Trump’s ugly pattern of attacking urban areas spotlights failure to act like president for all Americans

 

Election workers in Georgia's Fulton County count ballots by hand. (Hyosub Shin/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP)

WASHINGTON POST DAILY 202

There are literally hundreds of examples from the nearly four years that have followed of this president stereotyping urban areas and scapegoating their leaders with characterizations contradicted by the ground truth. Trump has governed more like the president of the Red States of America than the United States of America. He has often treated blue states and big cities more like adversaries than constituents.

Suggestions from Trump and his allies that the urban areas which overwhelmingly opposed him in battleground states are dens of corruption have reached a fever pitch over the last two weeks. 

When a Republican election official in Philadelphia went on CNN to denounce Trump’s claims of widespread fraud as “completely ridiculous,” the president immediately attacked him on Twitter: “A guy named Al Schmidt, a Philadelphia Commissioner and so-called Republican (RINO), is being used big time by the Fake News Media to explain how honest things were with respect to the Election in Philadelphia. He refuses to look at a mountain of corruption & dishonesty. We win!”

“I have seen the most fantastical things on social media, making completely ridiculous allegations that have no basis in fact at all,” Schmidt said, responding to Trump’s claims. “One thing I can’t comprehend is how hungry people are to consume lies.” “Trump is trying to cling to power by disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of Black voters,” writes columnist Eugene Robinson. “In Wisconsin, Trump's campaign has paid for recounts in just two counties, one of which is Milwaukee County. In effect, Trump is arguing that Black people have no right to vote him out of office.”

Trump denigrated Baltimore last summer as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” 

Trump called Chicago an “embarrassment” to America and claimed that “Afghanistan is a safe place by comparison.”

He claimed Los Angeles and San Francisco had squandered their “prestige” by not expelling homeless people. “What they are doing to our beautiful California is a disgrace to our country,” he said last summer.

Trump has often claimed that the most dangerous cities in America are all run by Democrats. They are not.

In September, Trump issued an order aimed at defunding police departments in large Democratic-led cities – specifically naming New York, the District, Seattle and Portland, Ore. – even as he falsely accused Biden of wanting to defund the police. “Anarchy has recently beset some of our states and cities,” Trump wrote. “My administration will not allow federal tax dollars to fund cities that allow themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones.”

The president is "orchestrating a far-reaching pressure campaign to persuade Republican officials in Michigan, Georgia and elsewhere to overturn the will of voters in what critics decried Thursday as an unprecedented subversion of democracy,” Philip Rucker, Amy Gardner and Josh Dawsey report. “After courts rejected the Trump campaign’s baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud, the president is now trying to remain in power with a wholesale assault on the integrity of the vote by spreading misinformation and trying to persuade loyal Republicans to manipulate the electoral system on his behalf. In an extraordinary news conference Thursday at the Republican National Committee headquarters, Trump’s attorneys claimed without evidence.

“The latest evolution in the Trump strategy came into view Thursday at RNC headquarters, where Giuliani and campaign attorneys Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell presented their argument for widespread fraud but provided no evidence. Powell argued that the voting systems used in many states, including those manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems, use software ‘created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chávez to make sure he never lost an election.’ … There is no evidence to support this theory. … The company’s products are certified for use in states that Trump won, including Utah and Florida. In addition, Giuliani and Powell’s claims have been disproved in Georgia, where the state’s hand recount of nearly 5 million paper ballots affirmed that the Dominion scanners accurately counted the vote. … Trump was said to be enthused about the news conference and asked allies to watch it, a White House official said. The event seemed at times farcical, with streaks of what appeared to be black hair dye mixed with sweat dripping down the sides of Giuliani’s face as he spoke.” 

Giuliani’s post-election meltdown is starting to become literal. “About 100 journalists and hangers-on had crammed into this potential coronavirus incubator for a news conference on the perverse legal strategy of Trump’s failed reelection campaign, which Giuliani is trying to hustle toward a twist ending,” Dan Zak and Dawsey report. The black liquid running down his face “might have been perspiration liquefying his hair dye, or sluicing the black polymer off his eyeglasses. One Manhattan stylist told the New York Times that it might’ve been running mascara; perhaps Giuliani had applied it to touch up the color of his sideburns. One Trump campaign adviser texted a Washington Post journalist as the black streaks inched toward Rudy’s jowls: ‘Is he deteriorating in real time?’ If Rudy is deteriorating, then so is anyone who listens to him. For 90 minutes, an unmasked Rudy and four maskless colleagues … spun a confusing web of conspiracies that indicate Trump won the election that he lost. A revolution, they said, was at hand. ‘It is the 1775 of our generation,’ declared [Powell] … She continued: ‘Globalists, dictators, corporations, you name it — everybody’s against us except President Trump.’”

• “Trump told an ally that he knows he lost, but that he is delaying the transition process and is aggressively trying to sow doubt about the election results in order to get back at Democrats for questioning the legitimacy of his own election in 2016, especially with the Russia investigation,” CNN reports.

The goal of Trump’s team is not to make a coherent argument; they have lost 31 lawsuits so far, and have racked up only 2 quite minor wins that do not affect the outcome. They are simply creating a narrative to muddy the waters, apparently either to get legislatures to replace Democratic electors with Republican ones, or to delay the certification of ballots to throw the election into the House of Representatives, where they think Trump has a chance of winning. They are making no pretense that Trump is the choice of a majority of voters-- Biden is ahead by almost 6 million votes. Rather, they are trying to game the Electoral College.

This is a long shot that gets longer every day. 

The threat of criminal prosecution may be one reason Trump refuses to relinquish the presidency.

“Two separate New York State fraud investigations into Trump and his businesses, one criminal and one civil, have expanded to include tax write-offs on millions of dollars in consulting fees, some of which appear to have gone to Ivanka Trump,” the Times reports. “The inquiries — a criminal investigation by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and a civil one by the state attorney general, Letitia James — are being conducted independently. But both offices issued subpoenas to the Trump Organization in recent weeks for records related to the fees." Ivanka Trump tweeted that both investigations into her dubious "consulting fees” are “100% motivated by politics, publicity and rage.”

In related news: Governments around the world are losing $427 billion each year to tax avoidance and evasion as companies and wealthy individuals shift their money to tax havens, according to a comprehensive new report from the Tax Justice Network, the Global Alliance for Tax Justice and a trade-union group called Public Services International. (Jeanne Whalen)

The coronavirus

The CDC recommends against traveling or gathering for Thanksgiving.

“In the agency’s first news briefing in months, officials said they were alarmed to see 1 million new cases reported across the United States within the past week. As the nation’s death toll since the start of the pandemic reached 250,000, officials spoke of the risks in stark terms, warning that as friends and relatives get together over the holidays, they could inadvertently bring the coronavirus with them,” Brittany Shammas reports. “For those still planning to travel, the guidelines offer tips specific to overnight stays. … Hosts should improve ventilation by opening windows or doors or putting central air and heating on continuous circulation. People should spend time together outdoors, taking a walk or sitting six feet apart for interpersonal interaction. Singing and shouting should be avoided, especially inside. Pets should be treated like human family members and kept from interacting with people outside the household.”

The seven-day average of new cases hovers at more than 160,000, according to Washington Post tracking. On Wednesday, nearly 1,900 deaths were reported, marking the deadliest day since mid-September. Biden said Trump will be remembered by history as one of the nation's most reckless leaders for delaying cooperation on the pandemic after losing reelection, and the president-elect added that an untold number of Americans are going to die as a direct consequence. Meanwhile, Vice President Pence touted encouraging news on the efficacy of vaccines and promised millions of doses could be distributed almost immediately upon approval by the FDA. “They urged the country to continue mitigation measures such as wearing masks and social distancing — even as Pence did not wear a face covering at the White House podium,” Anne Gearan and Seung Min Kim report.

The number of new unemployment claims spiked last week to 742,000, an increase of 31,000 from the previous week. An additional 320,000 claims were processed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the program for gig and self-employed workers. “About 20.3 million people are still claiming some form of unemployment insurance,” Eli Rosenberg reports. “The number of new claims has fallen from peaks in the spring but remains historically high. Claims have remained above the pre-pandemic record of 695,000, from 1982, for 35 weeks. … There are other warning signs for the economy. Credit card spending is on the decline. Reservations at restaurants, as measured by OpenTable data, have trended down in year-over-year comparisons in recent weeks. … 

“An estimated 12 million people could lose unemployment payments on Dec. 26, potentially pushing many over the brink, if Congress is unable to pass a new stimulus bill before then. Economists worry about the catastrophic effects of this expiration: households with little in the way of support or savings finding themselves in increasingly dire financial straits as the national eviction moratorium expires. Meanwhile, a contraction in household spending could threaten the economy at large. Analyst Andrew Stettner estimates that 4.4 million people have already been pushed off the unemployment rolls.”

America will reach 250,000 coronavirus deaths this week. Still, little has changed.

 

WASHINGTON POST DAILY 202

“Most everybody in town knows that Gladys Maull has been battered this year: Her father, her sister, an aunt, a great-aunt, all dead from covid-19. Maull keeps a sign on her front door: ‘Please do not come in my house due to covid-19. Thank you.’ Some people just step on in, maskless,” Marc Fisher, Shayna Jacobs and Pam Kelley report. “They mean no harm, but masks never caught on in rural Lowndes County, which has Alabama’s highest rate of coronavirus infections. In a place that gave 73 percent of its vote to Biden, the sheriff and the coroner agree that although cases are spiking and deaths are rising, most people share Trump’s view that masks are a matter of personal choice and that the end of the pandemic is just around the corner. … It has become clear that although close experiences with covid-19 do change some people’s attitudes, many Americans stick to their original notions, no matter what sorrows they’ve seen, no matter where they live. … About three-fifths of U.S. deaths from the virus have occurred in the 28 states and territories where Biden won. Yet there is no automatic correlation between the politics of a place and how people react to the death toll in their community. In Lowndes County, where more than 70 percent of the residents are Black, there’s no love lost for Trump. Yet no amount of urging from local officials seems to change people’s behavior during the pandemic, said Terrell Means, the elected coroner. … ‘It’s crazy out here. People are not being cautious at all. … They know it’s real and they don’t care.’ …

“Rural Alexander County, N.C., in the foothills of the Appalachians an hour’s drive from Charlotte, is the political opposite of Lowndes County. Seventy-nine percent of voters stuck with Trump this month. Like Lowndes, Alexander has one of the highest rates of new coronavirus cases in its state. Also like Lowndes, Alexander, population 37,000, is a county where deaths from covid-19 have had little impact on many residents’ attitudes toward the pandemic. People still chafe at the idea that masks are a must, still hang out together, still gather much as they always have when it’s time to say goodbye to a loved one. ‘There’s a lot of resentment’ about masks, said Monte Sherrill, 55, whose father died this summer of covid. Most people in shops and restaurants don’t cover their faces, Sherrill and two of his brothers said. Neither do they. All Trump supporters, they said they value their right not to wear a mask. ‘If someone can choose to have an abortion and end a human life, then I should be able to choose to wear a mask or not,’ said Kevin Sherrill, 48.” 

More than 3 million people in the U.S. are estimated to be contagious with the virus. 

“That number is significantly larger than the official case count, which is based solely on those who have tested positive,” Joel Achenbach reports. “To put the 3 million-plus figure in perspective: It is close to 1 percent of the population.

Long lines and delayed results again plague test centers as Thanksgiving approaches.

“Testing sites from New York to Wisconsin to Oregon are reporting lines stretching three to four hours, with results taking as long as five days,” William Wan reports. “In Denver, officials shut down one testing site within an hour of opening Tuesday because it had reached capacity. At another site, lines grew so long that officials closed over concerns about traffic safety. In New York, residents are standing in line for hours. In Olympia, Wash., officials have had to turn away as many as 200 cars in line in recent days because labs had reached capacity. … The problem is that even as the nation’s testing capacity expanded, so did demand.  … In addition to running out of necessary chemicals and swabs — as happened repeatedly early in the pandemic — many labs say they are running short of other equipment, such as pipettes, a laboratory tool used to carry fluid. Testing sites say they are also experiencing shortages of workers to handle the surge.”

And yet, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, maintains that no one in his department can coordinate with the incoming Joe Biden and Kamala Harris administration until the General Services Administration determines that Biden won the election. An administration official told CNN that department leadership had warned staffers not to communicate with Biden team, and to report any contact to the deputy surgeon general. Rick Bright, who was fired from the Trump administration for warnings about the dangers of coronavirus and who is now on the Biden team, told CNN: “We haven’t been able to sit down with the Trump administration at all, to be able to understand what plans are already in place, where the gaps are, where help is needed, and how we can make sure there's a smooth hand-off after January 20, where the bulk of these vaccines will be administered after that date.”

Phoenix Police and Maricopa County Sheriff's deputies stand guard outside the Recorder's Office, where local election officials work, in Phoenix. (Rick D'Elia/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

The corrosive consequences of GOP leaders humoring Trump as he sows doubt in democracy President Trump’s drumbeat of baseless claims about the integrity of the election and the decision by most Republican lawmakers who know better to play along are taking a damaging and dangerous toll on democracy. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, but a new poll from Monmouth University finds that 77 percent of Trump’s supporters believe President-elect Joe Biden only won because of fraud and 88 percent said they need more information on the count to know for sure who prevailed. Overall, 60 percent of Americans believe Biden won the election fair and square. But Trump’s P.R. campaign to sow doubt is working. A Monmouth poll before the election found that 55 percent of Republicans felt confident in the electoral process. Now, just 22 percent of them said they feel that way. Overall, 61 percent of Republicans are not at all confident in the election’s fairness and accuracy – up from 13 percent in September. “The anger among Trump’s base is tied to a belief that the election was stolen,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute. “It’s not unusual for backers on the losing side to take a while to accept the results. It is quite another thing for the defeated candidate to prolong that process by spreading groundless conspiracy theories. This is dangerous territory for the republic’s stability.” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) has resisted what he describes as pressure from prominent Trump allies to discard legitimate ballots in ways that could allow Trump to carry the state. He has said that his state’s vote was not tainted by fraud and that his refusal to pretend otherwise has led to a flurry of death threats. Even his wife has been getting messages on her private cellphone. "That is what is really offensive," Raffensperger told the Atlanta Fox affiliate. He shared a few of the messages with the local station: “You better not botch this recount. Your life depends on it.” “Your husband deserves to face a firing squad.” “The Raffenspergers should be put on trial for treason and face execution.” I have been a social worker for many years and can anticipate this reaction when people feel powerless and angry,” she wrote. “This does not excuse the perpetrators. Their continued intimidation tactics will not prevent me from performing the duties I swore an oath to do. … But there are those, including the president, members of Congress and other elected officials, who are perpetuating misinformation and are encouraging others to distrust the election results in a manner that violates the oath of office they took. It is well past time that they stop. Their words and actions have consequences.”Meanwhile, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) warned in a chilling statement of her own on Wednesday that she, her staff and members of her family have also been receiving escalating threats of violence since Biden carried the state. Hobbs descried the threats as “a symptom of a deeper problem in our state and country – the consistent and systematic undermining of trust in each other and our democratic process.” “The refusal of most Republicans to stand against President Trump’s unconscionable campaign to discredit a free election is one of the lowest points in the history of our republic — and a threat to democracy itself,” writes columnist E.J. Dionne.  This will make it even harder for an already broken Washington to govern, and it will make it harder for leaders of goodwill in both parties to bind the nation’s wounds after four years of blistering division. “Trump is in overdrive, tweeting one absurd falsehood after another to delegitimize the election he lost,” writes Fact Checker Sal Rizzo. “One repeated theme is that Republican observers were not allowed inside the room as election workers counted mail ballots in Philadelphia. Fraud thrives under cover of darkness, Trump warns. But, in fact, Trump’s own lawyers have attested in court that his campaign was granted access and observed the process, both in Philadelphia and in other cities, and has found no evidence of fraud.” “Mr. Trump may be setting a new precedent for how one wins elections in the United States: First, hold a vote; next, see whether you can bully enough state and local officials into manipulating the vote-counting and certification process on your behalf,” the Editorial Board warns. “The strategy could prove more viable in a closer election. Whether it works then will depend on whether public officials from the lowliest county clerk to the most senior U.S. senator allow previously pro forma matters of election administration to become partisan weapons.” “Rudy Giuliani is a mess,” writes Robin Givhan. “As a culture, we like to believe that with age comes wisdom. The truth of it may be that age only makes people more obviously what they’ve always been. … Giuliani, at 76, has revealed himself to be a man who believes that he can summon truth from falsehoods, bend the law to his will and conjure whatever reality suits him simply by speaking his hopes and dreams aloud. … He wears a Yankees World Series ring even though he did not earn it. The diamonds sparkle next to a pinkie ring. A pinkie ring. The mere fact of it is an abomination." Presidential legal adviser Jenna Ellis called Trump an “idiot” in 2016. “In one March 2016 Facebook post, Ellis said Trump's values were ‘not American,’ linking to a post that called Trump an ‘American fascist," CNN reports. “Ellis attacked Trump supporters in a Facebook post for not caring that the Republican candidate was ‘unethical, corrupt, lying, criminal, dirtbag.’ In another post, she said his supporters didn't care about the truth.” The Trump agenda Journalists have not laid eyes on Trump since he went golfing over the weekend. White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany ventured out on Wednesday for two Fox News hits, but she refused to answer questions from reporters. Here she walks back to her office with two of her assistants. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) The Trump team is trying to set so many fires it will be hard for Biden to put them all out. “Trump's order of a further withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and Iraq is the latest foreign policy move on a growing list in his final weeks in office that are meant to limit Biden's options before he takes office in January. The White House has directed newly installed acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller to focus his attention in the remaining weeks on cyber and irregular warfare, with a focus on China in particular," an administration official tells CNN. “It is contemplating new terrorist designations in Yemen that could complicate efforts to broker peace. And it has rushed through authorization of a massive arms sale that could alter the balance of power in the Middle East. The Trump team has prepared legally required transition memos describing policy challenges, but there are no discussions about actions they could take or pause. Instead, the White House is barreling ahead. A second official tells CNN their goal is to set so many fires that it will be hard for the Biden administration to put them all out."

The GOP’s Long March to Fascism Finally Arrives With Trump 2020

 DESTROYING TRUTH

It turns out the most important anti-truth of recent vintage was the one about voter fraud. This is what Trump will use to steal the election if he can.

DAILY BEAST

Michael Tomasky

Special Correspondent

Updated Sep. 24, 2020 6:51AM ET / Published Sep. 24, 2020 5:57AM ET 

OPINION

Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast/Photos Getty

Donald Trump's refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, though shocking, was no surprise. It's a dark, culminating step, although not the dark, culminating step, because that is still yet to come, of a long march, a step-by-step chipping away at democratic norms that long predates him.

At the heart of it: relentless attacks on the truth, large and small, year after year, decade after decade, until the point is reached where roughly 40 percent of the people still cling to truth, but another 40 percent have come to believe anti-truth, and the 20 percent in the middle don't know what to think. And that's how you put a knife in democracy's heart.

Small case in point. I watched about five minutes of Sean Hannity Tuesday night, and it was enough to get the drift. The segment was devoted to the lionization and martyrization of teenage Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, a campaign that’s been underway for weeks now.

Let’s make sure we have this right: A legal minor leaves his house in Illinois toting a semi-automatic weapon, crosses state lines into a state where it’s illegal for a minor to carry a gun except while hunting or at a range with an adult, saying it’s his job to protect the community (of which he is not a part), then he gets approached or accosted by two people who aren’t carrying guns and allegedly shoots them. This is what is what is being converted on Fox and elsewhere into an act of self-defense.

The obliteration of truth is essential to fascist movements. People who are fascists at heart know this in their bones, even if they’ve never read a book and don’t know Filippo Marinetti from Mario Andretti. They must destroy truth. Not by merely lying. They must tell anti-truths: things that are direct, frontal assaults on truth.

The reason is simple: Truth is a core value of democracy, and, importantly, of democratic power-sharing. In the golden age of American bipartisanship, from 1945 until maybe 1990, Democrats and Republicans disagreed on how to address a budget hole or a particular social problem. But they agreed that it existed. They agreed on the facts.

Yes, the country took a sharp turn to the right after 1980; and yes, certain non-truths were advanced then that from time to time one sensed a Weimaresque odor in the air: ketchup was a vegetable; trees caused pollution; Saddam Hussein was a good guy. But most of the time, Reagan accepted facts, such as that Social Security was in trouble in 1983, which is why he agreed to tax increases. George H.W. Bush did, too.

The effort to obliterate truth, and to elevate ideology and culture higher than factual truth, really began with Newt Gingrich. He was our first proto-fascist politician. He just said things, vicious things, out of thin air, complete inventions (one-quarter of Clinton White House staffers were taking illegal drugs), and he said them with intent—as a political weapon, to heighten the tension, divide us into camps.

This man is dangerous, some said. Oh, yes, he’s over the top sometimes. But you gotta admit he’s interesting.

Then came Rush Limbaugh. The entire purpose of his show from the beginning was to destroy truth and any sense of common, shared reality. And to get conservatives to leap from disagreeing with liberals to despising them. This, too, is a necessary ingredient of authoritarian power: domestic foes are evil. Subhuman.

This guy is way over the line, many said. Well, yes, in some ways; but look, bottom line, he’s an entertainer. People don’t really take him that seriously.

Then came Tom DeLay. Often overlooked these days, DeLay was a crucial soldier in this march to bury truth. He really started the aggressive gerrymandering and enforced the Hastert Rule—in other words, he made the first serious moves toward the anti-democratic stacking of the electoral deck to rig the game, which is the kind of thing you get away with, as DeLay knew, by accusing the other side of doing it. Then of course he was a key player in the Terri Schiavo madness, using that poor woman (in a vegetative state with no hope of recovery, her doctors said) as a bullet in the culture war.

And of course there was Karl Rove back in those days, too. John Kerry was a war hero, an upper-class Yale graduate who could easily have skipped the army but who volunteered anyway; who killed how many men for his country, risked his life how many times, we still don’t know. But Rove knew that he had to obliterate those truths in 2004, and the way to do that was to tell a morally sick anti-truth: to turn Kerry into a coward and a traitor.

DeLay and Rove, many of us were writing and saying, are taking this country to dark, unprecedented places. Oh, yes, some of this is pretty shocking, more hardball than usual. But creeping fascism? Don’t be silly.

On and on it went, too many steps to name here, each one taking us that much closer to the rendezvous with destiny that awaits us after Nov. 3. Barack Obama was a Kenyan, a Muslim. The antichrist, even. Subhuman, in other words. This was where Donald Trump started joining in, and from there, it made sense that each of those desecrations of truth led to Trump. I feel like an idiot today for thinking in the summer of 2015 that he’d fade in a few months. I didn’t understand how many millions of people had been persuaded to embrace unreality.

Now, it turns out the most important anti-truth of recent vintage was the one about voter fraud. This is what Trump will use to steal the election if he can.

If current polls hold, Joe Biden will win by maybe 6.5 or 7 points nationally, which could be as many as 10 million votes, and The Economist as I write these words predicts a 333-205 Electoral College majority for Biden. Trump and Bill Barr and Fox News and all the rest of them will call even this illegitimate—10 million votes, and 128 electoral votes. And they’ll pull every trick they can, from Nov. 4 to Jan. 20. That Barton Gellman piece The Atlantic posted Wednesday covered much of the grim territory.

They’ll say then the most outlandish things they’ve ever said, things that will shock us (even though we think we’re beyond shocking), because fascists know: The clearer the factual truth, the louder and more outrageous must be the anti-truth.

I can’t believe I’m writing this way about the United States. But then again, I’ve seen this coming for a long time. I just never really thought we would end up all the way here. But it’s where Donald Trump has brought us.