DEMOCRATS CARE ABOUT THE SUPREME COURT -- HAVE DEMOCRATIC POLITICIANS NOTICED?

A new poll from Marquette University Law School contradicts conventional wisdom.

The vacancy on the Court created by [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg’s death greatly increases the salience of a possible appointment to the Court in the midst of a presidential election campaign. In the survey, 48 percent say that the choice of the next justice is very important to them and 34 percent say it is somewhat important, while 17 percent say it is not too important or not at all important to them.

Among likely voters who support Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, 59 percent say that the next court appointment is very important, while 51 percent of likely voters who support President Donald J. Trump say this.

For years we've heard that Republicans care about the Supreme Court and Democrats don't, but in this survey, Biden voters care more -- and here are the numbers sorted by party affiliation.

Democrats also support court-packing, although independents as well as Republicans oppose it:

(The poll was conducted September 8-15, before Ginsburg's death.)

We see real-world evidence of how important this issue is to Democratic voters:

Hundreds of people are already lined up to vote early in Fairfax County, spanning across the Fairfax County Government Center, and have been here for hours. Polls don’t open for another 30 min.

Numerous voters tell me the death of #RBG motivated them to vote this morning pic.twitter.com/3N1veQmn4H

— Amanda Golden (@amandawgolden) September 19, 2020

NEWS: Democratic donors shattered ActBlue's all-time record for donations in an hour after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.

Democrats gave $6.2 million in the 9 pm hour.

Then they broke the record again in 10 pm hour.

More than $100,000 per minute.https://t.co/NeNG52PUnY

— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) September 19, 2020

This is happening despite the fact that Democratic officeholders and candidates never do anything to encourage interest in the Supreme Court. It's completely grassroots and spontaneous.

I wish the party and its presidential nominee had seen this concern increasing and made the Court (and judicial appointments in general) a bigger issue.

In any event, it's not going away. Democratic frustration will increase with every horrible decision made by the soon-to-be-6-to-3 GOP Court. The courts are no longer a Republican-only issue. I hope Democratic politicians understand that.

REPUBLICANS ARE PROBABLY ABOUT TO SEAT A SUPREME COURT JUSTICE -- AND SEAL TRUMP'S DOOM

We've just lost Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Mitch McConnell has already vowed to try to ram through a replacement.

McConnell announced Friday that he will move forward with trying to confirm President Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died Friday evening.

“President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate,” McConnell said.

We're told that President Trump will nominate a replacement for Ginsburg in the next few days. My guess is that it will be Amy Coney Barrett, a 48-year-old anti-abortion extremist. Barrett is a member of a Catholic group called People of Praise, whose members are each paired with a same-sex moral guide; until a few years ago, the female guides were known, embarrassingly, as "handmaidens." Republicans undoubtedly feel they have the upper hand if they nominate Barrett because Senator Dianne Feinstein was widely criticized for saying to Barrett, when she was being considered for an appeals court position in 2017, "the dogma lives loudly within you." Right-wingers now buy mugs and T-shirts emblazoned with this phrase.

But it's possible that Barrett isn't corporatist enough for the GOP's purposes, and another nominee might be chosen. Or Trump might not like her.

Three Republican senators say they oppose consideration of a justice this year.

So far the following GOP Senators have pledged that they will not consider a Supreme Court appointment until after the next inauguration.

Susan Collins
Chuck Grassley
Lisa Murkowski

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) September 19, 2020

But that leaves 50 Republicans who will let Mitch McConnell have his way, including such embattled Republicans as Colorado senator Cory Gardner, North Carolina senator Thom Tillis, and Arizona senator Martha McSally.

This U.S. Senate should vote on President Trump's next nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court.

— Martha McSally (@SenMcSallyAZ) September 19, 2020

I'm sure they feel they have to. Their rage-junkie voters won't vote for them if they block this appointment.

So I think Trump and McConnell will win on this. But remember how outraged Democratic voters were after Brett Kavanaugh won his confirmation fight -- what happened immediately afterward was the Democratic wave election of 2018. It's true that Barrett can't possibly seem as reprehensible as Kavanaugh did. But the shameless hypocrisy of Mitch McConnell, who said even holding a hearing on Merrick Garland in early 2016 was a violation of a precedent he invented from whole cloth, will be all the motivation many anti-Trump and anti-GOP voters will need to get them to the polls.

I think this has the potential to doom Trump in November. He'd be much better off telling his voters, "Do you want me to fill this seat, or do you want Biden to do it?" That would give them more reason to turn out. But he and McConnell won't want to wait. McConnell, in particular, wants to seat as many judges as possible before next January because he knows Biden is favored to win.

McConnell should be smart enough to realize that seating another Supreme Court justice will probably ensure his loss of the Senate. It won't stop him, though. He and Trump will win -- and then, in all likelihood, lose.

*****

Also:

Just days before her death, as her strength waned, Ginsburg dictated this statement to her granddaughter Clara Spera: "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

I think voters who aren't politically engaged will learn about this, see Trump and McConnell defying her last wishes, and be repulsed by their defiance of her final request. This has been an election about decency vs. cruelty. This will be another reminder of Trump and McConnell's cold-blooded, unfeeling nature. It's not a good look a few weeks before an election.

DEMOCRATS MIGHT WIN THE WHITE HOUSE, TAKE BACK THE SENATE -- AND LOSE SOME HOUSE SEATS

I'm feeling fairly good about the Trump-Biden polls, and about the Senate races -- the New York Times/Siena College polls has more good numbers today from Maine, Arizona, and North Carolina.

But I'm concerned about the House. Right now FiveThirtyEight says Democrats have a 6.4% generic-ballot lead; on September 21, 2018, Democrats had a lead of 8.8%, and their final lead was 8.7%. (I chose September 21 because Election Day was three days later in 2018 than it will be in 2020.) At Real Clear Politics, the Democrats' generic-ballot lead is now 5.7%. On September 21, 2018, it was 8.0%, and the final number was 7.3%.

Because of the way Republican state legislators have gerrymandered many House districts -- packing large numbers of Democrats in some districts and distributing large but non-majority concentrations of Democrats acrossd multiple districts, both of which dilute the Democratic vote -- Democrats usually need far more than a simple majority of the overall House vote to retain the House. In 2018, there were a number of estimates of the margin Democrats need to win the House:

... a report from the Brennan Center for Justice reignited the debate over exactly how much Democrats would need to win by, in order to retake control of the House. “To attain a bare majority,” Brennan’s Laura Royden, Michael Li, and Yurij Rudensky wrote, “Democrats would likely have to win the national popular vote by nearly 11 points.”

... there have been quibbles about the actual numbers. [Alan] Abramowitz [of Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball] thinks the Democrats will need to win by at least 4 points, Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report thinks that Democrats will need to win by 7.

The Federal Election Commission says that Democrats beat Republicans 52.55% to 43.93%, an 8.62% margin. Democrats won 54% of the vote that went to major-party candidates, and they won 54% of the seats (235 out of 435) -- they appear to have overcome the GOP's gerrymandering advantage by winning a lot of close races.

But if their overall advantage is smaller this year, they'll probably lose some seats. They'll still hold the House by a comfortable margin, but there'll be slippage.

Why is this happening? I think the Democratic wave election in 2018 happened because voting for a Democratic House member seemed like a way to stick it to Donald Trump. This year, however, the best way to stick it to Trump is to vote against Trump. There's less focus on the House.

But I also think the Democratic Party isn't selling its brand very well. The Biden campaign continues to direct our attention to Republicans who are defecting to Biden, as if Democrats aren't worthy of a vote unless they have a Republican imprimatur.

In addition, I'm sure that Trump fans are more engaged than they were prior to the 2018 election. Also, Republicans are denouncing the Democratic Party even more vigorously than usual (a high standard).

If Democrats won't praise their own party in the midst of a "Democrats will destroy America!" propaganda onslaught, they probably will lose a few seats in the House. Biden has managed to individualize his race, and Democratic Senate candidates in competitive contests seem to have individualized theirs, but what's shaping up to be a good election overall for the party's candidates might not be nearly as good for the party in the House, or for the party's reputation.

TRUMP MADE A CULTURE WAR FLASHPOINT OUT OF HIS NEUROSIS

In his town hall on Tuesday with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, President Trump said:

TRUMP: ... Now there is by the way, a lot of people don’t want to wear masks. There are a lot of people think that masks are not good. And there are a lot of people that as an example you have...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Who are those people?

TRUMP: I’ll tell you who those people are -- waiters. They come over and they serve you, and they have a mask. And I saw it the other day where they were serving me, and they're playing with the mask...I’m not blaming them...I’m just saying what happens. They're playing with the mask, so the mask is over, and they're touching it, and then they're touching the plate. That can’t be good.

Paul Krugman regards Trump's persistent opposition to masks as mere political cynicism:

... why make a partisan issue out of what should be straightforward public health policy? The fairly obvious answer is that we’re looking at the efforts of an amoral politician to rescue his flailing campaign.

The economy’s partial snapback from its plunge early this year hasn’t given Trump the political dividends he hoped for. His attempts to stir up panic with claims that radical activists are going to destroy the suburbs haven’t gained traction, with voters generally seeing Joe Biden as the better candidate to maintain law and order.

And it’s probably too late to change the views of the majority of voters believing that he has given up on fighting the coronavirus.

So his latest ploy is an attempt to convince people that the Covid-19 threat is over. But widespread mask-wearing is a constant reminder that the virus is still out there. Hence Trump’s renewed push against the simplest, most sensible of public health precautions.

But Trump was opposed to masks from the beginning. In fact, he's been squeamish about masks from the beginning. He also fixated on the idea that masks can be virus carriers in an interview in late June, long before it was clear that the economy and Trump's law-and-order push weren't working in his favor:

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Michael C. Bender, Trump went so far as to suggest that masks could be counterproductive.

“Masks are a double-edged sword,” he said. “People touch them. And they grab them and I see it all the time. They come in, they take the mask. Now they’re holding it now in their fingers. And they drop it on the desk and then they touch their eye and they touch their nose. No, I think a mask is a — it’s a double-edged sword.”

I don't think Trump is against masks because -- or merely because -- they remind voters of America's continuing struggle with the pandemic. I think the notion that they block the coronavirus creeps him out. It reminds the self-professed germaphobe that viruses exist. It's true, of course, that the virus can cling to a mask. That's why you should wash a non-disposable mask after every wearing. But he can't bear that thought.

So he hates masks for that reason -- probably also because he thinks masks emasculate him, or at least mess up his makeup, but primarily because they seem to him like repositories for germs, an idea he finds unbearable. He's turned this around, however, and made his base believe that his rejection of masks is a macho act rather than the neurotic response of a wimp.

In that ABC town hall, Trump recited another of his coronavirus mantras:

TRUMP: ... And we are going to be OK. We're going to be OK, and it is going away. And it's probably going to go away now a lot faster because of the vaccines.

It would go away without the vaccine, George, but it's going to go away a lot faster with it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: It would go away without the vaccine?

TRUMP: Sure, over a period of time. Sure, with time it goes away.

This, of course, is Trump deceiving himself, and trying to deceive the rest of us, with Positive Thinking -- but the more I hear him say "it is going away," the more I hear fear in it. I think he can't bear the thought that the virus is out there, potentially anywhere, all the time. I think it makes his skin crawl. This feels like something he says to himself to quell his anxiety.

I wish the virus would just go away, but it might never do that. There's a good chance we'll develop better and better vaccines and treatments and eventually regard this virus as highly manageable. But scientists say it will still be out there, in all likelihood.

If there are good defenses against it, I can live with that. I don't believe Donald Trump can.

REPUBLICAN LACK OF INTEREST IN A NEW STIMULUS BILL IS NO MYSTERY

The Atlantic's Derek Thompson has a theory about why the president isn't trying harder to pass another coronavirus relief package:

President Donald Trump faces an array of obstacles on his path to reelection. But he could do one thing, right away, that would, in all likelihood, immediately improve his odds with almost no downside risk: Call for Congress to open the cash spigot and buoy the lackluster economy on a wave of stimulus.

All he has to do is announce his intention to sign a second major economic relief bill—a CARES Act II, essentially—and count on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to muddle through. Such a law would almost certainly improve the financial state of countless families at a time of mass desperation, and just weeks before the election.

But, oddly, the White House has expressed practically no interest in supercharging the economic engine that could drive the president to victory....

What in the world is Trump thinking? ...

According to several conversations with Republicans, the answer is that the president is stuck in a Pollyannaish fantasy of his own making.

On the campaign trail and in his television ads, Trump proclaims that a great and historic economic recovery is afoot. The notion that the economy is sick enough to require a trillion-dollar booster shot is in direct tension with the claim that it’s thriving. So, the theory goes, Trump is unwilling to advocate for stimulus, because he doesn’t want to acknowledge that the economy is broken in the first place.

Is that it? I have my doubts. Remember, this is the guy who, early in the year, couldn't decide whether his reelection slogan should be "Make America Great Again" (again) or "Keep America Great." He didn't seem concerned that the former slogan would convey the sense that he hadn't made America great -- he just wanted to use whichever slogan sounded better.

Right now, he's arguing that "The Great American Comeback" (a) will happen next year and (b) is already happening.

So why wouldn't he seek a stimulus now while simultaneously arguing that the economy is already in awesome shape?

The answer is that he's too lazy and incompetent to get involved seriously in working out a stimulus deal. He's the boss. That's work for underlings.

Being the boss also means he never actually has to understand the details of anything being done in his name. Details are complicated! And tedious! For Trump, getting personally involved in negotiating a stimulus package would be like walking to the green when there's a golf cart handy, even if the walk is fifty feet. In both cases, he's entitled to be conveyed where he wants to go, with no effort on his part.

But what about other Republicans? Thompson has a theory about them as well:

... the GOP, as a group, has also convinced itself that more stimulus is unnecessary. Republicans are more dubious about Keynesianism than Democrats.... They don’t believe that states and local governments need a huge bailout. They’re reluctant to top off unemployment-insurance checks with hundreds of dollars in pandemic bonuses.

Makes sense so far. But Thompson continues:

The generous interpretation is that Republicans believe the economy will rebound without federal assistance; the critical one is that, just as Trump is delusional about economic realities, the GOP is delusional about economic policy. The Great Recession demonstrated clearly that without emergency support after sharp recessions, state and local governments lay off workers, whose unemployment delays the overall recovery. But the GOP, refusing to learn from the experience of past economic conflagrations, is clasping anachronistic ideas about economics with both hands.

Actually, the critical interpretation is that Republicans don't care what happens to the economy most of us experience. They already have the result they (and their donors) want: a booming stock market. Mission accomplished. In fact, a K-shaped recovery, in which the rich get richer, everyone else suffers, inequality widens, and state and local governments have to lay off thousands of workers, is, in their estimation, the economy functioning as it should.

They'll win plenty of elections this year the way they always do, by pumping up the culture-war rhetoric (and, these days, by letting QAnon tell their voters that all Democrats are cannibal pedophiles). And if they don't win enough elections this year and there's a Democratic wave, they'll just make America as ungovernable as possible for President Biden and plan for a comeback starting in 2022. Keeping ordinary people poor and desperate is a means to that end, because those people will presumably blame their suffering on the newly elected Democrats by 2022.

So for Republicans, what's the point? They don't think we're in a crisis. And the president is still waiting for the little people to take care of everything for him.

TRUMP HAD SO FEW CHOICES!

This seems appropriate:

The top spokesman for the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services is taking a leave of absence, the agency announced Wednesday, days after he promoted dangerous conspiracy theories during a Facebook Live video.

In the video, first reported by the New York Times, Michael Caputo, who is HHS' assistant secretary for public affairs, charged that scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "don't want America to get well." He also urged Trump supporters to load up on ammunition in preparation for a violent left-wing rebellion when the president wins re-election.

Caputo also said in the video he's been having health issues and that his "mental health has definitely failed."

Yahoo News deserves credit for obtaining a copy of the video. Here's part of it:

“This is war.”

MORE from Michael Caputo’s disturbing Facebook Live video. pic.twitter.com/k24WeNzAEF

— Alexander Nazaryan (@alexnazaryan) September 16, 2020

CAPUTO: This is war. Joe Biden's not going to concede. The antifa attacks, the murders, that have happened, the rallies that have turned into violence, this is all practice. We know it. We know it. My friends in law enforcement, in federal law enforcement, tell me that they recognize this as drills. Remember the Trump supporter who was shot and killed? That was a drill. That was a hit squad. And the guy that shot him went down fighting. Why? Because he couldn't say what he had inside him. There are hit squads being trained all over this country....

Crazy stuff. Here's another part of the video:

NEW: We have the Michael Caputo video from Facebook Live.

It’s...uncomfortable watching.

More, and story, below.https://t.co/pfZX744Trl pic.twitter.com/QLBJEqNOxN

— Alexander Nazaryan (@alexnazaryan) September 16, 2020

But in an otherwise unobjectionable story about Caputo and the video, Alexander Nazaryan of Yahoo News pauses to give Trump the benefit of the doubt on his approach to hiring:

Caputo’s plight is emblematic of a challenge that has hounded Trump from the very start of his administration. He promised to “drain the swamp” of Washington by bringing in outsiders from the private sector who would apply their business expertise to the federal government. But sensitive to criticism, many corporate executives kept a distance from the Trump administration. Meanwhile, many senior government officials fled a president bound to regard them as members of a “deep state.”

According to critics, that leaves Trump with little recourse at a time of crisis, leading him to rely on untested backbenchers.

So, you see, Trump had no choice! He had to hire the corrupt, the incompetent, the unqualified, and the clinically paranoid to staff his government! He wanted to staff his administration with "the best people," but the best people were just too darn sensitive! And sure, he alienated long-serving government employees with expertise and experience, but that was a matter of principle!

Trump has hired relatives, an ex-Apprentice contest, his former golf caddie, and lots and lots of people who have worked for Fox News. Caputo came to Trump's attention because he's a friend of convicted felon Roger Stone.

Maybe if Trump would hire from outside the very narrow range of his own experiences, he could find good help. But he thinks these jamokes are doing just fine.

WE'RE GOING TO HAVE THREE GISH GALLOP PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES

I didn't watch the Trump town hall on ABC last night, but I've been watching clips and reading the transcript this morning. It's getting bad press. Deadline called it a "train wreck." CNN's Scott Jennings said it "didn't go well." Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post was unimpressed.

Would love to know who in the White House thought that Trump doing this town hall was a good idea.

— Karen Tumulty (@ktumulty) September 16, 2020

I'm glad the coverage was bad, because if we assume that there are still a few undecided voters who don't pay a lot of attention to the news, what I think they saw was a president trying to seem reasonable and Gish-galloping, with some success, through the questioning. You know what a Gish gallop is, right?

The Gish gallop is a technique used during debating that focuses on overwhelming an opponent with as many arguments as possible, without regard for accuracy or strength of the arguments. The term was coined by Eugenie Scott and named after the creationist Duane Gish, who used the technique frequently against proponents of evolution.

There certainly were a lot of lies.

Another tour de force from @ddale8 fact-checking a torrent of lies pic.twitter.com/xDxKI32ef8

— Josh Campbell (@joshscampbell) September 16, 2020

DANIEL DALE, CNN FACT CHECKER: There was just so much lying, Don. I'm going to go quickly here. He said literally to stop me whenever you need to. He said again, Democrats won't protect people with pre- existing conditions. That is nonsense, as a voter told him, Democrats created those protections.

He insisted he didn't praise China on the virus. He did so repeatedly. We know that. He claimed that nobody knew at the time he was praising China that seniors were especially susceptible to the virus. That's one of the first things we learned out of China, and out of Italy, and the U.S.

He claimed Biden said in March that the pandemic was, quotes, totally over exaggerated. I can find no evidence that Biden ever said that. He said at Winston Churchill was kind of like him playing down stuff because he went on rooftops in London during the Nazi bombing and told people everything is going to be good. Churchill did not speak from the rooftops and did not say everything was going to be good. He warn of suffering and danger.

Trump said that he fired James Mattis, Mattis resigned. He said that protesters took over 20 percent of Seattle, it was a six block area. Nowhere close to 20 percent. He took credit again for sending in the National Guard in Minneapolis saying this happened after a week and a half of violence there.

It was not even close to a week and a half. It was days and the Democratic Governor is the one who activated the guard. He said he essentially repealed Obamacare by getting rid of individual mandate, not even close to true with the Medicaid expansion, pre-existing conditions protections, other stuff remains.

He said the coverage were empty of ventilators. His administration admits he inherited about 16,000 from Obama. He did his usual false boast about so-called bans on travel from China and Europe. They were not complete bans. He said stocks are owned by, quote, everybody. Just about half of Americans own stocks. He repeated his nonsense about testing causing cases, testing merely reveals and helps fight cases. He said that Biden has agreed to a Bernie Sanders style of socialized health care.

He fought Sanders on that issue. He has very much not agreed to a Sanders-style plan. And, Don, this is a preliminary list. I have hours of fact checking tonight to do because there's even more than this. So this was just a firehose of lying, again, from the president.

Moderator George Stephanopoulos pushed back on a few -- but he couldn't push back on all of them. The questioners, who expressed a sense that there's a lot wrong in America but seemed ready to be told that there was a good reason for Trump's response to many of our problems, heard a man insisting that his responses really have been reasonable. That's my concern -- he sounded reasonable, or at least he did a decent imitation of a reasonable man.

Maybe he won't be like that in the debates with Joe Biden. Maybe he'll be the nasty attack dog of the MAGA rallies. I think it's possible that his testosterone will get the better of him (or Biden will goad him) and he'll go on the attack. If so, that will hurt him. What much of America dislikes about him more than anything is his tone.

But if he restrains himself, low-info voters might conclude that he's done what he's done the past four years out of a sense of good judgment. He'll lie and lie and lie, and Biden will be forced to pick his spots in rebutting those lies, which means most of them will get through unchallenged.

I'm not really worried. Polls suggest that there aren't very many undecided voters, and Biden appears to be comfortably ahead in enough states to win. And the press seems fed up with Trump's bullshitting.

But Trump just might sound this way in the last few presidential events most voters will pay attention to, and it might help him some, even if he's telling the same lies he always tells.

RUSH LIMBAUGH (AND DANIELLE PLETKA): MATH IS HARD!

Here's how Rush Limbaugh was scaring your right-wing relatives on the radio today:

If the Democrats win, ... that’s the end of democracy. It’s the end of the two-party system. We’re gonna have a one-party government that is going to devote itself to eliminating all opposition. That’s what’s at stake. If they win, I think the Republican Party essentially ceases to exist.

One of the first things they will do is grant statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico, and that will give them four Democrat senators. They will never lose control of the Senate.

Okay, let's imagine that Democrats succeed in obtaining statehood for D.C and Puerto Rico. Let's say those new states reliably elect two Democratic senators each. Does that mean that Democrats "will never lose control of the Senate"?

No -- in fact, if you were to add four Democratic senators to the Senate right now, Republicans would still be in control. The current makeup of the Senate is 53 Republicans, 45 Democrats, and two independents (Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine) who caucus with the Democrats. So the Democratic caucus is 47 senators; 47 + 4 = 51.

Which is less than 53.

The Senate after the 2016 elections had 54 Republicans, 44 Democrats, and the same two independents caucusing with the Democrats. Add four Democratic senators and you would have had a Senate with a 50-member Democratic caucus and ... 54 Republicans.

You were saying, Rush?

They will never lose control of the House. They will pack the Supreme Court with who knows how many new justices, and they’ll all be left-leaning justices. And it won’t be take them long to do any of this. And after they’ve done it, there will be a one-party state.

Okay, let's talk about the House. Let's assume for the sake of argument (even though it's highly unlikely) that Democrats could rapidly win statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C., and that all their subsequent House members were Democrats.

To simplify matters, let's imagine that this change didn't come with a plan to thoroughly overhaul the makeup of the House. Let's assume that we'd just add a few extra House seats for the two new states.

The Census Bureau estimated that Puerto Rico's population in 2019 was 3,193,694. That's a little less than the population of Utah (3,205,958). Utah has four House members.

D.C.'s population in 2019 was 705,749 -- a bit less than the population of Alaska (731,545). Alaska has one House member.

So imagine this change adding a whopping five Democrats to the House. Will Democrats "never lose control of the House"? Let me remind you that the House elected in 2016 had 241 Republicans and 194 Democrats. The House elected in 2014 had 247 Republicans and 188 Democrats. Do I need to do the math for you? Five additional Democrats would not have tipped the balance in those years.

But what about the Supreme Court? It now has five members appointed by Republican presidents and four members appointed by Democrats. A recent proposal by a coalition of progressive groups recommended that the Court be expanded "by at least two seats." Two seats? If a Democratic president could add two seats right now, that would tip the balance from Republican by 1 to ... Democratic by 1.

Or as Danielle Pletka calls it in a much-talked-about Washington Post op-ed, "an increase in the number of Supreme Court seats to ensure a liberal supermajority." A "supermajority"! Of one!

And by the way, Joe Biden doesn't even support the idea of packing the Supreme Court.

Limbaugh continues:

The United States will be a one-party government....

Everybody thought that the election in 2016 was the election of a lifetime. This one is too, maybe even bigger. The Democrat Party has become full-fledged Marxist radical left. They do not believe in opposition. They don’t believe in debate. They don’t believe they should have to win minds and hearts. They don’t believe they should have to persuade anybody. They don’t believe that there is legitimate opposition.

So they’re not going to have debates, they’re not going to have any circumstance where they could lose politically. They believe in a one-party-dominating government. And it’s what they’re going to set up as quickly as they can.

You'll hear this from your right-wing relatives, and probably from quite a few "respectable" pundits, including some moderates. Many people will believe this scaremongering -- because math is hard.

THEY THINK THEY'RE BULLETPROOF

Paul Krugman asks why Republicans, on the verge of an election, aren't trying to solve any of America's problems.

One thing that’s clear ... is that Republicans — not just Donald Trump, but his whole party — are acting as if there’s no tomorrow. Or, more precisely, they’re acting as if there’s no next year.

... consider the large (and illegal) indoor rally Trump held Sunday in Nevada.

Before the release of Bob Woodward’s new book, you might have argued that Trump doesn’t believe the science and didn’t realize that his event might well sicken and kill many people. But we now know that he’s well aware of the risks, and has been all along. He just doesn’t care.

Or consider Trump’s weeks of silence and inaction on the wildfires ravaging Western states.

... those states account for almost 19 percent of the U.S. economy; you might think that he’d care about the damage they’re suffering, which will spill over to the rest of the country. But he clearly doesn’t.

... nothing has been done to alleviate either the suffering of unemployed Americans — who lost much of the benefits that were sustaining them at the end of July — or the looming fiscal crisis of state and local governments.

... it’s as if Republicans don’t expect to win, and they figure that if they do, they’ll deal with the mess somehow.

I'm sure many Republicans don't believe they'll win in November. But Donald Trump clearly believes he can win, or at least remain in office by some means -- in a hundred different ways, he's working to manipulate the outcome of the election so Biden can't become president. And he might win legitimately.

Trump and other Republicans know this, and yet if they do win, they're leaving themselves a flaming wreck of a country to govern. Why?

Well, why not? One of the lessons Republicans -- and the plutocrats they serve -- have learned over the past few decades is that when something terrible happens in America, there are no consequences for them. Maybe some Republicans are voted out of office (at which point they become lobbyists for their wealthy patrons). But they don't go hungry. Their quality of life doesn't suffer. And certainly their plutocrat masters never experience a decline in their quality of life.

Do you blame rich Republican donors for thinking they can always escape the consequences when bad thing happen in America? The Great Recession didn't really hurt them. The coronavirus recession isn't hurting them. They can dodge the coronavirus itself by living full-time at their massive weekend houses. They're white, so they're never going to suffer the fate of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor. Urban unrest generally bypasses their mansions.

The last two Republican presidents have been rich scions who were failures for much of their lives and never really suffered as a result. Donald Trump has run many businesses into the ground, and was once nearly a billion dollars in debt -- and yet he's always lived like a prince. George W. Bush never accomplished a thing in the first forty years of his life -- but he never missed a meal. This is moral hazard of the worst kind. This is what leads a person to say, Sure, let's invade Iraq -- what's the worst that can happen? or Yes, there's a dealy virus in America that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, but it interferes with my reelection strategy, so I'll just play it down. If even the worst mistakes you've made in your life have never really hurt you, you'll believe that nothing you do to anyone is particularly consequential.

Not every Republican politician is rich -- but they identify with the rich. And the rich don't care about the possible consequences of bad choices because, in the past forty years or so, they haven't had to. So of course they're not worried about what happens to America.

A CONSPIRACY SO VAST THAT ITS MEMBERS CAN'T STAND ONE ANOTHER

I told you this morning that Shadi Hamid's prediction, in The Atlantic, of Portland-style unrest all over America if Joe Biden loses the election was "conflat[ing] Democrats and window-breakers, in the way Fox News does." It's also a common rhetorical trope of Donald Trump and his surrogates. We see it in the paranoid rant of Michael Caputo.

The top communications official at the powerful cabinet department in charge of combating the coronavirus made outlandish and false accusations on Sunday that ... left-wing hit squads were preparing for armed insurrection after the election....

Mr. Caputo predicted that the president would win re-election in November, but that his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., would refuse to concede, leading to violence. “And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing.” ...

Over all, his tone was deeply ominous: He warned, again without evidence, that “there are hit squads being trained all over this country” to mount armed opposition to a second term for Mr. Trump. “You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going,” Mr. Caputo added.

The usual shorthand for this on the right is "antifa" -- that's who's to blame for all the violence, we're told, and, of course, antifa works hand in glove with the Democratic Party, in the Trumpers' fevered imagination.

Really?

I wanted to know what antifa groups actually think of Joe Biden. So I searched the Twitter feeds of several of them for Biden-themed tweets. Here's what I found.

From @NYCAntifa:

it would be interesting to see a venn diagram of biden supporters and those crying about tucker getting yelled at in a restaurant

— New York City Antifa (@NYCAntifa) March 5, 2020

"anarchists should be prosecuted" --joe bidenhttps://t.co/FATotic0pw

— New York City Antifa (@NYCAntifa) August 20, 2020

maybe the biden campaign should stop talking about "charlottesville" like it gives a fuck about what happened there on august 11th and 12th, 2017.https://t.co/2niTBs92fi

— New York City Antifa (@NYCAntifa) August 20, 2020

From @SocialistRA, the Twitter account of the Socialist Rifle Association:

Survivor @ReadeAlexandra accuses @JoeBiden of sexual assault. https://t.co/YndSM4RRGd

— Socialist Rifle Association (@SocialistRA) March 25, 2020

And from @antifa_ne, the Twitter account of the Nebraska Antifascists:

You need to disown the repeatedly accused rapist Joe Biden to reclaim your futile attempt at democracy.

— nebraska antifascists (@antifa_ne) June 1, 2020

Do you really think these people are going to be upset if Joe Biden loses? They loathe Joe Biden. Joe Biden, for many of them, is no better than Donald Trump.

Obviously, Michael Caputo is crazy.

He said his physical health was in question, and his “mental health has definitely failed.”

“I don’t like being alone in Washington,” Mr. Caputo said, describing “shadows on the ceiling in my apartment, there alone, shadows are so long.”

But nearly everyone on the right believes that antifa and the Democratic Party are part of one big evil, murderous octopus. It's a ridiculous notion believed even by right-wingers who aren't afraid of shadows.

ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE: FAILED STATE EDITION

The Atlantic's Shadi Hamid is not a worrier. He describes himself as

someone who has argued against catastrophism—I don’t believe Donald Trump is a fascist or a dictator in the making, and I don’t believe America is a failed state

I used to argue that Trump isn't a fascist or dictator in the making because fascism seemed to be one of many things he was too ignorant, lazy, and unfocused to achieve. I no longer feel this way, although if he wins reelection, I hold out the hope that he'll get bored with repression and spend his days watching TV and tweeting while trying to obtain a Nobel Peace Prize and a spot on Mount Rushmore. But I think it's obvious that we live in a failed state.

Hamid, who must have a very nice life as a Brookings Institution senior fellow, seems temperamentally inclined to see the glass as half full. In an earlier Atlantic essay, he wrote:

the novel coronavirus has receded into the background—not quite forgotten, but relegated to the ambient mood music of our new lives

That was on June 22, before a godawful summer that saw cases spiking to more than 70,000 a day for a time. (The numbers are now in the mid-thirties. I imagine Hamid is generally cheery again.)

Hamid, in the current essay, tells us he's not worried about the damage Trump can do to America in a second term, or even in a post-election power grab. But he is concerned about something. What is it?

I find myself truly worried about only one scenario: that Trump will win reelection and Democrats and others on the left will be unwilling, even unable, to accept the result.

You see, Trump's not the problem, you're the problem.

A loss by Joe Biden under these circumstances is the worst case not because Trump will destroy America (he can’t)

He can.

... but because it is the outcome most likely to undermine faith in democracy, resulting in more of the social unrest and street battles that cities including Portland, Oregon, and Seattle have seen in recent months.

So Trump -- with all the levers of government at his disposal, and with smart totalitarians (William Barr foremost among them) by his side -- can't possibly harm democracy, but democracy can be destroyed by the scruffy window-breakers who've been stirring up trouble in small swaths of selected cities. They'll destroy democracy, if Hamid is correct, on behalf of a Democratic candidate many of them don't support, assuming they vote at all. Scott Lemieux frquently cites Murc's Law: "the widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics." It's usually invoked when every Republican in Congress and one or two Democrats vote against a progressive bill. (Conclusion: the failure to pass this bill was the Democrats' fault!) But it fits here as well.

Hamid continues:

I struggle to imagine how, beyond utter shock, millions of Democrats will process a Trump victory. A loss for Biden, after having been the clear favorite all summer, would provoke mass disillusion with electoral politics as a means of change—at a time when disillusion is already dangerously high. If Democrats can’t beat a candidate as unpopular as Trump during a devastating pandemic and a massive economic contraction, then are they even capable of winning presidential elections anymore?

For now, let's ignore the fact that Hamid conflates Democrats and window-breakers, in the way Fox News does. Let's remember that most Democratic voters can easily imagine this outcome. Many believe it's the likely outcome, despite the polls. We're prepared to blame voter-roll purges in Georgia, long voting lines in Milwaukee, and a GOP campaign to discredit and then undermine mail-in voting, but we're also prepared to conclude that Joe Biden might have been an uninspired choice for a nominee, that he's failed to campaign hard enough for Hispanic voters in Florida, Nevada, and Arizona, that Bernie or Liz or Mayor Pete would've won. We're prepared to blame ourselves -- we didn't give enough money or make enough phone calls to swing-state voters. We're Democrats. We've lived through 1988, 1994, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2010, 2014, and 2016. We're used to fallng short.

Hamid writes:

Liberals have convinced themselves that Republicans are, in one way or another, cheating. In addition to all of Trump’s norm-breaking, the GOP is gerrymandering, purging voter rolls, and shutting down polling places in Black neighborhoods.

In other words, we've convinced ourselves that Republicans are cheating because Republicans are cheating. What strange tricks of the mind!

Yet Republicans wouldn’t have been able to do these things if they hadn’t won enough statewide and local offices in the first place. They have put themselves in a position to enact their favored redistricting and election procedures by finding candidates and pursuing policies that made them competitive in formerly Democratic states, demanding a level of party discipline that Democrats can seldom muster, and getting their supporters to turn out for down-ballot races. Republican manipulation is what the democratic process itself has produced, however unfair, and it can be undone only through that same process, however flawed. To some degree, this is just how the game is played, and Democrats need to play it better if they want to win the Electoral College.

So what Hamid is saying is that a period of violent unrest may destroy democracy in America, but persistently unfair elections don't destroy democracy -- even though fair elections would seem to be the defining characteristic of democracy.

He's also arguing that no other institution should step in when democracy is under assault. The courts, perhaps? Maybe in a functioning democracy the judiciary would rule that fair electoral processes are necessary for government by the people?

Hamid writes:

... democracies are supposed to be responsive to voters’ demands and grievances. But they aren’t always. The gap will grow larger under a Trump presidency than a Biden one, and this has implications for mass unrest and political violence across American cities. For democracy to work, the losers of elections need to believe that they can win the next time around. Otherwise their incentives to play the spoiler increase.

The critical factor in deciding whether Trump opponents abandon faith in democracy won't be the outcome of the election -- it will be how it was arrived at and what Trump and his party do as a result. If it appears that there was a reasonably fair election, we'll kick ourselves again and begin planning for 2022 and 2024. If Trump wins by sending thug cops to polling places, impounding mail ballots, and using protests as a post facto excuse for these and other abuses of democracy, we'll lose faith. If Trump uses his victory speech to talk about running for additional terms -- and I guarantee he will if he wins -- we'll lose faith. If he continues filling the federal bench with enemies of voting rights, we'll lose faith. If he and Barr use his second term to try to jail his politcal enemies, we'll lose faith.

In other words, we'll lose faith in American democracy if it no longer exists in any recognizable form.

HE WANTS TO BE ADORED

How obsessed is Trump with the Nobel Prize? Well, I haven't seen the clip yet, but here's one of his most committed flatterers saying just what the boss wants to hear:

Peter Navarro on CNN stops in the middle of answering a question about wildfire response to congratulate @realDonaldTrump on getting nominated for a Nobel prize.

— Garrett Haake (@GarrettHaake) September 13, 2020

“Before we begin, I would really like to congratulate President Trump for being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize,” WH adviser Peter Navarro tells @jaketapper on @CNNSotu

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) September 13, 2020

This follows the misspelled Facebook ad posted by the Trump campaign...



... and a rant from Trump at his rally in Nevada last night:

the guy with the nuke codes is out of his mind and so are his supporters. it's a hate movement pic.twitter.com/vZ91flbFYB

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 13, 2020

To me, you know, it's a big thing, even though obviously it's a very political thing, but it's a very big thing, the Nobel Peace Prize, right? I got -- it was just reported, I'm just reporting this -- I got zero time on the nightly news, on the network news. Zero. Zero. We got zero time. Think of it: The president of your country is honored by being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and your nightly news -- ABC, which is terrible, CBS, which is terrible, and probably the worst of all, owned by Concast -- they spend a fortune, you know, on PR, and then every time I get up, I call them Concast and sort of wipe out their fortune -- but they are bad people, but NBC is the worst of them all. Not one mention. These people are corrupt. Not one mention. Not one mention. So your president gets a Nobel -- at least a nomination -- and they don't mention it.

This is the desperate desire for Establishment acceptance that Maureen Dowd, whatever you think of her, portrays quite accurately in today's column:

Fresh off his win in 2016, he was eager to come talk to The New York Times. I’ve never seen Trump happier than in that hour with the “failing” New York Times. (He even got to upbraid me in front of my boss.) As we wrapped up, he told the assembled editors, reporters and Times brass: “It’s a great honor. I will say, The Times is, it’s a great, great American jewel. A world jewel. And I hope we can all get along.”

That same eager tone was echoed in the audio of Bob Woodward’s tapes with Trump, as the president warmly spoke the name “Bob” again and again, yearning for acceptance from the very establishment that he had denounced to win the Oval Office....

“I brought something that I’ve never shown to anybody,” the president told the writer in December 2019. “I’m going to show it to you. I’ll get you something that’s sort of cool.”

He had an aide bring photos of him with Kim Jong-un, including some capturing the moment when the two leaders stepped over the line between North and South Korea.

“Pretty cool,” Trump gushed. “You know? Pretty cool. Right?” He added, “I mean, they’re cool pictures when you — you know, when you talk about iconic pictures, how about that?”

In a later interview, he gave Woodward a poster-size picture of himself and Kim, saying: “I don’t even know why I’m giving it to you. That’s my only one.” He trumpeted about Kim: “He never smiled before. I’m the only one he smiles with.”

It's sad in a way that Democrats couldn't have neutralized Trump by flattering him. That's what Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un have done. He does what they'd like him to do because they make him believe they're his best friends. He gets so excited: These are very powerful people! And they like me!

But in America, mainstream Republicans got there first. Actually, Fox got there first: Once upon a time, Trump was pro-choice and praised the Clintons. In the 2000 election cycle, he briefly sought Ross Perot's presidential ballot line. But by 2011, he hated Barack Obama. Fox News made him feel wanted and admired -- he was given a regular gig on Fox & Friends. Eventually, the mainstream of the GOP embraced him. In return, the Republicans and Fox got the tax cuts and deregulation and judges they wanted. (He'd been steeping himself in Fox's worldview for a long time before his election, but for a while he also watched CNN and Joe Scarborough, and it clearly wasn't hate-watching, the way it is now.)

Democrats never had the opportunity to bend Trump to their will by flattering him. I suppose they could have tried being flatterers starting in 2017. Maybe they would have gotten an infrastructure bill, or protection of the DACA kids. But they never would have outflattered the congressional GOP and the right-wing media.

It's an unpalatable thought, and it's 20/20 hindsight, but if Democrats had fawned over Trump in the 1990s or early 2000s, he might be an angry, boorish, ignorant president now who was also pro-Planned Parenthood, pro-green infrastructure, and pro-progressive taxation. Maybe all it would have taken was the right amount of ass-kissing.

AN OCTOBER SURPRISE FOR AN AUDIENCE OF ONE?

We know that Donald Trump's reelection campaign has wasted millions of dollars on advertising the campaign knows won't affect the election outcome, just to please the boss:

Some spending choices appear devised, at least in part, to satisfy Mr. Trump himself, including the Super Bowl ads, which were purchased as part of an advertising arms race with [then-presidential candidate Mike] Bloomberg. The two ads on game day cost more than the Trump campaign spent on local television through the end of July in each of four battleground states: Wisconsin ($3.9 million), Michigan ($3.6 million), Iowa ($2 million) and Minnesota ($1.3 million).

Another Trump-pleasing expense: more than $1 million in ads aired in the Washington, D.C., media market, a region that is not likely to be competitive in the fall but where the president, a famously voracious television consumer, resides.

D.C. is solidly blue. So are Maryland and Virginia. And yet the Trump campaign was advertising in D.C. because seeing ads for himself during his daily TV binge pleased Trump.

I'm beginning to feel the same way about the least surprising October surprise in American politcal history, the upcoming report William Barr commissioned from John Durham. It's big news today that a top aide to Durham just resigned.

Federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy, a top aide to U.S. Attorney John H. Durham in his Russia investigation, has quietly resigned — at least partly out of concern that the investigative team is being pressed for political reasons to produce a report before its work is done, colleagues said.

Dannehy, a highly regarded prosecutor ... has worked with or for Durham for decades....

Colleagues said Dannehy is not a supporter of President Trump and has been concerned in recent weeks by what she believed was pressure from Barr, who appointed Durham, to produce results before the election.

The process of generating this political hit job is a bizarre combination of punctiliousness and partisan hackery. We know that the report is intended to harm Trump's enemies just before the election, and yet Barr hired Durham, who's considered respectable, and we now know that Durham hired at least one prosecutor who's not a Trump fan. So they care about making this look at least somewhat legitimate.

That's why, even though it's believed that Durham might be looking into Ukraine (and thus possibly Hunter Biden) as well as the folks who brought us the Russia investigation, I believe that Barr might have been speaking the truth when he implied that Hunter Biden won't be a target:

Whether Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham plan to take public investigative steps close to the election, flouting a longstanding Justice Department practice of avoiding overt activity within 60 days of an election if it could have a political impact on the vote, has been the subject of growing scrutiny.

Mr. Barr ... has put forward a narrow interpretation of the so-called 60-day rule, saying it only meant the department should not indict a candidate for office or a close campaign associate.

“The idea is you don’t go after candidates, you don’t indict candidates, or perhaps someone that’s officially close to a candidate — that is essentially the same — within a certain number of days before an election,” Mr. Barr said in an April interview with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “But, you know, as I say, I don’t think any of the people whose actions are under review by Durham fall into that category.”

Maybe Barr was lying. Maybe what he said was true at the time and isn't true now.

Or maybe this will be his way of insisting that he's not a politcal operative -- See? We didn't go after anyone close to Joe Biden within sixty days of the election -- because he considers the Russia investigation a target-rich environment.

But as I've said before, most of America tuned out Russiagate even before the pandemic and the killing of George Floyd -- the narrative is too convoluted, the cast of characters too unwieldy. Angry Trump haters care, and Trump fans care -- they're angry at the investigators.

Most of all, Trump cares. The Russia investigation is a source of deep shame for him. It implies that his glorious victory in the 2016 election wasn't legitimate. He wants the narrative rewritten and the investigators punished.

So I think what we'll get just before the election is a politicized assault on prosecutors and investigators most of the public doesn't care about -- but Trump does. I think we'll get a report that will cheer millions of voters who were 100% certain to vote for Trump anyway, while it infuriates voters who were 100% certain not to vote for Trump, and bores every other rank-and-file voter, while thrilling Trump.

In other words, this will be the equivalent of running Trump ads on television in D.C. It's for Trump's consumption more than anything. It's for the audience of one.

****

On the other hand, it's possible that Barr was weighing his words very carefully when he said the Durham report wouldn't go after anyone "officially close" to Biden just before the election -- Biden's son, after all, isn't close to the candidate in an "official" capacity. The only way this October surprise will be effective is if Hunter Biden is targeted. But my bet is that the targets will be the investigators, because that's what Trump wants.

IT APPEARS THAT THERE ARE SHY BIDEN VOTERS

Last week, Time magazine's Charlotte Alter -- presumably while reporting her story about the epidemic of conspiracy thinking in the heartland -- tweeted this:

Hello from the suburbs of Milwaukee, where I have met zero (0) people so far who are not voting the way they voted in 2016.

— Charlotte Alter (@CharlotteAlter) September 6, 2020

I was disheartened, because I've been imagining that there really are voters in GOP strongholds who aren't with the Trump program anymore, although they might not be acknowledging it publicly:

My hunch is that there are some shy Biden voters, most of whose husbands have huge Trump flags on the lawn.

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) September 6, 2020

According to Hanna Trudo of the Daily Beast, those shy Biden voters exist.

When Kristen talked over the phone Tuesday afternoon from a suburban Dallas neighborhood, she was in a different wing of her home than her spouse, with the door fastened shut.

“Right now, my husband is downstairs in the study and I’ve locked myself upstairs in my daughter’s bedroom in the opposite corner of the house,” said the mother of four, who was granted partial anonymity in order to speak freely.

Kristen’s caution may seem unorthodox. But to her it just made sense. She was, after all, about to detail her reasons for abandoning Donald Trump, the man she enthusiastically helped secure a landslide victory in Texas nearly four years ago.

There were many reasons why she wanted him out of office, but she didn’t want to start another fight with her husband over it....

In the post-Labor Day stretch before the general election, The Daily Beast conducted hours of conversations over two days with eight white suburban women in five consequential swing states—Texas, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota—who expressed anti-Trump views on social media after years of remaining loyal to the GOP....

Most women who agreed to be interviewed did so by using only their first names. Several women expressed concerns about being potentially identified, which ranged from possible blowback by partners and other immediate family members to suspected targeting by neighbors, friends, or employers. One woman specifically coordinated a time to talk when her husband was not around.

We've already heard -- for instance, from the pollsters at USC Dornsife -- that rural women are defecting from Trump at a far greater rate than men, who don't seem to be defecting at all:

Among voters who live in rural areas — Trump’s stronghold — his vote among men has remained stable [since 2016] but has slipped by around 10 points among women.

So pollsters are finding signs of Trump abandonment, while a reporter finds Trump abandoners who won't talk about it publicly.

It will be fascinating if the polls are underestimating rather than overestimating Joe Biden's support.

TRUMP HAS A TRANSACTIONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH REALITY

Michelle Goldberg believes we can stop arguing now about whether President Trump was in denial about the coronavirus.

People who’ve spent time with him often conclude that truth has no meaning for him. [Bob] Woodward quoted Dan Coats, Trump’s former director of national intelligence, saying: “To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.” ...

Yet in recordings Woodward has released of Trump talking about the coronavirus ... the president doesn’t sound ignorant or deluded. Rather, he sounds uncommonly lucid. On Feb. 7, Trump described the virus as airborne and “more deadly than even your strenuous flus,” adding, “this is 5 percent versus 1 percent, or less than 1 percent.” ...

And yet he told the country just the opposite. “The percentage for the flu is under 1 percent,” Trump said on March 7. “But this could also be under 1 percent because many of the people that aren’t that sick don’t report.” Despite knowing that the virus was airborne, he mocked mask-wearing and held several large indoor rallies. He told Woodward in March that “plenty of young people” were getting sick, but over the summer would insist that 99 percent of cases were “totally harmless” and that children are “almost immune.”

We know now that this wasn’t just Trump being buffoonish and engaging in magical thinking. It was conscious deception.

Yastreblyansky isn't sure -- magical thinking or a con?

Sure he was misleading the public, but it was in a good cause. To reduce panic. Because he's a cheerleader. And because he "shows confidence".

... he's a confidence man, in the strictest sense of the term.

That is, he's a believer in the magical power, not merely forcefulness, of positive thinking, which can turn reality around, snake oil that cures cancer because you believe, real estate boosting that makes your apartment more valuable, faith in the North Korean dictator that makes the nuclear weapons skulk away into the shadows and makes the world a safer place. Or at least people will be confident that it's happening, because of your fast talk and easy charm, and how is that not good enough? "Leadership is all about confidence."

He knew how bad the pandemic was going to be, as he told Woodward, but he "didn't really think" it would be that bad. He didn't think the "entire world" would be infected. He expected his happy talk would change the odds, and if they didn't he'd keep saying they did anyway, because that's what cheerleaders do. He doesn't think there's anything wrong with that, and he never will.

It's often said that Trump's approach to everything is "transactional." I think Trump's approach to reality is transactional. The truth is the truth when it serves his purposes. In those moments, Trump believes in reality. But in other moments, not only does he walk out to a podium and contradict reality, he does so without necessarily believing that he's lying. As I've said in the past, Trump doesn't believe in truth. There are (as we see them) facts, lies, and true and false interpretations of reality, but to Trump they're all equally valid. He'll use any of them to shape reality, and he'll believe whatever he's saying at the time, even if it contradicts what he said six hours ago. In part this is because, as Yastreblyansky says, he believes in the Power of Positive Thinking and therefore thinks confidence can shape reality. In part it's because it's important to him to be his audience's daddy, someone who dominates us the way his father dominated him.

Trump told Woodward the truth in part because he wanted to impress the famous reporter -- I'm privy to some amazing inside information that you don't know about, because I'm president. (That's Trump: He's the most powerful man in the world, yet he feels the need to make a reporter believe he's cool.) In that moment, the truth seemed useful to him.

But in public, Trump goes with the magical thinking -- and he appears to believe the fairy tales he tells. We know he's doing something other than just lying because he acknowledges the truth and then insists that if we see things his way, there'll be a better truth.

In March, when the cruise ship Grand Princess, full of sick Americans, was docked off San Francisco, Trump told us he didn't want them to disembark "because I like the numbers being where they are." More recently, he's insisted that people aren't really sick unless they test positive, and so he wants to "slow the testing down." He's telling us that reality will be different if it's reported differently.

(This is because reality for Trump consists solely of what happens to him. The reality of other people, including the sick, just isn't real to Trump.)

As Fintan O'Toole noted in a New York Review of Books essay in April, Trump believes Positive Thinking can defeat contagion.

In How to Get Rich, Trump links his own germaphobia to the idea that some people are born losers. Winners are people who think positively—and positivity repels germs. “To me, germs are just another kind of negativity.” He then goes on to tell the story of an unnamed acquaintance who is driven home from the hospital in an ambulance after being treated for injuries sustained in a crash. The ambulance crashes and he has to be taken back to the hospital: “Maybe he’s just a really unlucky guy. Or maybe he’s a loser. I know that sounds harsh, but let’s face it—some people are losers.” The train of thought here is typically meandering, but the logic is clear enough. Losers are inevitably doomed by their own negativity, of which germs are a physical form. Infection happens to some people because they are natural losers.

So Trump told Woodward the truth because telling the truth was a way of saying to Woodward, "You may think you're an important guy, but I'm president and you're not." And he told the public lies because he doesn't think his lies are lies, because believing something makes it true.

HALF THE COUNTRY ASSUMES TRUMP WILL TRY TO WIN THE ELECTION BY CHEATING, AND WE JUST SHRUG

Monmouth University released a good poll for Joe Biden today:

Biden is currently supported by 51% of registered voters and Trump by 42%.... This is similar to the Democrat’s pre-convention lead of 51% to 41% last month. The poll also includes Monmouth’s first national likely voter model of the cycle, which has Biden ahead by 7 points at 51% to 44%....

Biden continues to have more firm support – 43% of all registered voters and 45% of likely voters say they are certain to vote for him – than Trump does. Certain support for the incumbent comes from 37% of registered voters and 41% of likely voters. About half of the electorate (50% registered and 49% likely) continues to say they are not at all likely to support the incumbent, while about 4 in 10 (40% registered and 42% likely) say the same for the challenger.

And yet:

... more registered voters think Trump (48%) will win the election rather than Biden (43%) despite Biden’s consistent lead in the polls. Among firm Trump supporters, 92% expect their candidate to win and just 2% feel he will lose. Among firm Biden supporters, 80% expect the Democrat to win and 12% think he will lose. Among all other voters, including soft supporters and undecided voters, 43% believe Trump will win and 39% believe Biden will win.

One reason:

The poll also finds that more voters think the Trump campaign will try to cheat if necessary to win in November – 38% say this is very likely and 14% somewhat likely – than say the same about the Biden campaign – 25% very likely and 14% somewhat likely.

We're told,

As may be expected, nearly all firm Biden supporters expect Trump to cheat (91%) and very few say the same about their own candidate (8%). The same dynamic is true for firm Trump supporters, but not quite as widespread when it comes to cheating by the challenger – 78% say it is likely the Biden campaign will cheat and 8% say the same for Trump. Among voters who are undecided or not firmly committed to either candidate, 53% feel it is likely the Trump campaign will cheat compared with 30% who say the Biden campaign will cheat.

"As may be expected"? Did we always expect candidates to cheat in presidential elections? Did a majority of us always expect the incumbent to cheat? I don't want to sound like a cranky old man, but isn't this a relatively recent development?

I suppose Republicans have believed that Democrats cheat in every election since the Bush-era GOP began talking about a nonexistent epidemic of voter fraud. But now a majority of the country thinks the incumbent will cheat and a plurality thinks he'll win -- many of them, presumably, as a result of the cheating -- even though half the country vows not to vote for him.

That's the state of democracy in America today.

TUCKER CARLSON IS A GOOD LITTLE STALINIST

Tucker Carlson has duped a number of non-conservatives in recent months, persuading them that he's a fiercely independent thinker who doesn't toe the GOP/Trump party line. And while he might deviate from Fox News orthodoxy every so often, when Bob Woodward exposed the president's cover-up of the coronavirus's dangers, Carlson knew just what to do: Protect Dear Leader!

We know that President Trump chose to speak to Woodward on the record and on tape. We know that he and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, thought speaking to Woodward was a swell idea. We know that Trump was so eager to talk to Woodward that, as Woodward has told The Washington Post's Margaret Sullivan, the president began calling Woodward up to talk. But Carlson told his viewers last night that the president cannot fail -- he can only be failed. His decision to talk to Wood ward was someone else's fault.

" ... What’s surprising is that Donald Trump participated in making the book. The president sat for repeated interviews with Bob Woodward. Why in the world would he do that?”

Tucker, of course, had a scapegoat ready. Though he didn’t name his source.

“Well tonight, from a source who knows the answer to that mystery: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. It was Lindsey Graham who helped convince Donald Trump to talk to Bob Woodward. Lindsey Graham brokered that meeting. Lindsey Graham even sat in on the first interview between Bob Woodward and the president. How’d that turn out?” Carlson complained.

And that’s when Tucker went directly at Graham, taking the blame entirely off Trump for willingly participating in 18 separate interviews with Woodward.

“Now remember, Lindsey Graham is supposed to be a Republican, so why would he do something like that? You’d have to ask him, but keep in mind that Lindsey Graham has opposed — passionately opposed — virtually every major policy initiative that Donald Trump articulated when he first ran from ending illegal immigration, to pulling back from pointless wars, to maintaining law and order at home. Lindsey Graham was against all of that more than many Democrats. So maybe you already know the answer.”

BREAKING! Tucker Carlson is throwing Lindsey Graham under the bus over the Trump Woodard interview. pic.twitter.com/OewJ48pDMR

— gregarious (@mistergeezy) September 10, 2020

Like the good little Stalinist he is, Carlson knows that the leader must be protected, and therefore Graham must be rendered an unperson.

This despite the fact that Graham is in a reelection fight that's proving to be tougher than expected, in a year when every contested race could decide control of the Senate. Carlson is the most popular host in the Fox prime time lineup. His words are taken very seriously by Republican voters. If he continues attacking Graham, it's likely that some South Carolina voters will withhold their vote for him. In other words, there's an outside chance that Carlson might get a Democrat elected to Lindsey Graham's seat.

But the most important goal is to enforce loyalty to the leader. So Graham must be purged.

THERE SHOULDN'T BE A DEBATE ABOUT WHO IS THE GREATEST MONSTER IN THE NEWS TODAY

I don't have to tell you what today's top story is.

President Donald Trump admitted he knew weeks before the first confirmed US coronavirus death that the virus was dangerous, airborne, highly contagious and "more deadly than even your strenuous flus," and that he repeatedly played it down publicly, according to legendary journalist Bob Woodward in his new book "Rage."

"This is deadly stuff," Trump told Woodward on February 7.

In a series of interviews with Woodward, Trump revealed that he had a surprising level of detail about the threat of the virus earlier than previously known. "Pretty amazing," Trump told Woodward, adding that the coronavirus was maybe five times "more deadly" than the flu.

Trump's admissions are in stark contrast to his frequent public comments at the time insisting that the virus was "going to disappear" and "all work out fine."

Trump knew, earlier than the rest of us, about the dangers of this virus. Trump knew and covered it up, because he believes in the Power of Positive Thinking. He thought he could wish the pandemic away and save his precious stock market gains.

If Trump had a conscience, he would have long since resigned in shame and disappeared from public life. As it is, this probably won't make more than a tiny dent in his polling. He'll still be a contender for the presidency in November. He won't alter anything he's doing about the pandemic, and his fans will be fine with that.

Trump is a monster. There's no question anymore who the worst president in American history has been. It would take a Hitler to top him.

Yet much of the commentary I've read in liberal online circles today has barely focused on Trump at all. Typical of what I've seen is this, from Charlie Pierce:

Both the President* and Bob Woodward Knew This for Months and Kept It From the Public

Woodward knew the truth behind the administration*’s deadly bungling—and worse—and he saved it for his book, which will be released to wild acclaim and huge profits after nearly 200,000 Americans have died.

... Pause for a moment and gaze in awe at what happens when two towering careerists collide.

Let us be clear. Both of these men knew before anyone else that the president* was lying in public about the most serious public health crisis in a century. Both of these men knew before anyone else how serious that threat was, and how deadly the disease could be. Both of these men knew before anyone else that a potential disaster was not only possible, but increasingly likely. BOTH OF THESE MEN KNEW! The president* knew and lied because he wanted to get re-elected. Woodward knew and kept it to himself because he had a book to sell. Who’s worse? Far too measured a choice for this reporter, but, as someone who in his own small way practices the same craft as Bob Woodward, I have to wonder how Woodward watched the president* lie for six months as the body count ratcheted skyward without his conscience tearing out his heart. I have to wonder if, in some small way, journalism as public service died as collateral damage in that struggle.

All of this is true -- but one of these men was the president of the United States. His desk, not Woodward's, was where the buck stopped. You can call Woodward an amoral monster, but Trump is -- by far -- the greater villain.

And yet the thoughts of Pierce and many of the people I follow on social media instantly went to Woodward. I get it. A timely report on this, with Trump on the record and on tape, might have saved lives -- though I think it's important to stress the might in that. Confronted with his own words, Trump who's been lying longer than most of us have been alive, would have claimed that he'd been told a number of contrary things. He'd have claimed that the danger was contained because he personally had the virus under control. He'd have lashed out at everyone who wanted to use his words to enforce stricter public health measures -- and if he couldn't change the narrative right away, he'd have done it a couple of weeks later, just the way he did shortly after endorsing a (porous) shutdown of the country, when he angrily demanded reopenings and claimed the spring weather would magically make the virus go away, even as thousands died daily in New York City and elsewhere.

He is the worst monster in this story.

The decisions made by Woodward, his newspaper, and his publisher may have been morally abhorrent, but those are secondary indictments that should be brought only after Trump and all his loyal aides, legislative brown-nosers, and media flacks have had their time in the dock.

We can't rerun this history. Woodward withheld this information. We have it now. Let's focus on ensuring that as many people as possible understand how monstrous Trump's judgments were, and how unfit he is to serve as president.

RACIST SERIAL NOMINATOR NOMINATES TRUMP FOR A NOBEL PRIZE

Fox News reports:

... President Trump has been nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.

The nomination submitted by Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a member of the Norwegian Parliament, lauded Trump for his efforts toward resolving protracted conflicts worldwide....

Tybring-Gjedde, in his nomination letter to the Nobel Committee, said the Trump administration has played a key role in the establishment of relations between Israel and the UAE....

Also cited in the letter was the president’s “key role in facilitating contact between conflicting parties and ... creating new dynamics in other protracted conflicts, such as the Kashmir border dispute between India and Pakistan, and the conflict between North and South Korea, as well as dealing with the nuclear capabilities of North Korea.”

Tybring-Gjedde, further, praised Trump for withdrawing a large number of troops from the Middle East....

This is not Trump’s first such nomination, as Tybring-Gjedde submitted one along with another Norwegian official in 2018 following the U.S. president’s Singapore summit with Kim Jong Un.

Tybring-Gedde went on to say, in "an exclusive interview" with Fox News, "The people who have received the Peace Prize in recent years have done much less than Donald Trump. For example, Barack Obama did nothing.”

Tybring-Gjedde is the former head of Norway's Progress Party -- the party of Anders Breivik, who in 2011 killed 77 people in a car bombing outside the prime minister's residence and a shooting attack at a camp for young members of the left-leaning Labor Party. The Breivik massacre did not inspire Tybring-Gjedde to reconsider his Islamophobia.

Tybring-Gjedde has been one of Norway's most outspoken critics of multiculturalism and Islamic fundamentalism.... he has refused to moderate his rhetoric following the twin terror attacks mounted by far-right Anders Breivik in 2011.

"What was wrong with Norwegian culture, since you are determined to replace it with something you call multiculturalism?" he wrote in Dreams from Disneyland, a strongly worded article in Aftenposten. "It is Labor who are forcing culturally Norwegian people to escape many of Oslo's boroughs, leaving enclaves where Muslim simplicity, dogmatism and intolerance make increasingly fertile ground [for terrorism]."

More:

Christian Tybring-Gjedde, who heads the party in Oslo, refused to renounce the phrase "creeping Islamization", which was used by party leader Siv Jensen in 2009.

"Creeping or not, it is Islamization that I totally renounce," Tybring-Gjedde said. "If it is the phrase 'creeping islamisation' that they do not like, we can call it 'adaptation to Islamic culture based on Sharia law.' Maybe those are words that will make it more acceptable for the Christian Democrats to talk to us."

He has compared the hijab to a Ku Klux Klan robe.

Tybring-Gjedde is also a climate change denier. In 2016, Per-Willy Amundsen was named Norway's minister of justice. Amundsen had previously "declared climate change a ruse to implement socialist policies and [said] it is 'madness to spend billions on a hypothesis that the warming is man-made.' He [had] also expressed rigidly anti-Islamic and anti-immigration views." When his appointment was criticized by Liberal Party leader Trine Skei Grande, Tybring-Gjedde responded,

“Grande’s statements violate our democratic tradition. She has become a climate inquisitor. Either you confess you to her believe in climate change or otherwise you are considered infidels.”

He has also said, "I don't believe in the climate hysteria."

Trump isn't Tybring-Gjedde's first Nobel nominee. In 2006, he nominated Muslim-bashing filmmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali for the Peace Prize.

I think it's safe to say that Trump won't win the prize, this year or ever.