Trump, the Floyd Protests, and the End of Confident Conservatism by David Hopkins

honestgraft.com
Trump, the Floyd Protests, and the End of Confident Conservatism
8-10 minutes
 June 4, 2020

After Richard Nixon's 1968 election, many conservatives came to believe that their movement naturally represented the political views of most Americans. This conservative faith in the wisdom of the average citizen was cemented by Ronald Reagan's popularity in the 1980s, which was widely interpreted at the time (and not just by conservatives) as a decisive expression of the nation's exhaustion with both outdated New Deal economic policies and decadent '60s-era cultural practices. America's mistaken dalliance with liberalism was a passing phase that it was maturing out of, argued the Reaganites, and both the present and future belonged to the right. Reagan himself projected this sunny confidence in the nation's judgment, serenely dismissing liberal expressions of outrage in the same manner that he responded to the attacks of the hapless Jimmy Carter by half-chuckling "there you go again."

Bill Clinton's presidency temporarily shook, but did not ultimately damage, the confidence of the conservative movement. Conservatives found ways to explain away Clinton's electoral success, claiming that he only won because George H. W. Bush had betrayed conservatism by raising taxes, because Ross Perot's independent candidacies temporarily drained conservative votes away from the Republican Party, and because Clinton's slippery political style deceived the electorate about his true nature. Republican capture of both houses of Congress in 1994 for the first time in four decades, combined with a similarly dramatic set of electoral gains at the state and local level, continued to suggest to conservatives that they represented the future of American politics, and several major milestones in the Clinton presidency, from the government shutdown of 1995–1996 to the impeachment of 1998–1999, were conflicts precipitated by conservative leaders who had assured themselves (sometimes incorrectly) that most of the public would side with them in a fight.

Despite the close margin, controversial resolution, and discrepancy between the popular and electoral votes, conservatives generally treated the 2000 election as something of a restoration after an eight-year usurpation, underlined by the fact that the new Republican president was the eldest son of the last Republican president. Especially after the declaration of the War on Terror, the presidency of George W. Bush styled itself as the authentic, patriotic voice of the vast American interior, and mocked its critics as a vocal but small group of coastal elites. Bush's top political aide Karl Rove repeatedly expressed ambitions to construct a durable Republican advantage in the manner of his political hero William McKinley, whose 1896 election marked the beginning of a 36-year stretch of Republican dominance of national politics.

With a few strategic concessions to the nation's changing demographic trends—education reform to appeal to suburban professional women, a softer tone on race and immigration to cultivate a Republican vote among Hispanics—the Bush program of "compassionate conservatism" envisioned a stable popular majority supporting a policy agenda of laissez-faire economics, religious traditionalism, and interventionist military engagements overseas. But the failures and misfortunes of Bush's second term opened the door to the election of Barack Obama in 2008. In retrospect, this was a key turning point in the psychology of the conservative movement.

Obama represented a new and more serious challenge to conservatism's conception of itself as uniquely speaking on behalf of the American public. His race was an important element of this threat, but not the only one. In contrast to Clinton's "triangulation" strategies and propensity to echo conservative tributes to limited government and personal responsibility, Obama made few substantive or symbolic concessions to conservatism. His policies were farther left than his predecessor's, and he succeeded in enacting health care reform where Clinton had failed. He was from Chicago, not small-town Arkansas. And he rode into office on the support of younger voters who represented the generational future of American politics, and who seemed especially resistant to the appeals of his conservative opponents.

Conservative confidence in the nation's long-term direction became notably scarce in the Obama years, as widespread pessimism and fear replaced Reagan's cheerful assuredness. The popular backlash on the right against the "change" that Obama himself claimed to personify was stronger than it had been against Clinton, taking aim at the traditional leadership of the Republican Party as well as the Democrats. Rather than selecting yet another member of the Bush family to succeed Obama, Republican primary voters opted to nominate Donald Trump, an outsider candidate who had built his campaign around passionate contempt for Obama and the state of the nation under his watch.

But whatever expressive purpose the decision to elect him may have served, the current president is ill-equipped to usher in a new conservative age. Trump is not a friendly face with the charisma to increase conservatism's mass appeal, like Reagan was. He is not a man with a 40-year plan, like Rove was. And any hopes that his glowering demeanor and vengeful preoccupations would either intimidate liberals into silence or halt the progression of larger social changes have clearly not been realized. In part because Trump has inspired a backlash of his own, conservatives do not seem much more comfortable with the direction of America today than they were four years ago.

The waning confidence of the American right in its own popular standing has produced other manifestations as well. Its imprint can be seen in conservative opposition to measures designed to increase the ease of voting, in negative portrayals of "millennials" and college students in the conservative media, and in an increased emphasis on the unelected federal judicial branch, rather than the congressional legislative process, as an avenue for conservative policy-making. Perhaps most dramatically, it is expressed by the more frequent displays of firearms at conservative protest events—a clear suggestion that the use or threat of physical force might be necessary to compensate for losses in the court of public opinion.

The current crisis in the streets of America has roots that stretch in many different directions, but it has surely been exacerbated by the current administration's propensity for confrontation with the many perceived enemies that surround it. It's not especially important that Trump apparently moved briefly to the bunker under the White House last week in the face of protests outside the building—a subject of liberal mockery in recent days—but it's crucial that the administration's governing approach from its inception has reflected a bunker mentality. The protestors gathering daily outside the White House and in cities and towns all around the country since the George Floyd killing have come to embody the threat of cultural besiegement that many conservatives, including those in law enforcement professions, have been feeling since 2008.

Trump has started to echo Nixon's famous invocation of a supportive "silent majority." But he is the only president in the history of public opinion polling who has never had a majority of Americans on his side, even on his first day in office, and he has never shown much interest in courting skeptics rather than attacking them. Winning a second term will likely require him to eke out a narrow margin in the electoral college, very possibly without a popular-vote plurality once again. The current governing regime seeks to retain political power from behind barricades that are primarily psychological, separated in spirit more than in physical distance from a growing population of fellow Americans whom it no longer trusts to be on its side. When you see your own domestic political opponents as an irredeemably hostile force trying to destroy the country as you know it, perhaps it's only natural to fantasize about calling in the troops.

Donald Trump Is No Richard Nixon / Jonathan Bernstein

Donald Trump Is No Richard Nixon
By Jonathan Bernstein
bloomberg.com
3 min
June 3, 2020

Original here

Comparisons with 1968 have been on my mind as unrest has spread over the past week, perhaps because President Donald Trump is embracing Richard Nixon so explicitly in his response; not only is he talking about “law and order” these days but he also tweeted out the exclamation “SILENT MAJORITY!” (yes, in all caps) without any other context on Tuesday, presumably for the handful of us familiar with it as a Nixon-era phrase.

Never mind that, as historian Joshua Zeitz points out, the role that Trump appears to be playing from 1968 is that of Lyndon Johnson. Never mind, too, as political scientist Omar Wasow explains to Greg Sargent, that a whole lot of things have changed since then.

No, I was thinking of where Nixon was at this point in his subsequent re-election campaign, at the end of May 1972. He wasn’t screaming about law and order. He was in Moscow, finishing up a historic summit with the Soviets in which he signed, among other agreements, a landmark arms-control treaty. That came on top of an even more consequential trip to China, which had taken up the second half of February.

The thing is that Nixon didn’t run for re-election on law and order. He ran on peace and prosperity (see the first two ads here). And he had real accomplishments to campaign on, including continued troop reductions and peace negotiations in Vietnam (not to defend Nixon’s Vietnam record, but he had an argument for progress in the fall of 1972). The economy was booming too. So Nixon sent his attack dog vice president to safe Republican audiences (easier to do in those days with a less nationalized media), and in public he acted, well, presidential.

Far from Trump’s strategy of catering only to his strongest supporters at all times, Nixon also found ways to neutralize his potential opponents. He was sufficiently moderate toward labor that the AFL-CIO actually stayed on the sidelines in the general election. For suburban do-gooders who might’ve been upset by Nixon’s abandonment of civil rights and the cities, he offered environmentalism. And on and on. I don’t want to exaggerate this; Nixon was no liberal as president, and many of the accomplishments liberals liked from his presidency were really congressional initiatives that he went along with. And that’s before getting to the misconduct that forced his resignation one step ahead of impeachment and removal. But the point is that Nixon’s governing approach was nothing like Trump’s.

We should be careful with all of this: Presidential general elections do not flow only, or even primarily, through the campaign strategies of the candidates. Events always swamp campaigns, and even incumbent presidents have only a limited ability to shape those events, as the pandemic above all should make clear.

That said, Nixon’s example surely shows that there are things incumbents can do to improve their chances for re-election, and it’s hard to see how Trump is doing any of them. Perhaps he’ll wind up winning anyway. But it certainly won’t be by emulating Nixon.

1. Lindsay Cohn at the Monkey Cage on using the U.S. military for police work.

2. Michael T. Heaney at Mischiefs of Faction on collective action and the pandemic.

3. Also at Mischiefs: Matthew Green on Washington as a presidential prop.

4. Tom Pepinsky on “mobilization, protest, civil disobedience, and direct action.”

5. Perry Bacon Jr. and Julia Azari on the attack on Lafayette Square protesters.

6. Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman, Katie Rogers, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Katie Benner on Trump’s walk to the church. One of the things that’s underappreciated by both Trump’s opponents and his supporters is just how amateurish this White House still is. It shows.

7. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen on Trump’s attacks on protesters.

8. Susan Hennessey and Margaret Taylor on what Congress can do about police violence and civil unrest.

9. And Shawn Donnan and Catarina Saraiva on the slow pace of delivering unemployment-insurance payments.

Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close.

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:
Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Timothy Lavin at tlavin1@bloomberg.net

Published on June 3, 2020, 7:30 AM EDT
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The Daily 202: More churches rebel against state orders, as Trump reverses course on releasing reopening guidelines

PowerPost  Analysis

The Daily 202: More churches rebel against state orders, as Trump reverses course on releasing reopening guidelines

By James Hohmann

May 22 at 11:49 AM

with Mariana Alfaro

President Trump announced Thursday that his administration will soon release guidelines to help churches safely reopen, an apparent reversal after senior White House officials blocked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from doing so. 

The decision comes as a growing number of faith leaders have announced plans to reopen in the absence of federal guidance and, in many cases, in direct violation of state orders aimed at slowing the spread of the novel coronavirus.

“We’ve got to open our churches,” Trump told reporters traveling with him to a Ford plant in Michigan. “People want to go in.”

Social conservatives in Vice President Pence’s circle, as well as officials at the Office of Management and Budget and the Domestic Policy Council, objected to the propriety of government telling religious institutions what to do. Public health experts responded that they were not requirements – but best practices. After weeks of back-and-forth, the White House made the decision not to release any guidance for houses of worship as the CDC put out road maps earlier this week for safely reopening schools, child-care facilities, restaurants, colleges, summer camps and mass transit systems.

The absence of advice from the prestigious health agency has added to confusion, fueled a patchwork of approaches and laid the groundwork for clashes between religious leaders and local officials. Trump’s order to put out the guidance appears to be a belated effort to address this fallout.

A leaked draft of the CDC’s guidance last month included suggestions that faith leaders consider temporarily limiting community sharing of prayer books, hymnals and other worship materials; consider using a stationary collection box, the mail or electronic payment instead of shared collection trays or baskets; and avoid or consider suspending choir or musical ensembles during services.

The leaders of Minnesota’s two largest flocks, the Catholics and the Lutherans, announced Thursday that they will resume indoor worship services next week in defiance of Democratic Gov. Tim Walz’s orders. The Catholic archdiocese and the Lutheran synod will allow their congregations to gather indoors, at one-third capacity, starting on Tuesday. They say it’s “extreme and prejudicial” that fewer people are allowed to gather for a church service than in a store at the mall. “Our community members are suffering from financial and social and emotional strain,” Archbishop Bernard Hebda told reporters on a conference call organized by Becket, a religious liberties law firm. “It’s our sacred duty to meet the spiritual needs of the suffering.”

“Eric Rassbach, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, said faith groups have filed roughly 30 legal challenges to state and local officials’ reopening plans, the vast majority of them by smaller evangelical churches,” Michelle Boorstein reports. “Asked why the denominations decided to announce plans to defy Walz’s executive order instead of pursue a legal appeal, Rassbach said the order treats churches ‘unequally’ and is thus illegal. ‘If it’s illegal, you don’t have a duty to follow it,’ he said.”

More than 1,200 pastors in California have signed onto a letter announcing they plan to resume in-person services on May 31 in defiance of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s stay-at-home order. “Newsom has gradually allowed some businesses to reopen as the state’s number of virus-related hospitalizations has flattened. But churches are still banned, along with hair salons and sporting events. Newsom said Monday churches could reopen in weeks, not months,” per KPIX, the San Francisco CBS affiliate. “But many churches are tired of waiting.”

The Justice Department, following the recent directive from Attorney General Bill Barr, warned Newsom in an open letter on Tuesday that California must do more to accommodate in-person religious gatherings or face federal intervention.

Meanwhile, a Christian church, whose pastor was charged with violating Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam's prohibition on large gatherings after holding a Palm Sunday service last month, lost a First Amendment-based bid in federal court on Thursday to stop the governor's order.

A Pentecostal church in Holly Springs, Miss., which has been challenging the city’s restrictions on religious gatherings in court, burned to the ground on Wednesday. Investigators believe it was arson, and they found graffiti on pavement in the church parking lot that said, “Bet you stay home now you hypokrits (sic),” according to WLBT, the Jackson NBC affiliate. Jerry Waldrop, who has pastored the church for 31 years, said in a 14-page lawsuit, filed last month, that police officers disrupted a midweek Bible study and his Easter service 10 days before that. He said they will rebuild.

Embers smolder Wednesday on the remains of the First Pentecostal Church in Holly Springs, Miss. The church burned after it filed a lawsuit challenging city restrictions on gatherings amid the coronavirus pandemic. (Major Kelly McMillen/Marshall County Sheriff's Office via AP)

While the CDC has not issued guidance, the agency has released several studies tracking how the virus has spread like wildfire through houses of worship. A report released earlier this week looked into an Arkansas outbreak, for example, which began when a pastor and his wife attended church events over six days in early March and spread the virus to dozens of congregants. The CDC report said an additional 26 infections and one death in the community were probably linked to contact with people infected at the church events. Another CDC report released last Tuesday described how one asymptomatic person infected as many as 52 others during a March choir practice in Washington state. A CDC report published last month on the spread of the contagion in Chicago documented how someone came down with the virus after sitting within a row of an infected person at church for a service.

The failure to release guidance for churches in a timely manner is one of several communications missteps by the administration. The CDC updated its website earlier this month to clarify that touching contaminated objects or surfaces does not appear to be a significant mode of transmission for coronavirus. The same goes for exposure to infected animals. But there was no formal announcement or explanation. A CDC spokeswoman said the revisions were the product of an internal review that involved “usability testing,” but she added that the site has consistently made clear that the biggest danger comes from person-to-person contact. “Right-wing social media exploited the website tweaks this week,” Ben Guarino and Joel Achenbach report. “Fox News commentator Sean Hannity promoted a ‘breaking’ report about the change.”

“A persistent problem in this pandemic has been the lack of clear messaging from governmental leadership, and this is another unfortunate example of that trend,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Columbia University School of Public Health.

The CDC has also not held a public news briefing since March 9, and Trump ended his nightly coronavirus task force briefings several weeks ago.

Tony Fauci, who runs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Thursday night that he hopes the White House will allow the American people to begin hearing on a more regular basis again from him and Debbie Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force. Fauci told CNN that he has had conversations with the White House communications team about the need to allow experts to deliver routine updates. “They realize we need to get some of this information out,” Fauci said. “Hopefully you’ll be seeing more of us.”

New York Times’ Style Guide Substitutions for “The President Lied”



New York Times’ Style Guide Substitutions for “The President Lied”

by MICKEY MCCAULEY, mcsweeneys.net

May 19, 2020

“The president, offering no evidence, insisted upon his version of the story.”

“The president extemporized with a blithe disregard for established fact.”

“Confounding experts and antagonizing the historical record, the president painted his own, rosier portrait of events.”

“The president, perhaps inadvertently, wound up smudging the line between empirical verification and his own boundless optimism.”

“The president once again found himself galloping ahead of reality’s leisurely pace.”

“The president dabbled anew in the shallow pond of misrepresentation, filling his beak with succulent morsels hidden among the reeds.”

“The president’s most recent encounter with the specter of honesty caught him wrong-footed.”

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and the president? The president took the one less truthful.”

“Quantum physicists posit the existence of infinite universes, so it is entirely within reason that one or more such contained the timeline described by the president, and we look forward to seeing it.”

“Mrs. Clinton lied. The president followed suit.”

Opinion | Trump’s entire reelection message amounts to an admission of failure. By Greg Sargent

washingtonpost.com
Opinion | Trump’s entire reelection message amounts to an admission of failure
Greg Sargent
5-7 minutes

May 21, 2020 at 11:35 p.m.

Given his monstrous narcissism and megalomania, it was only a matter of time until President Trump began campaigning for reelection on the notion that his own government has failed him.

Trump’s political advisers have hit on a new strategy to cope with the challenge of running for a second term amid the most severe public health and economic crises in modern times, the Associated Press reports.

That strategy is to run once again as an outsider, which requires using his own government as a foil. Trump advisers tell the AP that Trump will be positioned as the outsider relative to Joe Biden, which you can see in the new label that Trump propagandists have been applying to Biden: “swamp monster.”

But if you dig beneath the surface of this argument, it really amounts to an admission of failure on Trump’s part, if an unwitting one.

Trump’s reelection message actually has two main components to it. The first is the idea that we’re rapidly returning to normalcy — or “transitioning to greatness,” as Trump has recently begun to say.

The interesting revelation reported on by the AP is that this campaign imperative — which was thrust on Trump and his advisers by his spectacular mismanagement of the pandemic — requires him to tacitly (and sometimes openly) attack his own government’s ongoing characterization of it.

To serve the illusion that we’re “transitioning to greatness,” Trump has been urging the country to reopen faster, regardless of whether states, in so doing, defy guidelines set by his own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When Trump tweets the command to “REOPEN OUR COUNTRY,” he is saying the word of his own government’s experts and scientists should be defied or, to some extent, ignored.

Anthony S. Fauci, the leading member of Trump’s own coronavirus task force, has urged extreme caution on this front, warning that if government directives are ignored, it could lead to “suffering and death that could be avoided.”

Trump has directly rebuked Fauci for this posture, recently accusing him of wanting to “play all sides of the equation.”

That’s not mere disagreement with Fauci. It’s a claim that Fauci is not representing his own views candidly and is placing his own media image before his mission to faithfully serve in Trump’s government. It’s an accusation of betrayal — at bottom, of him.

Trump cannot fail. He can only be failed.

At times, Trump has made this even more explicit. He recently accused intelligence services of letting him down on the coronavirus, claiming that on Jan. 23, he got a briefing in which he was told that coronavirus was “not a big deal” and was “of no real import,” as Trump put it.

In a deep dive into that episode, the New York Times demolishes this defense. As current and former officials tell it, it’s impossible to get Trump to engage seriously with what the intelligence actually does say:

    The president veers off on tangents and getting him back on topic is difficult, they said. He has a short attention span and rarely, if ever, reads intelligence reports, relying instead on conservative media and his friends for information. … Mr. Trump rarely absorbs information that he disagrees with or that runs counter to his worldview, the officials said.

What’s more, at that time, multiple officials throughout the government were, in fact, shrieking warnings about the coronavirus. And Trump continued dithering and failing to take the coronavirus seriously for weeks and weeks after that, so this defense isn’t exonerating in the least.

But again, Trump’s basic claim here is that his government failed him.

That’s galling on its own. But note what Trump is not saying here. He is not pointing to ways in which his own government, under his leadership, actually did scale up an early and robust federal response that actually did succeed in taming the virus.

Instead, here’s merely declaring that the coronavirus has been defeated and that it’s time to reopen, while simultaneously urging for this to happen in a way that leapfrogs his own experts.

When Trump does try to claim his government’s response has been robust — such as with his constant hyping of our substandard testing — he’s dissembling and lying.

At bottom, all of this amounts to an admission of failure. And this is even more starkly obvious on the economic front.

Yes, Trump is to blame

The second major component of Trump’s reelection message is that, having built the greatest economy in the known history of the universe, he will do so again. This messaging is directly linked to Trump’s insistence on reopening, regardless of the risks, as the AP demonstrates:

    “The first step in getting our economy booming again is to begin to reopen,” said Trump campaign spokeswoman Sarah Matthews. “Americans know the economy reached unprecedented heights under President Trump’s leadership before it was artificially interrupted by the coronavirus, and he will build it back up a second time.”

Nor is it right to say that the coronavirus “artificially interrupted” Trump’s glorious economic record. Trump’s failures are in no small part why the coronavirus rampaged out of control, requiring a more stringent economic lockdown than might otherwise have been necessary.

But regardless, the very use of this talking point is itself an admission of failure. Trump would never concede that he bears any blame for that failure. But we are under zero obligation to go along with that.

Read more:

Trump in Private: I Wish I Could Run Against Hillary Again / Daily Beast

thedailybeast.com
Trump in Private: I Wish I Could Run Against Hillary Again
By Hanna Trudo and Asawin Suebsaeng
9-12 minutes
May. 21, 2020 10:52AM ET 
 
In 2016, Donald Trump and his campaign staff found themselves up against a Democratic nominee who was running under a cloud of corruption allegations, family liabilities, a longtime “establishment” image, health and wellness questions, personal baggage related to sexual-misconduct claims, and politicized inquiries on Capitol Hill.

In 2020, they want to do it all over again. But this time, Team Trump faces a presumptive Democratic nominee who appears, at least thus far, significantly less vulnerable to those attacks that worked so well on Hillary Clinton. In poll after poll—both public and internal campaign variety—former Vice President Joe Biden has maintained leads over President Trump, including in several key battleground states.

The advantage has persisted as Biden’s prospects seemed doomed, as Trump’s standing momentarily brightened, as the attacks have grown more vicious, and as both men were taken off the trail because of the coronavirus pandemic. The steadiness has gotten to the point that Biden’s own confidants are now increasingly confident that Trump simply won’t be able to re-use the playbook that got him the White House four years ago.

“Joe Biden’s not Hillary Clinton, thank God,” one senior Biden adviser said about any attempt from Team Trump to paint him as a Hillary clone.

It’s also prompted some Trump lieutenants, and even the president himself, to start practically longing for the good ol’ days of having Clinton as their foe. As recently as last month, Trump privately joked how great it would be if Biden ultimately didn’t secure the nomination this summer and Clinton would have to step in, so that he could beat her harder than he did last time around, according to two sources close to the president.

“It would be nice, for sure, if we were running against a replica of Hillary,” a senior Trump administration official said. “But only Hillary Clinton is Hillary Clinton.”

It’s not as if the president and his team haven’t been trying to meld the last two Democratic candidates together. In interviews with half a dozen Trump aides in the administration and his re-election effort, each said that there was a concerted campaign to “make Biden the new Hillary,” in the words of one campaign official, whether it be by accusing him of engaging in shady foreign dealings, charging him with a embracing a culture of “corruption,” or portraying him as an immigrant-loving elitist.

“Joe Biden just told his wealthy liberal donors that Trump supporters are a bunch of racist xenophobes,” the president’s campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted last month. “Biden is picking up right where Hillary left off!”

Beyond portraying him as a Clinton clone, the president’s top political advisers have also gone after Biden on new fronts, first and foremost his positions and record on China. However, with the past few months having been dominated by the coronavirus and a collapsing American economy, the punches have proven harder to land, and some Republicans are worried that they may never will.

Part of Biden’s advantage, they concede, is that he has never been perceived as a boogeyman in conservative circles like Clinton was for decades prior to Trump’s arrival on the national scene.

“While Biden has universal name-ID, unlike Hillary Clinton he hasn’t spent the last two decades as the principal boogeyman among conservatives, and beyond that, he’s generally been pretty undefined politically, other than the fact that he was Barack Obama’s VP,” said a Republican close to the Trump campaign. “For now, Americans are focused on the virus. I think that by the summer, people will start paying more attention to the race between Biden and Trump—and you’ll be seeing his open wounds get picked at more and more.”

But for some Democrats, the simplest explanation as to why Biden is proving more immune (at least for now) to the Trump campaign playbook is chromosomal.
Related in Politics

“Donald Trump's attack on Hillary in 2016 ranged from calling her nasty, crooked, and unlikable,” said Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton's 2008 campaign manager and longtime confidant. “His tactics ranged from parading women who had accused her husband of various sexual assaults; to leading chants of ‘Lock Her Up’; to stalking her at a debate. None of these tactics will work on Biden because.... wait for it....HE’S A MAN!  Trump is going to have to dig deeper in his sleazy bag of tricks to attack his opponent this time around.”

Clearly frustrated by the durable nature of Biden’s campaign to date, Trumpworld has, in recent days, accelerated the attacks in visceral ways. Trump, his team, and his two eldest sons have taunted Biden with unfounded charges that he’s mentally deteriorating, a pedophile, and “China’s puppet.” Congressional Republicans have pushed subpoenas seeking to investigate a firm that did work for a Ukrainian company where Biden’s son Hunter sat on the board. And the broader Trump political apparatus has pushed accusations, unsupported by any available evidence, that Biden was involved in an elaborate effort to spy on Trump’s former adviser Michael Flynn.

Through it all, Biden’s inner circle has remained adamant in adhering to the plan they believe worked best in the Democratic primary: only engaging minimally when Trump and his allies attack.

“This is his pattern,” the former vice president stated in a forum with Yahoo News, already appearing exasperated at the mere mention of things like “Obamagate” before repeating the word “diversion” five times in rapid succession. “Don’t speak to whatever the issues before us are. My God! ‘Obamagate.’”

Nearly five minutes into the topic, Biden appeared to grow more frustrated with his opponent’s political approach, spitballing about the pettiness and general absurdity of Trump’s latest crusades.

“What he’s trying to do is get something going on the internet,” Biden said, answering a follow-up question about the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., sharing an online meme about a baseless insinuation that the former vice president has engaged in pedophilia. “It’s sick! It’s sick! It’s sick!... I don’t want to get down in the mud with these guys.”

Though Biden’s hesitance to mud-fight has worked so far, for some veterans of past campaigns, the strategy carries risk. Four years ago, Clinton took pains not to dirty herself trying to defend ongoing attacks about her use of a private email server at the State Department, or the death of a United States ambassador who was killed by an Islamic militant group while working in Benghazi, Libya. During one general election debate, where Trump hovered within striking distance, she famously didn’t engage.

“I think Hillary regrets a lot of that,” a former top adviser to Clinton said, speaking broadly about her hesitance to take Trump head-on over a variety of issues. “People can pretend all day that this whole not responding thing is the high road and the way to go, but it’s not.”

“Democrats need to understand that this is a real fight,” the former adviser went on. “And stop pretending that we can normalize this by offering some other type of positive politics that’s going to get us through it. It’s not. You have to hit this guy, you have to hit him harder.”

Still, Biden and his top allies believe there are stronger benefits to simply downplaying any outlandish remarks and turning the attention back to Trump’s record in the White House. Indeed, some Biden campaign officials delight at the prospect of Team Trump dusting off their 2016 playbook, saying that unlike 2016, when Clinton’s team struggled to anticipate the unorthodox and bombastic approach, they have an edge knowing what to expect this time around.

“He’s been at it all year long,” Mike Donilon, the Biden campaign’s chief strategist, said on a recent briefing call with reporters about the president’s attempts to trash the former VP.  "I understand that the president and his allies will undertake every effort to go after the vice president and try and change the subject, but first of all, I would say, this isn’t new.”

The thinking among some in Bidenworld is that, unlike Clinton, who only competed against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in 2016, Biden had to slug it out against a series of formidable challengers during a hard-fought primary. Trump’s attacks, including on his son Hunter Biden’s involvement with the Ukrainian company Burisma, didn’t stick then and won’t work now.

“He came after him in the primary. He made a real effort to try to stop him there,” Donilon said. “One of the things that’s been underestimated about the vice president from the beginning is how strong an image he has with the American people. He has held up incredibly well. I think he’s been attacked if not more than anybody else, pretty much in the same league. And he’s held up very well through all of it.”

There also is the matter of the political landscape at hand. The coronavirus pandemic has put the campaign on the backburner and prompted a nationwide debate about Trump’s capacity to handle a national crisis. For Biden, it’s been an opportunity. He released a plan for tackling coronavirus in mid-April, and has emphasized a coordinated strategy—from policy prescriptions to messaging and social media roll-outs—centered around the need to believe and elevate scientists, who Trump publicly downplays. In doing that, the campaign sees Biden’s handling of the pandemic as one of the strongest lines of defense against Trump, and a surefire way to rebuff the idea that he is a Clinton reincarnation.

“It’s going to fall on deaf ears,” said the senior Biden adviser. “It worked very well on Hillary because a lot of people didn’t like Hillary. It was primarily because of her unpopularity.”

—with reporting by Sam Stein

Anything But The Truth: Obamagate, The New World Order, and an Abdication of Responsibility — themuckrake

Anything But The Truth: Obamagate, The New World Order, and an Abdication of Responsibility — themuckrake


May 18

Written By Jared Yates Sexton
5-6 minutes

Original at The Muckrake


As America speeds past 90,000 dead of the coronavirus and the economy continues its disastrous freefall, Donald Trump and Fox News have rolled out their newest distraction: Obamagate. This follows on the heels of the Department of Justice flaunting its lawlessness by dropping charges against disgraced General Mike Flynn, clearing the way for a new offensive strategy of claiming that former president Barack Obama and, by extension, Vice-President Joe Biden, were involved in an unconstitutional investigation against Donald Trump and his assorted cadre of criminals.

The narrative is in full force. Every night on Fox is filled with one story of Obamagate after another, the stories growing more and more hyperbolic by the day. It’s something to talk about besides the disastrous mishandling of the pandemic and it serves multiple purposes, including scapegoating the failure, harming Biden’s campaign for the presidency, and dog-whistling to the assorted paranoid groups that the Republican Party now relies on as their base.

This conspiracy mongering is nothing new for Trump or Fox News. Having begun the descent in 2008 and Barack Obama’s election, the pairing has consistently questioned everything from Obama’s birthplace to whether he is the leader of an anti-American cabal obsessed with bringing the empire to its knees. Fox has continually peddled one story after another angling to paint Obama as a traitor and a danger to America, while Trump has done everything from calling him “dumb,” “weak,” and “the founder of ISIS.”

Of course, Birtherism was a conspiracy born of white supremacy, racial paranoia, and the troubling American past of identity and citizenship. The other charges are offshoots of the New World Order conspiracy theory that posits that white Christian America is under attack from shadowy, satanic operatives outside the country working with traitors within.

Obamagate, like the Deep State and Qanon narratives, is intended to pluck all of these different wires at once, presenting a mythical vision of an America that is unbeatable, indestructible, great, if you will, and perfect. An empire that has God’s favor at all times and only falters when elements within the country, whether traitors or “weak” individuals betraying God’s will, undermine the final goal.

Now, in the midst of a generational pandemic and an economic crisis rivaling the Great Depression, Obamagate is meant to achieve multiple goals. First, it changes the story from the coronavirus to a constructed narrative meant to short-circuit television news coverage, entice spectacle-addicted viewers, draw in networks determined to seem fair and balanced, and give supporters a one-word explanation for why their president has failed so spectacularly. Second, it draws Joe Biden, Trump’s opponent in the November election, into a complex and disgusting web of charges that could hurt his electoral chances while supplying a damning narrative to the media covering him, ala Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016. And finally, Obamagate activates the myth of American exceptionalism, making the case that we have faltered in the face of this test not because Donald Trump has failed to lead, but because elements within the country are acting against the national interest.

Soon, Fox and Trump will escalate their plan to blame China and insinuate the coronavirus was a biological weapon. We’ve already seen Trump infer that his media critics and Democratic rivals are in league with China. They will push this dangerous conspiracy theory as far as they can, possibly bringing Obama and Biden and anyone else fitting their designs into the public for show trials or public spectacles. The summer and early fall, as the numbers of the dead continue piling up, could be an ugly moment in American history as this scorched earth strategy unfurls.

Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. Currently he serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.