Fox News is having a rough time. On Friday the network got caught publishing digitally altered and misleading photos on stories about Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ).

As part of a package of stories Friday about the zone, where demonstrators have taken over several city blocks on Capitol Hill after Seattle police abandoned the East Precinct, Fox’s website for much of the day featured a photo of a man standing with a military-style rifle in front of what appeared to be a smashed retail storefront.

The image was actually a mashup of photos from different days, taken by different photographers — it was done by splicing a Getty Images photo of an armed man, who had been at the protest zone June 10, with other images from May 30 of smashed windows in downtown Seattle. Another altered image combined the gunman photo with yet another image, making it appear as though he was standing in front of a sign declaring “You are now entering Free Cap Hill.” …

… In addition, Fox’s site for a time on Friday ran a frightening image of a burning city, above a package of stories about Seattle’s protests, headlined “CRAZY TOWN.” The photo actually showed a scene from St. Paul, Minnesota, on May 30. That image also was later removed.

Fox News also was punked by a Reddit post that quoted lines from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, attributing them to a CHAZ self-appointed leader named Raz.

Fox News fell for a Monty Python joke on Reddit lmao pic.twitter.com/Yo34yuQvlD

— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) June 13, 2020

Fox promoted the Reddit post as a sign of dissension within the protesting ranks until an avalanche of Twitter posts clued them in to the joke.

Eric Wemple has a great critique of Tucker Carlson’s coverage of the George Floyd protests over the past several days. Carlson has been hyping violence. If Carlson were your only source of news, you might believe a large part of America was being burned to the ground by rioting leftists.

This framing explains all of the rhetorical jujitsu that Carlson has rolled out since Floyd’s killing.

Wemple then provides some examples of Carlson’s inflammatory coverage. But then the violence dissipated.

A change of gears, accordingly, was in store for “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” On Monday, he denounced the growing cultural influence of the Black Lives Matter movement: “America went insane over the weekend. … This was without precedent in the modern era, a small group of highly aggressive, emotionally charged activists took over our culture. They forced the entire country to obey their will. It all happened so fast and with such ferocity that virtually no one resisted it.”

Well, somebody seems insane, but not “America.” And then Tucker went on a long diatribe that ended with “This may be a lot of things, this moment we’re living through, but it is definitely not about black lives, and remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will.”

Exactly who “they” are was not specified. And this seems to be the speech that lost Tucker some of his advertisers, including the Walt Disney Co.

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

ANTIFA! They’re everywhere they’re everywhere …

Clearly, the Trump campaign has made a choice to double down on white nationalism and “lawnorder,” also known as “politce brutality.” In brief, he’s standing against the tide of current events and yelling “no!” Gonna party like it’s 1965! In Selma! And he’s not going to give an inch!

For example, the Great Confederate Generals Flap would be baffling if Trump were a rational person. There are ten military bases, all in former Confederate states, named for Confederate generals. According to the BBC, “Many of these sites date back to camps set up during World War One that were reactivated again for World War Two, eventually becoming permanent establishments.” I assume there was no particular reason for naming them after Confederate generals other than to make the local (white) politicians happy at the time.

The Pentagon itself has said it was open to changing the names of the forts. Even Republicans in Congress appear to be mostly on board with the change. The Associated Press reported:

Senate Republicans, who are at risk of losing their majority in the November elections, aren’t with Trump on this issue. A GOP-led Senate panel on Thursday approved a plan by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, to have the names of Confederate figures removed from military bases and other Pentagon assets.

The only senator on the panel to vote no was Josh Hawley, R-MO, who in his first term has established himself as a five-alarm flake. I take it most Senate Republicans don’t want the names of Confederate generals to be the hill they die on.

But Trump’s ignorance of history is the stuff of, well, history.

“Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?” Mr Trump reportedly asked John Kelly, his then-chief of staff, when they took a private tour in 2017 of the USS Arizona Memorial, a ship commemorating the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during the Second World War.

“Trump had heard the phrase ‘Pearl Harbor’ and appeared to understand that he was visiting the scene of a historic battle, but he did not seem to know much else,” write the authors, who quote a former White House adviser concluding the US president was “dangerously uninformed”.

And then there was this brilliant moment:

With Trump, “most people don’t know” is a signal that it’s something he just learned, himself. The Pearl Harbor anecdote is especially stunning to me, given that Trump was born in 1946. In my experience most Americans born at that time grew up listening to their fathers talk about World War II. I am not quite that old and still heard about Pearl Harbor up the wazoo throughout my childhood. The Trump family has no legacy of service to the U.S., however, and apparently none of the adults Trump was exposed to as a child had any interest in it. That’s just not normal.

With that in mind, let us reflect on what Trump said about the Confederate generals:

…history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom. The United States of America trained and deployed our HEROES on these Hallowed Grounds, and won two World Wars. Therefore, my Administration will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 10, 2020

Maybe somebody should quietly explain to Trump that the Confederate generals were all losers — it might be said of some of them that they were better assets to the Union than the Confederacy — and none of them served in World War II. Somebody might want to check that Trump understands what the Confederacy even was., See also David Petraeus, Take the Confederate Names Off Our Army Bases.

I understand that a disproportionate number of enlisted military personnel are from southern states, but it’s also the case that about a third of today’s military personnel are nonwhite. Standing up for Confederate generals may play well with older white southerners, but I doubt it’s a critical issue right now even with most of them.

Greg Sargent wrote today,

Just for fun, somebody might challenge Trump to name one of the Confederate generals he’s defending. I am sure he knows nothing about any of them, nor does he give a hoo-haw about any of them. He’s not giving an inch only because that makes him look weak, and because he’s decided that catering to white racism is a winning strategy.

Eugene Robinson:

Perhaps in an attempt to gain political advantage — and perhaps, as much evidence suggests, because it’s what he truly believes — Trump has used this moment to side with Lost Cause white supremacy. His all-caps tweets for “LAW & ORDER” sound like George Wallace when he was governor of Alabama; his demand for a militarized response to the protests reminds me of Bull Connor, the Birmingham commissioner of public safety who attacked nonviolent civil rights protesters with water hoses and vicious dogs.

Does this still work? More than anything else, Trump seems to be copying the Nixon campaigns from 1968 and 1972, which pandered to white fears of black criminals and resentment of civil rights and affirmative action programs. And then there was Reagan, who ran in 1980 against those welfare queens. George H.W. Bush used Willie Horton to defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988. In 1992 Bill Cllinton defanged the racial issue with the Sister Souljah moment. But for all the many ways I dislike him, I don’t remember that George W. Bush’s general election campaign did that much racial dog whistling — maybe I’m forgetting something — and then of course the next presidential winner was Barack Obama.

Polling over current events suggests that a large part of white America has moved past the dog whistles and black criminal hysteria that Trump is counting on. Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey, WaPo:

Though Trump has long sought to exploit class resentment and racial tensions for political gain, his decision to continue to do so in the wake of the death of George Floyd — an unarmed black man killed in Minneapolis policy custody — has left some in his orbit uneasy, and Democrats eager to capitalize on what some say is a racist president revealing his true beliefs.

The racism in Trump’s 2016 campaign was mostly pointed directly at President Obama, not at all African Americans, and some whites might not have recognized it as racism. But now you’d have to be as stupid as Trump to not see it.

There is irony here, because I believe a big reason Trump defeated Clinton in 2016, especially in the rust-belt states, was that she was the one who hadn’t kept up with the times and was out of touch with the mood of working class voters. But as this awful year drags on, Trump grows more and more out of step with the large majority of Americans. As I wrote a few days ago, Trump has lost ground even with his best demographics — working class whites and older voters. And I don’t think defending Confederate generals is going to help him any.

I can remember watching the great moments in civil rights history of the 1960s on the teevee — I was a child after all — and I think seeing the dogs and fire hoses and ugly racism acted out in plain view shocked a lot of white people into changing their views on equal rights. We’re having a similar moment, long overdue, now. Politicians who don’t keep up are likely to be sorry.

Even white southerners have other things to worry about, I believe.

Stuff to Read

Erin Aubry Kaplan, White tribalism is under assault — from white people. That’s an amazing development

Eric Alterman, You Don’t Have to Publish Both Sides When One Side Is Fascism

Eric Boehlert, How Fox News lost the Black Lives Matter debate

Although the current archives only go back to 2005, I’ve been writing this blog for close to 19 years now.  And over those years I’ve linked to a lot of right-wing sites to show what sort of nuttery is going on in them.

One of those sites is Legal Insurrection, written by a fellow named William Jacobson. Over the years Jacobson has been a reliably consistent apologist for whatever outrageous nonsense the Right is fomenting, and I have commented on his work occasionally, although it’s been a long time. This is one example, from 2009, although I notice the Legal Insurrection post I was commenting on appears to have been removed.

However, Jacobson is also a professor of law at Cornell University, and it seems a couple of his recent blog posts about Black Lives Matter have inspired an effort to get him fired. In a post full of high-minded sentiments about intellectual freedom and the importance of vibrant intellectual communities, he writes, “Those posts accurately detail the history of how the Black Lives Matters Movement started, and the agenda of the founders which is playing out in the cultural purge and rioting taking place now.”

So let’s take a look. This one from June 2 is titled “The Bloodletting and Wilding Is Part of An Agenda To Tear Down The Country.”

Yeah, it’s 2020 and this specimen is still using the word wilding in the context of racial crime..

Let us consider now what Professor Jacobson calls “history.” I’m putting nearly the entire post here, because I genuinely want people to read it all the way through.

This has been a long time coming. At least a generation, maybe two. The left methodically has taken control of key institutions to implement an anti-American, anti-Capitalist agenda.

You send your kids to public schools and college, where they are taught from their earliest years that America and capitalism are the sources of evil in the world, that we are a systemically racist society that consumes ‘black and brown bodies,’ while socialist and communist systems are more equal and fair. It’s all a lie, but it’s a lie told by the teachers, professors, and administrators with power. The real racists are the people who obsess about race, and who judge people based on the color of their skin.

When your kids emerge from the social justice warfare meat grinder, you don’t recognize them anymore. Oh well, you shrug.

There is a concerted effort funded by leftist billionaires and high tech companies to control what you can say, and to silence you through mob action or social media throttling if you get out of line. The large corporate media, with only a couple of exceptions, is thoroughly corrupt and works every day to elect their preferred candidates, always Democrats.

The law enforcement system is being undermined by district attorneys funded by George Soros whose agenda is to prevent enforcement of laws, and politicians whose goal is to see those arrested released immediately without bail. We’re seeing that right now with rioters and looters almost immediately released. The next push is to defund the police.

Hollywood, The music industry. Television. Gone.

We still have the vote and can win elections, despite the disadvantage. But it’s not a guarantee. Which is why the left wants to subvert voting integrity.

All this time, you have seen bits and pieces, and figured that while you might not agree, it wasn’t a threat to our existence.

The wilding and looting should be your wake up call. When seconds counted, the police were pulled back by the policitians.

The goal is to destroy capitalism, and to seek revenge. The Black Lives Matter movement, founded based on fraudulent narratives of the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases, is led by anti-American, anti-capitalist activists. They have concocted a false narrative of mass murder of Blacks at the hands of police, when the statistics show otherwise. They will exploit George Floyd’s death mercilessly to drive that agenda. And they will have some success, because all the institutions listed above are behind them.

There are short term things that can be done, but it depends on the federal government because in the Democrat states where most of the violence took place, the politicians are part of the problem. There needs to be a massive and relentless tracking down of the people who helped coordinate the violence. It needs to start right now. Of course, it will stop on a dime if Joe Biden is elected, but it needs to be started. It should not take more than 2-3 months to accomplish this, and it will take the key criminals off the street in the federal system where activist District Attorney’s can’t interfere.

Democrat states and cities are in a bad way financially due to their own mismanagement of their economies and their tolerance of rioters and looters. They all will be seeking federal bailouts. Just say no, unless there is structural change.

But these are just a short term actions that will not change the rot in our institutions. I wish I had a long-term solution. That’s something that needs to be discussed in the coming weeks.

Amidst all this gloom, there is a ray of light. Most of the country didn’t riot and loot. Most of the people in the country don’t hate capitalism and want a Marxist revolution. Most of the country still loves the country. Don’t lose sight of that. If after two generations the radical left were not able to beat patriotism out of most Americans, there is a chance.

This wackjob is teaching at a major university, mind you.

I’m not going to take the time to refute all this nonsense — mostly, a festival of strawman fallacies — because it would take a book to do so, but in brief Jacobson brushes aside generations of racial oppression so that he can fit the Black Lives Matter movement into his deeper concerns about the Communist Takeover of Capitalism, or whatever. And the destruction of capitalism is all a nefarious plot fomented by “leftists.” It’s not like capitalism is failing on its own or anything. (See also “The Looming Bank Collapse” at The Atlantic, which I just read this morning.)

And, of course, he’s ignoring the way red, rural states are soaking up the tax dollars of those liberal urban centers, Blue states and their allegedly dysfunctional cities have been bailing out the poorer and more rural red states for decades. But let’s go on.

The other post that’s gotten Jacobson into trouble, “Reminder: ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ is a fabricated narrative from the Michael Brown case” does get one point right — a whole lot of forensic evidence discredited the claim that Michael Brown was executed while he had his hands up in surrender.

But it’s not like the police shooting of Michael Brown was an isolated case and that black men and women aren’t executed by police on a dreadfully regular basis. Sometimes law-abiding people are killed by Amerian police while they do have their hands up. Sometimes they are in their own homes and asleep in their beds. And these atrocities keep happening, over and over and over. I can’t imagine how far up one’s ass one must keep one’s head to not be at least a little concerned about this.

Further, Michael Brown’s shooting was hardly an isolated incident in Ferguson, Missouri. A federal inquiry found a long pattern of abuse of Ferguson’s citizens at the hands of police.

The Police Department in Ferguson, Mo., has persistently and repeatedly violated the constitutional rights of African Americans, jailing them for minor offenses far more often than whites, using traffic stops to arrest them disproportionately and subjecting them to excessive force, a Justice Department investigation has concluded.

The investigation portrays a city in which police dogs were set upon blacks but not whites and where blacks were seven times more likely to be subjected to force than whites, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation’s findings.

Officers and municipal court officials in the St. Louis suburb exchanged racist emails, the investigation found, including one from 2008 predicting that President-elect Barack Obama would not be in office long because, it asked, “what black man holds a steady job for four years”? Another email relayed a joke in which a black woman receives $5,000 for having an abortion and, when she asks why, is told that the money came from the citizens group Crime Stoppers.

And even if we assume the shooting of Michael Brown was justified — and I’m not saying it was — this event was followed by absolutely outrageous behavior on the part of St. Louis police, including what has to be called an out-and-out police riot. And while Jacobson might not be aware of it, the Michael Brown incident took place against the backdrop of long-delayed justice for the shooting of  Anthony Lamar Smith by St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley. Will Bunch describes that bit of history here. Although the system let Stockley be acquitted, the St. Louis police board settled a wrongful death suit with Smith’s survivors for $900,000.

But in Jacobson’s mind, those simple black people are not really angry about police brutality and are just being stirred up by unnamed leftists who want to destroy capitalism.

It may be that William Jacobson is not dragging his wackjobbery into his classroom, and that he is competent at teaching whatever part of law he teaches. In that case, Cornell University might be justified in continuing to let him teach, which appears to be happening. It’s really hard to imagine that degree of bigotry doesn’t color the man’s professional work, but let’s continue.

The larger issue is, where is the balance between free speech and yelling fire in a crowded theater? Or, how much do we have to tolerate speech that is clearly harmful to our nation and society?

And then, of course, who gets to judge? Not the government, as a rule, because I don’t want the government to have censorship power. Even though the current White House thinks it does.

But Cornell Univeristy is not the government. Cornell has to consider whether keeping someone like Jacobson on as a professor is damaging the university’s standing and potentially driving better students to other universities. That possibility is one reason I think the Jacobson case requires widespread notice. If I were a recent college graduate with offers from more than one prestigious law school, this story ought to put Cornell at the bottom of the list.

It’s also the case that in the free marketplace of ideas, some ideas are worthwhile, and some are poison. And the First Amendment doesn’t guarantee that you won’t be criticized and ridiculed by other citizens for spewing out poison.

I’ve written elsewhere about how to protect liberal values without violating liberal values. See, for example, Tolerating Intolerance from December 2008. And it’s also the case that the Right perpetually uses every trick in the book to shut down speech they don’t like. See, for example “The Jackboot of Conservative Correctness” from June 2011.

Back in 2006 I wrote a post titled “Being Liberal Doesn’t Mean Being a Patsy.”

Some people don’t understand what tolerance is. It doesn’t mean being a patsy, or not respecting personal parameters. Righties in particular seem to think that because liberals value “tolerance” we’re supposed to stand aside like grinning idiots and approve of everything they do. Some righties think “tolerance” confers on them a right not to be disagreed with.

No; tolerance of public speech means I must not stop someone else from expressing an opinion. But “tolerance” doesn’t mean I can’t express my opinion of his opinion. Tolerance of behavior as a rule means tolerating behavior that is chosen from free will and not harming anyone else. It doesn’t mean I should stand aside if behavior is harming someone else. I don’t know why so many righties can’t grasp that.

And here we still are.

“Hacko di Tutti Hacki” (hack of all hacks, in Italiano, sorta) is Charles Pierce’s invention from awhile back, and it makes me laugh. And it truly fits “Attorney General” Bill Barr. Here is Pierce, today:

Just as ancient tales were being revived about what a classic bully Attorney General Bill Barr was in his younger days, a revival premised on his apparent lust for some Antietam Creek cosplay in Lafayette Park, a retired federal judge popped up on Wednesday and let Barr have one right in the chops. The retired judge was named John Gleeson, and he had been tasked by Judge Emmett Sullivan to submit an amicus brief on the attempt by the Department of Justice to give Michael Flynn a belated walk on the charges to which Flynn already had pleaded guilty. Gleeson proceeded to stomp a mudhole in the DOJ.

And here are some highlights from John Gleeson’s brief:

“The Government’s ostensible grounds for seeking dismissal are conclusively disproven by its own briefs filed earlier in this very proceeding. They contradict and ignore this Court’s prior orders, which constitute law of the case. They are riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact. And they depart from positions that the Government has taken in other cases.”
“The facts surrounding the filing of the Government’s motion constitute clear evidence of gross prosecutorial abuse. They reveal an unconvincing effort to disguise as legitimate a decision to dismiss that is based solely on the fact that Flynn is a political ally of President Trump.”
“The Court should deny leave because there is clear evidence of a gross abuse of prosecutorial power…The Government has engaged in highly irregular conduct to benefit a political ally of the President. The facts of this case overcome the presumption of regularity. The Court should therefore deny the Government’s motion to dismiss, adjudicate any remaining motions, and then sentence the Defendant.”
“That is about as straightforward a case of materiality as a prosecutor, court, or jury will ever see. In asserting otherwise, the Government struggles mightily to argue that Flynn’s false statements neither affected nor could have affected the FBI’s investigation of his and his colleagues’ potential ties to the Russian government.”

Oh, snap.

This is why it won’t matter what Trump says about racial equality and unification and whatever.

Trump supporters are disgusting. These Franklinville, NJ Trump supporters mockingly re-enacted the George Floyd murder. This needs to go viral! Who is this man? pic.twitter.com/xOOV2F7yNs

— Black Lives Matter (@HKrassenstein) June 8, 2020

These meatheads mocking George Floyd’s death in front of Trump’s name are what Trump stands for. And that’s all he stands for.

Two of the meatheads have faced some consequences; one guy is a New Jersey corrections officer who has been banned from his workplace pending investigation. The kneeling guy was a FedEx employee who was subsequently fired.

The word is that Trump is going to give an address written by Stephen Miller, for pity’s sake. That’s about as useless as me writing a paper for the American Mathematical Society. The words won’t matter; it’s an exercise in box-checking. It might soothe a few Republican moderates looking for an excuse to not abandon ship, but that’s about it.

There is more news about Trump’s declining poll numbers; see Wave of New Polling Suggests an Erosion of Trump’s Support by Nate Cohn in the New York Times.

His approval rating has fallen to negative 12.7 percentage points among registered or likely voters, down from negative 6.7 points on April 15, according to FiveThirtyEight estimates. And now a wave of new polls shows Joe Biden with a significant national lead, placing him in a stronger position to oust an incumbent president than any challenger since Bill Clinton in the summer of 1992.

We’ve got a way to go yet. But keep reading the Nate Cohn article —

Over the shorter term, the decline in the president’s standing has been particularly pronounced among white voters without a college degree, helping to explain why the Trump campaign has felt compelled to air advertisements in Ohio and Iowa, two mostly white working-class battleground states where Mr. Trump won by nearly 10 points four years ago.

In the most recent polls, white voters without a college degree back the president by 21 points, down from 31 points in March and April and down from the 29-point lead Mr. Trump held in the final polls of registered voters in 2016.

Mr. Trump didn’t just lose support to the undecided column; Mr. Biden ticked up to an average of 37 percent among white voters without a degree. The figure would be enough to assure Mr. Biden the presidency, given his considerable strength among white college graduates. In the most recent polls, white college graduates back Mr. Biden by a 20-point margin, up four points since the spring. It’s also an eight-point improvement for the Democratic nominee since 2016, and a 26-point improvement since 2012.

Trump is also doing far worse with women voters than he did in 2016, and he’s slightly behind Biden with older voters. I’m not sure if there is a demographic in the country in which Trump support is holding steady, actually.

There’s also a new podcast at FiveThirtyEight about the erosion of Trump’s support, which I am listening to as I keyboard. People are not impressed by Trump’s handling of either the protests or the pandemic. However, the statistics nerds remind us, Biden’s advantage in national polls won’t necessarily translate into a win in the Electoral College, especially if the gap between Biden and Trump is only four or five percentage points.

Greg Sargent proposes that these numbers are showing us a big cultural shift in white America.

Only 35 percent of Americans overall approve of Trump’s handling of the protests, the Post poll finds. Meanwhile, 74 percent support the protests and 69 percent say the killing of George Floyd shows broader problems in how police treat black Americans.

But note these findings among whites: Only 39 percent of them approve of Trump’s approach, while 57 percent disapprove; 69 percent of them support the protests; and 68 percent of them say Floyd’s death reveals systemic police mistreatment of blacks.

In these cases, there’s not a big difference along educational lines: Strikingly, a bare majority of non-college whites disapproves of Trump’s handling of the protests. And large majorities of both non-college and college-educated whites support the protests and say Floyd’s killing shows broader problems in the police treatment of black Americans.

Also striking: The 69 percent of Americans who believe the killing represents broader systemic problems represent a 26-point shift since 2014, when only 43 percent said the same on a comparable question.

The many videos of police brutality and murders probably are playing a part in this shift, but I doubt that’s the only factor at work. It may be that working class whites are finally getting a clue that the system doesn’t work for them, either, and that’s not because of nonwhites. or immigrants, or any other oppressed and marginalized group.

And then there’s the person of Trump himself, who can’t even fake being a decent human being for ten minutes straight. It may be that a lot of people are just now realizing what a colossal asshole Trump really is. The real Trump is not the guy from The Apprentice they thought they were voting for.  For example:

Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?

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

As Jeff Tiedrich of Smirking Chimp commented, “I have to confess I did not have ‘That 75 year old guy faked his own bleeding head trauma’ on my Donald Trump Batshittery Bingo card.” The gentleman who was pushed is still hospitalized, btw.  Politico reports that the tweet made some Republicans “cringe.” But the only way they’ll get Trump to be less of an asshole is if they lock him in the bunker and cut off his Internet access. That’s who he is. He can’t be otherwise.

And this takes us to the fortunes of other Republicans on the ballot with him. Paul Waldman:

Right now, Trump surely knows he’s in trouble, but he doesn’t seem to have much in the way of answers. Instead, he’s doing what he has always done: trying to create conflict and division, sending dozens or even hundreds of tweets a day, hoping that schoolyard nicknames, juvenile insults and fearmongering will ensure his success.

So far it’s not working. Republicans afraid he’ll drag them down may hope that he can pull off another unexpected victory. But even they may now realize that his shocking 2016 win was mostly a spectacular coincidence of circumstances. Yes, he realized when other Republican politicians didn’t (or couldn’t) that there was an appetite within his party for naked bigotry and xenophobia. But it’s not as though Trump planned to have then-FBI Director James B. Comey cast suspicion on Hillary Clinton 11 days before the election.

Trump’s allies are trying to create a repeat of those events by launching investigations of Biden in the desperate hope that they can uncover something damaging. But at the moment, that too looks ineffectual. Which means they’ll have to rely on Trump to come up with some way to turn things around.

It may be, the FiveThirtyEight nerds say, that losing faith in Trump will not translate into votes for Biden. But it may mean that a lot of one-time Trump voters will just stay home in November. And that would be a disaster for Republicans in other elections. Heh.

As I said yesterday, we’re at the mercy of events now. Trump isn’t going to change tactics — I understand he’s even pushing to restart his big rallies soon — so it will take an event I can’t imagine to pump his numbers up again. But a lot happens I didn’t imagine before it happened. And then there’s the possibility that the election itself will be such a mess that there’s no clear winner, and of course our courts are now stuffed with Federalist Society hacks, courtesy of Mitch McConnell.

If this were a novel, I’d be skipping to the ending already.

Stuff to Read

Do read American Psycho (“Jared Kushner—climber, sycophant, snob—is the perfect avatar of elite incompetence for our times.”) by David Roth at New Republic. Absolutely delicious snark.

Pair the David Roth piece with Ivanka Trump’s Vicious Behind-the-Scene Power Plays by Nancy LeTourneau at Washington Monthly.

Why Is Trump’s Campaign Buying Ads in Markets He Has No Chance of Winning? by Martin Longman. Basically, the Trump campaign is running ads in DC so that Trump will see them when he watches television and be happy. Seriously.

NPR, No Sign Of Antifa So Far In Justice Department Cases Brought Over Unrest. Do tell.

75 year old Martin Gugino, after being shoved by police.

I’ve been thinking about history, and what history can and cannot teach us about current events.

One thing history ought to teach us is that nations, politics, and the course of events are not just shaped by the plans laid by people in power. As often as not, the trajectory of history is shaped by how the people in power respond — or react — to events they hadn’t planned for.

Presidents more often than not are remembered for how they dealt with unexpected crises rather than how well they carried out their campaign promises. Are they able to adjust their thinking as situations demand, or do they remain stuck in their ideological playbooks — think Herbert Hoover’s inability to deal with the Depression. See also Peter Baker, Presidents Form Their Legacies in Crises.

Trump has been in a uniquely bad position since, in fact, he doesn’t even do plans. His only objective is his own glory. He has more or less lumbered through three exhausting years in the White House by taking credit for good news and blaming others for bad, whether he had a hand in events or not. He’s been sheltered from the consequences of his own actions, or inactions as the case may be, by congressional Republicans and the right-wing media infrastructure.

But now the nation has been hit by massive crises, and people are seeing for themselves that Trump is failing miserably to address them. He can’t adjust his thinking because he doesn’t think; he just reacts, and all of his reactions are either self-protecting or self-aggrandizing. He cannot put his emotional neediness aside to just do what is required any more than he is likely to master quantum physics or the title role in Verdi’s Otello.

And in this, he is showing us that the tides of events, and history, sometimes are too big to be subdued by propaganda and gaslighting.

Greg Sargent, this morning:

President Trump’s advisers are letting it be known that he is seriously considering a televised national address on race and national unity. When your paroxysms of laughter subside, consider the serious point here: This reveals just how badly Trump misread the politics of this moment, to a potentially fatal degree.

You know that if he does give such an address, it will consist of anodyne phrases strung together by his staff in no discernible order and clumsily read by Trump from a teleprompter in the weird sing-song tone he adopts when he’s trying to sound serious.  It will mean nothing and accomplish nothing, but the Trump campaign and its Republican enablers will claim he “addressed” racism, as if it were just a box that needed to be checked. And then Trump will prompty resume tweeting juvenile insults of everyone in the world who doesn’t adore him enough.

A typical view of Trump’s proposed address:

Spare us, please! Trump knows nothing about race or national unity, plus he can’t read a teleprompter, so it will be like another hostage video… https://t.co/HdG5bcPWkA

— John Dean (@JohnWDean) June 8, 2020

See Pretty Much No One Thinks It’s A Good Idea For Trump To Give A Speech On Racism And Unity. Nearly any other person who has served as POTUS in the nation’s history would have given such an address already. Indeed, presidential nominee Joe Biden has already given such an address. But Trump cannot rise to this moment because Trump is massively unsuited to be president at all. I doubt the man could competently manage a WalMart, to be honest. Yes he has owned a lot of businesses, many of which failed, but there’s no indication he has ever been all that hands-on in running any of them. All his life he’s just thrown his daddy’s money at walls to see if it sticks.

Back to Greg Sargent:

What’s been exposed is this: Trump simply will not, or cannot, operate out of any conception of what’s good for the country — the whole country. Faced with enormous crises, he has tried to pretend they don’t exist, or has tried gaslighting us into disbelieving our own eyes and ears about them, or has used them as occasions to demagogue and incite hatreds in ways he believes will help his reelection.

This takes us back to history. Trump and his team reacted to the protests that followed George’s Floyd’s killing as if it were still 1968. They assumed they coujld invoke “lawnorder” and call the protesters “thugs,” and the white voters of America would rally behind them. But that hasn’t worked this time. And even as the administration tentatively suggests that maybe Trump could address racism and national unity, administration officials continue to deny there is systemic racism in law enforcement. Which means Trump’s people can’t address racism and national unity, because they don’t know what those words mean.

And this is what happened when Trump learned that Mitt Romney marched with Black Lives Matter:

Tremendous sincerity, what a guy. Hard to believe, with this kind of political talent, his numbers would “tank” so badly in Utah! https://t.co/KqHsHmSRKo

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

In fact, Romney’s approval numbers in Utah are looking pretty good — 56 percent approve, 42 percent disapprove, according to a recent poll. According to FiveThirtyEight, Trump nationwide is currently at 41.4 percent approve, 54.3 percent disapprove.

We’ve all heard that history repeats itself, but what does that mean, exactly? History does show us repeating patterns involving class, poverty, various forms of tribalism, greed, war, colonialism, etc. But at the same time, no nation, society or culture remains static for very long. Everything is always changing, even if in small and subtle ways. So while we’re dealing with many of the same issues as in 1968, it ain’t 1968 any more. A lot really has changed. In many ways, we’re all marching into a great unknown; the patterns of the past are not necessarily going to hold.

It’s too soon to say that Trump’s chances for re-election are dead — events may yet occur that change the current trajectory — but it appears they’re about to start circling the drain. Do see Jonathan Last at The Bulwark, The 2020 Cake Is (Almost) Baked.

See also Matt Yglesias, Joe Biden has a really big lead in the polls.

A Monday morning CNN poll showed Joe Biden with a staggering 14-point lead over President Trump as the electorate’s stated level of concern with “race relations” soars and the former vice president is seen as much better equipped to handle the issue.

Winning the popular vote by such a large margin would likely mean Democrats overperformed in battleground states and in places like Georgia, Iowa, and Texas that would put the Senate clearly in play.

And while the CNN poll is just one poll, and something of an outlier at that, there is now a very clear trend in national polling — Biden was winning before the outbreak of massive national protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and that lead has gotten bigger.

Maybe not 14 points bigger, but bigger than it was before and clearly larger than any lead Hillary Clinton ever held in the 2016 campaign.

Events are driving us all now. At this point the scope and depth of Trump’s incompetence and unfitness are too visible to hide, but where the tides are taking us is hard to say.

Gabriel Sherman writes at Vanity Fair that Trump has been calling people and prodding them to admit that the polls are all wrong.

“He’s asking people to agree with him that the polls are biased. But no one is telling him what he wants to hear,” said a Republican briefed on the calls. Republicans know how bad things are, but the party still believes sticking with Trump is the best bet for holding the Senate. Last week, Mitch McConnell told Republican senators that they couldn’t abandon Trump, according to a source. McConnell reminded Republicans that former New Hampshire senator Kelly Ayotte lost her 2016 reelection bid after breaking with Trump over the Access Hollywood video.

Hey Mitch — it ain’t 2016 any more, either.

U.S. President Donald Trump announces an agreement with Mexico on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) at the White House in Washington, U.S., August 27, 2018. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque – RC1D94FA7CB0

There are new reports that in a Monday morning Oval Office meeting, on the day of the Bible Stunt, Trump demanded the military put 10,000 active duty troops into the streets “immediately” to counter protests. AG Barr, SecDef Esper, and Chair of the Joint Chiefs Milley talked Trump out of this by saying the governors could call National Guard instead. This brought about the inhinged conference call in which Trump yelled at state governors that they were “weak” and threatened to send federal troops if they refused to deploy the Guard. And then to prop up his he-man image, Trump engaged in the Bible stunt.

Talk of using federal troops against protesters has the military up in arms, so to speak. This is not to say the military is about to overthrow Trump in a coup; it is not. And it’s not to say that Trump doesn’t have loyal followers in uniform. But Trump has been put on notice by a significant portion of the brass that he can’t order the military to do anything he wants. The military willl obey a reasonable order, but not every order. The idea of ordering federal troops in U.S. against protesters was a bridge way too far.

But this isn’t the first time Trump and the military have butted heads. It’s a pattern, actually.

At the beginning of his administration, Trump treated the military as some kind of perk of office, like use of the company jet. Here is a Business Insider story from 2017 —

What has set military members off is Trump’s insistence on saying “my generals” and “my military,” which some say suggests a misguided sense of ownership over the country’s armed forces.

In the past, former military members have voiced their displeasure with Trump’s phrasing. Former Army Officer Mark Hertling recently told Business Insider he found Trump’s language “extremely offensive.”

“The US military belongs to the nation, not the president. We’re not his,” Hertling said. …

…One of the first instances came on Inauguration Day in January — at a luncheon just hours after being inaugurated — when Trump recognized Gens. James Mattis and John Kelly.

“I see my generals, generals that are going to keep us so safe,” Trump said to members of Congress and other dignitaries, before saying to Mattis, “These are central casting. If I’m doing a movie, I pick you General.”

But “my” generals were always a bit cool about being cast as Trump’s trained monkeys, especially when Trump issued orders to them on Twitter. See a post I wrote in July 2017, Did the Joint Chiefs Just Diss Trump?

And it’s not just the brass. The Military Times has been reporting for a while that support for Trump among active-duty troops has been slipping; see stories from October 2018 and December 2019.

And then there was Trump’s repeated demands for a fancy eastern-European style military parade, which he sorta kinda got last year. Clearly, his goal was to surround himself with military glory. Service chiefs were expected to stand near Trump for public display; I assume they complied. He wanted the same thing this year, but the pandemic has spared us, somewhat. Trump has been pushing for a 4th of July parade in Washington; this weekend may have changed his mind. We’ll see.

Let us recall the flap over Edward Gallagher, the “freaking evil” renegade SEAL officer adopted by Trump as his personal military totem. In brief, the Navy wanted Gallagher disciplined; Trump interfered. This led to a convuluted mess, culiminating in Trump’s firing of the Secretary of the Navy. Trump began attacking the Pentagon itself as part of the “deep state” that was out to get him. There was much grumbling on many op ed pages about Trump’s undermining of military discipline and the code of justice.

In December 2018 Trump announced he wanted U.S. troops withdrawn from Syria, which is what inspired General Mattis to resign as Secretary of Defense. More recently there was the shameful episode in which Trump, apparently on a whim, told Turkish President Erdogan that invading northern Syria and slaughtering our allies, the Kurds, would be just peachy with the U.S. I suspect the brass was mortified about that.

I missed it at the time, but shortly after General Mattis announced his resignation,  Admiral James Stavridis (Ret.), a former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, published an op ed at Time titled Why Trump’s Generals Have Abandoned Ship.

In the cases of Generals H.R. McMaster, John Kelly and, finally, James Mattis–all of whom I’ve counted as not just colleagues but also friends–the details of each individual departure vary somewhat. But the common theme is actually pretty simple: President Trump simply cannot be briefed, staffed, scheduled or organized in a manner that long-serving military personnel find effective.  …

… The President famously does not actually read the voluminous policy papers with which he is presented. From the perspective of a senior military mind, this would be akin to a car refusing to be gassed up. According to multiple reported accounts, Trump’s briefings have to be put in the simplest terms; the traditional complex military PowerPoint slides were anathema to him. The military presents its shared wisdom by detailing a traditional set of information: assumptions, existing conditions, courses of action, centers of gravity and, in the end, the ultimate three options suggested to the decisionmaker; the President prefers to go with his gut. This made for a continuous collision between the President and his generals, and the recent series of decisions-by-tweet (notably including the withdrawal from Syria) truly underscore the impossibility of molding the President’s approach.

See also Top Military Officers Unload on Trump in the November 2019 issue of The Atlantic.

So there has been tension building between Trump and “his” military. The brass hasn’t liked Trump very much for some time. Still, for the most part they were keeping quiet about a sitting president, until now.

After Gen. Jim Mattis’s rebuke of Trump published at The Atlantic, other retired officers felt freer to speak up. For example, eighty-nine former defense officials signed an open letter in WaPo, The military must never be used to violate constitutional rights.

Jacqueline Alemany at the Washington Post wrote,

Candidate Trump once said he gets his military advice from “watching the shows.” President Trump stocked his Cabinet with “my generals.” Now, the president is on the receiving end of a battering ram of criticism from some of those same military heavyweights he once bragged about as he vows to “dominate” those protesting racial injustice — comparing the commander in chief to a wannabe dictator whose actions are endangering the country.

Most recently, Gen. Colin Powell announced he would be voting for Joe Biden. Trump responded with one of his signature juvenile taunts.  See also Dismay and disappointment — A breach of sacred trust by Gen. Vincent K. Brooks (Ret.) at Military Times.

It’s true that most of the people we’ve heard from are retired, but I don’t think there’s any doubt they speak for a large majority of officers and for the Pentagon generally. Robert Burns of the Associated Press wrote yesterday,

Tensions between the White House and Pentagon have stretched to near a breaking point over President Donald Trump’s threat to use military force against street protests triggered by George Floyd’s death.

Friction in this relationship, historically, is not unusual. But in recent days, and for the second time in Trump’s term, it has raised a prospect of high-level resignations and the risk of lasting damage to the military’s reputation.

What are the implications of this development? Well, for one thing, it’s going to be harder for Trump to use the military as part of his re-election campaign. He does have a few trained monkeys like the disgraced Gallagher he can trot out at rallies and photo ops, but there may not be many uniformed generals or admirals willing to get their pictures taken with him now.

See also Franklin Foer, The Trump Regime Is Beginning to Topple, which is worth reading all the way through.

The most important theorist of nonviolent revolutions is the late political scientist Gene Sharp. … In Sharp’s taxonomy, the autocrat’s grasp on power depends entirely on the allegiance of the armed forces. When the armed forces withhold cooperation, the dictator is finished. Of course, the U.S. is far more democratic than the regimes Sharp studied and doesn’t fit his taxonomy neatly. But on Wednesday, the president’s very own secretary of defense explicitly rejected Trump’s threat to deploy active-duty military officers to American streets. It’s among the most striking instances of an official bucking a president in recent decades.

The examples of Serbia, Ukraine, and Tunisia show how even the subservient unexpectedly break from a leader once that leader is doomed to illegitimacy. And to an extent, the cycle of abandonment has already begun. Jim Mattis’s excoriation of his old boss prodded Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly and Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to echo his condemnation of the president. As each defector wins praise for moral courage, it incentivizes the next batch of defectors.

Even if the protests fizzle—and the parade of denunciations comes to an end—it’s worth pausing to marvel at the moment. Despite the divisions of the country, a majority of its people joined together in shared abhorrence of the president, at least for an instant. Sectors of society that studiously avoid politics broke with their reticence. In a dark era, when it seemed beyond the moral capacities of the nation, it mustered the will to disobey.

Last week Lee Drutman of FiveThirtyEight wrote that If Republicans Are Ever Going To Turn On Trump, This Might Be The Moment.

This is one of those rare moments of uncertainty when it’s possible that the wall of Republican support sheltering Trump finally crumbles. It is still unlikely to happen, but as I’ve written before, if it does happen, it will happen suddenly. …

… Most likely, Senate and House Republicans will eventually find a way to defend Trump’s actions, as they have done before (remember the impeachment trial?). Trump may not be perfect, they may say, but the Democrats are much worse. This is the prevailing rationalization of our zero-sum politics.

But in moments like this, when nobody knows exactly what to say or do, a few unlikely public critiques of Trump could have a surprising cascade effect. And if the president continues to transgress widely-shared democratic values — putting congressional Republicans in an increasingly difficult electoral position — we may yet see a consequential crack in the Republican Party.

Especially since public opinion is overwhelmingly on the side of the protesters it’s unlikely Trump will expand his base by continuing to be a dick about them. Remember the Bigger Asshole rule? You can’t possibly be a bigger asshole than Trump.

Steve Bell/The Guardian

It’s now official; while our attention was diverted elsewhere, Biden secured enough earned delegates to clinch the nomination. The convention will be just a formality. Last week Paul Waldman published a post titled Maybe Joe Biden isn’t such a terrible candidate after all. It’s worth reading.

The Washington Post reports that huge numbers of protesters have gathered in Washington DC and are engaged in multiple rallies in several parts of the district. I fervently wish them much success and an injury-free day. Do check out the photograph that accompanies the article, showing crowds approaching the White House from Lafayette Square Park. See the snipers on the roof of the White House? The equestrian statue is of Andrew Jackson..

Yesterday Trump was jubilant because of an unexpectedly not too awful jobs report. It turns out there was a misclassification error in the report that made the numbers look better than they are. Oops. Trump hadn’t tweeted about the error, though, when I checked.

At Vanity Fair, Eric Lutz writes that polls show Americans massively disapprove of Trump’s handling of the protests.

Two-thirds of Americans in an ABC News survey published Friday said they disapproved of the president’s handling of the response to Floyd’s killing, compared with just 32% who approve. As the Atlantic’s David Frum pointed out, it’s possible that some of those disapprove because they want Trump to be even more aggressive in his approach. But the poll suggests that it’s Trump’s authoritarian crackdown, divisiveness, and disregard for protesters’ demands that is driving the disapproval. …

… There remains a receptive audience for this ugly conception of “law and order”—it worked for Richard Nixon, Richard Daley, and countless others in the 1960s, and Trump aides are counting on it working for the president come November. But wrenching video of Floyd’s killing—as well as a spree of clips documenting outrageous, seemingly unprovoked violence by police against protesters in recent days—have made the issues at play here exceedingly difficult to deny.

The issue of the militarization and brutality of police is at the forefront now. See Jamelle Bouie, The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It.

Rioting police have driven vehicles into crowds, reproducing the assault that killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. They have surrounded a car, smashed the windows, tazed the occupants and dragged them out onto the ground. Clad in paramilitary gear, they have attacked elderly bystanders, pepper-sprayed cooperative protesters and shot “nonlethal” rounds directly at reporters, causing serious injuries. In Austin, Texas, a 20-year-old man is in critical condition after being shot in the head with a “less-lethal” round. Across the country, rioting police are using tear gas in quantities that threaten the health and safety of demonstrators, especially in the midst of a respiratory disease pandemic.

None of this quells disorder. Everything from the militaristic posture to the attacks themselves does more to inflame and agitate protesters than it does to calm the situation and bring order to the streets. In effect, rioting police have done as much to stoke unrest and destabilize the situation as those responsible for damaged buildings and burning cars. But where rioting protesters can be held to account for destruction and violence, rioting police have the imprimatur of the state.

We got a preview of all this after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. At that time Joan Walsh wrote,

“This looks like a textbook case of what not to do,” Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund told Lawrence O’Donnell.

On the 49th anniversary of the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles, it’s important to remember that the famous Kerner Commission established to look at 1960s urban upheavals found that virtually every “riot” was triggered by police brutality – and that has continued in our own time, from the so-called Rodney King riots in 1992 through today. On MSNBC Ifill indicted the failures of police training and culture that led not only to the killing of Michael Brown, but also the overreaction to every night of protests.

But Ifill also made the important point that the militarization of the Ferguson police is something entirely new and enormously disturbing. The images Wednesday night should wake all of us up to the alarming militarization of local cops all over the country. How did a local police department get tanks and trucks and body armor that look like it all was designed for the streets of Baghdad and not a little city outside St. Louis?

This is one of many issues that has been allowed to fester for too long. We need massive police reform. See also the New York Times editorial board, America’s Protests Won’t Stop Until Police Brutality Does and Charles Pierce, The Chief Vector Is the Executive Branch.

Elsewhere, in the Baby Steps department, we learn that the U.S. Marines have officially banned displays of Confederate flags, including on bumper stickers and coffee mugs, at any of their installations.  Only took ’em just under 160 years.

Is there no end to the Stable Genius? Trump toured a factory that makes swabs for coronavirus testing in Maine. That’s fine, but all the swabs made while he was in the factory will have to be tossed. It’s not clear from the article whether this was done because El Dumbo’s refusal to wear a mask contaminated the product (likely) or some other reason.

Other Stuff to Read

Franklin Foer, The Atlantic, The Trump Regime Is Beginning to Topple. We can hope.

Lisa Mascaro, TPM, Joint Chiefs Of Staff Chairman Privately Reached Out To Dem Leadership This Week

I’m seeing more about Trump’s new White House fortifications. See With White House effectively a fortress, some see Trump’s strength — but others see weakness at the Washington Post.  This was published last night:

Please take a look at the map that goes with the article. The new fencing isn’t just around the White House lawn. It looks as if the White House is attempting to fence in everything from the north side of Lafayette Square — right across the street from St. John’s Church — down to Constitution Avenue, south of the Ellipse. That’s a lot of territory that has always been open to the public.

This week’s security measures follow nighttime demonstrations just outside the campus gates last weekend that turned violent. White House officials stressed that Trump was not involved in the decision to beef up security

Oh, bullshit he wasn’t.

or to increase the fencing around the compound’s perimeter, with one senior administration official saying that the precautions are not unique to the Trump administration.

Trump has been crowing that such fortifications prove that he’s strong, or something.

“Washington is in great shape,” Trump said Wednesday in a Fox News Radio interview. “I jokingly said, a little bit jokingly, maybe, it’s one of the safest places on earth. And we had no problem at all last night. We had substantial dominant force and it — we have to have a dominant force. Maybe it doesn’t sound good to say it, but you have to have a dominant force. We need law and order.”

Others disagree.