As Trump struggles to respond to crises, internal polling instills fear in advisers: Sources

abcnews.go.com
As Trump struggles to respond to crises, internal polling instills fear in advisers: Sources
ABC News
10-12 minutes

June 11, 2020


One week ago President Donald Trump met with advisers from his 2020 re-election campaign, who greeted him with bad news.

The campaign's internal poll numbers showed the president down in swing states, and down with key demographics of voters including women and independents.

The messaging from the White House on the coronavirus pandemic and the growing anger about the brutal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis was fueling a drop in his numbers. Top aides warned that former Vice President Joe Biden, now the presumptive Democratic nominee, was positioned to defeat the president by a significant number of electoral votes based on the campaign's analysis, according to multiple sources familiar with the meeting.

While some of the president’s advisers insisted the current campaign internal poll numbers aren’t relevant in gauging Trump’s re-election chances this far from November, others among his most loyal and longest serving advisers have developed a new posture: one of increasing alarm. They fear that without a course correction -- and quickly -- Donald Trump could lose the 2020 presidential election.

This account of the president and his advisers' struggle to respond to the ongoing crises and the political fallout is based on conversations with 17 sources including White House officials, campaign advisers and sources close to the president.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd on May 25, some White House officials have been lobbying the president to give a formal address to the nation from the Oval Office to show he was taking the death and the growing protests around the country seriously. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was in favor of the idea. Meadows believed it was a moment for the president to deliver a message of unity, according to sources familiar with his thinking.

Others, like the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, were against such an address, arguing it could do more harm than good, according to four sources. A source close to Kushner disputed that categorization, saying instead the goal has been to announce a policy initiative that will have an impact.

The president has also been encouraged to participate in listening sessions with African American leaders, as he has hosted previously at the White House. But that idea was rejected by the commander-in-chief, according to sources.

A person who has attended similar events as a guest of the president previously told ABC News they heard from a White House official to "be on standby" for an event with the president, but then nothing ever materialized.

Trump is "not capable of showing empathy here," said the source, who is still a loyal supporter of the president.

Vice President Mike Pence, on the other hand, has participated in a number of listening sessions on the issue.

Meanwhile, earlier this week Trump held a roundtable with some law enforcement officials, but even then some sources in the White House took issue with the meeting because the number of White House staff seated around the table outnumbered the outside attendees.

The White House is preparing to announce a number of proposals later this week related to race and policing, but the rollout has yet to be determined.

Many top advisers concede that these proposals are often overshadowed by controversial statements coming from the president’s Twitter account. Days in the West Wing are so often dictated by what he tweets and impact whatever the goal for the day was initially set out to be.

One such incident occurred on Tuesday when the president tweeted to his over 80 million followers promoting a conspiracy theory where he made unfounded allegations against a 75-year-old protester, Martin Gugino, who was pushed to the ground by police in Buffalo, N.Y. last week and was seen bleeding from the head, motionless. At the time of the tweet Gugino was still in the hospital, and the two police officers involved in the incident have been charged with assault. The president was citing a bizarre report by fringe right-wing television network One American News, or OANN.

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended the tweet, saying the president was raising some "legitimate" questions. An attorney for Gugino called the president's accusations "dark, dangerous and untrue."

Multiple aides said they have now even opted to turn off notifications for "@realDonaldTrump,” the president's personal Twitter account. "What's the point?” one adviser told ABC News.

Meadows, who was on Capitol Hill Tuesday for meetings, refused to defend or comment on the tweet when asked multiple times by reporters.

However, two other outside advisers to the president instead said it wasn’t the president’s rhetoric that was problematic -- adding that’s in part how he won in 2016 -- but rather they took aim at Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale's running of the campaign, while noting that daily campaign decisions must be run by Kushner first.

Those who represent the president in media have struggled for guidance on messaging directives from the campaign. In the wake of Floyd's death and the growing calls for police reform, some advisers have been pushing the campaign for a defined message on some Democrats pushing a Defund the Police movement, believing it could help the president gain back some lost ground from the past few weeks.

Erin Perrine, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, told ABC News that the campaign's data "shows that in key states we track, the President is strong against a defined Joe Biden."

In response to a request for comment for this report, White House Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere said the president has "accomplished more at this point in his first term than any President in history," including in the White House's estimation saving "millions of lives" with the pandemic response and "restor[ing] law and order to our streets."

But a growing chorus of Republican advisers outside and inside the White House also believe Kushner is alienating the president's voter base because he is too moderate a force.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson said last week that "no one has more contempt" for Trump's voters than Kushner, taking him to task over his support of a program to "let more criminals out of prison and back onto the street." Carlson was talking about the First Step Act, a largely bipartisan criminal justice reform bill that sought to reverse some of the excesses of the drug war, mostly by granting relief to longtime convicts with nonviolent drug offenses.

White House sources and outside advisers have echoed that sentiment. One White House source told ABC News Kushner "assumes our base is going to go along with anything we say" and accused him of intentionally driving the president in the wrong direction.

A source close to Kushner pushed back, saying, "This is consistent -- people are constantly trying to cause separation between Jared and the president but they've been unsuccessful because the president knows Jared’s track record of success and his ability to stop bad actors from gaining influence.

“That obviously creates a desire to have him [Kushner] removed but his relationship with the president is as close as it’s ever been," the source said.

Trump also has felt stuck in the White House, and advisers claim he’s antsy to get back on stage and speak to the large crowds who gather for his political rallies.

The coronavirus pandemic halted campaign travel for nearly three months, and his campaign was forced to hold events virtually.

Trump is slated to return to the campaign trail next week, and the campaign has already sparked controversy for choosing to host the first rally since the coronavirus pandemic in Tulsa, Oklahoma -- the site of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 -- and on Juneteenth, an annual holiday commemorating the end of slavery.

The president has been tweeting there is a "big demand" for such events. Campaign officials are banking on the massive protests in recent weeks dampening criticism over holding large events in person, according to multiple sources.

Multiple sources in the White House and on the campaign are hopeful giving the president the platform again of massive crowds will provide him with an opportunity to air his grievances and move on, rather than harping on issues that have been unhelpful to his re-election efforts.

The president, who is known to call multiple advisers and friends outside the White House in addition to speaking to White House and campaign aides daily, is also listening to the advice of most everyone who gets in his ear, sources said. But that includes advisers who some aides view as problematic.

Several sources particularly pointed to Jenna Ellis, the president’s campaign legal adviser who's repeatedly sparked controversy over comments she's made on social media, including last month specifically attacking female White House reporters of color on Twitter for asking what she called “stupid questions” at press briefings.

Ellis also mocked Dr. Anthony Fauci, a leading member of the White House coronavirus task force, tweeting that she trusted "the local weather forecast" more than the nation's leading infectious disease expert.

Ellis has been “in [Trump’s] ear a lot lately,” one source said, calling her a “bad influence” who is giving the president poor legal advice.

When reached by ABC News, Ellis declined to comment on what counsel she provides the president beyond saying her conversations with him are privileged.

“Any legal advice that I give [President Trump] or those conversations are legally privileged,” Ellis said.

When asked whether she consults with the White House counsel’s office on legal matters, Ellis refused to say.

“Legally he is the client so is the holder of the privilege, not me,” she said.

One top adviser told ABC News the president seeking advice through various channels is a good thing.

"He's not yelling, he's not hanging up, there have been long talks with him which means he is processing everything," the adviser said.

This is what happens when bigotry dominates the main conservative media platform

This is what happens when bigotry dominates the main conservative media platform

By 

Michael Gerson 

Columnist

June 9, 2020 at 7:27 a.m. GMT+9

On the theory that decency and sanity are rare enough these days that they should be recognized, let us praise Kay Coles James, the president of the Heritage Foundation.

James — the first African American and the first woman to head the conservative think tank — reacted to the “horrific and needless death” of George Floyd in Minneapolis by recalling the reality of racism in her own story, in a Facebook post that appeared directly after the killing.

“When your family has had crosses burned on their front lawns,” she said, “when your own children have been stopped and harassed by police because they were driving through a white neighborhood . . . when you sit up at night with all the normal fears any parent would have when their kids are out, but have to add to that worry that they may not make it home just because they are Black males.”

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In a column that appeared (ironically) at Foxnews.com, James asked, “How many more black people must die, and how many more times will statements of sympathy have to be issued? . . . How many more committees will have to be formed until America admits that racism is still a problem in this country? . . . It’s time America takes responsibility and expands human flourishing to all of its citizens — not just the majority of them.”

How did Tucker Carlson of Fox News react to this plea? Did he listen respectfully to the voice of a different experience? Of course not. Carlson attacked James’s article as a “long scream denouncing America as an irredeemably racist nation” and urged his listeners to stop sending funds to Heritage. This is what happens when the main media platform of American conservatism is dominated by bigotry.

Full coverage of the George Floyd protests

James felt compelled to make her points because she is woman of faith and character. For a glimpse of what the total absence of faith and character looks like, see the Republican Party of Texas. In the aftermath of Floyd’s death, a dozen elected leaders of the GOP wrote or retweeted racist memes and conspiracy theories. Comal County Republican Party Chair Sue Gafford Piner propagated the idea that philanthropist George Soros is funding a race war. Bexar County GOP Chair Cynthia Brehm suggested that Floyd’s death was staged to hurt President Trump’s reelection chances. Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller wrote that the civil rights protesters are “domestic terrorists who were organized and paid for by George Soros.”

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This is not the rejection of “political correctness”; it is the success of white supremacy in the Texas Republican Party. The GOP, in many places, has become an institution where leaders are elevated and groomed for cruelty and bigotry. This is what happens when the president of the United States normalizes racism and mainstreams ideological madness.

These habits of prejudice took root easily in the GOP, indicating a broad, preexisting disposition. If Republicans are ever to recover their moral balance, they will need to dispose of three pervasive assumptions.

The first is the assumption of rough equality — the belief that most racial prejudice was addressed by the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and, phew, aren’t we glad all that is over with. In this view, every abuser of rights is dismissed as one of a few bad apples — even when it is clear that some institutions (say, police forces or the Trump GOP) are engaged in the mass production of rotting fruit.

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The second is the assumption of personal innocence — the belief that because an individual is not personally at fault for segregation, redlining and police abuses, he or she is not obligated to address their legacy. This amounts to a selfish rejection of the common good, as well as a denial of the Golden Rule.

The third is the assumption of historical irrelevance — the belief that if subjugation did not take place this morning, it is morally extraneous. This is a particularly absurd view for conservatives, given their traditional belief that the past has a powerful hold on the present. For most of American history, deeply unjust laws meant that police enforced an oppressive social order, sometimes through tactics of terror. This has left habits in many police departments and scars in many communities. And this does not even start to cover the legacy of stolen labor, educational inequality and disenfranchisement.

There are many horrors in American racial history but also some powerful inspiration. It is extraordinary that a group of people who came to our country in chains came to understand the essence of Christianity and the essence of our country far better than their oppressors. You might even call it providential. And this should lead to an enduring lesson: America often sees itself more clearly through the eyes of the harassed and oppressed.

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How Cummings continues to gaslight the nationby Mainly Macro



How Cummings continues to gaslight the nation

by Mainly Macro, mainlymacro.blogspot.com

June 1, 2020

There is little sign of anything that can dislodge Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s adviser in chief, from his boss’s protection. Yet there is no doubt the episode has been costly in terms of the popularity of the Prime Minister and his government. It is dangerous for the gang who say they are on the side of the people against the elite to reveal themselves as an unaccountable elite who couldn’t care a damn about the sacrifices others have been making during a crisis whose severity is largely that gang’s fault.

The cost goes beyond popularity. The government is desperate, far too desperate, to end lockdown well before the experts think it is safe and before common sense says it is safe. The Cummings affair will only make that even more dangerous, as those so disposed flout the rules because if Cummings can do it, so can they. And remember how ministers have fallen over themselves to reinterpret the rules so that they become Cummings-safe, and thereby allow those rules to become open to interpretation (or even instinct).

To understand why this has happened, you have to stop thinking about how our democracy used to function. The old rules, like when an adviser becomes the story they go, just do not hold anymore, because this government has no respect for those rules. Suspending parliament in 2019 should have been warning enough of that. As Robert Saunders notes, the online version of parliament put together to cope with COVID-19 has just been curtailed, with no obvious alternative in place that allows every MP to vote.

We now have a populist government, in the specific sense that it has little respect for the trappings of a pluralist democracy (parliament, the civil service and so on), and instead pretends to speak for the people. The people in this case is a number big enough to keep them in power, and certainly does not reflect every voter. In reality their interest in the wishes of 'their people' is slight, and mainly involves ensuring they continue to win power.

Which is why Cummings is so valuable. Winning a referendum where you had to persuade a majority of voters that leaving the EU would not have an impact on their economic wellbeing was quite an achievement. He gaslighted half a nation into making them poorer because of an issue few of them had cared about before the referendum. To then convince enough people that Johnson accepting a deal which the EU originally proposed and the UK rejected was some kind of triumph was also impressive. Winning a large majority in the subsequent election sealed his reputation as a master manipulator of voters, although it has to be said that with all these things he had tremendous help from the collective media.

But Cummings is much more than a manipulator of voters. He has a personal mission as well, and intends to use his position to recast the UK state into something more to his liking. He didn’t ensure all ministerial advisers report to him because he wanted to ‘improve the coordination of government messaging’ (gaslighting of journalists), but because he wants a say in everything any minister does that might influence his mission.

In this he has found the perfect partner. Johnson famously wrote two articles about the EU before he chose to put all his eggs in the Brexit basket. That calculation was about his route to power rather than anything based on principles. Johnson’s skill is in charming voters, provided he is fed the right lines. He is happy to allow his partner in crime to pursue his own agenda, because Johnson does not have an extensive agenda of his own.

The combination of Cummings and Johnson have effectively purged the Conservatives of any vestiges of One Nation Conservatism. That was ruthlessly done when Johnson came to power. It is worth repeating the tweet from ex-Chancellor Phillip Hammond replying to Matt Hancock (HT Mark Thomas): “Sorry Matt, I’m afraid the Conservative Party has been taken over by unelected advisors, entryists and usurpers who are trying to turn it from a broad church into an extreme right-wing faction.”

There can be little doubt the key unelected advisor he had in mind was Cummings. When Johnson won the election and signalled an early reshuffle, many commentators thought that would be the time when Johnson reintroduced some of the remaining (in both senses) talent into the cabinet. Instead, again I suspect with a great deal of help from Cummings, he chose those who would do Cummings bidding. The previous Chancellor could not accept that, and Johnson was prepared to fire him for it, but it was Cummings making the demand.

The ultimate in Cummings gaslighting was his appearance in the Rose Garden of No.10. As Frances Coppola writes, it was a gigantic show, a show of personal power. Look what I can do, he was saying. I can lie about why I went to Barnard Castle, I can lie about how I foresaw how vulnerable the UK was to a pandemic, and there is nothing you can do about it, much like all the previous lies I have made in the past and got others to say. Cummings was saying in no uncertain terms that he is the power behind the throne. And later, when a BBC presenter tells the truth about what he did, his helpers get the BBC to give her a reprimand.

But Donald Trump got rid of Steve Bannon. Why didn’t Johnson do the same, knowing how weak trying to defend Cummings would make him look? I think the key difference is that Trump doesn’t understand his evident weaknesses whereas Johnson is acutely aware of them. He knows he cannot cope with the detail which any Prime Minister in a pluralistic democracy is required to know. It makes him impatient with that democracy, but it also makes him feel vulnerable. His revealing quote after his recent appearance in front of select committee chairs was about how much Sherpa time it took for him to appear as clueless as he did.

Above all else, coronavirus has shown him that his political instincts can lead him seriously astray. His handling of the pandemic has been diabolical, and he cannot use surprise as an excuse. He continues to make mistakes, almost certainly ending the lockdown earlier than he should, and thereby delaying a complete recovery. (Note the current Chancellor, who is winning over a style obsessed commentariat, is as responsible for this as anyone.) The UK’s “world beating” track and trace system, like so many schemes farmed out to private contractors, is turning into a fiasco.

All those decisions were made with Cummings at his side, so it is not as if Cummings necessarily improves Johnson’s decision making capacity. What Johnson desperately needs is someone with a proven record of gaslighting a nation to get voters to forget about it all as quickly as possible. For that reason Cummings survives, for now at least. The consequences of all this for the UK cannot be overstated. When Frances Coppola writes that “Britain will now be run by puppet politicians controlled by a ruthless, manipulative, unaccountable mastermind” she is essentially correct.

How could it be that just one unelected adviser can have so much power? The mechanics of how it happened are clear, but Johnson’s victory in 2019 indicates that too many in the media and the country have failed to understand what was going on. When a government behaves like populists, and talks like populists, and does things populists would do, why does most of the commentariat still think the threat in 2019 came from the left?

Populist governments have a leader who takes absolute power because they tell the people they embody their best interests and hopes, and that pluralist democracy is frustrating these interests and hopes. They can be individuals like Trump who gets rid of any adviser who annoys them, or they can be the frontman for one or more advisors who hold the real power. Either way the idea of any collective government disappears, particularly if the advisors despise the elements of a pluralistic democracy that normally keeps a government on the rails. We have paid the price with one in every thousand dying from COVID-19, most unnecessarily, and with hundreds of NHS staff and carers dying because of lack of physical or financial protection. It would be a big mistake to assume this is the only sacrifice we will have to make on the altar of one man’s vision.

Locking down too late but ending lockdown too earlyby Mainly Macro



Locking down too late but ending lockdown too early

by Mainly Macro, mainlymacro.blogspot.com

June 9, 2020

The major reason we have one of the highest death rates as a result of the coronavirus pandemic is that Johnson/Cummings had an intense aversion to imposing a lockdown, and an unusual disregard for human life. Any decent politician, after being told at the end of February that 500,000 of their citizens might die, would have moved heaven and earth to stop that happening. Anyone watching the recent Despatches documentary would have heard about scientists worrying about how to stop the pandemic, with little pressure from politicians to do so. It may have been an ultimatum from French president Macron that finally forced Johnson/Cummings to enact a full lockdown on March 23rd.

Unfortunately the same factors that delayed a lockdown have led Johnson/Cummings to relax the lockdown too early, when the number of infections was still pretty high. This is partly because in the circles that Johnson/Cummings move, the recession that the pandemic has created is associated with the lockdown rather than the pandemic. Free the economy by ending the lockdown, they cry. Some practice what they preach, in the sense that they ignorethe lockdown rules. One of these people was Cummings himself, which is the second reason why the UK lockdown is being relaxed too quickly.

This is a tragic error, not just because it will lead to yet more deaths but also because it will delay any economic recovery. As I explained in a Guardian article, any recovery will be severely limited if new infections per day remain high. While we often focus on the irresponsible minority, the majority of people are cautious, and do not want to risk catching the virus. They are going to stay away from shops as much as possible, and will certainly not go back to pubs and restaurants, or public transport if they are able to avoid it.

The idea that there is a trade-off between protecting the economy and protecting people’s health is not only wrong, it is also dangerous. It encourages politicians to relax the lockdown too early, which risks reducing the speed at which the number of new infections fall, or even stabilising infection rates at too high a level. Below is data for the number of COVID-19 admissions to hospital, that is shown in the government’s daily briefing.

It is probably the best indirect measure we have for the path of new infections over time, with a lag of 2-3 weeks. (The problem with data on the number of people tested is that it depends on how easy it is to get tested, which has varied greatly over time.) This seems reasonably consistent with the Cambridge/PHE Joint Modelling Team’s estimates that currently there are around 17,000 new infections every day.

The worrying aspect of this data is that it seems to be levelling off, which is another way of saying that R is getting close to 1. This also accords with Cambridge/PHE Joint Modelling Team’s estimates of regional R values. They note “There is some evidence that Rt has risen in all regions and we believe that this is probably due to increasing mobility and mixing between households and in public and workplace settings”.

All this is important not because we might see ‘a second peak’. It is important because it means that the number of new infections is declining very slowly, which in turn means that most people will not return to previous patterns of ‘social consumption’. That in turn means that there cannot be a complete recovery. We do not know at what level of daily infections people will be happy to resume social consumption, but it is bound to be well below 17,000. The difference between R=0.8 and R=0.9 in getting to that much lower number of infections is measured in months, as is the difference between R=0.9 and R=0.95. We are relaxing lockdown at much higher levels for daily new infections compared to Italy, France and Germany.

Relaxing the lockdown might (I stress might) be justified if there was a tried and tested alternative mechanism to suppress R. That mechanism does exist: a well functioning and comprehensive track, trace and isolate (TTI) infrastructure. Yet the government still attempts to gaslight journalists with a launch of the new Serco led, “world beating” TTI regime at the beginning of June, that we now learn will not be fully operational until September or October. Quite how Serco sold that to ministers/Cummings we can only guess. Scaling up existing local authority teams would have been both quicker and more effective, but is contrary to this government’s ideology and the interests of those who fund it.

It seems clear that many/most of the scientists advising the government also think lockdown is ending too quickly. The alert level remains at 4, despite Johnson/Cummings’ wishes. As Rafael Behr put it, “Johnson's relationship with science has gone the way of most of his relationships.” Yet this divergence does not seem to worry him and those around him at all, which is a bit odd for a government that kept claiming they were following the science.

I should resist the temptation to suggest that all this is obvious. When I modeled the economic impact of a pandemic I was surprised at how much of aggregate consumption was social. It isn’t just pubs, restaurants and tourism, but large parts of recreation, culture and transport. These sectors make up over a third of consumption. Even the demand for clothing may decline if there are no parties to go to. The pandemic creates a huge demand shock even without any lockdown measures like school closures.

That is why many better-off households have been saving much more during the pandemic. The certain way to get a recovery is to release those savings, by creating the conditions for social consumption to resume. That in turn means getting daily infections down substantially by not relaxing the lockdown too soon. As the Faculty of Public Health writes “Like everyone else we are longing for restrictions on our lives to be lifted. But evidence from around the globe shows that the way to achieve this is not to merely suppress covid-19, but to systematically reduce its incidence.”

In other words there is no trade-off between public health and the economy: better public health (less COVID-19 infections) is the sure way to a substantial recovery. The idea that we have to lift the lockdown for the sake of the economy is the new austerity. With austerity it was about how we had to get the deficit down, in order to have a sound economy. Now it is that we have to end the lockdown, in order to free the economy. In both cases it was the opposite of the truth. In both cases lives were unnecessarily lost. In both cases the recovery was blunted.

Could we get a similar recovery by some other means, such as a large fiscal stimulus? The short answer is no. Because social consumption is such a large proportion of the total, you would need a ridiculously large increase in spending in other sectors even to come close to substituting for that loss. The only reason why you would contemplate not doing the first best option, getting infections down, is because your ideology is screwing your common sense. Which is a pretty good description of how this government has dealt with this pandemic so far.

Back from the brink? / Dan Drezner

Back from the brink?
By
DANIEL W. DREZNER
washingtonpost.com
5 min
View Original
June 8, 2020 at 7:00 AM EDT

Seven days ago, in the middle of a pandemic and the worst economic contraction in a century, the Trump administration used force to evict peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square. The administration then decided to enlarge the perimeter surrounding the White House and mobilized unmarked elements of federal law enforcement and the National Guard to protect its borders. This led to some extremely disquieting images of Washington, D.C.:

Little wonder, then, that both ordinary Americans and elite commentators are fretting about the state of the union. NBC News’s Mark Murray reported out the highlights of the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll and found that “8 out of 10 voters believe that things are out of control in the United States, with majorities still concerned about the spread of the coronavirus, pessimistic about the economy returning to normal before next year and down on President Donald Trump’s ability to unite the nation.”

Similarly, there is no shortage of pundits expressing concern about Trump’s authoritarian impulses. Reports emerging that last week Trump wanted 10,000 active-duty troops patrolling the streets of D.C. will have that effect.

I get the concern, but something has happened over the past week. The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts shares Ta-Nehisi Coates’s optimism about where we are going as a country. Consider some tentative and not-so-tentative trends that have become apparent over the past week or so:

1) Covid-19 might be harder to contract than everyone expected. Remember that video of everyone partying in that Ozarks resort over Memorial Day weekend? I was convinced that would lead to a spike in infections, particularly after one of the attendees tested positive soon afterward.

It has been a week since then, however, and Missouri health officials report no new cases emanating from that weekend. This may be dumb luck, or it may be that it’s much harder to contract the novel coronavirus outdoors.

Given the mass protests that are ongoing outside, this should be welcome news across the political spectrum, because it suggests a wider array of possible warm-weather activities without risk of triggering a massive second wave of infections (that said, Vegas still scares me).

2) The economy may be bouncing back more quickly than expected. Friday’s positive jobs report took economists by surprise. My Washington Post colleague Catherine Rampell has an excellent explainer for why so many economists got this wrong. For one thing, the Paycheck Protection Program had a positive effect. It also appears that forecasters focused too narrowly on those applying for unemployment: “What economists missed is that some of those workers who had filed unemployment claims were starting to go back to work. There wasn’t good data on that.”

Rampell also notes that “it’s encouraging that 2.5 million got their jobs back in May, but 21 million are still unemployed.” And the New York Times’s Neil Irwin cautions that the damage from the pandemic will be with us for a while. Paradoxically, the good news now may cause public officials to lose their sense of urgency and not take continued action. Still, as tentative as it may be, positive job creation qualifies as good news.

3) The protests have gotten less violent and more widespread. Last week, there was a lot of irresponsible rhetoric, some of it from the junior senator from Arkansas, alleging anarchy in the streets as demonstrations protesting the death of George Floyd persisted.

The aggregate evidence contradicts those claims in two ways. The first is that reports of violence have been paltry, given the size of the demonstrations. The director of Fox News’s Decision Desk observed that “64 People were killed in the LA Riots in 1992. Less than 20 have been killed nationally in the current protests across the nation. The level of violence is clearly lower than it’s been in other historical unrest.”

The videos going viral over the weekend were either police overreacting to demonstrators, dancing National Guard troops or protesters refusing to be provoked by people who want to provoke them.

    Make this go viral happen in whitefish, MT this dude is big mad for no reason pic.twitter.com/3x8i1xZMdC
    — Gerardo (@therealpapaG17) June 4, 2020

Instead the media coverage has been about the diverse, decentralized and peaceful nature of the protests.

Oh, and they are everywhere. Writing at the Monkey Cage, Lara Putnam, Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressman have gathered data about the demonstrations and conclude that there has been far greater social mobilization now than even during the women’s marches immediately after Trump’s inauguration: “The United States rarely has protests in this combination of size, intensity and frequency; it usually has big protests or sustained protests, but not both.” They also concur that the protests have been “overwhelmingly nonviolent.”

This is reflected in public opinion as well, and shows why a “law and order” campaign is likely to fail this fall. According to Murray:

    Fifty-nine percent of all voters — including 54 percent of whites, 65 percent of Latinos and 78 percent of African Americans — say they’re more troubled by Floyd’s death and the actions of police.
    That’s compared with 27 percent who say they’re more concerned about the protests over Floyd’s death, some of which have turned violent.

4) Trump will be hard-pressed to rely on the military and law enforcement to intimidate the opposition. The blowback from the Lafayette Square incident has been fast and furious. When even Attorney General William Barr is trying to distance himself from responsibility, it’s a sign that the administration knows that it crossed a line.

The actions at Lafayette Square triggered an interesting phenomenon of Pentagon civilians, military, intelligence officials and retired national security officials reemphasizing the need for a nonpolitical military. The very fact that Trump’s unrealized desire for 10,000 active-duty troops patrolling D.C. was leaked out suggests the degree to which the uniformed services in particular want no part of the president’s attempt to escalate the situation.

Last week, Georgetown University professor Elizabeth Saunders explained why Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s statement — against invoking the Insurrection Act and using active-duty military forces — in particular was such a big deal: Among other things, it makes it that much harder for Trump to get buy-in from his own Cabinet if he revisits bringing in troops.

Sure, in theory Trump could fire Esper and Milley and bring in even bigger toadies. That’s unlikely, however. Congressional GOP support for Esper is robust. And as my Post colleagues Anne Gearan and Josh Dawsey reported on Sunday, Trump cannot afford to have any more ex-Cabinet officials going after him during a campaign:

    Trump’s tendency to fire, or part ways with people, unceremoniously leads to them leveling potentially politically damaging criticism. There has been an effort in recent months to keep officials Trump has been angered with, including Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, “inside the tent.”

Some of the trends listed above could be reversed. Others seem more enduring. All of them, however, suggest that fears of the country spinning out of control are unfounded.

A week ago, I was concerned that Trump would try to use the military to crack down on lawful peaceful protests — and that the military would go along with it. Now, I wonder if last Monday was the brink that will never be revisited again in my lifetime.
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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.

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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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