How Trump Could Lose the Election—And Still Remain President

How Trump Could Lose the Election—And Still Remain President | Opinion

TIMOTHY E. WIRTH AND TOM ROGERS , EDITOR-AT-LARGE FOR NEWSWEEK

ON 7/3/20 AT 6:00 AM EDT

03:56

OPINION

DONALD TRUMP

2020 ELECTION

It is increasingly looking as if Joe Biden can beat President Donald Trump in November. The president seems more and more out of step with the national mood, from his handling of the pandemic to his response to racially biased policing, not to mention a wide array of other issues. Even in key swing states, Trump is losing ground that will be difficult for him to make up.

For Trump, there are two broad pathways to maintaining power. First, we can already see very clearly a strategy designed to suppress voter turnout with the purging of registration rolls of large numbers of mostly urban voters; efforts to suppress mail-in ballots, which are more necessary than ever, given COVID-19; a re-election apparatus that is training 50,000 poll watchers for the purpose of challenging citizens' right to vote on Election Day; and significant efforts to make in-person voting in urban areas as cumbersome as possible in order to have long lines that discourage people from exercising their voting rights.

The second pathway to subverting the election is even more ominous—but we must be cognizant of it because Trump is already laying the groundwork for how he can lose the popular vote, and even lose in the key swing states necessary for an Electoral College victory, but still remain president.

This spring, HBO aired The Plot Against America, based on the Philip Roth novel of how an authoritarian president could grab control of the United States government using emergency powers that no one could foresee. Recent press reports have revealed the compilation by the Brennan Center at New York University of an extensive list of presidential emergency powers that might be inappropriately invoked in a national security crisis. Attorney General William Barr, known for his extremist view of the expanse of presidential power, is widely believed to be developing a Justice Department opinion arguing that the president can exercise emergency powers in certain national security situations, while stating that the courts, being extremely reluctant to intervene in the sphere of a national security emergency, would allow the president to proceed unchecked.

Something like the following scenario is not just possible but increasingly probable because it is clear Trump will do anything to avoid the moniker he hates more than any other: "loser."

Trump actually tweeted on June 22: "Rigged 2020 election: millions of mail-in ballots will be printed by foreign countries, and others. It will be the scandal of our times!" With this, Trump has begun to lay the groundwork for the step-by-step process by which he holds on to the presidency after he has clearly lost the election:

Biden wins the popular vote, and carries the key swing states of Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by decent but not overwhelming margins.

Trump immediately declares that the voting was rigged, that there was mail-in ballot fraud and that the Chinese were behind a plan to provide fraudulent mail-in ballots and other "election hacking" throughout the four key swing states that gave Biden his victory.

Having railed against the Chinese throughout the campaign, calling Biden "soft on China," Trump delivers his narrative claiming the Chinese have interfered in the U.S. election.

Trump indicates this is a major national security issue, and he invokes emergency powers, directing the Justice Department to investigate the alleged activity in the swing states. The legal justification for the presidential powers he invokes has already been developed and issued by Barr.

The investigation is intended to tick down the clock toward December 14, the deadline when each state's Electoral College electors must be appointed. This is the very issue that the Supreme Court harped on in Bush v. Gore in ruling that the election process had to be brought to a close, thus forbidding the further counting of Florida ballots.

All four swing states have Republican control of both their upper and lower houses of their state legislatures. Those state legislatures refuse to allow any Electoral College slate to be certified until the "national security" investigation is complete.

The Democrats will have begun a legal action to certify the results in those four states, and the appointment of the Biden slate of electors, arguing that Trump has manufactured a national security emergency in order to create the ensuing chaos.

The issue goes up to the Supreme Court, which unlike the 2000 election does not decide the election in favor of the Republicans. However, it indicates again that the December 14 Electoral College deadline must be met; that the president's national security powers legally authorize him to investigate potential foreign country intrusion into the national election; and if no Electoral College slate can be certified by any state by December 14, the Electoral College must meet anyway and cast its votes.

The Electoral College meets, and without the electors from those four states being represented, neither Biden nor Trump has sufficient votes to get an Electoral College majority.

The election is thrown into the House of Representatives, pursuant to the Constitution. Under the relevant constitutional process, the vote in the House is by state delegation, where each delegation casts one vote, which is determined by the majority of the representatives in that state.

Currently, there are 26 states that have a majority Republican House delegation. 23 states have a majority Democratic delegation. There is one state, Pennsylvania, that has an evenly split delegation. Even if the Democrats were to pick up seats in Pennsylvania and hold all their 2018 House gains, the Republicans would have a 26 to 24 delegation majority.

This vote would enable Trump to retain the presidency.

We cannot let ourselves believe that this is a far-fetched scenario. We have just seen Trump threaten to invoke emergency powers under the Insurrection Act of 1807 to call up the U.S. military against domestic protesters. The remarkable apology by Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley, stating that it was wrong to create a perception that the military would get directly involved in a domestic political protest and intervene against American civilians, underscores the corrupt use of executive powers Trump is willing to employ. As Fareed Zakaria recently said in summing up the lessons of former national security adviser John Bolton's new book: "Donald Trump will pay any price, make any deal, bend any rule, to assure his own survival and success."

So what do we do as citizens to face the impending reality of The Plot Against America? We must "out" this scenario—and do so loudly and consistently. We have an imperative to build a "people's firewall" that reaches deeply across the country and reflects public revulsion at the potential for Trump to undermine our entire democratic system of governance.

Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, should immediately ask the Judiciary, Commerce, Armed Services and Intelligence Committees to hold hearings on how steps can be taken to safeguard against this scenario, especially how to confront any invocation of emergency powers by the president.

There needs to be an outpouring at all levels of society that this will not be tolerated—from government officials and lawmakers at all levels; to civic associations and civil rights groups; to business groups and trade associations, who have to recognize the economic chaos that would result from this kind of coup; to lawyers, academics and student groups practiced in resisting government policies; and, of course, to the editorial voices of the press, both local and national.

The recent resistance of our military establishment is an encouraging sign and necessary component of the "people's firewall." The president has to know there will be overwhelming resistance to any post-election chaos to undermine our constitutional order. He must know that the "people's firewall" will not yield to lawlessness. He has to be confronted with the reality that The Plot Against America must remain a work of fiction.

Timothy E. Wirth is a former U.S. senator from Colorado.

Tom Rogers is an editor-at-large for Newsweek, the founder of CNBC and a CNBC contributor. He also established MSNBC, is the former CEO of TiVo, currently executive chairman of Engine Media, and is former senior counsel to a congressional committee.

The views expressed in this article are the authors' own.

Rise of autocracies spells end to the west’s global supremacy

ft.com
Rise of autocracies spells end to the west’s global supremacy
Tony Barber November 6 2019
7-9 minutes

The rise of autocracy and of rightwing populism, its western democratic cousin, gives rise to understandable concern that liberal political values and the rule of law are heading towards terminal decline. However, neither autocratic states such as China and Russia nor rightwing populist leaders in the US, Italy and other western countries have had everything go their way in 2019. Their mixed fortunes suggest that it is premature to write off the prospects for global governance, even though the rules-based order constructed after 1945 largely to US specifications is decomposing and will never return in its old form.

In its closely followed annual “Freedom in the World” report, Freedom House, a non-partisan, US government-funded organisation, stated this year that global freedom had shrunk for 13 consecutive years between 2006 and 2018. During this period, some 116 countries experienced a net decline in freedom and only 63 experienced a net increase, Freedom House said. The US ranked as a free country, but it trailed France, Germany and the UK as a result of erosions of the rule of law under the Trump administration.

Similar concerns appear in the latest “Rule of Law Index” of the World Justice Project, a Washington-based civil society initiative. According to this study, limits on governments’ powers, such as independent judiciaries, free media and legislative oversight of executives, have declined significantly in countries such as China, Egypt, Hungary, the Philippines and Turkey. “One of the most striking things about the degradation of the rule of law is that it is being effected through laws and legal institutions. The law itself is being hijacked and used to erode checks on power,” says Elizabeth Andersen, WJP’s executive director.
Mandatory Credit: Photo by ROMAN PILIPEY/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock (10371693z) Protesters wearing gas masks in action agains the police during an anti-government rally in Tsuen Wan, in Hong Kong, China, 25 August 2019. The protests were triggered by an extradition bill to China in June, now suspended, and evolved into a wider anti-government movement with no end in sight. An anti-government rally in Kwai Fung and Tsuen Wan in Hong Kong, China - 25 Aug 2019
Protestors take part in an anti-government rally in Hong Kong in August 2019 © ROMAN PILIPEY/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

A no less disturbing trend is the threat to free expression in the form of censorship laws, attacks on independent book publishers and official pressure on scholars who refuse to toe the line. Ziya Selcuk, Turkey’s education minister, announced in August that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government had removed more than 300,000 books from schools and libraries since a failed 2016 coup and had destroyed them. Under President Xi Jinping, China’s paramount leader since 2012, the authorities have shut down bookstores that sell material critical of the communist party, turned up pressure on independent academic authors and sealed most access to uncensored information on the internet.

Despite these setbacks for individual liberties, political pluralism and the rule of law, the world’s autocrats and rightwing populist leaders have encountered rising resistance from their countries’ citizens and public institutions in the course of 2019. Matteo Salvini, leader of Italy’s hard-right League party, lost his jobs as deputy prime minister and interior minister after overestimating his ability to force snap parliamentary elections and become his nation’s undisputed strongman. Although the League retains more support than other parties, its popularity has tumbled since Mr Salvini’s unsuccessful gambit, which matched his failure to lead a clutch of far-right EU parties to victory in May’s European Parliament elections.

Likewise Donald Trump finds himself in arguably the most serious crisis of his presidency after implicating himself in an attempt to discredit Joe Biden, a former Democratic vice-president and rival in the 2020 presidential race, with the help of a foreign ruler, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. An impeachment inquiry is going ahead in the House of Representatives despite the White House’s refusal to co-operate. Meanwhile, mass public protests in Hong Kong have evolved over the past seven months from opposition to an extradition law to broader demands that the Chinese government should honour basic democratic rights that it promised to respect after resuming control of the territory in 1997.
Protesters gather as they take part in a march to protest against the alleged impunity of law enforcement agencies in central Moscow on June 12, 2019. - More than 200 people including opposition leader Alexei Navalny were detained as police sought to break up a peaceful Moscow rally against the alleged impunity of law enforcement agencies. Russian police in riot gear moved in against the unsanctioned march of more 1,000 people amid screams of protesters shouting "you are criminals" and "stop police terror."


Moscow was gripped this year with the largest anti-government demonstrations seen in the Russian capital since the winter of 2011-12. The spark was the decision of the authorities to ban opposition candidates from standing in city council elections. In the event, President Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia party suffered heavy losses after an opposition campaign that recommended “smart voting”, or votes for any candidates other than self-declared Putin loyalists. The bigger picture is that Mr Putin’s popularity is falling as a result of public discontent with stagnant living standards, changes to the state pension system, environmental damage, and the high-handed behaviour of the police and security services.
International Governance


The Chinese and Russian states possess immense resources of violence and intimidation that allow them to suppress dissent with ease, as long as the authorities have the necessary willpower. China’s Communist party displayed such willpower on Tiananmen Square in 1989 and has never regretted doing so — an unyielding state of mind that augurs badly for the Hong Kong protesters. However, there is far less tolerance for politically related violence in European societies, as was demonstrated by the public backlash in Slovakia against the murder of Jan Kuciak, an investigative journalist, and his fiancée.

Should rightwing populism fail to make deeper inroads in western political systems, owing to its unrealistic promises and policy confusion when in power, the deliberate disruption of the post-1945 global order would arguably slow down. This particularly applies to the US, where a transfer of power after the 2020 election might significantly reduce the White House’s hostility and scepticism about multilateral global institutions. The growing internal challenges of autocratic systems in countries such as Russia and Turkey might reinforce this trend.

However, the most important long-term trends in international relations over the past 30 years have been the rise of China and the accelerating shift of economic power from the west to the Asia-Pacific region. This in itself ensures that the Washington-designed post-1945 order, built mainly for the benefit of the US, Europe, Japan and their allies, will give way to a more dispersed form of global governance. For the west, the cold reality is not that autocracy will triumph and democracy will fail, but rather that the 500-year-long era of western global supremacy is coming to an end.

Opinion | Why the CFPB’s loss at the Supreme Court is really a win

Opinion | Why the CFPB’s loss at the Supreme Court is really a win
Opinion by Richard Cordray

5-6 minutes

June 30, 2020 at 7:20 a.m. GMT+9

For six years, I served as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In 2010, Congress determined that this important new agency should have a single leader, with independent tenure protections, to make the hard decisions about how best to protect consumers against big banks and financial companies.

Our aggressive work to protect people from being cheated and mistreated understandably aroused opposition from some of these powerful companies. And so, ever since, the financial industry has been peppering the bureau with various challenges to its constitutionality. Among them was the claim that a single director of an agency wielding so much power does not square with strong notions of presidential control over the executive branch of the government. Some courts accepted this claim; others rejected it. Eventually, the case found its way to the Supreme Court, and Monday, in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the court issued a 5-to-4 ruling striking down the bureau’s leadership structure as unconstitutional.

On its face, that sounds like a major blow. The court’s holding that the agency was established in an unconstitutional manner might seem to jeopardize everything it does and all that it has ever done. Certainly, when the financial companies first began raising these claims, they did so with a desire to put the CFPB out of business once and for all.

But that is not the upshot of the decision. If anything, this ruling is a sheep that comes in wolf’s clothing. Although the court did invalidate the independent tenure of the CFPB’s single director, seven of the nine justices stopped right there and refused to go further. By carefully slicing off the tenure protections for the director, they left all other aspects of the agency in place. In fact, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. pointedly noted that “the CFPB’s structure and duties remain fully operative without the offending tenure restriction.”

At least for the foreseeable future, this “losing” verdict represents a big victory for consumers, in three respects. First, this case was the last gasp for the CFPB’s opponents, who had hoped to dismember it through the courts. No tenable constitutional challenges remain to the bureau’s considerable authority. As no less an avowed critic than former acting director Mick Mulvaney has grudgingly conceded, the CFPB “is not going anywhere,” and it is “going to play an important role in government.”

Second, the constitutional challenges had repeatedly impeded the bureau’s enforcement work in many cases. Just as the agency’s lawyers were trying to focus the court on predatory or deceptive actions by certain companies, those companies would throw the constitutional flag to gum up the works. By raising these arguments, they secured delays that stretched for months or even years to prevent the courts from addressing their conduct. Now, with the constitutional issue definitively settled by the highest court in the land, those tactics will no longer be effective.

Third, and most ironically, the immediate effect of the court’s decision is to cut off protections for the one director currently affected by the case: President Trump’s appointee, Kathy Kraninger. Although these stones initially were thrown at me, in the hopes of ousting me or at least intimidating the CFPB into doing less for consumers, they now are landing on a different target. Kraninger had been confirmed for a five-year term lasting to December 2023. But after today’s ruling, she can be dismissed at any time — including Jan. 20, 2021, when a new president may take office. If that happens, the tenor of the agency’s work is sure to change once again, this time tipping back toward strongly protecting consumers and their families.

In the long run, the practical effects of the case are also likely to be limited: It means simply that each new president will likely appoint a new CFPB director, in much the same way he or she will appoint new Cabinet members. The broader question is whether this ruling will encourage further challenges from conservative academics trying to dismantle the independence of other federal agencies, such as the Federal Reserve or the Federal Communications Commission. Those more far-reaching arguments were vigorously presented in this case, but they fell far short of the mark, with only Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch taking the bait.

As with any type of fishing, doctrinal change at the Supreme Court requires immense patience. Perhaps in another decade or two, we will get more answers. We don’t have to wait, however, to grasp the good news that the justices delivered Monday for American consumers: The CFPB is here to stay.

Read more:

Opinion | The Supreme Court’s abortion decision seems pulled from the ‘Casey’ playbook

washingtonpost.com
Opinion | The Supreme Court’s abortion decision seems pulled from the ‘Casey’ playbook
Opinion by Melissa Murray

June 30, 2020 at 9:51 a.m. GMT+9

5-6 minutes

Melissa Murray is the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at New York University School of Law.

Depicted as a serpent or a dragon eating its own tail, the ouroboros in Greek mythology was interpreted as a symbol of eternal renewal — the infinite cycle of life, death and rebirth. Now, the ouroboros lives on in the Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence and in the court’s invocation of the doctrine of stare decisis.

Latin for “let the decision stand,” stare decisis has shaped the court’s abortion jurisprudence — and the public debate over abortion rights. Consider the calls to overrule Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that recognized a woman’s right to choose an abortion. Although abortion opponents insist that Roe is both morally abhorrent and constitutionally unprincipled, the court, citing deference to precedent, has declined multiple invitations to overrule the decision.

The court again relied on stare decisis Monday to beat back another assault on abortion rights in June Medical Services v. Russo. This time, the court’s liberal wing teamed up with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to strike down a Louisiana law that required abortion providers to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. To be sure, Roberts is no supporter of abortion rights — he dissented in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the court’s 2016 decision invalidating a Texas admitting privileges law. But in the role of chief justice, he is perhaps the most stalwart defender of the court’s legitimacy, and in Monday’s decision, he emphasized the importance of “adherence to precedent” for maintaining the “actual and perceived integrity of the judicial process.” With these words, abortion rights live to fight another day.

If all of this feels familiar, it should. Similar dynamics were at play 28 years ago when the court decided Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Then, as now, the question of precedent loomed large as abortion rights groups braced for the court, with its new complement of Reagan and George H.W. Bush appointees, to scuttle Roe. Instead, the court, in an apparent nod to precedent, affirmed Roe’s “essential holding” that there was a constitutional right to choose an abortion.

But Casey was far from an unadulterated endorsement of Roe. Indeed, in contrast to Roe, which required state legislation restricting abortion to meet a punishing constitutional standard, Casey lowered the standard by which abortion laws would be judged, giving states more latitude to impose conditions on the abortion right, so long as the restrictions did not pose an “undue burden.” Emboldened by Casey and its less rigorous standard, states enacted a spate of laws that imposed a litany of conditions on abortion providers and patients, strangling abortion access and burdening those seeking to exercise the abortion right. Despite its professed allegiance to precedent, many argue that Casey, in rendering the abortion right a nullity for many women, effectively overruled Roe.

June Medical seems ripped from the Casey playbook — a victory scaffolded by lofty talk of precedent and stare decisis. Roberts makes clear that his decision to join the court’s liberals is guided solely by respect for precedent. The law challenged in June Medical is the twin of the Texas admitting privileges law invalidated in Whole Woman’s Health. And if like cases are to be treated alike, Roberts wrote, Whole Woman’s Health requires invalidating the Louisiana law challenged in June Medical.

But Roberts’s respect for precedent goes only so far. Meaningfully, he does not endorse Whole Woman’s Health’s reasoning, which required courts to weigh whether an abortion law’s purported benefits exceeded the burdens imposed. Instead, Roberts rejected this logic, concluding that in determining the constitutionality of an abortion restriction, courts need consider only whether the law places a “substantial obstacle” in the path of a woman seeking an abortion. In the name of stare decisis, Roberts reiterates Whole Woman’s Health’s outcome, while completely disavowing its reasoning and its protections for abortion rights.

In this way, Roberts’s decision in June Medical Services does to Whole Woman’s Health what Casey did to Roe. It preserves the outer shell of the earlier decision while gutting its substance. And in so doing, it invites states to push the envelope on abortion legislation, secure that, regardless of the benefits to patients, courts will bless the laws so long as they do not pose a substantial obstacle.

For years, in their defense of Roe and abortion rights, reproductive rights advocates have underscored the importance of stare decisis and precedent. But what these appeals to the past overlook is that precedent, like anything else, can be deployed for good or for ill, and in some cases may do both simultaneously. Like the mythical ouroboros that consumes itself in an endless cycle of death and life, stare decisis once again is the vehicle for preserving the court’s abortion jurisprudence while also destroying it.

Read more:

Could America’s pandemic response be any more medieval? Dana Milbank.

Could America’s pandemic response be any more medieval?
By Dana Milbank

4 min

July 1, 2020 at 7:09 a.m. GMT+9

Sen. Rand Paul doesn’t much care what Anthony Fauci has to say. The Kentucky Republican gets his public health advice from Friedrich Hayek.

Hayek, the Austrian-born economist and libertarian hero, died in 1992. But Paul, an ophthalmologist before he took up politics, still takes medical guidance from the 20th-century philosopher.

“Hayek had it right!” Paul proclaimed at Tuesday’s Senate health committee hearing on the coronavirus pandemic. “Only decentralized power and decision-making based on millions of individualized situations can arrive at what risks and behaviors each individual should choose.”

Paul focused his wrath on Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious-disease official. “Virtually every day we seem to hear from you things we can’t do,” Paul complained. “All I hear is, we can’t do this, we can’t do that, we can’t play baseball.”

Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic

Fauci assured Paul that “I never said we can’t play a certain sport.”

Unsatisfied, Paul demanded: “We just need more optimism.”

So that’s what we need. The United States is hitting new records for infection, largely because President Trump and allied governors across the South and Southwest ignored public health guidance. While other countries beat back the virus, we’re on course to have 100,000 new cases a day, Fauci said, and doing little about it. But we just need to be more upbeat!

Not for the first time, it feels as though 21st-century America is 14th-century Europe, reacting with all manner of useless countermeasures to the plague: balancing ill “humors” and dispelling evil “vapors” caused by planetary misalignment, religious marches and public self-flagellation, cures involving live chickens and unicorns, and the wearing of amulets and reciting of “abracadabra.”

Now, we have science to tell us how to beat the coronavirus — with face masks and social distancing. Yet our response is resolutely medieval.

The president ridicules mask wearing as politically correct and unmanly. His campaign staff tears down social distancing signs at his mass rally. Governors of hard-hit states tamper with data, sideline public health experts and blame the spread on Latino farmworkers, civil rights demonstrations and increased testing — anything but their reckless and premature relaxing of restrictions.

And then there’s Vice President Pence, head of the White House coronavirus task force. “I’d just encourage every American to continue to pray,” he said at Friday’s task force briefing.

I’m all for prayer. But prayer without face masks won’t defeat the virus.

“The attitude of pushing back from authority and pushing back on scientific data is very concerning,” Fauci told senators Tuesday, bemoaning a “lack of trust” in government. “We’re in the middle of a catastrophic outbreak and we really do need to be guided by scientific principles.”

A lack of urgency about the virus caused the testing debacle. A lack of regard for science caused the hydroxychloroquine debacle. A contempt for public health advice caused the reopening debacle. A president’s vanity caused the anti-face-mask debacle. An immunology debacle likely comes next: If Trump rushes out a vaccine before the election, would anybody believe it’s safe?

Belatedly, more than a dozen states have paused or scaled back their rash plans to reopen without heeding public health guidance. But we still have the White House proclaiming “remarkable progress” against the pandemic because the latest victims are younger — as though they won’t infect the old and the sick. Trump insists he wasn’t joking when he said he told health officials to “slow the testing down” to suppress the number of reported cases. He’s proceeding with plans for an in-person, mask-optional convention in Florida, now a virus hot spot.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blames street protests (even though New York, Washington and Minneapolis experienced no such surge in cases) and “overwhelmingly Hispanic” workers, and as cases spiked last week, he claimed that “nothing has changed.” Like other GOP governors and the Trump administration, he also blames an increase in testing — which doesn’t explain the higher rate of positive tests.

Pence, too, rejects the obvious conclusion that “the reopening has to do with what we’re seeing” in the viral spread. (It’s the evil vapors!) He said Sunday that it’s a “good idea” to wear face masks — just after attending a church event at which half the 2,200 people, including the choir, eschewed masks.

At Tuesday’s committee hearing, Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who is retiring, urged Trump to “occasionally wear a mask” so his admirers “would follow his lead and help end this political debate.”

But neither Alexander’s pleadings, nor those of the various health officials testifying, are likely to break down America’s medieval resistance to science. Paul, citing the successful reopening of schools in Europe, demanded U.S. schools reopen (ignoring that Europe has contained the virus). Invoking the superiority of Hayek’s theories to the findings of public health officials, Paul said “we shouldn’t presume that a group of experts somehow knows what’s best.”

Hayek must be right. After all, he never got covid-19.

Why Fox News thinks the ‘cognitive decline’ attack on Biden will work

Why Fox News thinks the ‘cognitive decline’ attack on Biden will work
By Greg Sargent
washingtonpost.com
3 min
View Original

Fox News has been relentlessly pushing the line that Joe Biden might be suffering from dementia. A Fox News reporter asked Biden at a press conference on Tuesday whether he has “been tested for some degree of cognitive decline.”

That drew a sharp retort from Biden, who said this: “I can hardly wait to compare my cognitive capability to the cognitive capability of the man I’m running against.”

The Fox News website is playing this up in a big way, blaring this headline:

    Biden, at rare news conference, says he’s eager to compare ‘cognitive ability’ with Trump

The careful reader will note the word “rare” slipped in there, which is in keeping with the Trumpworld talking point that Biden is hiding in his basement. That’s supposed to magically convert this into a bad contrast for Biden. Given how heavily Fox personalities have promoted the “dementia” line, they likely think they scored big by getting Biden to comment on the matter.

Fortuitously, a new Pew poll digs into public attitudes towards the temperaments of both men. The poll, which finds Biden leading Trump among national registered voters by 54 percent to 44 percent, shows Biden with a solid advantage on many -- though not all -- such traits.

For instance, Biden has a 35 point advantage on the question of whether each is seen as “even tempered,” with 60 percent of voters saying this about Biden, and only 25 percent saying it about Trump.

On whether each is seen as a “good role model,” Biden has a 15 point advantage (46 percent to 31 percent). On whether each “cares about the needs of ordinary people,” Biden leads by 13 points (54 percent to 41 percent). On whether they’re “honest,” Biden leads by 12 points (48 percent to 36 percent).

However, on the question of whether they’re seen as “energetic,” Trump has a 16 point edge (56 percent to 40 percent).

That’s something to keep an eye on -- it suggests the background noise that Trumpworld (and some pundits) have drummed up on Biden’s age could be seeping into voters’ minds. But taken with those other findings, it isn’t that worrying: “Energetic” by itself isn’t necessarily a positive, given that an abysmal 25 percent say Trump is “even tempered,” and Biden is seen by vastly more people as empathetic and honest.

Indeed, if Trump is seen as energetic, it’s likely that far more voters than not believe this to be the case in an almost uniformly destructive way.

In the context of the big crises facing the country, it’s plainly obvious that these temperamental contrasts are terrible for Trump. The new Pew poll finds Biden favored over Trump to handle coronavirus by 11 points (52 percent to 41 percent); favored to effectively handle race relations by 13 points (48 percent to 35 percent); and favored to bring the country together by 14 points (45 percent to 31 percent).

It’s highly likely those numbers are connected, at least in part, to perceptions of temperamental contrasts on these issues. We’ve seen Biden try to strike a balance between calling for civil peace and recognizing protesters’ grievances while Trump engages in full blown racial incitement, something that large percentages of educated white voters see as worrisome and destabilizing.

We’ve seen Biden wearing a mask and speaking about the emotional challenges of social distancing while Trump parades around maskless even as his campaign has rally attendees sign liability waivers.

And we’ve seen Biden vowing to defer to experts while Trump prods them to endorse drinking bleach.

So why does Fox News think this contrast will play well for Trump?

You don’t have to look far for the answer to this. It came at the Tuesday briefing, from White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. Under questioning about whether Trump had read briefing papers reporting on intelligence concerns about Russia allegedly paying bounties to Taliban-linked militias, McEnany actually said this:

    Here’s Kayleigh McEnany characterizing Trump as “the most informed person on planet Earth when it comes to the threats we face” and somehow not bursting into laughter pic.twitter.com/rXxnlyZhUg
    — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 30, 2020

The very act of saying something so preposterous suggests high confidence that it will be widely believed by Trump supporters. If large swaths of the Trump-supporting Fox News audience are prepared to believe this, of all things, then there’s pretty much no chance that they’ll see the monumental flaws in Trump’s temperament that much of the rest of the country sees.

So it can be taken as a given, or even a certainty, that in those precincts, the temperamental contrast with Biden is simply guaranteed to play in Trump’s favor.
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Can we trust Trump to act in the interests of the United States — ever?

Can we trust Trump to act in the interests of the United States — ever?
By Paul Waldman

washingtonpost.com
5 min
View Original

“What did the president know, and when did he know it?” That evocative question was posed by House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) in a news conference Tuesday, speaking of reports that the intelligence community believes Russia has been offering bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill U.S. personnel in Afghanistan.

The fact that this is even a question could only happen under this president. But the particular circumstances of this disturbing development raise another, perhaps even more important question: What if the president not only can’t be trusted to always do what is in the interests of the United States as any president should, but can never be trusted to do so? What if he only acts in America’s interests by coincidence, when those interests happen to line up with his own?

When the story about the Russian bounties broke on Friday, the White House insisted that Trump knew nothing about it, though they never denied that Russia may have done this. Yet within days, one report after another described how the information has been known — and sent his way — for some time.

The Associated Press reported that White House officials knew about the bounties in early 2019. CNN reported that the information was included in one of Trump’s “daily briefings on intelligence matters sometime in the spring.” The Post also reported that it was included in the president’s daily intelligence brief, or PDB.

But for now, anyway, the position of the White House is that the president had no idea about any of this.

“Neither the President nor the Vice President were briefed on the alleged Russia — Russian bounty intelligence,” said press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Monday. She claimed this was because the intelligence wasn’t “verified,” as though the president is only told about intelligence for which there is incontrovertible proof.

Asked whether the president had a message for Moscow in response, McEnany said, “A specific message for Moscow? No, because he has not been briefed on the matter.”

If true, this would mean that days after these reports had come out, Trump still had not been informed of what the intel community knows about the Russian bounties.

But one must understand the context, which is that Trump’s intelligence briefings are a kind of surreal comedy routine in which professionals try to figure out some way to inject vital information into the brain of a president determined not to hear it, no matter what it’s about.

Early in his presidency, it was reported that Trump is essentially incapable of reading anything much longer than a page or two, so briefers put in fun pictures and graphs to hold his attention (yet even now he still prefers to get information from conservative media).

Briefers also learned to repeat his name in “as many paragraphs as we can because he keeps reading if he’s mentioned,” as one source told Reuters. In addition — and most important when it comes to Russia — he grows angry if he’s told anything that contradicts what he believes or what he has said in public.

So the answer to the mystery of what Trump knew and when he knew it is one of the following:

    Intelligence officials, knowing that Trump would react negatively to information that cast the Kremlin in a bad light, decided not to tell him about the bounties.
    Trump was informed in his written PDB that Russia was offering these bounties, but didn’t read it.
    He read it, but promptly forgot it.
    He was told verbally, but forgot it.
    He was informed in the written PDB and/or verbally, but didn’t like what he heard so he decided to ignore it, and is now having aides lie about it.

While all of these are at least theoretically possible, the last option is the one that lines up most closely with the information we have as of now.

Now let’s turn to a remarkable CNN story by Carl Bernstein. In his calls with foreign leaders, Bernstein reports, Trump is unprepared, easily manipulated, abusive to allies and simply idiotic, to the point where senior officials believe he is “delusional” and “a danger to the national security of the United States.”

Some of the stories are merely vulgar, such as when he told German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who happens to have a PhD in quantum chemistry, that she’s “stupid.” But when it comes to Vladimir Putin, aides describe Trump as “inordinately solicitous of Putin’s admiration and seemingly seeking his approval.”

Particularly relevant is an early call with the Russian dictator, after which Trump ignored the assessment of those who actually knew Putin — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Russia expert Fiona Hill and national security adviser H.R. McMaster — preferring instead to bask in praise from his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner about how gloriously he had performed:

    McMaster viewed that early phone call with Putin as indicative of the conduct of the whole relationship between Russia and the Trump administration, according to the sources — a conclusion subsequent national security advisers and chiefs of staff, and numerous high-ranking intelligence officials also reached: unlike in previous administrations, there were relatively few meaningful dealings between military and diplomatic professionals, even at the highest levels, because Trump — distrustful of the experts and dismissive of their attempts to brief him — conducted the relationship largely ad hoc with Putin and almost totally by himself. Ultimately, Putin and the Russians learned that “nobody has the authority to do anything” — and the Russian leader used that insight to his advantage, as one of CNN’s sources said.

As Rep. Hoyer said at the news conference, the question is whether the relationship of the United States to Russia “is compromised by the relationship between the president and Mr. Putin.” Is there a single person who could honestly say otherwise? That Trump’s decisions about Russia are based solely on the best interests of the United States and not on his pathetic desire to ingratiate himself with Putin?

If there was ever any doubt, we know now that Trump’s attempt to strong-arm Ukraine into helping him win reelection, an action for which he was impeached, wasn’t an aberration. It was the pure expression of the way he conducts foreign policy. And it will be some time before we understand the full extent of the damage.

Watch Opinions videos:

Leon E. Panetta: Trump has no excuse for his failure to take action to defend America’s troops

Jennifer Rubin: Trump shows us what ‘unfit’ means

Max Boot: Why does the ‘America First’ president keep putting Russia first?

Greg Sargent: As Trump’s corruption gets worse, some Democrats want a tougher response
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