President Donald Trump and his allies are publicly endorsing the idea of a civil war, and columnist Molly Jong-Fast wonders whether it's time to start taking them seriously.
The president has endorsed violent retribution against left-wing protesters, and a litany of Republican lawmakers, Trump administration officials and longtime associates of the president have called for the imposition of some form of martial law, Jong-Fast wrote for The Daily Beast.
"Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that as the election grows closer, Donald Trump’s allies and sycophants are trying to shop a low-key civil war via the Insurrection Act of 1807, which Trumpworld learned about in early June when Trump gassed protesters so he could do a photo op in front of a church holding a Bible upside-down," she writes. "Trumpworld is now very jazzed to use this 1807 act. Not entirely clear they know much about it except that they think they can do martial law with it."
Trump and his allies seem to understand that chaos and violence might be the only way the president can hold on to power, she wrote, and that's reason enough for them.
"Trumpworld has every reason to be worried," Jong-Fast writes. "They can read the polling on the internet, and it’s not great. Trump’s economy is even less great, and coronavirus has already killed 195,000 Americans. And then there’s the Woodward tapes, which show the president knew the coronavirus was 'the plague' while still holding indoor rallies and tweeting about liberating states from lockdown. There is not much American greatness happening, despite Trump’s promise of it. This is so true that the campaign slogan 'make America great again, again' feels like something right out of 'Veep.'"
Their calls for martial law and violence are occurring with such frequency that Jong-Fast has grown concerned.
"This civil war business, rather like the Trump presidency itself, started out very stupidly, with crazy people saying insane stuff on right-wing outlets," she writes. "But like everything in Trumpworld, these people will go as far as you let them. If Democrats and the one Republican who has a spine (I’m looking at you Mitt Romney) don’t push back on this, Trumpworld will happily litigate this election into another term for the president."
With the release of Bob Woodward's book "Rage," we've been given the opportunity to revisit the Trump administration's response to the pandemic with the added insights of comments the president made in private at the time. Unsurprisingly, we have learned that Donald Trump was lying to the public every step of the way. Day after day, we hear more of the Woodward tapes, and each one reveals Trump to have been even more reckless and self-centered than we knew, leaving Woodward and millions of others unable to tell "whether he's got it straight in his head what is real and what is unreal."
The president had the presence of mind to tell Woodward in April that the virus is "a killer if it gets you," but shortly after that told the public, "The Invisible Enemy will soon be in full retreat!" By July, he had stopped even trying to explain away his failure. He grew very petulant and upset with Woodward for questioning him on this:
On Tuesday night ,Trump attended a town hall sponsored by ABC News. He had to talk to regular voters in Pennsylvania rather than reporters, and it was a train wreck. He lied so often that the Washington Post fact check was headlined, "Trump's ABC News town hall: Four Pinocchios, over and over again."
His comments about the pandemic were especially egregious. Here's just one example:
Lately Trump has taken to ridiculing Joe Biden's mask-wearing, suggesting that the former vice president has a psychiatric problem. He sets an example for his tens of millions of supporters and they follow it, unfortunately for them and everyone with whom they come in contact.
We probably won't know the full extent of the damage done by his mask-free super-spreader rallies until after the election, which is one reason why Trump — who clearly has little regard for his most ardent fans — now feels free to hold them. But it is certain that there will be fallout. People who attended a Trump rally this fall will die, and some will almost certainly spread it to others some who will die.
A recent study using some new and controversial techniques tracked the spread of the virus from the big motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, last month, which seemed to show a massive increase in cases around the country stemming from the 500,000-person gathering. While the overall numbers have been disputed by scientists at Johns Hopkins, there is no doubt about an increase in cases in the surrounding Sturgis area. USA Today reported this week that "a month after the controversial Sturgis Motorcycle Rally drew hundreds of thousands of bikers to South Dakota, COVID-19 infections are growing faster in North Dakota and South Dakota than anywhere in the nation."
Contract tracing is tough in this country. We don't have a good system to begin with, and many people refuse to cooperate. It's fair to guess that Trump rally-goers are among the least likely to agree to it. So we may never know how many of the thousands of people who will have attended Trump rallies by Nov. 3 will be sacrificed to give the president the ego boost he craves.
But one has to look no further than the famous Maine wedding last month to know just how lethal these events can be:
At least seven people have died in connection to a coronavirus outbreak that continues to sicken people in Maine following a wedding reception held over the summer that violated state virus guidelines, public health authorities said. The August wedding reception at the Big Moose Inn in Millinocket is linked to more than 175 confirmed cases of the virus, the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday ....
The virus cases stemming from the wedding have spanned hundreds of miles in a state that had largely controlled the spread of the coronavirus through the summer. Maine has reported less than 5,000 cases of the virus in total since March.But the growing number of cases related to the wedding, which exceeded the state's guidelines of 50 people or less at indoor gatherings, could undo some of that progress if it continues to swell. Authorities have said more than 65 people attended the wedding.
Trump's rallies feature thousands of people, many of them older and the vast majority without masks, standing close together for long periods of time, cheering and shouting. They aren't worried, because their beloved leader is telling them they don't need to be:
While Trump's followers believe everything he says, the damage is much broader than that. His lies and manipulation of the facts during this crisis have eroded the rest of America's trust in the government to such an extent that, according to a new NBC News/Survey Monkey poll, "Fifty-two percent of adults say they don't trust the president's vaccine comments, while just 26 percent say they do." Only 20% say they're unaware of what the president has said. Here's what has people nervous:
If you want to know the truth, the previous administration would have taken perhaps years to have a vaccine because of the FDA and all the approvals, and we're within weeks of getting it.
Trump's manipulation of federal agencies to allow unproven therapies, which in at least one case had to be withdrawn when it proved dangerous, doesn't inspire faith in the process. How can people be expected to trust his administration to deliver a safe and effective vaccine under these circumstances?
America was once seen as the global leader in science and technology, but the nation's reputation has plummeted around the world in the wake of Trump's mishandling of this crisis. According to Pew Research, U.S. allies are appalled by Trump's handling of the pandemic and find him less trustworthy than the presidents of Russia and China. People in all countries surveyed view the U.S. response as worse than that of their own country's, the World Health Organization, the EU or China. (One of the great ironies of this whole disaster is that Trump pulled the U.S. out of the WHO ostensibly for lying about the lethality and spread of the virus — when that was exactly what he was doing every single day. )
Trump likes to say that "nobody's ever seen anything like this," and in this case, at least, he's right. The consequences of the president's psychological and intellectual shortcomings, which led him to downplay the pandemic, are so devastating that it led Scientific American to endorse a candidate for president for the first time in the magazine's 175-year history:
The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people — because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September. He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its greatest challenges. That is why we urge you to vote for Joe Biden, who is offering fact-based plans to protect our health, our economy and the environment.
It is hard to see how any rational person could come to any other conclusion.
With less than two months until the US presidential election, Democratic nominee Joe Biden leads incumbent Donald Trump in the bulk of opinion polls.
But poll-based election forecasts have proved problematic before. The polls were widely maligned after the 2016 election because Trump won the election when the majority of the polling said he would not.
What went wrong with the polls in 2016? And is polling to be believed this time around, or like in 2016, are the polls substantially underestimating Trump’s support?
US presidential elections are two-stage, state-by-state contests.
States are allocated delegates roughly proportional to their populations, with 538 delegates in total. The votes of Americans then decide who wins the delegates in the Electoral College.
In almost all states, the candidate who has the highest vote total takes all the delegates for that state. The candidate who wins a majority (270 or more) of the Electoral College wins the election.
For the fifth time in American history, the 2016 election produced a mismatch between the national popular vote and the Electoral College outcome. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, won nearly 2.9 million more votes than Trump, yet still lost the election.
Trump won states efficiently, by razor-thin margins in some cases, converting 46% of all votes cast into 56.5% of the Electoral College. Conversely, Clinton’s huge popular vote tally was concentrated in big states such as California and New York.
For this reason, election analysts focus less on national polls and more on polls from “swing states”.
These are states that have swung between the parties in recent presidential elections (for example, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida and North Carolina), or could be on the verge of swinging (Arizona, Texas, Georgia and Minnesota).
These states — even as few as two or three of them — will decide the 2020 election.
As part of a large research project at the United States Studies Centre, we have compiled data from polling averages in all the swing states going back to 120 days before the election and compared them to the same time periods in 2016. Our goal was to provide a key point of reference to more correctly read the polls in 2020.
The charts for all swing states can be found here.
Our research shows Biden currently has poll leads in several states that went for Barack Obama in 2008 and/or 2012 and then swung to Trump in 2016, such as Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. These five states are worth 90 Electoral College votes.
Biden also leads the polls in consistently Republican-voting Arizona (11 electoral votes).
So, if we take recent polls in these states at face value, then Trump would lose 101 of the Electoral College votes he won in 2016 and be soundly defeated.
Why did state polls perform poorly in 2016?
But state polls were heavily criticised in 2016 for underestimating Trump’s support, as these charts in our research highlight.
The final poll averages in 2016 underestimated Trump’s margin over Clinton by more than five points in several swing states: North Carolina (5.3), Iowa (5.7), Minnesota (5.7), Ohio (6.9) and Wisconsin (7.2). This is calculated by taking the difference between the official election result and the average of the polls on election eve.
A review of 2016 polling by the American Association of Public Opinion Research examined a number of hypotheses about the bias of state-level polls in 2016.
Two predominant factors made the difference:
1. An unusually large number of late-deciders strongly favoured Trump
The number of “undecideds” in 2016 was more than double that in prior elections. Of these, a disproportionate number voted for Trump.
But 2020 polling to date reveals far fewer undecided voters, suggesting this source of poll error will not be as large in this year’s election.
United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney
2. Changes in voter turnout
In 2016, Trump successfully mobilised white voters who are becoming a smaller portion of the American electorate and ordinarily have low rates of voter turnout. These were largely non-urban voters and those with lower levels of education.
This year will likely see high levels of engagement from both sides — and potentially a surge in turnout unseen in decades — which could further undermine the accuracy of election polls.
United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney
Re-interpreting the 2020 polls
The latest state poll averages imply Biden will handily win the election with an Electoral College victory of 334 to 204.
But if the 2020 polls are as wrong as they were in 2016, then Biden’s current poll leads in New Hampshire, North Carolina and Wisconsin are misleading. If Biden loses these three states, the Electoral College result will be 305-233, still a comfortable Biden win.
United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney
In recent weeks, however, we have seen Biden’s poll leads in Pennsylvania and Florida be smaller than the corresponding poll error in those states from 2016.
If Trump wins these two large states (in addition to New Hampshire, North Carolina and Wisconsin), and the other 2016 results are replicated elsewhere, then he will narrowly win the election with 282 Electoral College votes.
Given the statistical range of poll errors seen in 2016 — and assuming they reoccur in 2020 — current polling implies Trump has roughly a one in three chance of winning re-election.
The COVID-19 pandemic and controversies around the administration of the election could further jeopardise the validity of 2020 polling. Official statistics already show many voters are attempting to make use of voting by mail or in-person, early voting.
Access to these alternative forms of voting varies tremendously across the United States, so the political consequences are difficult to anticipate.
Trump and his Republican supporters have raised doubts about the validity and security of vote by mail. A recent opinion poll showed Democrats are much more likely to rely on vote by mail compared to Republicans (72% to 22%).
Unsurprisingly, Democrats and other groups are bringing numerous lawsuits to help ensure vote by mail remains a widely available method of voting.
It is quite likely the courts will be asked to rule on the validity of the results after the election, on the basis mail ballots have been either improperly included or excluded in official tallies.
So, will it be closer than expected?
On the one hand, this year’s election seems to have historically low levels of undecided voters, a factor that should make polls more accurate. But offsetting this is tremendous uncertainty about turnout and whose votes will be cast and counted.
All this suggests considerable caution be exercised in relying on the polls to forecast the election. These forecasts are almost surely overconfident.
The other main takeaway: Trump’s chances of re-election are likely higher than suggested by the polling we have seen to date.
The charts in this piece were initially created by Zoe Meers, formerly a data visualisation analyst at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.
Are demons active forces in American life and politics? That is what a large number of evangelicals in the US believe and are increasingly vocal about.
Since the 1980s, growing numbers of evangelicals have given the fight against demons a key role in their spirituality and their politics. Known as “spiritual warfare”, this views demons as central actors in world politics and everyday life. While often seen as fringe, belief in spiritual warfare is common across denominational lines, including among evangelicals close to Donald Trump such as Robert Jeffress and the president’s spiritual advisor, Paula White.
A key idea in spiritual warfare is that demons don’t only attack people, as in depictions of demonic possession, but also take control of places and institutions, such as journalism, academia, and both municipal and federal bureaucracies. By doing so, demons are framed as advancing social projects that spiritual warriors see as opposing God’s plans. These include advances in reproductive and LGBTQ rights and tolerance for non-Christian religions (especially Islam).
In a recent article published in the journal Religion, I explore how these ideas about demons combine with the wider Christian nationalism shown to be prevalent among Trump’s support base. Through a survey of conservative evangelical literature, articles, and television and radio broadcasts released between 2016 and 2018, I analyse how their authors used discourses of spiritual warfare to navigate the changing political reality, and Trump’s victory and presidency in particular.
The evangelicals whose works I analyse vary in their attitudes to Trump, from ardent advocates to reluctant supporters. Yet even the reluctant supporters interpret his presidency in terms of spiritual warfare, framing Trump’s victory as a divine intervention against a demonic status quo.
Trump’s alleged battle against the “deep state” here adopts cosmic meaning, as not only the US government but undocumented immigrants and Black and LGBTQ people are cast as agents of demonic forces.
Divine intervention
The deep state has become a watchword of the Trump era, a term used by his supporters to depict Trump as an outsider fighting a corrupted political system. The deep state is central to the conspiracy movement QAnon, which depicts Trump as at war with a “deep state cabal” of devil-worshipping cannibal paedophiles.
QAnon has many overlaps with spiritual warfare and its practitioners. It uses similar ideas of religious revival and donning the “armour of God” against unseen foes.
Not all spiritual warriors engage with QAnon. But even for those that don’t, the deep state has come to represent broader ideas of demonic control, as demons are imagined as a “deeper state” working behind the scenes. Demons become the source of economic and environmental regulations and of social welfare programmes. The deregulatory ambitions that former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon called Trump’s “deconstruction of the administrative state” become imagined as a project of national exorcism.
For many spiritual warriors this project began on election night 2016. Trump’s improbable victory stoked narratives of divine intervention. Comparing the red electoral map of Republican victory to “the blood of Jesus” washing away America’s sins, one evangelical framed the election as overthrowing “Jezebel”, a demonic spirit often depicted as behind reproductive and LGBTQ rights.
Banning abortion is central to conservative evangelical politics. Spiritual warriors often go further, framing support for abortion and same-sex marriage as both causing and caused by demonic control. They portray evil spirits and sinful humans as creating reinforcing systems of beliefs, behaviours and policy agendas. The deep state has become a key representation of these systems.
This spiritual war against the deep state can be understood as part of post-truth politics. While sometimes seen as a politics which delegitimises truth itself, post-truth can also be understood as a destabilisation of mainstream narratives about society. One that allows new narratives to be pushed.
In spiritual warfare, this new narrative is one where God is retaking control of the US from demonic forces. One where God’s truth is being reasserted over competing truths, which are reframed as demonic lies. Spiritual warfare here becomes a struggle over competing narratives about what America is, or should be. Dismantling the deep state is part of this struggle. But it is not the only one.
The demons at work
Spiritual warfare has also come to frame evangelical reactions to ongoing protests. Demonic opposition to Trump has been positioned by spiritual warriors as being behind events from the 2017 Women’s March to the 2020 protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd. Stances on immigrants and refugees are also included.
In one book, turned into a part-biopic, part-propaganda film called The Trump Prophecy by the conservative evangelical Liberty University, victory over demons is paralleled with the mass expulsion of undocumented migrants. Others have framed the central American migrant caravans as carriers of diabolic “witchcraft”.
Conspiratorial claims that both the protests and migrant caravans were funded by the investor/philanthropist George Soros or the deep state close the circle. They cast demonised groups – such as “nasty” women, Black protesters, refugees and undocumented migrants – not just as agents of corrupt deep state forces but avatars of the demonic deeper state behind them.
Spiritual warriors are often keen to separate the demons they battle from the people they claim to be saving from them. But today such deliverance from evil has been shown to never just be about the spiritual salvation of individuals, if it ever was. It has profound and lasting material consequences for both those individuals and the nation.
By imagining demons behind social welfare, economic and environmental regulations, or legal protections for marginalised groups, spiritual warriors frame the dismantling of these systems as ridding the US of demons. More than this, they frame the people and groups they see as benefiting from those systems as agents of evil incarnate. Only after such people are removed can there be a national rebirth.
When I first started writing about politics, way back in the George W. Bush era, this was a legitimate question when it came to trying to understand the mindset of Republicans, especially when it came to their stubborn refusal to accept scientific truths. Republicans have denied or cast doubt on science in so many ways — denying that condoms are effective, that evolution is real, that climate change is actually happening and largely caused by human activity — and many liberals and progressives have felt legitimately confused about exactly why.
Was it that right-wingers were too ignorant or benighted to accede to scientific realities? Or was it more sinister than that: They knew full well what the science said, but were too selfish and cruel to care, and also selfish and cruel enough to lie about it to our faces?
Well, with the West Coast on fire, a pandemic spreading across the land, and a pathological liar in the White House as the Republican standard-bearer, I think we can consider that debate settled: It's not ignorance. It's malice.
Donald Trump is a profoundly stupid man — so stupid that he appears to have actually believed it was a stroke of genius to suggest injecting household cleaners into people's lungs — but even he, as we now know for certain, was only pretending not to understand that the coronavirus is deadly and easily transmitted. Famed journalist Bob Woodward has been steadily releasing audio clips from the interviews he conducted with Trump over the spring for his new book, "Rage." These recordings make clear that Trump knowingly lied about the scale and danger of the pandemic. In one, he tells Woodward, "I wanted to always play it down" and "I still like playing it down".
New tapes released on Monday indicate that, even as Trump was publicly claiming that the virus "would soon be in full retreat" and encouraging protests against lockdown measures, he was privately admitting that "this thing is a killer" and that the virus "rips you apart" if "you're the wrong person."
In other words, Trump gets it but simply doesn't care. That was confirmed again on Monday by a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, who confronted Trump about his decision to hold a packed (and largely mask-free) indoor rally in Henderson, Nevada, despite warnings from public health officials that such events easily spread the coronavirus.
"I'm on a stage and it's very far away," Trump told the reporter. "And so I'm not at all concerned."
So the safety of the thousands of people who showed up to show fealty to Trump is clearly of no importance. He was far away from them! So he's "not at all concerned."
Trump's odious attitudes towards the people who are being harmed by his failure to take science seriously were on display later in his trip, when he visited McClellan Park in Sacramento, California, where the skies are clogged from smoke from wildfires tearing up the West Coast.
That the frequency and severity of wildfires around the world — and currently up and down the Pacific Coast at a level never seen in human memory — is a result of climate change is beyond dispute. But when a California state official asked him about the issue, Trump simply responded, "It will start getting cooler. You just watch."
"I don't think science knows," Trump insisted, while trying to pretend the problem on the West Coast is about forest management, instead of soaring summer temperatures that turn bone-dry wooded areas into kindling. (It was just nine months ago that similar summer fires in Australia reportedly killed more than a billion animals.)
Claiming that the science is still unclear or that the continued existence of winter proves that there's no climate crisis are standard issue deflections from Republicans. It worked for many years, however, because the consequences of climate change weren't readily apparent to most people, and many people didn't grasp that snow in December doesn't negate the problems caused by record hot summers. (In fact, one aspect of the climate crisis is more extreme weather in all directions: Record heat, epic hurricanes and sometimes powerful blizzards.)
But the "I don't see the problem here" act is a lot harder to pull off when you literally have to walk through a cloud of smoke to get to the microphone where you deny the problem.
The term "gaslighting" —when someone pretends not to know something that both they and their target know is true — has been around in psychology for a long time and recently made the leap to politics, since it so perfectly describes the nature of Trump's obvious lies.
That's also what Republicans have been doing all along when it comes to denying science. Even the duller specimens within the party tend to be a little sharper than Trump, after all. So if he understands the facts and is just pretending not to, it's safe to assume the same thing about the vast majority of Republicans whose lead he follows, and who are perhaps a bit more skillful at performing ignorance.
They aren't ignorant. They don't really believe the science is controversial. That's just an act to cover for a sadistic agenda.
This was always obvious to people who were watching closely. I spent years reporting on reproductive health care, and it soon became evident that no amount of common sense or scientific evidence would overcome the insistence by many conservatives — such as Vice President Mike Pence — that condoms don't work to prevent HIV transmission and other sexually-transmitted diseases. That wasn't, as some headline writers seemed to believe, because Pence was too dumb to understand the science.
Pence is not the brightest bulb on the tree, but it doesn't exactly take a doctorate in molecular biology to see how a condom prevents virus from moving from one body to another. He was just feigning ignorance to justify his hostility to policies that protect the health of people he hates, especially LGBTQ people and women who have sex lives outside of heterosexual marriage.
It was comforting to believe that incomprehension was the main reason why conservatives resist scientific information on everything from STI transmission to the climate crisis to evolutionary biology. For one thing, that problem would seem to have a ready solution: Better education and reasoned discourse. So well-meaning defenders of science would hold "debates" with climate skeptics or evolution deniers, hoping that superior evidence and eloquent arguments would cause conservatives to see the light and embrace rational policies that are better for the planet and its people.
Nah. Conservatives were just lying about this stuff the whole time. We know this, because they've rallied around Trump, a man who tells so many obvious lies that he clearly doesn't care that everyone knows that he's lying. In fact, that's why he tells laughably obvious lies. It's a power play — a demonstration that he can do or say whatever he wants, no matter how outrageous or offensive, and no one has the ability to stop him.
This distinction matters, because it puts the fight over these issues squarely in the realm of a moral debate, instead of a debate about facts or science. And that's a debate conservatives don't want to have, because they know they'll always lose a moral debate over, say, whether it's OK to let the entire West Coast burn every summer and fall. The gaslighting and feigned ignorance was a tactic to keep the discussion mired in a pointless debate over facts that are abundantly clear, and to avoid these larger moral questions.
Maybe now, with Trump giving the game away, we can stop letting the right waste our time with gaslight-fueled "debates" and turn to what really matters: Will our nation do the right thing, or will we continue to let a pack of bigots and sadists determine our national priorities? That fateful decision is long overdue, but with Trump in the White House trying to lie and cheat his way into a second term, we can no longer avoid it.
Bob Woodward is the most conventional of conventional reporters. He is very good at gaining access and gathering facts, but like most members of the Washington press corps, he nearly always avoids thinking through the ramifications of what he finds, even if the evidence, which he reliably piles high, demands that he think it through.
The legendary reporter was on “60 Minutes” Sunday to talk about his new book, Rage. It reveals for the first time that the president knew in February how deadly the new coronavirus was going to be—that it’s airborne and worse than the flu—but did everything in his power to prevent the public from understanding it fully. That would have been enough to warrant an interview with Scott Pelley. Then Woodward did something to my knowledge he’s never done, nor have too many in Washington.
He came to a moral conclusion.
Pelley: You’re known as the reporter who doesn’t put his thumb on the scale. And yet, at the end of this book, you do just that.
Woodward: It’s a conclusion based on evidence, overwhelming evidence, that he could not rise to the occasion with the virus and tell the truth. And one of the things that President Trump told me, ‘In the presidency, there’s always dynamite behind the door.’ The real dynamite is President Trump. He is the dynamite.
Remember that coming to a conclusion is taboo among orthodox journalists like Woodward. (And the older the reporter, generally the more orthodox they are.) Coming to a conclusion violates the news tradition of neutrality and letting readers decide. The reporter’s job is reporting facts. Moral conclusions are for editorial writers. That Woodward of all people is breaking this rule should be seen as a reckoning of sorts for a press corps complicit in the creation of a “post-truth” authoritarian presidency.
When Donald Trump speaks, every third word is a lie. Reporters keep giving him the benefit of the doubt, though. They report what he says unfiltered or weakly qualified. After more than 20,000 falsehoods (as of July), you’d think empirically minded people like members of the press corps would by now have come to the conclusion that Trump is a liar. Don’t believe him. Verify everything. They haven’t. They seem to have an almost religious belief that democracy will endure no matter how many lies poison it—that the status quo is strong and sustainable, and will outlive Trump. The press corps isn’t alone. Many Americans, even now, tend to take democracy for granted.
For granted? That flies in the face of conventional wisdom, doesn’t it? We’re told that Donald Trump’s election and that of authoritarians in Hungary, Brazil, Turkey and the Philippines are proof that people have lost faith amid a conspiracy of international crises—climate change and globalization being chief among them. Instead of reforming institutions or reviving political participation, they are turning to would-be strongmen to save them. People have too little faith in democracy, not too much.
The whole truth in this country is there are plenty of voters (most of them white, most of them affluent) who do not believe the president is dangerous to the republic. They believe it will carry on, so much so they can grind as many axes as they please. Sure, he says things no president should say, but he doesn’t believe half of them. He doesn’t believe, as he said in Nevada over the weekend, that after winning a second term, he’s going to “negotiate” a third, maybe even a fourth. He doesn’t believe these things, these voters believe, because he knows a president can’t do that, even if he wanted to. This is an “unthinking faith,” according to David Runciman, allowing people to believe democracy can withstand anything. “Far from making democracy invincible, this sort of blithe confidence makes it vulnerable,” the Cambridge scholar told The Economist in 2018. “It gives us license to indulge our grievances regardless of the consequences.”
You see where I’m going. There are plenty of voters in this country who don’t mind the president’s effort to ban Muslims, deport “illegals,” police Black people and otherwise punch down on the margins of society if they can get another tax break. They don’t mind his corruption, dereliction of duty and erosion of the rule of law. They think his critics are partisans only, or complaining for the sake of complaining. Importantly, they don’t or won’t believe their support is fueling democracy’s decline. These mostly white and mostly affluent Americans believe they are serious, respectable, reasonable and patriotic citizens. They know the president is lying but won’t act. They know he’s lying but don’t care. Either is the result of too much faith in democracy, not too little. Like the press corps, they suspend their disbelief and refuse to come to a moral conclusion.
Let’s hope Woodward’s taboo-shattering goes some way toward changing that.
John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of the Editorial Board, a newsletter about politics in plain English for normal people and the common good. He’s a visiting assistant professor of public policy at Wesleyan University, a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative, a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly, and a contributing editor for Religion Dispatches.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) called for the jailing of former national security adviser John Bolton -- and got reminded of his own potential criminal liability.
The Department of Justice opened a criminal case into President Donald Trump's former national security adviser after he published an unflattering tell-all book, and Jordan's gloating was interrupted by social media reminders that he'd been accused of helping to cover up sexual abuse.
Eight former Ohio State wrestlers claim Jordan knew that team doctor Richard Strauss had sexually abused student-athletes but did nothing to stop the abuse as an assistant coach.
The political media is making the same mistakes that helped President Donald Trump get elected -- and avoid any serious consequences from special counsel Robert Mueller's probe.
Veteran journalist James Fallows, in a new column for The Atlantic, argues that rules and standards won't stand up to a candidate or president who refuses to respect the norms expected from him, and that asymmetry produces fundamental failures.
"Many of our most influential editors and reporters are acting as if the rules that prevailed under previous American presidents are still in effect," Fallows writes. "But this president is different; the rules are different; and if it doesn’t adapt, fast, the press will stand as yet another institution that failed in a moment of crucial pressure."
That same anachronistic idealism failed Mueller, who Fallows argued seems to have been naïve to the threat to his investigation that Trump posed from beginning to end.
"[Mueller] knew the ethical standards he would maintain for himself and insist on from his team," Fallows writes. "He didn’t understand that the people he was dealing with thought standards were for chumps. Mueller didn’t imagine that a sitting attorney general would intentionally misrepresent his report, which is of course what Bill Barr did. Mueller wanted to avoid an unseemly showdown, or the appearance of a 'fishing expedition' inquiry, that would come from seeking a grand-jury subpoena for Donald Trump’s testimony, so he never spoke with Trump under oath, or at all. Trump, Barr, and their team viewed this decorousness as a sign of weakness, which they could exploit."
The press is again making the same mistake as 2016, which Mueller repeated during his investigation of Trump campaign ties to Russia.
"They’re behaving like Mueller, wanting to be sure they observe proprieties that would have made sense when dealing with other figures in other eras," Fallows writes. "But now they’re dealing with Donald Trump, and he sees their behavior as a weakness he can exploit relentlessly."
Media outlets have grown even more dependent on Trump content than four years ago, when networks gave him billions of dollars in free airtime, while also playing down the former reality TV star's personal flaws to preserve the illusion of balance.
"The networks offset coverage of Donald Trump’s ethical liabilities and character defects, which would have proved disqualifying in any other candidate for nearly any other job, with intense investigation of what they insisted were Hillary Clinton’s serious email problems," Fallows writes.
The mainstream political media still isn't devoting as much coverage to the president's continuous scandals and failures as Clinton's overblown use of personal email, Fallows argued, and he fears the results will be the same as last time.
"Now it’s four years later," he writes, "and we’re waking up in Groundhog Day, so far without Bill Murray’s eventual, hard-earned understanding that he could learn new skills as time went on. For Murray, those were things like playing the piano and speaking French. For the press, in these next 49 days, those can be grappling with (among other things) three of the most destructive habits in dealing with Donald Trump. For shorthand, they are the embrace of false equivalence, or both-sides-ism; the campaign-manager mentality, or horse-race-ism; and the love of spectacle, or going after the ratings and the clicks."
Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” reveals that Donald Trump has been purposefully lying to the American people about the coronavirus pandemic. Trump admits he knew that COVID was “deadly stuff” but he did not want the public “to panic.” Instead, he fiercely denied the severity of the pandemic by acting as a “cheerleader” for the country. Sadly, William Haseltine, PhD, a world-renowned scientist, told CNN that we could have saved as many as 180,000 lives had Trump not lied to the public and had developed a proactive national strategy.
Erich Fromm, PhD, originated the term malignant narcissism. Otto Kernberg, MD, further defined malignant narcissism as including a grandiose self-image, antisocial features, paranoid traits, and sadism. Sadism is the deriving of pleasure from inflicting harm, humiliation, and destruction onto others. It can also include emotional cruelty, manipulation of others through fear, and glorification of violence.
Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist whose sadism is front and center. It dominates his life. It is instinctual. Trump is not able to reign it in because it is deeply entrenched in his psyche. It is the destructive part of his psychological make-up.
Trump’s sadism underlies his unthinkable response to our coronavirus pandemic. So far, he has killed 195,000 Americans because of his denial, his inaction, his lies, his false conspiracy theories, his childlike magical thinking, and his reckless medical cure-alls. He seems completely comfortable with the idea that thousands of Americans are dying each week under his direction; comfort he creates through the design of his alternate reality in which he operates. His alternate reality, in turn, is maintained by his sycophants, his loyal White House circle, his de facto state TV in Fox News, and a complicit Congress.
Having Americans die is acceptable and even preferable for a man who is compelled by sadistic urges. According to John Gartner, PhD, Trump is engaging in “democidal” behavior. It is the willful and purposeful killing of people by a political leader. In this case, President Trump seems to get intense pleasure from knowing that his actions—or inactions—are causing tens of thousands of deaths throughout the country. Put in more alarming terms, individuals with the qualities displayed by Trump are elated at the thought of going down in history as a “record-breaking” villain. Trump is locked into a deeply dysfunctional relationship with the American people and enjoys causing them pain and suffering. It rings true when you consider that the United States far outnumbers all other countries in the world in our deaths from the coronavirus. And it is all due to Trump’s intentional inaction to prevent death.
Make no mistake about it: Donald Trump has the power to contain and defeat this pandemic. He has chosen not to. He is an accessory to mass murder, at the very least.
Despite knowing that the coronavirus is five times more deadly than the flu, Trump continues to hold campaign pep rallies where face masks and social distancing are not required. He is hosting these “super-spreader” events where illness and death are not even considered. Putting others—even his followers—in harm’s way shows his utter disregard for human life, other than his own.
Trump’s emotional cruelty has been exposed. Trump thrives on degrading and humiliating political foes. He is especially cruel to Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. He has said that “Sleepy Joe” Biden will “hurt God” and will “destroy the suburbs.” He has said we would have a world “without any form of animals” under Biden. He has also said that “people in dark shadows” are controlling Biden. Similarly, Trump has called fallen military members “losers” and “suckers.” He has said that Senator John McCain was “not a war hero.” It is now reported that Trump told his trade adviser, “My fucking generals are a bunch of pussies.” Trump’s contempt and belittling of political figures and military personnel comes from his sadistic need to undermine the authority or praise or respect of others, especially those who threaten his sense of superiority and entitlement.
Trump’s cruel racism has been revealed as well. When asked by Bob Woodward if he thought it was important to understand the pain and anger of black people, Trump responded, “No. You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Wow. I don’t feel that way at all.” This one quote speaks volumes.
Dozens of major wildfires are burning throughout the U.S. West Coast, destroying hundreds of homes and wiping out entire neighborhoods in Oregon. About 500,000 people are under evacuation orders in Oregon, which is nearly 10% of the state’s population. Trump’s response to the wildfires has shown his cruelty, his unresponsiveness, his pettiness, and his lack of care. In the past, he has criticized the fire management team in California. Up until three days ago, his silence about the Oregon wildfires was deafening. Trump seems oblivious to the pain and suffering of others. But he is not oblivious, since his past behavior and public statements suggest that he is willfully punishing the citizens of Oregon and the others because they reside in “Democrat” states.
Donald Trump’s sadism is pervasive. His hostility is palpable throughout the country. We are the most divided and tribal we have been since the 1960’s. Trump’s sadism is creating a sense of collective anguish among all of us. And it is because he is a master of cruelty and ruthlessness.
The Office of the Presidency is traditionally regarded in a paternalistic, albeit flawed, manner. The American people have historically turned to the president at times of national crisis or tragedy, such as Pearl Harbor, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the terrorist attacks on 9/11/01, and the shooting of children in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. But what if the national “paternal” figure is cruel? What if Americans cannot turn to the White House at troubling times? Even worse, what if the paternal figure is not just devoid of empathy but is destructive and evil? That is exactly what we are facing today with Donald Trump. Our president seeks not to comfort but to harm, not to unite but to divide, not to build up but to tear down. The psychological toll of this on most Americans is enormous, especially when you add in the compounding factors of food insecurity, inaccessibility to healthcare, job loss, income shortages, social isolation, increased suicide, and rising substance abuse.
We cannot have a president who is guided by his sadism. He is destructive. He is dangerous. He is not capable of ensuring the safety and welfare of the public. In fact, Americans are dying today under Donald Trump’s direction. Even after his lies and false denials have been exposed, Trump is doubling down on his cruelty and recklessness by continuing to “play down” the pandemic. Estimates are that we could reach up to 410,000 deaths in the U.S. by January 1, 2021.
Donald Trump is a sadist. The cruel and destructive part of his disordered psyche rules him. It is at the core of his malignant narcissism.
“Now I can be really vicious,” Trump announced Saturday at his pep rally in Nevada.
It is who he is.
Alan D. Blotcky, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Birmingham, Alabama. He is Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Seth D. Norrholm, PhD, is Scientific Director of the Neuroscience Center for Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma in the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan.
Donald Trump appears to be seceding from the Union, which is bizarre given his status as the president of it. Make no mistake: Trump appears to be deliberately marginalizing himself by repeatedly insisting that he's not responsible for certain states and cities, despite technically being the president of the entire United States.
We've all heard him say it. On topics ranging from poverty to crime to COVID-19, Trump never hesitates to defer all the blame for whatever onto state and local Democrats rather than acknowledging that he's supposed to be the president of those cities and states, too.
Earlier this year, for example, Trump tweeted, "The homeless situation in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and many other Democrat Party run cities throughout the Nation is a state and local problem, not a federal problem." Trump, of course, is the president of those cities, and has been for nearly four years. Has he proposed any national solutions to the homelessness problem? Nope. He's simply seceding himself from those cities.
On Sept. 3, Trump tweeted, "Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York has the worst record on death and China Virus. 11,000 people alone died in Nursing Homes because of his incompetence!" Trump apparently doesn't realize he's the president of New York as well. Bob Woodward, by the way, confirmed that Trump's much-hyped travel restriction against China prompted tens of thousands of travelers simply to return from China to the U.S., by way of Europe, through New York's JFK airport, sparking the massive New York infection rate early in the pandemic. Turns out, that was the president's doing. We'll circle back to the pandemic presently.
Meanwhile, on Monday morning, Trump tweeted the following whiny lament: "Our people have all left Drudge. He is a confused MESS, has no clue what happened." Note the use of the phrase "our people." Trump's people are, technically, all Americans, but once again he appears to only give a rip about the people who support him.
Over the weekend, Trump visited Las Vegas, where he told reporters, "And by the way, every city that's in trouble, every state. You look, Democrats, liberal Democrats — they've run them into the ground, every city." Here's our refrain again: He's the president of all those cities and states.
Again, Trump clearly blurted that "every state" in trouble is run by "liberal Democrats." So let's take a look at which states are, in real life, doing the worst. But first, to be abundantly clear about all this: Issues like education, crime and poverty are always considerably more complicated than the party affiliations of the various mayors, city councils, governors and legislatures that control those places can possibly explain. But since we're playing Trump's leadership-cherrypicking game, we'll play by his rules for the sake of argument.
States with the highest poverty rates: 1) Mississippi, 2) New Mexico, 3) Louisiana, 4) West Virginia and 5) Alabama. What do all those states have in common? All except New Mexico are solidly Republican and delivered their electoral votes to Trump. Three of the five are controlled by Republican governors.
The least educated states: 1) Mississippi, 2) West Virginia, 3) Louisiana, 4) Arkansas and 5) Alabama. All Trump states, and all but one controlled by Republican governors.
States most dependent on federal handouts (the "taker" states): 1) New Mexico, 2) Kentucky, 3) Mississippi, 4) West Virginia and 5) Montana. Are you catching the pattern here? Trump carried four out of five in 2016, and three have Republican governors.
So these are mostly Trump-Republican states, and if he wants all this on his record, I'm OK with that. After all, he's rejecting wealthier, better-educated states as "Democrat-run." It's also germane to note that among large cities, the two "most dangerous" cities in America per 100,000 residents are Springfield, Missouri and Spokane, Washington — each run by a Republican mayor.
One thing is certain: whether we like it or not, Donald Trump is the president of the United States. That means all of it. Therefore he's responsible for all of it. There's nothing in the Constitution that says the president can disown the states and cities that hurt his feelings or make him look bad.
Perhaps Trump's most egregious abdication of personal and presidential responsibility has been his response to the pandemic. One thing has become shockingly obvious in the last couple of days: Trump was privately aware of the deadly seriousness of COVID-19, calling it deadlier than the most "strenuous flus," but chose instead to publicly lie about it, telling the nation that COVID was, in fact, just like the flu and that it would go away "like a miracle" when the weather got warmer.
Seven months later, we're nearing 200,000 American deaths and 6.2 million cases, with no end in sight.
Trump could have borrowed and rebranded, as his own, the paint-by-numbers pandemic instructions left to him by the previous administration. He could have framed the national effort with the same kind of hyper-patriotism we experienced after 9/11. But he refused to take the reins himself. Instead, he walked away, delegating the response to governors and mayors. And now he wants to blame all the bad news on the states and cities, while washing his stubby hands of all responsibility.
Trump and his disciples don't understand, nor do they care to grasp, that a national crisis requires a national effort in response. For example, the local governments of New York City and Arlington, Virginia, both attacked by al-Qaida on 9/11, didn't fight the war on terrorism alone. We fought, as we always do, as a nation. When imperial Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, we didn't send Hawaii to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima. Americans from the entire nation engaged in that war.
By the same token, when a pandemic strikes the entire nation, the entire nation has to respond in unison, otherwise there's about as much chance of containing the virus piecemeal as there is containing piss in a hot tub. Trump and his loyalists will never understand this basic leadership dynamic.
And he's not only blaming the states and cities, he's actively sabotaging them, too, probably so he can blame them for everything that happens as a consequence of the sabotage. Along those lines, on April 13, Trump told Woodward that the virus was "so easily transmissible, you wouldn't believe it." Trump elaborated with a story about a meeting in the Oval Office in which someone sneezed, sending everyone, including Trump himself, running for the exits. Again, that was on April 13. Four days later, he tweeted, "LIBERATE MICHIGAN," deliberately undermining Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's pandemic response by exploiting the bully pulpit to insist upon reopening the economy, while knowing how transmissible the virus was.
From there, Trump's loyalists followed his lead, leaving responsible behavior to the rest of us while they gratuitously engaged in pool parties and biker rallies, insisting that caring for others and acting in the national interest was a trespass against their liberty.
The childish, self-indulgent, Q-amplified irresponsibility of 30-40 percent of American voters — including their messiah in the Oval Office — is precisely why we're still enduring a thousand deaths a day, eight months into this madness, while Canada and other allies have reduced their respective death tolls close to zero.
Why is Trump so afraid to take responsibility himself? The answer is obvious: Because he's a coward and a shirker, vastly out of his depth, painfully outmatched and fatally incapable of handling a crisis of any magnitude, much less this one. When the going got tough, Brave Sir Donald ran away, stealing credit for the upside while blaming everyone else for the downside. The impact of his ineptitude is worsened, by the way, though his grisly fascination with stirring up chaos all around him, not unlike a malicious tween boy who shakes up an ant farm just to watch the ants freak out. Anyone who buys his "I don't want to create a panic" nonsense is dumber than he is.
In the end, if Trump only wants to be president of the places that aren't mean to him, if he doesn't want to be president of the entire nation, it's time for him to step aside and allow grownups who aren't afraid of being responsible leaders — who aren't afraid of being presidential — to take the wheel. The entire country, including the people who voted for him, will be better off for it.
President Donald Trump still doesn't appear to understand the difference between the weather and the climate, a fact frequently explained in elementary school classes. While speaking in California about the overwhelming wildfires up and down the West Coast, Trump dismissed that it was attributed to climate change.
“It’ll start getting cooler. You just watch," said Trump about the weather.
"I wish science agreed with you," said California Secretary for Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot.
According to researchers, climate change has dramatically amplified the risk of many conditions that help wildfires start and spread.
"We now have very strong evidence from those years of research that global warming is, in fact, increasing the odds of unprecedented extremes," said Noah Diffenbaugh, professor and senior fellow at Stanford University in California.
It isn't the first time Trump has dismissed the science. He noted in 2015, "It could be warming and it's gonna start to cool at some point."
After getting a briefing from his Department of Homeland Security officials, Trump announced, "Now, the virus that we're talking about having to do—you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We're in great shape though."
It was a week later, he repeated the claim, "it's going to disappear. One day—it's like a miracle—it will disappear."
Before he learned it was unpopular, Trump was also an anti-vaxxer, telling a reporter in 2007 that he believed vaccines can cause autism in young children.
"When I was growing up, autism wasn't really a factor," Trump told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. "And now all of a sudden, it's an epidemic … My theory is the shots. We're giving these massive injections at one time, and I really think it does something to the children."
Trump's comments Monday were something that drew ridicule among those watching the incident unfold online. See the tweets below:
If you are in the 99% here is how well you are faring under Trump policies compared to the 1%—for each dollar of increased income that you earned in 2018, each One-Percenter got $88 more income.
Huge as that ratio is, it’s small change compared to the super-rich, the 0.01% of Americans with incomes of $10 million and up. That ratio is $1 for you and $2,215 for each super-rich American household.
The slice of American income pie going to the poor shrank under Trump by the same amount that it grew for the super-rich.
Ponder that for a moment. For each additional dollar that you earned in 2018 compared to 2016, each of the wealthiest taxpayers got an additional $2,215.
The bottom line: with Trump as president it’s good to be rich
The average super-rich American enjoyed $7.1 million more income under Trump in 2018 than in 2016, the last year that Barack Obama was president. For the Ninety-Nine-Percenters, in contrast, average income rose just $3,360 with most that gain among those making $200,000 to $500,000.
Not Widely Reported
[caption id="attachment_20255" align="alignright" width="279"] One-Percenters Donald and Melania Trump in their Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.[/caption]
You haven’t heard these numbers on the nightly news or read them in your morning newspaper because no one announced them. I distilled them from an official government report known as IRS Table 1.4, a task I've repeated annually for a quarter-century.
At DCReport we don’t attend press conferences, we don’t rewrite press releases and we don’t depend on access to officials because other journalists do that just fine. Instead, we scour the public record for news that oozes, news that no one announced.
Last week I reported my preliminary analysis of Table 1.4, showing that 57% of American households were better off under Obama. That contradicted Trump’s naked claim, repeated uncritically and often in news reports, that he created the best economy ever until the pandemic.
This week’s focus is on the big changes in how the American income pie is being divvied up.
More for the Top
The rich and super-rich are enjoying a bigger slice of the American income pie.
On the other hand, this is a truly awful time to be poor. Trump policies are narrowing the pockets of the poor, the third of Americans make less than $25,000. In 2018 their average income was just $12,600, a dollar a day less than in 2016.
Trump & Co. has numerous plans afoot to reduce incomes of the poor even more and take away government benefits, as we have been documenting at DCReport.
Less for the Bottom
The poor saw their slice of the national income pie shrink by 1 percentage point from 6.5% to 5.5%. In a mirror image of that change, the super-rich saw their share of income pie grow by the same 1 percentage point, from 4.5% to 5.7% of all income.
That means the richest 22,122 households now collectively enjoy more income than the poorest 50 million households.
What these huge disparities make clear is that the sum of all Trump policies not only makes the poor worse off, but their losses are transformed into the gains of the super-rich.
The economic growth that began in early 2010 when Obama was president continued under Trump, albeit at a slower pace as DCReport showed last year. Pre-pandemic Trump underperformed Reagan, Clinton, Carter, and the last six years of Obama, who inherited the worst economy in almost a century.
The continuing upward trajectory for the economy meant that overall Americans made more money in 2018 than in 2016 even after adjusting for inflation of 4.1% over two years. Total income grew by almost $1 trillion to $11.6 trillion.
Half-Trillion for the One-Percenters
Almost half of the increase went to the 1%. They enjoyed $487 billion more money. The rest of America, a group 99 times larger, divvied up $511 billion.
The big winners, though, were the super-rich, the $10 million-plus crowd. That group consists of just one in every 7,000 taxpayers yet they captured every sixth dollar of increased national income, a total gain of $157 billion.
So, if you are among the 152 million American taxpayers in the 99% ask yourself whether Trump administration policies are good for you. Do you want a government of the rich, by the rich and overwhelmingly for the rich? Or would you prefer a government that benefits all Americans?
And see what you can do to make sure more Americans know about the big shifts in the way America's income pie is being sliced up.
Well, that escalated quickly. Only a couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump and his allies were using the term "self-defense" to condone the behavior of armed right-wingers who showed up at Black Lives Matter protests to intimidate demonstrators — and also to justify the alleged murder of two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, by 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse.
Now Trump has expanded the universe of excuses for such lethal violence, suggesting that it's acceptable in the name of "retribution."
In this case, the lethal violence was inflicted on Michael Reinoehl, a self-identified supporter of antifa, which isn't an organized movement so much as a loose association of left-wing activists who use confrontational tactics to fight perceived fascists. Most people who identify as antifa aren't violent, but some have become enamored of seeking violent confrontations with far-right or white supremacist groups. Reinoehl appears to have been such a person: He seemingly confessed on camera to killing a right-wing activist named Aaron Danielson during an Aug. 29 skirmish in Portland, Oregon.
U.S. marshals shot and killed Reinoehl near Olympia, Washington, on Sept. 3, and justified the shooting by claiming he had pulled a gun, which at least one witness says is not true. But when Trump discussed the killing, he didn't even bother with the usual talk about how it was necessary to protect the officers from harm. Instead, he claimed it was justified as "retribution." And because Trump loves to play-act being a tough guy while avoiding all difficult decisions, he tried to take personal credit for ordering Reinoehl's death.
"Two and a half days went by and I put out, when are you going to go get him?" Trump bragged to Fox News host Jeanine Pirro. "That's the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this."
Retribution: That's how Trump sees this killing. Not, as law enforcement claims, a necessary self-defense action in the course of trying to apprehend a criminal suspect. Trump seems to understand this as one faction getting revenge on a rival faction for the murder of one of their own.
That's even more alarming when you consider that Aaron Danielson, the man killed in Portland, had no connection to law enforcement. He was a member of Patriot Prayer, a militia-style group whose main purpose is to descend on progressive communities, mostly Portland and Seattle, to troll local residents and try to provoke street fights with antifa and other left-wing activists. With this talk of "retribution" talk, Trump is explicitly linking law enforcement paid for by taxpayers with extralegal militias. Effectively, the president views them as part of the same faction and in opposition to antifa, a group Trump regularly — and falsely — conflates with progressives and Democrats generally.
At first blush, it would seem unwise for Trump and his far-right allies to justify killing Reinoehl by invoking the logic of gangland murders. Trump and his supporters have sought to celebrate Danielson as a martyr, and his death is being leveraged for maximum propaganda value, as "proof" of the supposed outbreak of leftist violence that, in turn, justifies violent assaults from the right. One would think that capturing Reinoehl alive so he could be tried in court would have aided this propaganda campaign, creating a show trial that would enable the telling and retelling of the fable of Danielson's martyrdom.
But there is another, deeper purpose to this "retribution" talk. For one thing, it encourages police and right-wing militias to see themselves on the same "team," hastening a process that was already well underway, as evidenced by the cordial treatment Rittenhouse and other militia types got from police on the night he shot three people in Kenosha.
For another, Trump is signaling to his followers that they don't even need to wait for a semi-plausible "self-defense" situation to justify using violent force to silence leftists. Instead, he's trying to redefine what constitute "legitimate" reasons for his followers to use violence.
He kept up the excuse-making on Sunday night, at a rally in Henderson, Nevada, bragging that Reinoehl was "taken care of in 15 minutes."
The implication isn't subtle, especially as Trump has ranted for years about how law enforcement is supposedly hobbled by all these silly rules about respecting people's constitutional rights. Now he's encouraging his followers to see due process and laws against vigilante violence as unjust burdens, and suggesting they should just define for themselves when lethal force is justified against people they see as "un-American."
Trump has long flirted with the idea of turning the sea of armed and angry white men who worship him into a militia he can use to seize power he can't win through democratic means. During the 2016 campaign, Trump told his supporters that "Second Amendment people" should consider taking action against Hillary Clinton, if she won the election.
Trump's current Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, has a healthy lead in the polls, and Trump likely understands that he can't win a fair election. The blueprint for stealing this one — helpfully laid out last week by convicted felon and long-time Trump ally Roger Stone, in an interview with Infowars — will rely on an alliance between law enforcement and armed right-wing civilians to prevent people from voting, prevent election officials from counting the votes, and the suppressing the inevitable street protests by Trump's opponents demanding that votes be counted.
So Trump is preparing his people — both the armed civilians and his right-wing allies in law enforcement — to take violent action by teeing up the rationales now. Using false claims of "voter fraud," he's encouraging his followers to be "poll watchers," an obvious euphemism for trying to intimidate anyone whose race, appearance or demeanor makes them look like a probable Democrat. Now he's pushing the boundaries of what constitutes a legitimate use of violence.
The beauty of "retribution" as an excuse for violence is how flexible it is. Implicit in Trump's unhinged comments is a belief that laws against murder are too strict, and that his followers should feel free to transgress them if they conclude that the target of their ire has it coming. In lionizing people like Rittenhouse or the marshals who shot Reinoehl out of "retribution," Trump is sending a clear signal to his followers: Forget what the law says, and do whatever you think is necessary to "make America great again."
One-Percenters Donald and Melania Trump in their Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.[/caption]