Why Trump’s Protest Crackdown Keeps Blowing Up in His Face



Why Trump’s Protest Crackdown Keeps Blowing Up in His Face

by Jonathan Chait, nymag.com

July 29, 2020 06:00 AM

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Donald Trump’s plan for exciting his base during the 2018 midterm elections was to crank up the threat of a migrant caravan. Fox News ran caravan footage on endless loop, and Trump smashed democratic norms by using the military as a campaign prop, deploying it to the border to “defend” against the supposed threat of violence (which, of course, magically dissipated immediately after the election.)

Trump’s party obviously fared terribly in the midterms, as one would expect from a deeply unpopular president. But he did crank up historically high levels of Republican turnout, and was hardly mistaken in seeing the tactic as a success.

The caravan episode has become the model for Trump’s reelection strategy. Trump hypes the threat from a small band of telegenic miscreants who may pose no threat to the average person, but look scary enough in a tightly-framed video clip, and whom he can link to his opponent and promise to brutalize. In this case, the enemy is small bands of vandals that have lingered at the tail end of the George Floyd demonstrations. Trump has used the danger to justify a surge of federal troops, in the hoops that they would create footage of confrontations that would present Trump as the heroic vanquisher of chaos, this time inside America’s borders.

An administration official recently told the Washington Post the White House “had long wanted to amplify strife in cities,” and that “It was about getting viral online content.” A confession that the president is provoking violent confrontations on American soil in order to seed campaign propaganda would tear apart a normal president, but has already been half-forgotten against the backdrop of a presidency in which scandals of this scale occur several times a week.

And yet Trump’s ploy has not worked at all. Indeed, he and his supporters have been reduced to complaining that the biased news media is showing images of non-violent protesters rather than the troops-versus-anarchist battles Trump longs to put on display.

Conservatives do have a germ of a point: Some of the protesters, especially in Portland, have destroyed or defaced property and provoked police, rather than merely demonstrating against racism and police violence. The Portland NAACP complained that “mostly white anarchists” have incited violence and diverted attention from the purpose of the protests.

But the reason Trump’s tactic fails is that, by deploying troops to fight the anarchists, he broadens the issue into a fight about Trump himself. This inevitably draws more, largely nonviolent protesters, into the streets. “The numbers of protesters had dwindled substantially in recent weeks,” one reporter in Portland observed last week, “but reports of heavily armed, unidentified, camouflaged federal officers abducting people off the street into unmarked vehicles and meting out violence on the people of Portland have thoroughly re-energized the populace.”

The same thing happened further north. “Nightly protests since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis had dwindled in recent weeks in Seattle but were reinvigorated in the wake of federal action in the Portland protests and after Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) tweeted that President Trump had sent federal law enforcement agents to the city,” reported the Post.

And so the scenes that Trump craves, pitting soldiers against black-clad radicals, have transformed quickly into troops against veterans, moms, and other antagonists who cut a more sympathetic profile. The protesters report that they have joined the protests because of Trump’s response to the protests. Tessa and Leshan Terry formed the “Wall of Vets” in Portland, and came to their first demonstration after seeing video of agents beating a fellow Navy veteran.

Peter Hamby recently found polling that showed Trump’s approval dropped precipitously following the battle of Lafayette Square. And it was not just Trump’s approval or vote share against Joe Biden that collapsed. The episode triggered a sharp change in public attitudes toward the police. As the political scientist Omar Wasow had found in the 1960s, non-violent protests increased support for civil rights, even as violent protests diminished it. The first few days of the protests combined both violent and non-violent protests, but eventually larger peaceful demonstrations dominated the scene. It was likely the violence used by police against peaceful demonstrators that turned public opinion decisively — not only on Trump, but also the reality of abusive policing that was on such vivid display.

Trump wishes to frame the election as a conflict between himself and anarchists. But the very act of inserting himself into the conflict changes its nature. Trump’s strategy is failing because he thought he could isolate a static enemy. He wanted to beat up on a new caravan. This time, though, the caravan is all of us.

The Two States Where Trump’s COVID-19 Response Could Backfire in 2020

The Two States Where Trump’s COVID-19 Response Could Backfire in 2020
By Ronald Brownstein
theatlantic.com
9 min
View Original

Updated on April 13, 2020 at 5:26 p.m. ET

A handful of swing states will almost certainly decide the winner of November’s presidential election. And in two of them, Michigan and Florida, Donald Trump’s complicated relationship with their governors could expose him to greater political risk as the economic and social price of the coronavirus pandemic mounts.

Trump faces mirror-image threats. Michigan voters could interpret Trump’s animosity toward Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer as punishing the state. By contrast, in Florida, Trump’s liability could be his close relationship with Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, which is seen by many as one reason DeSantis was slow to impose a statewide stay-at-home order.

In each place, voters may be even more likely than those in other states to blame or credit the president for how the outbreak unfolds there. And in both cases, Trump’s posture toward the states is now inextricably interwoven with the larger story of their struggle to contain the disease.

Michigan is where Trump’s behavior presents the clearer danger to him come November. The president has repeatedly disparaged Whitmer and suggested that the White House should not return her calls, even as the state is buckling under the nation’s third-largest coronavirus caseload and faces medical-equipment and staffing shortages. “It is politically stupid of the president to pick a fight with a governor who is trying to manage a crisis in a state that he has to win,” Eric Goldman, Whitmer’s former campaign manager, says flatly.

In Florida, conditions have not yet reached such a crisis point, though its caseload is growing steadily. But because DeSantis waited so long to act, he and Trump could be punished if the outbreak ultimately imposes a heavy cost on the state. “If this does get worse and worse … I think DeSantis’s vulnerability is Trump’s vulnerability,” says Adam Smith, a Tampa-based senior vice president at the bipartisan firm Mercury Public Affairs.

In no other swing state has Trump’s relationship with a governor been as intense during the outbreak as his relationships with DeSantis and Whitmer. The two leaders, both elected in 2018, present different profiles. Whitmer, a former state senator, was at the vanguard of governors who moved quickly to shut down social and economic activity. She closed educational facilities on March 16 and imposed a statewide stay-at-home order a week later. DeSantis, a former congressman who soared from relative obscurity to win the gubernatorial nomination after Trump’s endorsement, closed educational facilities a day after Whitmer. But he conspicuously left open the state’s crowded beaches through spring break, and he didn’t impose a statewide stay-at-home order until April 1, after every other major state.

Trump’s hostility toward Whitmer—who, like other Democratic governors, has at times criticized the federal government for failures in testing and supplies—was perhaps most memorably expressed at his March 27 White House briefing. Trump said he told Vice President Mike Pence not to “call the woman in Michigan.” “You know what I say?” Trump added. “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call.”

Trump made clear his affection for DeSantis, meanwhile, a few days later. As DeSantis faced growing criticism at home and around the nation for his refusal to shut down Florida, Trump described him at another press briefing as a “great governor,” who “knows exactly what he’s doing.” When DeSantis finally issued his stay-at-home order, he made clear that he did so only after talking with Trump.

These divergent records frame the political risks confronting Trump from his relationships with these state leaders.

In Michigan, Democrats are sure to remind voters of his threats against Whitmer. He risks alienating those who think that a political grudge is driving the federal response. “There is an incredibly minuscule chance” that the clip of Trump talking about his conversation with Pence “does not make it into television ads, digital ads, and mailers throughout the state of Michigan later this year,” Goldman told me.

Whitmer has tried to soothe her conflict with Trump. Last week, she told my colleague Edward-Isaac Dovere that she’d had a productive call with the president, and this week she praised the federal government for sending more medical equipment. But in her interview with Dovere, she also didn’t back away from her repeated criticism that an inadequate federal response had compounded the suffering in her state and elsewhere. “More people are going to get sick and more lives are going to be lost because we don’t have enough testing, because we don’t have enough [personal protective equipment], because there aren’t enough ventilators,” she said.

John Truscott, a veteran Republican consultant in Michigan, told me that, right now, most voters probably see Whitmer as standing up for her state, not seeking to score political points. But Truscott believes that the conflict is doing more to harden partisan divisions in Michigan than to scramble them. Trump’s attacks on Whitmer are “one of those things where people thought it was unnecessary and kind of gratuitous,” he said. “But at the same time, people who like Trump weren’t bothered by it. People who don’t like him hate him even more.”

If the reaction has been relatively muted so far, Truscott believes that it’s because the outbreak is still seen primarily as a problem for greater Detroit. It hasn’t yet penetrated as deeply into the small-town and rural parts of the state that constitute the Trump heartland.

But that doesn’t mean it won’t—or that Detroiters’ outrage doesn’t affect Trump. He won Michigan in 2016 by only 10,704 votes—a smaller margin than in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the two other bricks that he dislodged from the Democrats’ “blue wall.” The president can hardly afford any erosion in the populous Detroit metropolitan area.

Two suburban counties outside the city illustrate his problem. Four years ago, he won Macomb County, the fabled seedbed of blue-collar “Reagan Democrats,” by 12 percentage points, and he lost white-collar Oakland County by about eight points. In 2018, Whitmer narrowly won Macomb and roughly doubled Hillary Clinton’s margin in Oakland. Just before the outbreak crested last month, turnout in both places soared in the 2020 Democratic primary compared with 2016, a sign of rising engagement among Democrats.

Now both counties are facing fierce conditions, with more than 6,600 cases and 375 deaths combined as of yesterday morning. (Wayne County, which includes Detroit, has more than 9,600 cases and almost 450 deaths, one of the nation’s heaviest concentrations.) Detroit newspapers this week have been filled with wrenching stories about hundreds of local health-care workers, particularly nurses, who’ve tested positive for the disease.

The only recent public polling in Michigan came in mid-March, before Trump’s public attacks on Whitmer and the health-care crisis’s surge in the state. Even at that point, the share of residents who approved of Whitmer’s response to the outbreak (about 70 percent) dwarfed the portion that approved of Trump (about 50 percent), according to the Great Lakes Poll, which is conducted across several Midwest states by Baldwin Wallace University. The survey also found that Trump trailed former Vice President Joe Biden in a general-election matchup in Michigan by five percentage points.

Bernie Porn, the president of the Lansing-based nonpartisan polling firm EPIC-MRA, told me that before the outbreak, Trump “was already vulnerable in Michigan.” But his confrontations with Whitmer could seal his fate.

“I don’t understand what he is thinking about,” Porn said. “She has done a fantastic job during this health crisis. She’s been very decisive. And she made decisions about closing things down and taking actions” before the state hit a spike. By attacking Whitmer while she copes with these enormous challenges, Porn said, Trump has created a situation where “the ads write themselves” for Democrats in the state.

As ever, the politics on the ground in Florida are more complex. The state has been extraordinarily close in recent presidential and gubernatorial elections. Trump won it by just more than one percentage point in 2016, four years after Barack Obama won it by just less than one point. But after Republicans took the governorship and a Senate seat in 2018, many Democrats grew even more pessimistic that they could recapture the state from Trump this year, given his strong hold on older, rural, and blue-collar voters.*

“The general perception among people who obsess about this was, Trump was sitting prettier in Florida than in a lot of the other swing states,” says Adam Smith, who was for many years one of the state’s most prominent political reporters at the Tampa Bay Times.

The question in Florida is whether the coronavirus outbreak will jolt the state hard enough to rattle that consensus. As of last night, Florida ranks eighth among the states in total number of cases. Over half of those have been recorded in the three big Democratic-leaning counties in the southeast: Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach. The statewide death toll remains relatively low, at about 300, or approximately one for every 100,000 people.

The outbreak’s concentration in the bluest parts of the state has created a dynamic similar to the one in Michigan: The Republican heartland (in northern and Central Florida, as well as parts of the Gulf Coast) may feel more threatened now by the economic risks of the disease than by the health dangers. “You have to remember, this is largely a South Florida thing,” says Ryan Tyson, a Republican pollster who conducts surveys for the state’s business community. Even Democratic strategists privately acknowledged to me that many Florida voters may be sympathetic to DeSantis’s decision to delay action, given how important tourism is to the state’s economy.

Tyson says that in his ongoing polls, both Trump and DeSantis are maintaining approval ratings well over 50 percent in the state, about the same as two weeks ago and higher than one month ago. But the most recent public poll, from the University of North Florida, found the two in a much more tenuous position. Only 45 percent of respondents approved of Trump’s handling of the outbreak, and 51 percent gave DeSantis positive marks. That’s significantly below the number for governors in most other states.

The UNF poll, which was conducted from March 31 through April 4, found Biden leading Trump by six percentage points in the state. But longtime Florida political observers I spoke with believe that Democrats still face an extremely difficult puzzle in Florida. The Democratic ticket needs to excite turnout among African American and non-Cuban Latino voters, while still reassuring enough older white voters to avoid catastrophic losses among that huge bloc in the state.

“These are tough trade-offs for Democrats,” says Daniel A. Smith, a University of Florida political scientist. “To find someone who can calm the nerves of the older white electorate that votes and mobilize younger voters and people of color—it’s a high bar.”

But to Smith, as with other analysts in the state, the coronavirus outbreak remains a wild card. DeSantis deviated so conspicuously from the approach of virtually every other big-state governor. (Ironically, until this crisis, most political observers in Florida felt like DeSantis had been edging away from Trump and looking to broaden his appeal.) Whether DeSantis faces a backlash for delaying a shutdown will likely depend on how hard the disease ultimately hits the state. Another potential vulnerability is that Florida’s unemployment system, which was redesigned under DeSantis’s Republican predecessor, has staggered under the increased demand from disease-related layoffs.

But what is clear even now is that many in the state see Trump’s fingerprints on the governor’s decisions. That means the president is unlikely to escape unscathed if Floridians ultimately conclude that the governor made the wrong choice in waiting to act until only a handful of governors in the most conservative states, such as Alabama and Wyoming, had refused to do so.

“This is a pivotal moment right now, and we continue to not see leadership coming out of Tallahassee on this issue, certainly relative to almost every other state,” Smith said. “We are akin to what’s going on in Alabama. Is that what we expect from our leadership in this state?”

The answer to that question may determine whether Democrats can fight back into contention in a key swing state that before the crisis had seemed to be drifting beyond their grasp. And Florida could be even more consequential to the president’s reelection hopes if he’s already doomed his chances in Michigan.



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In just one month, Trump commits a whole new set of potentially impeachable offenses

In just one month, Trump commits a whole new set of potentially impeachable offenses

By Fred Hiatt

July 27, 2020 at 5:37 a.m. GMT+9

President Trump’s contempt for the Constitution is deepening at an accelerating pace.

How can I tell?

In a June 28 column, I updated the articles of impeachment, imagining as a thought experiment that the Senate had postponed action at the beginning of the year rather than voting to acquit. Based on Trump’s behavior in the intervening five months and what we had learned of his earlier actions, I argued that at least four new articles were warranted.

Now, only four weeks later, there’s enough misbehavior to lengthen the indictment just as much again.

To be clear: I am not suggesting that the House should again impeach the president. It’s up to the voters to render judgment, and we will have our chance soon enough.

But the thought experiment is valuable as a measure of whether Trump was chastened by becoming only the third president in history to be impeached, as some Republican senators assured us he would be — and as a warning of what we might expect if he is returned to office for a second term.

You will recall that Trump was impeached on two counts: abuse of power, for withholding aid and a White House meeting in a corrupt attempt to extort political favors from the president of Ukraine; and obstruction of Congress, for refusing to cooperate with the legitimate House inquiry into his scheme.

In June, I proposed four additional articles. The first was for willful endangerment of the American people, for political ends, with his fatally negligent response to the covid-19 pandemic.

Trump decided that his reelection depended on reopening, so he ignored his own scientists’ advice and undermined governors’ leadership with calls to “liberate” the states. The result: a pandemic out of control. In just the past six weeks, the number of cases has doubled from 2 million to 4 million.

Yet, as that has been unfolding, the White House engaged in a bizarre campaign to discredit the nation’s top infectious-disease doctor, Anthony S. Fauci. And Trump continues to belittle testing, the essential tool for reopening. Let’s add those to the indictment.

My month-old Article 2, abuse of law-enforcement powers, will have to be retopped, because the offenses I included a month ago pale beside the recent, reckless deployment of federal forces into U.S. cities for political purposes. As my colleague Ruth Marcus wrote, “Something terrible, something dangerous — and, yes, something unconstitutional — is happening in Portland, Ore.” — where, over the objections of the governor and mayor, unbadged federal agents have swept peaceful protesters into unmarked vans and detained them. All so that Trump can posture as a “law-and-order” president.

My Article 3, abuse of appointment power, will have to be updated, too, now that the courageous Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman has been not only drummed out of the White House but bullied out of the military altogether.

Article 4, abuse of power in foreign affairs, gets a new count. The original cited Trump’s acquiescence to China’s concentration camps in western China in exchange for the campaign help of promising to buy soybeans from Midwest farmers.

Now we would have to add his unexplained, and thus far inexplicable, supine acquiescence to Russia’s reported bounty payments for the killing of U.S. servicemen in Afghanistan.

And we would need some new articles as well, starting with Article 5: Abuse of power for personal enrichment. The New York Times reports that the U.S. ambassador to Britain told several people in 2018 that Trump was pushing him to get the British government to steer the lucrative British Open golf tournament to a Trump-owned resort in Scotland.

He hasn’t landed the tournament yet. But attempted sleaze is still sleaze.

But if you want actual payments, we have those, too, as Post reporter David Fahrenthold has helped uncover. In this election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, Trump’s campaign, Trump-affiliated committees and the Trump-controlled Republican Party have steered more than $4 million to Trump-owned businesses. Those aren’t tax dollars, true, but I would not want to be the defense lawyer arguing in the U.S. Senate that it’s perfectly fine to use donor funds and the political process to enrich oneself.

Article 6 would be abuse of the reprieve and pardon power. The Constitution allows the president to free felons, including one who has been convicted of lying to Congress and the FBI to protect the president. That doesn’t make it okay.

Finally, Article 7 would charge Trump with undermining faith in the electoral process. The president’s lies about the possibility of fraud in mail-in balloting, combined with his threats to disregard the results of the election, wouldn’t register as transgressions in the U.S. criminal code. But could there be any higher crime and misdemeanor than deliberately seeking to suppress the vote, seed chaos and lay the groundwork to obstruct a peaceful transfer of power?

Well, maybe. Come back in a few weeks.

Read more:

Spin, deride, attack: How Trump’s handling of Trump University presaged his presidency

Spin, deride, attack: How Trump’s handling of Trump University presaged his presidency

By 

David A. Fahrenthold, 

Joshua Partlow and 

Jonathan O'Connell

July 25, 2020 at 9:00 p.m. GMT+9

The judge was out to get him, he said. So was that prosecutor in New York, whom he called a dopey loser on a witch hunt. So were his critics, who he said were all liars. Even some of his own underlings had failed him — bad people, it turned out. He said he didn’t know them.

Donald Trump was in trouble.

Now, he was trying to attack his way out, breaking all the unwritten rules about the way a man of his position should behave. The secret to his tactic: “I don’t care” about breaking the rules, Trump said at a news conference. “Why antagonize? Because I don’t care.”

That was 2016. He was talking about a real estate school called Trump University.

On May 27, 2016, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump went on an 11-minute rant about Gonzalo Curiel. (Reuters)

Trump University, which shut down in 2011 after multiple investigations and student complaints, was treated as a joke by many of Trump’s political opponents — much as they treated Trump Steaks or Trump Vodka. But to those who knew the school well, it wasn’t a joke.

It was a premonition.

The saga of Trump University showed how far Trump would go to deny, rather than fix, a problem, they said — a tactic they have now seen him reuse as president many times, including now, in the face of a worsening pandemic. For months, President Trump promised something wonderful but extremely unlikely — that the virus would soon disappear.

John Brown, a former Trump University student from New York, said he understands why some people believed him.

“This is how people get sucked [in]. Because they want it,” Brown said. “That’s what happened to me.” He wanted to succeed so badly that he paid $25,000 for a Trump University “mentorship” program, which left him deeply disappointed.

Another former student, Bob Guillo, said he felt a deep frustration at being unable to prevent Trump University’s saga from playing out again on a far larger stage.

“I tried to warn the American people that if Donald Trump was doing this to me, he’s going to do the same thing if he’s ever elected president,” Guillo said, referring to interviews and TV appearances he did during the 2016 election. “Unfortunately, people believed Trump. And they didn’t believe Bob.”

Now, many former students, instructors and lawyers who sued Trump wonder whether, as he faces a worsening pandemic, they see parallels to another chapter of Trump University’s story. Its end.

Eventually, they said, Trump’s attacks could not conceal the huge gap between Trump University’s promises and its results. He began to lash out, attacking his antagonists as conspirators and fools.

“It’s something I think about all the time,” said Tristan Snell, who was the lead attorney for the New York state attorney general’s office in a lawsuit against Trump University. Snell said the school “had a fulfillment problem”: It could not deliver on the enriching real estate secrets it promised.

“Maybe that’s a good metaphor for what’s happening in America is that we have a fulfillment problem,” he said. “You’ve sold X and Y and Z and you can’t actually fulfill the order.”

In this case, Snell said, what Trump promised but cannot provide is not real estate secrets. It is something even harder to deliver — victory against a deadly disease.

“The difference this time is the fact that he’s running his game on a virus,” Snell said. “And the virus doesn’t care.”

Trump settled three lawsuits against Trump University in 2016, after his election. Trump University paid a total of $25 million but did not admit fault on claims that customers were defrauded by the school. When The Washington Post asked about Trump University recently, the Trump Organization sent a statement that focused on the lawsuits.

“After several years of litigation, Trump University was amicably resolved and settled by the parties with no admission of any liability,” Kimberly Benza, a Trump Organization spokeswoman said in an email. “We remain confident that we would have absolutely prevailed had the case proceeded to trial.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The questionable tactics used by Trump University did not diminish some former students’ opinions of him, any more than political setbacks have upset his base. Some interviewed for this report said Trump’s political record was good enough to outweigh their bad experience at Trump University.

“Trump 2020!” said Michael Sheehan of New York state.

In 2009, Sheehan paid $1,495 to attend a three-day Trump University seminar at a Marriott in Albany, N.Y. — then discovered it was one long sales pitch for more-expensive programs. “Trump was a big sham,” Sheehan wrote in 2012, summing up his experience in a court affidavit.

Now, Sheehan said, he doesn’t blame Trump for Trump University. The instructors were probably at fault, he said: “I don’t think he sat there and said, ‘Hey, I want you to rip everybody off.’ ”

This year, he doesn’t blame Trump for the worsening of the coronavirus crisis. Trump’s enemies are probably at fault, he said. “You don’t think it’s very convenient,” he said, that the pandemic arrived in an election year?

But others said they felt the experience showed Trump was willing to use his reputation as a tough, heart-of-gold billionaire against them — and to ask them to believe him over their own instincts.

Stephen Gilpin was one of Trump University’s instructors. He recalled sitting in on another instructor’s class shortly after joining the school in 2007. It was nothing more than an up-sell, he said, laden with false promises.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, we’re all going to be arrested,’ ” Gilpin said.

Now, he and others said, the Trump administration is trying a similar tactic again, by asking people to believe Trump’s rosy predictions about the pandemic — in the face of an increasingly grim reality.

“It’s the same thing he does today,” said Gilpin, who left the school in 2011. “His behavior has now become our norm.”

Trump University began in 2005, when Trump was at the height of his fame from television’s “The Apprentice.” Trump invested about $2 million and took near-complete control over the school, according to court filings by the New York attorney general’s office. One executive said in his deposition that Trump personally approved all the ads.

The basic sales pitch of Trump University was one that Trump would reuse in his 2016 campaign.

The billionaire had made enough money for himself.

Now, he would put his famous brain to work for the little guy.

“Come on America, pull yourself up!” Trump said in one newspaper ad, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. In the ad, Trump said real estate was where millionaires were made, “and now I’m ready to teach you how to do it.”

But Trump, the billionaire, still wanted them to pay.

The costs ranged from $1,500 for a three-day seminar to $35,000 for a “Gold Elite” mentoring program. One instructor, James Harris, justified the charges this way, according to a 2008 transcript of a class held in Atlanta that was later filed as an exhibit in a lawsuit: The money wasn’t for Trump’s benefit. It was for the students’ benefit. They had to pay Trump, he said, to show they were investing in themselves.

“He is doing this so you assume personal responsibility for doing the work,” Harris said, according to the transcript.

Harris did not respond to questions sent via email for this report. In 2016, he told The Post that “I was told to do one thing” as a Trump University instructor: “Make sure everybody bought” more Trump University seminars. “That is it.”

At Trump University, saying yes didn’t stop the pressure. As Republican leaders would later learn when dealing with Trump himself, saying yes once wasn’t the end. It was the beginning.

“I’m like a sheep led to slaughter,” Dean said.

In Richmond, Dean said, she was told she should take another class, in Houston, on tax liens. It cost $9,997. She paid. In Houston, they told her Trump University had a great investment opportunity for her in Biloxi, Miss., which required a $23,980 payment. She paid again.

In the end, Dean said, she wound up with no property in Mississippi, no valid tax liens and not enough skills to become a real estate investor. She had paid more than $30,000, borrowing from her tax-sheltered annuity.

“It was a bitter thing for me. Here I am, I am a lowly schoolteacher, public school teacher. Donald Trump is, according to him, a very rich man,” Dean said. “Now here I am, having to pay money back for enriching someone that’s already rich.” She complained in a letter to the Justice Department that was submitted as evidence in the New York attorney general’s lawsuit.

Trump University attracted more than 5,000 paying customers, according to court papers, and took in more than $42 million in revenue. Trump himself got back his $2 million investment and got $5 million in profits on top of that, according to filings from the New York attorney general.

But there was a problem — disgruntled students.

At best, many former students said, their thousands of dollars in payments to Trump University bought them rudimentary knowledge of real estate, basic lessons they could learn anywhere. At worst, they said, they found their classes useless and their high-dollar personal “mentors” unhelpful and hard to reach.

Their complaints had begun to bring scrutiny from state regulators.

In Texas, Trump University pulled out of the state after an investigation by the office of then-Attorney General Greg Abbott (R) — now the state’s governor — concluded that the company was “engaging in false, misleading and deceptive practices” and had defrauded Texas out of $2.6 million. The school had disputed that its classes were deceptive, according to correspondence later obtained by the Dallas Morning News.

An estimated 267 Texans spent more than $425,000 on the three-day seminars, and 39 purchased the $35,000 packages, according to John Owens, who was the Texas attorney general’s deputy chief of consumer protection.

In public, Trump defended his school. “The vast majority of people love us,” Trump told the New York Daily News in May 2010. “Thousands and thousands of people have taken our courses, and very few have complained.”

But soon after, he shuttered Trump University. In its offices on the 32nd floor of a Trump-owned office building, employees were fired so fast that they left desks still covered in work papers, said one former Trump Organization employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships with the company.

“It was like a horror movie where everyone just died and their bodies disappeared,” the person said.

In California, former students filed two class-action suits against Trump University, in 2010 and 2013. In New York, then-Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) filed another in 2013, alleging Trump University had deceived its students.

What happened next will sound familiar.

Trump attacked.

In New York, Trump filed a formal ethics complaint against Schneiderman, saying the attorney general had pressured him for campaign donations. The state ethics board investigated but decided not to pursue the case, according to news reports.

Then there were the personal attacks on Schneiderman, whom Trump publicly called “dopey” and a “loser.” On Twitter, Trump also accused Schneiderman of wearing makeup.

“It’s Tuesday. @AGSchneiderman is wearing Revlon eyeliner today,” Trump wrote in 2014. Schneiderman, who resigned his office in 2018 after allegations he had abused women, declined to comment for this report. He has said his long eyelashes are a side effect of glaucoma medication.

As the class-action lawsuits proceeded in California in 2016, Trump used Twitter to criticize Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge hearing those cases, as un-American. Curiel was born in Indiana to parents who were Mexican immigrants. Trump called him “Mexican,” saying he was biased because of Trump’s hard line on illegal immigration.

Those attacks paralleled the bitterest moments of Trump’s political career — his attacks on GOP primary rival Ted Cruz’s father and wife, his insults aimed at special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and then at witnesses during Trump’s impeachment trial. All aimed to cast doubt on an authority — or authority figures — that might turn against Trump.

In the Trump University case, opposing lawyers said, they learned how to deal with Trump’s eruptions. Ignore them. Keep digging. Let Trump talk to himself.

“As difficult as it is, you can’t get distracted with the mudslinging or name-calling,” said Rachel Jensen, one of the attorneys in the California class-action cases. “You have to remain disciplined and focused on the substance. Over time, it pays off.”

In Texas, after a months-long investigation relying on undercover agents attending seminars, the attorney general’s office drafted a lawsuit in 2010 seeking $5.4 million in restitution and penalties. “We had the goods on them,” Owens said.

But Owens’s bosses did not file the suit. David Morales, then deputy attorney general, said that he spiked the suit without Abbott’s input. “I approved an investigation into this company in Fall 2009 and did not file suit in Spring 2010 due to lack of consumer complaints,” he said in a recent email.

In Florida, staffers for then-Attorney General Pamela Bondi (R) also pondered whether to pursue an investigation of Trump University. Bondi’s office chose not to. Around the same time, Bondi received a $25,000 political donation from Trump, made via Trump’s charitable foundation. Bondi’s staff said the donation did not affect its decision.

Since then, Bondi and Morales have risen to greater prominence. In 2018, Trump nominated Morales to be a federal judge. And Trump chose Bondi — now out of office — to be one of his attorneys during his impeachment trial earlier this year.

But it was hardly a moment of loss for Trump.

He had just been elected president, having beaten a slew of rivals who had tried to use Trump University’s problems against him.

“Donald Trump’s election benefited Trump University students around the country,” Jensen said. “For everyone else, all I could say was ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

Now, former students and staffers at Trump University say there is something familiar about the present moment.

Trump is again struggling to fulfill a promise and again facing a growing backlash. His presumptive opponent in the 2020 election, Democrat Joe Biden, seems to have learned the lawyers’ lesson, ignoring many of Trump’s attacks instead of amplifying them with tit-for-tat responses.

But some former Trump University students say it’s too early to believe that the covid-19 crisis will doom Trump’s presidency after one term. They say they learned in 2016 that there were enough people who believed in Trump the way they used to.

There might be enough in 2020, too.

“I think there are many people who are saying — they’ve pulled the curtain back, and they’re saying, ‘Who’s this person behind the curtain?’ ” said Brown, the former Trump University student who spent $25,000 on classes. “Others are still under the spell, this magical spell.”

“My father’s one of them,” Brown said. He told his father, a Trump supporter, about his experiences with Trump University. “He just said, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ That was it.”

Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Why aren't Republicans trying to juice the economy? by James Pethokoukis

Why aren't Republicans trying to juice the economy?
An elephant.
Illustrated | iStock
President Trump is losing his bid for re-election. Opinion polls, forecasting models, betting markets, and superforecaster predictions are all telling the same story. And it's not even close. Trump might even suffer such a devastating defeat to former Vice President Joe Biden that Democrats retake the Senate and extend their House majority. It's rapidly becoming a historically dire situation for the GOP.

So, a political mystery: Why aren't his fellow Republicans in Washington doing whatever it takes to help their president, not to mention save their own jobs?

Of course, Congress can only do so much. It can't pass a bill that immediately creates a raft of new COVID therapeutics or a one-shot-and-you're-immune vaccine. But it can support and stimulate the economy through aid to individuals, business, and state and local governments. So far lawmakers have passed some $3 trillion in assistance through three different fiscal packages.

But while Democrats want to spend another $3 trillion on a "phase four" package, Republicans are trying to keep the price tag around $1 trillion. For instance, they don't want to fully extend the weekly $600 jobless benefit bonus or give huge new grants to states and cities. And it's not just that they are reflexively opposed to any and all Democratic ideas. Senate Republicans are also showing little interest in Trump's idea for a payroll tax cut.

That relative stinginess is confusing to many Washington watchers. If you believe more spending this summer likely means a stronger economy than otherwise on Election Day, then it would seem to be in the political self-interest of Republicans to spend whatever it takes to juice GDP and job growth over the next few months. It's hard to imagine that Trump would veto even a $3 trillion spending bill if it contained a payroll tax cut and he thought it would help win him the election. At this point, what's a few more percentage points in the federal debt-to-GDP ratio? That's some future president's problem, not his.

But Republicans in Congress aren't going to send Trump a $3 trillion package. Maybe even not half that amount. And here's why: First, many Republicans, as well as conservative economists, genuinely think some kinds of new spending could actually hurt the economy in the short-run. So supporting those measures would actually harm the party's electoral chances. Particularly problematic, in their view, is that $600 jobless bonus. In a recent analysis, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist at the right-leaning American Action Forum and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, calculated that extending the bonus means 63 percent of workers would make more on unemployment insurance than at their previous job. "There is good reason to fear that unemployment will stay high because of the bonus," he concluded. Lots of Republicans agree.

Second, it's clear the GOP thinks portraying Democrats as belonging to a party lurching toward socialism is a winning message. But it's sure harder for Republicans to make that case if they want government to spend as much as the Democrats do. Monthly stimulus checks might make lots of voters happy right now, but it muddies the message that Joe Biden is a stalking horse for radical leftists who would, you know, send everybody checks. And a big infusion of cash to poorly managed blue states? No way.

Third, many analysts overestimate just how much Trump has changed the GOP on economic policy. The Trump tax cut represented traditional GOP economics. So, too, have the Trump administration's efforts at deregulation. Even though Trump keeps talking about it, there's been no massive infrastructure spending bill. And Trump didn't need the help of congressional Republicans to launch his various trade wars.

What's more, plenty of GOPers really are worried about debt and deficits, at least if they are generated by spending increases rather than tax cuts. Here's what Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania had to say recently about another big stimulus package: "Let's remember, there's no free lunch. All of this is either borrowed money or created money and, either way, Americans are going to pay a price for this." That is classic conservative thinking. Fiscal support during a pandemic is one thing, stimulus another. Don't forget that many regular Republicans still think they belong to the party of fiscal responsibility, even though deficits were rocketing higher under Trump before the coronavirus outbreak. And as many GOPers see it, the economy is already bouncing back, as evidenced by the recent strong jobs reports for May and June.

Republicans are running a risk, however. The economy was rebounding, but maybe not so much anymore as the pandemic has worsened since mid-June. "The economy is sputtering again," writes Moody's Analytics economist Mark Zandi in a recent note. And the only reason he isn't forecasting a double-dip recession is that he expects Congress to pass a large fiscal package of at least $1.4 trillion. But don't expect anything like a boom. Even with that additional federal aid, Zandi sees a "largely sideways" economy between now and a COVID vaccine. If Trump loses by a little rather than a lot, Republicans may wish they had spent more like Democrats.

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Coronavirus ravaged Florida, as Ron DeSantis sidelined scientists and followed Trump

Coronavirus ravaged Florida, as Ron DeSantis sidelined scientists and followed Trump

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, center, attended a White House event on drug pricing on Friday, when the state recorded 12,444 new cases of the virus and 136 deaths.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, center, attended a White House event on drug pricing on Friday, when the state recorded 12,444 new cases of the virus and 136 deaths. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

"I never received information about what happened with my ideas or results," said Thomas Hladish, a University of Florida research scientist whose regular calls with the health department ended June 29. "But I did hear the governor say the models were wrong about everything."

DeSantis (R) this month traveled to Miami to hold a roundtable with South Florida mayors, whose region was struggling as a novel coronavirus hot spot. But the Republican mayor of Hialeah was shut out, weeks after saying the governor "hasn't done much" for a city disproportionately affected by the virus.

As the virus spread out of control in Florida, decision-making became increasingly shaped by politics and divorced from scientific evidence, according to interviews with 64 current and former state and administration officials, health administrators, epidemiologists, political operatives and hospital executives. The crisis in Florida, these observers say, has revealed the shortcomings of a response built on shifting metrics, influenced by a small group of advisers and tethered at every stage to the Trump administration, which has no unified plan for addressing the national health emergency but has pushed for states to reopen.

DeSantis relies primarily on the advice of his wife, Casey, a former television reporter and host, and his chief of staff, Shane Strum, a former hospital executive, according to Republican political operatives, including a former member of his administration.

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“It’s a universe of three — Shane and Casey,” said one Republican consultant close to DeSantis’s team who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment.

The response — which DeSantis boasted weeks ago was among the best in the nation — has quickly sunk Florida into a deadly morass. Nearly 5,800 Floridians have now died of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus — more deaths than were suffered in combat by Americans in Afghanistan or Iraq after 2001. One out of every 52 Floridians has been infected with the virus. The state’s intensive care units are being pushed to the brink, with some over capacity. Florida’s unemployment system is overwhelmed, and its tourism industry is a shambles.

DeSantis began the year as a popular governor, well-positioned to help his close ally President Trump win this crucial state in November's election. DeSantis is now suffering from sagging approval ratings. Trump is polling behind Democrat Joe Biden in recent polls of Florida voters. And both men, after weeks of pushing for a splashy Republican convention in Jacksonville, succumbed to the reality of the public health risks Thursday when Trump called off the event.

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Trump asked DeSantis in a phone call in May whether he would require masks for the convention and whether the virus would be a problem, according to a person with knowledge of the conversation. DeSantis said he would not require masks and the virus would not be a major problem in August in Florida.

“You were elected to be the governor of our state and make decisions about what is best for us in Florida,” Hialeah Mayor Carlos Hernández said of DeSantis. “If he was more concerned with what the president thought of him, the outcomes are here.”

DeSantis’s office did not respond to interview requests or to a set of detailed questions sent by The Washington Post. In response to questions, a spokesman for the health department said the governor and Rivkees, the surgeon general, “are continuing to remind all Floridians to protect the vulnerable by avoiding the Three Cs: Closed Spaces, Crowded Places and Close-Contact Settings and by wearing a mask in public.”

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The spokesman, Alberto Moscoso, did not explain why the department had ended its work with the university modeling team or why Rivkees appears only once this month on the governor’s schedules, which have been released through July 23.

During the same period, DeSantis spoke regularly to members of the Trump administration. He appeared twice on Fox News and called in to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show.

“Ron DeSantis is doing a great job and will go down in history as a great governor of Florida,” the president told The Post through a spokeswoman.

Those who defend the governor’s approach point to his early efforts to protect nursing homes. They also dispute claims that he has been inflexible, emphasizing his decision to re-close bars and clubs last month after a spike in infections. The governor’s allies have also commended him for securing more remdesivir, an antiviral drug used to treat the most severe coronavirus patients, which is in short supply across the country.

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Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said the governor’s relationships in Washington have benefited Florida. In the spring, the state emerged on top “in terms of supplies and resources,” because, in the telling of Trump, “we’re really good at asking for stuff,” Gaetz said.

Jared Moskowitz, a former Democratic state legislator who now heads the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said DeSantis has been “completely accessible” and “open-minded in our conversations.”

He continued: “Anything that I have needed or asked for, dollars that are going to be required to respond appropriately have always been available.”

The department’s command center was temporarily shuttered this month after a series of infections among staff working there.

Some of Florida’s woes are shared by other states, especially in the Sun Belt: economies powered by tourism and hospitality whose leaders sought reasons to invite people back to their states; skeletal public health systems that could not adequately respond with contact tracing and other interventions; and holiday celebrations that caused residents, particularly young people, to flout guidelines.

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But the crisis in Florida has been especially acute, infectious-disease specialists say, because politics have dictated the response at crucial junctures — never more so than with the state’s reopening, which was cast by the governor as a return to normal rather than as a new and even more precarious phase of the pandemic.

Trump told aides that Florida’s early success gave other states a justification to reopen, according to three administration officials. Meanwhile, DeSantis quickly turned presidential rhetoric into gubernatorial orders, all while rejecting measures, including a statewide mask mandate and an extended stay-at-home order, that helped other states contain their outbreaks.

Officials involved in the local health and emergency response say DeSantis has selectively highlighted favorable metrics, such as a decline in the median age of people who are testing positive, rather than developing more serious mitigation strategies.

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“I think we’re on the right course,” he said as cases surpassed 400,000 and he continued to push for schools to open for in-person classes in a few weeks.

Some on the front lines are drawing different conclusions.

“The numbers are up, my man,” said Frank Rollason, the emergency management director in hard-hit Miami-Dade County. “They speak for themselves.”

'Chance to rubber-stamp it'

The governor’s small inner circle stands in contrast to the number of people tapped for his reopening task force in April. The group included more than 100 participants but only five doctors, who were placed on a working group alongside representatives from the ­elder-care industry and farming leaders.

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The working group met twice for 2½ hours, said one member, dentist Rudy Liddell, and did not develop written recommendations or provide continued input once the report of the executive committee was released at the end of the month.

The guidelines that emerged from the executive committee closely mirrored the reopening recommendations issued by the White House. There were few specific benchmarks following the first phase of a statewide reopening on May 18 — after about six weeks of sweeping restrictions — with movement into new phases premised instead on “adequate health care capacity” and the absence of a resurgence of the virus. In early June, DeSantis announced that much of the state could move into the second phase, lifting restrictions on bars and movie theaters, on the same day the state recorded 1,317 new cases, the largest surge in six weeks.

“It was outcome-determinative — they knew what they wanted to do,” said state Sen. Gary Farmer, the incoming Senate minority leader. “It was a joke. . . . It was, ‘Here’s the plan. Here’s the chance to rubber-stamp it.’ ”

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As the state shifted into reopening, the Republican National Committee announced plans for its convention. The National Basketball Association opted to finish its season in Orlando. Disney World reopened July 11.

Compliance in April with the sweeping stay-at-home order brought the state’s numbers down to a point that reopening looked feasible, said Cindy Prins, an epidemiologist at the University of Florida. The problem, she said, was the speed with which the state moved through the subsequent phases of its economic restart.

“There was hardly enough time for the new infections even to show up,” she said.

The governor’s quest to put the pandemic behind him undermined the very message — that the virus was still a deadly threat — that could have made his reopening a success, said J. Glenn Morris, director of the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute.

“One of the areas where we failed in Florida was in convincing people that as things began to open up, that we still had a serious situation, that the virus was still present in the community and that there remained a critical need to maintain the basic practices recommended by the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention],” he said.

Critical mitigation strategies remain inadequate, according to lawmakers and experts, owing to years of disinvestment in the state’s public health infrastructure. One estimate, by a researcher at Florida International University, found that the state had slashed public health spending 35 percent between 2009 and 2015.

The health department’s 2017 budget request warned of “insufficient individuals at the local level who have the skills to perform epidemiological analyses” and manage outbreaks.

Contact tracing, which has been central to controlling outbreaks in other settings, has been highly limited in Florida. State Rep. Rene Plasencia, a Republican representing parts of Orange County and Brevard County, said not a single family member or friend sickened by the virus has been contacted by the health department.

With the virus tearing through urban centers, “we’re at a point where I don’t even know how you would do contact tracing anymore,” Plasencia said.

The lesson of the pandemic for Florida, said Charles Lockwood, dean of the University of South Florida’s College of Medicine, was, “Never declare victory until the referee blows the whistle.” When the wave of cases predicted this spring did not initially crash down on the state, Tampa General Hospital and the University of South Florida used the time to order ventilators and stockpile personal protective equipment, Lockwood said.

Meanwhile, steps he suggested to health officials in his county were not acted upon, including a recommendation to use cellphone technology to track at-risk patients and encouragement to stand up a more robust system of contact tracing. In both instances, he said, local health officials indicated they were constrained because these were functions controlled in Tallahassee, the state capital. The health administrator in Hillsborough County, Douglas A. Holt, declined to be interviewed.

Efforts to offer advice on contact tracing at the state level were rebuffed, as well, according to experts involved in the response. Hladish, the infectious-disease researcher, said he and other specialists had tried to raise the subject during one of their calls with department staff but were told contact tracing was handled by a different team.

“We were told that they were too busy to talk,” he said.

Even health department staff were constrained in the nature of the advice they could offer, according to state health officials stationed in counties, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing response. They said conversations with state officials have recently included reminders that they were not authorized to advise school districts about whether to reopen but simply to “provide them with information,” as one official put it.

These officials said calls that once occurred daily with Rivkees, the surgeon general, have been scaled back to three times a week. Rivkees, a pediatrician whose specialty is not epidemiology or disease surveillance, was escorted out of a news conference by the governor’s communications director in April after saying Floridians may have to practice social distancing and wear masks for up to a year, a prediction at odds with statements from DeSantis and Trump.

Some of his top staff have left the department mid-pandemic.

The administrator of the department’s surveillance section left in March for a job at Pfizer. Rebekah Jones, who had been managing the department’s public-facing data portal, was dismissed in May after a dispute over changes to the dashboard, which she said were designed to hide relevant information. State officials, who accused Jones of “insubordination,” said the changes were aimed at increased accuracy. Scott Pritchard, who headed the department’s investigations unit, left last month. He informed his team he was leaving on the day DeSantis announced plans to reopen schools at “full capacity,” according to people familiar with the matter.

Pritchard, who did not respond to a request for comment, then left the state altogether.

'Government has failed us'

DeSantis has left Florida for the White House numerous times during the pandemic.

At an April briefing in the Oval Office, Trump offered to hold the governor’s foam display boards as DeSantis detailed how Florida had corralled the coronavirus better than almost any other state.

“Everyone in the media was saying Florida was going to be like New York or Italy, and that has not happened,” DeSantis said.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Florida now eclipses New York’s caseload by more than 3,300. Florida has at least 168,000 more cases than Italy, a country with about three times the state’s population.

DeSantis joined Trump for a White House event on drug pricing Friday, when the state recorded 12,444 new cases of the virus and 136 deaths.

DeSantis was a little-known congressman in the first half of the Trump administration who made a name for himself with appearances on Fox News denouncing the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

He netted the president’s endorsement in the 2018 Republican gubernatorial primary, riding it all the way to the governor’s office.

“What’s the old phrase — dance with the one who brought you,” said Farmer, the incoming Florida Senate minority leader. “That’s what he’s doing. His political fortune in becoming governor was not just closely tied, but almost exclusively tied, to the Donald Trump train.”

Trump feels bonhomie with DeSantis, likes having him in the Oval Office and regularly speaks with him on the phone, even though many around the president do not trust the governor, people familiar with the matter say. DeSantis also regularly consults with Brad Parscale, the president’s recently deposed campaign manager.

Florida’s initial ability to skirt the worst effects of the virus was a boon for DeSantis and for Trump: The governor’s aggressive efforts to jump-start his economy were right out of Trump’s playbook, perceived at the time as a benefit in the battleground state. Administration officials regularly sent reports and clips of DeSantis bragging about Florida not having cases early in the outbreak, to argue that many states were overreacting and, at times, that seasonal heat could cure the virus.

Now, with the virus spreading uncontrolled in Florida, former health officials think DeSantis has joined the president in seeking to manage expectations about its consequences rather than formulate a plan to bring it under control.

“They keep hoping it’s going to go away by itself,” said Richard Hopkins, an epidemiologist who spent 19 years at the Florida Department of Health. “I don’t know what’s going on — whether they’re afraid that they will get primaried by someone to their right if they take appropriate public health action.”

Approval of DeSantis’s handling of the pandemic has fallen by double digits since April, when 50 percent of registered voters in Florida backed the governor’s approach. Now, 38 percent of residents approve of his response, while 57 percent disapprove, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday.

The return this summer to crisis conditions has felt like whiplash for front-line workers.

In June, employees at the six-hospital Memorial Healthcare System based in Hollywood, Fla., thought they had dodged a wave of coronavirus patients that threatened to overwhelm their hospitals.

Exhaling workers began to dismantle surge areas from auditoriums and classrooms that had been converted into treatment areas. But it was premature. By the end of the month, covid-related hospitalizations had begun to soar, said the system’s chief medical officer, Stanley Marks.

“We converted them back,” Marks said. “By early July, we again were in full emergency mode.”

Darlene Dempsey, a nurse in West Palm Beach and a lifelong Republican, said she could no longer support Trump or DeSantis, both of whom, she added, had chosen to “gaslight nurses” instead of using the time in March and April to ramp up production of medical equipment and develop a testing plan.

“The fairy tales about all being under control are nonsense,” she said. “Our government has failed us.”

Wootson reported from St. Petersburg, Fla., Stanley-Becker and Dawsey reported from Washington, and Rozsa reported from West Palm Beach, Fla. Jacqueline Dupree and Emily Guskin in Washington contributed to this report.

Coronavirus: What you need to read

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Updated July 25, 2020

Tsunami warning for Republicans

Tsunami warning for Republicans

Republicans are inching closer to a political wipeout, losing complete control of power in Washington. The way things are going, the 2018 midterms may end up looking like a GOP high water mark.

AP Photo/Armando Franca

Josh Kraushaar @HOTLINEJOSH

 July 24, 2020, 11:53 a.m.

In the dozens of interviews we conducted with Republican and Democratic strategists as part of our latest Hotline House race ratings, one dynamic became apparent: The bottom is falling out for Republican candidates across the country, from traditional battleground states to even heavily Republican strongholds like Alaska. While public polling shows President Trump badly behind in typical swing states, internal surveys from top pollsters are indicating trouble in surprising locales.

There are hints of the looming GOP shellacking all over. Joe Biden is up by a whopping 13 points in Trump’s new home state of Florida, according to a new Quinnipiac poll, as close to a must-win as it gets for the president. Trump is trailing in Texas by 1 point, consistent with other surveys showing the president in trouble in a state Republicans have carried in every election since 1976. Democrats are investing millions in Georgia, convinced that they can contest not just the presidential race but both Senate seats up for grabs in the traditionally red state. Democrats provided us with remarkable internal data from reliably Republican House seats—from Oklahoma to Indiana—showing districts that Trump carried by double-digits are now Biden battlegrounds in the presidential race.

Biden is now the heavy favorite to win the presidency. This week, The Cook Political Report declared Democrats are favored to win back the Senate, with a massive Democratic gain of five to seven seats more likely than a narrow Republican majority. And our House race rankings of the most competitive races contained more Republican-held seats than Democratic ones, a stunning dynamic given how many red-district seats Democrats are defending after riding a big blue wave in the 2018 midterms.

Indeed, the last midterm election is a useful benchmark for examining this year’s election. Optimistic Republican strategists are holding out hope that the political environment would be similar to that of two years ago, when Republicans badly struggled in the suburbs but ran competitively in wide swaths of the country. Republicans point out that GOP candidates notched a few significant wins that year despite their overall struggles, winning a big Senate seat and governor’s race in Florida, toppling a couple of red-state Democratic senators, and holding their own in working-class territory where Trump made major gains in his first presidential race.

Right now, replicating that 2018 environment looks like a best-case scenario for Republicans. They’re losing even more ground in the suburbs, forcing the party to write off nearly any district where Trump was already losing ground before. And as the coronavirus continues to spread across the country, Republicans are taking hits among normally dependable white working-class constituencies. The rural heartland of Iowa would normally be a golden opportunity for Republicans to mount a comeback. Instead, GOP Sen. Joni Ernst is struggling against a little-known challenger, and the GOP could whiff on three promising pickup opportunities in the House.

Actions are speaking as loudly for Republicans as the polls. Trump’s decision to dramatically scale back the Republican convention—canceling proceedings in Jacksonville after demanding a packed house full of Trump supporters weeks ago—is a sign of Republicans’ declining fortunes. A clear majority of voters don’t believe Trump has taken the pandemic seriously, and is continuing to punish him and his party for the misconduct. With early voting in many states beginning in two months, there’s not much time left for the president to shake off the widespread perception of incompetence on the biggest issue of the day. Businesses have again been forced to close in major hotspots across the South and Sun Belt, threatening another economic speed bump that Republicans simply can’t afford.

Internal Republican divisions are also beginning to emerge, in ways that suggest the party is already looking ahead to a post-Trump future. Republicans are struggling to find consensus on a new coronavirus-relief package, a fight that pits fiscal conservatives wary of spending additional public money against the risk of economic calamity that awaits if they don’t. Several House GOP hard-liners went after Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney this week, accusing her of being insufficiently supportive of the president. Cheney, a potential future party leader, fired back by portraying them as political nihilists. In Kansas, outside Republican groups are pouring millions into a primary in a desperate attempt to prevent a hard-right candidate from costing the party an otherwise winnable Senate race.

This is the sign of a political death spiral. At this point, Republicans would be content to suffer through another blue-wave election, holding out hope the Senate could remain narrowly in Republican hands. Right now, Republicans are staring at the reality of a historic tsunami, wiping out all their avenues of power in a rebuke against a hapless president.

 

Trump knows he's going to lose

How can you tell President Trump thinks he’s going to lose in November? Because he has already begun salting the earth behind him.

And his fellow Republicans are helping by sabotaging key institutions that the next (presumably Democratic) president will inherit.

On Tuesday, the Republican-controlled Senate Banking Committee approved Trump’s latest two picks for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. One of these nominees, Christopher Waller, would be a competent, reasonable, totally qualified addition to the most powerful economic body in the world.

The other is Judy Shelton.

Shelton, a professional crank, has previously suggested that the Fed shouldn’t exist. She has repeatedly likened the Fed to a “Soviet State Planning Committee” because the central bank, rather than the quantity of gold, controls the money supply. Shelton has spent her career trying to bring back the gold standard, a monetary system abandoned worldwide and roundly rejected by economists.

Those were her views until recently, anyway. Once Trump nominated her to the Fed, she changed her tune. Now, the key problem with the central bank, she says, is that it is not political enough and ought to “pursue a more coordinated relationship with” the president. Which happens to be exactly what Trump wants: a Fed that serves his narrow political interests, rather than the economy’s.

Never mind that the Fed must be politically independent in order to function; as Argentina, pre-euro Italy and other basket-case economies have illustrated many times over, a central bank cannot credibly commit to stable prices if the money supply is even mildly suspected of being controlled by politicians.

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Republicans have indulged Trump’s choice to install charlatans elsewhere in the executive branch. But GOP senators had previously drawn the line at unqualified picks for the Fed. The central bank was too powerful, too important, to leave in the hands of buffoons and yes men.

So, as with some other quacks Trump had advocated for the Fed, until quite recently it looked as though Shelton’s nomination would fail. Especially, perhaps, when the economy hit its worst numbers since the Great Depression and it became clear the Fed was the country’s only competent economic policymaking body.

After all, Shelton has long been considered fringe even by hard-line Republicans. In fact, she was previously considered too outlandish to merely testify before the committee that just approved her for a Fed seat. “The idea of even calling her as a witness for something was beyond the pale,” a former Republican Senate Banking Committee aide said as Shelton faced confirmation hearings earlier this year.

So what changed?

For one thing, Trump’s poll numbers.

There is, even according to Republican lawmakers, no economic upside in putting Shelton on the Fed. In praise so faint it’s inaudible, Republican senators have suggested the best thing about her is . . . she’d be just one voice among many and would therefore be unable to unilaterally implement her worst ideas, such as reinstating the gold standard.

That’s their best-case scenario: that Shelton has no influence whatsoever. The worst: She could cause some chaos, including by making discussion among (understandably paranoid) Fed officials less candid. But perhaps a less functional Fed is desirable, if you’re expecting Joe Biden to be president come January.

It’s reasonable to suspect that Republicans might advocate personnel or policy changes damaging to the economy simply because a Democrat is president. They’ve done so before, when Barack Obama was in office. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, such advocacy came in the form of open letters and crabby op-eds fearmongering that low interest rates and Keynesian stimulus would stoke (in Shelton’s words) “ruinous inflation.”

If Shelton is ultimately confirmed to the Fed by the full Senate, those crank calls would be coming from inside the house.

Outgoing presidential administrations have engaged in petty, puerile pranks against their successors, such as stealing W keys from computer keyboards. This administration may be seeding something more sinister, across multiple critical institutions:

This landmine in the Fed. A hollowed-out State Department. Brain-drained statistical and scientific agencies. A shredded social safety net. A gutted immigration system, so financially mismanaged that about 75 percent of its employees are slated for furlough in two weeks. A hobbled higher-education system, once the envy of the world, now struggling to attract global talent because the administration has made it so difficult for that talent to study here. Perhaps a permanently lost tax-revenue stream from the past several decades of unrealized capital gains.

Of course, much could change before November. What might Trump do if, after so much destruction and earth-scorching, he wins reelection?

Perhaps he hasn’t thought that far ahead. Or maybe he’d revel in the “Mad Max”-style landscape he’s now cultivating. William Tecumseh Sherman left flames in his wake; Trump appears to prefer everything on fire, at all times, around him.

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Why Putin wants Scottish independence

WRITTEN BY Stephen Daisley

22 July 2020, 6:12pm

The Russia report was supposed to prove once and for all that the Kremlin rigged the EU referendum, Boris Johnson is an FSB asset and Dominic Cummings a bot operated from Saint Petersburg. Anything but the glum reality that the Leave campaign was more effective than its rival. That is not to say Vladimir Putin’s regime did not attempt to influence the 2016 vote. It is almost inconceivable that it didn’t, but the government’s complacent attitude towards democratic security means there was insufficient monitoring to know for certain.
Ministers and intelligence agencies should have been alive to the threat of Russian interference because, as the report confirms, the Kremlin intervened in the Scottish referendum six years ago. The long-awaited review cites ‘credible open source commentary suggesting that Russia undertook influence campaigns in relation to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014. This will have come as no surprise to long-time observers of Putin’s international strategy.
The report echoes the frustration of many Western analysts of Moscow’s global realpolitik:
“The security threat posed by Russia is difficult for the West to manage as, in our view and that of many others, it appears fundamentally nihilistic. Russia seems to see foreign policy as a zero-sum game: any actions it can take which damage the West are fundamentally good for Russia."
Putin’s foreign policy jealously guards Russia’s geopolitical independence while aggressively pursuing destabilisation in Western nations, especially the United States and its allies. It is classical realism meets post-Soviet angst about national weakness and decline. Putin measures his regime’s power at least as much by its ability to cause external disruption as its ability to suppress internal dissent.
It will also not have come as a surprise to casual viewers of Russia Today’s coverage of the referendum campaign. There was no pretence at even-handedness: the United Kingdom was on the verge of imploding and Putin’s propagandists were keen to toss in a few grenades to help out. If it seems improbable that the annexers of Crimea would care a jot for Scottish efforts to cast off the yoke of English colonial oppression, understand that the break-up of the United Kingdom would be a coup for Putin’s Western destabilisation campaign.
Perversely, the Russian government appreciates better than our own that Scottish independence is a national security issue. If anything, the dissolution of the Union would be messier, more protracted and more distracting for the UK than the sluggish crawl out of the European Union. Brexit was cancelling a Netflix subscription compared to the winding up of 313 years of shared politics, economics and history. Scexit would see the UK retreat from the international sphere to focus on interior matters for years.
The diminution in Britain’s global standing would be in more than political coherence and confidence. The mere possibility of impending Scottish secession would severely set back Liz Truss’s efforts to secure trade deals with new partners. Investing in a country that could lose one-third of its landmass and almost one in ten of its citizens in the near future is a very different prospect to the International Trade Secretary’s current offering.
Economic damage is one thing, but what about disrupting the UK’s military capability? Despite the SNP’s decades-long campaign against Trident, Westminster seems not to apprehend that Scottish independence could unilaterally disarm the UK of its nuclear deterrent. Those defences are currently located at Faslane and Coulport but an independent SNP government would require their removal from Scotland. The Scottish government has described a report suggesting the warheads can be disarmed within weeks and the whole system transported out of Scotland in two to four years as ‘a welcome indication of how quickly Trident could be removed’.
However, it is not a matter of simply sailing the submarines to another UK naval base. If the SNP insisted on expeditious removal, a 2013 Scottish Affairs Committee report concluded:
“t would mean the armed submarine on patrol would be recalled, and in effect, continuous-at-sea deterrent would stop. The UK at that point would no longer be able to operate its nuclear deterrent and it is not clear how quickly the UK could restore continuous-at-sea deterrence."
Other UK locations are either non-starters or would require significant time, investment, environmental changes or even population displacements. The tides are too low at Barrow-in-Furness, Plymouth too densely populated to store warheads nearby and Milford Haven home to liquefied natural gas plants and oil refineries. The other alternative would be relocating the submarines and warheads to the United States or France.
Britain would either be disarmed or humiliated and Nato would face losing one of its nuclear powers. For Putin, this would represent not only the humbling of a prominent Western nation but the weakening of the international body he deems the greatest obstruction to Russia’s expansionist designs. There is a reason Russia Today pumps out so much independence-related and SNP-sympathetic content. There is a reason it airs a weekly show fronted by a former first minister of Scotland and icon of Scottish nationalism. There is a reason Sputnik chose Edinburgh for its UK headquarters.
It is the same reason that Iran also interfered in the 2014 referendum: destabilising a rival power, one that plays an important role in promoting democracy, the rules-based international order and American global leadership. Our enemies see in the dismantling of the Union a chance to cut Britain down to size. Continued government negligence of this threat imperils not just our democracy but our national security.

The Trump campaign is the grift that keeps on grifting by Karen Tumulty

The Trump campaign is the grift that keeps on grifting


By Karen Tumulty

July 18, 2020 at 7:19 a.m. GMT+9

There has long been an element of grift to political campaigns.

The guys who make the ads and the media buyers get rich by paying themselves a percentage of the amount that is spent on advertising. The same is true for those who put together the direct-mail operation. As one political consultant explained it to me: “It’s sort of like getting to grade your own homework.”

Hired fundraisers can make six-figure commissions by exaggerating their worth. Others get paid similar amounts for providing “strategic advice.”

But there has never been anything quite like the racket that President Trump appears to have going.

In two days alone during March, the president’s reelection effort forked over roughly $380,000 of its contributors’ money to his hotels for “facility rental/catering services.”

The Trump Organization told my colleague David Fahrenthold that this paid for a “donor retreat” to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. A source familiar with the arrangement explained to Fahrenthold that the figure had to be broken into 43 separate payments, because Mar-a-Lago can’t handle credit card transactions of more than $10,000.

The campaign has also been paying more than $37,000 a month in rent to Trump Tower in New York, which is odd, considering that the campaign’s headquarters is in an office building in Rosslyn.

The Center for Responsive Politics has been keeping track of all of this on its OpenSecrets website. During this election cycle, the center reports, the president’s campaign and its related committees have steered $2.6 million of their donors’ money to Trump’s family-owned properties and businesses. The Republican Party has spent nearly $1 million as well, and GOP candidates, elected officials and their political action committees have spent another $391,000.

Sophisticated political contributors are generally wary when they see campaigns holding events in expensive hotels and resorts with lavish catering. That’s because they are well aware who is paying for it: They are.

But Trump’s donors, big and small, apparently are so dazzled by the aura of celebrity he has created around himself that they don’t care how much of their own money goes directly into his businesses. It’s all part of the experience.

Trump is not the first person to move from the private sector to the presidency. However, his predecessors — properly — severed ties with their financial holdings, for an obvious reason: to avoid conflicts of interest. There has never been a situation anything like the one that Trump created when he insisted on continuing to profit from his family business while serving as president.

As the Center for Responsive Politics noted: “Trump and his family are in the unique position to profit directly from his public service. Special interests in Washington have caught on. Those seeking to curry favor with Trump are not only donating to his reelection campaign but holding fundraisers and galas at his resorts, private clubs and hotels — the proceeds of which benefit him and his family.”

The White House loves to remind us that Trump is not taking his $400,000 annual government salary as president. In May, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany held up an oversize $100,000 check from the president’s personal bank account, made out to the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health. She said Trump earmarked his earnings for the quarter to be used by the Department of Health and Human Services to combat the novel coronavirus.

HHS, no doubt, had plenty of good use for the money. But spare us the argument that this was a gesture of Trump’s great altruism. At this rate, his government salary amounts to chump change for Trump — and those who are handing his campaign their own money are the chumps.

Read more:

Which Judy Shelton Would Show Up at the Fed?

Which Judy Shelton Would Show Up at the Fed?

By Ramesh Ponnuru.

bloomberg.com.

3 minutes.

July 3, 2019, 7:00 PM GMT+9.

Judy Shelton, the economic adviser President Trump says he is nominating to the Federal Reserve Board, has long been a predictable voice in monetary policy debates. Predictability is often a good thing in that context: It beats being erratic. Many monetary policy specialists want central banks to minimize the possibility of surprises by announcing relatively simple rules they will follow.

Until very recently, Shelton has been a consistent voice for tight money. In 2010, she decried the idea that the Fed would strive for 2%  annual inflation. That was much too high. It meant that “over and above all the taxes you pay … you will also give up another 18 percent of what you’ve earned and saved” over a decade, as inflation eats away at the value of your dollars. “An egregious violation of your property rights,” she called it. The next year, she said that any inflation, even at a rate as low as 2 percent a year, is “highly immoral.”

She kept sounding the same notes for years afterward. Quantitative easing was a mistake; the U.S. should lead the way to a new international gold standard; the Fed should stop setting “ultralow interest rates.”

But she is sounding very different now that she has a chance to be the nominee of a president who favors lower interest rates and isn’t worried about inflation. She told the Washington Post last month that she would lower interest rates “as expeditiously as possible,” just as Trump wants. Her concerns about the debasement of the currency and the violation of property rights brought about by loose money are evidently a thing of the past. The price of gold has been rising for much of the last year, which the Shelton of yesteryear would have seen as a sign that monetary policy needs to tighten. The Shelton of today doesn’t.

This might seem promising: Her old views were worth discarding. In 2010, inflation was at one of its lowest levels in decades. Attempting to drive it down even further would have increased unemployment at a time it was already nearly 10%. It would also be extremely unusual for anyone to suffer the ten-year losses she discussed from a 2% inflation rate, since nominal wages, interest rates and asset values all rise when the price level does. Tying the dollar to gold, meanwhile, would put swings in the global demand for the metal above the needs of the U.S. economy in setting monetary policy.

But Shelton has not rejected her views because they were wrong. Her explanation for why she now favors cutting interest rates is that the economic landscape has supposedly changed. “When you have an economy primed to grow because of reduced taxes, less regulation, dynamic energy and trade reforms, you want to ensure maximum access to capital,” she told the Wall Street Journal.

This argument is exactly backwards. If Trump’s policies have increased productivity, as Shelton claims, it’s a reason to raise rather than to lower interest rates. In an economy that is limping along with a trend growth rate of 2% a year, low rates might temporarily produce faster growth. If the Trump administration has achieved its goal of raising the trend growth rate to 3%, we will have faster growth without that boost.

Shelton’s prescription for monetary policy has changed so dramatically, and her rationale for it makes so little sense, as to make her appointment to the Fed a gamble. Does she believe what she is now saying, or is she just saying what Trump wants to hear? If the latter, then at the Fed would she revert to the rigid opposition to inflation at any cost that has marked most of her career? Or stick with whatever Trump wants?

The Journal interviewer began his write-up by saying, “These are dizzy days for monetary economists.” For people keeping track of Shelton’s pronouncements, they’re even dizzier.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:

Ramesh Ponnuru at rponnuru@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net

Published on July 3, 2019, 6:00 AM EDT

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Trump's Not-So-Proto Fascism is Still Not Proof of Political Genius (Evil or Otherwise)

Trump's Not-So-Proto Fascism is Still Not Proof of Political Genius (Evil or Otherwise)
By Neil H. Buchanan
dorfonlaw.org
11 min
View Original
by Neil H. Buchanan

Now that Donald Trump has decided that he wants to expand his terrifying use of unidentified shock troops in American cities beyond Portland -- a tactic that Professor Dorf has brilliantly (and accurately) likened to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Crimea -- people are finally feeling some sense of growing alarm about the lawless intent of this president and his enablers. One hopes that it is not too late.

Even in the midst of existential crises like this one, it continues to surprise me how important our word choices are. What we call things frames how we think about things (of course), and it is no mistake that demagogues and autocrats abuse language to minimize or maximize matters to their own purposes. Hence, Trump's description of increases in reported coronavirus cases as merely "the sniffles" -- as if hospitals (already stretched to capacity) say, "Oh, a positive case with trivial symptoms; looks like we'd better expedite his admission papers!" -- is completely normal for even for dimwitted politicians like him and is part of the drip drip drip of trying to get people not to blame him for being the failure that he is.

How do sloppy and misleading word choices make matters worse today? There are the typical Orwellian abuses of language for political ends ("Biden is a puppet of the radical left!"), but there are also inadvertent choices that end up weakening our responses and making Trump appear stronger than he is. This is a big problem, for multiple reasons.

In the case of Trump's embrace of disturbingly classic fascist tactics, I am worried to see his paramilitary goon squads being referred to simply as "feds." This authoritarian crisis is most definitely not a federalism question, at least not at its core. If Trump did not have the power to use Border Patrol agents for his political ends but did have the power to use state militias, the problem would be the same. Yes, state and local leaders are right to decry a federalization of the public safety response to isolated acts of violence or destruction within larger political protests, and I am glad that they are being vocal about it.

Even so, we would have a much less worrisome problem if the federally invoked personnel were acting according to the rule of law. If they were being used only to respond to identified and serious problems of public order; if they themselves were fully identified (since they do not need to work undercover for these purposes -- indeed, quite the opposite); if they were acting on probable cause or with valid warrants; if they were stopping and seizing people only after stating their reasons and where the suspects were being taken; if they kept records of seizures; and if they were not intimidating people into waiving their rights -- if all of those things were being handled appropriately, people would have less reason to worry that these were federal employees rather than non-federal ones.

There is reason to worry, of course, given that we do care about whether agencies that are supposed to enforce immigration laws are suddenly being used to deal with local issues -- even those local issues involving federal properties. Again, however, none of that would carry a heavy threat of incipient fascism. And when something becomes a federal issue simply because federal property is involved -- especially in the western half of the country, where "federal lands" encompass about half of total land area in many states -- this itself is a possible path to egregious overreach.

If the federal government is allowed to rampantly overreact to what amounts to minor property crimes against federal buildings, then we are one step closer to false-flag operations being used by Trump's supporters to create the pretext for lawless crackdowns. Historians are still unsure whether the Reichstag Fire was set by Nazis to justify jailing their political opponents, but the bottom line is that would-be dictators use such situations opportunistically. Trump has made it clear that his continued (and, if he has his way, ultimately absolute) power can be justified by pointing to "out of control" cities and the need to "dominate the battlespace."

So our real problem here is not that Trump sent in "the feds" or even "federal troops." Treating it that way trivializes the threat to the rule of law, and we should be clear that we are talking about Trump's abuse of presidential power to terrorize Americans who oppose him, potentially creating a United States-centered update of Argentina's and most infamously Chile's desaparecidos -- "the disappeared."

It is of the highest level of seriousness when we have even news and opinion sources who oppose Trump using cleansing and imprecise language when discussing his atrocious decisions and actions. Even short of that level of importance, however, it continues to be frustrating to see journalists misuse language and misapply professional standards in ways that are helpful to Trump.

To take a relatively blase example, a recently news article in The Washington Post addressed the important question of why wearing face coverings during the Covid-19 crisis became a politically divisive issue. The article began:

"By any measure, the United States has some of the top public health experts in the world. Yet as the novel coronavirus began to spread early this year, these U.S. experts repeatedly recommended against a simple tactic to prevent spreading the infection: face masks.

"The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in January that it did not recommend the use of masks for people who are well.' On Feb. 29, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams went further, tweeting a warning:'STOP BUYING MASKS.'

"But weeks later, the advice was reversed."
It is true that the Surgeon General's tweet began with the now-risible claim that masks "are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus." Even so, the remainder of that sentence was this: "but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!"
The Post's article makes it sound as if medical professionals in general were surprised by the idea that masks ended up being a good idea. The reality at the time, however, was that virtually all of the public statements about masks were couched as a matter of priorities: Don't start buying up masks that will do much more good if worn by health care workers. The advice was reversed when that unintended effect was no longer an issue, as it became obvious that people could make their own masks rather easily (or buy them cheaply) without competing for medical-grade masks.

This is a bit more than a matter of simple word choice, a la "the feds" rather than "unidentified Trump-directed thugs." Still, the point is that a news source that in no way should be seen as deliberately pro-Trump framed this important issue in a way that made it seem that one could reasonably have heard the medical community to be saying what Trump now says: "Masks are unneeded, so let people be free."

Even more than the inadvertently Trump-assisting framing through the use of true-but-not-truthful statements, however, I am constantly frustrated by the idea that Trump's actions are a matter of political "genius," or words to that effect. Even the lead editorial in today's Post, which appropriately and firmly criticized Trump's use of shock troops in U.S. cities, included this:

But Trump is not a "master" of anything. Less than two weeks after he was inaugurated in 2017, I published "Trump Is No More a Political Genius Than Lottery Winners Are Financial Wizards," here on Dorf on Law. Back then, people were hailing him as an evil genius who masterfully manipulated his followers and beat the media through shrewdly crafted messaging. All of which was (and is) false.
As I described it back then, this is essentially a variation on the question of whether special men make history or history makes some men seem special. In Trump's case, he is the beneficiary of a political and media culture in which his particular pathologies and excesses ended up fitting perfectly into the moment (with big assists from Vladimir Putin and James Comey).

There is no evidence that Trump, for example, consciously uses anything to "deflect" people's attention from one thing or another. Some demagogues do indeed engage in such strategies, but Trump simply has shown no evidence that he is responding strategically to anything. He is a sociopath and a narcissist, and he seeks to create situations in which he can make himself feel personally validated. When frustrated, he lashes out and says something stupid or shocking, rather than actually making an argument. That stops the immediate pain for him, but that is not mastery of anything. That is merely stimulus and response.

Why does the difference matter? First, it makes people give Trump credit for being strategic, which implies that he is several moves ahead, which I will discuss in a moment. Second, however, is the much more important point that this difference is absolutely essential to correcting the Biden-style "Trump is the ultimate problem" description of our current reality.

If Trump is a "master of distraction" or a political genius of some sort, then getting rid of him solves our problem, at least to a significant degree (with some cleanup of collateral issues still to be done). But because Trump is a fool -- a dangerous fool, but still a fool -- it is important to understand why this particular fool is able to do what he does at this particular time.

Although the U.S. media have made important strides in reducing their reliance on false equivalence, and especially in changing their habit of refusing to call a lie a lie, the press's treatment of Trump is still a problem to this day. Much more importantly, treating Trump as a uniquely gifted political savant makes it easier to ignore that it was the Republican Party's generation-long descent into madness that made Trump not merely possible but almost inevitable.

This means that Trump simply did the non-genius things that he does, and he happened to fit into the opening that Republicans had created for a reality-denying bigot like him. He remains the rancid version of the sweet character Chauncy Gardener from the brilliant 1979 political satire "Being There," in which an innocent dolt said things that "worked" not because he knew what he was saying but because the empty things that he said happened to land in ways that people misunderstood and took seriously.

Trump has never adjusted his approach in a way that tracked with anything other than a short attention span and a desire to lash out at people who criticize him. Nonetheless, political commentators continue to peddle the "genius" line. For example, one of the guys on The Post's roster of puzzlingly underqualified op-ed columnists, David von Drehle, wrote a piece three months ago under the title: “Trump’s Handling of the Pandemic is a Political Master Class.” The evidence of mastery? Trump refused to take responsbility for the pandemic.

You might be asking: "Wait. What? It was politically masterful to refuse to take responsibility as president for a national crisis?" Well yes, said our intrepid pundit. Trump had first threatened to order governors to do something stupid, at which point the governors said that Trump did not have the power to order them to do so. Trump then said, "OK, you're on your own."

See? Even though the pundit admitted that Trump has no political understanding as we commonly think of it, we were assured that Trump is simply a natural -- like a brilliant musician with a great ear but who cannot even read music. He manipulated those traditionally trained political operators in governors' mansions like a puppet master, and they fell for it!! "Never was a man happier to be pronounced powerless." Right.

This was absurd at the time, because as always, there was no evidence that Trump was playing n-dimensional chess or outfoxing his opponents. He had tried to be a bully, and when called on it, he petulantly said that he never wanted the responsiblity in the first place. The idea that this would go well for him -- that a national disaster would not boomerang on the resident of the Oval Office -- was never serious. ("Oh, but he survived the 'Access Hollywood' tape." Yes, and 140,000 Americans had not been killed by an infectious disease.)

Still, one supposes that it was possible for von Drehle's drivel to be proved correct. Are people in the United States holding Trump harmless, blaming governors in every state for not coordinating what was necessary to stop a crisis that Trump downplayed? Of course not. The governors who have acted like Trump are now being vilified, but the others (regardless of party) are being applauded. Trump is most definitely not floating above the fray.
This past weekend, The New York Times published an important article explaining just how badly this has damaged Trump politically: "Inside Trump’s Failure: The Rush to Abandon Leadership Role on the Virus," with a helpful subtitle: "The roots of the nation’s current inability to control the pandemic can be traced to mid-April, when the White House embraced overly rosy projections to proclaim victory and move on."
In the end, Trump's handling of the Portland stormtroopers situation is not evidence of political genius, and he is not able to intuit what political professionals fail to see in ways that help him politically. He has blundered into a political environment in which the Republican Party had spent decades assiduously plowing the political ground from which an ignorant, bigoted carnival barker could thrive.
Trump is what he appears to be: an insecure man who will stop at nothing to gain power and punish his enemies. We must never forget that that is true, because it does mean that one needs to be uniquely careful in responding to him. But ascribing genius where there is none -- indeed, imagining minimally intentioned action where there is nothing but brute instinct -- misunderstands the man and the moment.