"One of the people familiar with Pence’s prep work said several debate-related meetings were slated to be held Thursday," the Washington Post reported.
Walker, who lost his reelection in 2018, has been brought into the Trump fold with an appointment to the Wilson Center board. He won't say whether he's helping with debate prep, but the Post cites two sources who said they couldn't give specifics because they haven't been authorized to yet.
Walker will go up against a law school graduate, former prosecutor, district attorney, attorney general and now-senator who has a knack for taking powerful men down by asking simple questions they struggle to answer.
The idea that Walker could go up against Harris, much less perform as Harris, was the source of much hilarity for those reading the story online.
On Aug. 21, people gathered around the Washington County School District building in St. George, Utah. They came by the hundreds to protest the governor’s mandate requiring schoolchildren to wear face masks. According to local newspaper The Spectrum, a protester said during a closing prayer that “safety is not as important as our freedom and liberty.” He went on: “Forcing masks on our children is child abuse.” Another protester “compared mask-wearing to the death of George Floyd.”
“When George Floyd was saying ‘I can’t breathe’ and then he died, and now we’re wearing a mask, and we say ‘I can't breathe,’ but we’re being forced to wear it anyway,” St. George resident Shauna Kinville told KTVX, a Salt Lake City TV station. Video of KTVX’s report went viral this week after Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher shared it.
It was in microcosm something we should expect in macrocosm if we’re lucky enough to see Joe Biden win the presidency. The Democratic nominee has promised to impose a nationwide mask mandate to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, which has now killed more than 201,000 Americans (as of this writing), infected more than 6.8 million more, and injured scores of thousands of businesses and communities around the country. The pandemic is deadliest in rural and southern counties, places most likely to benefit from a nationwide mask mandate but least likely to obey one.
Should Biden win, we can expect a St. George anti-mask protest writ large in the coming years. It will probably follow a playbook similar to the one used a decade ago by the so-called “Tea Party,” by which small reactionary groups, funded by billionaires and organized by professional GOP operatives, present themselves as a grassroots revolt against centralized government tyranny. The press corps will probably play along, covering it the way it did the last “insurrection”—as if red-blooded Americans, dedicated to the cause of liberty and driven by the principle of rugged individualism, are taking back their country from eastern elites in the name of freedom and God. (Instead of the “Tea Party,” it might be the “Q Party,” after the QAnon conspiracy theory). From these political conditions, we can anticipate a permanent pandemic.
Scholars will play a role, too. Indeed, they already are. The Brookings Institution and other social scientists are studying why some Americans refuse to wear masks even though masks are the best way of avoiding contagion. (The virus is airborne, living in water droplets so small they hang in the air.) Already scholars are coming to the wrong conclusion: that the American frontier mentality, and the individualism at the root of the innovation and self-reliance that constitute our national character, trumps the government’s interest in public health. “Safety is not as important as our freedom and liberty,” the St. George protester said. Some academics, like Boston University’s Martin Fiszbein, have argued for the reevaluation of rugged individualism, a principle he calls “dangerous” in the face of public health crises demanding collective action.
America does not have too much rugged individualism. It has too little. The more we think rugged individualism is the problem, the bigger the real problem will be. People who refuse to wear masks are not reflecting the American frontier mentality. They are not rejecting commonsense out of the nobility of self-reliance. They are not harming themselves, literally, due to outrage against government overreach. They are acting in the interest of the groups they identify with. More importantly, they are acting out of fear of being punished by their group. They’re not individualists. They’re collectivists.
If we keep saying that individualism is why some Americans won’t wear masks, we can expect to occupy a hell more hellish than the one we already occupy, in which mass death is now normal because there’s no apparent way to resolve the conflict between gun rights and public safety. We should not, and cannot, allow conventional wisdom to gel in which the demands of individuals grind endlessly against the demands of public health. We must speak the truth. The tension isn’t between individualism and collective action. It’s between two collectivisms. One good and one very, very bad.
In one kind, individuals defend, maintain and expand liberty by way of accepting responsibility for and working toward a collective good. In the time of the ’rona, we are all in this together. We rise and fall, as one. In the other, individuals subordinate their interests and surrender liberty to group identity. (The group is not “America,” because the United States is not where “real Americans” live.) They claim to be rugged individualists, but they know individualism is punishable. One kind of collectivism rewards moral courage. The other kind, on the other hand, rewards moral cowardice.
We need an individualism that’s as moral as it is rugged. We need individuals rugged enough to make a hard moral choice between two visions of our country’s future. About half the country seems prepared to make that choice. That, alas, isn’t enough.
President Donald Trump griped that Twitter's trending topics are always making him look bad, and his threat against the social media company was met with mockery.
The president hinted the government was looking into the tech giant's methods for promoting content after noticing that many of the posts about him seemed to be critical.
"Twitter makes sure that Trending on Twitter is anything bad, Fake or not, about President Donald Trump," he tweeted. "So obvious what they are doing. Being studied now!"
— (@)
Trump and his children, along with many other Republicans, have long accused Twitter of stifling conservative voices, and he signed a May 28 executive order allowing the Federal Trade Commission to investigate complaints about political bias.
Donald Trump announced Tuesday night that he wants Americans to develop herd immunity, what he called “herd mentality,” in response to the coronavirus pandemic. According to the experts, that will result in millions of deaths.
Historically, presidents of the United States are “beacons of light” who guide and represent us. They are expected to be the ultimate public servant. The overarching responsibility of a president is to serve and protect the people. Donald Trump has taken a far different approach. We have been twisted into knots by his 20,000 lies, his childlike magical thinking, and his constant gaslighting of the truth. His malignant narcissism has intruded into every aspect of his presidency and our daily lives. To take it one step further, Trump is expecting Americans to die for him during this pandemic. Literally for him. But I am not willing to sacrifice my life—not for his personal and political survival.
Trump has already implicitly asked nearly 200,000 Americans to die for him from COVID so that he can project a false sense of normality to the public. He is expecting increasing numbers of Americans to die as he focuses exclusively on his re-election campaign. Estimates are that we may reach 410,000 deaths by January 1, 2021. All of these deaths are acceptable to Trump so long as he is re-elected. His only goal is to hold onto power. He has no interest in protecting the health and safety of the American people. He has abdicated his responsibility to defeat the coronavirus in favor of looking out for his own political fortunes.
The proof is in his statements and in his behavior. Even after his lies and false denials have been exposed by Bob Woodward in his new book, “Rage,” Trump continues to put American lives in jeopardy. He is undermining the mitigation measures that public health experts recommend. He is still sabotaging mass national testing. He keeps promoting the idea that the virus will disappear on its own, even without a vaccine. Now Trump has restarted his campaign pep rallies and he is not requiring masks or social distancing. He is hosting these super-spreader events without illness or death even being contemplated. Ex-presidential candidate Herman Cain contracted COVID and died after attending a Trump rally in Tulsa. How many Americans will get sick and die after each of his ill-advised campaign gatherings? When asked about his rallies, Trump said he is not worried about his own safety because “I’m on a stage and it’s far away.” He did not even mention the safety of the thousands of supporters who show up to proclaim their loyalty to him. Trump expects Americans to die for him—all in the name of politics.
Up to 150,000 additional Americans will die during Trump’s pandemic, referred to as “deaths of despair.” These are deaths from suicide, substance abuse, domestic violence, neglect, and other factors. These deaths are direct byproducts of Trump’s conscious unwillingness to defeat the coronavirus. In essence, Trump is asking these Americans to die for him as well.
Trump’s expectation that Americans will die for him strikes home for me. I am 66 years old and I have pre-existing medical conditions. If I contract COVID, I am at high risk for the development of severe complications, including death. The pandemic is front and center for me. It is not an abstraction. It is a deadly reality.
The Office of the Presidency is traditionally regarded in a paternalistic way. At times of national emergencies or tragedies, we turn to our presidents for support and comfort. A once-in-a-century pandemic qualifies as a national crisis. It has become a national tragedy because of Donald Trump’s conscious decisions. Never have Americans been asked to die for a president’s own political gain.
Let me be clear: Donald Trump could have contained and defeated this coronavirus early on. Other countries have done so. Trump chose not to. It was a political calculation. The loss of American lives was entered into the calculation and deemed acceptable by this president.
Donald Trump is the polar opposite of a paternalistic president. He is a malignant narcissist who demands loyalty, praise, adoration, and subjugation from the public. To Trump, people are supposed to honor and idolize him—he is not obligated to serve and protect the people. Trump’s psychopathology does not allow him to be a public servant. He cannot protect the public when he is always watching out for himself. Trump’s needs and wants are the sole determinant in his thinking. Our safety is of no concern to him—unless it profits him politically or some other way.
The expectation that Americans will die on his behalf is completely reasonable to Donald Trump. But not to me. I expect my president to protect me. I expect my president to bring the full power of his office to bear on containing and defeating this coronavirus. I should not be expected to die for Trump’s political viability. That would be tragic. That expectation, in fact, is the behavior of a dictator.
I do not want to die for Donald Trump. His belief that Americans should die for him is tragic, is pathological, and is unacceptable.
But that is who he is.
Can I—and you—survive?
Alan D. Blotcky, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Birmingham, Alabama.
Within the next few days, we will pass a grisly benchmark: more than 200,000 Americans dead from the coronavirus. Public health experts predict that number may rise to 400,000 by the end of the year. If the Trump administration pursues a "herd immunity" strategy, where the disease is allowed to spread unchecked throughout the country, then millions of people may die.
It is clear that wearing a mask that covers one's mouth and nose is the easiest way to slow the transmission of the coronavirus. If a national mask mandate had been instituted across the United States in March, many thousands of lives would have been spared, and the country's economy might not now be in ruins.
Why then do so many Americans refuse to wear masks during this pandemic?
Social scientists and other researchers have reached several preliminary conclusions.
People with lower cognitive abilities find it difficult to follow directions about when to wear a mask and when it is appropriate and safe not to do so. Moreover, when the rules about wearing a mask are inconsistent, it becomes even more difficult for people with lower cognitive abilities to wear masks consistently and correctly.
Researchers have also found that people who exhibit the "dark triad" of behavior and personality traits (Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy) are also more likely not to wear masks as compared to others.
So, they go maskless. In doing so, they expect that their masculine ideology group will accept them, respect them and not reject them.
The irony is that these men think they're manifesting the ideal of the rugged, individualistic American, when their refusal really traces in part to a fear of what other people will think about them. Drunk on a toxic brew of self-interest and that masculine ideology, they mistake their refusal to protect themselves and others as a mark of character when instead, it's a mark on their characters.
Moving from the general to the specific, what is known about the relationship between wearing a mask during the coronavirus pandemic and a person's political values and beliefs?
Unsurprisingly, political partisanship and support for Donald Trump and the Republican Party is highly correlated with refusal to wear a mask and opposition to other public health initiatives which are intended to stop the pandemic.
Such thinking and behavior also reflect the fact that Trump supporters, Republicans, and other conservatives exist in a media echo chamber which has assured them that the pandemic is a "hoax" or "fake news" crafted by liberals and intended to hurt the Trump administration. As has been repeatedly shown by media scholars and other researchers, the right-wing echo chamber is a system ruled by epistemic closure in which incorrect information, outright lies and conspiracy theories dominate. As is often cited, viewers of Fox News actually know less about empirical reality and the world as it relates to current events than people who watch no news programs at all.
Donald Trump leads an authoritarian cult of personality. Given that, his ability to influence the thinking and behavior of his followers is extreme.
Trump's repeated suggestions that his followers should not wear masks, should feel free to ignore social distancing rules and attend his rallies, and should even take up arms against Democratic officials such as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan have a direct and measurable impact on public health by encouraging the spread of the coronavirus.
But Trump's power over his followers reveals something much more dangerous and troubling about American society than "just" the coronavirus and its season of death — and even more than the underlying social inequalities and pathologies that made this pandemic so much worse than it should have been.
Beginning in the 1980s, American conservatism has morphed into a type of religious politics in which fact and reason have been subsumed by faith. This manifests in many ways: anti-intellectualism and anti-rationality, racism and white supremacy, hostile sexism and misogyny, a worship of ignorance and greed, right-wing Christian fundamentalism, a disregard for truth and empirical reality, and contempt for expert knowledge.
At its root, faith is a belief in that which cannot be proven by empirical or other ordinary means. The Republican Party's policies on taxes, the environment, social inequality, education, public health and other issues (tax cuts pay for themselves!) are rooted in faith. They are easily refuted and disproved by the empirical data. In practice, that makes no difference to those who are true believers.
If today's American conservatism is a type of religious politics, then Trumpism is one of its most dangerous sects and a de facto cult. In the age of Trump, refusing the mask is a form of sacrament, a political-religious symbol that signifies loyalty to Donald Trump and his movement.
Because of my background in ancient religion and culture I have special reason to be alarmed by the frequent references to the psychopathology of the president and his followers as a "cult." Not that I find these references misleading — on the contrary, they contain a truth that's more dangerous than we may realize.
I'm old enough to remember "the Jonestown massacre" of November, 1978, in which some 900 Americans committed what they called "revolutionary suicide" at the behest of a deranged demagogue. After the horrific event sunk in, I could not stop asking myself, "How could 900 presumably educated, mature adults, poison themselves — and in some cases their own children — and do it for such an obvious egotist? What was wrong with them? What were they lacking?"
Strangely no one seemed to be asking this obvious question.
The question, Nagler continues, "has come back to haunt us with greater urgency. But this time it's not just a circle of deluded followers — it's the whole country that's at the mercy of an egotistical demagogue. ... And the cup he's offering is not cyanide but ecocide: the extinction of all life on earth. ... As we know from the nightmare of Nazism, when the 'leader' supports the delusions, the conspiracy theories of a deluded element in the society, as the current president is doing, the combination can reach extremely dangerous proportions."
It is therefore quite feasible to imagine that at certain historical conjunctures there may arise situations in which the vacuous ego of one megalomaniac succeeds in superimposing itself on many an ego by the conduit of primary narcissism. And indeed, the 'art' involved in the deal offered by Donald Trump is squarely predicated upon what may be termed transactional narcissism. In this scenario, to use the formula of Freud, people accept Trump as their "high ego-ideal" and "exchange [their] narcissism for homage to [it]". In short, it is not a tale of isolated, solitary self-love but that of interdependence and reciprocity: rising to the level of being a fully-exposed syndrome, Trump's Other-abjuring narcissistic persona both feeds on and flares up the mostly latent similar sort of narcissism of the mostly forgotten masses.
But, this is not all.
Whoever courts an ego-ideal, secretly pines for the tantalizing interplay of pleasure and pain. By transferring primary narcissism to the safe-keeping of some supposed strongman, more often than not, s/he automatically takes on the role of being passively active in some theatre of sadomasochism.
As journalist Bob Woodward has recently revealed, Donald Trump knew from the beginning that the coronavirus was lethal, not a hoax. Trump simply chose to lie to the American people about the pandemic, as well as to actively sabotage relief efforts, and in doing so committed a crime against humanity. Trump's political cult members are not moved by these facts. They continue to gather at his command at rallies where thousands huddle together unmasked to bask in the glorious revelation of his presence. At Trump's rally last Sunday in Nevada, thousands of his followers actually ran into the arena, as though they were on fire with joy.
It was perhaps too irresistible to liberal schadenfreude, this image of Trumpists enthusiastically running into a pandemic petri dish as though it was the healing fountain at Lourdes.
Journalist Carl Bernstein told CNN's Anderson Cooper, "We are witnessing a homicidal president convening ― purposefully ― a homicidal assembly to help him get re-elected as president of the United States instead of protecting the health and welfare of the people of the United States, including his own supporters whose lives he is willing to sacrifice."
But such an analysis ignores the power of Trumpism and today's version of "conservatism" as a type of religious politics. Trump's followers run toward death because he and his movement are providing them with emotional nourishment and meaning in their lives.
Trump's neofascist movement will not disappear even if the Great Leader is voted out of office on Election Day and decides to step down. Such people will just latch onto another American fascist and demagogue, in whatever form he or she may take. Decent Americans may see the Trumpists and others of their ilk as tainted, but they themselves feel touched and empowered. In living the faith of their right-wing political religion, Trump's followers have found "salvation" through a leader who is simultaneously "like them" but is also a type of semi-divine prophet whose example they aspire to imitate or emulate.
Trump's English comprehension is garbled by decades of being unable to listen to anyone speaking about any topic that doesn't directly concern his greatness or his personal finances. But he appeared to be talking about the concept of "herd immunity," which is generally understood to require 70 to 90% of the population to be immune to a given infectious agent. This "let everyone get it" plan has been a favorite of Trump's from the beginning of the pandemic. Recently, he has hired a borderline quack named Dr. Scott Atlas — a radiologist with no expertise in virology or epidemiology — to keep telling him it's a good idea. But even Atlas knows this is a crackpot plan, and has so far refused to admit to reporters that he's the source of Trump's incoherent muttering about "herd impunity" or "herd magnanimity" or "herd it on the grapevine." (To be clear: Kidding! He hasn't said any of those things. At least not yet.)
Right now, somewhere around 2% of Americans have tested positive for the coronavirus — which is still a whopping 6.6 million people, more than any other nation on Earth — and of that group, just over 196,000 have died as of Wednesday afternoon. I leave it to readers — who, unlike Trump, didn't pay someone to take their SATs for them — to figure out how many more people are likely to die if we go with Trump's brilliant plan of infecting perhaps 35 times as many people with the virus as have now tested positive.
Here I thought that Trump had crammed thousands of his followers, without masks, into an indoor rally in Henderson, Nevada, just because he's a terminal narcissist who prioritizes his insatiable need for applause over the lives of the very swing-state voters he would need to win the election. But hey, it might also be that he's using the bodies of his own supporters — who tend, on average, to be older and likelier to die of COVID-19 — for his grand experiment in "herd development."
Move over, Burning Man: It's time for a new desert festival! Donald Trump's Coronafest 2020: The drugs aren't as good, and you're way likelier to end up dead.
The wild thing is how many people turned up for the dubious pleasures of risking their lives to hear Dr. Bleach-Injector's whiny, singsong cadence for more than an hour. Thousands of people showed up at the Henderson rally, putting it all on the line to show the world that they're willing to get sick or even die rather than admit it was a bad idea to elect a racist reality-TV host with the moral compass of a serial killer to the highest office in the land.
In the first year of Trump's presidency, I wrote a piece warning about the powers of rationalization, and suggesting how far Trump supporters would likely go rather than admit they made a mistake in voting for the man in 2016.
"[T]he answer to the question of when Trump voters will come around is somewhere between 'a long, long time from now' and more likely 'never,'" I wrote in June 2017.
I quote myself only to say that, holy yikes, did I understate the case. No matter how confident I was that Trump supporters would contort themselves into ridiculous pretzels or sign onto outrageous beliefs to justify their 2016 vote, even I had no idea how wacky things could get. Here we are, three years and change later, and this is the lengths Trump voters will go to avoid having to say, "Oops!"
— (@)
Or check out this rally in the town of St. George, Utah, which happened a few weeks ago but has now gone viral, due to the I-can't-believe-this-isn't-satire aspect of it all. That report doesn't come from a progressive media outlet of any kind, just the local news station. It features a bunch of angry white people comparing having to wear a face mask to George Floyd being killed by police in Minneapolis, or claiming that "most child molesters love" masks.
No doubt it's tempting to dismiss these examples as nut-picking, no different than when right-wingers grab the occasional anarchist-flavored vandal at a Black Lives Matter protest and use him to demonize the whole movement. But the difference is these loons don't actually sound much different than their beloved president.
Trump has also suggested that people only wear masks to spite him. He was clearly coached by his campaign staff to sound vaguely pro-mask during the Tuesday town hall, his true feelings came out when he kept repeating variations of "a lot of people think the masks are not good." (When Trump says "some people" or "a lot of people" are saying something, he is just stating his own opinion and, like the incorrigible coward he is, refusing to own it.) And like that "child molester" lady, who is obviously a QAnon follower, Trump loves pushing Q-friendly conspiracy theories, even retweeting a QAnon adherent who recently accused former Vice President Joe Biden of being a pedophile.
Despite all this, Trump's approval rating sits right around 42 to 44%, and is apparently immovable. The phrase "in for a penny, in for a pound" has never been more relevant. Apparently, anything is better than admitting that the liberals were right that voting for Trump was a bad idea — even getting COVID-19 is preferable to that. That's why the conspiracy theories must get more baroque all the time, because trying to tell a story in which Trump voters are the good guys is harder than trying to explain to the cops why you have a freezer full of human body parts.
Hell, maybe it was a smart idea for the campaign to throw Trump on TV, thereby guaranteeing that liberals would mock him and the fools who vote for him without mercy. As the past four years have demonstrated, it just makes Trump's supporters more defensive, and more determined than ever to stick it to the libs one more time. Because heaven forbid that Trump's 2016 voters should demonstrate a conscience by acting like real good guys would: Sucking it up, admitting they were wrong and making better choices this November.
President Donald Trump for months has been promising a coronavirus vaccine by November 1 – just days before Election Day. It started back in early August, when he told Fox News' Geraldo Rivera a vaccine would be ready before the end of the year, and it "could be much sooner."
“Sooner than November 3?” Rivera asked Trump – feeding him an impossible expectation.
“I think in some cases, yes possible before, but right around that time,” Trump replied, taking the bait.
It didn't take long for the Candidate-in-Chief to power up the campaign lies and wouldn't you know, America, Trump promised we will have a coronavirus vaccine in early October.
“We’re within weeks of getting it," Trump promised ABC News' George Stephanopoulos Tuesday night. "You know, could be three weeks, four weeks, but we think we have it.”
Trump is all in, and one-hundred percent committed to a vaccine in the next few weeks.
He has laid a huge trap for himself, walked right in, and has no way out.
Trump very easily could have declared, when Americans don't have access to the vaccine by the end of September, or the beginning of October, or November 1, that he just meant the vaccine would be approved. Ready to be manufactured.
On Wednesday Trump promised "distribution" of the vaccine within weeks, meaning in the hands of doctors and nurses and other medical professionals who will begin to inoculate America. (He also said nothing about safety or effectiveness.)
The Director of the CDC on Wednesday told America a coronavirus vaccine would not be "generally available" until early spring or in the summer.
Trump told reporters Dr. Robert Redfield was mistaken.
And then, he walked right in to his own trap.
"I'm telling you, here's the bottom line," Trump said at Wednesday's press conference, while lashing out at a reporter. "Distribution's going to be very rapid, he might not know that, maybe he's not aware of that, and maybe he's not dealing with the military, etc., like I do. Distribution's going to be very rapid."
— (@)
One hour earlier Joe Biden told Americans they should not trust a vaccine from the Trump administration unless the president can answer three basic questions:
"What criteria will be used to ensure that a vaccine meets the scientific standard of safety and effectiveness?"
"If the administration greenlights a vaccine, who will validate that the decision was driven by science rather than politics? What group of scientists will that be?"
"How can we be sure that the distribution of the vaccine will take place safely, cost-free and without a hint of favoritism?"
— (@)
Voters should judge the candidates by their promises, if those promises are realistic, and if they keep them. And cast their ballot accordingly.
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.
