Trump’s return means more anxiety for White House reporters
My father was a Navy medic; were he with us now, he’d be so ashamed of this man.
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Lawyers for E. Jean Carroll contest DOJ intervention in Trump defamation case
Attorneys for writer E. Jean Carroll filed a motion in a New York court Monday contesting the Department of Justice’s notice seeking to replace President Trump’s private lawyers in her defamation lawsuit against him.
Details: “There is not a single person in the United States — not the President and not anyone else — whose job description includes slandering women they sexually assaulted,” Carroll’s lawyers said in response to the DOJ’s argument that Trump was “acting within the scope of his office” as president when he said in 2019 that she was “lying” about claims that he raped her in the 1990s.
Why it matters: Carroll’s lawyers’ filing against the highly unusual intervention of the DOJ comes less than a month before the presidential election.
- The Elle magazine columnist has requested a DNA sample from the president as evidence of her sexual assault allegations in the defamation case.
- If the court permits the DOJ to replace Trump’s attorneys, “Carroll’s complaint would effectively be dismissed,” per the New York Times.
What they’re saying: The Trump administration did not immediately respond to Axios’ request for comment. But a White House spokesperson told Axios last month that Carroll “was trying to sell a book” when she sued Trump for defamation “for denying her baseless claims” and that the DOJ’s action was warranted because of a law called the Federal Tort Claims Act.
- Carroll said in an emailed statement that Trump “knows that I told the truth.”
Read the memorandum of law, via DocumentCloud:
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7222505/Carroll-Opposition-Brief.pdf
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7222505/Carroll-Opposition-Brief.txt
Eric Trump deposed in New York probe into family business
President Trump’s son Eric Trump was questioned under oath Monday as part of New York’s investigation into the Trump Organization’s financial dealings, Bloomberg first reported and Axios can confirm.
The intrigue: The deposition comes less than a month out from Election Day, after a judge denied Eric Trump’s motion to have it delayed until after Nov. 3. The 36-year-old Trump Organization executive vice president had argued he did not want the questioning to be used “for political purposes,” per the New York Times.
- Attorney General Letitia James asked a judge to compel Eric Trump’s testimony in August, and the judge gave the Trump Organization executive until Oct. 7, the Times reports.
Background: The investigation is focused on whether the Trump Organization inflated the values of four properties “to obtain favorable terms for loans and insurance coverage, while also deflating the value of other assets to reduce real estate taxes,” according to a previous statement from the office.
- The probe is civil, and does not allege that crimes have been committed.
What they’re saying: The N.Y. attorney general’s office declined to comment on the latest developments.
- The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to Axios’ request for comment. But Eric Trump accused James in an August Twitter post of “prosecutorial misconduct” for pursuing the Trump organization.
- “Without any basis, the NYAG has pledged to take my father down from the moment she ran for office,” he said.
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From House Armed Services Committee Chair on T’s character.
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Some cautions for people visiting 45 when they enter the President in his residence…surgical gowns but no full hazmat type suit, and some eye goggles, and masks.
On Monday, the White House Management Office sent out an email to senior staff who routinely interact with Trump, aimed at protecting both the president and his advisers. The memo, obtained by The Washington Post, urges staffers to “limit all foot traffic on the first floor of the West Wing as well as in the Residence” and says that “staff should only go to the Oval Office or the second floor Residence when they are requested and expected.”
For staffers who do visit the Oval Office or the second floor of the residence, where Trump lives and holds meetings, and who expect to be within six feet of the president, the memo also requires that they wash their hands or use hand sanitizer before entering; remove any outer garments; and don personal protective equipment provided in an “Isolation Cart” — including a yellow gown, surgical mask, protective eyewear and gloves.
The White House has not changed its mask guidance and is still following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines that recommend, but do not require, wearing a mask. Several administration officials said nearly everyone in the White House has been wearing a mask in recent days, including Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, who usually does not sport one.
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Boo 
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Trump mounts bizarre and misleading White House return despite warnings
A strongly medicated President Donald Trump bolted from his VIP hospital bubble Monday, staging a bizarre White House comeback that included an irresponsible mask removal and a reckless pronouncement there is nothing to fear from Covid-19, which has already killed 210,000 Americans.
His actions show him, if anything, entrenched deeper in denial over the virus than ever before and more committed to trashing scientific protocols that could slow the pandemic.
“We’re going back. We’re going back to work. We’re gonna be out front. As your leader I had to do that. I knew there’s danger to it but I had to do it,” Trump says in a strange campaign video whipped up by aides within an hour of his return to the White House, in which the President framed himself as a warrior who took on the virus and won.
“I stood out front. I led. Nobody that’s a leader would not do what I did. I know there’s a risk, there’s a danger,” Trump said, despite his doctors earlier saying he is still not fully “out of the woods” in his fight with the virus.
A still infectious Trump ignored advisers who wanted him to stay admitted and instead rode Marine One from Walter Reed Military National Military Medical Center back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
On Tuesday morning, he was back on Twitter again equating the novel coronavirus to the seasonal flu, continuing his tendency to downplay the disease in public even though he fully understands its seriousness, once telling Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward it was “deadly.” Trump tweeted falsely that “in most populations” Covid-19 was “far less lethal” than flu.
“Are we going to close down our Country?,” Trump tweeted. “No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid.”
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Tacking on a few other goodies:
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Coughing Trump tells Hannity he’s healthy and ready to hold rallies
Recuperating from the coronavirus and plunging in the polls, President Trump is retreating to his safe spaces: Twitter, Fox, and rallies.
On Thursday Trump started and ended his day on Fox. And, as if those appeals to his base weren’t enough, he is also holding a “virtual rally” on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show Friday afternoon.
In the morning, the President phoned into Fox Business for a rambling, off-the-rails conversation with journalist-turned-sycophant Maria Bartiromo. At this point she might as well be a spokesperson for the Trump campaign. As Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote, she has “served as little more than a hype woman, setting Trump up with softball questions and encouraging his responses. It wasn’t the first time she has played such a role, but it was nonetheless remarkable to see the scope of her disinterest in posing any challenge to the president.”
While speaking with Bartiromo, Trump ranted and raved about his political enemies. He implored Attorney General Bill Barr to “indict these people for crimes,” specifically naming Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Hours later, after Trump’s interview with Bartiromo had faded to a degree from memory, Jeffrey Toobin tweeted: “Just so it’s clear. [Trump] today called for [Obama] and [Biden] to be indicted and prosecuted. Have our standards fallen so far that this kind of antidemocratic authoritarian behavior passes without criticism? Is this now normal?”
A coughing Trump insists he’s well
Trump continued to careen from topic to topic on Sean Hannity’s show, promoting conspiracy theories, peddling falsehoods, and launching attacks on Democrats and the media during a roughly 25 minute conversation. But it was arguably the President’s health that took center stage. During the interview, Hannity twice asked Trump if he had been tested for the coronavirus since he became ill last week. It was a question that the President apparently couldn’t answer. Trump instead said that he will “probably” be tested on Friday. Medhi Hasan quipped about the non-answer, “Mark the date, we have reached the point where even Sean Hannity is asking Trump simple questions that the president can’t or won’t answer.”
It wasn’t just Trump’s comments on his health that drew attention. It was what the audience could hear at home. At least twice during the interview, Trump had to pause his sentences and audibly clear his throat and cough. The President insisted he was feeling great, claiming he saw his doctors earlier in the day and that they believe him to be in “great shape.” But he sure didn’t sound like he was cured, as he claimed to be.
…says he might hold rally Saturday
After Trump boasted about how great he felt and the treatment he had received, he told Hannity, “I think I’m going to try doing a rally on Saturday night. If we have enough time to put it together. But we want to do a rally in Florida probably on Saturday night. Might come back and do one in Pennsylvania the following night.” His comment aligned with reporting from the New York Times’ Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, who wrote earlier that an “angry” Trump who was watching the news coverage of the political race had “been imploring aides to let him resume campaign rallies as soon as this weekend.”
Reminder: The President’s doctor has not held a news conference to brief the pubic about Trump’s health and allow for reporters to take questions since Monday — all as Trump, sick with the coronavirus, coughs during a national TV interview while suggesting he might do a rally in days. This is an unacceptable level of transparency from the White House.
Trump on Rush
From a strategy point of view, it’s always been bizarre to me that Trump hasn’t called into nationally syndicated right-wing radio shows more often. Yes, Fox News reaches a large swath of his base. But Rush Limbaugh is a powerhouse. Limbaugh, who has been off the air this week while undergoing treatments, said Thursday that Friday will be the “largest virtual rally in radio history.”
Brian Stelter adds: “I’d like to make a little bit of a prediction here. There has been lots of talk about whether Trump would launch a TV network if he loses the election. What if the speculation has been right but the medium has been wrong? What if he ends up with a high-profile talk radio gig next year?”
Speaking of right-wing media’s influence…
CNN’s Sandee LaMotte reports: “Viewers who trust Fox News coverage more than CNN’s are slightly less likely to take preventative measures against the novel coronavirus and a little more likely to put themselves at risk, according to a new study published Thursday in the journal BMJ Global Health.”
Also this week, a new report from Pew found that 90% of Republicans who only listened to Fox News or talk radio as major sources of political news said the country has controlled the outbreak as well as it could. Fox loyalists were also more likely to feel like the pandemic has been overblown: “As of early September, among Republicans with only Fox News and/or talk radio as major news sources, 78% say the coronavirus has been made a bigger deal than it really is.” Only small numbers of Democrats made similar assertions…
Fourth member of White House press corps tests positive
Another member of the White House press corps tested positive for the coronavirus on Thursday — meaning that four journalists have now been infected ibecause of the outbreak that has swallowed the West Wing. The White House Correspondents Association emailed members to let them know that a journalist “received a preliminary positive result for COVID-19 today after undergoing a rapid test.” The person is now awaiting results from a PCR test and is “currently asymptomatic.” According to WHCA, the person was last at the White House on October 1, a full week ago.
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Here’s her news conference on introducing the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump for his erratic health concerns.
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Zeroing in on T’s readiness for getting back to regular business, considering his recent Covid diagnosis.
President Donald Trump insisted Thursday that he is ready to resume campaign rallies and feels “perfect” one week after his diagnosis with the coronavirus that has killed more than 210,000 Americans, as his doctor said the president had ”completed his course of therapy” for the disease.
The president has not been seen in public — other than in White House-produced videos — since his Monday return from the military hospital where he received experimental treatments for the virus. On Thursday, his physician, Navy Cmdr. Sean Conley, said in a memo that Trump would be able to safely “return to public engagements” on Saturday, as the president tries to shift his focus to the election that’s less than four weeks away, with millions of Americans already casting ballots.
While Trump said he believes he’s no longer contagious, concerns about infection appeared to scuttle plans for next week’s presidential debate.
“I’m feeling good. Really good. I think perfect,” Trump said during a telephone interview with Fox Business, his first since he was released from a three-day hospital stay Monday. “I think I’m better to the point where I’d love to do a rally tonight,” Trump said. He added, “I don’t think I’m contagious at all.”
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Couple of notables:
Isolated in the White House, Trump struggles to project a sense of normalcy after canceled debate
Trailing in the polls, stricken with the novel coronavirus and stuck in isolation at the White House, President Trump has tried to project an image of strength and normalcy that belies his troubled circumstances.
On Thursday, he spent an hour phoning into a television interview, released two video messages aimed at key voting groups, began planning rallies for next week and promised senior citizens free access to the experimental drug he falsely claimed was “a cure” for covid-19.
“I want you to get the same care that I got,” Trump said in a video message to senior citizens released Thursday afternoon on Twitter. “You’re going to get the same medicine — you’re going to get it free, no charge.”
But the president’s attempts to depict a back-to-normal presidency were punctured when the Commission on Presidential Debates announced Thursday morning that next week’s scheduled town hall meeting with Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would take place virtually rather than in person.
Trump’s Struggles Ripple Across the Sun Belt, Endangering G.O.P. Stronghold
President Trump is fading nationally as he alienates women, seniors and suburbanites, polls show. But private G.O.P. surveys show he is in close races in solidly red states, too.
GOP plunged into crisis as Trump abruptly ends economic relief talks, dismisses virus
Facing a political reckoning as Trump’s support plummets and a possible blue tsunami looms, it is now conservatives and Trump allies who are showing flashes of discomfort with the president, straining to stay in the good graces of his core voters without being wholly defined by an erratic incumbent.
For some Republicans, the 11th-hour repositioning may not be enough to stave off defeat. But the criticism, however muted, illuminates the extent of the crisis inside a party that is growing alarmed about its political fate and confused by Trump’s tweets and decision-making.
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T at the crossroads - knowing he could be one of the ‘diers’ of this Covid thing, and yet, he could turn it into a win. But what about his responsibility in the Nation’s lack of effective response that is rocking his chances to win in the polls…well, that just needs some more good PR.
WTFery…when do we reach the absolute bottom with this guy?
Donald Trump was on the phone, and he was talking about dying. It was Saturday, October 3, and while his doctor had told the outside world that the president’s symptoms were nothing to worry about, Trump, cocooned in his suite at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, was telling those close to him something very different.
“I could be one of the diers,” he said.
The person on the other end of the line couldn’t forget that unusual word the president used: dier. A seldom-said dictionary standard, it was a classic Trumpism, at once sinister and childlike. If being a loser was bad, being a dier was a lot worse. Losers can become winners again. Diers are losers forever. But aren’t we all diers in the end? Donald Trump, the least self-reflective man in America, was contemplating his own mortality.
He said it again: “I could be one of the diers.”
The previous day, at 12:54 a.m., he had announced that he and the First Lady, Melania, had tested positive for COVID-19 in an outbreak that would sideline dozens across the West Wing, the East Wing, the highest levels of the federal government, the military ranks, Trump’s 2020 campaign team, and prominent supporters in the religious community. The virus had barreled into the very White House that allowed its spread throughout the United States, where 213,000 were dead and 7.6 million more were infected amid the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression.
As infections swelled nationwide, the virus made its way inside the president himself — an epic security failure with no modern analog. It was over a century ago, amid a pandemic in 1919, that Woodrow Wilson got sick in Paris. His White House blamed what it called a cold and a fever on the dreary weather. But, in fact, Wilson was sick with the virus now known as the Spanish flu, which killed hundreds of thousands of Americans as his administration looked away. One hundred and one years later, the story of Trump’s “mild symptoms” became less and less true as the hours ticked by. His fever crept up. His cough and congestion grew worse. Doctors gave him oxygen and administered a high dose of an experimental antibody treatment unavailable to the ailing masses and made using fetal tissue, a practice his administration opposes, from the drugmaker Regeneron. Still, he resisted going to Walter Reed. “I don’t need to go,” he said, according to a person who spoke to him. “I’m fine. I’m fine. We have everything we need here.”
Persuading him to leave the White House required an intervention from his doctors, members of the White House operations staff, the Secret Service, and his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. They had failed to stop the mass deaths of high-risk Americans, but they were going to save Trump, the most important high-risk American of them all. They told him, “This isn’t just your choice. This really isn’t about you. It’s about the presidency. Our job is to protect the presidency, and you occupy it.” They asked him to think about the military and everyone else whose life would be upended if the state of the country’s leadership was in doubt.
Fine. He agreed to walk across the South Lawn and board Marine One. The White House said the move was made “out of an abundance of caution.” In a video posted on social media, the president hinted that things weren’t so great. He put it this way: “I’m going to Walter Reed hospital. I think I’m doing very well, but we’re going to make sure that things work out.”
In the hospital, Trump’s world shrank overnight in a way it hadn’t since he arrived in Washington from New York to be sworn into office nearly four years ago. Contagious and isolated from his family and closest aides, he was accompanied by Dan Scavino, the social-media director who had first been his caddie and had survived at his side longer than anyone who wasn’t blood, and Mark Meadows, his highly emotional chief of staff, who slept in a room nearby, and was attended to by a team of camera-conscious doctors. In this sterilized confinement, he tried to distract himself from his illness. He plotted his escape, planned public-relations stunts, watched TV, and took calls from friends, members of his staff, and Republican lawmakers. But he remained consumed by what the doctors told him about his chances of survival. It wasn’t a sure thing.
Nine months into the pandemic and one month away from Election Day, the president considered for the first time that the disease killing him in the polls, threatening his political future, might just kill him, too. On the phone he remarked sarcastically, “This change of scenery has been great.”
He asked for an update on who else in his circle had contracted the virus, though he expressed no regret, no indication that he understood his own decisions could have led to the infections. Unable to process the irony of his own misfortune, he tried his best to find the Trumpiest spin. Looked at one way, he was having the greatest and most important illness of all time. He had the best care in the world, and he raved about the virtues of the drugs the doctors had him on, including dexamethasone, a steroid pumping up his lungs that can induce euphoria. He was awed by the wonders of modern medicine. He said he was feeling really good, and it didn’t sound like he was lying. Then he admitted something scary. That how he felt might not mean much in the end.
“This thing could go either way. It’s tricky. They told me it’s tricky,” the president said. “You can tell it can go either way.”
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Yes, T wants no liability for you wanting to be there to celebrate him.
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BREAKING
Another big NYT Trump’s Taxes and Finances Drop - hitting like well-placed Election attention grabbers. And they are RIVETING…
There have been 3 or 4 other NYT’s articles (See below) on T’s taxes, but this time they have received about 10 years of them (through an unknown source, but a legal one)
But basic grift is the game here - Trump can sell what people want - access to the President through his hotels, clubs etc. More swampy activity.
But Mr. Trump did not merely fail to end Washington’s insider culture of lobbying and favor-seeking.
He reinvented it, turning his own hotels and resorts into the Beltway’s new back rooms, where public and private business mix and special interests reign.
…
Federal tax-return data for Mr. Trump and his business empire, which was disclosed by The New York Times last month, showed that even as he leveraged his image as a successful businessman to win the presidency, large swaths of his real estate holdings were under financial stress, racking up losses over the preceding decades.
Federal tax-return data for Mr. Trump and his business empire, which was disclosed by The New York Times last month, showed that even as he leveraged his image as a successful businessman to win the presidency, large swaths of his real estate holdings were under financial stress, racking up losses over the preceding decades.
But once Mr. Trump was in the White House, his family business discovered a lucrative new revenue stream: people who wanted something from the president. An investigation by The Times found over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments that patronized Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration. Nearly a quarter of those patrons have not been previously reported.
But once Mr. Trump was in the White House, his family business discovered a lucrative new revenue stream: people who wanted something from the president. An investigation by The Times found over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments that patronized Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration. Nearly a quarter of those patrons have not been previously reported.
The tax records — along with membership rosters for Mar-a-Lago and the president’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., as well as other sources — reveal how much money this new line of business was worth.
Articles from NYT on T’s Finances
Oct 9, 2020 The Latest - Friday, October 9
Sept 27th What The Fuck Happened Over The Weekend?
Sept 28th NYT Article on T’s Tax Records - Quest for fame
FIrst NYT article 10.2.18 chronicling Trump’s family finances coming from Fred Sr.
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Willy Wonka is trending on twitter because Trump wanted to pull a Gene Wilder-like stunt of pretending to be frail and then busting out a superman shirt under his clothes when he left Walter Reed.
Seriously.
Trump Makes First Public Appearance Since Leaving Walter Reed
The president continued to play down the threat of the virus, but the event that the White House had previewed as a huge “peaceful protest for law and order” was uncharacteristically brief.
https://twitter.com/Cavalorn/status/1315057602276007937?s=20
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Failing the 3am call, a statement used in every Election debate - do you trust your leader to handle any crisis at 3am? And T failed to perform, and failed miserably.
T’s inability to rise to the job has been highlighted lots. Everyone (here) sees it, and a majority of those polled.
WTF - 24 days til Nov 3rd. We’re ready.
A memorable campaign ad from 2008 urged voters to ask themselves which candidate would perform better in an unexpected emergency: “It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep, but there’s a phone in the White House and it’s ringing … Your vote will decide who answers that call.” Franklin D. Roosevelt answered Pearl Harbor. John F. Kennedy answered the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba. How would this year’s candidates respond when confronted with an emergency?
Joe Biden has never held the top job, so voters can only speculate. But a pandemic began on Donald Trump’s watch, so no speculation is needed. Trump showed us how he did perform in a crisis: He failed. Trump is obviously not responsible for all of the COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. But the U.S. has fared much worse than the median developed country. And among wealthy nations, its per capita deaths rank in the top five. Trump can’t avoid blame for America’s subpar performance, because voters can identify specific actions he took that contributed to the country’s failures. Especially damning is that Trump couldn’t even protect himself from the disease.
> Compare the White House to the NBA. Months ago, the league decided to go ahead with its season by bringing 22 teams into a “bubble” with coaches, trainers, referees, support staff, and media, despite a formidable challenge: Hundreds of young basketball players would run, pant, sweat, jostle for rebounds, huddle together in time-outs, and fill their off hours together, away from friends and family. The league developed sound protocols. Players, coaches, and others executed them competently. And the NBA went months without a positive COVID-19 test, allowing it to salvage a season worth billions of dollars while entertaining the American public.
A presidential bubble is comparatively easy to protect: Trump had all the resources of the federal government, no need for close physical contact, the ability to consult with any expert on optimal protocol, and a Secret Service to enforce whatever he decided upon. Yet he proved unable to stay healthy, not because he was stricken early, when little was known, but because he failed to take the most commonsense precautions, such as wearing a mask or not hosting large events.
Trump’s carelessness didn’t just jeopardize his own health, and that of his wife, his aides, and the Secret Service. The September 26 White House event for the Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett appears to have compromised the health of many important officials. “More than 100 people gathered,” NPR reported. “Guests mingled, hugged and kissed on the cheek, most without wearing masks. An indoor reception followed the outdoor ceremony. Seven days later, at least eight people who were at the ceremony have tested positive.” Someone may die because of the White House’s bizarre laxness at an unnecessary event. And because U.S. senators are among the infected, its consequences could conceivably delay or even derail Barrett’s nomination. Nothing like this could have happened to a president exercising good judgment.
But the drama of recent days should not overshadow Trump’s actions prior to his illness. His compounding failures of leadership date back to the very beginning of the pandemic.
Mendacity was his most avoidable failure. Presidents in a public-health crisis should tell the truth. Trump lied to Americans from the outset of this life-threatening emergency. In early February, he privately told Bob Woodward that COVID-19 spread through the air and was more dangerous than the flu, even as he downplayed the seriousness of the disease in public. “I wanted to always play it down,” he later told Woodward. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” The false impression he gave was echoed by his allies through the conservative media. Millions would have taken COVID-19 more seriously if Trump hadn’t repeatedly downplayed it. But instead of leveling with Americans, Trump kept lying month after month.
…
Throughout those months, the U.S. regulatory state was failing in various ways. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed its own test procedures early on, but those proved to be faulty and based on contaminated materials,” the economist Tyler Cowen told me. “At the same time, the CDC legally prevented Americans from pursuing other testing options. That is a major reason America fell behind in the testing race, and with its late start, America was not able to buy up enough testing materials before those items became very scarce.”
A better president would have shored up America’s public-health infrastructure prior to the pandemic rather than letting it continue to decay. A better president would’ve seen the earliest failures of the regulatory state and used the powers of his office to correct them as quickly as possible. But rather than constantly insisting that the regulatory state treat COVID-19 more like an emergency and emphasizing that brief bureaucratic delays could cost thousands or tens of thousands of lives, Trump repeatedly focused on downplaying the challenge that America faced. As Ronald Klain, who served as chief of staff to two different Democratic vice presidents, told my Atlantic colleague Ed Yong, “In the best circumstances, it’s hard to make the bureaucracy move quickly. It moves if the president stands on a table and says, ‘Move quickly.’ But it really doesn’t move if he’s sitting at his desk saying it’s not a big deal.”
Trump’s failures can be exaggerated. He is not the only public official to err. His defenders are correct when they observe that Anthony Fauci fumbled his early messaging on masks, that various governors failed to adequately protect nursing homes in their jurisdictions, and that public-health officials undermined the culture of social distancing when they put out politicized statements justifying large public gatherings to protest the death of George Floyd. Many officials at the national and state levels behaved in ways that suggest they should not be trusted in future emergencies. But Trump is the only one running for president on his record.
Besides, a core part of the president’s job in an emergency is to glean useful advice from experts while overruling them when their narrow insights are outweighed by broader national interests––but for the most part, Trump neither accepted the best expert advice nor rejected the worst. He presided over the worst of both worlds. “Caution has become politically contentious in part because of disputes over whether this spring’s shutdowns were necessary. That is a legitimate subject for debate,” Scott Gottlieb and Yuval Levin wrote in The Wall Street Journal . “But that dispute has kept us from grasping the truly critical mistake––the failure to deploy diagnostic tests early that would have helped gauge where the virus was spreading. Some cities, such as New York, were on the brink of collapse. Others still had little spread and containment was possible. This failure led both to exploding caseloads and overbroad shutdowns.”
No one can pinpoint exactly how many excess deaths Trump is wholly or partially responsible for, or how much excess economic pain America is suffering because of his poor job performance, not only because of the complexity of parceling out blame and the hypothetical nature of what different leaders might have done, but also because the death toll is still rising–– every week or two , COVID-19 is killing more Americans than died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
And winter is coming. Cold weather drives people inside, public-health directives that allowed many businesses to reopen by doing as much as possible outdoors will no longer be feasible in colder regions, isolated people will want to travel home to gather with family for winter holidays, and the flu season is almost here. Back in mid-September, when there were roughly 40,000 new cases of COVID-19 each day, my colleague James Hamblin interviewed Fauci. “As we approach the fall and winter months, it is important that we get the baseline level of daily infections much lower,” Fauci told him, adding that “we must, over the next few weeks, get that baseline of infections down to 10,000 per day, or even much less if we want to maintain control of this outbreak.” But Trump had no plan to do that. Daily new cases are still at more than 40,000.
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People who felt compelled to leave the WH because they did not like what they saw in terms of policy and the way people were being treated can be free to openly discuss what they experienced in meetings and inside the corridors of the WH. Here are two - Miles Taylor, who left HHS and Olivia Troye who left working for Pence within the Corona Task Force. The sexist commentary from a T are mind-boggling, but when you elect a playboy-grifter-egomaniac-narcissist all these pointed comments make sense. They are just gross.
Women are not voting for him in droves.
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Trump wants to hit campaign trail every day through election
President Trump has asked his campaign to put him on the road every single day from now until Nov. 3.
Behind the scenes: His team is in the process of scheduling events to make that happen, two sources familiar with the discussions tell Axios. But not everyone thinks this is a good idea. One adviser said, “He’s going to kill himself.”
Why it matters: Look at the polls. Trump is in need of a rebound, and he’s betting he’s got a better chance on the move than sitting around the West Wing.
What we’re hearing: The campaign is more worried than ever that seniors — a crucial voting bloc — are abandoning Trump over his handling of the pandemic.
- “He really f----d up with seniors when he said not to worry about the virus and not to let it control your life,” one Trump adviser told Axios. “There are so many grandparents who’ve gone almost a year without being able to see grandchildren.”
Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh tells Axios: “The president has personal experience with COVID and understands what people are going through."
What’s next: Trump hits the trail for the first time since contracting COVID-19 tomorrow for an airport rally in Sanford, Florida, followed by stops in Pennsylvania on Tuesday and Iowa on Wednesday.
‘He’s going to kill himself’: Trump aides concerned as he demands to be on the road every day until the election
President Donald Trump’s aides are concerned that he may be risking his life as he launches into a huge travel schedule until Nov. 3.
Axios reported Sunday that Trump understands he’s losing and he’s prepared to do whatever it takes.
“His team is in the process of scheduling events to make that happen,” the site said, citing two sources.
“He’s going to kill himself,” said one adviser.
“He really f*cked up with seniors when he said not to worry about the virus and not to let it control your life,” an adviser said.
Trump’s comments came months after Texas Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and others in the GOP, appeared on Fox News to tell seniors to sacrifice their own lives to help Trump’s economy.
“There are so many grandparents who’ve gone almost a year without being able to see grandchildren,” the adviser also said.
The Trump campaign is trying a new strategy after the president failed to sufficiently handle the pandemic for the past nine months. They now say that he’s an expert in the pandemic because he’s had the coronavirus. It’s a claim that was criticized online, as people noted that having brain surgery does not mean you’re capable of performing brain surgery.
Trump’s rallies have turned into super-spreader events. In Minnesota, a Trump rally led to at least 9 new COVID-19 transmissions so far, said Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) officials. His Tulsa rally in June led to record high COVID-19 numbers just weeks after the event.
Given there are just weeks before Election Day, the last thing Trump should want is to expose his supporters to the virus, because they would be in quarantine during a time he would want them to be voting.
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Long view on T’s presidency and AG Barr who helped shape this despotic administration. From historian Sean Wilentz. Worth a read
Trump and Barr have made the election into a test of democracy. If the United States is to survive as it has existed since 1787, Trump must not simply be defeated, but repudiated.
The Sedition of Donald Trump
Historian Sean Wilentz says the president and his chief accomplice Attorney General Bill Barr’s subversions of democracy have taken America to the very brink
Before Donald Trump got himself infected with the coronavirus, he had firmly secured his place as the worst president in American history. Now, after mocking Joe Biden at their first debate for mask wearing, Trump has proved to be a reckless superspreader, risking the lives of donors at a New Jersey fundraiser and the Secret Service agents sworn to protect him by demanding a bizarre motorcade photo op outside of Walter Reed hospital. One aide and associate after another of those exposed to him — and his wife — have fallen victim to the virus. Trump’s coronavirus policy, or rather the absence of it, had already been shown to have morbid consequences. Herman Cain, the former pizza king, could testify about that had he not died due to complications from the virus after attending Trump’s ill-fated Tulsa rally crammed with shouting, barefaced fanatics.
After demanding to be released from the hospital, Trump put on a display worthy of Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator, except that it wasn’t a parody. Clearly struggling for breath, the president first told the nation that Covid-19 was no big deal — “Don’t be afraid” — playing the he-man while spewing the deadly virus. The next day, Trump tweeted that there would be no further talk about a bill to stimulate the economy until after the election. The New York Stock Exchange averages immediately collapsed. But this unhinged performance is in keeping with the president’s attitude toward the contagion from the beginning, a toxic mixture of denial and presumed invulnerability.
Since Covid hit, Trump’s refusal to call the pandemic a siren-howling public-health emergency, coupled with his know-nothing disparagement of medical science, has led directly to the soaring death count, now well over 210,000 Americans, and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The escalating number of fatalities of Americans from the coronavirus outstrips the number of U.S. combat deaths in World War I, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and every war since combined. However Trump fares with the virus, whether he suffers its symptoms for months or recovers, his legacy is already written in stone as one of catastrophic and lethal failure.
That’s for starters. Trump’s racist rhetoric and shout-outs to white nationalists have cleaved the nation in two, driving political polarization with an intensity not seen since the Civil War. His explicit encouragement of violence and armed demonstrations has menaced the rule of law. His brazen attempt to shake down the president of Ukraine (“Do us a favor, though”), in order to manufacture dirt against his chief political opponent — the event that triggered Trump’s impeachment — almost surely would have led to his removal from office but for the cynicism, cowardice, and partisanship of the Senate Republican majority. His amply documented obstruction of justice in connection with the Russia investigation — 10 offenses, according to the Mueller report; the corruption of his office to enrich himself and his family in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause; his purposeful sabotage of the First Amendment by demonizing the free press as enemies of the people — all this and more add up to not just the worst performance of any American president, but the most subversive conduct since Jefferson Davis, who was not a president of the United States.
Trump’s subversion is an immediate existential crisis for American democracy, the worst since the Civil War. He has deliberately tried to discredit and delegitimize democracy itself. By repeatedly trashing the upcoming election as rigged and corrupt, raising baseless wild charges about voting by mail, Trump has poisoned the political wells. By instructing the neo-fascist and anti-Semitic Proud Boys to “stand back” and “stand by,” and instructing his goon squads to descend on the polls to intimidate voters, he has openly called for disrupting the election. By refusing to pledge to a peaceful transition of power should he lose the election, Trump has revealed his plan for a coup d’etat, with the connivance and unswerving support of the Republican Party.
Before Trump fell ill, he openly disclosed his plot, what looked like the last option left to him to snatch a victory despite almost certain defeat. Claiming that the Democrats were out to steal the election and getting his frenzied supporters to turn out, vote, and prevent others from voting, Trump prepared the hardcore MAGA base to unleash orchestrated chaos in the streets in case he lost, a standard tactic in banana republics. The obscene scramble to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court — a cynical move to solidify a right-wing majority on the court — was, again by Trump’s own admission, an equally important element in his mind for the projected coup. Should Trump fall short, as current polls show him doing, then his campaign, against the backdrop of civil chaos, would try and throw the election into either the House of Representatives, where the GOP controls the majority of states and thus the outcome, or the courts, where they can expect that, eventually, the Supreme Court, packed with his appointees and other right-wingers, will simply declare Trump the winner. Complicit GOP leaders and officeholders would absolve themselves of responsibility by throwing up their hands and saying the law, then, must be followed, knowing full well the final decision had been politically preordained. The Republican theft of the presidency in 2000 would look like a dry run for the overthrow of American democracy in 2020.
The president’s illness has not put that strategy on hold, only made it more urgent. His wild performance in the first debate — which repelled voters who saw him unfiltered for 90 minutes and was sufficient to double Biden’s lead — only makes Trump more dependent than ever on undemocratic tactics. The situation around the election is so volatile that no projection appears too dire. But when historians look back on the 2020 election, it will be important for them to recognize that Trump’s plot was taking shape before the virus intervened. This is not lurid speculation. An earlier plan, which was exposed, involved smearing Biden, and it provoked Trump’s impeachment. Since then, Trump has developed a conscious and deliberate strategy to discredit and overturn the popular vote in the election and even the Electoral College in order to keep himself in power.
Trump may never have thought he could actually pull this off. If the scheme faltered, he might fall back on using a coup threat as an opening bid in a negotiation for a pardon for all of his federal crimes, as well as his crimes against New York state law. The exposure of his tax returns by The New York Times had shown that he paid virtually no taxes and is a terrible businessman. More important, though, it showed that even if Trump recovers, he may well be in profound legal trouble, along with members of his family, potentially facing charges of bank fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy, and much more. If so, as seems likely, Trump has always known he’s guilty, and he knows that he and Ivanka and Don Jr. and Eric might also end up in prison. When the virus struck, he was already a truly desperate man, facing not simply an election but also his own existential crisis, one just as severe as the one afflicting the nation. From his bed in the Walter Reed Medical Center, even suffering symptoms his chief of staff called “concerning,” Trump was spreading lies and sowing chaos. So, as we hurtle toward Election Day, the question remains: How did we get to this point? How has Donald Trump managed to take the nation to the brink, holding on to power despite his manifest abuses of the public trust?
First, there is his base, which has become a true cult worshipping its Dear Leader, whipped up by an elaborate propaganda apparatus of Fox News, right-wing talk radio, and conspiracy-spouting websites. Fear of that fevered base, inhabiting its own media bubble, and the immense power of unregulated dark money from special interests, has turned whatever is left of the national Republican Party into a subsidiary of Trump Inc., with the Senate GOP majority ceding Trump enormous power as well as a firewall against congressional checks and balances. When talking about the Republicans, though, it’s important not to forget the long-standing party fixtures outside of Congress that have also done their utmost to secure Trump’s power. Of those insider subversives, none has been more essential to protecting, guiding, and sustaining Trump’s regime — and his election plot — than Attorney General William P. Barr.
When Barr replaced the utterly unqualified lunkhead serving as acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, in February 2019, the sigh of relief from Washington’s quarters of conventional wisdom was almost audible. Whitaker’s predecessor, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, had infuriated Trump by recusing himself from investigating possible Russian interference in the 2016 election. Sessions had in turn acquiesced in the appointment of a special counsel, former FBI director Robert Mueller. As soon as the 2018 midterms were done, Trump fired Sessions and appointed Whitaker as his temporary replacement. But eventually Trump picked Barr — and the choice may have appeared to be a nod to the old establishment.
Barr had no apparent ties to Trump, for whom personal loyalty is everything; and he had previously served as President George H.W. Bush’s attorney general. The elder Bush, who had just died, had not only refused to support Trump’s election, but actually voted for Hillary Clinton. So Trump choosing Barr didn’t seem entirely to add up, if you thought of him as a traditional Bush man.
Barr seemed to be what is approvingly called in Washington an institutionalist, meaning in this case the type of conventional GOP operator who privately loathed Trump. What most observers had forgotten is that back in 1992, Barr had helped successfully shut down once and for all the investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal that for a time had threatened to topple Ronald Reagan and to upset George H.W. Bush. Now Barr was about to go to full-scale war in the service of Donald Trump — and his own ideas about America as a degenerate liberal culture in need of a right-wing judiciary and an autocratic president.
Inside of two years, Barr has become the most aggressively political attorney general in American history. Of course, there have been rotten attorneys general before: Richard Nixon’s consigliere, the taciturn John Mitchell, a convicted felon in the Watergate affair; Ronald Reagan’s ethically challenged California buddy Ed Meese, who resigned under a cloud amid the Wedtech scandal. And before them there was Harry Daughtery, Warren G. Harding’s attorney general, boss of the “Ohio Gang,” who was implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal.
Since his appointment, Barr has rushed forward as Trump’s public savior, making havoc of the rule of law he claims to revere and using the full weight of his office to deflect trouble and advance Trump’s political fortunes. Barr deliberately thwarted potential checks and balances on the president’s corruption, inflamed the civil strife on which Trump feeds, and both launched and cooperated with investigations of dedicated public officials for maximum political effect on the eve of the election. If Trump grabs another term, he will have Barr to thank possibly more than anyone. And if that happens, what’s left of the Justice Department as an institution above partisan politics, serving the public trust, will almost certainly and completely collapse. A survey of the damage done so far makes that clear.
Barr’s first outrage was to scuttle the Mueller report. Exploiting his authority under the special-counsel law, Barr held on to the report for a month, preventing the press and the public from reading it, while he and his staff heavily redacted the two volumes of official findings. It was the old strategy of redact-and-delay that Nixon’s men deployed to try squelching the Watergate investigation by hiding the material that proved Nixon’s guilt. The strategy hadn’t worked then, but Barr would make it work now. In defense of Trump, Barr was acting out Nixon’s revenge. He issued a statement effectively exonerating the president before releasing the heavily redacted yet still very damning report a few weeks later. The delaying tactic had its desired effect, and the damaging details of Trump’s extensive attempts to obstruct justice and a clear willingness to play ball with foreign operatives to win an election were muted. If anyone had been able to do for Nixon what Barr did for Trump, Nixon’s crimes would never have been exposed.
Barr has effectively served as Trump’s mouthpiece, repackaging White House talking points with an air of blunt authority, dismissing any and all serious charges against the president as “bogus,” and, in true Trumpian fashion, turning the tables and accusing the accusers of fabricating accusations against Trump and therefore committing crimes against the American people. Not finished after having gotten Trump off the hook for the Mueller report’s findings, Barr has also used the power of the Justice Department to try to eradicate every trace of the president’s Russian scandal.
First up was the case of Michael Flynn, the retired lieutenant general and rabid Trump supporter who Trump tapped to be his national security adviser. In the interim between the election and the inauguration, Flynn had had improper contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, in which they discussed possible relief of sanctions imposed on the Russians by the Obama administration. Exposure of the contacts led Flynn to abruptly resign, and in time he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI twice, a federal crime. But Trump was unrelenting in trying to get Flynn in the clear.
This past May, it looked as if Trump just might have to pardon Flynn, which would have caused political blowback. Barr, though, did the job for him by simply having the Justice Department drop the charges, over the stern objections of a federal judge, who happened to be a Reagan appointee. Another former federal judge, brought in to review the matter, called it “a corrupt and politically motivated favor” that was “unworthy of our justice system.”
Barr’s role in the case of Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime dirty trickster, crony, and connection to Wikileaks — and through that to Russian military hacking operations, according to U.S. intelligence — was even messier. Early in 2020, Barr, goaded by the president, personally intervened to ensure that Stone — convicted of seven felony counts in connection with the 2016 campaign — received little or no jail time. The affair shook the Department of Justice to its core. The entire federal prosecution team on the case quit in protest, and more than 2,000 former department officials called for Barr’s resignation. Reportedly, Barr balked at an outright commutation of Stone’s sentence, but he had set the stage. Trump then commuted Stone’s sentence.
Meanwhile, Barr pushed ahead with continuing efforts to criminalize the intelligence community’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. In May 2019, a month after the release of the blacked-out Mueller report, Barr announced he had appointed U.S. Attorney for Connecticut John Durham as special prosecutor to investigate the FBI’s probe into the Trump-Russia connection. The Durham investigation amounted to putting Trump’s conspiracy theories into action, placing “deep state” villains in the inquiry’s crosshairs. The probe was going to be payback time.
At around the same time as the Flynn and Stone stories were breaking, Barr summarily removed the U.S. attorney for the powerful and famously independent Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman. A Republican, named by Trump to the position on an interim basis in 2018, and a former associate of Trump’s fixer Rudy Giuliani, Berman had proved dangerously professional and unreliable to Trump, beginning with the investigation into and flipping of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney.
The plan was to fire Berman, who Barr had already told aides needed to be reined in, and have Trump’s hand-picked nominee for the post step in right away. Initially, Barr lied to the press, saying that Berman had resigned his post. Speculation about what the rush was all about focused immediately on pending Southern District investigations of Trump’s friends and associates, including the funding of the inaugural committee and financial dealings with the Turkish Halkbank, as well as two close and shady associates of Giuliani in his Ukraine capers indicted for fraud. In the end, Berman put up a fight and, though he finally left his job, his next-in-line, and not Trump’s favorite, took over. The plan was foiled, but Berman was still purged.
The historic events of the late spring and summer opened up new fronts and new opportunities for Trump and his attorney general to begin a great campaign for law and order. After George Floyd was killed on May 25th, mass protests against racial injustice swept the country. Three days later, the death toll in the United States from the Covid-19 pandemic surpassed 100,000, prompting the Centers for Disease Control to redouble its public appeals for social distancing and wearing face masks. At that very moment, Biden’s lead over Trump in national polls, noticeably widened.
Trump’s response to the pandemic was to belittle the science and to encourage resistance to the public-health appeals for masks, social distancing, and lockdowns. Then he sought to distract attention from the pandemic by casting the Black Lives Matter demonstrations as the work of lawless violent radicals and fomenting a Nixon-style “law and order” panic campaign. Third, he tried to throw the entire election into disarray with groundless claims that voting by mail would be subject to massive fraud.
Barr not only followed Trump every step of the way, but often led the way. He set the Justice Department in conflict with public-health officials. In April, as some states began relaxing public-health measures, he directed the nation’s federal prosecutors to look out for any state and local anti-Covid -ordinance that “crosses the line” into alleged infringements of constitutional rights, and to “address that overreach in federal court.” He called proposals for a national lockdown the worst abuse of civil liberties in all of American history, apart from slavery.
There has been no more steadfast peddler of falsehoods about mail-in voting than the attorney general. In September, he declared flatly that “there’s no more secret vote, there’s no secret vote,” with mailed ballots, adding with dark emphasis that “the government and the people involved can find out and know how you voted.” That kind of talk is typical from a barroom loudmouth, not an attorney general of the United States. In fact, there are numerous safeguards to mail-in voting to protect voters’ privacy. Those safeguards are familiar to voters in the several states who have adopted mail-in voting for years. They are of course familiar to the attorney general, who has also voted by mail.
But Barr’s handling of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations was his most daring authoritarian intervention. The battle of Lafayette Square on June 1st will stand in Trump administration history as the most notorious incident, when Barr ordered the forceful clearing of peaceful demonstrators across from the White House, after which he marched with Trump over to St. John’s Church, where the president held aloft a Bible fetched from Ivanka’s purse for a publicity shot. More than 1,250 former Justice Department workers called for an internal investigation of the attorney general. Barr brushed off the criticisms by pointing to Black Lives Matter demonstrations that had turned violent, claiming the crowd had been warned three times to depart, warnings that video showed were inaudible, and that tear gas had not been used on the crowd, which was false.
That infamous display of power fit a larger pattern of incitement on Barr’s part, making a tense situation worse with unnecessary force and inflammatory rhetoric. In Portland, Oregon, for example, where there were unquestionably violent protests that called for arrests, the Justice Department upped the ante by sending in armed, unidentified federal officers to roam the city’s downtown, shoving demonstrators into unmarked cars, police-state style. Later, Barr pressed federal prosecutors to charge demonstrators with sedition, a major crime against the United States rarely if ever mentioned in peacetime.
Barr’s crackdown was intended to distract from Trump’s dismal record confronting the pandemic, all while Trump encouraged menacing bands of armed right-wingers. Trump’s summons to militias began long before his callout to the Proud Boys. “Liberate Michigan,” the president tweeted in all caps in April, when rifle-toting MAGA troops shut down the state’s Legislature over Michigan’s Covid restrictions.
These two words were seditious in the most exact sense, a president instructing armed American citizens to attack their own government. His acts amounted to an assault by the president himself on the Constitution’s clause that guarantees states “a Republican Form of Government,” including against “domestic violence.” And chillingly, they may well have encouraged, if not incited, the right-wing militia plot, now revealed by the FBI, to kidnap Michigan’s governor Gretchen Whitmer, storm the state capitol, and overthrow the state government. (In character, Trump the inflamer reacted to news of the plot by attacking Whitmer as an ingrate who has done “a terrible job” on Covid.) Yet Trump’s April tweet — perhaps the most literally subversive utterance by any president in our history — has proven to be but a forecast of the grander subversion taking place right now.
How, then, did William Barr, the respected conservative lawyer and public servant, come to this abysmal bottom? Like so many Republicans who have come into Trump’s orbit, he has been seduced into loyalty, but that barely scratches the surface of his motives. Barr has not become captive to Trump’s agenda; like other longtime Republicans, Barr has an agenda of his own. Trump uses Barr, just as Barr uses Trump. Barr’s agenda is a very distinct agenda, nothing so crass as merely more tax cuts for the rich, or so mundane as “America First.” It is a vision of the United States as a Christian nation — a certain kind of Christian nation with a certain kind of Christianity.
There have been several strong articles about Barr’s emergence as a right-wing enforcer. One of the best, by Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, reports on Barr’s youth in Manhattan as a boyhood tormentor, described by one schoolmate as a “classic bully,” “power abuser,” and “sadistic kid,” with a special hatred for liberal causes and a “vicious fixation on my little Jewish ‘commie’ ass.” Milbank notes that research shows childhood bullies are likely to become adult bullies, which may help explain not just Barr’s current performance but also his and Trump’s mutual admiration. It may also account for Barr’s deepening adulation for Trump as a “statesmanlike” leader — this with regard to the White House’s raw politicized handling of the pandemic — coupled with his accusations that Trump’s critics have launched a “jihad” against him, equating political opponents to Islamic terrorists. Through Barr, Trump gets the kind of competent legal muscle that Giuliani never could give him, while Barr gets to be the all-important henchman, operating as the power behind the throne.
But Barr has ideas as well as a temperament, described recently in The Atlantic by Donald Ayer, a former U.S. attorney under George H.W. Bush. After closely examining the attorney general’s 30-year paper trail, Ayer finds that Barr holds two primary propositions to be at the heart of everything. The first is that the founders established the United States as a religious and more specifically Christian nation, dedicated to, in Barr’s words, “a transcendent moral order with objective standards of right and wrong,” divulged by God through his church. The second is that contrary to what Barr calls the “civics-class version” of the Constitution, the founders, by resolving in favor of a single executive officer, invested the president with extremely broad authority.
According to Barr, “Judeo-Christian” government prevailed in this country until the tumult of the 1960s — which to Barr amounted to a wave of soul-destroying licentiousness — when, allied with unremitting attacks on sacrosanct presidential power, the immoral left began toppling the founders’ design. The enemy — a militant secularism, rooted not in the word of God but in the humanism of the Renaissance and the rationalism of the Enlightenment — has unleashed moral chaos. Simultaneously, Barr writes, “a steady grinding down of the executive branch’s authority, that accelerated after Watergate” has reduced the presidency to a wisp of what the founders envisaged. Trump — the candidate who paid hush money to a porn star — may not be a perfect vessel, but he stands strong against the immoralists, the Democrats, who Barr says want to create a “progressive utopia” stripped of God’s blessings. For Barr this nightmare scenario must be stopped at all costs.
To a historian, a lot of this is crackpot stuff. The founders, although for the most part self-designated Christians, were devotees of precisely the secular rationalism and humanism that Barr calls the root of all evil. Although some were likely to invoke God’s grace and even speak in providential terms, this had nothing to do with founding a Christian nation. Had they wanted that, they wouldn’t have framed and ratified a godless Constitution. Likewise, Barr’s account of the presidency is perfectly wrong: Far from a powerful and omnipotent presidency falling into ruin in the 1960s, the presidency, with a few major exceptions like Abraham Lincoln, was fairly weak until Theodore Roosevelt took the job, and the greatest expansion of presidential authority came not with the founding but in the 20th and 21st centuries and the advent of the imperial presidency.
Whatever Barr is driving at has little or nothing to do with what the American Revolution established, nor with any kind of government this nation has ever known. It more closely resembles a theocracy, overseen by a president who more closely resembles an elected monarch. Trump, for his part, would prefer a kind of Putin-like kleptocracy. Barr’s vision, if you can call it that, is an Americanized version of something more akin to Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s Spain. This is a counterrevolutionary doctrine and it is now in command of the Department of Justice, aiming for much, much more power. Its first order of business is to return Donald Trump to the White House by any means necessary.
After Trump fell ill, Barr, who himself is quarantining as of press time, continued the plot to cast doubt on the popular vote, to hype the bogus Durham investigation, and to proclaim the election one between orderly Americanism and the massive threat of Antifa anarchy. This is Barr’s last chance to shape an authoritarian presidency, a federal bench and Supreme Court that will be a right-wing conservative bastion for a generation to come, and a very different country.
Trump and Barr have made the election into a test of democracy. If the United States is to survive as it has existed since 1787, Trump must not simply be defeated, but repudiated. There can be no forgiveness in the name of some fanciful national unity for all the criminal carnage that Trump has done, before as well as during his presidency. Failure to attack the roots of a far greater seditious threat more than a century and a half ago, in the form of the Confederate States of America, has led directly to our current traumas, allowing a bacillus of racism and authoritarianism to survive, mutate, and reinfect our politics. That bacillus is now virulent as Trumpism.
Trump and his accomplices have not merely betrayed American principles. Some of our previous presidents and political leaders have done that. But Trump, with his threats and his rhetoric, his self-dealing and his contempt for the rule of law, has crossed a very dangerous line. Should the American majority prevail, and should he survive, Trump must be held to full account at the bar of history as well as the bar of justice. Should the majority fail, the American experiment in free government will be so badly damaged as to be unrecognizable.
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