Saturday, July 4, 2020
Friday, July 3, 2020
Wednesday, July 1, 2020
Tuesday, June 30, 2020
Monday, June 29, 2020
Trump May Lose- Lets Help Him
David Dayen. the American Prospect
Plenty of leaders have failed during the pandemic. But I think we can agree that a president has more agency than anyone else in moments of national crisis. From the very beginning, Trump tried to push off that responsibility to the states, because of his aversion to being blamed for anything. But responsible he is, in numerous ways.
Trump’s CDC so botched testing that hundreds of thousands of Americans were infected before we had the information. He’s admitted to deliberately slowing testing at key points to make the numbers look better. He actively cheered reopening way too soon and offered no federal support for states to prepare. The FEMA program of commandeering and shuffling personal protective equipment was the work of a criminal gang. His attitude toward the virus was to dismiss its grave implications, even now amid the unending first wave. His campaign manager is in quarantine, and advance staffers have contracted the disease; his approach is crumbling around him. And the continual pronouncements of the great job he’s doing, amid 125,000 deaths and untold long-term damage to people’s lungs and their livelihoods, recalls Nero and the fiddle.
Americans habitually reject incompetence in their leaders. Before being feted as a kindly painter, George W. Bush was the most loathed man in the country, because he got us bogged down in a war based on lies, let an American city drown, and presided over a crushing financial crisis. He was bad at his job, in public. Herbert Hoover was bad at his job as millions suffered during a presidency shaped by the Depression. The nation rejected them. They’re in the process of rejecting Trump.
There’s a way for a hypothetical president to succeed in the next four months and eke out re-election: universal masking, massive support for testing and army field hospitals and contact tracing where needed, a wide-open money spigot to individuals financially affected. It’s actually a pretty simple formula.
Trump won’t do it. He’s taken the position that everything’s fine, and thinks that moving off that would show weakness. And even if he wanted to do what might seem simple for a replacement-level president, he’s so far below that standard as to make such steps impossible. This is why he should, actually, resign, as Chris Hayes called for yesterday. Instead we’ll have to settle for him being snubbed at the polls in four months.
Trump’s entire political career has been built on hucksterism and grievance. You can fool people with hucksterism for a long time, but not once slapped by reality. Then the sheen wears off. BSing his way through served Trump well in business, which we’re discovering is much more forgiving than government. But you can only whine for so long, as Biden noted yesterday, before it becomes pathetic. Trump can’t figure out how to attack the coronavirus, and without doing that work he cannot attack Biden. He knows he’s going to lose (Biden “is going to be president because some people don’t love me, maybe,” Trump said to Sean Hannity on Friday), because he’s incapable of the governing that would prevent it.
This is the important point. A president has to be president, not just play one on TV. They cannot just express competence, but actually succeed. The difficult truth is that Trump is carrying on a tradition. We’ve done very little to arrest our long-term crises for several decades. The next president needs to actually deal with them. FDR’s descendants wrote an open letter to Biden, urging outsized ambition to fill in the existing cracks exposed by this crisis. Passivity—at income and wealth inequality, at unequal treatment, at structural racism, at a raging pandemic but also the everyday failures we faced before—will only lead to disapproval and decline.
So when Biden wins, he needs to salve the festering wound that is American government, or we’ll get another in a series of wave elections that haven’t really ended since 2006. Trump’s humiliating defeat sets the course for Biden’s presidency: tangibly govern.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/opinion/trump-coronavirus.html?
Plenty of leaders have failed during the pandemic. But I think we can agree that a president has more agency than anyone else in moments of national crisis. From the very beginning, Trump tried to push off that responsibility to the states, because of his aversion to being blamed for anything. But responsible he is, in numerous ways.
Trump’s CDC so botched testing that hundreds of thousands of Americans were infected before we had the information. He’s admitted to deliberately slowing testing at key points to make the numbers look better. He actively cheered reopening way too soon and offered no federal support for states to prepare. The FEMA program of commandeering and shuffling personal protective equipment was the work of a criminal gang. His attitude toward the virus was to dismiss its grave implications, even now amid the unending first wave. His campaign manager is in quarantine, and advance staffers have contracted the disease; his approach is crumbling around him. And the continual pronouncements of the great job he’s doing, amid 125,000 deaths and untold long-term damage to people’s lungs and their livelihoods, recalls Nero and the fiddle.
Americans habitually reject incompetence in their leaders. Before being feted as a kindly painter, George W. Bush was the most loathed man in the country, because he got us bogged down in a war based on lies, let an American city drown, and presided over a crushing financial crisis. He was bad at his job, in public. Herbert Hoover was bad at his job as millions suffered during a presidency shaped by the Depression. The nation rejected them. They’re in the process of rejecting Trump.
There’s a way for a hypothetical president to succeed in the next four months and eke out re-election: universal masking, massive support for testing and army field hospitals and contact tracing where needed, a wide-open money spigot to individuals financially affected. It’s actually a pretty simple formula.
Trump won’t do it. He’s taken the position that everything’s fine, and thinks that moving off that would show weakness. And even if he wanted to do what might seem simple for a replacement-level president, he’s so far below that standard as to make such steps impossible. This is why he should, actually, resign, as Chris Hayes called for yesterday. Instead we’ll have to settle for him being snubbed at the polls in four months.
Trump’s entire political career has been built on hucksterism and grievance. You can fool people with hucksterism for a long time, but not once slapped by reality. Then the sheen wears off. BSing his way through served Trump well in business, which we’re discovering is much more forgiving than government. But you can only whine for so long, as Biden noted yesterday, before it becomes pathetic. Trump can’t figure out how to attack the coronavirus, and without doing that work he cannot attack Biden. He knows he’s going to lose (Biden “is going to be president because some people don’t love me, maybe,” Trump said to Sean Hannity on Friday), because he’s incapable of the governing that would prevent it.
This is the important point. A president has to be president, not just play one on TV. They cannot just express competence, but actually succeed. The difficult truth is that Trump is carrying on a tradition. We’ve done very little to arrest our long-term crises for several decades. The next president needs to actually deal with them. FDR’s descendants wrote an open letter to Biden, urging outsized ambition to fill in the existing cracks exposed by this crisis. Passivity—at income and wealth inequality, at unequal treatment, at structural racism, at a raging pandemic but also the everyday failures we faced before—will only lead to disapproval and decline.
So when Biden wins, he needs to salve the festering wound that is American government, or we’ll get another in a series of wave elections that haven’t really ended since 2006. Trump’s humiliating defeat sets the course for Biden’s presidency: tangibly govern.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/opinion/trump-coronavirus.html?
Thursday, June 25, 2020
The Revolt of the Cities—Again.
The Revolt of the Cities—Again.: New York’s primaries confirm a major new reality of American politics: Our cities are turning overwhelmingly left.
Saturday, June 20, 2020
"Rise" | June 20th Poor People's Campaign Promo
Friday, June 19, 2020
Trump Rally 2020
In the United States, where the world’s largest known outbreak has infected more than 2.2 million people, several states repeatedly set record daily highs for new cases.
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
Defend DACA And All Undocumented
antiracismdsa: Defend DACA And All Undocumented: Editor’s Note: On Monday morning, Latino Rebels received the following open letter for publication. It has since been published on Me...
Sunday, June 14, 2020
Defund, Dismantel, Sacramento County Jail system
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Saturday, June 13, 2020
Tuesday, June 9, 2020
The Civil War Never Ended !
The Civil War That Never Ended. Today, in a superb column, my colleague Bob Kuttner writes of how our nation has descended into a kind of civil war, whose front lines are those of the protesters confronting the police. In its current form, this conflict has been building ever since the Republicans became the party of the white South, in a historic switch inaugurated by Barry Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and his nomination later that year as the Republicans’ candidate for president.
In the Prospect’s pages, I’ve been comparing our condition to the Civil War for quite some time—finding similarities to the Confederacy in the Republicans’ current war on black voting; noting the echoes of the antebellum South’s drive to extend slavery into the free states in the spread of right-to-work laws from Southern states to Northern ones—Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana—when they fell under Republican rule during the past decade; and equating the efforts of city and state governments under Democratic control to create sanctuaries where undocumented immigrants could be safe from ICE arrests to the efforts of Northern cities to hinder the seizure of former slaves and free blacks by Southern “slave hunters” under the Fugitive Slave Act.
Now, the video showing Minneapolis cops murdering George Floyd seems to have had a political effect somewhat akin to the South’s unprompted attack on Fort Sumter, which enraged the North and propelled the nation into open civil war. What united the North was not only an immediate sense of outrage, but also a sense that by the nation’s breaking apart, the very idea of a democracy would be threatened (that’s pretty much what Lincoln said at Gettysburg). Also uniting the North was a long-simmering anger at the South’s dominance of the federal government and its policies—a belief held even by many white Northerners not yet committed to emancipation.
Today, rather than seeing the murder of George Floyd as some outrageous one-off, the vast majority of Americans see it as a continuation of a national pattern of racist and brutal policing. A number of polls, including one in today’s Washington Post, reveal a public that has clearly been moved—even mobilized—to actions that curtail racist practices. According to the Post, 69 percent of the public see the murder as part of a broader pattern, 74 percent support the protests, while just 10 percent blame the protesters for the violence that occurred in the protests’ wake (14 percent blamed the police, 66 percent blamed “other people acting irresponsibly”). Fully 61 percent disapprove of Trump’s response to the protests, while just 35 percent approve it—a figure that reveals even some cracks in the Republican base.
So add to my friend Bob’s observation that we’re engaged in another civil war one further observation: As in 1861 (and 1865), a clear majority of Americans are with us. Today, they view Trump and Trumpism, as 1861 Americans viewed secession, as a threat to democracy itself. Today, a majority favors ending Trumpian and Republican (which is to say, white Southern) rule, as 1861 Americans favored an end to the slaveocrats’ control of the government.
To which all I can add is: To the barricades—not just the streets, but the voting booths (well, voting booths by mail) come November!
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
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