America Held Hostage, continued — As Mitch McConnell begrudgingly acknowledges that yeah, maybe there ought to be another pandemic relief bill, he and Trump declare what they will demand of us in exchange for letting us live.

One, Trump wants to block any funds for testing and contact tracing.

Last night, Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum filed a lawsuit in federal court against “the United States Department of Homeland Security, the United States Marshals Service, the United States Customs and Border Protection, the Federal Protection Service and their agents alleging they have engaged in unlawful law enforcement in violation of the civil rights of Oregonians by seizing and detaining them without probable cause,” it says here.

Seriously, this isn’t right.

Protests against systemic racism and police brutality have been a nightly feature in deeply liberal Portland since Minneapolis police killed George Floyd on May 25. President Donald Trump has decried the disorder and Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf blasted the protesters as “lawless anarchists” in a visit to the city, helping make the clashes between police and demonstrators a national focus.

The administration has enlisted federal agents, including the U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group and an elite U.S. Customs and Border Protection team based on the U.S.-Mexico border, to protect federal property. But Oregon Public Broadcasting reported this week that some agents had been driving around in unmarked vans and snatching protesters from streets not near federal property, without identifying themselves.

The Governor Kate Brown of Oregon and the ACLU have denounced the presence of whatever sort of federal law enforcement officers/troops/thugs have been pulling people off the streets in Portland without identifying themselves or giving a reason.

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler has demanded that Trump “Keep your troops in your own buildings, or have them leave our city.” Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf was in Portland yesterday to meet with the troops, during which time he also met with the head of Portland’s police union but not the mayor or other elected officials.

Now, if this strikes you as a tad unconstitutional, I agree. I direct your attention to a long article at Lawfare by Steve Vladeck, What the Heck Are Federal Law Enforcement Officers Doing in Portland?

By all appearances, there are now at least 100 federal law enforcement officers on the ground in Portland. But media reports suggest that many of those officers (a) are not wearing identifiable uniforms or other insignia, (b) are not driving marked law enforcement vehicles, and (c) are not identifying themselves either publicly or even to those whom they have detained and arrested.

Vladeck goes on to say that these officers, dressed in military-type camoflage, appear to be Customs and Border Protection officers. Can they lawfully operate in Portland without permission from city and state authorities? It’s worth reading this article all the way through; here I’m just going to call out the major points.

* Since Oregon is on the Pacific Ocean — although Portland is about 360 miles inland — it can be argued that Oregon is a “border.”

* Many of the protests have gone on around federal courthouses, and federal law enforcement officers are allowed to protect federal courthouses. They have some latitude to detain and arrest people on federal property. Warrantless arrests still require probable cause.

* However, it appears this operation is being run by the Department of Homeland Security and not the Department of Justice. Protecting federal courthouses would usually be the responsibility of the Department of Justice.

* Also, too, it’s not clear what federal laws are being enforced.

* Under Oregon law federal law enforcement officers may detain and arrest people not on federal property if the officers observe a person violating federal or state law. If we’re talking state law the feds may make an arrest if the officers have also received state training, which they probably haven’t. Also, if the arrest is for violating state law, the officers are required to immediately take the person to state law enforcement authorities.

* Under federal law there is no requirement for federal law enforcement officers to identify themselves. However, Oregon law requires them to identify themselves and state reasons for making arrests.

* The federal officers have been seen patrolling the streets of Portland in unmarked vehicles, which appears to be a violation of all of the above. They’ve also arrested people just walking down streets (see video above) that don’t appear to be federal property.

* There are a great many unanswered questions about what the feds are doing in Portland, and the federal government is not volunteering answers. Further, it’s going to be just about impossible to compel the feds to cough up those answers anytime soon.

Here’s another perspective, from the New York Times:

After President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to send personnel to protect monuments, statues and federal property during continuing protests against racism and police brutality, the Department of Homeland Security formed “rapid deployment teams.” Those are made up of officers from Customs and Border Protection, the Transportation Security Administration, the Coast Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement who back up the Federal Protective Service, which is already responsible for protecting federal property.

Videos showing federal agents using tear gas on protesters and complaints that federal agents lacking insignia are pulling people from the streets have raised questions over the legal authority that homeland security officials have to crack down on citizens. In Portland, federal agents have acted against the expressed opposition of the local authorities.

But officials in Washington said they had clear authority. Customs and Border Protection, which sent tactical border agents to Portland, cited 40 U.S. Code 1315, which under the Homeland Security Act of 2002 gives the department’s secretary the power to deputize other federal agents to assist the Federal Protective Service in protecting federal property, such as the courthouse in Portland.

We’re seeing that all the police powers awarded to the feds after the 9/11 attacks are now being used against U.S. citizens excercising constitutional rights, as many predicted would happen at the time.

Those agents can carry firearms, arrest those accused of committing a crime without a warrant and conduct investigations “on and off the property in question.”

“An interpretation of that authority so broadly seems to undermine all the other careful checks and balances on D.H.S.’s power because the officers’ power is effectively limitless and all encompassing,” said Garrett Graff, a historian who studies the Department of Homeland Security’s history and development.

This goes on to say that detaining protesters not on federal property is a gray area. In times past, the feds would only have gone in at the request of state and local government to assist local law enforcement. Here, state and local authorities are demanding the feds withdraw.

But the lack of any consent from local officials just means federal agents cannot rely on state and local laws to justify the arrests. Federal agents can still detain the demonstrators away from federal property if they can assert probable cause that a federal crime was violated, according to Peter Vincent, a former top lawyer with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has also sent agents to cities across the United States.

“Homeland security’s authorities are so extraordinarily broad that they can find federal laws that they are authorized to enforce across the spectrum, so long as it has some national security, public safety, human trafficking, criminal street gang conspiracy,” Mr. Vincent said.

Again, we’re seeing that powers given the feds to protect us from al Qaeda are now being turned on Americans exercising their First Amendment rights so that Donald Trump can brag about law and order. Or worse.

Charles Pierce:

Why in the hell is this not a bigger story? A major American city is being softly Pinochet’ed in broad daylight. And, if we know one thing, if this president* and his administration* get away with this, it will only get worse. You’d have to be out of your mind—or comatose since the Fall of 2016—not to suspect that this could be a dry run for the kind of general urban mobilization at which the president* has been hinting since this summer’s protests began.

The violence in the Portland protests has consisted mostly of graffiti on federal buildings. “Two more dirty words on the side of a building, and Wolf might be calling in air strikes,” Pierce says.

Portland may be a dumbshow for dummies, but it also looks like a dress rehearsal. This is not an “authoritarian impulse.” This is authoritarian government—straight, no chaser. And this administration has a powerful thirst for it. It will do anything if it thinks it can get away with it in order to benefit a president* who wants to bring the Republic down on his head.

Trump’s twitter feed in recent days has consisted mostly of accusing Joe Biden of wanting to defund the police, which is a bogus charge. I take it he’s determined to make clamping down on the BLM demonstrations the centerpiece of his re-election campaign. So this is going to get worse.

The conscience of the Congress.

Last night I got a bit tired of hearing all the gee-whiz announcements that Trump used the N word. His niece Mary told that to Rachel Maddow, which was to me the least interesting part of the interview on Maddow’s show last night. Of course he did. The man’s a stone cold racist. Tell us something we don’t know already.

In fact, I don’t recall that Mary T. said anything I didn’t at least suspect, but here is what I found most critical for our understanding of the present moment —

One, according to his neice, back in the day when Trump was allegedly flying high as a big-deal real estate tycoon and casino executive, he didn’t appear to do any actual work. Trump had asked Mary to ghost write a book for him, and she spent several weeks at his office and traveled with him a bit, during which time he told her absolutely nothing useful for his book. He spent his days gossiping on the phone, giving interviews about his social life, and reading newspaper clippings about himself. The people around him were working to keep his businesses going, but Trump appeared to just spend time doing whatever he felt like doing in the moment. In the book, she wrote, “after all of the time I had spent in his office, I still had no idea what he actually did.”

This corroborates my suspicion that one reason Trump hasn’t done, and still isn’t doing, anything to address the pandemic in the U.S. is that he is incapable of disciplining and organizing himself to do anything. He doesn’t know how to do anything. He decides what he wants to happen, and he orders that it be done, but if he had to do anything himself he’d be lost. He’s never actually held a job, remember.

See also “Trump Doesn’t Do Plans” and “The Push to Reopen Schools: Trump in a Microcosm.”

We all know Trump is a liar. But if anything was a revelation, it’s Mary’s description of Trump’s lying as a source of pleasure and as a way to gain power over people. He lies incessantly because he enjoys it and because few people have ever corrected him.

Mary T writes in her book that in the Trump family, lying is a standard coping mechanism. Lying was how they related to each other as children, especially to the sociopathic paterfamilias, Fred Trump Sr. Lying was how they dealt with stressful situations, especially Fred Trump’s wrath. Lying was how they defined themselves. From the book: “For some of the Trump kids, lying was a way of life. … For Donald, lying was primarily a mode of self-aggrandizement meant to convince other people he was better than he actually was.” From an early age, lying was Donald Trump’s primary mode of relating to the world. At this point he’s probably beyond comprehending the difference between lies and the truth. Wrapping himself in lies may be a weird way of protecting, re-affirming, and comforting himself.

Another significant moment in the interview was this:

“I want people to understand what a failure of leadership this is, and the reason he’s failing at it is because he’s incapable of succeeding at it,” Mary Trump said. “It would have required taking responsibility – which would, in his mind, have meant admitting a mistake, which, in his mind, would be admitting weakness, which in my family was essentially punished with the death penalty, symbolic or otherwise. What I think we need to grapple with now is why so many people are continuing to allow this.”

Greg Sargent:

It’s also clear in retrospect that when Trump declared in March that “I don’t take responsibility at all” for the epic failure to mobilize testing, it was a seminal moment, a declaration that he would not do this at any point henceforth, no matter what.

Mary Trump helps us understand why: Taking responsibility — undergoing a major course correction — would have constituted an unthinkable admission of failure.

In short, Trump is a walking collection of character and personality flaws, or whatever you want to call ’em — maladjustments, disorders, pathologies. He is incapable of doing anything normal, including normal human relationships. He can’t organize and discipline himself to carry out complex tasks. He doesn’t process information in a normal manner. He is pathologically dishonest. He is incapable of responding normally to basic life challenges, never mind the job he’s got now. And he’s not going to change. If it weren’t for the fact that he was protected by his father and boatloads of money, he wouldn’t have been able to manage an ordinary life or hold any sort of job for very long.

What should alarm us is not so much that Trump is utterly screwed up. It’s that our political system is utterly screwed up. He should never have gotten near a presidential nomination. I believe that in earlier times party leaders would have recognized how unsuitable he was and made sure he was eliminated from the competition, somehow. But that didn’t happen. Once nominated, he shouldn’t have been elected. I blame news media for a lot of that, and the Democratic party also. And once elected, and once it was obvious Trump is incapable of doing the job, he should have been removed from office via a 25th Amendment process. The fact that the system is so broken that we are still stuck with Trump is the real issue here.

The short answer to the question above is power, but power for what? to do what? on behalf of what? I’m starting to think that Republicans themselves don’t know any more. They’re running on reflex.

Their core policies now boil down to —

• Whatever benefits the rich and big corporations, especially tax cuts and deregulation.
• Screwing the middle class and the poor, because somebody’s got to pay for those tax cuts for the rich.
• Whatever Christian nationalists/extremists want — criminalizing abortion; license to discriminate against people who are Not Them, especially the LGBQT folks; tax benefits for their parochial schools.
• Supporting the government of Israel, right or wrong. This is partly to appeal to Christian dispensationalists who believe something about the nation of Israel is going to bring about the Apocalypse any time now. There may also be some hazy thinking that supporting Israel may win them the Jewish vote, even though it hasn’t worked so far. And there is lingering pro-Israeli sentiment left over from the time we were standing with Israel as a pro-western ally against a mostly hostile Middle East. But see the paragraph below about foreign policy.
• Whatever the NRA wants.
• Whatever appeals to racism and xenophobia, including demonizing immigrants and nonwhites, and keeping women in their place.

Republicans used to be big on foreign policy, especially “tough” foreign policy designed to spread American hegemony to alien places. But their foreign policy messages are so muddled now I get a sense they’ve given up on it, other than occasional bleating about getting tough on China. They’ve gone silent on perpetual war in the Middle East. Until as recently as last year they were trying to tie Mexican immigrants showing up at the border to ISIS and al Qaeda, but that was bogus, and I haven’t heard them go on about that lately. Russia is now their friend, and they are agraid to speak ill against Putin. They aren’t even sure what to say about Kim Jong Un.

I can’t think of anything else.

And the point is, how does this add up to anything approximating a political or governing philosophy? What is the underlying belief system tying these things together? Some might say “small government,” but the “small government” talking point was always just a scam to persuade middle- and working-class Americans not to expect government to do anything for them. Government can be plenty big enough when Republicans need it for something, like starting a pointless war somewhere or using government powers to deny reproductive rights to women.

Basically, the bulleted items above amount to strategies to appeal to random constituencies so that Republicans can get lots of campagin donations and votes. And maybe it really is just about appealing to the wealthy so that they can cash in themselves, politically and personally. That’s the only explanation that makes sense, frankly. But maybe there’s something else.

I admit that if we apply the same test to Democrats in recent years, the results are even murkier. The growing frustration many of us have had with the Democrats, even as we continued to vote for them, is that the party didn’t seem to stand for anything in particular. They have been more commited to civil liberties than Republicans, but that didn’t translate into consistent support for all freedoms for all people across the board. Most of the time they have been more committed to “safety net” programs than Republicans, but that didn’t mean doing everything possible to enable upward mobility for the poor or to prop up the sagging middle class. It just meant keeping Republicans from scuttling those programs altogether.

For the most part, since the 1980s the Dems have been trying to walk a middle way between what was left of FDR’s Democratic liberalism and Reaganism, and not being especially effective at either. By the time Hillary Clinton ran in 2016 the party faithful were conditioned to believe that ineffective tweaks, halfway measures, and baby steps that never arrive anywhere were just what the country needed, but as you’ll recall that didn’t turn out well.

But today I’m seeing a lot of musing from conservatives, who are admitting they’ve taken a wrong turn, somewhere. For example, at The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum compares her circle of conservative friends from the 1990s to what they are now. After dropping some names — Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz, Roger Kimball, Dinesh D’Souza, David Brooks, Laura Ingraham — she recalls the long-ago days of Reaganite sunny optimism just after the Soviet Union had fallen.

What really held that group together—and what drew me to it as well—was a kind of post–Cold War optimism, a belief that “we had won,” that the democratic revolution would now continue, that more good things would follow the collapse of the Soviet Union. This wasn’t the nostalgic conservatism of the English, or the hard-right nationalism found elsewhere in Europe; this was something more buoyant, more American—an optimistic conservatism that wasn’t backward-looking at all. Although there were darker versions, at its best it was energetic, reformist, and generous, predicated on faith in the United States, a belief in the greatness of American democracy, and an ambition to share that democracy with the rest of the world.

This was always bullshit, of course. Reagan’s “sunny optimism” was a thin veneer of nice over a lot of nasty, especially to African Americans and gays, and I see that Applebaum still isn’t ready to admit that. But let’s go on.

“Reaganite optimism slowly hardened into something better described as a form of apocalyptic pessimism,” Applebaum writes. She is writing in particular about Laura Ingraham, but this could apply to the party that nominated, elected, and protects Donald Trump. The only real difference between that “Reaganite optimism” and “apocalyptic pessimism” is that it’s finally dawning on the Right that they will lose the culture wars, and that their vision of a nation permanently dominated by white, culturally conservative Christians is being overrun by a new vision of diversity. In their guts, they know they’re losing. And that’s what’s pushing them into extremes.

And now the Republican faithful seem divided between those who are prepared to ride Trumpism into oblivion and those who are desperately trying to halt the Trump train while there might be something of Republicanism left to save. This explains the Lincoln Project. We might cheer their work and their spot-on ads, but we must not forget that this same crew was deeply complicit in building the Trump train and setting it on its current course, even if Trump isn’t what they intended. Charles Pierce:

… it should never be forgotten that many of these sharpies honed their skills in the Atwater-Rove era of Republican politics, and that during that time, the Republican Party sold its soul and lost its mind, I think irretrievably.

Cruelty, racism, sexism, xenophobia and homophobia became the essential raw materials out of which many of these folks molded candidacies. A toxic form of masculinity invaded the party’s personality. It was these campaigns that softened the ground for the march of this president* into the White House. If that were not the case—if, say, President Jeb Bush were running for re-election this time around—these deadly commercials would be aimed squarely at Joe Biden’s shining forehead. That should never be forgotten as we get closer to the election. Max Cleland is available for corroboration.  …

Pierce goes on to say that this crew will have a lot of soul-searching to do on the morning after election day. “There’s a lot of soul-searching to do when you first have to search for your souls,” says Pierce.

Even Jonah Goldberg, who never struck me as an introspective type, is gloomily admitting that the Republican Party now belongs to Roger Stone. The Republican Party has been taken over by hypocrisy and cynicism, Goldberg laments. Do tell.

Of course, whatever happens in November, most of the institutional infrastructure that has kept the Right propped up — the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, Fox News — will still be in place with their same old agenda, whatever that is. I believe the one principle that they still probably hold in common is that Austrian school economics is next to godliness, so they will still be fighting progressive reform.

But the challenge to them is going to have to be, how will they sell perpetual austerity (except for the already wealthy) to voters without resorting to culture war dog whistles to keep the peasants in a state of being pissed off at liberals and minorities? Because if Trump goes down hard in November, this should signal that’s not a well they can draw from any more if they want to win elections.

At Washington Monthly, Ed Kilgore asks, What Motivates the Republican Party? It’s a good article, and I recommend reading it all. Kilgore documents clearly that the cynicism and hypocrisy that Jonah Goldberg wails about have been central to how the Republicans have operated for years. IOKIYAR, peeps.

Kilgore argues that what it really comes down to is this:

Over the last several decades, the Republican Party has been conquered by the Christian right and the overwhelmingly white Tea Party movement. The former has a theocratic vision for America. The latter militantly opposes economic redistribution. These movements converged with a realization that demographic trends were unfriendly to their party’s older base, generating a white identity politics that found its natural expression in the intensely divisive and intermittently racist stylings of Trump.

With Trump, the neoconservatives with their dreams of global American dominance were frozen out of this picture in favor of a new version of isolationism. And, of course, the few old-school Republicans left were frozen out some time back because today’s Republican party has no interest in governing at all, other than to create policies to pander to their favored interest groups (see bulleted list, above).

Referencing Steve Benen’s new book The Imposters, which I have not read, Kilgore continues,

Consider, for example, the party’s embrace of devious voter suppression and gerrymandering. Benen treats these as a by-product of Republican opportunism. But for a party existentially committed to restoring (or preserving) white, Christian supremacy in the face of increasing diversity, they are a direct means of delivering that dominance. Similarly, the determination of Republicans to resist any hint of gun regulation, despite public opinion (which The Imposters documents thoroughly), isn’t just a matter of gun lobby campaign contributions. Instead, it comes from a genuine belief among grassroots conservatives that armed struggle against what Trump calls “radical Democrat elites” must remain an option if conventional politics fails.

Arguably the root problem with the GOP, then, isn’t extreme partisanship or a lazy dependence on lobbyists or a taste for fact-free demagoguery. It is the belief that a virtual civil war is necessary to impose Red America’s will on Blue America, now and forever. Donald Trump, with his contempt for democratic norms and his authoritarian narcissism, knows about as much as he needs to for the task of banana republic rule. He is a suitable vessel for this project.

Trump’s entire campaign appears to be coalescing around a kind of call to arms, Red versus Blue. It’s not about governing at all, which Trump doesn’t do. It’s about who gets to dominate whom; who get to write the rules and maintain control, and the hell with republican government. It’s about power, baby. (See also, from 2014, Politics of the Id.)

So we’ll see how that works out. It seems to me that the road ahead for Republicans looks a bit like this:

Meanwhile, with the Clintons finally shoved into retirement the Democratic Party has allowed itself to be pushed a bit to the left. Certainly, it’s not all the way there. But there are signs the future party will be led by progressives, especially progressives of color.

In the meantime, we’ve got Joe Biden, who so far has managed to signal he’s moving left and staying centrist at the same time. Well, whatever beats Trump. Paul Waldman:

The Mary Trump book went on sale today. I haven’t read it yet, but do read Dahlia Lithwick’s review  (h/t Swami) —

At bottom, Too Much and Never Enough may be the first book that stipulates, in its first pages, that the president is irreparably damaged, and then turns a clinician’s lens on the rest of us, the voters, the enablers, the flatterers, the hangers-on, and the worshippers. It is here that Mary Trump’s book makes perhaps the most enduring contribution to the teetering piles of books that have offered too little too late, even while telling us that which we already knew. Because Mary Trump begins from the assumption that other analysis tends to end with: Donald Trump is lethally dangerous, stunningly incoherent, and pathologically incapable of caring about anyone but himself. So, what Mary Trump wants to know is: What the hell is wrong with everyone around him? As she writes in her prologue, “there’s been very little effort to understand not only why he became what he is but how he’s consistently failed up despite his glaring lack of fitness.”

The book is thus actually styled as an indictment not of Donald Trump but of Trump’s enablers. The epigraph is from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and it’s emphatically not about Donald John Trump at all: “If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.” Mary Trump blames Fred Trump for Donald Trump’s pathology, although she doesn’t claim that her uncle is a tragic victim of abuse. She blames his family that propped him up (also her family, it should be noted), and then in concentric and expanding circles, the media that failed to scrutinize him, the banks that pretended he was the financial genius he was not, the Republican Party, and the “claque of loyalists” in the White House who continue to lie for him and to him in order to feed his insatiable ego and self-delusion. Even the phrase “too much and never enough” is perhaps deliberately borrowed from the language of addiction, and what Mary Trump describes here is not just her uncle’s addiction to adulation, fame, money, and success, but a nation’s—or some part of a nation’s—unfathomable addiction to him.

I’ve had enough experience with psychologically damaged people, especially in the workplace, to see the pattern. If you have to deal with a sociopath or narcissist, you’re either all in or all out. There’s no negotiation, no balance, no middle ground. Especially if this person is in a position of authority, you must either go along with the sociopathy and do whatever is necessary to feed the ego monster you’re dealing with, or you walk away. Perhaps a person with therapist training could find a third way, but that’s not most of us.

One issue that’s come up with a lot of people who originally agreed to work in the administration, like Rex Tillerson or John Bolton, is that they later said they had no idea how damaged Trump is (or words to that effect). They’ve never had the experience of working for a sociopath/narcissist. I would bet money that there are many such people in middle management in companies Tillerson has headed, because the sociopath/narcissist tends to fail up because of his/her sheer aggression and ability to intimidate people. Tillerson and Bolton probably have some sociopathic/narcissistic tendencies themselves.

And then, of course, sociopath/narcissists tends to gather other psychologically damanged people around themselves. The word “codependent” comes to mind. They often create office cultures that replicate their dysfunctional families of origin. The result is an absolutely toxic workplace that will probably crash and burn eventually, but perhaps not for years, because workers who want to keep their jobs will keep trying to be productive. But I have seen this happen so many times that it must be pretty common, or else I have really bad work karma to end up working for these people time and time again.

It must be absolute hell to work for the White House now, but I’m guessing the pay is good and it’s a classy thing to put on one’s résumé (although the Trump White House may prove an exception). That accounts for the people who stick there, but some of them must be inwardly seething, because juicy stuff keeps getting leaked to the press. I bet a lot of them are secretly praying that he loses, so that they can be freed from workplace hell without having to quit or be fired.

But then we have to stand back and look at the enablers who don’t actually work in the White House. It’s possible that someday historians will write that the Trump Administration was the nail in the coffin of the Republican Party. We can hope, anyway. Republicans made the choice to stick with Trump because they were afraid of his base of cult worshippers, we’re told. But Republicans are also utterly dependent on a relatively small handful of mega donors, and to a large extent the MAGA-heads and the deep pocket plutocrats are both holding the Republican Party hostage. Nancy LeTourneau writes,

Because Democrats were so successful in raising small donations online via ActBlue, the Republicans created something similar in 2019 that they call WinRed. But it’s not working out very well for them.

Last month, the National Republican Senatorial Committee prepared a slideshow for Senate chiefs of staff full of bleak numbers about the party’s failure to compete with Democrats on digital fundraising. For anyone not getting the message, the final slide hammered home the possible end result: a freight train bearing down on a man standing on the tracks.

The slideshow, obtained by POLITICO, painted a grim picture of the GOP’s long-running problem. Republican senators and challengers lagged behind Democrats by a collective $30 million in the first quarter of 2020, a deficit stemming from Democrats’ superior online fundraising machine. Since then, Democrats’ fundraising pace accelerated further, with the party’s challengers announcing huge second-quarter hauls last week, largely driven by online donors giving through ActBlue, the party’s preferred fundraising platform.

Republican strategists suggest the problem is that their candidates haven’t done the legwork that is necessary to build a grassroots base of small donors. But at least one Republican who lost in 2018 suggests that the problem goes much deeper.

Many candidates have long assumed that “95 percent of the money you would raise would be from large donors, political action committees. Online fundraising was just to check the box,” said former Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), who lost his seat in 2018 after being outraised by his Democratic opponent. “For a long time, members didn’t understand the potential of online fundraising.”

With tax cuts and deregulation as their only real agenda, Republicans have built their fundraising campaigns around the desires of their big donors who support their election via superPACs. That means that they haven’t had to pay attention to the grassroots in order to build the kind of small donations that come via online fundraising. Therefore, to fully utilize a platform like WinRed requires them to change their entire culture. That’s why they’re struggling.

Instead of protecting Trump, Republicans would be in a much better place now if they’d found a way to dump Trump at least a couple of years ago and let Pence be POTUS. Based on his record in Indiana I doubt he would have handled the pandemic or the police brutality crises effectively, either, but perhaps he wouldn’t have made as total a botch of it all as Trump has. But the Republicans waited too long.

Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson had an article in WaPo last week that points to the same thing —

This account is not so much wrong as badly incomplete. In its fixation on right-wing populism, it ignores right-wing plutocracy: conservative business leaders and reactionary billionaires who’ve focused not just on winning elections, but on rewriting the rules of our economy and our democracy. The growing power of these forces has encouraged the GOP to embrace a retrograde economic program that has little support even among its own voters. One effect is more inequality. Another is a Republican Party more reliant on white identity to stay in power.  …

… With concentrated wealth has come unprecedented investments in politics by billionaire donors and business organizations, mostly on the right. Showcasing this conservative tilt, in 2016, the anti-government advocacy network associated with Charles Koch spent about as much to advance its reactionary agenda and elect sympathetic politicians as the Republican Party itself. In the process, plutocratic forces have reshaped the positions of both parties — especially the Republican Party.

But how do you keep getting votes with an unpopular agenda? That’s where the race-baiting and stoking the fires of resentment and fear come in. This is what Hacker and Pierson are calling “plutocratic populism.” It’s a strategy that relies on organized money and organized outrage.

In the 1990s, GOP leaders like House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay and future House Speaker John A. Boehner embraced wealthy donors and an increasingly assertive business community, which had started ramping up its political efforts in the 1970s. Simultaneously, they nurtured grass-roots groups skilled at stoking grievance, particularly the Christian right and the National Rifle Association. Crucially, so long as these groups got a full-throated defense of gun rights and traditional values (especially from nominees to the federal courts), they had no problems with the party’s plutocratic priorities.

That works as long as members of the outraged mob are either reasonably well off or are completely blinded to how they’re being used. And the wins for the plutocracy under Trump have been huge. Outrageous tax cuts, plutocracy-friendly judges, killing safety and environmental regulations, you name it. The rich are winning, bigly. No wonder the stock markets keep going up even though the economy is in big trouble.

Now the bill may be due. If the problem were just an aging and outnumbered voting base, it would be vexing enough. But Republicans have also locked themselves into priorities with powerful backers yet little popular support. When Republicans’ extraordinarily top-heavy 2017 tax bill looked set to fail, one GOP senator predicted “the financial contributions will stop.” Another warned, “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.’ ” A year later, GOP donors were privately advocating that candidates downplay the tax cuts and hype an immigrant “invasion.”

I wrote a couple of days ago that Trump is holding us all hostage, and it still feels that way because none of our crises can be competently addressed as long as he is POTUS. But of course it’s bigger than that. The Republican Party is holding us hostage but the plutocrats and the Trump cult are holding the Republican Party hostage. And as long as the Clinton cult controlled the Democrats, the Democratic Party played the role of enabler of much of what the Republicans were up to. But I think the Dems are finally starting to move on from the Clintons, at least.

Basically, though, we’re a nation holding itself hostage. Nothing but a complete break with the patterns of the past four to five decades or so will save us.

Der Spiegel

Well, this went well.

Disastrously embarrassing performance by DeVos this morning. pic.twitter.com/4ZGSpRwItK

— Jamie ?’Grady ? (@JamieOGrady) July 12, 2020

In brief, she is demanding that schools fully open at their regularly scheduled time, but she wants local school districts to come up with their own plans for how to keep children safe.

“Every school should have plans for that situation to be able to pivot and ensure that kids can continue learning, at a distance if they have to for a short period of time,” she said. What’s the plan? The plan is to have plans. It’s a plan plan.

Bash followed up: “Why do you not have guidance…just weeks before you want those schools to reopen,” she wondered, “and what happens if there’s an outbreak?”

“You know, there’s really good examples that have been utilized in the private sector and elsewhere, also with front line workers and hospitals, and all of that data and all of those examples can be referenced by school leaders,” DeVos said.

Private sector office buildings are not schools. Meat packing plants are not schools, Hospitals are not schools. Warehouses are not schools. Schools are different from those places in a lot of ways. Schools involve large numbers of children, some of them quite small, for one thing. Certainly a big city school will have different issues from a small rural school, but will the administration not even provide some baseline criteria? And what about appropriating some money for schools that need to find more space in order to keep students further apart? And what about covid-19 tests?

DeVos flamed out on Fox News, also:

WALLACE: And President Trump tweeted Friday: Schools must be open in the fall. If not open, why would the federal government give funding? It won’t.

Two quick questions and I need a quick answer if I can from you, Secretary DeVos.

One, under what authority are you and the president going to unilaterally cut off funding, funding that’s been approved from Congress and most of the money goes to disadvantaged students or students with disabilities? And secondly, isn’t cutting off funding exactly the wrong answer? Don’t you want to spend more money to make schools safer, whether it’s with plastic shields or health checks, various other systems? Does it make more sense to increase funding for schools where it’s unsafe rather than cut off funding?

DEVOS: Look, American investment in education is a promise to students and their families. If schools aren’t going to reopen and not fulfill that promise, they shouldn’t get the funds, and give it to the families to decide to go to a school that is going to meet that promise.

(CROSSTALK)

WALLACE: Well, you can’t do that.

DEVOS: It’s promise to the American people. That’s —

(CROSSTALK)

WALLACE: I know you support vouchers and that’s — I know you support vouchers, and that’s a — that’s a reasonable argument. But you can’t do that unilaterally, you have to do that through Congress.

DEVOS: Well, we’re looking at all the options because it’s a promise to the American people, to students and their families, and we want to make sure that promise is followed through on.  …

…WALLACE: But, Secretary, I want to get — I want to get to this issue of — because the president of the United States said that the CDC guidelines were tough, expensive and impractical. I want to look at some of the other CDC guidance. They talked about putting up shielding in places where six foot — six feet of distance is not possible, plastic shielding. They talked about staggered drop-offs and pickups. Is that tough, expensive and impractical?

DEVOS: Well, again, all of the guidelines are meant to be helpful, to help local education leaders decide and work on how they are going to accomplish what they need to do, and that is getting kids back in school based on their situation and their realities. We know that schools across the country look very different and that there’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all approach to everything. But the key is, there has to be a posture of doing something, of action, of getting things going, putting a plan together for your specific school, for your specific district or for your classroom that ensures that kids are going to start learning again this fall.

Today the Los Angeles and San Diego school districts announced they would be online only in the fall. I suspect there will be more such announcements. I also anticipate a lot of school districts opening up and then closing back down again when a child tests positive and parents decide to keep their kids home.

But DeVos, like Trump, doesn’t think rules apply to her. Last October she was held in contempt of court for trying to collect student loan debts from people defrauded by for-profit college chains, notably ITT Technical Institute, and Corinthian College, that had collapsed. An injunction had been placed on collecting the debts by a U.S. District Court Judge; DeVos tried to collect them, anyway. She argued that the students still had gotten some value from the schools even though the schools are so notorious now that credits from them are worthless.

This is an ongoing issue. Most recently, the Department of Education has been mailing out letters to people who had filed claims for debt relief. The letters say their claims were accepted but they get zero relief, because they had suffered no financial damage, even though they can’t even put their ITT credits on their resumes.

DeVos also has been using the pandemic as an excuse to funnel public school money into private and religious schools. This is from May:

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, signed in late March, included $30 billion for education institutions turned upside down by the pandemic shutdowns, about $14 billion for higher education, $13.5 billion to elementary and secondary schools, and the rest for state governments.

Ms. DeVos has used $180 million of those dollars to encourage states to create “microgrants” that parents of elementary and secondary school students can use to pay for educational services, including private school tuition. She has directed school districts to share millions of dollars designated for low-income students with wealthy private schools.

And she has nearly depleted the 2.5 percent of higher education funding, about $350 million, set aside for struggling colleges to bolster small colleges — many of them private, religious or on the margins of higher education — regardless of need. The Wright Graduate University for the Realization of Human Potential, a private college in Wisconsin that has a website debunking claims that it is a cult, was allocated about $495,000. All of the colleges could apply for the funds or reject them, and Wright officials said the school did not claim the funds.

This is from last week, after Trump demanded that all schools must open in the fall.

Trump then threatened that if schools don’t reopen for in-person instruction in the fall, the federal government might withhold the billions and billions of dollars it sends to primary and secondary education each year. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos later clarified that the federal government would not withhold public education funding entirely but instead convert grants to schools and districts that don’t open sufficiently into private education vouchers for families. …

… DeVos also initially pushed to tilt coronavirus relief funds away from public schools and toward private schools. In the face of widespread opposition, her department modified that proposal, though public school advocates continue to express skepticism. She also announced plans to use some of the Cares Act funding to provide “microgrants” to support home schooling families.

Also this week, DeVos has been slammed for scheduling more time for meetings with the Federalist Society about ways to protect young men from sexual assault allegations instead of addressing the looming school opening fiasco.

And there have been news stories that children taken from parents at the border have been given to a “Christian” adoption agency with ties to DeVos. With all the other crises going on, that one keeps getting lost.

Chris Koski at a Lawyers, Guns, and Money notes that DeVos is someone horrible enough to have stayed in her position the entirety of the Trump Administration — incompetent, evil, and servile. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree in business economics from Calvin College in Michigan, did not go to graduate school, and has never been a teacher, so she has no qualifications whatsoever for her position. She does appear to have a deeply held animus against public schools, which of course would make her a logical choice to Trump.

UNITED STATES – MARCH 28: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos testifies during a Senate Appropriations Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee on the FY2020 budget request for the Department of Education in Dirksen Building on Thursday, March 28, 2019. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

Sorry I’ve been scarce. I gave a Zoom talk this morning to some zennies and had to prepare something. But now it’s done.

We’re being held hostage by a virus. Very little of our civic or economic life can be normal until we are no longer being held hostage by a virus. That’s what our situation amounts to.

The Right is still trying to blame China. There are stories out today in right-leaning media that Steve Bannon is pushing a story that Chinese scientists have defected to the West and are helping the FBI (wouldn’t that be the CIA?) build a case that the coronavirus was deliberately leaked by a Chinese lab.

Real scientists insist that they can tell the virus evolved in nature and is not a lab creation. But Trumpies remain obsessed with blaming China for our current situation. As if it matters.

If you were being held hostage by crazy gunmen, and you found out that instead of trying to rescue you the authorities are just arguing about who the gunmen work for — the mob? the deep state? Tucker Carlson? — you’d probably be pretty damn pissed about it. Just rescue me, already.

Today Trump is raving on Twitter that he won’t let crazy leftists tear down the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial, “or any other Federal Monumrnt  [sic],” as if that were a real threat. And he’s bragging aboujt the great economy and insisting that Barack Obama played more golf as POTUS than he did. That claim has been debunked copiously, most recently at Business Insider.

But what are you doing about the pandemic, Donald? Anything? He submitted to wearing a face mask yesterday at a visit to Walter Reed. That’s about it, as far as I can tell.

Instead, Trump is pissed at the coronavirus task force officials who keep warning people to maintain social distancing, etc. ABC reported yesterday:

As President Donald Trump threatens to cut funding to schools that don’t reopen in the fall and continues to host mega-rallies as cases of coronavirus increase, there appears to be a growing rift between the Trump White House and its top health advisers.

The president has taken his criticism of the government’s top expert on infectious diseases and of leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into the public forum in his massive push to reopen the country.

Despite coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx asking Americans in hot spot zones to avoid indoor gatherings and reduce them to 10 people or fewer, Trump on Friday delivered remarks and attended a home fundraiser in Florida as cases there rise — one day after the state saw a record death toll.

The trip came as Trump seeks to downplay the danger in states like Florida, Arizona, Texas and California struggling to control outbreaks — which he calls “embers” — and openly disputes coronavirus task force officials.

In a series of interviews this week, Trump questioned the expertise of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institutes of Health for more than three decades and a prominent member of the White House coronavirus task force, who continually polls higher in favorability than the president.

We’re being held hostage by crazy gunmen, and instead of rescuing us the police officer in charge tells us to just ignore the gunmen and go on about our lives. Some of us may get shot, but hey, that happens.

A couple of days ago, the New York Times released an internal Trump administration document that said “fully reopening schools and universities remained the ‘highest risk’ for the spread of the coronavirus.”

Clearly, the document was prepared to release to school districts to provide guidance. But it was never released. This is possibly because some of the suggestions for mitigating risks to children and faculty, like widespread testing and contact tracing, would be expensive.

We’ve heard of threats that schools could be invaded and children taken hostage by crazy gunmen, but the government doesn’t want to deal with it because providing protection for children would cost money. So just send the kids to school, anyway. Most of them probably will be okay. And, anyway, we need to deploy troops to protect our monuments.

Oh, there is one thing the White House is doing about the pandemic. It’s working to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci. NBC reported today:

The White House is seeking to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, as it works to marginalize him and his dire warnings about the shortcomings in the U.S. coronavirus response.

A White House official told NBC News that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things.” The official provided NBC News with a lengthy list of past comments by Fauci earlier in the pandemic, including Fauci saying in January that coronavirus was “not a major threat” and “not driven by asymptomatic carriers” and Fauci’s comment in March that “people should not be walking around with masks.”

Many of the past statements the White House is criticizing Fauci for are ones that were based on the best available data at the time and were widely echoed by Trump, other members of the task force and senior White House officials. As Surgeon General Jerome Adams told CBS News on Sunday, “When you learn more, you change those recommendations. Our recommendations have changed.”

Let’s review:

We’re being held hostage by crazy gunmen. The police have an excellent hostage specialist who might know how to rescue us, but officials dismiss him because he originally thought the hostage-taking would happen on a Thursday instead of Wednesday. So now no one is working to rescue us, because the new guy in charge of rescuing people won’t admit we need to be rescued.

About a week ago Dr. Fauci got out a warning that we must not read good news into a falling death rate.

I’m trying to wrap my head around SCOTUS rulings today. Adam Liptak at the New York Times explains the Trump financial records rulings:

The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for prosecutors in New York to see President Trump’s financial records, a stunning defeat for Mr. Trump but a decision that probably means the records will be shielded from public scrutiny under grand jury secrecy rules until after the election, and perhaps indefinitely.

In a separate decision, the court ruled that Congress could not, at least for now, see many of the same records. The vote in both cases was 7 to 2. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote both majority opinions.

The court’s decision in favor of the New York prosecutors was a major statement on the scope and limits of presidential power, one that will take its place with landmark rulings that required President Richard M. Nixon to turn over tapes of Oval Office conversations and forced President Bill Clinton to provide evidence in a sexual harassment suit.

In the case concerning the prosecutors’ subpoena, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that “no citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding.” He added that Mr. Trump may still raise objections to the scope and relevance of the subpoena.

The two holdouts were Alito and Thomas. We probably won’t see the records before the election, but I trust the New York prosecutors will not hesitate to go forward and nail the bleeper next year.

Note that the Big Baby is having a meltdown now:

POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2020

We have a totally corrupt previous Administration, including a President and Vice President who spied on my campaign, AND GOT CAUGHT…and nothing happens to them. This crime was taking place even before my election, everyone knows it, and yet all are frozen stiff with fear….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2020

…Won all against the Federal Government and the Democrats send everything to politically corrupt New York, which is falling apart with everyone leaving, to give it a second, third and fourth try. Now the Supreme Court gives a delay ruling that they would never have given…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2020

….for another President. This is about PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT. We catch the other side SPYING on my campaign, the biggest political crime and scandal in U.S. history, and NOTHING HAPPENS. But despite this, I have done more than any President in history in first 3 1/2 years!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2020

Courts in the past have given “broad deference”. BUT NOT ME!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2020

The Supreme Court sends case back to Lower Court, arguments to continue. This is all a political prosecution. I won the Mueller Witch Hunt, and others, and now I have to keep fighting in a politically corrupt New York. Not fair to this Presidency or Administration!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2020

PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2020

What can one say, but …

Here’s another explanation of the rulings, from Mark Joseph Stern at Slate:

The Supreme Court managed to pull off a seemingly impossible balancing act on Thursday: It denied President Donald Trump the sweeping immunity from oversight he demanded while also shielding Trump from oversight before the November election. In Trump v. Vance, the court cleared the way for a New York grand jury to subpoena the president’s tax returns … eventually. In Trump v. Mazars, the court upheld Congress’ authority to investigate the president but stymied (at least for now) its current efforts to do just that. With these two decisions, the Supreme Court—and, specifically, Chief Justice John Roberts—has dealt a blow to Trump’s alarming view of unbridled executive power. Yet it has also protected this particular executive from immediate scrutiny.

Vance and Mazars are different cases that ask a similar question: Is the president above the law while he is in office? Or must his executive authority yield to other compelling interests? In both cases the Supreme Court declared that, no, the president cannot exploit his constitutional powers to insulate himself from all oversight. This ruling is a major blow to Trump, and very good news for the fundamental democratic proposition that the president is not a king. But the court went on to give Trump a temporary victory by sending both cases back down to the lower courts for further assessments. In Vance, this move is probably just a hiccup on the way to a final order sending Trump’s tax returns to a New York grand jury. In Mazars, however, the court’s compromise could functionally kill the House of Representatives’ efforts to get its hands on Trump’s financial records.

Aaron Burr made the news today, and not the entertainment section. Jennifer Rubin:

In Vance, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — writing for a 7-to-2 majority — held that the president not only lacks immunity from a state criminal investigation but also enjoys no special, heightened standard of proof. Roberts recounted the history of the trial of Aaron Burr and then-Chief Justice John Marshall’s ruling that President Thomas Jefferson was not immune from a subpoena for records. “In the two centuries since the Burr trial, successive Presidents have accepted Marshall’s ruling that the Chief Executive is subject to subpoena,” Roberts wrote. He also cited U.S. v. Nixon, which held that “the President’s ‘generalized assertion of privilege must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial.’” While these cases involved federal subpoenas, Roberts held that state subpoenas are no different. Rejecting the notion of absolute immunity, Roberts found that “we cannot conclude that absolute immunity is necessary or appropriate under Article II or the Supremacy Clause.” (On this, he points out there was unanimous agreement in the court.)

So while it’s disappointing the records won’t be released  before the election, it could have been worse.

In another significant ruling I didn’t see coming, the Court ruled that about half of Oklahoma is rightfully a reservation under the jurisdiction of the Muscogee (Creek), Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole Nations.

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that nearly half of Oklahoma falls within an Indian reservation, a decision that could reshape the criminal-justice system by preventing state authorities from prosecuting offenses there that involve Native Americans.

The 5-to-4 decision, potentially one of the most consequential legal victories for Native Americans in decades, could have far-reaching implications for the 1.8 million people who live across what is now deemed “Indian Country” by the high court. The lands include much of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s second-biggest city.

The swing vote this time was Gorsuch, siding with the four liberals.

“Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of federal criminal law,” Justice Gorsuch wrote. “Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word.”

I suspect it’s going to take some time for people to figure out how this is going to work. But treaties are treaties.

Trump wants schools to reopen in the fall. That in itself is not unreasonable; the American Academy of Pediatrics also wants schools to open in the fall. I’m sure a whole lot of parents of school-age children want schools to reopen in the fall. What the kids think no doubt varies.

However, Trump really wants schools to reopen in the fall. He seems nearly frantic about it.

In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS. The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but is important for the children & families. May cut off funding if not open!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 8, 2020

Let’s review:

From CNN as of 6/30/2020. Source: Johns Hopkins Data Center

So, we can say the U.S. and Europe are not exactly in the same place wth this pandemic thing. But maybe we could reopen schools if we took proper precautions …

I disagree with @CDCgov on their very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools. While they want them open, they are asking schools to do very impractical things. I will be meeting with them!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 8, 2020

NPR:

Existing CDC guidance includes temporary school dismissals if there is a substantial spread of COVID-19 within the community and, in cases of mild to moderate community transmission, modifying classes where students are in close contact, staggering arrival/dismissal times and enforcing social distancing.

The CDC continues to update its website with best practices, including this checklist for schools. It’s unclear which specific guidance the president was rebuking.

So no precautions. Trump just wants the doors to open and the students to get their butts back in classrooms. There’s been some vague talk about providing targeted help for schools in hot zones, but nothing specific.

Trump’s talk of cutting off funding for schools rings a bit hollow when you understand that federal money is, on average, less than 10 percent of revenue, the NPR article says. Also, school funding is appropriated by Congress; Trump has no authority to cut it off.

It’s also the case that public schools in the U.S. are administered by locally elected school boards, and so ultimately the go or no-go decisions will be up to them. Trump says he will lean on governors to force schools open, but I’m not sure how much even governors can do if a particular school district decides to postpone opening because of the pandemic.

The reason Trump is frantic to open schools is, obviously, that having kids at home makes it harder for a lot of workers to get back to their jobs. His whole Grand Plan for re-election hinges on Making America January 2020 Again, but without having to actually do anything about the, you know, pandemic. He’s not a detail guy.

So he’s going to tweet and harangue and bitch that the evil Democrats want to keep schools closed because of “politics,” and he will send all of his remaining minions out to talk to the media about how much they value education and want to get kids back to school. The one thing I doubt he will do is provide useful guidance and sufficient funds for whatever adjustments (such as number of students in a classroom) schools might have to make.

And if the pandemic is really slamming us in September, as I suspect it might, will America’s parents be all that keen about sending the kids back to the same overstuffed classrooms with no thought given to what germs the kids might pick up and bring back home? And has Trump even considered that such parents might be angry with him for putting their families at risk? Probably not; he’s not exactly the responsible parent type.

It appears that after all this time and all the suffering, Trump still doesn’t get that the pandemic is a really bad thing that he can’t intimidate or wish away. But Greg Sargent argues that the problem isn’t that Trump is in denial about what could happen. He knows; he just doesn’t give a bleep. “Malevolent” is the operative word here.

Once we dispense with the idea that Trump remains “in denial,” we’re left with a few interpretations. The most charitable is that Trump continues to have principled disagreements with experts over these matters, but there are zero indications he has any substantively grounded views on them of any kind.

A far less charitable interpretation is that he’s merely indifferent to the catastrophic consequences that are resulting from these failures — and will continue to do so — and that he’s prioritizing nakedly self-interested political calculations over any such concerns.

I’m leaning toward the latter, because that has been Trump’s pattern all along. Time and time again he’ll launch some scheme to do this or that — separate families at the border, ban travelers from Muslim countries, etc. — with no planning, no consulting with people tasked with carrying out the scheme, no forethought to consequences — and at some point you just have to admit, this is who he is. Trump doesn’t do plans. He doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself. He just wants what he wants, now.

That’s why I’m saying this school reopening thing — issue? controversy? — is the Trump administration in a microcosm. Trump makes up his mind that something will be to his advantage, and he throws endless tantrums until he gets what he wants. But he can’t be bothered to do the thing in incremental steps or make accommodations to people for whom doing the thing would be a problem. And he doesn’t consider consequences, even if they are explained to him.

This doesn’t necessarily rule out denial, though. The man has some serious short-circuiting in his brain. Previews of the upcoming tell-all book by his neice Mary Trump point to this. “… Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for,” she writes.

Mary takes the media to task for searching for a “strategy” in anything Donald does and for soft-pedaling what she describes as multiple psychological disorders, which, by her account, check a variety of boxes in diagnostic manuals. She thinks that Donald, at a minimum, suffers from an “antisocial personality disorder” and a longstanding but undiagnosed learning disability.

Mary Trump is a trained clinical psychologist, so I am inclined to take her word for this. We do not need to spin our wheels over the why; we just need to understand this is what Trump does, and he doesn’t have it in him to do anything else.

That said, could schools be reopened in the fall? Matt Yglesias has an article up at Vox that looks at this question from several angles. The short answer is yes, but not without a whole lot of money and planning, little to none of which schools are going to get from the federal government or most of the state governments. So, once again, we’re heading toward a disaster we can see coming, but because of Trump there’s little that will be done about it.