Sure, when Donald Trump first invaded the White House, people thought it was a big deal that he was strong-arming the Park Service to falsify the numbers for his pitifully attended inauguration. And it’s kind of hilarious that, nearly four years later, Trump is still claiming to have “massive numbers of cheering people” at events where a bare handful bothered to show up. But we’ve long since passed the days when whatever nonsense Sean Spicer was peddling to the press room was the worst thing going on in America.
With Trump currently engaged in an effort to subvert the election by means of destroying the Postal Service, it’s easy to forget that even this might not even be at the top of the charts for ways in which Donald Trump is currently wrecking the nation. It’s not just that Trump is the world’s premiere practitioner of the Gish gallop, but with the passing months the scale of his actions has grown from ludicrous to genuinely monstrous. With that in mind, here’s a short list of things that Trump is doing, right now, that can’t be overlooked.
7. Donald Trump is supporting birtherism against Kamala Harris.
Donald Trump is championing a revival of racist "birtherism" against Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris and supporting claims that she is not a valid candidate for vice president. At first glance, this effort may seem as ridiculous as any story Trump tells in which someone calls him “sir.” After all, Harris was born in Oakland, California and not even the far reaches of QAnon are claiming that she was secretly smuggled in from some other country … so far.
But Trump’s birtherism isn’t about preventing Harris from running for office, any more than the birtherism against Barack Obama was really meant to remove him as president.
In both cases, these right-wing attacks are meant as reminders that Harris and Obama are not white. The attack on Harris, like all such arguments built on undermining birthright citizenship, is intended to "other" Black and Latinx Americans. This goes a step beyond Trump’s attack on immigrants to claim that the children of immigrants are also not real Americans. Or at least, the children of non-white immigrants. If your mother comes from Scotland, you get a pass. The attack on Harris is both explicitly and implicitly racist, and like the attacks on Obama, it’s meant to demean her as a person and diminish her effectiveness as a politician.
6. Donald Trump handed off COVID-19 data to Republican mega-donors
Until last month, every hospital in America handed over information on occupancy, ICU usage, contagious disease, and deaths to a database at the CDC which made all of this data public. In addition, in many areas the data was also provided to additional agencies at the state level. But all of that changed in July, when Donald Trump handed over control of this data to a private company run by a Republican mega-donor Michael Zamagias. The changeover didn’t just require that hospitals change the data they were sending, and how it was encoded, in the middle of a pandemic; it also made clear that the data was to be sent to Zamagias’ company, TeleTracking Technologies, and nowhere else.
As a result, agencies and governors have complained they can no longer tell what’s happening in their own states. The CDC dashboard that previously provided this information to researchers was completely gone for days, and has returned with an incomplete set of data. And there is every reason to think that the numbers being provided to the public are not accurate. On top of all this, TeleTracking has made it clear that it has signed an Trump-typical NDA and isn’t talking to anyone. That includes being unwilling to discuss the new database with Congress.
This is vital information that is needed to protect American citizens, and Trump has ensured that it can no longer be trusted.
5. Donald Trump is planning to make more false charges against Joe Biden
Just because Donald Trump was impeached for his attempts to pressure foreign officials into making false charges of improper behavior on the part of Joe Biden (Reminder: Donald Trump was impeached) doesn’t mean he’s not still at it.
Now that Republicans in both House and Senate have given Trump a free pass to invite foreign interference, and William Barr is on hand to prevent Trump’s friends from being prosecuted even when they confess to a crime, the effort to involve foreign agents in swaying the U. S. election isn’t even secret. Barr, and his assistant John Durham, have traveled the world, soliciting anyone who might provide a claim to back up Trump’s conspiracies against Biden. They’ve promised to deliver all their findings before the election. Read that as right before the election, when no one will have a chance to check for any truth behind the boatload of claims they’re sure to deliver.
Barr is far from alone. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a 1,600 page stack of supposed information on Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and who knows what else, to Republican members of the House and Senate. But not to Democrats. Meanwhile, cow-suing Congressman Devin Nunes is sitting on yet another packet of information that supposedly came from some of the sources friendly to Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. This information has also been shared with other GOP members of Congress.
Expect all of this information to “leak” in October. And don’t be shocked it the media gives it all the attention of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
4. Donald Trump created a non-existent threat to excuse violence
In a shock to no one, as soon as Donald Trump removed his camo-wearing mix of Border Patrol, ICE agents, corrections officers, and who knows who else (Really. Who knows?) from the streets of Portland, the tension in the city went down drastically. But that doesn’t mean Trump considers the deployment of the tear-gas happy brigade a failure. Far from it. What happened in Portland, like what happened when Trump and Barr unrolled a goon squad of prison riot-busters on the streets of Washington D. C., showed that he can increase racial tensions and create a staged “riot” on demand. That’s what this trial run was all about.
The threat isn’t just that Trump is ready to deliver his secret police anytime, anyplace that needs a little roughing up. It’s that he, with the support of other Republicans, has created the perfect foil in the form of “antifa.” That non-existent organization was the subject of a Senate Judiciary committee hearing earlier this month, as Ted Cruz led the chorus against “radical leftists.” That included bringing on a whole brigade of witnesses to explain how violent and un-American this threat really is. Or would be, if it existed.
But of course, it doesn’t matter if antifa is less a thing than Joseph McCarthy’s communist threat. It’s all the excuse that Trump needs to roll out more shoot-them-in-the-face forces to cities when he wants to display his ability to “get tough” … say, right around Nov. 1.
3. Donald Trump is still refusing to negotiate on pandemic relief
Democrats in the House passed the Heroes Act over two months ago, dropping onto Mitch McConnell’s desk a bill that provided additional relief to each American family, extended unemployment benefits, prevented evictions, provided relief to states starved for cash by the failing economy, and incidentally provide necessary funds for the Post Office. Predictably, McConnell did nothing but launch an immediate chorus of claims that Democrats were the hold-up in the process. Meanwhile it took until the last week of July for Republicans to craft a piece of paper they had no intention of passing, and which provided very little in the way of plans to address the pandemic. But it did include a whole new squadron of F-35 fighter jets so … job well done.
The truth is that most of the Republicans in the Senate are absolutely uninterested in providing anything more in the form of pandemic relief, McConnell isn’t capable of controlling his party, and Trump isn’t telling them to play ball. So the White House has now just stopped all pretense of negotiating and walked away from the table.
Instead, Trump has signed a series of “executive orders” to … do nothing. The order that supposedly increases unemployment benefits doesn’t. The order that is supposed to protect against evictions doesn’t. People are suffering because Donald Trump wants it that way.
2. Donald Trump is trying to steal the election by destroying the Post Office
Yes, we’ve finally reached this issue … and it’s still not number one. Donald Trump isn’t covering up his efforts to sabotage the United States Postal Service. Mail sorting machines are being ripped out of offices without explanation. Even plain old shelves where postal workers manually sort the mail are disappearing, all in the name of making the job harder, slower, and less efficient. At the same time, the familiar blue postal boxes are disappearing from streets across the nation in a mass rapture of America’s ability to send a letter. Trump’s handpicked postmaster general—and Republican mega-donor—Louis DeJoy isn’t threatening to destroy the Post Office; he IS destroying the Post Office.
The reason behind this is even less subtle. Ever since Trump’s malignant incompetence around the COVID-19 criss made it impossible to conceive of how the nation could conduct a safe election, Trump has been engaged in an attack on mail-in ballots. If that connection needed to be underlined a little more clearly, Trump did so this week. Twice. When talking about potential funding for the Post Office, Trump said, “Now they need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots. But if they don't get those two items that means you can't have universal mail-in voting because they're not equipped to have it.” So of course, Trump means to make sure the Post Office is starved for cash. And that’s just a start. DeJoy is actively tearing the service apart.
In the meantime, DeJoy has met directly and repeatedly not just with Trump, but with Republican leaders in Congress. This isn’t some obscure theory or complicated conspiracy. It’s just sabotage, plain and simple.
1. Donald Trump is attempting to commit genocide
Sure, an open assault on free and fair elections falls way over on the evil side of the line, but when it comes to a list of “worst” things, nothing it really going to top attempted genocide. Considering that the confession out of the White House came a whole two weeks ago, it’s understandable that some people may have already forgotten this under the constant hoofbeats of fresh doom, but if you live in a blue state, Donald Trump is trying to kill you. Deliberately. For his own political gain.
In an investigation into how it was possible that the national testing strategy Trump announced in March had completely failed to appear, a White House aide filled in the blanks. It wasn’t just that Trump’s team—headed up by Jared Kushner and his college roommate—ultimately didn’t have the knowledge or capability to manage the roll out of anything bigger than a cheese tray. It’s a lot worse than that.
The worst part is that Trump, Kushner, and everyone involved knew that hundreds of thousands of Americans would die if they failed to act, but they still refused to act out of a political calculation. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states,” said the source for Vanity Fair’s article on testing strategy, “that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.”
The United States’ worst in the world results on COVID-19 is not an accident. The 170,000 Americans dead at this point is not an accident. The fact that the nation still has no testing strategy as we roll on toward the next hundred thousand dead is not an accident. This isn’t something that happened on Trump’s watch. This is something Trump did.
Special bonus evil — Donald Trump is still supporting the murderer of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Sure, one more murder when we’re already looking at 170,000 may seem like a small thing. But somehow the idea that Jared Kushner took a list of “disloyal” Saudis to his pal Mohammed bin Salman, and then sat back as a journalist was trapped, beaten, tortured, dismembered, and burned to ash still seems worth noting.
Can you steal me this election, Billy boy, Billy boy,
Can you steal me this election, crooked Billy...
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