held the numbers in the United States this low? All the evidence says yes. A rapid response on testing, a coordinated national effort, and a system that ran on evidence rather than spite could have identified the areas where COVID-19 was circulating in the community before emergency rooms filled up. South Korea’s response limited the cases there to just 12,000 and kept deaths down to 285.

Of course, none of this is going to be easy for Joe Biden, who isn’t starting from scratch, but has to deal with a nation where Trump has simply walked away from any responsibility. But at least Biden has a plan that’s more real than a fairy tale … unlike everything Trump has done.

Wednesday, Jul 8, 2020 · 9:43:23 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

And it’s possible I lied about the whole “no dragons” thing.

In the news we were all expecting to hear, Tulsa Health Department Director Dr. Bruce Dart is now all but confirming Donald Trump's Tulsa, Oklahoma campaign rally a few weeks ago has produced hundreds of new COVID-19 infections in the county.

As reported by The Associated Press, Dart is constrained by department policy in identifying any specific infection source (a stupid policy that needs revision, if it is impeding informing citizens of specific dangers to their health) but still spelled out the circumstances quite clearly: “In the past few days, we’ve seen almost 500 new cases, and we had several large events just over two weeks ago, so I guess we just connect the dots.”

The 500 new Tulsa cases almost certainly do not include others who attended the campaign rally but tested positive only after returning to their home states. Trump ally Herman Cain, who was still hospitalized for "serious" COVID-19 symptoms as of Monday, would fall into that broader category, as would attending campaign staff, Secret Service members, and reporters who have tested positive.

In other news, Houston, Texas Mayor Sylvester Turner and city convention center operator Houston First have now informed the Republican Party of Texas that they can pound sand, cancelling the party's in-person Houston convention set for next week. The move came a day after the party itself announced that important Texas Republicans like Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick would be giving their speeches remotely, via video, while leaving the 6,000 less important Republican conventioneers to take their chances with the virus.

Given Tulsa's experience, you'd have to be ten different kind of stupid to want to show up.

Meanwhile, in Jacksonville, Florida, cases have risen almost tenfold in the last two weeks—but as of right now, the Republican National Convention is still scheduled to go forward.

On the heels of his sweeping successes in safely jumpstarting the nation's economy, Donald Trump hopes to recreate his secret formula for reopening schools this fall. 

The only difference is, Trump's placing even less emphasis on safety and more emphasis on bludgeoning governors and local officials into choosing between two impossible options: putting children and families at extensive risk or starving their states of a key component needed to fuel their economic recovery. 

Remember when Trump balked momentarily at the Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp's rush to reopen the state even though it hadn't met the suggested White House task force metrics for safely reopening? None of that this time around. Trump is taking the hammer directly to state officials while overtly sidelining the recommendations of his own Centers for Disease Control.

"We're very much going to put pressure on governors and everyone else to open the schools," Trump told reporters Tuesday. On Wednesday, he added a comparison between U.S. schools and those of other wealthy nations that actually enacted national coronavirus testing plans.

“In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS,” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning, adding, "May cut off funding if not open!" An hour later, Trump also tweeted that the current CDC guidelines for reopening schools were "very tough & expensive," complaining that they were "very impractical."

His entire administration is now singing from that same dis-the-CDC song sheet. "We don’t want the guidance from CDC to be a reason why schools don’t open," Vice President Mike Pence, pandemic extraordinaire, told reporters during a White House task force briefing Wednesday. Pence also offered that his wife, Karen, was “the best expert” he knew on the topic of schools reopening. The CDC is now reportedly reworking its own guidance, presumably with the help of Karen Pence, expert.

But one thing we can trust for certain is that safety isn't a key priority for anyone in Trump’s orbit. Trump is approaching his push to reopen schools exactly as he approached his push to reopen states. While demanding that governors and local officials reopen facilities, he hasn't offered to lift so much as a finger to make those reopenings more safe. 

For instance, how about putting billions toward deep cleaning the schools, helping them stock up on masks and other protective equipment, and opening on-site care centers with testing and contact tracing capability?

Nope. None of it. Not one damned thing. No funding, no resources, no useful guidance—nothing. Just the f*cking pressure campaign with a hope and a prayer for best results if we're all lucky.

So just to be clear—it's pretty safe to say that every working parent in America wants schools to reopen in fall. Safely. While most kids appear to weather the coronavirus quite well, they could easily carry the virus home and infect other members of the household, thereby hobbling the workforce and putting more lives at risk.

Recent polling shows a majority of Americans are worried about exactly that—the safety of their families. Late last month, a combined 54% of Americans said they were either somewhat uncomfortable or very uncomfortable with reopening K-12 schools this fall, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll. 

But since that poll, Trump's beta launch for reopening the economy has gone completely off the rails, with more than 40 states nationwide reporting an increase in coronavirus cases as hospitalizations rise in at least 22 states and testing capacity tanks. In short, thanks to Trump's handiwork, the global pandemic that America had months to prepare for is ripping through the nation unabated. 

Early in the pandemic, Trump left states and governors to fend for themselves. Now he's leaving families to do the exact same thing. His incompetence is an endless nightmare playing out in real time for the entire nation. First it doomed the old and vulnerable populations, then the economy. Next up: kids and their families. No one will escape untouched. 

Since Trump took office, foreign students have only faced greater challenges in coming to the US.

Many foreign students have fled the US amid the pandemic, going back to their home countries while they await word from university administrators about whether they will be able to come back to campus in the fall. But some have stayed in the US — and a new Trump policy would force them to either return home, transfer to programs with in-person classes, or potentially face deportation.

The news has been a blow to students like João Cardoso, a rising senior at Yale University from Portugal on an F-1 student visa, for whom going home isn’t really an option.

His mother lives in a one-room apartment, and he is locked into a lease that doesn’t expire until next May. Yale subsidizes his housing as part of his financial aid package; if he were to leave the country, that money would disappear, and so would his ability to make rent.

Yale has allowed seniors to return to campus in the fall, adopting a hybrid model in which a small number of classes are in-person while the rest are online. Cardoso’s plan was to finish up his senior thesis from the safety of his apartment while tuning into online classes for his major, astronomy.

But foreign students on temporary F-1 and M-1 visas like Cardoso will no longer have the option of staying near campus while solely taking classes online.

“The news was absolutely devastating because I don’t have the safety of staying here anymore,” he said. “I’m pissed. I’m mad at what they’ve done. I think it’s really counterproductive.”

Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security, told CNN that the policy change was meant to “encourage schools to reopen” — part of the Trump administration’s goal of forcing American life to resume even as Covid-19 continues to spread and the death toll mounts. Foreign students who have made significant sacrifices and commitments, both financial and personal, to study in the US are thus being used as political leverage.

Harvard and MIT filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts federal court on Wednesday morning challenging the policy, claiming it overlooked universities efforts’ to keep students, instructors and other members of their communities — especially those who are immunocompromised and face higher risk of complications from Covid-19 — safe amid rising cases nationwide.

“We believe that the ICE order is bad public policy, and we believe that it is illegal,” Harvard President Larry Bacow said in a statement Wednesday.

It’s just the latest way that President Donald Trump, who has criticized universities for “taking the easy way out” by canceling in-person classes amid the pandemic, has targeted foreign students. In recent years, he has sought to clamp down on visa programs that allow foreign students to gain work experience post-graduation, preside over sting operations to weed out student visa fraud, and make it easier for students to fall out of legal status.

Foreign student enrollment, which totaled about 1 million students nationwide in 2014, has consequently been on a steady decline since his election. That has dealt a blow to universities that rely on their talents and tuition and to the US economy — foreign students generate an estimated $32 billion in revenue annually and support more than 300,000 jobs, according to the think tank New American Economy.

Students may have to self-deport under ICE’s new policy

Before the pandemic, ICE had a longstanding policy of barring international students from living in the US while pursuing online-only curriculums. To maintain a valid visa, foreign students must pursue the number of credits necessary to complete whatever their school deems to be a “full course of study.” For students on F-1 visas, only a single online class can count towards their full course of study and, for students in technical and vocational programs on M-1 visas, none count.

ICE changed its policy as universities suspended in-person classes starting in early March to stop the spread of coronavirus, temporarily waiving limits on how many online courses foreign students can take for the spring and summer semesters. The exemption would remain “in effect for the duration of the emergency” related to Covid-19, the agency said at the time.

But the national emergency is by no means over, and universities have been working for months to determine how they can safely hold classes in the fall without becoming “super spreaders.” ICE nevertheless announced that it was updating the policy change on Monday such that students pursuing online-only curriculums would no longer be allowed to remain in the US, just hours after Harvard announced that it would be holding classes entirely online in the fall.

That still offers schools more flexibility than the agency’s pre-pandemic policy, Cuccinelli told CNN on Tuesday. And it could still be subject to change since the agency has yet to publish the changes in a temporary final rule in the Federal Register.

“We’re expanding the flexibility massively to a level never done before so that schools can use hybrid models,” he said, adding that “anything short of 100 percent online” would allow foreign students to stay in the US.

But schools say that the policy change, as described by ICE, will hamper their careful plans to reopen and leave their students with no option but to leave the country. ICE suggested that students can transfer to programs that are not online-only, but that’s impossible within weeks of the start of the fall semester.

And for many students, the prospect of returning to their home countries to take classes online is “impossible, impracticable, prohibitively expensive, and/or dangerous,” according to Harvard and MIT’s suit. Raúl Romero, a student at Kenyon College from Venezuela, said that returning to his home country would mean going back to a socioeconomic and political crisis that has displaced thousands and led to increases in violent crime, starvation and poverty.

Some attorneys have nonetheless expressed worry that Harvard and MIT’s lawsuit could fail — given that ICE had a longstanding policy of barring foreign students from pursuing online-only curriculums pre-pandemic, it’s harder to argue that this decision was “arbitrary and capricious” and violated the Administrative Procedure Act. But the litigation could still delay the implementation of this policy change until the worst of the pandemic has passed.

“This is not the clearest litigation compared to some of the other things we’re litigating for the reason that there are has been for a long time, a regulation that existed that limits online courses that you can take as a foreign student,” said Ron Klasko, an immigration attorney based in Philadelphia who has litigated a number of cases successfully challenging the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

How Trump has previously targeted students

On the campaign trail in 2015, Trump voiced support for keeping foreign students in the US. But once he took office, Trump pursued a number of policies taking aim at them instead.

Trump has imposed restrictions on visa programs that provide a pathway for students to remain in the US long-term, including the sought-after H-1B visa program for skilled workers. It’s a pipeline for foreign talent, particularly in the fields of computer science, engineering, education, and medicine.

During the pandemic, Trump signed a proclamation temporarily blocking the entry of foreign workers coming to the US on H-1Bs and other visas through the end of the year. According to a senior administration official, he’s also pursuing reforms to the program that would make it harder for entry-level workers just graduating from US universities to qualify.

More than 85,000 immigrants get H-1B visas for skilled workers annually, including thousands for workers at tech giants such as Google and Amazon. Recipients are currently selected by lottery, but Trump is proposing to instead prioritize workers with the highest wages and raise the program’s minimum wage requirements.

For foreign students deciding to attend American universities, the prospect of being able to work in the US post-graduation is a major draw. Absent that ability, they might decide against choosing to attend school in the US.

Trump has also sought to clamp down on student visa fraud, using what many advocates consider to be questionable methods. ICE came under fire in November after announcing that it had been operating a fake university designed to lure in immigrants seeking to obtain student visas fraudulently — but the students claimed they were the ones who had been deceived. Some 250 students at the University of Farmington in Farmington Hills, Michigan, were consequently arrested.

The University of Farmington wasn’t a real educational institution: Although ICE advertised the university as offering graduate STEM courses, it did not have any teachers, curriculum, classes, or other educational activities. Its primary selling point, prosecutors said, is a ticket to an F-1 visa.

But attorneys for the students affected say that these operations are entrapment, designed to trick unknowing international students into paying thousands of dollars to a university, while having no way of knowing that their actions are illegal.

The Trump administration also tried to make it easier for students to face penalties for violating the terms of their visas. US Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a memo in 2018 that meant that mistakes so minor as failing to file an address change report or having to drop a course could have prevented students from applying for a new visa or barred them from reentering the US for a period of up to 10 years, Klasko said. That memo, however, was blocked in federal court before it could go into effect.

How Trump’s attacks on students harm American innovation

Trump’s attempts to target foreign students have already led to a decline of almost 11 percent in enrollment since the fall of 2016. That drop can largely be attributed to their perception that the US is less welcoming toward foreign students.

That’s a loss for both universities and the businesses who rely on their talent and economic power. Foreign students tend to pay more in tuition than Americans and the loss of that revenue could hurt the quality of US higher education more broadly, universities have argued. At the graduate level, many serve as research and teaching assistants, now aiding critical research on the coronavirus pandemic, and some grad programs could not exist in the STEM fields and social sciences without them.

Post-graduation, many international students go on to become entrepreneurs or pursue careers in fields requiring specialized skills, particularly in STEM fields where there are well-documented labor shortages. Nearly a quarter of founders of billion-dollar American startups came to the US initially as international students, according to the National Foundation for American Policy.

Absent that talent, many businesses may have to resort to candidates that are less qualified, institute training and reskilling programs for their employees or outsource work abroad, Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of global business at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, said.

Even if international students go back to their home countries post-graduation, they still indirectly contribute to the US economy. Many become contact points for American businesses looking to build a relationship with companies abroad or expand their business abroad. And US-educated graduates populating foreign governments may pursue US-friendly policy.

“It is the American-trained, American-educated graduates that become the primary interlocutors,” Chakravorti said.

But as Chakravorti has observed among his own students, Trump’s immigration policies have soured many foreigners on attending university in the US or staying in the country after they graduate.

When Cardoso was accepted to Yale, he was seriously considering finding a job in the US post-graduation, but the past three years have dissuaded him. He speaks German fluently, so he could get a job in Germany instead as a software developer and wouldn’t even need to apply for a new visa since he is a European Union citizen. For him, staying in the US isn’t worth the hassle or the heartache.

“I’m out of here as soon as possible,” he said. “I’m completely disappointed with this country in so many ways.”

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Words projected onto the EPA's headquarters during a demonstration. (credit: Victoria Pickering / Flickr)

Update: This story has been updated with a statement from the operator of the Dakota Access pipeline.

A series of decisions in the last few days has halted or scuttled three high-profile oil- and gas-pipeline projects. The Keystone and Dakota Access oil pipelines—sources of long-running controversy—both suffered legal setbacks that will require additional environmental impact reviews. Separately, the Atlantic Coast natural gas pipeline recently won a case before the US Supreme Court, yet it has now been abandoned by the two energy companies behind it.

The Keystone XL pipeline is meant to carry oil produced in Alberta, Canada, southeast to Nebraska, but it has suffered major delays. The Dakota Access pipeline, on the other hand, has been operational for several years, carrying oil from North Dakota to southern Illinois.

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A homophobic “Karen” was filmed spewing anti-gay slurs as she stood with a right-wing group with Confederate flags as they came face to face with Black Lives Matter activists at an annual Independence Day celebration at the Covered Bridge in Elizabethton, Tennessee. The video of the woman, identified as Sonya Holt, went viral earlier this week.

Here’s a refresher:

Holt told WJHL that she has since lost her job at Keith Family Vision Clinic in Johnson City.

In the viral clip, Holt is seen yelling, “Come across the line fag boy. Come across the line,” to one of the protesters. She later screeched at the same man, “You are a gay homosexual piece of crap and you’re going to burn in Hell.”

Holt told WJHL: “As far as the gentleman that I said some bad remarks about his sexuality, prior to that, you’re not seeing that on video. I was just standing there, along with everybody else. And he called me ‘Ku Klux Karen’ because of my haircut. And he said that I was a member of the KKK. And he repeated this several times. And then when I lashed out at him and called him what I did, which I shouldn’t have said because his sexuality is none of my business. I was just angry and I lashed out.”

Seth Loven, the protester targeted by Holt, denied that he had said anything like it “besides calling her Karen with the flip phone or Karen.”

In another video, Holt was filmed yelling at a black protester: “White lives matter! You’re just a poor little black girl who’s got a messed up mind. White lives matter! White lives matter!”

Holt told WJHL that she would not have said the words to the girl if she had known she was 16-years-old: “I would like to apologize to the little girl. I did not know that she was a minor. If I had known she was a minor, I would have never spoken to her.”

Holt added, “I’m not racist at all. I have Black friends. I have Black relatives in my family. The reason that I was angry is because I was being accused of being in the Ku Klux Klan. Which I would never in my life be a part of. I think that’s horrible.”

The post Homophobic ‘Covered Bridge Karen’ Speaks Says She Was Fired After ‘White Lives Matter’ Tirade at Protesters: ‘I’m Not Racist at All’ — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

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Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today sued the Trump administration to block an action that forces foreign students with nonimmigrant visas to leave the United States or transfer to different schools that offer in-person classes. The schools' complaint, filed in US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, asks for a temporary restraining order and permanent injunction preventing the administration from enforcing the new policy issued by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

In the complaint, Harvard and MIT said:

By all appearances, ICE's decision reflects an effort by the federal government to force universities to reopen in-person classes, which would require housing students in densely packed residential halls, notwithstanding the universities' judgment that it is neither safe nor educationally advisable to do so, and to force such a reopening when neither the students nor the universities have sufficient time to react to or address the additional risks to the health and safety of their communities. The effect—and perhaps even the goal—is to create as much chaos for universities and international students as possible.

The ICE policy will be especially problematic for Harvard and MIT students from certain countries, such as "Syria, where civil war and an ongoing humanitarian crisis make Internet access and study all but impossible," the lawsuit said. "Others come from Ethiopia, where the government has a practice of suspending all Internet access for extended periods, including presently, starting on June 30, 2020."

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For several weeks now, we've seen Donald Trump's approvals inching lower in most polls while his disapprovals also hit historic highs in some polls. In Gallup's latest poll earlier this week, Trump sank to 38% approval, down 11 points from his personal best of 49% in early May and just three points above his worst-ever Gallup rating of 35%.

But perhaps what's most significant is that Trump's overall approval rating seems to be resetting at the level of the new lows, and that's putting him in the company of presidential incumbents whose reelection bids have not fared well.

Here's how that new normal looks in Civiqs' tracking poll—as is often the case, the specific number isn't quite as important here as the trend. And trend-wise, over the last month, Trump has reset at a lower approval and a higher disapproval rating by a several-point margin. 

But as Gallup notes, the last two presidents who had sub-40s approvals in its polling in June were George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, who both lost reelection. Pre-COVID and before George Floyd, Trump's high 40s approvals were looking more on a par with those of Barack Obama and George W. Bush. However from this point on, there's no predictive trend about whether an incumbent president's approvals rise, fall, or flatline.

What we do know is that ever since the early ‘70s, incumbent winners are typically polling in the high 40s to 50s, while incumbent losers are polling closer to high 30s, low 40s. And for the moment, Trump's sweet spot appears to be idling in incumbent loser mode.

One more instructive data point that CNN's Harry Enten has noted is that while Republicans have been complaining that the public polling is being skewed, they also aren't releasing their own internal polls. Since April, Enten notes, Republicans haven’t made a single internal poll public, while Democrats have released 17 of their own internal polls publicly. 

That ratio alone is "highly predictive" of where the election is headed, according to Enten.