Month: October 2020

Life in the time of Trump.

The election is next week.

The polls all say that Trump’s behind.

He’s swimming up the creek.

He’s trying to suppress the votes

It’s his only path.

For if the vote is free and fair

We’ll see a blue bloodbath.

Are white Christians the only true Americans, and thus entitled to rule even if they don’t constitute the majority of the American people?

Does the winner of the presidential election have the right to behave as an autocrat, accountable to no one, for four years, or is he constrained by the law and the rest of our political institutions, as contemplated by the Constitution?

Assume that Trump loses the election by a decisive margin. What does he do between early November and Inauguration Day?

It won’t be pretty. He will be sulking at Mar-a-Lago and tweeting furiously. His interest in governing, always limited at best, will be restricted to finding ways to reward his friends and punish his enemies. He will pardon people who suck up to him and consider pardoning himself. He may direct people around him to destroy records that would make him look bad. His cooperation in making the transition should not be assumed.

The best case scenario is that he plays golf and watches lots of TV. Sad!

Some right-wing commentators are arguing that Barrett is not required to recuse herself from any litigation arising from the election because the argument in favor of recusal applies equally to Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. Are they right?

No. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were confirmed well before the election was pending. There was no suggestion that their nomination was any kind of a quid pro quo for keeping Trump in office. Barrett is in a completely different position; the inference of undue influence will be drawn by hundreds of millions of Americans if she casts a deciding vote in favor of Trump in an election case.

For the good of the country, she should recuse herself. Period.

Muhammad Ali beat George Foreman in the “Rumble in the Jungle” by remaining passive during the first several rounds and letting Foreman punch himself fruitlessly into exhaustion. Ali called this tactic the “rope-a-dope,” and, like many of his more memorable lines, it stuck.

Biden is doing something very similar with Trump. He’s making the election a referendum on the incumbent, rather than a choice between two visions of America, by saying and doing only the minimum that is required. Every day that Trump is out shooting himself in the foot is a victory for him. The fruits of it will be seen on November 3.

This is not a very inspiring approach, and it would only work against someone as narcissistic and erratic as Trump. It does, however, require great discipline, which has not been a hallmark of Biden’s campaigns in the past. The old dog has learned a new trick.

The point of the debates, in the final analysis, is to provide information to undecided voters. With such a polarizing president, who are these people in 2020? I answered that question in a post a month ago; they either wanted to see if the condition of the country would improve before the election, or they had unanswered questions about Biden’s strength and acuity.

Trump clearly agreed with my analysis, because his strategy for the first debate was to try to shake Biden and thus win over the second kind of undecided voter. It was a high risk, high reward approach, and it failed miserably. He came across as an obnoxious lunatic, and it cost him votes.

Instead of doubling down, he switched tactics last night in an apparent effort to win back the ground he lost at the first debate. While there was plenty of obvious untruth, ludicrous grandiosity and narcissism, and laughable absurdity in his presentation, he did not sound insane. As a result, he cleared the ridiculously low bar he created for himself, and he may have clawed back a few of the wavering supporters who had fallen off his bandwagon after the first debate.

But in the end, he accomplished nothing. Biden is still standing. He didn’t sound like a feeble, senile old man to the undecideds. Trump is far behind; he needed to do far more than prove to his supporters that he is still on his rocker. The election is still a referendum on him and his response to the pandemic. He can’t win that argument.

At least not in a fair fight. It’s all about vote suppression and the law now. If Biden wins Florida on November 3, it’s over. If he doesn’t, the nightmare scenario is upon us, and the question will be whether all of the lawful votes in the swing states will be counted.

The election is twelve days away.

We fear it more than we can say.

We have feelings of dread

Occupying our heads

But Trump wins if we give in that way.

The leaves are spectacular in the mountains of North Carolina at this time of year. You cling to them desperately, and try to savor every moment, because you know they’re doomed. They’ll be gone in a week or so. Winter is coming.

It’s hard to avoid seeing this as a metaphor for the election and our political system. If Trump somehow leverages vote suppression and the support of “his” Supreme Court into an unlikely victory, he will (probably correctly) view it as a successful referendum on autocracy, and behave accordingly. The next four years will be about the Orban Option, and whether it can be stopped. If Biden–the most inoffensive Democrat available–wins, he will have to deal with the fact that 30-40 percent of the voters consider his presidency illegitimate, because the bulk of his supporters aren’t straight white Christians. That, not the innumerable shortcomings of Trump’s personality, is the central problem of American politics today.

The only hope for our system is a successful Biden presidency that moves America to the left on economic issues and accommodates the right on cultural issues. It will be an exercise in threading the needle. The odds are against it. But it’s all we’ve got.

Trump is clearly convinced that he’s losing, which is bad news for us and the integrity of our liberal democratic system. The more threatened he feels, the more the craziness quotient goes up. With less than two weeks to go and the polls looking really bad, the sky’s the limit.

What will he try at the debate? Trevor Noah is apparently making jokes about him screaming or trying to grab Biden’s microphone when his is muted; I don’t think that is implausible at all. Will he run over to Biden and try to make a citizen’s arrest? Will he and his entourage show up without masks and try to make everyone sick? Who knows?

It’s not physically possible to hold your breath for twelve days, but that’s really what’s required here.

Superman, of course, can fly. The Flash can move at something like the speed of light. The Incredible Hulk is amazingly strong. If Donald Trump is a superhero, what are his superpowers?

They’re in his thumbs. He owns the libs on Twitter.

As I understand it, the Pennsylvania official in charge of running the election issued an order, based on the pandemic and problems with the Post Office, permitting the counting of votes that are postmarked, but not received, by November 3. Local GOP luminaries sued in state court. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court applied state law and upheld the order. The US Supreme Court subsequently considered the issue and deadlocked 4-4 on staying the Pennsylvania court’s order, with Roberts joining the three liberals. The order consequently remains in place, at least for now.

This sounds positive, but it isn’t. The Supreme Court did not issue an opinion on the matter, so we don’t know what the reasoning of the majority and the minority was, but we do know that one of the appellants’ arguments was that vote counting has to stop on the day of the election as a matter of federal law. In other words, all of us have a constitutional right to vote, but not to have that vote counted, even if it was cast in complete accordance with the law. Barrett will be on the Court on November 4. If Biden doesn’t win a clear victory on November 3, therefore, it is now certain that we will have the toxic cocktail of Trump “orders” to stop the counts, litigation in state courts, multiple Brooks Brothers riots, and an ultimate decision by a Supreme Court beholden to the man on golf cart.

Both sides agree that Barrett is on the ballot with Trump on November 3. Only he, however, can be removed from office that day. What happens if the Democrats win a decisive victory? Will she view that as a vote of no confidence in her legal right-wing agenda, and tread cautiously, like Roberts? Or will she ignore the public will and plow straight ahead, in the manner of Thomas and Alito?

There is nothing in Barrett’s background or writings which suggests much flexibility. I’m guessing she’s the damn the torpedoes type. For the sake of the country, I hope I’m wrong.

4.5 million people live in Kentucky. 6,600 are coal miners. That’s a statistical blip. And yet, virtually all of the McConnell and McGrath commercials that I have seen have focused on coal mining.

There is a point at which nostalgia crosses the line and becomes delusion. I’m afraid that’s where Kentucky is right now.

Tim Alberta argues in today’s Politico that America has (metaphorically, of course) had a beer with Donald Trump every day for the last four years, and finds him repulsive. Is that really Trump’s core problem?

Not exactly. Even leaving aside the fact that Trump doesn’t drink, he never encouraged anyone to have a beer with him. He doesn’t have close friends; he doesn’t even like dogs. His sales pitch isn’t empathy, but that he is the indispensable superhero who alone can fight off the evils of the Other–cancel culture, socialism, Mexicans, the Chinese, etc. His most dedicated fans still believe that. The rest of us look at the results and note that the country is far less safe than it was four years ago. The virus, to continue the metaphor, was his kryptonite.

If he’s not a superhero, what’s the point? Why would we identify with a stupid, corrupt billionaire who wants to be a man on horseback, but can’t pull it off? We might as well vote for an ordinary, compassionate mortal with whom we really could have a beer. That’s Biden.

Trump has been playing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” at his rallies for years. Yesterday, we learned that he is also playing “Fortunate Son” over John Fogerty’s objections. During a news story on one of his rallies, I could hear Elton John’s “Funeral for a Friend” in the background. Finally, it seems that the Trump supporters outside of Walter Reed were playing “Born in the USA.”

Honestly, you couldn’t make this stuff up.