Opinion

President Donald Trump's tweets accusing two vital swing states – Nevada and Michigan – of acting "illegally" by making it easier for their residents to vote by mail during the pandemic were just "alerts" meant just for the eyes of the Secretary of the Treasury and the Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Reports of Trump flying into a rage behind closed doors--shouting at aides, turning on former allies and at one point threatening to sue his campaign manager for failing to deliver good polling numbers--have been ubiquitous over the last three years. But this past week feels qualitatively and quantitatively different, as he has fired a series of inspector generals, lashed out at the reliably sycophantic Sen. Lindsey Graham, pushed a number of snake-oil cures for Covid-19 and threatened to cut off federal funding to several states for the "crime" of sending voters applications for absentee ballots, which he insists against all evidence are rife with fraud. He's lurched between falsely bragging about the number of people we're testing for Covid-19 and saying that we're testing too many; between claiming that we'll have a vaccine by November and insisting that the pandemic will just disappear without a vaccine.

I still believe no one should presume fairness in this year’s election. Indeed, our best understanding depends on presuming that it won’t be. But it’s worth imagining what our current politics might look like years from now. From a future vantage point, it might be that most people already made up their minds about Donald Trump, and it might be that they made up their minds about him from close to the beginning.

While tens of millions of Americans are out of work, many desperate for cash to feed their children, the richest Americans merrily float on a rapidly rising tide of cash thanks in good part to Trump & Co.

On Tuesday, both the pro- and anti-choice world were rocked by a revelation that undermines literal decades of religious right nonsense. Norma McCorvey, the "Jane Roe" of the Supreme Court case that legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, claimed before her 2017 death that her famous "conversion" to anti-abortion activism was a con job.

On March 20, just after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic on March 11, the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) sent a cable to U.S. State Department instructing officials how they should speak about China and the novel coronavirus, according to the Daily Beast, which obtained the cable. One section of the cable is called “NSC Top Lines: PRC [People’s Republic of China] Propaganda and Disinformation on the Wuhan Virus Pandemic.” The cable says, “Chinese Communist Party officials in Wuhan and Beijing had a special responsibility to inform the Chinese people and the world of the threat, since they were the first to learn of it.”

As America reopens for business, you might expect Jeff Bezos, the richest man in America, and his Amazon corporation, one of the most profitable corporations in America, to set the corporate standard for how to protect the health of American workers.

Earlier this week Attorney General Bill Barr held a press conference at the Justice Department, supposedly about a recent terrorism arrest in South Florida. But nobody cared about that and neither did Barr.

In this Age of COVID, there was a time long, long ago—about six weeks past!—when Donald Trump began referring to himself as “a wartime president."

With the rising scandal over Donald Trump's mass firing of inspectors general who are threatening to uncover widespread corruption in his administration, the president is clearly desperate for some delicious culture-war bait that will distract cable news pundits and lure his supporters and his critics into pointless arguments. So he coughed up one such juicy nugget on Monday afternoon, bragging to reporters that he had started taking hydroxychloroquine — the anti-malarial drug with no proven benefits for COVID-19 — 10 days ago.

What Rick Bright publicly revealed more than anyone else is that, if we continue to push a president’s wishful narrative over medical expertise and fail to coordinate a national response, “2020 could be the darkest winter in modern history.” Mental health experts have been trying to inform the public that not even a nuclear winter could be ruled out.