When Joe Biden spoke of the “darkness” that’s been delivered by
Donald Trump, there is more to it than just Trump’s violent rhetoric and
angry divisiveness. Trump’s darkness is of the same variety that has
been draped over whole centuries of history: the darkness of
ignorance. During the 2016 election, Donald Trump described his perfect
voter. “I love the poorly educated," said Trump. That’s not
hyperbole or sarcasm. For the last four years, Trump has been dedicated
to the idea of undermining sources of public information. He’s called
the truth “fake” and passed off lies as truth.
It should be no surprise that out of this stew of ignorance is rising
a distorted worldview that’s twisted, uninformed, and as filled with
monsters as the marginalia of any Medieval manuscript. QAnon (known in more enlightened circles as "QAnonsense") the
movement that began as a gathering of internet cranks reading messages
from a clearly false source, has grown to become not just accepted in
the Republican Party, but the core of the party. Because the natural
outgrowth of an attack on science, evidence, and reason is an explosive
growth of nonsense, falsehoods, and sheer ignorance.
At some point in their careers, just about everyone is likely to work
for a boss or company that believes in Mushroom Management—keeping
employees in the dark and feeding them bullshit. For companies, the
result is a corporate culture riddled with rumors and fear. The same
thing works on a larger scale—only worse. As Russia (and a million
Reddit subgroups) demonstrated so thoroughly in 2016, the sheer scale of
the internet makes it possible to drown every crumb of fact under a
thousands competing false claims. Dedicated use of misinformation makes
it perfectly possible to provide an endless stream of lies—and a media
prone to inserting “both sides” and “opposing views” into every article,
no matter how straightforward, making a point of contention.
That kind of informational poison—the deliberate introduction of
false statements and contrafactual arguments—has been deployed for a
long time. As historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway laid out in their
book Merchants of Doubt, tobacco companies and oil companies
are only among the latest to employ the technique of exploiting the
tendency of media to refuse to filter out bad information.
But QAnon isn’t informational poison. It’s informational cancer.
Its malignant growth is consuming the Republican Party in a tumorous
mass of not just lies, but pure nonsense connected together by the
tenuous strands of ugly make-believe. And it can’t be cured by ignoring
it.
The very first message from the supposed “Q-source” was one
announcing that Hillary Clinton was going to be arrested on Oct. 30.
That would be Oct. 30, 2017. Every other pronouncement from
this modern Oracle of Delphi has been just as completely, utterly, and
absolutely wrong. Perversely, the response to each of these absolute
misses hasn’t been to weaken the QAnon base, but to grow the tumor into
something even more complex, multitentacled, and invasive.
As The New York Times reports,
the Texas Republican Party has now consciously adopted QAnon phrases
and mythology as the motto of the party and the theme for the coming
election. And why not? Trump has retweeted QAnon claims over 200 times.
Even as the Democratic convention was underway, Trump answered a
question from a White House reporter about whether he is “secretly
saving the world from this Satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals.”
Trump’s reply was one that generated a million virtual, and increasingly
non-virtual, high fives among the group’s still-growing supporters. “Is
that supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing?” said Trump. “If I can
help save the world from problems, I am willing to do it. I’m willing
to put myself out there. And we are actually, we’re saving the world.”
QAnon supporters took this as confirmation of everything from the pizza
parlor child trafficking rings to underground Bigfoot hives.
The Biden campaign pointed out that far from
being people who love America, QAnon followers are the new “very fine
people,” in that, just like white nationalists, the FBI has identified
them as a domestic terrorism threat. Considering that QAnon followers
have explained that their conspiracy theory encouraged them to block the road across the Hoover Dam, plan a kidnapping, and carry out a murder, it isn’t hard to believe that this expanding web of ignorance and suspicion constitutes a grave threat.
At the moment, there are still Republicans
in the House and Senate who are speaking out against QAnon … in exactly
the same way they spoke out against Donald Trump before the 2016
election. Those Republicans can be defined simply as: people who no
longer know their own party. They’re also people who have happily ridden
the whirlwind of “fake news” and “deep state” so long as it was
carrying them along. Now that they find themselves in an unfamiliar
country, it’s far, far too late for them to get off.
QAnon may have gotten an “official” start
with some internet posts in 2017, but that’s not where it began. It’s
the absolutely foreseeable outcome of Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh,
and the Tea Party, and Donald Trump. For decades, Republican backers
have poured billions into talk radio, the Tea Party, and the assault on
experts, scientists, journalist, and facts. This is where that journey was always going: into darkness.
On Thursday night, Joe Biden made a call to
deploy the light of learning and compassion to push back the tide of
darkness and hate. We had better work to make that happen. Because
history shows that darkness, once it has entered, can take centuries to
dispel.
And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
— from “Dover Beach,” by Matthew Arnold (1867)
Welcome to the strange new world according to Trump.
I hesitated to write this because it’s just so damn ugly. I certainly
don’t want to. But these are the deplorables that our supposed
“president” has 100% committed to, so we can’t pretend they don’t exist,
or that their words aren’t being circulated.
Obviously, as a strong Black and South Indian woman, the deplorables
are driven to a frothy rage by vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
They are spawning a growing list of sexist and racist slurs. Their
current favorite? “Joe and the Hoe.” Here was Amazon a few days ago,
before they cleaned house of this garbage:
Lest you think this was an effort from the deplorable fringes of the putrid conservative movement, it wasn’t. As the New York Daily Newsreported,
“Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh used his radio show’s massive
reach to push stories about vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris
as a ‘hoe’ and a ‘mattress.’” The conservative opinion magazine, The American Spectator (no link, fuck them), wrote: “It
is no secret but public knowledge that Kamala Harris slept her way up
into California political life by being a very public escort and
mattress for California Democrat Kingmaker Willie Brown.”
The reality is that she was briefly romantic with Brown, who had been separated from his wife for 10 years.
Who gives a shit? Are conservatives really going to try and talk about
sex and infidelity given who their president is? The guy who cheated on
his wife, who was at home with a baby, with a porn star, then bribed the
porn star to keep quiet about it? The guy who bragged about grabbing
women’s pussies without consent? The guy with multiple wives, all of
whom he’s mistreated?
Of course, hypocritical misogyny is just part of the conservative
anti-Harris playbook. There was the Republican mayor in Virginia who said that Democratic nominee Joe Biden “just announced Aunt Jemima.” A Trump national delegate leapt to the mayor’s defense:
“This is what I do because our Bible is at the ballot box
against socialism, which is vile evil, which goes along with identity
politics, which is nothing but racist thinking from within itself,” he
continued, then added “When you subdivide and categorize citizens by the
color of their skin it is racist. And to assume that everyone who would see that post would think it’s racist is racist within itself.” [Emphasis mine.]
And if you go deep into the fever swamps of the right, like 4chan or
conservative Facebook groups, “Camel Kamala” is fast becoming a
favorite. Not sure why, though. It’s clearly intended to be a racist
slur, but are they confusing Indians with Arabs, or are they confusing
camels with elephants (the actual animal sometimes used for
transportation in India)? Either way, they are dumb as rocks. Racism and
stupidity do, indeed, go hand in hand.
As ugly as all of this is, what truly stands out is how little they
actually have in their efforts to tar both Biden and Harris. Sleepy Joe?
Camel Kamala? Those slurs may be stupid or ugly, but what they aren’t
is effective.
Donald and his bigot followers just before they light the cross.
The obvious answer to “Is the Republican Party just one big scam?” is
“Yes,” since the modern Republican Party and its Fox News
infrastructure exists just to convince ordinary people that handing over
billions more to billionaires is the Real American Way. But in a more
specific sense … is it all just tacky fraud and scams all the way down?
After all, the last month has seen the New York attorney general move to disband the NRA after showing that "top executives funneled millions into their own pockets." And Jerry Falwell Jr. went on a vacation of unspecified length after the “Christian” leader of Liberty University flashed underwear pics of the sweet life on his yacht. And now Steve Bannon has been arrested
along with other leaders of the We Build The Wall organization after
the funds that were sent to them turned out to be funding boats, homes,
and whatever Bannon did to run up a tremendous debt. And then, of course, there’s the grifter-in-chief, whose “university” scammed thousands out of their life savings and whose “charity” paid off his golf bets.
It seems incredible that behind every Republican scam … is another
scam. With the evidence that organizations right at the center of the
American right are nothing more than money funnels for a handful of con
artists, it’s worth asking: Is there anything at all to the right?
Across all these scams, the M.O. is the same. They start with a pitch that seems to break down into one of two categories:
You’re missing out on secrets that can quickly give you an advantage over other people
Your way of life is being threatened by people who are not like you
These are, of course, the classic basis of scams for centuries. The solution to either of these issues is the same—send money.
With money, you can defend the right to bear arms! Or … give millions
to Wayne LaPierre while hitting members with frantic messages about a
critical need for cash. With money, you can be gifted the secret insight
of Donald Trump’s real estate genius. Which … turns out to be being
born to someone who leaves you a billion so you can spend your time
womanizing and duping people who think you know something. With money,
you can build that wall, even if Congress won’t! Except … instead of
building a wall, you can pay off hundreds of thousands of personal debt
for Steve Bannon. (And again, just how did the perpetually grubby Bannon
run up, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands in personal debt?)
Steve Bannon is a scam artist. Roger Stone is a scam artist. Paul
Manafort is a scam artist. Rudy Giuliani is a scam artist. Jerry
Falwell, and Kenneth Copeland, and Joel Osteen,
and Paula White, and a long list of other televangelists are scam
artists. David Clarke is a scam artist. Alex Jones is a scam artist. David Daleiden is a scam artist. James O'Keefe is a scam artist.
A quick glimpse of the boards of any of
the organizations involved, or a reference to all the “institutes” and
“think tanks” that provide an endless stream of talk show
guests, recycled lobbyists, and Republican politicians bouncing around
in the safety net shows that the same names come up over and over again.
The same right-wing figures constantly vouch for each other’s
importance and knowledge. The same right-wing “experts” are dredged up
to give opinions on science, when they know nothing about science, or
explain health care, when they have no interest in health care, or
simply fill the airwaves with confusion when there’s no better strategy.
QAnon, with its worldwide conspiracy of
Satan-worshipping pedophiles (not to mention its bigfoot and space Nazi
offshoots), isn’t true. But it is real—as real as every other
scam in the Republican universe. Right now you can absolutely bet that
quite a few someones are pocketing millions over Q-related nonsense. The
first of those someones would be scam-daddy Donald Trump, who on
Wednesday declared that he really was saving the world from Satanic cannibals. But he certainly isn’t the only one. And
when Fox News or right-wing radio asks, you can bet there will be a
parade of Hoover Institute, Heritage Foundation, American
Enterprise experts ready to talk to the Satanpedocannibalistic threat.
Space Nazis, too.
The truth is that there is no secret knowledge. Knowledge is
available to anyone. It’s just that becoming a real expert on anything
requires years of study and experience. It doesn’t come in a weekend
seminar, or in a ring-binder priced higher than a Midwestern home. The
truth is also that things change. Places change. Institutions change.
Countries change. No one can promise that they won’t. Pretending
otherwise is no more than selling snake oil. And of course, Republicans
are at that, too. Isn’t that right, My Pillow guy?
Maybe there was a time when the Republican Party stood for something.
If so, it’s hard to locate that time. What’s absolutely clear is at the
moment the Republican Party exists only as a marketing organization—a
platform for launching scams. The reason that Republicans never get
concerned about upholding real knowledge or expertise isn’t secret at
all—those things make it more difficult to part fools from their money.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke with U.S. Postmaster General Louis
DeJoy Wednesday, a conversation in which he "frankly admitted that he
had no intention of replacing the sorting machines, blue mailboxes and
other key mail infrastructure," she said in a statement. She says she spoke with him to let him know that his announcement Tuesday that he was suspending certain policy changes that have crippled mail service "is not a solution and is misleading."
"The Postmaster General's alleged pause is wholly insufficient and
does not reverse damage already wreaked," Pelosi wrote. In addition to
the key infrastructure he's refusing to replace, he admitted "that plans
for adequate overtime, which is critical for the timely delivery of
mail, are not in the works." The destruction of sorting machinery is continuing, as was discovered Wednesday in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The USPS had already confirmed
that restoration of infrastructure wasn't going to happen. This makes
it official, and is going to make for some intense congressional
hearings Friday and Monday.
Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, who scheduled
his hearing for Friday in an attempt to pre-empt the Democratic House,
is probably regretting that decision now. His plan was to have DeJoy
testify that he didn't need any additional funding, and that is going to
be wholly overshadowed by DeJoy's wanton destruction of the
institution. The follow-up hearing on Monday in the House is definitely
going to be lit.
DeJoy is proving himself to be a real gift to Democrats—not just in
giving them all this fodder, but in making Republicans look craven and
stupid. Not that it's a stretch to make House Minority Leader Kevin
McCarthy look bad, but then he tweets
that the "so-called crisis at the @USPS" is just Democrats
"manipulating information in order to push a conspiracy theory." A
conspiracy theory that the USPS disproved
by sending a letter to 46 states warning them that their elections are
in jeopardy. Also a conspiracy theory that prompted DeJoy to pretend he
was going to stop doing it.
This is all going to make passing the $25 billion emergency aid bill,
which also requires the Postal Service to restore service to
pre-coronavirus levels, that much easier for Pelosi. Once that passes,
it's going to make it that much harder for Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell to refuse to bring the bill to the floor. Not that he won't be
craven and corrupt enough to ignore it: It's just going to be really
painful for all his fellow Republicans to fall in line.
Just imagine how many mail-in ballots these displaced mailboxes could accommodate. Not to mention checks, bill payments and prescription medications.
The supposed suspension of policy changes
at the U.S. Postal Service by Trump lackey and Postmaster General Louis
DeJoy has been greeted with skepticism from pretty much all parties.
Skepticism and demands for policy reversals, not just suspensions.
Because, as Hunter pointed out, the statement says nothing about undoing
the damage that is already devastating the institution and keeping our
mail from us.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in the middle of an interview when the news covered DeJoy's announcement, said: "They felt the heat and that's what we were trying to do, to make it too hot for them to handle." She followed up with a more complete statement
to reporters, saying it "is a necessary but insufficient first step in
ending the President’s election sabotage campaign." She continued:
"This pause only halts a limited number of the Postmaster’s changes,
does not reverse damage already done, and alone is not enough to ensure
voters will not be disenfranchised by the President this fall." That was
the sentiment roundly heard from Democrats on both sides of the
Capitol.
Sen. Chuck Schumer tweeted:
"It’s good they’ve recognized the problems they’ve caused but we need a
PERMANENT rescission of ALL of DeJoy’s harmful policies—and they MUST
treat all election materials as first class." Sen. Gary Peters, the
ranking member on the Homeland Security Committee that will grill DeJoy
on Friday, said:
"there are still too many unanswered questions," like whether sorting
machines will be returned and which changes DeJoy is leaving in place.
Peters continued:
"I will keep pressing the Postmaster General for answers through my
investigation and at Friday’s Senate hearing." Sen. Elizabeth Warren responded in the same vein:
"Our work is far from over. We've got to reverse the damage DeJoy has
already done, investigate his conflicts of interest, and fully fund the
USPS. He and Trump have shown us the lengths they'll go to in order to
sabotage the Postal Service—and we can't let them off the hook."
Former Deputy Postmaster General Ronald Stroman, who stepped down in May, told reporters
on a press call: “I think it raises more questions than it provides
answers. And it will be important int he coming days to see if we can
get clarity in regard to those questions.” For example, he said: "What
does that mean when you say overtime will be granted as needed? One
could determine at any time that overtime is not needed in a particular
instance." No one who isn't a completely partisan Republican is satisfied with this statement from DeJoy.
That includes the Democratic attorneys general
from numerous states who are suing to have the policy changes reversed.
The co-chairs of the Democratic Attorneys General Association,
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and Oregon Attorney
General Ellen Rosenblum, said: “We
put Trump and his hand-picked Postmaster General on notice, and it
worked. It’s no coincidence that DeJoy backed down just as Democratic
AGs announced lawsuits. When Dem AGs team up, the Administration pays
attention.”
“But,“ they continued, “we won’t believe it until we see it. Without
concrete action by DeJoy to undo the damage already done and prevent
future problems, we are moving forward to hold the Trump Administration
accountable.” They added: “And here’s our message to the American
people: Use your vote. Vote early; whether in person or by mail. However
you choose to vote, Democratic state attorneys general are standing up
to make sure every single vote is counted.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 involvedknewthat hundreds of thousands of Americans would die if they failed to act, but they still refused to actout 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,
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