There’s a lot of good commentary on the Trump campaign today, much of it with a similar theme — Trump is running on empty.

Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes, The Atlantic, Trump Is Campaigning on a Platform of Abject Failure

In a series of speeches over the past several days, the president has spelled out, or at least gestured toward, the major themes of his coming campaign. There will be other themes, to be sure—mostly, one presumes, attacks on Joe Biden—but the president’s recent speeches in Tulsa, in Phoenix, and at Mount Rushmore all outline what appear to be the main components of his affirmative case for a second term.

Trump’s arguments for himself are threefold, Jurecic and Wittes write. First, he claims to have built a great economy (as opposed to coasting on the economy left him by Barack Obama, which is closer to the truth) before the pandemic hit. He is the guy you want to make the economy great again, as opposed to Biden, who is going to raise your taxes. How persuasive this argument will be if the economy doesn’t get significantly better before November is anybody’s guess, but I’m doubtful it’s going to work.

Second, he’s boasting he did a great job keeping the pandemic under control, while at the same time claiming it isn’t that bad and will just go away. “As The Washington Post reports, he has suggested 19 times since February that the virus might just “go away”—most recently on July 1,” Jurecic and Wittes write. Trump is at the mercy of the virus.

And third — culture war. Confederate monuments, law and order, scary immigrants, more racist dog-whislting than we’ve seen since the 1960s. At the same time, there will be much demonizing of the “left-wing mob” trying to destroy everything good and pure and white in America.

Let’s take these three items in reverse order, starting with culture wars. Jamelle Bouie writes at the New York Times that if the election were held today, Trump would almost certainly lose in a landslide. He’s got four months to turn his fortunes around. Can he do it?

With enough racist demagogy, Trump seems to think, he’ll close the gap with Biden and eke out another win in the Electoral College. But it is one thing to run a backlash campaign, as Trump did four years ago, in a growing economy in which most people aren’t acutely worried about their lives and futures. In that environment, where material needs are mostly met, voters can afford to either look past racial animus or embrace it as a kind of luxury political good. When conditions are on the decline, however, they want actual solutions, and the politics of resentment are, by themselves, a much harder sell.

Bouie goes on to provide some examples from history to argue that racist campaigns work better in good times than bad, concluding —

… if it takes a decent economy to make voters conducive to the campaign Trump wants to run — then he is, at this moment, speeding down an electoral dead-end. As long as Covid-19 is out of control, as long as there is mass suffering, sickness and economic distress, then nothing short of actually doing his job will help him get ahead. There simply is no substitute for good governance.

And good governance isn’t something Trump can do. He couldn’t do it if he tried. He has no clue what “governance” even is. See also Shane Savitsky at Axios, Trump’s failing culture wars, and Zeeshan Aleem at Vox, Trump is going all in on divisive culture wars. That might not work this time.

I’m seeing some Trump ads on St. Louis television stations that are about what’s going to happen when you call the police and have to deal with an automated telephone tree with a five-day response time. But whatever you think of defunding the police, that’s a state and local matter. I’ve also seen internet ads playing up the alleged corruption of the Obama-Biden administration, although exactly what that corruption was supposed to be is not explained.

The Trump campaign is painting Joe Biden as too weak and feeble to deal with all the chaos the “left-wing mob” is bringing. However, at the same time, the Trumpies are trying to hang the anarchists and Antifa! and all the dark boogeymen in their dark minds around the neck of Biden, as if he were in cahoots with them, and I don’t think they can have it both ways.

Anyway, I agree with the view that most voters whose lives have been upended by the pandemic and the economic disruptions caused by the pandemic don’t want to hear about Confederate statues. They want to know what you’re going to do to put their lives back together.

And attacking Bubba Wallace? Seriously? See Will Leitch, New York magazine, Trump Can’t Turn Bubba Wallace Into Colin Kaepernick.

About the pandemic — Greg Sargent writes that it is just now dawning on Republicans that maybe they’ve made some bad decisions.

So Republican politicians are swallowing hard and saying, um, yeah, maybe we ought to be wearing masks. Maybe we should have maintained isolation longer, instead of pushing to open the economy back up so fast.

Just as an example of how the ground has shifted, today Texas governor Greg “what pandemic?” Abbott blasted local leaders for not taking the pandemic seriously enough and enforcing restrictions, including mask orders.

There is also serious talk about whether down-ballot Republicans should cut their ties with Trump to salvage their own elections. They aren’t going to do it next week, but if we get to the first of September or so without visible progress on either the economy or the pandemic, some may feel forced to make that choice.

[Update] See Nancy LeTourneau at Washington Monthly:

Trump’s failing campaign is threatening Republican control of the Senate. Nevertheless, when asked whether the president has exhibited failed leadership in response to the coronavirus, Senator Joni Ernst defended him saying, “I think that the president is stepping forward.”

Apparently that response helped her opponent, Theresa Greenfield, raise over $100,000. It’s worth noting that the most recent Des Moines Register poll showed Greenfield leading Ernst by three points. In a state Trump won by nine points in 2016, that same poll had Biden ahead by one point.

The Senate race in Iowa demonstrates the dilemma facing Republicans all over the country—even in traditionally red states: Do they stick with the president and go down with him, or do they hold him accountable and risk losing the support of the GOP base, which remains loyal to Trump. At this point, they’re obviously picking the former. But according to Gabriel Sherman, they’ve adopted a deadline on that.

A Republican strategist told Gabriel Sherman that “Republicans have Labor Day penciled in as the deadline for Trump to have turned things around. After that, he’s on his own.” LeTourneau expresses the opinion that Republicans are deluded if they think Trump is going to start doing anything differently from what he’s doing now, which isn’t working.

Regarding the economy, bringing that back will depend a lot on the virus and a lot on Congress. The headlines today are full of the names of all the companies and organizations that got PPP loans instead of your cousin whose restaurant business is going under. Even so, Congress needs to get another stimulus package out, soon. Mitch McConnell opened the door a crack yesterday that maybe something would be considered, which suggests what’s left of his hair isn’t in fire yet. It ought to be.

The only thing I can say for sure is that Trump is not going to pivot away from his campaign decisions. It’s going to be GLOOM DOOM CULTURE WAR, what pandemic?, and trust me on the economy from now until the election.

I’m still thinking a lot about history and how we tell it. Charles Blow today recalls a Columbia University sophomore who went on an infamous rant about how white people created the modern world.

“We invented science and industry, and you want to tell us to stop because oh my God, we’re so baaad. We invented the modern world. We saved billions of people from starvation. We built modern civilization. White people are the best thing that ever happened to the world. We are so amazing! I love myself! And I love white people!”

Blow says that these are the sentiments “at the root of patriarchal white supremacist ideology.”

To people who believe in this, white men are the heroes in the history of the world. They conquered those who could be conquered. They enslaved those who could be enslaved. And their religion and philosophy, and sometimes even their pseudoscience, provided the rationale for their actions.

It was hard not to hear the voice of von Abele when Trump stood at the base of Mount Rushmore and said, “Seventeen seventy-six represented the culmination of thousands of years of Western civilization and the triumph not only of spirit, but of wisdom, philosophy and reason.” He continued later, “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.”

To be clear, the “our” in that passage is white people, specifically white men. Trump is telling white men that they are their ancestors, and that they’re now being attacked for that which they should be thanked.

The ingratitude of it all.

I don’t know if world history is still being taught this way, but back in my day world history was “western civilization.” We skipped from ancient Egypt to Mesopotamia to Greece and Rome to the rest of Europe and, eventually, the European conquest of the New World. Period, end of the story of world history. Nothing about Africa after ancient Egypt, nothing about Asia after Mesopotamia except through the eyes of the Crusaders, nothing at all about East Asia, nothing about the indigenous civilizations of the Americas except that they were conquered.

One of the challenges I faced when writing The Circle of the Way was that I had to get up to speed on Asian history. Indeed, most of what I know about Asian history I’ve learned, in bits and pieces, over the years while studying and writing about bits of Buddhist history. I stumbled into what European colonialism did to the people and civilizations of India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. This is dark stuff, and I don’t know if Europeans have ever reckoned with it. Americans are nearly all blissfully unaware of it. Then, to get Circle right I had to dig deeper into the histories of China, Japan, and Korea. I developed an appreciation of what “western civ” might look like to an Asian, which is, um, not nearly as flattering as how “western civ” sees itself.

19th century cartoon of western powers fighting over the spoils of China.

That the period of European exploration and conquest had a huge impact on what we call the “modern world” is beyond doubt, but if that had never happened it is not at all a given that we wouldn’t now have a modern world that is just as technology-rich and “enlightened” as this one. I’ve come to realize that a whole lot of the acrimony and tensions in the world today can be traced back to cultural and societal destruction caused by European colonialism and other episodes in which Europeans, and Americans, messed around with other people’s countries. The partitioning of the Middle East after World War I comes to mind.

If you look at all of world history, you see that there’s nothing innate in Europeans to make them uniquely advanced. If anything, through most of world history Europe was, relatively, a cultural backwater. In the 12th century China was light years ahead of Europe in technology and other advances, from movable type, compasses, and timepieces to architecture to the earliest development of commercial farming. During the period of the European crusades the Islamic world was at a cultural peak, and was way ahead of Europe in science and mathematics. From the 11th to 14th centuries many Europeans traveled to the Middle East to study, and in part from this infusion of not European scholarship eventually the Renaissance was born.

So, white folks, we ain’t that special. Deal with it.

Charles blow quotes Trump as calling attempts to correct the historical record a “defilement” of history. Is it a defilement to state, correctly, that several of the founding fathers were slave owners and that even Abraham Lincoln said some things that come across today as blatantly racist? “It is not a defilement, but deprogramming,” Blow writes. “It is a telling of the truth, and the time for it is long overdue.”

Getting history right is important, because a skewed version of history leads to a skewed version of how we got to be where we are now. Keeping up the pretense that western civ brought nothing but bounty and blessings to the world is keeping us stuck in an untenable present.

And it should terrify all of us that Trump, who knows nothing of history and probably associates Confucius with Charlie Chan movies, is responsible for dealing with China. I assure you that China understand us a lot better than we understand them. As Sun Tzu said, “If you know the enemy and you know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt.”

And then there’s U.S. history. I’ve already written quite a lot about the damage done by the Lost Cause mythology that romanticizes the Confederacy. But here’s an anecdote that hammers home the denial we are in about it. This is by Tom Wheeler at the Brookings Institute.

A few years ago, I was making a presentation in a former slaveholding state based on my book “Leadership Lessons of the Civil War.” When I referred to those who fought for the Confederacy as traitors, you could feel the air being sucked from the room. Afterward, some who had been in the audience confronted me over the statement.

But the judgment is unassailable. To take up arms against your country is a traitorous act.

This is one one might call a bare-assed fact, but people refuse to look at it. That’s programming.

Erecting statues is just a way to obfuscate that reality while celebrating what caused it. In a similar manner, naming American military bases for generals who fought against America helps keep that traitorous tradition alive.

The Confederate stuff has to go. Other historical monuments we can debate on a case by case basis, but the Confederate stuff has to go.

At the New Yorker, Isaac Chotiner interviews historian Susan Neiman on How to Confront a Racist National History. Neiman has written quite a bit on postwar Germany and how Germans, slowly, came to process the Third Reich. She said,

I think it is very natural for everyone to want to see their ancestors and their nation as heroic. And if you can’t do heroic, then the move is to see yourself and your nation as a victim. But the move from seeing oneself as a nation of victims to a nation of perpetrators is one that the Germans finally and with great difficulty made. And that’s a historical precedent.

White southerners have been programmed to understand the Confederate legacy as a victimization of the South by the northern industrial states. And they see the Confederates as noble and heroic. But they were traitors, their cause was ignoble, and they bleeping started the bleeping war. We’re not going to be done with this hideous “heritage” until white southerners or anyone who romanticizes the Confederacy fully acknowledge that the Confederates were perpetrators. Not heroes, not victims. Perpetrators. At times in our history other Americans played the role of perpetrators. And some of that part of our history — see: Native Americans — is ongoing. It’s time we grew up about it.

Something of a postscript: Recently Jeff Sharlet posted something on Facebook I’d like to share here —

Again, what we see here is that this skewed, heavily mythologized version of history that remains embedded in school curriculum and popular culture just feeds notions of white supremacism and other right-wing wackjobbery. In this case, Sharlet describes the veneration of Stonewall Jackson among some white Christian conservatives. Jackson is held up as a “soldier of the Cross,” the ideal of the Christian warrior. Here’s just a bit —

In All Things for the Good: The Steadfast Fidelity of Stonewall Jackson, the fundamentalist historian J. Steven Wilkins opens a chapter on Jackson’s belief in the “black flag” of no quarter for the enemy with a quotation of Jackson’s view of mercy toward Union soldiers: “Shoot them all, I do not wish them to be brave.”

Earlier, in the Mexican War, Lieutenant Jackson defied an order to retreat, fought the Mexican cavalry alone with one artillery piece, and won. General Winfield Scott, commander of the U.S. forces, commended him for “the way [he] slaughtered those poor Mexicans.” Many of the poor Mexicans slaughtered by Jackson were civilians. His small victory helped clear the way for the American advance, and Jackson was ordered to turn his guns on Mexico City residents attempting to flee the oncoming U.S. Army. He did so without hesitation—mowing them down even as they sought to surrender.

This is commended in Christian popular history as proper Christian warfare. And these are the same alleged Christians who support Donald Trump. Knowing how they understand history does shed some light on their devotion to Trump. But along with his cold-blooded fanaticism for the Cause, Jackson was a flawed man who harbored a host of “eccentricities” that would have been labeled “neuroses” in later times and “psychological disorders” nowadays. He is not exactly a healthy role model. But in decades past even standard histories and textbooks, never mind Christian ones, made him out to be a great American. Enough.

Back in the day, on a normal 4th of July, people gathered in backyards for potato salad and chips and cold beer and various meats cooked on the grill while a Major League Baseball game played on a radio. Some might take advantage of the 4th of July blowout sales at the mall to get that new microwave or mattress. Some might take a long weekend for a car trip to some scenic place. In the evening, there were fireworks.

At some point in the day, some thought might be given to the Declaration of Independence, but that wasn’t mandatory. And maybe that was okay. The point of the Revolution was to enable people to lead peaceful and normal lives, not to churn out succeeding generations of flaming revolutionaries.

This year — I guess not.

We’re engaged in a vast and messy national argument about our past, our present, and our future. I assume the November election will give us some indication of which argument is winning, although it’s probably too much to hope for a resolution. But as awful as this year has been, this blowup needed to happen. It’s been building for a lot of years. Trump’s awfulness hurried it along, but it would have happened sooner or later.

Let’s hope that next 4th of July we’re all in a much different place, and we’ll all be enjoying big cookouts and fireworks and even blowout sales on mattresses. This year, take some time for a cold beer and watch Hamilton on the Disney Plus channel. You’ll enjoy it.

Stuff to Read

Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, Trump Is Turning America Into the ‘Shithole Country’ He Fears

Charles Pierce, Esquire, This Fourth of July, We’re in Another One of Those Moments Where the Great Bluff Gets Called

David Atkins, Washington Monthly, The Trump Administration Is Giving Up on Fighting the Pandemic

Robin Givhan, The Washington Post, Trump got his crowd and his fireworks, and peddled his fiction

Paul Krugman, The New York Times, Trump’s Virus Is Spreading, and His Economy Is Stalling

Dale Beran, The Atlantic, The Boogaloo Tipping Point

I’ve been thinking a lot about the convergence of history and myth lately. Modern people like to believe we have left myth behind, but that is not true. As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, many of us have a whole lot of mythology clanking around in our heads that define us, as individuals and as citizens and as a lot of other things. See, for example, The Myths That Guide Us from 2017 and The Last Hurrah of the Lost Cause from a couple of days ago.

Timothy Egan wrote in today’s New York Times that “No country can last long without a shared narrative.” That may be true, and it’s very possible that a big part of our current divisiveness is that we as a nation have been divided by narrative, and by that I mean narratives that tell us who we are as Americans and what the U.S.A. is supposed to be.

For example, we all may share some part of the history of the Revolutionary War as part of our internal narrative. But it’s striking how much the Right so often falls back on the imagery and symbols of the Revolution, as if they owned them, in support of causes that would baffle the original revolutionaries.

UNITED STATES – APRIL 6: Tea party activist John Oltesvig, of North Carolina, wears a colonial costume with a tri-corner hats as he participates in the rally at the Capitol on Wednesday, April 6, 2012, days before a possible federal government shutdown. (Photo By Bill Clark/Roll Call) (CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

Let’s take taxes. The real founders, of course, were not opposed to  taxes, but to taxes without representation. President George Washington himself put on his army uniform and led federalized militia against the big tax revolt of his day, the Whiskey Rebellion, in 1794.

Or let’s take guns. The framers of the Constitution did not write the 2nd Amendment so that Americans could own any damnfool weapon they wanted to be ready to revolt against the U.S. govrnment whenever they got pissed off enough, as gun-rights activists insist. (See Garrett Epps at The Atlantic for background; I don’t have the strength to wade back into gun rights again.) So we see that today’s political Right is using a highly mythologized version of our founding history as part of their internalized narrative about what America is supposed to be, and it’s doing a lot of harm.

When the founders got around to forming a government, including the second one under the current Constitution, they were very careful not to put too much power into the hands of one person but to spread power around among various parts and levels of government. Today, the Right wants all power to flow to Donald Trump, and anyone considered disloyal must be part of the evil “deep state.” That’s more Orwellian than Jeffersonian, my dears.

The Revolution was supposed to be about freedom. But I wrote back in 2005 that the Right had stripped the word freedom of all meaning and rendered it into nothing but a tribal totem. The people who fetishize about freedom are too often the same ones who want to jail protesters, make excuses for police brutality, and approve of putting children in cages at the border. Oh, and let’s not even start on reproductive rights. Freedom for me, but not for thee.

The Revolution was about people shaking off the rule of a distant power so that they could form their own government with their own elected representatives, with some restrictions on that government written into the Bill of Rights. This was the liberty they fought for, not license to do whatever I want whenever I want to do it, and the hell with everyone else.

See also The Pandemic, the Constitution, and Civil Liberties. The notion that mandatory quarantines or mask wearing is government tyranny that Our Forefathers wouldn’t have approved of just doesn’t hold up. And those who are outraged that bars or hair salons are closed to get the damn pandemic under control are not people I personally want to pledge my life, fortune (such as it is) and sacred honor with, to tell you the truth. I would be concerned that on the day we are called to do our utmost for the nation, they’d be getting their nails done. (I do wonder if a lot of the people who think only “sheeple” wear masks are the same ones who adamantly refuse to grasp the concept of herd immunity and vaccinations, but that’s another rant.)

By now most of us are grappling with the fact that much of our national mythology has been all about white people. This is dysfunctional. We will not be a more perfect union until we are a more inclusive union. Timothy Egan’s column begins:

As baffling as it is to find statues of traitors, slaveholders and killers of Union soldiers ensconced in many a prominent square, consider the historical discordance of Custer County, S.D.

The hard beauty of the Black Hills, sacred land to Native Americans, overshadows the county, the main town and the state park, all named for George Armstrong Custer. The hard history was shaped by the slayer of those native people. Custer’s willful trespass into territory promised by treaty to the Sioux set the stage for the last violent encounters between New World and Old.

Just under 20 miles from Custer is Mount Rushmore, which President Trump plans to visit this Fourth of July weekend. A mere seven miles from Custer is the Native American Rushmore — a still unfinished carving of the Oglala Sioux leader Crazy Horse, 641 feet long and 563 feet high.

Here is the American paradox in a grid of stark geology.

As you know, Trump plans to get his picture taken with fireworks over Mount Rushmore in front of a maskless and not socially distanced crowd this weekend, in spite of the real danger of forest fire and coronavirus spread. The President of the Oglala Sioux Nation, Julian Bear Runner, says that the land around Mount Rushmore belongs to the Oglala Sioux by treaty, and that Trump doesn’t have permission to go there, but of course that’s going to be ignored.

We absolutely must stop treating Native Americans as some relic of past history and bring them into full inclusion of the more perfect union, treaties and all.

Today the Disney Plus channel is beginning to stream the musical Hamilton. I got to see it on Broadway a couple of years ago, I think it was; it’s wonderful. Of course, part of the genius of Hamilton is that it claims the story of the Revolution as one belonging to Americans of color just as much as whites. It’s adjusting our founding story to be more inclusive.

Back in 2016, when a casting call for non-white actors went out for the touring company, righties howled in outrage! But the mostly nonwhite cast is part of the deeply embedded message — this belongs to us, too. The only white character, of course, is King George. And that creates all kinds of subliminal messages about the nature of us and them. Who is us? Who isn’t? It’s long past time to clarify that point.

Recently Leslie Odom, who played Aaron Burr in the original cast, spoke about the tension and dissonance in the piece. Most of the historical figures depicted in the musical were slave owners, after all, and yet here were nonwhite actors recreating this bit of history as their story.

It’s really the first question that needs to be asked is, okay, whose history is this? …

… Lin, he started with, he started the conversation of, “Well, this is the history that we’ve all agreed on, right?” Okay, so these are the facts: as you’ve told them to me again and again. Okay, great. The first step is, now we’re going to take them and we’re going to tell the story in our own words. Are you okay with that?

I might ask here, why do we assume the story automatically belongs to white people? Especially white people whose ancestors got here long after the Revolution?

Odom recalls a young woman telling him, “So my friends and I talk about Hamilton a lot. And we feel like this show actually isn’t revolutionary at all. It’s just a bunch of People Of Color standing on the stage telling White people stories. What do you think about that?”

And all I could say to this young girl, this young revolutionary, was: Lin wrote the show that was on his heart to write. There is no doubt in my mind that in some time, someone is going to write the show that makes Hamilton look quaint. I have no doubt in my mind. I hope I live long enough to see that show. I said to her, “It’s your job.”

Someday, maybe we won’t see this bit of history as “white people stories.”

Along those lines, please do see this video of young people, descendants of Frederick Douglass, reading Douglass’s speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” This is part of our heritage. Not just African-American heritage; all American heritage.

I very much hope that we’re living through a lot of last hurrahs, and not just of the Lost Cause. I want to see the end of white supremacy, and the end of conservative Christians being allowed to write policy that favors their religious beliefs over all others; and the end of the notion that ordinary people shouldn’t expect government to do anything for them. It’s our government. That was what the Revolution was about. We can do with it as we want. 

Maybe this is the darkness before the dawn. Let’s hope. But we seriously need to update out national mythology to one that is both a more accurate reflection of real history and that makes us all equally visible and equally valuable. Otherwise our descendants will be refighting the same old wars.

Living in the U.S. right now feels a bit like being on a bus stalled on train tracks and watchng the train coming. You know that there’s no way shit’s not going to get worse the remainder of the year, but there is little one can do. Because …

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque – RC1D94FA7CB0

Trump is back to hoping the pandemic just goes away. This is from yesterday:

I wrote yesterday that the Trump campaign will likely double down on racism and name-calling, because what else has Trump got? He doesn’t govern. He has no second-term policy plans. Eli Stokols writes at the Los Angeles Times:

President Trump on Wednesday suggested that painting the words “Black Lives Matter” on New York City’s Fifth Avenue would amount to a “symbol of hate,” complaining that such an action would be “expensive” and “denigrating [to] this luxury Avenue.”

That came shortly after a threat by the president to veto the Pentagon’s budget legislation should it include a measure to take the names of Confederate generals off military bases, which he denounced as being sponsored by “Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren (of all people!).”

That came only hours after his declaration that he “may END” a federal housing regulation aimed at desegregating neighborhoods, which he claimed has had “a devastating impact” on America’s suburbs.

And that came roughly a day after he re-tweeted a video of supporters in an almost entirely white Florida retirement community shouting “white power” from a golf cart.

Sinking further behind former Vice President Joe Biden in presidential election polls, Trump in recent days has indulged in a string of blatant appeals to racism.

Stokols goes on to cite polls showing this is out of touch with the large majority of the U.S. public, and that political strategists of both parties are baffled by the direction Trump’s campaign is taking. I don’t know why they are baffled, however. Trump’s entire shtick is to run as the strong man who will protect us against some awful scary hated thing, whether it be Hillary Clinton or nonwhite immigrants or (sometimes) China, except when Trump wants something from Xi Jinping, during which times China stops being an awful scary hated thing. I believe we’re back to being alarmed about China now, but it’s hard to keep track.

Nancy LeTourneau asks the question, What Are Trump’s Plans for Reviving His Failing Campaign? Trump’s poll numbers are terrible, not just nationally but also in the critical swing states. Biden is competitive in Georgia and Texas. LeTourneau writes,

With four months to go before the votes are counted, it has become clear that the president will need a herculean effort to counter those headwinds. His situation is unprecedented because no incumbent has ever trailed by this much at this point in an election cycle. So what are Trump’s plans for a comeback? According to reporters at the Washington Post, here are a few things that are being considered.

1. Remain in denial about the polls
2. Launch a shake-up of campaign staff
3. Deploy a campaign message about Trump as a builder (ie, “he’s building a wall”)
4. Push a “renew, restore, rebuild” theme about the economy (as the pandemic continues to rage)

Seriously, what else can he do? He’s not going to suddenly become an effective president. He doesn’t have it in him.

The Washngton Post article cited by LeTourneau adds this:

I think the chart is pretty clear, although Rampell adds more explanation in her op ed if you want to read it. Rampell continues,

Thursday’s jobs report reflects activity in mid-June. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ employer survey always covers the pay period that includes the 12th of the month.) In some senses, only a couple of weeks feels like ages ago.

Since mid-June, confirmed coronavirus cases have surged, especially across the Sun Belt. Some states have halted or even reversed their reopening plans, especially in the industries that reported the greatest job gains at mid-June: Leisure and hospitality, which according to Thursday’s jobs report shows as adding 2.1 million positions in June, accounted for two-fifths of the overall gain in total payroll jobs.

Some big states are re-closing right now because of out-of-control virus spread. Rampell also points to indicators showing that spending is slowing down even more now, possibly as people are getting a clue that this virus thing isn’t going away anytime soon. When the enhanced unemployment benefits expire at the end of July … crash. And it won’t be long before states start having to lay off employees also. The economy desperately needs more stimulus and other money injected into it, but that’s not likely to happen, because …

(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

So, we’re screwed. See also The Fed is raising dire economic warnings. But they will go unheeded.

And then there’s the virus. I am predicting that in many parts of the country schools will have to remain closed in September. And then I hope somebody — maybe the Lincoln Project, since they’re better at negative ads than the Democrats — runs a video compilation of all the times Trump said the virus would just go away, or that he had it under control.

Trump obviously still thinks that if he ignores a thing, it will go away. But some things don’t go away.

Here are a couple of articles to read together. First, see David W. Blight, Europe in 1989, America in 2020, and the Death of the Lost Cause at The Atlantic. I would seriously love to round up everyone complaining that toppling Confederate statues is “erasing history” and rub their noses in what Blight wrote here.

The Lost Cause is, of course, a mythology that grew in the South after the Civil War. And at the hands of generations of Southern historical scholars, the mythology supplanted the real history of the war, as well as the real history of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and a lot of other things. The Lost Cause denied that the primary — and secondary, and tertiary — reason so many slave states seceded and formed the Confederacy was to protect the institution of slavery. Instead, the myth insisted, the Civil War was fought to preserve some noble, agrarian way of life that was principled and free. Seriously. And this way of life was ripped away from the poor victimized South by those dirty northern industrialists for some vague reason that never made coherent sense. And if you know anything at all about the real history, you know what a pile of excréments de taureau that is.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu found a document in the National Register of Historic Places that explains the Lost Cause pretty well. It said:

The Cult of the Lost Cause had its roots in the Southern search for justification and the need to find a substitute for victory in the Civil War. In attempting to deal with defeat, Southerners created an image of the war as a great heroic epic. A major theme of the Cult of the Lost Cause was the clash of two civilizations, one inferior to the other. The North, “invigorated by constant struggle with nature, had become materialistic, grasping for wealth and power.” The South had a “more generous climate” which had led to a finer society based upon “veracity and honor in man, chastity and fidelity in women.” Like tragic heroes, Southerners had waged a noble but doomed struggle to preserve their superior civilization. There was an element of chivalry in the way the South had fought, achieving noteworthy victories against staggering odds. This was the “Lost Cause” as the late nineteenth century saw it, and a whole generation of Southerners set about glorifying and celebrating it.

David Blight, who is the Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, takes that a bit further:

The Lost Cause argued that the Confederacy never fought to preserve slavery, and that it was never truly defeated on the battlefields of glory. Lost Cause spokesmen saw the Confederacy as the real legacy of the American Revolution—a nation that resisted imperial and centralized power, and which could still triumph over rapid urbanization, immigration, and strife between labor and capital. Above all, the Lost Cause seductively reminded white Americans that the Confederacy had stood for a civilization in which both races thrived in their best, “natural” capacities. The slaughter of the Civil War had destroyed that order, but it could be remade, and the whole nation, defined as white Anglo-Saxon, could yet be revived.

It didn’t take a lot of mutation for the Lost Cause myth to become the right-wing politics that infect us today. I would argue that most right-wing nuttiness of today is the result of the Lost Cause getting mingled into Red Scares/McCarthyism and evangelical premillennialism. And, unfortunately, that nonsense spread everywhere and wasn’t limited to the South.

As I’ve written here before, most of the Confederate monuments in the U.S. were erected in the early 20th century, a time in which the Lost Cause myth had reach cult proportions. This perod also coincided with the First Red Scare. The Confederate officers so enshrined were depicted as dashing, patriotic gentlemen heroes, nobly defending their “way of life” from the rapacious, freedom-killing federal government.

The 1920s also saw the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. This is all of a piece. Those who embraced the Lost Cause myth also came to lump eastern European immigrants, labor unions, communism, big cities generally, any form of religion that was not Christian fundamentalism, and egghead college-educated northeastern elites into the same pot.

David Blight:

From the eighteen-nineties through the First World War, as Jim Crow laws and practices spread across Southern states, and as lynching became a ritual of terror and control, it was organizations like the U.D.C. and U.C.V. that placed hundreds of monuments, large and small, all over city squares and town centers. By 1920, virtually no one in the South, black or white, could miss seeing a veterans’ parade, or a statue of a Confederate soldier leaning on his musket with sweet innocence and regional pride. Schools, streets, and parks were named for Confederates. And, at one dedication after another, the message sent to black Southerners was that the Lost Cause was no longer lost. It had, instead, become a victory narrative about the overturning of Reconstruction and the reëstablishment of white supremacy. The myth had become the ruling regime, which governed by law and by violence, and because it controlled the story. What’s more, the nation largely acquiesced to, and even applauded, this dogged Southern revival.

I could go on and on, but the short version of this is that the Lost Cause myth is a pile of historical revisionist nonsense that squeezed out real history, and I honestly believe it has to die and be replaced by real history before the poison it represents can be excised. That’s a big reason I am all in favor of getting rid of Confederate monuments, except arguably the very few that mark the spot of some real historical event. Most of them have nothing to do with history; they are totems of the Lost Cause. It also means we need to squeeze what’s left of the myth out of American schools and textbooks, and as much as possible, jeer it out of popular culture. Zero tolerance, I say. We won’t have a manageable, inclusive nation until we accomplish this.

If you can get past the Atlantic firewall (I think they give you a couple free articles every month, if you don’t subscribe), it’s very much worth reading Blight’s essay all the way through. But now I want to move on to the other article of note and a more recent byproduct of the Lost Cause — the Southern Strategy.

Paul Waldman writes How Donald Trump will finally kill the Southern Strategy. It begins:

Not to alarm you or anything, but Dr. Anthony Fauci testified to a Senate committee today and said we’re in big trouble.

“We are now having 40-plus thousand new cases a day. I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around. And so I am very concerned,” Fauci said in response to questioning from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on what the overall U.S. death toll is likely to be.

It’s official now; Americans are barred from Europe. Not that I was planning to go anywhere this year, but still, this ought to bother people. Just about everybody else can go to Europe, including very likely the Chinese.

Here is why we’re banned from Europe:

From CNN as of 6/30/2020. Source for data: Johns Hopkins University

A lot of beaches and other summer attractions that might have been opened by July 4 are now going to be closed, because governors opened their states way too soon; and because selfish, entitled Americans can’t be bothered to wear masks or maintain distance or even just bleeping stay home; and because Donald Trump is president. That last reason is the main one. (See David Frum at The Atlantic, “This Is Trump’s Plague Now.”) And I am truly sad for business owners who will lose a major part of their annual revenue because of pandemic closings. But, damn. It didn’t have to be this way. I don’t know what it’s going to take to get people to take this disease seriously.

See also James Fallows, “The 3 Weeks That Changed Everything,” also at The Atlantic, about the utterly catastrophic failure of the Trump Administration to respond to the pandemic. Note that it is still failing. It isn’t even trying now.

There have been several new developments in the Russian bounty scandal, including a new story from the New York Times about money transfers between Russia and the Taliban. The evidence for the bounty on U.S. soldiers may be circumstantial, but there’s a lot of it, and it appears that portions of the military and intelligence communities are taking this accusation seriously. Is it possible they are mistaken? Yes, but we don’t know that.

What is beyond dispute at this point is that (1) there is a credible accusation that Putin offered bounties to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, (2) that the White House was told about this months ago, and (3) the Trump Administration has made no response whatsoever except to deny that Trump knew about it. Today Trump has been frantically retweeting statements from John Ratcliffe — Director of National Intelligence and a former right-wing Republican wackjob congressman from Texas — declaring that Trump didn’t know about the Russian bounty story. Well, he knows now. Is he doing anything yet? Not so far.

See also Ben Mathis-Lilly at Slate — Trump Spent the Day He Was Supposed to Have Learned About Russian Bounties Praising His Own Response to the Coronavirus.

What was Trump doing on Feb. 27 instead of reading the brief? According to the transcript of a White House Black History Month event held that Thursday, his attention was mainly occupied by the idea that he hadn’t gotten enough credit for preventing a coronavirus outbreak in the United States. “We have a situation with the virus. We’ve done a great job. The press won’t give us credit for it,” he said, describing the United States’ response to the threat as an “incredible achievement” on which his administration was “doing incredibly,” “doing great,” had done an “incredible job” and a “fantastic job,” and was “prepared like we never have been prepared.” At the time, there were 15 known cases of the virus in the country, a number he predicted “will soon be down to three or four.” (There have been an additional 2.59 million COVID-19 cases reported in the U.S. since this prediction.) Said Trump: “It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.”

That’s what. In the meantime, Trump has stirred up some mini-scandals by retweeting videos with white supremacist messages. Like he doesn’t have anything else to do.

Yesterday Greg Sargent wrote a column describing what Trump’s allies think should be done to re-energize Trump’s campaign for re-election.

Trump and his top officials have sought to cast civil unrest as fundamentally left-wing in origin, badly distorting the true nature of the protests, and playing down the role of domestic right wing extremism in the disorder.

As one Trump ally suggests to Politico, things will improve once Republicans “start defining Biden” with “resources” and “consistent messaging.”

But note the underlying premise here: that the Trump campaign has not adequately communicated to voters that Biden would be too weak to control a country that’s spiraling out of control.

Throughout, the theme is that if the Right can just amp up the messaging to make Joe Biden look weak and demonize Black Lives Matter as leftist terrorists, then Trump can cruise to victory in November. Tucker Carlson, for example, is quoted as saying that the pandemic should be helping Trump’s re-election by showing the public that he was right about China. If it’s not helping Trump then the message needs to be clarified. Just the message. Not much we can do about that pandemic, I guess.

So my memo to the GOP is: Shit is now real. People can see that for themselves. You can’t bullshit it away.

Stuff to Read

Be sure to read Carl Bernstein’s From pandering to Putin to abusing allies and ignoring his own advisers, Trump’s phone calls alarm US officials. It begins:

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America’s principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials — including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff — that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.

The calls caused former top Trump deputies — including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials — to conclude that the President was often “delusional,” as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders. The sources said there was little evidence that the President became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest.

This is fascinating. For a long time it seems Recep Erdogan had Trump on speed dial, calling him twice a week for long chats. Trump was abusive to allies, particularly women leaders such as Angela Merkel and Theresa May.

Here’s a fun read — Who’s the most galling, captivating character on our screens this summer? It’s Karen — and she’s everywhere.

Greg Sargent, Why Fox News thinks the ‘cognitive decline’ attack on Biden will work

Fox News has been relentlessly pushing the line that Joe Biden might be suffering from dementia. … So why does Fox News think this contrast will play well for Trump?

Thanks for the good times.

We can start with a bit of good news — this morning in a 5 to 4 decision, the Supreme Court overturned a Louisiana abortion law that required any doctor offering abortion services to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. Chief Justice Roberts voted with the liberals, while the usual suspects — Scalia, Thomas, Gorsuch, and BeerBong — said screw precedent and voted to keep the law. However, Kevin Drum points out that Roberts’s written decision leaves room to possibly allow other abortion restrictions to stand.

And I’ve just seen that Paul Waldman agrees. Roberts certainly wants to overturn Roe v. Wade, Waldman writes, just not right now.

If the Louisiana law had been upheld, Waldman continues, we all know good and well that every state Repubican legislature in the U.S. would go on an abortion-restriction binge. And doing this just months before a presidential election could trip a backlash that could eviscerate many Republicans’ election or re-election chances. If Trump wins another term, and especially if the Senate stays in Republican hands, it’s a sure bet that Trump will put more hard-right judges on the bench, and then no liberal laws will be upheld for the next forty years. Of course, conservatives are unlikely to see this nuanced position and will just call Roberts a traitor.

Speaking of BeerBong, do see Marty Baron Made The Post Great Again. Now, the News Is Changing. by Ben Smith at the New York Times. Marty Baron is WaPo’s executive editor, and back in 2018 after the Kavanaugh nomination, Baron killed a story by Bob Woodward that exposed BeerBong as an anonymous source for Woodward’s book Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate, published in 1999.

Mr. Woodward was planning to expose Mr. Kavanaugh because the judge had publicly denied — in a huffy letter in 1999 to The Post — an account about Kenneth Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton that he had himself, confidentially, provided to Mr. Woodward for his book. (Mr. Kavanaugh served as a lawyer on Mr. Starr’s team.)

The article, described by two Post journalists who read it, would have been explosive, arriving as the nominee battled a decades-old sexual assault allegation and was fighting to prove his integrity.

But Marty Baron killed the story, and the rest is travesty, as you might remember.

Now, on to our current and ongoing travesties. The story that Russia put bounties on U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and that the White House knew about this and did nothing, gets more and more outrageous. It’s also getting more and more corroborated.

This morning, David Ignatius was on “Morning Joe” saying that the Trump Administration has known about the bounty for awhile, and that Pentagon officials were “pounding on the door” of the White House demanding a response.

The Pentagon officials still don’t have a response. Trump is denying he was ever briefed, and anyway he’s now being told by “intel” to disregard it.

Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or @VP. Possibly another fabricated Russia Hoax, maybe by the Fake News @nytimesbooks, wanting to make Republicans look bad!!! https://t.co/cowOmP7T1S

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 29, 2020

The reference to @nytimesbooks suggests he thinks the Times book review section is out to get him. But there’s a large amount of reporting coming from several different sources corroborating the original story.

Jonathan Chait says it’s possible Trump didn’t know, but that doesn’t exonerate him.

The original Times scoop has been confirmed by other American media and European intelligence sources. Other administration officials have tried to draw a less obviously indefensible line. Over the weekend, the White House press secretary and Director of National Intelligence denied “the president nor the vice-president were briefed” on Russia’s involvement. This would seem to push responsibility away from Trump and onto a nebulous bureaucratic failure.

Yet the administration conspicuously failed to deny the Times report that the bounty intelligence was included in the President’s Daily Brief. The gap between Trump “being briefed” on the Russian bounty, and information on the bounty being included in his brief, may sound merely semantic. But Trump is known not to read his brief, instead relying on a verbal summary from intelligence officials.

The Washington Post reported three years ago that the officials who deliver Trump’s intelligence summaries have learned to dance carefully around anything that casts a dark light on Putin. “Russia-related intelligence that might draw Trump’s ire is in some cases included only in the written assessment and not raised orally,” it found, noting that briefers have learned that Russian-related intelligence tends to send the briefing “off the rails.”

And so the Russian bounty might well have been included in Trump’s official briefings, which everybody knows he doesn’t read. And the officials around him may well have decided not to mention the matter to him because experience has taught them not to broach the topic of Russian misconduct with the boss.

In other words, it’s possible Trump’s own mismanagement and lack of interest in doing his damn job has caused his briefers to have given up trying to brief him. It’s also possible he was told and just shut it out of his mind because he didn’t want to deal with it. It’s so much more fun to just send rage tweets about polls all day long.

Charles Pierce:

The White House spent three days trying to decide whether its most effective defense was that the Commander-in-Chief was actively negligent in this regard, or that the Commander-in-Chief was as plainly ignorant about this as he is about every other part of his job.

It seemed by Monday to have settled on the latter, with the president* himself tweeting out that his intelligence community had told him that there was no “credible” information regarding the bounty program, which is almost certainly a lie, and which undoubtably will bring a cascade of new leaks from Spook Central designed to counter the president*’s threadbare alibis. It also has been denied by both the Russian government and by the Taliban, both of which possess roughly the same credibility as the president* at this point. Not even Republicans are buying this tale. Congresswoman Liz Cheney already is raising all kinds of hell and, prior to getting together on the links with the president* on Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham insisted that it was “imperative” that Congress get to the bottom of the situation. Whether Graham will stay on the fairway in this regard is beyond my poor analytical skills.

I’m gong to go out on a limb and say it’s possible Miz Lindsey will stay on the fairway, so to speak, if only because Graham appears to be in a tougher re-election fight than he probably anticipated, and he may decide that opening up some space between himself and Trump is the smart move right now. We’ll see.

US President Donald Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin hold a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, on July 7, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

The New York Times reports that covid-19 testing sites are overwhelmed, especially in the West and South.

Coronavirus testing sites in Arizona, Florida and Texas have become a source of tension and risk, with numerous residents waiting in long lines, and others being turned away as sites reached capacity. Crowding is raising the risk of infection as people rush to the front of the line at some centers.

Residents of these and other hard-hit U.S. states are turning out in droves to get tested as the virus continues its surge across the South and West, threatening to overwhelm areas that until recently were spared the worst of the pandemic.

“Pushing, yelling, ZERO social distancing enforced,” one Houston resident wrote on Twitter. Two testing sites at Houston stadiums reached capacity just hours after opening on Saturday, according to the local health department. The city’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, has said that intensive care units there are nearly at capacity.

Elsewhere in Texas, Stefano West drove more than an hour from Killeen to Austin to find a testing site, noting that few were available closer to him. He said he then waited about four and a half hours in his car at the site.

Oh, and there’s this:

Nationwide, coronavirus cases have risen 65 percent over the past two weeks.

On Thursday, Trump was in Wisconsin bragging about how great the testing is.

“We have the greatest testing program in the world,” said President Trump. “We’ve developed it over a period of time and we’re up to almost 30-million tests. That means we’re going to have more cases. Deaths are down. We have one of the lowest mortality rates. We’ve done an incredible, historic job.”

That same day, some GOP senators pushed back on the Trump administration plan to end support for testing sites. So, apparently, that really was the plan, even though Trump himself vacillated all last week between saying yes, he wanted to close sites and no, he was just kidding. More recently Trump agreed to extend federal support for testing sites, in Texas. Elsewhere, who knows?

He’s still claiming that there are more cases only because there are more tests, notice. There has been an increase in the percentage of tests coming back positive, meaning that the real number of cases is going up, not just that more cases we wouldn’t have known about are being diagnosed.

I hate to say it, but it’s entirely possible that in a month or two we’re all be back in shelter-in-place mode. Some of us never left, of course.

The one decisive thing Trump did last week to address the pandemic was to suspend work visas, stopping foreigners from entering the country to take or seek jobs. (See: Barn, horse out of.)  He’s still thinking in terms of the virus being a foreign thing that can be locked out.

Meanwhile, a number of other news outlets have confirmed the story about Russia paying bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops. Trump denies that he was ever briefed. People who have worked for previous administrations say of course he was briefed. It’s always possible that Trump was briefed but wasn’t paying attention, or that the people who do the briefing have just plain given up trying to tell him anything and just show him cartoons.

On the other hand, Juan Cole writes that it doesn’t make a lot of sense for Russia to pay the Taliban to kill American soldiers, considering that Russia wants the U.S. to stay in Afghanistan. And that Trump has already pledged to leave Afghanistan. Professor Cole speculates that Russia wanted to piss off Americans so they would stay in Afghanistan.