Hold On to Your Democracy

Every day is a new shock or an aftershock from a day before. The center of our attention now has to lie with voting.

The big threat today is Trump's attack on the US Postal Service. Recent decisions by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a huge Trump donor, have slowed down deliveries, leading to a backlog. Alarm bells are going off, alerting us to the threat that Trump may be undermining mail-in voting in an attempt to skew election results. During a pandemic, no less.

There's a context for this fear. Trump is doing everything he can to undermine the legitimacy of the election.

A little over a week ago Donald Trump started the shenanigans by threatening not to honor the election results "if" he loses. Asked by Congress, Attorney General William Barr offered no assurances to the contrary--he'll leave office "if the results are clear"--and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held Trump's back as well. 

Then Trump tweeted the suggestion that we might postpone the election due to the coronavirus. Some commentators maintain we shouldn't be anxious, since the Constitution doesn't allow Trump to make that call. I'm not so sure. Congressional Republicans generally haven't stood up to Trump on such matters, and his action could undermine the election's credibility. Remarkably, Steven Calabrisi, co-founder of the Federalist Society, spoke out to declare Trump's tweet both fascistic and impeachable. Those were his words. 

We need to be vigilant about voting. The White House is laughing about it. Today Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany condemned the Hong Kong government for delaying their election. One day after Trump threatened our own election.

Making things worse, the DHS indicates foreign enemies could "mislead" the public based on unproven claims of voter fraud--like those promoted by Trump and Barr. (Just seen on CNN.)

On the horizon: Vanity Fair has a big story on the vanishing of Jared Kushner's big push to promote a national testing plan. The big stink: the White House decided the pandemic was a blue state problem. According to one source, 

The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.

We already knew Trump was letting blue state folks die because he said out loud that he wouldn't fulfill requests from blue state governors. Maybe some die-hard Trumpsters won't care, but most Americans won't stand for a government that chooses who lives and dies according to voting patterns. 

We'll see. The CDC says we're gonna lose 30,000 more Americans in the next 3 weeks. 

A Racist Fog

You know what happened yesterday? The COVID Tracking Project reported that coronavirus cases may be flattening again, but: 

Once again, the state data on current COVID-19 hospitalizations is unstable. CA, SC, and TX have all posted notices stating their hosp. data is incomplete because of the HHS changeover. We’ve maintained the freeze on their hospitalization data again. More on that tomorrow.

In other words, the Trump administration's determination to shift data from the CDC to the Department of Health and Human Services is doing just what we feared: making it harder to understand the full scope of the pandemic's devastation. 

The official death count is nearing 150,000. We know there are more, simply because we have what they call "excess deaths" on the books. 

And since Donald Trump's poll numbers are down, he needs distractions. One of his go-to distractions is race. 

Sure enough, Trump indicated he won't show up in person to pay his respects to the deceased Member of Congress and civil rights hero John Lewis. Possible explanations abound, including that Lewis was a vocal critic of Trump, but one sure effect of the decision is to signal to his racist followers that Trump just doesn't give a flip about Lewis.

But that's petty stuff for Trump. His new line is that he's gonna protect the suburbs from "those people." By all accounts the United States would be better off if we distributed affordable housing more broadly. I won't go into it. But Trump?

That's right. "Those people" are a threat. You'll be "bothered." You'd have "crime." And by the way, the AFFH is not an Obama rule. It goes back to 1968.

Prominent Trumpians couldn't wait to pile on to the racism distraction wagon. Senator Tom Cotton described American slavery as a "necessary evil." And Trump evangelical Eric Metaxas, who sure enough knows better, tweeted that Jesus was white--and therefore white supremacy can't be a problem.

It's easy to pass off Trumpism as a clown show. Jealous that the Washington Nationals invited Dr. Anthony Fauci to toss the Opening Day first pitch, Trump announced that he'd had to decline the Yankees offer to do the same.

(Remember, Trump was roundly booed when he showed up for a Washington game last year.) 

Trump had not been invited. He is scheduled to throw the first pitch at a game in August.

So you might be tempted to write all off as tomfoolery. But remember: Tom Cotton went to Harvard. Eric Metaxas went to Yale. And there's a totalitarian playbook about how to help your guy. They make mistakes, but when you see coordinating messages, guess what? 

They're coordinating messages.