Democrats Are Legitimizing the Legitimacy Debate, and That's a Damned Good Thing

As Amy Coney Barrett ascends to the Supreme Court, it seems that Democratic politicians are singing from the same hymn book about the meaning of this dire occasion.  Not only is there discussion of righting the imbalance in the Court, now that conservatives hold a 6-3 majority, there is open talk of how the Court’s very legitimacy is at stake.  This is as it should be, given that since 1969 Republican presidents have appointed 15 of the last 19 justices, despite that party having won the presidential popular vote a single time over the last 28 years and seven elections, and in light of the fast-tracking of nominations like those of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett that robbed Americans of their ability to assess whether those justices are qualified or fit for their positions, followed by their approval by a GOP Senate majority that collectively received millions votes less than the Democratic Senate minority.

Foregrounding the concept of “legitimacy” in the discussion is essential because it’s crucial not only to Supreme Court appointments and rulings, but to the coherence of the American political system more generally.  For instance, it’s easy to see how talking about the legitimacy of Supreme Court appointments by Republican presidents who lost the popular vote logically leads into questions around the legitimacy of the electoral college, which permitted minority GOP presidents to make such appointments.  Beyond this, it puts up for public discussion the extremely important notion of legitimacy in a democracy.

But what does “legitimacy” specifically refer to?  I’ve repeatedly written of the need to de-legitimize the GOP because of its embrace of racism and political violence during the Trump years, but haven’t spent a lot of time explaining what I mean by this.  Recent discussions around the Barrett nomination have helped clarify my thinking, including a surprise assist yesterday from none other than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

As he often does, McConnell has been engaging directly but misleadingly with the arguments his Democratic opponents have been making, most recently in response to the rising Democratic fury around the Barrett appointment.  According to Bloomberg reporter Steven Dennis, McConnell remarked that Democrats “repeating that confirming a justice was ‘illegitimate’ doesn’t make it so,” and that ‘legitimacy’ is not the result of their feelings.”  McConnell is essentially making the case, most strikingly embodied in his handling of the foiled Merrick Garland and successful Kavanaugh and Barrett nominations, that as long as the Constitution allows something, it is legitimate.

But Democrats who talk about legitimacy are referring to something broader than just whether the constitution allows a certain action; they are also talking about whether an act or situation is characterized by democratic fairness.  In this sense, talking about legitimacy is another way of talking about what should be considered fair and acceptable in a democracy.  Mitch McConnell would have us believe that there is no distinction between what is constitutional and what is legitimate, while Democrats are making the case that there are indeed important distinctions between what is allowed by the constitution and what should be considered as legitimate in American democracy.  

As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes tweeted yesterday, to illustrate the distinction between what the constitution allows and what would be generally considered permissible (i.e., legitimate), it would be entirely constitutional for a president to order his chief of staff to murder a political opponent, then use his pardon power to pardon that chief of staff — yet such a move would be very widely recognized as grotesquely illegitimate, both in terms of the murder and in terms of a clear abuse of the pardon power.  It’s an extreme example, but effectively shows why McConnell’s effort to conflate constitutionality and legitimacy is a way to forestall discussion of the latter concept.  

McConnell wants to avoid such a discussion around the Supreme Court because he fears, rightly, that the GOP will very likely find itself on the losing side once we start talking not of constitutional legitimacy but a broader democratic legitimacy of recent court appointments.  If legitimacy is conferred not simply by blind obeisance to the letter of the constitution, but also depends on the degree to which a certain action reflects the will of the majority, then it matters very much that the three most recent appointees were named to the Supreme Court by a president who did not receive a majority of votes.  

Ironically, then, we find that legitimacy actually IS dependent on people’s “feelings,” to use McConnell’s own language — or, to put it in less inflammatory and insulting terms, is dependent on people’s feelings of justice, right and wrong, democratic accountability, and other reasonings and intuitions that citizens agree should be taken into account when political decisions are made.  McConnell’s attempts to distort our traditional, if not always fully articulated, ideas of democratic legitimacy have backfired, leading to a necessary discussion about what is considered legitimate in American politics.  

This is a conversation that is likely to lead to a discrediting of McConnell’s self-serving constitutional literalism.  Once you agree that things outside the constitution matter, then you are in the realm of majority politics and debate, an area of contention where minds can be changed and consensus built.  McConnell, as a leader in a political party that is steadily losing supporters, should well dread such a process, just as Democrats are right to embrace it.

What makes me disinclined to board the gloom and doom bandwagon that some are on, in which the Supreme Court is sure to strike down any progressive legislation passed by a future Democratic president and Congress, is that the debate currently underway about legitimacy, particularly regarding the Court, is one that is not easily put back in the bottle.  In fact, it’s a debate that the Democrats should have advanced long before now.  And a discussion of democratic legitimacy hardly ends with the Supreme Court; it’s a framework for talking about, and undoing, various other anti-democratic measures the GOP has implemented to maintain power despite growing minority status, such as voter suppression and gerrymandering.

But I’m not just buoyed by the prospect that this is an argument Democrats can make to the public and win.  Talking about legitimacy means talking about a bedrock principle of democracy, which is healthy for our political system in a general sense, in that it is always good to understand and re-affirm first principles.  Beyond this, though, when Democratic politicians talk about such a basic idea, one that every voter can understand and offer an opinion on, it has the effect of making it difficult for those politicians to then turn off such rhetoric and settle for compromise with the status quo rather than pursuing a difficult but necessary fight to rally public opinion to their side, whether it’s expanding the court system or passing new voting rights legislation.  Talking about legitimacy creates a higher likelihood of a feedback effect, in which energized citizens press their elected representatives to make good on all their reasonable, high-minded, and motivating talk.  It is not something that can easily be switched off once the election is past, and the urgency of getting votes and donations has abated.  In a very real way, Democrats are locking themselves into a path to action.  This is a very hopeful development.

Meadows' Comments on Not Controlling Pandemic Should Haunt GOP After Election

With his statement this weekend that the United States is “not going to control the pandemic,” White House chief of staff Mark Meadows further clarified the harrowing stakes of the upcoming election and made a case for Joe Biden likely worth tens of millions in equivalent advertising dollars.  Alongside his accompanying declaration that “We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas,” the message is clear: the Trump administration takes no responsibility for advocating or coordinating measures like social distancing, strategic closures, and mask-wearing that might mitigate and even control the spread of the coronavirus, and has effectively embraced a “let them eat covid” strategy of allowing the virus to run its course while blaming Americans for their inclination to fall ill and die.

This dovetails with something people like Paul Krugman and John Stoehr have been writing about — the Trump administration’s approach to the pandemic has been “strongly influenced by the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto on behalf of herd immunity that grew out of a meeting at the American Institute for Economic Research.”  The AIER has connections to the Charles Koch Institute, famous for promoting libertarian (i.e., anti-worker and anti-government regulations) approaches to the economy, which means that the White House’s public health policy appears driven not by public health concerns, but by powerful business interests who fear above all the loss of a single cent of profits.  Among other things, this further validates the motivations I suggested were propelling the various GOP governors who have thrown up their hands about being able to do anything about the spread of the virus; the notion that workers simply need to hurl themselves into the breach of an ailing economy, and take one for the team (even if “taking it” means getting seriously ill or dying), while checking their expectations about whether the government can or should play a role in protecting public health, is of a piece with the libertarian claptrap coming out of an organization like the AIER.

(In a gratifyingly direct connection, Krugman notes how the AIER “published an article lauding Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, whose refusal to take action against the coronavirus has turned her state into what the article called “a fortress of liberty and hope protected from the grasps of overbearing politicians.””  Noem, you may recall, was possibly the most odious of the GOP governors I wrote about; among other things, as the Washingon Post described, “She is one of the few governors who refused to issue a stay-at-home order in the spring, has repeatedly questioned the validity of using masks to reduce viral spread and hosted the president for a massive, tightly packed Fourth of July celebration at Mount Rushmore.”)

I think when we look back at the disaster of the coronavirus response, this malign confluence between conservative business interests that literally do not care if workers live or die, and a president who feared above all else the appearance of a crashing economy in an election year, were key culprits.  But the fact that a cruel, profits-first mindset appears to provide the intellectual grounds (such as they are) for conservatives’ backing of the president’s approach needs to be kept front and center in the public mind, now that it looks increasingly likely Donald Trump will be defeated in the upcoming election.  Without Trump’s personal incompetence and mental illness clouding the picture, it will be more important than ever to zero in on the deadly policies and immoral thinking of his current abettors and future successors — those fellow Republican elected officials who will doubtless take up the baton of fighting against reasonable measures to protect the public health, arguing that it is government tyranny to tell people to wear masks and social distance and close non-essential businesses if that’s what’s necessary to save lives.  Mark Meadows this weekend wasn’t just enunciating Trump’s view, but the view of businesses and conservatives who horrifically believe that no number of lives is too many to lose if there is a chance that profits may be made without interruption.

If they want to maximize the chances of a Biden administration successfully implementing a science-based coronavirus response, Democrats will need to remain on the attack against those in the GOP who holds such twisted values and want them to guide the government’s pandemic response.  The attacks around incompetence and selfish self-preservation that worked against Trump will need to be replaced with a more direct attack on such murderous, pro-business ideology.  Democrats can’t rest if Trump is defeated; they will also need to discredit and drive from office all those who serve up in more sophisticated form arguments that elected officials have no role to play in protecting the health of the citizenry.

Thoughts on the Debate

At last night’s second and final presidential debate, Joe Biden and Donald Trump both played it safe in their separate ways.  As the front runner, Biden seemed uninterested in doing anything to shake up the race, and maintained a sober tone that stuck to his major campaign themes, without any particularly savage attacks against the president’s horrific record.  The president was restrained in comparison to his first performance, refraining from the constant interruptions that turned the first debate into a showcase for his narcissism and aggression.

But Trump’s calmer delivery made his torrents of lies and slander last night all the more horrifying.  His calculation and amorality took literal center stage.  Most striking were his attempts to paint not simply Biden but his entire family as a crime syndicate, a predictable move, but so clearly an act of pure malice and projection.  All the untruths he leveled at Biden’s exploitation of government for personal gain are descriptions of Trump and his own family’s betrayal of the public trust by exploiting their White House power for personal gain.  What I was struck by again and again was how Trump not only lies constantly but seems to feel not an ounce of compunction or doubt about doing so — the shamelessness that so many people have long described was almost tangible.

I don’t think the lies, existing without clear referents or evidence in the real world for most people, helped Trump’s cause, and his continued unwillingness to articulate responsibility or a plan for the coronavirus were obvious to anyone paying attention. It’s a bit crazy that some people are referring to how substantial the debate was compared to last time. Joe Biden may have brought substance, but Trump brought lies in such vast quantity that his performance was an enactment of propaganda against the American electorate.

But unlike the first time, where Trump’s bull in a china shop behavior made him seem stylistically and substantively unpresidential, this second showdown was a good demonstration of how Trump can be legitimized and propped up by a presidential debate, even one in which he’s asked critical questions by a highly competent moderator.  Whatever Trump’s plans or lack thereof for handling the coronavirus pandemic, fixing the economy, or providing Americans with health care, he is also a president who has incited violence against political opponents, refused to say if he will step down if he loses the election, and called for the incarceration of his opponent literally the day before the debate.  When his direct attacks on democracy itself are removed from such a fundamental public conversation, the president is given a pass on the very issues for which the public most requires an accounting.  In this respect, part of the blame lies with Joe Biden, who passed up opportunities to press home that Trump is not just a failed president but an authoritarian who has already vowed to retain power no matter what the voters say.

With Great New Jersey Power Comes Great Responsibility

It’s good that Chris Christie has recovered from his bout with the coronavirus, and even better that he has done that rare thing among politicians, and in particular Trump allies, and admitted he was wrong not to have worn a mask during his recent interactions at the White House leading up to his illness.  If this helps save even one life, it’s a good thing. Credit where credit is due.

Yet, in an op ed published today in the Wall Street Journal, Christie avers that after wearing a mask consistently for seven months, “I let my guard down” while at recent events at the White House — the Supreme Court nomination event for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, and Donald Trump’s debate preparations.  But this is not the entire truth, is it?  Christie didn’t just randomly let down his guard at the Barrett event, but joined in a televised parade of propaganda orchestrated by the White House to present mask-free images of Republican leadership meant to reinforce the president’s re-election message that the pandemic has largely been defeated and that covid-19 is nothing to be feared.  This spectacle ended up being self-defeating and grotesque, a super spreader event that sickened senators and White House staff.  

Christie also steers well clear of the contradiction between serving a key role in prepping President Trump to debate Joe Biden, and Trump’s centrality in spreading misinformation and denial about the virus — including, most saliently, the president’s long-standing contempt for mask wearing.  To put it again in the terms in which he chooses to frame his decision not to wear a mask at the White House — Christie didn’t just let down his guard because the White House was supposed to be a safe space.  He let down his guard interacting with a man who berates and belittles staff members who wear masks, and who has done unparalleled damage to the effort to get Americans to wear masks, all for the sake of increasing his re-election chances so that President Trump can keep on with his anti-mask, pandemic-denying insanity.  

The clincher is that in his op ed piece, Christie has the gall to offer the following observations:

We are asked to wear cloth over our mouth and nose, wash our hands and avoid crowds. These minor inconveniences can save your life, your neighbors and the economy. Seldom has so little been asked for so much benefit. Yet the message will be broadly heeded only if it is consistently and honestly delivered by the media, religious leaders, sports figures and public servants. Those in positions of authority have a duty to get the message out. 

One of the worst aspects of America’s divided politics is the polarization of something as practical as a mask.

No American politician has been more responsible for denigrating these “minor conveniences” as the very same man that Christie treats as a close ally, a man who has singled-handedly created the “polarization” that Christie decries.  In refusing to name names while professing to be on the side of the angels, Christie is caught in the awkward act of attempting to flee a sinking ship while pretending he wasn’t one of the captain’s best mates.  You cannot support President Trump’s re-election, cannot help him debate and defeat Joe Biden, while also pretending to denounce politicians who don’t take the coronavirus seriously.

Bearing Witness at the Black Mass

A recent Plum Line post by Greg Sargent makes an argument that complements the case I tried to make yesterday about the perfidy of Republican governors who have stood down from their coronavirus responsibilities.  Sargent writes that even as GOP politicos panic over the president’s desultory re-election trajectory, they still can’t bring themselves to actually talk about the coronavirus pandemic, or to urge the president to change course for the sake of saving his presidency:

For these Republicans, the very existence of Trump’s authorship of this catastrophe cannot be acknowledged. So public revulsion over this sick and dying elephant in the room — and the role that’s playing in Trump’s travails — also cannot be conceded.

The clincher is that both President Trump and the GOP are ignoring public sentiment: 

Majorities don’t believe the virus is under control now and want more government action to rein it in even if that slows the recovery, rejecting Trump’s central story of the moment. Voters think Biden will better handle the virus by large margins. Approval of Trump’s handling of it is at a near-low, rivaling where it stood amid the last coronavirus peak.

Trump’s failure is echoed by the failure of GOP governors to do their duty and respond to the public’s desire for more action. Yet, across the GOP, we find a conspiracy of denialism and downplaying, all out of tacit recognition of what a disaster the pandemic is and that the president’s handling of it, being indefensible, must simply be ignored.

Sargent rightly points to the president’s ongoing in-person rallies as attaining an emblematic significance in the light of all this denial of reality:

Trump’s own rallies — the most visible manifestations of his case for a second term right now — unfold largely without masks and social distancing, themselves dramatizing this pathology as vividly as one could imagine.

Indeed, these late-stage campaign rallies in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century, which effectively act as potential super-spreader events among Trump supporters, are the supercharged Trumpian analogue to those GOP governors who tell citizens they are responsible on their own for dealing with the coronavirus.  The particular responsibility of his supporters is to enact in rally-size miniature the covid-free world he claims is imminent, to bask in a sort of immunity-by-mass-denial.  Yet just as average citizens have become victims in a GOP war to discredit a meaningful role for government in their lives, so Trump’s strongest fans — those who show up — are willing victims in his quest for power and approval.  But even more than victims, they are modern-day sacrifices to the orange demon god, giving up their lives so that his campaign might live another day.  

We joke, but only to cope with the terror of a national spectacle whose substance may still consume us — politicians willing to not only tolerate but actively abet the spread of a deadly virus in the name of proving that they have not failed us, that if we get sick it is our own fault for not having the proper attitude or genes or medical care.  And the willingness of so many of our fellow citizens to go along, or to join in the ritual of Trump rallies, orgies of hatred, racism, misogyny, and fascistic appeals, is dizzying and disheartening.

Tears of Rage

Watching North Dakota’s Republican Governor Doug Burgum choke up while describing his state’s covid crisis is to witness a seemingly decent man brought face to face with the immorality of his own cruel political ideology, but still insufficiently moved to make a leap of conscience and actually take the measures within his control that would save some of the lost lives that drive him to tears.  Bergum tears up as he describes a vulnerable child who could be saved by wearing a mask, yet his sadness cannot move him to mandate simple measures that might save that theoretical child and help turn those tears of sadness into tears of joy.  And so he limits himself to recommending masks and social distancing, while denying that the state government has any role in backing those life-saving recommendations with the force of law.  

“It’s not a job for government,” says Bergum.

Yet Burgum appears as possibly the least heinous of the lot of GOP governors discussed in an article out Sunday from The Washington Post. Iowa’s Governor Kim Reynolds “has refused to revisit her decision to lift most restrictions on businesses and to allow students back to class without masks” despite new state coronavirus records this month; she even echoed President Trump’s steroid-addled pronouncement that “We can’t let covid-19 dominate our lives.”  Texas Governor Greg Abbott is re-opening bars even though they’re ground zero for coronavirus transmission.  And South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem parrots Trump’s propaganda that increasing numbers of cases are due simply to more testing.  The Post also notes that Noem shares Trump’s antipathy to scientific knowledge, writing that, “She is one of the few governors who refused to issue a stay-at-home order in the spring, has repeatedly questioned the validity of using masks to reduce viral spread and hosted the president for a massive, tightly packed Fourth of July celebration at Mount Rushmore.”

The common thread among these governors is that they “preach the mantra of “personal responsibility,” insisting that government interventions such as mask mandates or business restrictions are either unnecessary or harmful, and that people should be trusted to make their own decisions about how to keep themselves — and each other — healthy.”  What’s especially insidious about this “personal responsibility” over government action line is that of course personal responsibility is essential to stopping the spread of the coronavirus.  Of course everyone needs to do their part in slowing and stopping the spread of this virus.  This is a point that no one of good faith would question.  The problem, as experts interviewed for the article point out, is that a pandemic requires government coordination, not just individual efforts, including stronger rules about what people should and should not do.

The proof of this is the failures unfolding under the watch of these do-nothing governors.  North Dakota, with a population of 900,000, has been seeing 900 new cases a day (for comparison, The Hot Screen’s home of Oregon, with a population of 4.2 million, has recently experienced an average of 324 new cases a day over the last week). The other states discussed are likewise seeing their coronavirus situations deteriorate.

And so, as coronavirus spreads in GOP-governed states where personal responsibility is supposedly all, the convenient conclusion is that the people themselves have failed.  And this is the point at which Governor Burgum’s tears become not moving, but enraging.  He cries at the thought that North Dakotans are not doing all they can to stop a young cancer patient from being infected by the coronavirus.  And yet, if those people are constantly hearing from the government that there is no government role in fighting the coronavirus, and if that government does not put in place measures that would help them help themselves, a fair-minded person is in danger of reaching the conclusion that it is actually Governor Burgum, not the ordinary citizen, who has failed to live up to his personal responsibility.  He has not done his job; he has failed his state; like Donald Trump, he takes no responsibility.

The reason Burgum and his fellow Republican governors refuse to govern in the matter of the coronavirus is in large part because their conservative ideology refuses to see such governmental activism as within the realm of the possible.  After decades of the GOP proclaiming that a democratically-elected government is always the enemy of those who democratically elect it, they must now stand by their word and ensure that their actions make their twisted rhetoric into reality.  Because in states like North and South Dakota, Iowa, and Texas, the governors have become, if not enemies, then de facto antagonists of their populace and unintended allies of the virus itself.  How else to describe the actions of politicians who have the power to save lives by the most benign of actions — say, by mandating the wearing of a mask in crowded public places — but declare that such actions are not within their power?

And so Republican anti-government ideology has reached it logical conclusion, the murderous end point of what turns out to have been a suicide mission all along.  To prove that government can do no good, they withhold the most basic governance amid a pandemic, even if it costs lives.  In fact, because a pandemic proves the necessity of competent government, that is exactly when government’s role must be rejected at all costs.  In this case, “all costs” means the mass death of innocent Americans who have been failed by those they elected to serve them.

There’s also a perfect fit between Donald Trump, who denies the seriousness of the pandemic so as to maintain the illusion that the economy is strong and he should be re-elected, and Republican politicians at the state level who are fine with pushing their nonsensical ideology to the breaking point.  And just as Donald Trump has failed in his duty to protect the American people from harm, and should face voters’ retribution for his failure, no governor has the right to perpetuate mass death in his or her state.  When Americans elect governors, they seldom think that they are making a life and death decision.  Part of the reason for this is a baseline expectation that governors, when faced with a pandemic, would follow the advice of epidemiologists and other medical professionals. That baseline expectation has now been shown to be inoperative when a governor belongs to the GOP. Such politicians lack the most basic understanding of their responsibilities in a democratic society, and by all rights should be driven from office by an outraged and betrayed citizenry.

The incompetence of Republican governors, and their complicity with President Trump’s failed coronavirus response, has resulted in mass death, suffering, and disruption unseen in the United States within our lifetimes. This needs to be the final chapter of a party that’s made opposition to democratic, competent government its guiding star. If Trump and the GOP are dealt the defeat they deserve in November, it will have been bought at an indescribable price, literally paid for in American lives and incomprehensible suffering. The 200,000-and-counting American dead are not just victims of a virus, but martyrs in the fight to render the anti-democratic GOP null and void as a major American political party.

Of Generals and Generalissimos

A Washington Post piece out this week, titled “As Election Nears, Pentagon Leaders’ Goal of Staying Out of Elections Is Tested,” provides a muddled and misleading look at both President Trump’s efforts to involve the U.S. military in his re-election campaign and urgent issues around his possible plans to use the military in the event of losing the November election.  

While the president’s willingness to essentially burnish his strongman credentials by promulgating an image of himself as endorsed by Pentagon brass is indeed really, really bad, the idea that he might use the military to “clinch another term” is light years worse.  A clearer way of describing a president who uses the military to “clinch another term” is a president who “stages a coup”; if the article were about any other country, this is very likely the phrasing that would have been used.  But by creating the impression that including images of Pentagon brass in campaign videos and staging a coup are simply varieties of norm-breaking, it fails to capture the utter wildness and unacceptably anti-democratic concept of an American president holding on to power by force.  And by discussing isolated instances of Democrats pressing the boundaries of using military imagery in their own political productions, the article provides a misleading frame in which both parties are supposedly putting undue pressures on the Pentagon. To suggest that the president attempting to force the U.S. military to participate in a coup d’etat “underscores the potential for the military to be thrust once more into the partisan fray,” as the lead paragraph suggests, pushes banal, both-sides-do-it phrases like “partisan fray” far past the breaking point. 

To be fair, the variety of presidential norm-breaking involving the military to date that the article describes is dizzying.  The Post notes that “the president treated troop events like campaign rallies, diverted military funds for his border wall project and used the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes to launch his ban on travel from Muslim-majority nations.”  But the larger point of Trump’s norm-breaking is left unstated: like authoritarian leaders around the world, he has sought to boost his power by surrounding himself with the images and rhetoric of military might, while also naturalizing the idea that the military is simply an extension of his political will.  This, not some abstract concept of norm-breaking, is the bridge between his militaristic self-propaganda and a president who might contemplate staging a coup by means of military force to stay in office.

While the article describes the Pentagon’s efforts to avoid being drawn into electoral politics, the overriding need for this resistance in the first place is obviously Donald Trump’s illicit willingness to use the military for political aims, such as when he oversaw the deployment of National Guard soldiers to Washington, D.C. as part of an effort to portray social justice protests as acts of insurrection that threatened the very existence of American government.  The issue is not simply that the Pentagon needs to avoid being drawn into taking a side — the U.S. military absolutely needs to communicate to politicians and the public that it understands its non-involvement in electoral politics.  The chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, communicated the right thing in an interview with National Public Radio, saying, “I would tell you that in my mind, if there’s a disputed election — it’s not in my mind, it’s in the law — if there’s a disputed election, that’ll be handled by Congress and the courts.  There’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election. Zero, there is no role there.” It is more than reasonable for Democrats to receive further assurances from top military commanders that this non-role is widely understood.

It’s unfortunate that the Post piece provides such a fragmented view of the situation, as the president’s refusal to consent to a peaceful transfer of power means that his possible use of the military to retain office should be a subject of serious examination, discussion, and condemnation — not to produce panic over whatever schemes he may be putting together, but to ensure that the public is fully informed of the dangers of this presidency and that the U.S. military leadership fully understands that any moves to support Trump’s effort to disrupt the election would subject them to the harshest legal and career repercussions available. This president has shown that there are no limits to what he will do to maintain power, from committing treason by accepting Russian election assistance, to lying about a once-in-a-century pandemic he was too incompetent to handle. Re-affirming the absolute subservience of the military to the Constitution and the American people might seem like overkill in normal times, but in 2020 it’s called covering your bases.

Russian Bear Hug

The urgency of the upcoming election, the continued daily political maelstrom, and the reality that the fight for American democracy will remain fraught and vicious even should there be a Democratic sweep in November have made it hard to imagine ever having time to assess the mayhem and conflict of the past four years.  But an article from Mother Jones’ David Corn has re-focused me on a political thread whose consequence has seemed as small as its coverage has been large: Russia’s efforts to subvert the 2016 election and its ongoing attempt at a repeat in 2020, all with the complicity if not outright assistance of Donald Trump.

Corn discusses an interview with former Trump national security advisor H.R. McMaster two weeks ago that would have caused a potentially presidency-ending crisis in earlier times; in particular, Corn points to McMaster’s remarks that the president currently “is aiding and abetting Putin’s efforts” to interfere in the 2020 election.  Corn asserts that this is indistinguishable from McMaster stating that the president is “acting like a traitor,” which I think is a fair assessment.  After all, a president who denies the existence of a foreign attack, fires national security officials who seek to highlight it, and works to keep the public in the dark about such an attack is committing treason under any reasonable meaning of the word.  And as Corn goes on to describe, the president’s effort has been abetted by Republican senators, who, despite publishing a report acknowledging current Russian subversion efforts, have failed to hold a single hearing on the matter.

This is not simply a case of Democrats failing to make any effort to hold Trump accountable for treasonous behavior.  Corn notes efforts by elected officials like Connecticut Senator Phil Murphy and Oregon’s Senator Ron Wyden to publicize the Russian campaign and the Trump administration’s efforts to ignore it.  Murphy has also asserted that U.S. intelligence agencies have essentially become part of Trump’s campaign by downplaying Russian efforts and overstating those by China and other countries.  

But as Corn notes, shockers like McMaster’s interview comments are hardly front page news for major media outlets.  Beyond this, the issue of Trump’s treasonous behavior is hardly a theme of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.  At a basic level, it seems that the 2020 tale of Trump-Russia complicity has fallen into the same vortex of public disregard as the original 2016 story; Republicans don’t care about it, and Democratic rank-and-file aren’t calling on their elected representatives to press the matter.  

The million dollar question is why this vortex exists in the first place.  It’s reasonable to say that in 2020, the pandemic, economic meltdown, and escalating presidential insanity have inevitably pushed all other issues to the margins, even something as significant as treason.  Yet simply reading David Corn’s article is enough to drive home the unforgivable betrayal by the president and the GOP in the matter of Russian’s attempts to subvert our elections.  Why is this not a more prominent issue in American politics and in the presidential election?  Or, as Corn writes, “As McMaster tells it, there is a turncoat in the White House. Other than the pandemic, what could be a greater threat to the United States and more deserving of continuous coverage and dread?”

There is indeed no greater threat; yet why this lack of “continuous coverage and dread” should exist emerges as a central mystery alongside Corn’s rhetorical question.  Certainly there are many possible, overlapping explanations: the public’s perception that there was never any actual collusion between Russia and Trump in 2016, leading to the assumption that the current story is nothing to be overly concerned about; an accompanying exhaustion of belief that this issue matters following the seeming dud of the Mueller investigation and the failed impeachment effort on related grounds of treason; steadfast denials by the Trump White House that they have done anything wrong; and a general sense of abstraction in both the concept of treason and the extent to which Trump actually has benefitted from his malign behavior.

I think these all play some role — but a few more ominous ones have had more of an impact.  The first is that not only the president, but the great majority of Republican senators and congresspeople, have made themselves party to denying Russian efforts to subvert American elections.  Having made this fateful decision, they can hardly change to opposition or interrogation now.  A second, equally ominous reason, flows from the first: many Republican politicians simply don’t see anything wrong with receiving foreign assistance, even from an obvious adversary like Russia, so long as it allows them to defeat an even worse enemy: Democrats (Adam Serwer has written persuasively on this angle).  And a third factor works to validate the first two — most Republican voters apparently don’t care that their elected officials have made themselves complicit in the president’s aiding and abetting of Russian interference, so long as it helps them beat the Democratic Party.

The thing about treason is that it’s not important if individual citizens get particularly worked up about it.  What matters much more is that there is a collective, societal understanding that treasonous behavior is so far beyond the pale that it is, at a minimum, politically disqualifying.  In that sense, it doesn’t matter if it seems abstract, so long as it is also universally recognized as really bad.  What is so horrifying about our situation is that a sufficient number of Americans, largely in the GOP, have decided that treason either doesn’t exist or doesn’t exist so long as it’s done to benefit their side, as to render questionable the basic concept of treason in the first place.  And I wonder if a complementary mindset hasn’t taken hold of most Democrats: if the GOP is so bad, does treason even make them that much worse?  

I think part of the reason the Democratic Party has never more aggressively made a bigger deal of the president’s treason, apart from the political reality that pressing the point won’t really change many votes, is out of a tacit recognition of this bitter divide over whether treason is even a thing, and the disturbing questions it raises about how divided the American people truly are.  Pressing the point may lead to possibilities many don’t want to contemplate.

I think a variety of this recognition also guides the media to shy away from pressing the point even in the face of renewed complicity between Trump and the Russians.  If it turns out that Trump is a traitor but only to half the country, that we can’t even agree that it’s bad for the president to look the other way when another country interferes in our elections, are we really a single nation any longer?  Even the prospect of such a world could fill the steeliest journalist with a sense of nausea and fear.

The problem for all of us is that treason and foreign subversion are actually real and deadly serious matters.  Russia isn’t interfering in America’s elections to make Trump stronger, but to make America weaker.  This is why, despite the horror of the American divide over whether treason is even possible anymore, GOP complicity in the president’s conniving with Russia is indeed a big deal; is, in fact, behavior that should disqualify those complicit from any position of public trust.  No matter how much they might think so, loyalty to the GOP is not the same as loyalty to the United States.  Right now, Republican politicians may think there is safety in numbers, in acting as an unquestioning herd, but will this unity survive the coming years of revelations, and continued scrutiny of their actions?  How well will it bear up as the party continues to lose elections and as its self-serving kneecapping of democracy alienates and enrages a larger and larger majority of Americans?  At some point, a greater recognition of the party’s outright treason may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, shatters the party’s standing by providing the ultimate clarity as to whether the party can even be counted on to stand for America.

So while Democrats may feel a sense of futility right now, duty and political canniness both point in the same direction: never giving up on the cause of defending the U.S. from foreign depredations, and calling out a party that sells out the country in the hope of election victories it is no longer certain it can achieve on its own.

After Foiled Michigan Militia Plot, Democrats Can't Let Up on Tying Right-Wing Violence To Trump

The FBI’s announcement last week that it had arrested more than a dozen people in connection with terror plots in Michigan, including a scheme to kidnap Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, provides perhaps the starkest evidence to date that President Trump has encouraged and abetted a surge of white nationalist terrorism in the United States.  The president has done so by deliberately downplaying the threat from right-wing terrorists, including white nationalists; by refusing to credibly denounce them; and by repeatedly promoting violence against political opponents, immigrants, and the press.  Beyond this, the placement of far-right and white nationalist values at the center of national policy — including the Muslim ban, the demonization of Latin American immigrants, and the targeting of civil rights protestors as insurrectionists — has created a permissive atmosphere for more extreme and violent manifestations of such beliefs.  The Trump administration’s unwillingness to admit or effectively confront this movement at the federal level has been accompanied by a deliberate misinformation effort about the dangers posed by antifa and anarchists; most notably, President Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr have worked overtime to falsely portray such groups as an existential threat to the United States.

In an opinion piece published shortly after the indictments were announced, Governor Whitmer drew a direct line from the president’s rhetoric and the kidnapping plot:

When our leaders encourage domestic terrorists, they legitimize their actions. When they stoke and contribute to hate speech, they are complicit. And when a sitting president stands on a national stage refusing to condemn white supremacists and hate groups, as President Trump did when he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during the first presidential debate, he is complicit. Hate groups heard the president’s words not as a rebuke, but as a rallying cry. As a call to action.

Shining a spotlight on the complicity of President Trump, and other right-wing Republicans who echo his inflammatory language, is exactly the right approach for Whitmer and other Democrats to take.  The urgency for doing so is all the greater now that the president seems to see inciting violence and chaos around the November election as his only route to retaining power.  When right-wing violence occurs or plots to commit violence come to light, pointing out the clear links to the president and the GOP provides vital clarification for the public that these terrorists and vigilantes are hardly coming out of nowhere; they are being tacitly and even overtly encouraged by the rhetoric of right-wing politicians like the president.

The key here is that a strong majority of voters are already appalled and incensed by right-wing violence, and citizens should realize it is in their collective interest to punish those politicians who incite it or fail to draw a clear line against its perpetrators.  And as I’ve said before, refusing to accept violence as a political tool, and delegitimizing instances of it, is now a strategic necessity for the Democratic Party.  There is simply no democracy and no competing with the Republicans if the GOP is able to bring violence into the competition; we are at a dangerous point where the Republicans are beginning to explore if they might get away with it.  At its most extreme, there cannot be free and fair elections when one party openly, or even tacitly, encourages armed gunman to intimidate or commit acts of violence against voters from the other party.  That we are at some point along a sinister spectrum towards that point is alarming, but it also leaves the Democrats no choice but to make the GOP pay as deep a political price as they can by pointing out that party’s role in the rise of actual and prospective right-wing violence.  In this case, making political hay out of right-wing violence fully aligns with doing the right thing for the sake of public safety and defense of our democracy.

But it’s definitely not enough for Democrats to just say the right things in this perilous time; they need to make sure they do the right things as well, as much as their power allows.  If there is a rising threat of right-wing violence that may crest on or after the election, then Democrats in Congress must use their oversight powers to ensure that the FBI is doing its duty in disrupting plots like the one in Michigan.  It’s also clearly time for governors to start dusting off the anti-militia statutes on state books, and acting more aggressively to deter and take apart armed vigilante groups that seek cover behind laughable misreadings of the Constitution.  Above all else, we need to remember that these armed fanatics are operating out of weakness, not strength, and are trying to hide the unpopularity of their retrograde views behind the barrel of a gun wrapped in the American flag.  Most Americans see them for what they are — cowards and losers who defile not only the ideals of patriotism and citizenship, but the basics of mutual respect and decency that bind any society together.

At VP Debate, Pence's Godliness Act Turned Grotesque

I am guessing that both Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris were guided by a general strategy of doing no harm to their respective candidacies last night, but it ended up being a better night for the Biden campaign than for the GOP ticket.   Although Pence avoided any disastrous moments, and in fact stuck stubbornly to a script that made use of his ability to lie with an appearance of sincerity and dispassion, his steadfast dedication to going past his allotted time and interrupting Harris added to the Republican ticket’s approaching wipeout with women voters.  He wasn’t nearly as aggressive as Trump was with Biden, but his willingness to disrespect the Democrats’ VP candidate was a losing move.

Two issues in particular struck me last night; both involve areas where Democrats are playing defense when they should be on offense.  The first was Harris’ evasion of how closely the Biden climate plan hews to the Green New Deal, mirroring Biden’s denial that he supported the Green New Deal last week.  Where the environment and climate change are concerned, Democrats should never, and I mean never, be on the defensive.  For four years, the Trump administration has not only neglected climate issues, it has actively sought to exacerbate them by ignoring facts and coddling fossil fuel companies.  Mike Pence’s bland and baldly false statements that “climate change is happening” while declining to accept human causation, while saying the administration follows the science, was a good reminder that while Trump may be uniquely awful, the standard GOP party line that Pence parroted on climate change is monstrous and unacceptable.  

My other moment of illumination came when Pence referred to himself as “pro-life.”  As with many politicians, Pence deploys the term as a badge of probity and morality; uttered in the context of his administration’s failure to save hundreds of thousands of American lives, the phrase rang more hollow than ever.  Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was triggered as well, tweeting, “Just to be clear: there is nothing “pro-life” about denying people comprehensive sexual education, making birth control harder to access, forcing others to give birth against their will, and stripping them of healthcare and food assistance afterwards.”  Such direct attacks on the GOP mantle of false godliness and hypocrisy are needed to expose their truly irreligious attitudes on matter of life and death.

The Lingering Absurdity of Asking Donald Trump If He Denounces White Supremacists

When moderator Chris Wallace gave Donald Trump an easy opportunity at last Tuesday’s presidential debate to denounce white supremacists, the president declined to do so.  Instead, he said that the white nationalist Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by.”  Over the past week, a consensus has emerged among political pundits and other commentators that this was the low point of the night for Trump, in which he whiffed an obvious opportunity to say the right thing, and in doing so demonstrated once again that he essentially doesn’t see any reason to criticize white supremacists.  It was like he was given a do-over of his post-Charlottesville remarks, and failed once again.

But I’ve seen little to no commentary on how basically absurd it is to pose this question to Donald Trump in the first place.  If he had indeed done what pretty much any other presidential candidate would have done, and had declared his opposition to white supremacism, it would have been completely meaningless, because it would be a lie.  Whether or not Donald Trump “denounces” white supremacists doesn’t change one bit the fact that he himself is a white supremacist who has attempted during his four years in office to turn the national government into an instrument and bastion of white supremacism.  For Chris Wallace to pose the question, as if the answer would be meaningful, ignores this reality.  Donald Trump no more opposes white supremacists than he opposes himself.  

We are way past the point where anyone should be asking the president whether he will denounce white supremacists.  He will not do so, and if he does, it would be a lie.  Asking this question in fact suggests that whether Donald Trump might or might not support white supremacism depends to some extent on his answer to the question.  Asking this question provides a lifeline to Donald Trump to obscure his actual intentions and policies from the American people.

We received a vivid demonstration of how misguided and misleading such a question is when Donald Trump spoke at a rally in Minnesota the day after the debate.  He attacked refugees, and falsely accused Somali-American Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar not only of voter fraud, but as someone who has no place in U.S. government, saying, “Then she tells us how to run our country.  Can you believe it?”  Reacting to the president’s vile words, Ronald Brownstein tweeted that, “Again his message to his voters is that people of color, big cities, liberals are interlopers in the real America-their White Christian America. Anyone still in his coalition can have no illusions about the racism embedded in its core.”  And NPR’s Steve Inskeep noted the through-line between these comments and his Proud Boys remarks at the debate, tweeting that, “This goes much, much farther than the Proud Boys remark. And it’s an ordinary sequence for the president. Plays off his core message.”

Perhaps asking the president to denounce white supremacists back in 2017 made sense, after the dark Charlottesville spectacle but before the president had provided us with literally years of overwhelming evidence of placing a white supremacist mindset at the center of his presidency.  Though it may be illuminating for some when he refuses to denounces white supremacists now, the question itself provides him with a fig leaf of plausible deniability that he does not deserve.  

Sickness Is the Health of the State

The days since we learned that the president has covid-19 have been a dizzying mix of unnerving, enraging. . . and unexpectedly invigorating.  As predictable as Donald Trump’s illness is, I think many of us had been taken in by the image of invulnerability he has worked so hard to convey as he’s barnstormed the country like a maskless anti-hero.  He had dodged the coronavirus for so long that his apparent invulnerability seemed like just another bizarre layer of this sick joke of a presidency.  There was also of course the fact that he was at the center of a bubble of protection afforded no other U.S. citizen — but based on flawed tests and a deranged antipathy to masks, the bubble seems to have backfired, transforming the seemingly invulnerable White House into a hothouse of infection.

As folks like Jared Sexton and Jason Stanley have been telling us for years now, the president’s authoritarian approach to politics means that the idea of strength is at the center of his rhetoric and image-making.  Yet not only did the president get sick from a virus he’s spent much of this year downplaying, he got truly, visibly sick, in a way that the camera captured and that he could not hide. But this has not stopped the president from trying to control his image, leading to efforts at state propaganda over the weekend that rightly left many Americans feeling nauseated and aghast that this could be happening in America.

The fact that many of us have some memory or awareness of similar strategies employed by ailing Soviet leaders made the propaganda all the more unsettling, and ridiculous.  We were treated to photos of the president allegedly working at the hospital during the course of a day, though a quick analysis revealed that the photos allegedly capturing hours of work were taken ten minutes apart, and included a shot of the president signing his name to a blank piece of paper.  Then there was the absurd, brief drive around Walter Reed to wave at Proud Boys and other cheering admirers.  Above all else, though, there were the spin doctors, aka Trump’s actual doctors, in particular Dr. Sean Conley, who in the hallowed tradition of Trump’s previous physicians talked up his amazing resilience, and talked down or omitted his serious challenges on the low oxygen/high fever/pneumonia front.  Above all else, the damning, discrediting reality of the situation had to be denied — that the president, aged, obese, and physically unfit, was battling a deadly virus that through his misrule has ravaged the nation and left more than 200,000 dead.

These efforts were all necessary because, as Greg Sargent writes, “The physical invincibility of the leader is a standard authoritarian trope.”  For such a leader, illness is truly the enemy.  Sargent went on to correctly predict what would come next: “Trump and his propagandists will try to spin his triumph over Covid (if it happens) into a symbol of the infallibility of his handling of it as president.”  And so Trump’s spokespeople and allies are already hard at work at the first part of the effort, arguing that the president has defeated the virus in a sort of hand-to-hand combat, and has by extension defeated China (assumedly as the originator of the virus).  They have also suggested, grotesquely but predictably, that Donald Trump is now better positioned to lead the nation because he has experienced the virus firsthand.  All of this, of course, is to cover for the inescapable fact of the president’s failure to protect both the country and now himself from the pandemic.

To further the portrayal of a president triumphant over the enemy, the administration orchestrated a set piece of authoritarian imagery upon Donald Trump’s return to the White House.  In a 90-second sequence brutally dissected by The Bulwark’s Tim Miller , the president removed his mask and saluted the departing Marine 1 for an abnormally long and agonizing time, all the while clearly short of breath and physically discombobulated.  Seeking to project strength, he sweated weakness and weirdness.  He came across as a pathetic man playing the role of pretend strongman. 

This piece of fascist theater was accompanied by a short video the president also released upon his return to the White House.  His repeated injunctions to not let the virus “dominate” our lives and that it is nothing to fear have rightly generated outrage and condemnation, but other comments within the video haven’t gotten nearly enough attention.  I had to transcribe the words for myself to make sure I wasn’t mishearing them:

I could have left two days ago.  Two days ago I felt great, better than I have in a long time.  I said just recently better than 20 years ago.  Don’t let it dominate, don’t let it take over your lives.  We’re going back, we’re going back to work, we’re going to be out front, as your leader I had to do that I knew there’s danger to it but I had to do it I stood out front I led, nobody that’s a leader would not do what I did and I know there’s a risk a danger but that’s OK and now I’m better and maybe I’m immune I don’t know but don’t let it dominate your lives.

I don’t think it’s possible to interpret this as anything other than a declaration that Donald Trump more or less intentionally got sick in order to take the virus on, mano a mano, on behalf of the nation, to suffer and triumph on our behalf in order to show the way forward, Jesus Christ and Rambo rolled into one. Donald Trump has said many deranged things during his presidency, but I submit that this videotaped spiel is the apex of all the pudding-brained assertions he had gawped out before.  It is sick; it is stupid; it is revealing of a diseased mind and an authoritarian spirit.  Amazingly, though, it ramifies even beyond this: in its utter self-serving stupidity, it shows a bottomless contempt for the American people, and constitutes an insult to our collective intelligence that, even if this were somehow the only malign thing he had ever uttered, would be enough to assure his place as the most unfit president in our history.

The insult and contempt leveled at the public has in fact been the real story of the president’s covid illness.  The easily disproved lies about the president’s health; the message that Americans don’t deserve information about their leaders; the president’s renewed falsehoods, based on his still-unresolved illness while receiving literally the best medical care in the world, that Americans should not be scared of getting this deadly disease; the grotesque proposition that he has purposely gotten sick in order to personally defeat the virus, and in so doing has proven that Joe Biden is weak because he refuses to tear off his mask and freebase virus like a real man — collectively, these messages convey that Trump and his administration think that we’re a nation of fools and marks.

I think Donald Trump’s last remaining paths to re-election were destroyed this weekend by this very display of contempt for America’s collective intelligence and common sense.  Trump revealed himself as a fool, a moron, and a weakling in ways that cannot be undone.  But whatever hope may be on the horizon, there is no escaping the horror and the sadness that this obvious sociopath has been supported by so many of us for so long, and that it has taken the needless deaths of thousands to at last turn the tide against him.

Death Match 2020

Donald Trump’s coronavirus illness and hospitalization have seemed to many of us like a comeuppance the president deserves, a reaping of the viral seeds he himself has helped sow across the country, with more than 200,000 Americans now dead and many thousands more debilitated by the disease due to his incompetence.  But while it’s natural to feel a sense of righteousness at the president becoming the victim of his own retrograde attitudes and murderous polices, to feel that a sort of rough justice has been administered by the universe and even a dark pleasure at his suffering, we need to make a conscious effort to resist these temptations lest they distract us from the full scope of our crisis.

Donald Trump’s offenses are against our democracy and the American people, and so our democracy and citizens must be the masters of Donald Trump’s fate, not the coronavirus, his own stupidity — or even fate itself.  Donald Trump deserves judgment at the ballot box and by our systems of justice, particularly because he has done so much to attack our government and our collective well-being.  His attempts to undermine us demand that this country flex its collective muscles and refute everything he has done and everything he stands for, in the November election and going forward.  An early death for this corrupt and evil man is too easy an escape for someone who we need to make an example of, both for our sake and for future generations.  

Rooting for Donald Trump not to recover is too close for comfort to the authoritarian impulse to impose political decisions by force.  The last thing we need is for Donald Trump to evade the judgment of voters in November — a judgment that will now be even more damning in light of his own self-inflicted illness, his crowing anti-achievement of incompetence.  To borrow a line from the president, Death itself needs to stand back and stand by, indefinitely; the American people get first dibs on this monster.

The spectacle of the president battling the coronavirus once against threatens to distract us from the one fact I don’t want anyone to ever lose sight of: Donald Trump may be a uniquely malevolent president, but the threat he presents is inseparable from the anti-democratic Republican Party that supports him with everything it’s got, and that shares his basic authoritarian ideals.  That the Republican Party has become the Trump-Republican Party means that we need to beat the GOP across the board, and that the threat it poses to our lives and livelihoods won’t disappear when the president is no longer in office.

The essential indistinguishability of the president and his party on crucial matters of policy and politics couldn’t have been clearer at the levels of symbol and substance in the apparent superspreader event that may well be the source of the president’s own illness: the Rose Garden ceremony and related events last week at which President Trump announced his nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. As The Washington Post summarizes, “Striking images of last weekend’s event, where influential Republicans and lawmakers mingled without masks, seemingly played on a loop on cable television, fueling critics who called the party reckless and enablers of superspreader events.”  Multiple attendees have subsequently tested positive for the coronavirus, including Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, campaign manager Bill Stepien, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.  

As others have smartly written, the spectacle of Republican leadership catching a virus at an event celebrating the possible ascension of a justice who would very likely strike a death blow against Obamacare and health coverage for millions of Americans, after so many of them failed to protect the country against this virus, encapsulates the GOP’s incompetence and unfitness for power in one go.  The sense one gets that they believe themselves immune to the virus, as they go about hugging and yapping into each others’s unmasked faces, adds a true “last days at Versailles” quality to the whole event.   It is not just that their own incompetence and arrogance has endangered themselves - they also put in danger everyone they came into contact with, including ordinary Americans who have the misfortune to work for them.

So there should be no letting down of the guard in light of the president’s illness.  In the event of his unlikely but possible death before election day, it would still be necessary to vote the Republican Party out of power.  And no matter what direction his health turns, the GOP will continue its project to subvert the 2020 election, whether by attempting to discredit mail-in-ballots that might favor Democrats, closing down polling places in urban areas, and scrubbing likely Democratic voters from voting rolls.  It is more important than ever to remember that Trump, while posing a crisis in and of himself, is part of a larger authoritarian threat that will not go away when he is no longer in office.

In fact, we may well see an escalation of current efforts to essentially steal the election to compensate for the hit Trump’s support will take in the wake of his illness and all it says about his incompetence.  After this, there really is no way he can win, or for the GOP to stave off national- and state-level defeats of historic proportions, without Republicans fully going to war with American democracy itself.

No Sympathy For the Coronavirus-Bedeviled

If the president finds himself facing a sympathy deficit among the public as he moves from photo op to photo op in his Walter Reed luxury suite, we don’t need to look much further than his catastrophic presidency that has inflicted mass death on the United States, coupled with his own utter lack of sympathy towards the victims of the coronavirus pandemic.  But if we do look a little further, a very illness that would ordinarily provoke a nation’s sympathy has itself been an object lesson in why millions in this country are largely unburdened by the president’s coronaviral plight.  The Trump administration has from the beginning dissembled and propagandized around the president’s illness.  Their lies in fact now appear to encompass even the meaning of “the beginning” — the president tweeted early Friday morning that he had tested positive for the virus, yet comments from his doctors this weekend suggested that he actually tested positive as early as Wednesday.  If true, this would mean that the president proceeded with his normal schedule for two days, possibly infecting dozens or hundreds of people through his malignant carelessness.  

And since he’s been in the hospital, his doctors — clearly under instruction from the president or his advisors to hide the severity of his illness — have offered misleading and confusing information, such as when and whether he’s been on supplemental oxygen.  Meanwhile, at odds with their positive prognosis, his chief of staff yesterday told the press that, “The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning, and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care.  We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.”  Compounding the confusion of the mixed medical messages have been the bizarre photos and videos released of the invalid president allegedly hard at work in his medical quarters, including a shot of Trump apparently signing his name to a blank piece of paper.  Needless to say, a demonstration that the president needs to practice his own signature is not the reassuring image he and his advisors think it is.

These efforts to lie to and manipulate the public about the president’s health are more of the same from an administration that has for years shown contempt for the majority of Americans who did not vote for the president and do not support his presidency.  They are of a piece with the authoritarian tendencies that have led Trump to lie about everything from the size of the crowds at his inauguration to whether he tried to coerce Ukraine into a plot to destroy Joe Biden’s candidacy.

So now, in illness, he still cannot stop reminding us that he does not see himself as our president but as a sort of supreme leader, never to be questioned no matter how absurd his pronouncements, even as some in the media and on the right argue for the unquestionable need for all to feel sympathy for our president.  This is asking a lot, and for many of us, it really is too much, when even the illness that is supposed to arouse our sympathy is handled with the same mendacity and illiberal spirit as is so much else in this administration.  Even as his life is in mortal danger, the president’s contempt for democracy and the American people is, to borrow a phrase from Ivanka Trump, relentless.

Covidiocy

With the stunning news last night that Donald Trump has tested positive for the coronavirus, the president is now the most potent exhibit in the case alleging his incompetence, malice, and cruelty in his mishandling of the coronavirus.  A man who downplayed the reality of the virus out of concerns it would damage his re-election prospects, and so assured the deaths of more than 200,000 Americans, is now the victim of his own murderous policies and arrogant disregard of the virus’ danger.  No one in the United States made it as likely that Donald Trump would eventually get the coronavirus as Donald Trump himself.  He literally has only himself to blame.

Not only has his misrule led to unforgivable mass death, he has now compounded the dangers of our moment by getting sick not only after repeatedly flouting recommendations by his own medical advisors around mask wearing, crowd size, and the like, but after months of failing to advocate basic policies that would have limited the spread of covid-19 around the nation.  As abhorrent a president as he is, it endangers the entire country for a president to be ill, for the nation to appear weak to foreign adversaries, and to introduce yet more tension around the onrushing election.  But if our sense and reality of crisis has been heightened by his illness, never forget that the common thread of our national crisis is always Donald Trump himself.

More than ever, the president is now exposed as an idiot, a conman, and an incompetent.  The disease that supposedly isn’t at all serious, and will go away on its own, has now found an easy home in his obese and physically unfit person.  This will clearly come as unbelievable news to many of his supporters, who have been led to doubt the gravity and even existence of the coronavirus.  I look forward to many on the right twisting this development into a Democratic conspiracy, and to begin to conceive of Trump even more as a Christ-like figure, suffering for our sins, taking on the pains of the world to redeem us all.  And if the president survives this experience, I fully expect him to use his own recovery as further evidence that the coronavirus is no worse than the flu, and so implicate himself further in the mass death sweeping America.

It is hard to see how this diagnosis doesn’t further the implosion of Trump’s re-election prospects.  After ensuring that millions of Americans have been sickened by the coronavirus, his incompetence has now sickened even him.  His illness will garner little sympathy from those who already oppose him, and will confuse and shock many of his supporters.  He has gone from would-be strongman to pathetic straw man in one savage blow.