WHO'S THE MEDIA'S DADDY?

I spotted this exchange on Twitter a little while ago:

They want him to win https://t.co/dhTnxhaDIB

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) June 20, 2020

Is that it? Do mainstream politcal journalists really want Trump to win?

Their coverage of Trump has been quite negative throughout his term; I wouldn't say that "they want him to win." But what he's doing right now resonates with them on an almost unconscious level. He seems like an assertive Man of Action, making things happen in Tulsa, generating great copy. He may not be the candidate they want to win, but he's the candidate they clearly find exciting to cover. He's being the take-charge Republican Daddy, even if he's a crazy Daddy.

Joe Biden isn't a Man of Action. He's now a soft-spoken, sentimental older man. He's male (unlike that icky Hillary and all those icky women who ran against him in the primaries), but he doesn't seem like a real man, if you know what I mean.

America's mainstream political journalists seem as if they're at least culturally left of center, but they've hated every Democratic presidential candidate of the past half century with the exception of the two young bros, Barack Obama and (at least briefly) 1992 Bill Clinton. If you're a Democrat and you're not a fortysomething New JFK, the press corps doesn't want anything to do with you.

The risk in this election is that the press will try to turn the race into a contest about vigor. Trump wins on those terms, but only because he's a manic rage monster who thinks his job, as candidate and president, is to create endless spectacles, many of them focusing on his own out-of-control emotions. He does it with just enough testosterone that the press feels a thrill up its leg every time he stirs the pot. And the voters who like the pot-stirring are Heartland white people, whose opinions the press always overvalues. (The press also has a crush on Trump's male voters -- they're considered real men, too.)

I hope the vote in November reflects the fact, obvious from the polls, that most of the public is sick of this. I worry, however, because the press clearly isn't.

WOULD EARLY AMERICANS HAVE BELIEVED THAT MASK REQUIREMENTS INFRINGE ON FUNDAMENTAL FREEDOMS?

In a few hours, President Trump will hold a large indoor rally in Oklahoma, a state where coronavirus cases are rising rapidly. Six members of the Trump campaign's advance team have already tested positive for the virus. An NBC story about the pre-rally crowd waiting to enter the arena is headlined "Outside Trump's Tulsa Rally Site, Few Face Masks and No Social Distancing." The crowd won't be required to wear masks during the event; undoubtedly, many of them believe that mask mandates are an unconstitutional infringement on basic American freedoms, and believe that the recent lockdowns were also violations of our rights as Americans.

Are they right? In the midst of an epidemic, would early Americans have rejected public health measures as infringements on their lberty?

No. I recently found a 1992 paper titled "Public Health Practices in the Colonial and Federalist Periods." The author is Wendy S. Parmet, who is a law professor at Northeastern University and the director of Northeastern's Program on Health Policy & Law; her books include Populations, Public Health, and the Law.

Here's what Parmet writes about public health in New England in the late 1700s.

In the early years of the Republic, long before the sanitary and progressive movements of the late 1800s, the General Court [the Massachusetts state legislature] ... had enacted legislation providing for a standing board of health for Boston and health powers for other local officials.... the statutory scheme interwove regulation and protection. A statute of 1797 authorized selectmen to

take care and make effectual provision in the best way they can, for the preservation of the inhabitants, by removing such sick or infected person or persons, and placing him or them in a separate house or houses, and by providing nurses, attendance, and other assistance and necessaries for them; which ... shall be at the charge of the parties themselves, their parents or masters (if able) or otherwise at the charge of the town or place whereto they belong: and in case such person or persons are not inhabitants of any town or place within the State, then at the charge of the Commonwealth [of Massachusetts].

Once Edward Jenner's new smallpox vaccine was introduced into the Commonwealth, the General Court enacted a law requiring every town lacking a board of health to appoint a vaccination commission, effectively providing at least partial public subsidy for the vaccination of all inhabitants.... thousands were vaccinated and the incidence of smallpox continued to decline. Moreover, the public bodies of Massachusetts had shown once again the necessity of public health regulation and the relationship between limits on freedom and provision of care.

And in New York:

... the post-Revolutionary era saw renewed civic attention to the problems of health and sanitation. In 1784, the colonial quarantine laws were officially reenacted by the state of New York.... Public money also helped support private institutions which provided vaccinations for the poor in the early years of the nineteenth century.

The yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s greatly influenced public health policies in the mid-Atlantic states and led to more structured and vigilant approaches. New York City responded to the crisis by isolating the ill and enacting sanitation orders. In 1796, New York State enacted comprehensive health legislation which created the New York City Health Office, granted the city authority to enact sanitary ordinances, and further developed the city's quarantine system. When another major epidemic struck in 1798, the city council appointed a special health committee with almost unlimited powers.... A report following the epidemic urged that the city be given even more authority to inspect buildings, enforce sanitation, and plan for a fresh water supply. The report stressed that the public good had to take precedence over any individual inconveniences that might occur. Following receipt of the report, the city council drafted and the state legislature enacted legislation authorizing the appointment of street commissioners to carry out all laws for "the cleansing of the City and promoting the Health thereof."

The management of public health in Philadelphia was less stringent (and the spread of smallpox and yellow fever was worse as a result).

This lack of organized structure, however, was not an expression of laissez faire ideology. Although the Mayor of Philadelphia eventually called upon a citizen's committee to help the city through the epidemic, the authorities did not assume the epidemic to be a matter of private responsibility.... The citizens committee took over only after civil authority had prove inadequate. Moreover, the committee, with the mayor at its helm, clearly acted as a public body wielding de facto public authority.

The inhabitants of federalist Philadelphia, like others facing epidemics during this period, never questioned whether government should exercise extraordinary authority in response to the epidemic. The debate was over the nature of the response. Positions depended upon views of the etiology of the disease as well as politics. Contagionists, who were most often Federalists, favored quarantine and the closing of the port.... Sanitarians, also known as localists, were most often Jeffersonian Republicans. Not surprisingly, they favored sanitary reform and keeping the port open.... But almost everyone agreed on the need for some public response. In fact, a year after the epidemic, a standing board of public health was finally established to prevent the type of crisis that had occurred.

These were contemporaries of the Founding Fathers. They didn't believe the fight against contagion was strictly a matter of individual choice. Trumpist conservatives are defining "freedom" in a way early Americans would not have recognized.

DEAR MEDIA: STOP PUBLISHING LIGHTLY EDITED VERSIONS OF BRAD PARSCALE'S PRESS RELEASES

I'd be a better person if I avoided horserace journalism altogether during election years, but I admit I was curious when I read this CNN headline:

How Trump plans to turn around his losing campaign

For three paragraphs, the story seemed unobjectionable.

Earlier this month, several top Trump campaign advisers gathered for a virtual strategy session to address a political reality they could no longer ignore: The President was in serious trouble.

For weeks, the collective trauma of the coronavirus, the resulting recession and the simmering unrest over racism and police brutality had eroded Trump's approval rating and given his presumptive Democratic opponent Joe Biden a sizeable early lead.

It was clear that a reset was in order.

Then I read the next sentence:

But as dire as things seemed, there was also a sense of cool confidence that pervaded the meeting, according to two people who were aware of the discussion.

This is the tone of every damn story about the Trump campaign -- You might think the president is struggling in the polls, but his campaign aides have assembled an unstoppable machine that will pulverize Joe Biden in the fall. Resistance is futile.

The CNN story continues:

The message that emerged from the meeting was simple -- Trump needed to get back on the road and show voters the country is ready to reopen. The campaign settled on pushing a clear message of America's comeback and distilled the idea into three words: "Renewing. Restoring. Rebuilding." That means leaning hard into Trump's economic track record, which polling shows remains his biggest strength among voters.

Yes, polls do show that Trump is seen as a good steward of the economy. These are the same polls, in many cases, that show Trump losing to Biden by margins that would add up to a landslide. Many voters think Trump did a good job with the economy in the run-up to 2020, but 2020 demanded much more from him and he's utterly failed.

The campaign will also take every opportunity to define Biden as weak, ineffectual and hiding in his basement.

Hey, why run an ad when CNN will broadcast your talking points for free?

And also your unverifiable boasting:

On Saturday that new messaging will get a full roll out in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the President will hold his first rally in more than three months. The campaign has billed the event as a major extravaganza. Local officials and campaign aides claim more than 1 million people requested tickets and that 100,000 people are expected to show up to Tulsa's BOK Arena, which has a capacity for just 20,000.

Daily Kos's Bethesda 1971 has asked a very good question about this claim: If there are a million ticket requests, why didn't the campaign seek to hold the event in an outdoor arena such as Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, which seats 80,000? An outdoor rally would be much safer. The obvious answer: The Trumpers aren't telling the truth about ticket requests. They don't want Trump appearing in a half-empty stadium.

More from the CNN story:

For the true believers among Trump's team of advisers, Tulsa is seen as a cure-all for the campaign's current woes, a chance for the President to model a return to normalcy and reposition himself as the once and future savior of the US economy.

"The rally is a great signal to the rest of the country that it's time to get things moving again," said Tim Murtaugh, Trump's campaign communications director.

Wait -- we're getting back to normal because Trump is out and about? Trump, who never encounters anyone these days who hasn't been tested for the coronavirus? That's supposed to make us feel that everything's fine and happy days are here again?

To give the CNN team its due, the story takes a skeptical turn here. Four writers share the byline, and this must be the part written by whoever was least susceptible to the campaign's hype:

But to many Republicans, the rally is a sign of desperation and merely provides a temporary distraction from a litany of bad news. The intense focus the campaign has put on holding a rally in a deep red state illustrates what some Republicans outside the campaign worry is a failure to acknowledge the real trouble the President is in.

The event undoubtedly marks a pivotal moment for Trump's reelection effort. In a matter of months, what looked to be a strong case for a second term has evaporated. The coronavirus has turned his biggest strength -- a roaring economy -- into the worst recession in more than a generation.

Though the political landscape has changed dramatically, many Republicans worry the campaign has not changed along with it. Some strategists associated with the campaign tell CNN they are frustrated that the new focus on "renewal" and "rebuilding" is not more clear, given the fact that the Trump team has had months to get used to the new political environment....

But then we're assured that voters will come away from the rally thinking Trump is back, baby! because ... um, because he'll feel better.

But aides say Tulsa is about something far more important: giving Trump the adulation he craves and reenergizing him after weeks spent wallowing in sagging poll numbers and critical media coverage.

"I guarantee you after Saturday, if everything goes well, he's going to be in a much better mood," a Trump political adviser said. "He believes that he needs to be out there fighting and he feeds off the energy of the crowds."

What's important in 2020? A raging pandemic? The worst unemployment numbers since the Great Depression? Murders by racist cops? Nahhh. What really matters at this pivotal moment in American history is how Trump is feeling.

And now we get the Brad Parscale hype.

Advisers tell CNN that the Tulsa rally is the first chance to put its vaunted campaign operation to the test. With an impressive war chest, and years' of data collected from the President's most loyal supporters attending his rallies, Trump's campaign manager Brad Parscale and his team are preparing to deploy those tools to get every last Trump voter to the polls.

According to one Trump aide, Parscale has told people around him that the campaign has already identified two-thirds of the voters they need to win.

Omigod! We might as well not even hold the election again -- we can't possibly compete with Parscale and his Database of Death.

A bit more skepticism slips into the CNN story and then there's this deathless sentence:

Still, while the Trump campaign may be floundering, it's far from flailing.

Sir, you can describe us "floundering" if you choose, but if you say we're "flailing," I'll have to ask you to step outside!

This leads to:

An incumbent president carries myriad advantages, and Trump has proven particularly resilient amidst an endless stream of controversy and crisis.

"Traditional rules of politics have never applied to Donald Trump. We'll see if they do this time," said a senior Iowa Republican official who speaks frequently to the President's team. "Counting him out would be malpractice for Democrats."

Well, of course we shouldn't count him out. But he's floundering and flailing. And yet we'll be told that if Trump pleases a crowd of his biggest fans in Tulsa, that means he's back and Democrats should be running scared. We'll be told, as we are here, that no rules apply to Trump. We'll be told that good polls mean Trump will win and bad polls mean Trump will win. (After all, his polls were bad in 2016.)

And we'll be told that the campaign's latest attempt to change the narrative is the issue every American is talking about:

Part of [the] effort to shift the focus includes a new push by the Trump campaign for more presidential debates. Former New York City mayor and Trump confidant Rudy Giuliani has been empowered by the campaign to make a pitch to the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates.

Really? It's mid-June and Trump thinks we care about debates now?

But the media will probably parrot the Trump narrative: Biden's hiding in his basement! He's afraid to be seen in public because he's senile! Already, in certain corners of the media, it's hard to tell the reporters' message from the Trump campaign's.

Joe Biden hasn't done a press conference for more than two months, I think, though he's done quite a few interviews.

— Ben Smith (@benyt) June 17, 2020

Question of the Day for Joe Biden

Why haven’t you held a press conference in 77 days?

— Trump War Room - Text TRUMP to 88022 & get the APP (@TrumpWarRoom) June 18, 2020

I'm hoping the public won't fall for this. At this moment, no one apart from the Trump superfans seems to be buying the notion that Trump is leading the Great American Comeback. But it would be nice if the press wouldn't convert Trump hype into news stories.

MORAL HAZARD IS A HELL OF A DRUG

I understand why plutocrats want the economy reopened even as the coronavirus rages: They hope people will earn and spend money on the products and services they sell, and if large numbers of those people get sick and die, well, that's just a cost of doing business. The plutocrats assume that their own pandemic experience will be safety and security -- they have nice houses on nice grounds where they can hunker down; they never have to work on contaminated shop floors or in virus-filled warehouses. There's a crisis in America, but they're largely exempt from it. They've set up their lives so they won't get sick; we have to rearrange our lives so they'll continue to make money.

And we're doing that. In America, we always make policy decisions to ensure that the rich don't suffer bad consequences.

Rich people are accustomed to having life organized to guarantee that they never suffer. Donald Trump is one of those rich people -- he was nearly a billion dollars in debt once, but he never stopped living a gold-plated life, and now he continues to live that life and he's president. The rich really get used to the idea that nothing terrible can ever happen to them. Our system all but guarantees that.

But this perspective is challenged by a deadly virus. Donald Trump may think he's bulletproof, and he's probably right: He'll never miss a meal, he'll never be homeless, he probably won't spend a day in prison despite the fact that he's committed many crimes. He probably won't contract the coronavirus because literally every person who comes in close contact with him is tested daily.

But, narcissist that he is, he acts as if his voters are protected by a similar shield. That's why he's holding an indoor rally this weekend, to be followed, undoubtedly, by dozens more. Trump is so used to thinking he's at zero risk, and he's so used to hanging out with people in similar circumstances, that he can't imagine the risks for rally attendees.

There's a lot of this going around. Here's an example in Nebraska:

$125 billion dollars of COVID-19 relief funds are in the states control, but Governor Pete Ricketts says if counties don't follow certain requirements they won't see any of that money....

If a county requires visitors to wear a mask into county buildings, the governor says they won't be eligible for the funds.

"If they don't want to follow the guidelines they won't be eligible for the CARES Act money,” said Governor Pete Ricketts, “But that's certainly their prerogative to do that."

Ricketts is a son of the founder of TD Ameritrade; Forbes reported a few years back that the Ricketts family was worth $4.5 billion, and the governor himself says his net worth is $50 million. Why should he worry about risk to people who have to enter government buildings in Tulsa or Omaha?

Fox News, overseen by Rupert Murdoch (the billionaire son of a media mogul) and one of his superprivileged children, is back to telling its viewers that the pandemic is a hoax.

Fox prime-time host and sometime presidential coronavirus adviser Laura Ingraham says that Democratic leaders facing increasing COVID counts would only reinstitute stricter social distancing measures in order to torpedo the economy and hurt Trump’s reelection chances, and the federal government should punish any state that does so.

“The left is really panicked about the economy coming back,” she tweeted on Wednesday. “Ruins their narrative. Expect more calls to shutdown states again citing supposed COVID concerns. No tax dollars to states that refuse to open.”

On her Fox program on Monday, Ingraham suggested that the “hyperventilation over a second wave of COVID cases” is simply an effort by journalists and the left to hamper the president’s campaigning. She also included Fauci in that conspiracy theory.

“The medical deep state strikes again,” Ingraham said of his statement over the weekend that normality won’t return this fall or winter....

Her colleague Tucker Carlson last week attacked journalists who “were acting as press agents for power-drunk Democratic politicians” by “lying to us about the coronavirus and our response to it,” claiming that “we can say conclusively the lockdowns were not necessary.”

In the George W. Bush years, I concluded that the president failed spectacularly because, as a rich man's son, he'd never really learned that failure can have serious consequences -- he'd been a failure for the first forty years of his life, and how much harm did it really cause him?

The rich don't understand risk. They don't grasp the risk to American society from increasing inequality or climate change or the know-nothing populism of Fox News and Donald Trump. They just assume that they'll be exempt from whatever harm there is. With the virus, they're coming to the same conclusion.

THE MOST NARCISSISTIC HUMAN BEING WHO EVER LIVED IS NARCISSISTIC ABOUT DEADLY DISEASES, TOO

The portion of President Trump's interview with Michael Bender of The Wall Street Journal that's getting the most attention is this moment of extreme narcissism.

On race issues, Mr. Trump said a black Secret Service agent told him the meaning of Juneteenth as the president was facing criticism for initially planning to hold his first campaign rally in three months on the day....

Holding a rally on that day, particularly as racial protests continued throughout the country, was insensitive, African-American leaders told Mr. Trump. He eventually pushed the rally back a day to June 20.

“I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous,” Mr. Trump said, referring to news coverage of the rally date. “It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it.”

Many people had heard about it, of course, but the president hadn't, nor had any of his usual sounding boards ("Mr. Trump said he polled many people around him, none of whom had heard of Juneteenth"). Therefore, Juneteenth practically didn't exist until he publicized it!

But Trump's take on the coronavirus is equally narcissistic.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Bender on Wednesday, President Trump caught himself.

He was boasting about the recent positive uptick in the economy, as measured by, among other things, improvements in the stock market.

“Nasdaq hit 10,000 for the first time, an all-time record,” Trump said. “Nasdaq, that was three, four days ago. In the middle of the pandemic, not in the middle toward the end of the pandemic.”

That’s where Trump would like to think the country is: at the tail end of the pandemic....

Later in the interview with the Journal, he again hinted that maybe the country had emerged from the woods.

“If I didn’t act, we would have had 3 million deaths,” Trump claimed. “And instead we’re at 110,000. And we could be heading to a number that’s, you know, higher than 150,000 to 2,000, it could be ending all now depending on how it goes.”

Trump said that we're "toward the end of the pandemic" and that "it could be ending all now depending on how it goes." In another interview yesterday, he said, "if you look, the numbers are very minuscule compared to what it was. It's dying out." Meanwhile California, Arizona, Florida, and Texas experienced record-high positive test results again today. This is now a daily occurrence in these states. Cases have been spiking recently in nearly half the states in the U.S.

But Trump says the pandemic is ending because it's ending for him. Under orders from the plutocracy, he's given up on trying to control the spread of the virus. And, personally, he's safe -- White House employees who might come in contact with him are tested every day, as are any guests he encounters.

I know Trump is doing what he usually does: selling an upbeat line of bullshit because that's his go-to move whenever he's at risk of failure. But he's also declaring the virus a thing of the past because, as far as he's concerned, he doesn't personally have to worry about it. He'll enjoy a dose of his favorite drug this weekend, a big MAGA rally; he had to temporarily quit MAGA rallies cold turkey because of the virus, but that's over now. So the virus is over, too.

ADVISERS: IF TRUMP LOSES, IT'S BECAUSE HE WANTS TO LOSE

According to Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni of The New York Times, advisers to President Trump have looked at his inflammatory response to the George Floyd protests and drawn what they believe is the obvious conclusion. Is it that Trump is an angry racist who's completely unqualified to be president of the United States during multiple national emergencies? No, it's this:

They say his repeated acts of political self-sabotage — a widely denounced photo-op at a church for which peaceful protesters were forcibly removed, a threat to use the American military to quell protests — have significantly damaged his re-election prospects, and yet he appears mostly unable, or unwilling, to curtail them.

Mr. Trump doesn’t want to be seen as a “loser,” a label he detests, in the campaign against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. And some advisers believe Mr. Trump’s taste for battle will return in the fall, when the general election fight is more engaged.

But for now, they said, the president is acting trapped and defensive, and his self-destructive behavior has been so out of step for an incumbent in an election year that many advisers wonder if he is truly interested in serving a second term.

Yeah, that's it: The Bible-brandishing photo op wasn't an attempt by Trump to try to curry favor with a major segment of his voter base a few months before the election, and the calls for brute force and a "law and order" approach to the protests haven't been an effort to appeal to the vast majority of his base. Trump just isn't trying very hard to win. That's the explanation!

I suspect that Haberman and Karni were fed this line by members of the campaign, who suspect they're about to lose badly and want it known that it wasn't their fault.

I also suspect that this narrative will fit in nicely with the mainstream media's inevitable downplaying of Joe Biden's victory, assuing Biden wins. We'll be told Biden didn't deserve much credit. We'll be told that the country wasn't rejecting decades of Republican meanness and cruelty embodied in one man -- nahhh, Trump lost because he didn't feel like winning.

Representative Peter King, a New York Republican, said the serious challenges facing the country had thrust Mr. Trump into uncharted territory. “This is not something he’s used to,” Mr. King said in an interview....

“He is the modern L.B.J., where everything has gone wrong and none of his skill sets are effective at what’s gone wrong,” said Anthony Scaramucci, who served as the White House communications director....

Nothing Mr. Trump has tried so far, Mr. Scaramucci said, has changed the narrative about his presidency, or shoved broader concerns about racism and the spread of the virus aside in news coverage.

“That’s why I know he doesn’t like the job,” Mr. Scaramucci said.

... the president has made public statements suggesting his mind is on life outside the White House.

Speaking at a recent Rose Garden event about an improvement in hiring, Mr. Trump mentioned a boom in the construction of recreational vehicles, then paused before sounding a wistful note, saying: “I may have to buy one of those things, drive around town. Maybe I’ll drive back to New York with our first lady in a trailer.”

It was only in April that the seriousness of the twin health and economic crises caused by the coronavirus fully set in with Mr. Trump, several current and former aides said, adding that they were no longer confident he was enthused about presiding over the difficult task of pulling the country out of a recession, with few moments of glory.

Yes, he's unconsciously trying to lose -- so if Biden wins, even in a landslide, don't think for a minute that it means he has a mandate for change.

MY UNPOPULAR OPINION: IT'S FINE THAT JOHN BOLTON SAVED HIS REVELATIONS FOR HIS BOOK

I know what I'm supposed to think about John Bolton's book:

John Bolton gets his revenge six months after Democrats needed him for impeachment https://t.co/iqh9wR9FKm

— Axios (@axios) June 17, 2020

The argument, I guess, is that these revelations could have turned the tide:

Mr. Bolton describes several episodes where the president expressed willingness to halt criminal investigations “to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked,” citing cases involving major firms in China and Turkey. “The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t accept,” Mr. Bolton writes, adding that he reported his concerns to Attorney General William P. Barr.

Mr. Bolton also adds a striking new allegation by saying that Mr. Trump overtly linked trade negotiations to his own political fortunes by asking President Xi Jinping of China to buy a lot of American agricultural products to help him win farm states in this year’s election. Mr. Trump, he writes, was “pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win. He stressed the importance of farmers, and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”

... Mr. Bolton ... had nothing but scorn for the House Democrats who impeached Mr. Trump, saying they committed “impeachment malpractice” by limiting their inquiry to the Ukraine matter and moving too quickly for their own political reasons. Instead, he said they should have also looked at how Mr. Trump was willing to intervene in investigations into companies like Turkey’s Halkbank to curry favor with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey or China’s ZTE to favor Mr. Xi.

But in the impeachment trial we actually had, Democrats proved beyond any doubt that Trump used American foreign policy to advance his own electoral interests in the case of Ukraine -- and all but one Republican in the Senate voted to acquit. If Bolton had testified, maybe Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski would have wrung their hands a bit more, but I'm persuaded that the outcome of the trial would have been exactly the same. The fix was in.

And while polls showed that a plurality of Americans consistently supported impeaching Trump, please note that his poll numbers went up over the course of the impeachment and trial. On October 27, 2019, four days before the House adopted a resolution beginning the public impeachment process, Trump hit a polling trough -- according to the Real Clear Politics average, he registered 41.6% approval and 55% disapproval -- but after that his numbers steadily rose, so that by February 27, 2020, three weeks and a day after his Senate acquittal, he was at 46.1% approval and 50.7% disapproval, with overwhelming support from his party's base.

Nothing Bolton might have said would have changed that. Quite a few Republicans in both the House and Senate were at risk of being defeated in primaries if they turned against a president widely revered by their voters, and almost universally seen as the victim of a witch hunt conducted by people who, these voters believed, should have been on trial themselves. The scales weren't going to fall from Republicans' eyes just because Bolton was a right-wing hero in the distant past.

I don't believe that Bolton's revelations would even have had much impact on his original publication schedule. In mid-March, when he first planned to publish the book, it would have had a brief moment of notoriety and disappeared in a wave of coronavrus news -- and it would have been followed by the couple of weeks when Trump seemed to be taking the pandemic seriously, which was the time when his numbers were best (47.3% approval, 49.3% disapproval on March 27, according to RCP).

Right now might be an ideal time for the book, a moment when some voters who were once favorably disposed toward Trump have finally begun to see him as a failure. Trump's scapegoating of China for the coronavirus and attempts to brand Joe Biden as a pushover for the Chinese are the perfect setup for some of Bolton's revelations.

Also, this is gonna show up in some ads: pic.twitter.com/ttmLeTZjsl

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) June 17, 2020

This is a fine way for John Bolton to go public. The only way his timing might have been better is if he'd published the book closer to Election Day.

"NO MASK DAY" DOESN'T SEEM LIKE A BIG DEAL, SO FAR

I spotted this paragraph in an NBC News story about the mask culture wars:

On social media, dueling hashtags specifically tied to masks have emerged: #MaskItorCasket for those who are pro-masks, and #NoMaskDay for those who want to do without — and plan to do just that in cities nationwide this Saturday.

Saturday is going to be a nationwide No Mask Day? Really?

Well, yes and no. There's a campaign to make No Mask Day happen nationwide, but it seems to be the work of a small, Connecticut-based right-wing group called CT Liberty Rally, which has been denouncing the state's lockdown (and Democratic governor) for a while now.



The founder of CT Liberty Rally, identified on the group's Facebook page as Jonathan Milon Johnson, is a registered libertarian from New Britain, Connecticut. CT Liberty Rally has been part of the Reopen movement, but it doesn't seem to be taking in wingnut welfare money -- Johnson posted a GoFundMe for the group last month and raised only $25 of his $1000 goal.

The group does a fair amount of whining online:



When the group isn't whining, it's holding protests that try to force shop owners to suspend their safety protocols.



The good news is that this isn't a mass movement yet. But it's representative of a widespread attitude in America, and it largely explains this chart.

U.S. vs. E.U. on confirmed COVID-19 cases pic.twitter.com/ZL4DU10p8q

— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) June 17, 2020

It's not just Trump. It's the plutocrats and GOP officials who've pushed the idea of reopening without adequate testing and tracing or reductions in transmission, and it's ordinary citizens who consider it a violation of the Constitution to enact public health measures, or do anything that they consider an inconvenience.

I'll leave you with CT Liberty Rally's Facebook banner:



I'm not the first one to say this, but I wonder if they regard "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service" signs to be unconstitutional tyranny.

TEXAS GOVERNOR: AS LONG AS WE HAVE ENOUGH HOSPITAL BEDS, WE DON'T CARE HOW MANY PEOPLE GET INFECTED

Texas is one of the many states where the spread of the coronavirus is getting worse, but the governor is only mildly concerned:

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) on Tuesday urged people to stay home as the state registered the highest number of new hospitalizations due to the coronavirus, marking the fifth consecutive day of rising hospitalizations.

Abbott reported that 2,622 people tested positive on Tuesday for the coronavirus, a new daily record for the Lone Star State. The prior record had been set on June 10, when 2,504 tested positive.

The state’s Health and Human Services Department also reported that 2,518 lab-confirmed COVID-19 patients are currently in Texas hospitals, up from 2,326 on Monday. Hospitalizations have been on a steady upward trend since May 25, when about 1,500 were hospitalized.

“If you do not need to go out, the best advice is still to stay at home,” Abbott said at a press conference in Austin.

But while Abbott says you shouldn't go out unless it's necessary, his reopening policy is saying, "Go out! Go out!"

Abbott announced on June 3 that the state would enter its third phase of reopening, allowing restaurants to use 75 percent of their capacity and allowing most businesses to operate at 50 percent capacity or more.

In some communities, there's concern that the reopening needs to be slowed down.

Local officials in Travis County, which includes the state capital of Austin, have extended stay-at-home orders in recent days in response to the rising number of COVID-19 hospitalizations. The “Stay Home, Work Safe” order that was set to expire on June 15 has been extended to Aug. 15.

But there are limits to what local governments can do.

Reopened businesses [in Austin and Travis County] “are strongly encouraged” to operate their indoor spaces at 25% capacity or less and to provide services that promote physical distancing, like curbside pickup, according to the Austin order. But these orders can’t be enforced because Gov. Greg Abbott has allowed Texas restaurants to operate at 75% capacity and other businesses to operate at 50% capacity.

... And as he announced ... reopening plans, he issued a new order that overruled any local governments’ mandates that certain businesses stay closed or that people not wearing masks in public could be fined or penalized.

Apparently, the governor doesn't care how many people get sick in his state, at least as long as there are enough hospital beds to accommodate the critically ill and dying.

Abbott on Tuesday stressed that the Texas medical system has more than enough capacity to deal with the surge in hospitalizations.

Texas has reported 14,993 available hospital beds, a 78 percent increase since mid-March.

Abbott said there is only one county in the state where 10 percent of hospital beds are taken up by COVID-19 patients. The average statewide is 6.3 percent, Abbott said....

“The increased occupancy of hospital beds, it does raise concerns, but as shown today, there is no reason right now to be alarmed,” Abbott added. “Even though there are more people hospitalized, we still remain at the lowest threat level [for occupancy].”

So who cares if infections and hospitalizations are increasing unchecked?

I know that the primary purpose of all the public health measures in this pandemic has been to prevent the healthcare system from being dangerously overloaded. But should we just shrug off the spread of the virus if the hospital bed occupancy level is tolerable?

Apparently, Texas believes we should -- the economy is much more important than citizens' health. You're admonished to take care of yourself, even as you're told that the state is open for bidness at near capacity.

And so the virus will spread nearly unchecked through much of Texas and the rest of red America. We'll see how bad that gets.

TRUMP ISN'T TRYING VERY HARD TO BLOCK JOHN BOLTON'S BOOK (updated)

Yesterday, ABC News reported:

Just a week before the much-awaited book by President Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton is set to go on sale, the Trump administration is expected to file a lawsuit in federal court seeking an injunction to block the book from being released in its current form, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

The lawsuit is expected to be filed in the coming days and could come as soon as today, sources said....

CNN's Brian Stelter was a tad skeptical about this lawsuit yesterday.

Trump was noncommittal when asked about the possibility of a lawsuit — he said "they're in court, or they'll soon be in court" over the book. This is an "I'll believe it when I see it" situation, given Team Trump's history of threatening to sue but not following through.

In fact, no lawsuit has been filed.

Simon & Schuster plans to publish the book next week. Trump is not just claiming that a lawsuit might be forthcoming -- he's warning of criminal prosecution.

"If he wrote a book and if the book gets out, he's broken the law and I would think you would have criminal problems. I hope so," Trump said....

Attorney General Bill Barr claimed that Bolton did not complete the process of pre-publication review with the White House to ensure classified information is not published.

But Bolton's lawyer contests that, writing in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week that Bolton underwent a four-month review process and that the White House attempted to block publication at the last minute by claiming the book still contained classified information.

CNN's Stelter believes that attempting to block publication of the book, rather than seeking to punish Bolton after it's published, is the kind of thing that's just not done in America.

From a First Amendment perspective, it'll be a much bigger problem if the book doesn't get out. American politicians don't get to veto unflattering tomes — everyone knows that.

But do you think Trump cares? His administration says the book includes classified information. His base -- the only people whose opinions he cares about -- would applaud prior restraint of Bolton's book.

But he's not suing yet -- and what's more telling is that he didn't sue before copies became available to some reporters.

Copies of "The Room Where It Happened" have already been printed and shipped to distribution sites. Reporters at ABC News have already read the book, since Martha Raddatz sat down with Bolton on Monday for an interview that will air Sunday night in a prime time special. Other reporters are likely to obtain the book in the next few days. So if the Trump admin or the Trump campaign tries to sue to block the release of the book, the suit would be rendered moot...

Trump's threats are for show -- perhaps because he didn't know enough to sue before copies of the finished book left the warehouse and began going out to booksellers, reviewers, and reporters. If he'd been smarter, he would have sued a lot earlier. If he were a competent totalitarian, he would have been a lot more intimidating toward Bolton, Simon & Schuster, and S&S's parent company, ViacomCBS.

Barr knows that even Republican judges aren't likely to accept the administration's evidence of misuse of classified material (probably because there is no misuse). But Trump also seems more interested in stamping his foot and seeming like a tough guy than in actually doing something heavy-handed. He's just letting the book come out and hoping, as he has many timex throughout his life, that if he yells "I'LL SUE!" loudly enough he'll intimidate his antagonist.

He clearly won't. The book will arrive next week. The international totalitarians Trump admires so much would never allow something like this to happen.

****

UPDATE: Okay, here's the suit.

The U.S. on Tuesday filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit against former national security adviser John Bolton, seeking to delay the publication of his book, which the suit alleges contains classified information that could compromise national security.

The lawsuit, filed by the U.S. attorney in Washington, accused Mr. Bolton of breaching the contract he signed as a condition of his employment and to access classified information.

A few hours ago, Charlie Savage of The New York Times tweeted:

I don't understand how a lawsuit seeking to block Bolton's book makes sense, legally or practically. I could see one that attempts to seize Bolton's proceeds for not completing the pre-pub review process he agreed to when getting a clearance, but that wouldn't stop publication.

— Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) June 16, 2020

It makes Trump happy, though. It feels to Trump as if the government is making the book go away on Trump's orders -- even though that won't actually happen. Simon & Schuster (which is not named in the lawsuit) will still publish the book. Oh well -- anything to make the boss happy.

THE MASKS AT TRUMP'S TULSA RALLY ARE NOT MEANT TO BE WORN

Axios reports:

President Trump's campaign will require temperature checks and will distribute face masks and hand sanitizer to each person attending his rally in Tulsa on Saturday, a spokesperson said Monday.

Why it matters: The decision to move ahead with the rally as the number of coronavirus infections continues to be on the rise in many states has prompted scrutiny from public health experts and local officials in Tulsa. It will be the first rally by any presidential candidate since the pandemic was declared in March.

Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel said Monday that masks would be optional, telling Fox News: "The American people can make decisions for themselves, we're all pretty informed about Covid at this point."

Trump tweeted earlier Monday: "The Far Left Fake News Media, which had no Covid problem with the Rioters & Looters destroying Democrat run cities, is trying to Covid Shame us on our big Rallies. Won’t work!"

You've heard airport anti-terrorism measures described as "security theater"? Well, this is public health theater. Temperature checks seemed like a sensible anti-COVID measure a couple of months ago, but we've known for a while that a significant percentage of infected people don't develop a fever.

The hand sanitizer is a nice freebie, but the masks are being offered largely as a thumb in the eye of the president's enemies: Team Trump knows the audience won't wear them, and will make a great show of mocking the idea of wearing them, and that will be a great moment in lib ownage.

Ronna Romney McDaniel makes the point clear when she says, "The American people can make decisions for themselves, we're all pretty informed about Covid at this point." In other words: You know this all nonsense, right? We'll give you the silly masks just to shut the media up, but we all know that only wussy Democrats actually wear them.

It's going to be like this until there's a vaccine -- which many of the Trumpers won't want. I have no idea what the health toll of all this rejection of science will be, but it won't be pretty.

IF THERE ARE ATTEMPTS TO OVERTURN A BIDEN VICTORY, THEY MIGHT NOT BE FROM THE TOP DOWN

We worry that President Trump won't leave office if he's defeated in November, but he's telling us he'll accept the outcome.

U.S. President Donald Trump said he will go on to other things if he loses the Nov. 3 election, after Democratic opponent Joe Biden said the Republican might cheat and refuse to leave the White House.

“Certainly if I don’t win, I don’t win. I mean, you know, go on and do other things,” Trump told Fox News Channel in a television interview broadcast on Friday.

A forthcoming book about Melania Trump says that her husband was prepared to flee the country if he lost in 2016, not dispute the election results.

The election night win came as a surprise even to Trump, according to many on his campaign, and little preparation had been done for what came next. Trump had even talked about going to one of his golf courses in Scotland immediately after the election so he didn’t have to watch Hillary Clinton bask in her success. One campaign aide recalled that candidate Trump had “told the pilot [of his private jet], ‘Fuel up the plane.’”

Can I imagine Trump disputing the results? Sure. Can I imagine him walking away in disgust and building a new life based on tweeting and golf (in other word, pretty much his current life, but without the nuclear launch codes)? Absolutely.

But the election results might still be disputed -- by rank-and-file voters, the right-wing media, and state and local GOP officials.

If a new Politico story is accurate, the latter group is living in a world of epistemic closure -- they don't believe the polls, they don't believe a Biden victory is possible, and, implicitly, they won't believe the result in November even if Joe Biden wins decisively. They might just be repeating the company line to a reporter, but it sounds to me as if they genuinely believe what they're saying.

“The more bad things happen in the country, it just solidifies support for Trump,” said Phillip Stephens, GOP chairman in Robeson County, N.C., one of several rural counties in that swing state that shifted from supporting Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. “We’re calling him ‘Teflon Trump.’ Nothing’s going to stick, because if anything, it’s getting more exciting than it was in 2016.”

This year, Stephens said, “We’re thinking landslide.”

... from the Eastern seaboard to the West Coast and the battlegrounds in between, there is an overriding belief that, just as Trump defied political gravity four years ago, there’s no reason he won’t do it again.

... Lawrence Tabas, the chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, went so far as to predict that Trump would not only carry his state, but beat Biden by more than 100,000 votes — more than twice the margin he mustered in 2016.

“Contrary to what may be portrayed in the media, there’s still a high level of support out there,” said Kyle Hupfer, chairman of the Indiana Republican Party. He described himself as “way more” optimistic than he was at this point in 2016.

... in the states, the Republican Party's rank-and-file are largely unconvinced that the president is precariously positioned in his reelection bid.

“The narrative from the Beltway is not accurate,” said Joe Bush, chairman of the Republican Party in Muskegon County, Mich., which Trump lost narrowly in 2016. “Here in the heartland, everybody is still very confident, more than ever.”

... At the center of the disconnect between Trump loyalists’ assessment of the state of the race and the one based on public opinion polls is a distrust of polling itself. Republicans see an industry that maliciously oversamples Democrats or under-samples the white, non-college educated voters who are most likely to support Trump. They say it is hard to know who likely voters are this far from the election. And like many Democrats, they suspect Trump supporters disproportionately hang up on pollsters, under-counting his level of support.

Ted Lovdahl, chairman of the Republican Party in Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District, said he has friends who will tell pollsters “just exactly the opposite of what they feel.”

When he asked one of them why, his friend told him, “I don’t like some of their questions. It’s none of their business what I do.”

Joe Biden won't really win by that 14-point margin seen in a recent CNN poll. He might not win at all. But there's a decent chance he could win by 5 to 7 points, with a decisive Electoral College margin. Will these local Republican leaders believe the results? Will GOP voters? Will Fox News and Republican elected officials give up and accept the results, or will they claim that five or six million votes were cast fraudulently?

And what if it's closer, as most of the presidential elections in the twenty-first century have been? I think Greg Palast can be overwrought at times, but he worries about this scenario, and it seems to me that it could happen:

Constitutional expert Thom Hartmann and I are concerned the GOP-controlled Legislatures could claim that mail-in ballots are fraudulent and thereby refuse to certify a Democratic win in states such as Wisconsin and Georgia. By refusing to send electors to the Electoral College and thereby denying any candidate 270 votes in the Electoral College, under Article XII of the Constitution, the election shifts to the House of Representatives whose members will cast one vote per state — Wyoming gets the same vote as California. Trump would then be “reelected” even if he loses both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

On the other hand, these folks didn't seriously dispute Barack Obama's two victories, or the results of the 2018 midterms, so they probably won't do anything other than grumble if Biden wins.

Yet they still might not believe the numbers are legitimate. Or maybe they'll believe that the vote totals are accurate, but only because George Soros engineered the second wave of the coronavirus in consultation with Bill Gates in order to destroy Donald Trump and enslave America.

TRUMP'S IMPAIRMENTS ARE THE SAME ONES HE'S HAD FOR YEARS

There's a lot of chatter about President Trump's difficulties walking down a ramp at West Point yesterday.

Trump descended a ramp extremely carefully at the end of his West Point speech today pic.twitter.com/uMG3KyB1V1

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 13, 2020

I'd consider this significant if we hadn't been talking about the president's troubles with ramps and stairs since at least 2017, when the story below appeared on CNN.



At the time, there was talk that Trump had bathmophobia -- a fear of stairs or slopes. He's clearly quite careful when walking down steps or ramps, which might be explained by simple knee trouble (I'm speaking from personal experience here: my kneecaps go out of alignment when I bend my knees, and as a result I'm as careful as Trump when I walk down a flight of stairs or a steep hill). But what about Trump's decision to take a golf cart 700 yards uphill from an ancient amphiteater to a piazza in the hilly Sicilian town of Taorina, where the 2017 G7 was held, a short trip the other leaders made on foot? Did the president not have the stamina to make the climb, or was he afraid of the incline?

But please note that we've been talking about this for years. There's much speculation that Trump's walking difficulties at West Point were signs of worsening health problems, or even of dementia. I'm not sure he seemed any more tentative on the ramp yestarday than he was in similar situations in 2017.

The same is true for Trump's two-handed water drinking.

Trump still hasn't totally figured out how to drink water pic.twitter.com/IO8CDXmD9i

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 13, 2020

That's hard to understand -- but here's a 2017 video from Newsweek on the same subject.



And are we going to talk about Trump struggling with "MacArthur"?

"McGarther" -- Trump also repeatedly had trouble with General Douglas MacArthur's name pic.twitter.com/HLSwbol2yL

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 13, 2020

Well, here's a story about slurred words from -- again -- 2017.



Trump probably has impairments we'll never know about. But he's been like this for nearly an entire term. If he's deteriorating, it's not a rapid deterioration.

Trump's ignorance, laziness, lack of empathy, bigotry, narcissism, amorality, unwillingness to read and learn, Dunning-Kruger certainty that he's the smartest man in the world are the real problems, along with his head full of Fox News propaganda and his alliances with such loathsome human beings as Mitch McConnell, Leonard Leo, and Vladimir Putin. Let's not get hung up on Trump's neurological state.

TRUMP TO BLACK PEOPLE: WE'RE STILL FRIENDS, RIGHT?

The president is trying so hard.

President Donald Trump late Friday announced he will no longer hold a comeback campaign rally on Juneteenth, saying he'll push the event back one day out of respect for the date that commemorates the end of slavery in the United States.

"Many of my African American friends and supporters have reached out to suggest that we consider changing the date out ... of respect for this Holiday, and in observance of this important occasion and all that it represents," Trump posted on Twitter. "I have therefore decided to move our rally to Saturday, June 20th, in order to honor their requests."

After all he's said and done in recent weeks, and at a time when he's categorically rejecting the renaming of military bases named for Confederate leaders, Trump still believes that a slight uptick in his non-white vote will help him win reelection in November.

He's not completely delusional about this, although some of the numbers he's probably looking at come from surveys taken before George Floyd's murder.

It's pretty off-narrative, but the one demographic group that Trump has actually improved his standing with since 2016 is non-white voters. https://t.co/8DnL9cEFWd pic.twitter.com/qgvqnRewby

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 9, 2020

There's been a slight increase in his non-white support. Will these people stick with him because he postponed the rally? Or because he gave an interview to a black Fox News personality?

Fox News host Harris Faulkner gave President Donald Trump every opportunity to calm tensions over racist police brutality during an interview in Dallas that aired, in part, Friday afternoon. He either had no interest in doing so or was ultimately incapable....

Allowing that police killing unarmed black men and women is a “terrible thing,” Trump told Faulkner, “You know that better than anyone would know it.”

When Faulkner pushed him to speak directly to those protesters’ concerns, he said, “I think it’s a shame, I think it’s a disgrace and it’s gotta stop.” But then he added, “At the same time, we have incredible people in law enforcement and we have to cherish them and take care of them.”

... At another point in the chat, Trump boasted that “I think I’ve done more for the black community than any other president—and let’s take a pass on Abraham Lincoln because he did good although it’s always questionable, you know in other words the end result,” before Faulkner interrupted to say, “Well, we are free, Mr. President.”

Trump did not further elaborate on what, in particular, about Lincoln’s legacy was “questionable.”

Later, Faulkner asked Trump if he can be both the “law and order president” and “consoler-in-chief.” Without missing a beat, the president said, “Yes, I think so.”

That's what Trump is thinking: Law and order is good for the blacks! I was trying to save their neighborhoods! They should be grateful to me! Recall what he said in Dallas on Thursday:

The President ... proceeded to defend his demand for governors to call in the National Guard to “dominate the streets” earlier this month, claiming that he meant using “force with compassion.”

“But if you’re going to have to really do a job, if somebody’s really bad, you’re going to have to do it with real strength, real power,” Trump said, before responding to the criticism over his incendiary remarks by ripping into “what happened in New York City.”

“The damage they’ve done — you have to dominate the streets. And I was criticized for that statement,” Trump said. “I made the statements with the ‘dominate the street’ and they said, ‘oh that’s such a terrible thing.’ Well, guess what? You know who dominated the streets? People that you don’t want to dominate the streets, look at the damage they did.”

Trump added that he’ll “stick with that” and thinks “most” people attending the roundtable will also do so out of “compassion.”

“Maybe every person in this room will stick with that, and we’re doing it with compassion,” Trump said. “If you think about it, we’re dominating the street with compassion because we’re saving lives, we’re saving businesses, we’re saving families from being wiped out after working hard for 20 and 30 years.”

The blacks should be thanking me!

He might not even be resentful. He might think that many black people are thanking him, and the liberal media doesn't want you to know that. He might really believe that they'll agree with the argument that taking down Confederate statues is erasing history.

Look how many black admirers he has!

"Opportunity Zones is more than just a program.

It's more than just a concept.

It is a mission." —@ScottTurner45 pic.twitter.com/KzmIYPRCRH

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) June 11, 2020

“People are looking for hope— something to unify this country. That’s exactly what this President is doing.” @JaRonSmith45 talking to @EWTN about the President’s holistic approach to address historic injustices in American communities. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/0xt5Els75f

— Mallory Blount (@MalloryBlount45) June 12, 2020

Those are recent retweets from Trump's Twitter feed -- the same feed where Trump also recently posted these messages:

So true! https://t.co/CSjsY2v3ex

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2020

LAW & ORDER!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2020

Plenty of black people agree, right? Or at least two or three percent more than voted for him in 2016?

JESUS LOVES THE ADULTERERS

I don't usually pay much attention to Sean Hannity's personal ife, but he's been in the gossip columns a lot lately. Ellen at NewsHounds has the rundown:

When news broke last week that Sean Hannity had been divorced for more than a year, I suggested that a new woman was the reason this information had suddenly become public. Today we learned Ainsley Earhardt [of Fox News] is the one.

As I wrote in a post for Crooks and Liars today, Gabriel Sherman broke the news that the two have been “dating” for “quite some time.”

I think it’s pretty darn clear it’s more than “dating.” According to People, Earhardt is renting a home nearby Hannity’s and uses his studio for her Fox & Friends broadcasts.

People also reported that the two have “been seeing each other very secretively for years."

The source says Earhardt and Hannity have been seen together "acting flirty in off-hours" and "getting cozy in the back of" a New York City bar not far from the Fox News studios.

"And he's whisked her off on his chopper for a vacation many times," the source says.

When I read this, I thought: Wait, isn't Sean Hannity Catholic? Doesn't that mean he's not supposed to get divorced?

I learned that Hannity used to be Catholic -- but last December he made a public announcement that he'd left the church. And guess which TV personality he shared the information with...

Popular talk show host Sean Hannity says that despite leaving the Catholic Church due to “institutionalized corruption,” his Christian faith and relationship with God continue to be the source of his peace, security, and fulfillment.

In an interview with Ainsley Earhardt, co-host of FOX & Friends and host of FOX Nation’s "Ainsley’s Bible Study" that will be broadcast online Wednesday, Hannity opens up about his journey to finding God, his current religious beliefs, and why he loves the Christmas season.

The host of "The Sean Hannity Show" revealed in a clip shared with The Christian Post that despite attending Catholic school for 12 years, he is no longer affiliated with the Catholic Church due to “too much institutionalized corruption” that has not been “rectified.” However, Hannity said his faith has “gotten stronger” as he’s “gotten older.”

“I would say I realize more than ever that I not only need, but I want God in my life,” the 57-year-old author said....

Yes, when he left the Catholic faith -- because of the chuch's shortcomings, of course! -- he made the declaration to his secret girlfriend, on her show.



I feel holier just knowing that.

JARED KUSHNER IS THE '62 METS OF POLITICAL AIDES

Remember when Jared Kushner was on the verge of completely reinventing the Republican Party platform?

For the past six months, top Trump campaign officials, reporting to Jared Kushner, have been working on a radical overhaul of the Republican Party platform.

... The Trump campaign's Bill Stepien has been leading the process, working with campaign colleagues and the Republican National Committee. As with all significant campaign matters, they've been reporting back to Kushner.

The president's son-in-law and top adviser has told confidants he wants to shrink the GOP's extensive platform of policy beliefs and principles down to a single card that fits in people's pockets. That's a huge change. The 2016 platform runs 58 pages — the product of extensive debate and heated negotiations.

Kushner told colleagues he wanted "something like the 10 principles we believe in," per two sources familiar with his comments. He asked Stepien to find historical examples of Republican platforms that look more like a "mission statement," per a source familiar with one of their meetings.

What a brilliant idea! It was also a brilliant idea when Newt Gingrich thought of it 26 years ago and called it the Contract with America.

Like so many other things Kushner is involved in, this process has now gone down in flames.

A vote by the Republican National Committee to leave the party’s 2016 party platform unchanged ahead of the November election has infuriated grassroots activists — including moderates who wanted to streamline its message and social conservatives who sought added language on emerging hot-button topics.

The decision by the party’s executive panel Wednesday means the GOP will maintain positions in the 4-year-old policy blueprint — including opposition to same-sex marriage and a nod to gay conversion therapy — and decline to stake out new positions on topics such as police reform, gender identity and third-trimester abortions. Party officials and senior Trump campaign aides had previously discussed ways to pare down the 58-page document to a single note card or abbreviated list of principles, but the effort broke down after several conservative groups registered complaints with the White House.

But Republicans aren't blaming the collapse of the talks on intraparty conflicts. They're blaming it on a Democratic officeholder.

The Republican Party has found itself in this awkward bind because of President Trump’s decision last week to move the location of his nominating speech. Under the R.N.C. rules, the convention will adjourn with the old platform serving as the official party platform until 2024.

That move came after the president reached a stalemate with Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, a Democrat, over what kinds of safety precautions would be put in place in Charlotte to protect attendees from the spread of the coronavirus....

The decision to simply let the current platform stay in effect, rather than try to pass any new platform, was ultimately driven by logistics, officials said. Republican officials decided it did not make sense to ask about 5,000 delegates and alternates to pay to fly to Charlotte, N.C., when the speeches and most of the action of the convention, including the hallmark speeches by the president and the vice president, would be happening in another city altogether.

And this is especially "awkward" because the 2016 platform includes

more than three dozen unflattering references to either the “current president,” “current chief executive,” “current administration,” people “currently in control” of policy, or the “current occupant” of the White House....

The platform censures the “current” president — who in 2016 was, of course, Barack Obama — and his administration for, among other things, imposing “a social and cultural revolution,” causing a “huge increase in the national debt” and damaging relationships with international partners.

I have questions.

Why can't platform drafters continue to haggle over the text of the document via Zoom meetings, like every other white-collar organization in America? Sure, virtual meetings are awkward, but the rest of us are soldiering on and getting work done. Why can't the Republicans?

Why can't the members vote on the platform electronically, or even by mail? And why, if the Trump acceptance speech is moving to Jacksonville, do they have to vote in Charlotte? Is that a provision of party bylaws? Why can't they vote to change the bylaws, at least in this one instance? The party rulebook isn't the U.S. Constitution. It can't be that hard to amend.

And look at the date on that original Axios story -- May 24. In late May, no one had considered the possibility that it might be difficult to have an in-person vote on the platform?

And if the party is going to retain the 2016 platform, why can't it agree to retain that platform except for all the references to the (then-)current president and administration? How hard would it be for a low-level staffer to just flag all those passages for deletion? It would take a couple of hours, tops. Why would this would this be any more controversial than not changing the platform at all, which we're told is very controversial?

It's as if these people believe that miminal levels of competence are an oppressive form of political correctness that they need to defy in order to prove they're free human beings. It's as if getting a job done right is bending the knee to the oppressor.

THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE ARE NEARLY AS STUPID AS DONALD TRUMP

Financial markets were rallying until recently, but then Wall Street was force-fed a hot, steaming cup of reality.

Stocks suffered their biggest one-day pull-back in three months on Thursday as traders grew concerned about the number of coronavirus cases increasing in some states that are reopening up from lockdowns....

The major averages posted their worst day since March 16, when they all dropped more than 11%....

“You’re seeing the psychology in the market get retested today” as traders weigh the the recent uptick in coronavirus hospitalizations and a grim outlook from the U.S. central bank, said Dan Deming, managing director at KKM Financial....

“The reality is this thing’s going to linger longer than probably the market had anticipated,” Deming said.

Duh.

What did these people expect when we embarked on coast-to-coast reopenings without significantly reducing the number of new infections and hospitalizations (except in hot spots such as New York) and with little or no test-and-trace capability in most of the country?

I suspect that many of the Masters of the Universe consume as much right-wing media as your uncle who sends Pelosi-as-Wicked-Witch email forwards. I imagine that a lot of them believe the pandemic is all a big hype -- they assume that the disease is no more dangerous or contagious than the flu, that the virus dissipates in the warm weather, that all the concern and the lockdowns were part of a liberal plot to destroy the economy and blame the damage on President Trump. These guys know how to make money, but I don't think we have any reason to believe they're smart or well informed in any other subject area.

Trump doesn't actually know much about business, but he really doesn't know anything about anything else. In his world, though, being an ignoramus about non-business subjects is probably not unusual.

IS IT 1964?

I'm looking at the upcoming election and thinking about 1964.

Obviously, there are signifcant differences between 1964 and 2020 -- the country was prosperous then (although the economy was pretty good for many people up to the early months of 2020). In '64, the country had just suffered the assassination of a president, while a civil rights struggle was ongoing -- but much of America thought life was good. That's not the case now. Also, the president then was a Democrat.

Here are the similarities: In both years, the Democratic presidential nominee was a man who'd risen to prominence as a senator but had struggled as a presidential candidate. Neither was seen as magnetic; each had been vice president to a young, charismatic president. And in both years, the Republican nominee was a polarizing, widely despised right-wing extremist.

In both years, middle-of-the-road people showed surprising levels of support for significant social justice reforms. I've lived my entire adult life in the backlash to the 1960s, so it's remarkable to me that Lyndon Johnson could sign the Civil Right Act in 1964 and then be a widely popular presidential candidate -- in any subsequent Democratic presidency, something like that would have been seen as a tremendous risk of political capital. Johnson won a landslide in 1964 -- 44 states, 486 electoral votes, 61% of the popular vote. How was that possible? Middle-of-the-road voters were willing to embrace at least the most basic goals of the civil rights movement.

This seems like a similar moment. I expected a tremendous backlash to the George Floyd protests, but polls consistently show that the peaceful demonstrations, at least, are widely popular. Middle-of-the-road Americans now recognize racial injustice in policing and believe change is necessary.

Lyndon Johnson hadn't been known as a progressive champion, but he embraced the moment. Joe Biden's past is similar to LBJ's, but although he won't endorse the slogan "defund the police," he seems open to some significant reforms.

I think there are many possible outcomes to the 2020 election, including a Trump Electoral College victory, but it now seems reasonable to imagine that Biden can win by a wide (though not LBJ-size) margin.

But then what?

The civil rights, voting rights, and anti-poverty legislation Johnson supported didn't end racism or injustice. There was increasing unrest in the cities, along with youth protest against the Vietnam War and rising crime. In the 1966 midterms, the Republican Party gained 47 seats in the House and 3 seats in the Senate.

And then the GOP won five of the next six presidential elections, and won 40 or more states in all but one of those elections.

If you've read Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, you know this story. I just hope we don't repeat it.

What if Biden wins big, Democrats take the Senate as well as the House, the federal government as well as states and localities embrace progressive change -- and the public decides that the changes aren't working? In particular, what happens if police forces are reformed, crime rises, and Democrats are blamed?

I want change, but it has to work. If it doesn't, the backlash could be massive. Republicans have a simple narrative about the 1960s: The lefties took over and everything went to hell.

Much of America believed it. Much of America still believes it. They're ready to dust it off for a new era.

I hope everybody really enjoyed that 1968-1980 period, because we're about to repeat it.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) June 8, 2020

Let's do this right. If we don't, we risk another half-century backlash.

YOU WERE FINE WITH THE RIGHT'S MEDIA ECOSYSTEM FOR YEARS, CHARLIE

At the Never Trumper site The Bulwark, Charlie Sykes laments President Trump's approach to information gathering, after the appearance of that Trump tweet citing a conspiracy theory that a 75-year-old Buffalo-area anti-racism protester was a secret antifa agent.

... the problem is not the tweet. That’s a distraction.

The problem here is the mind of Donald Trump.

The fact that this insanity appears in a tweet seems to distract us from the rather more fundamental fact that it is insane.

But this is the way the president of the United States thinks; the way he processes information and makes judgments. He has access to the world’s most sophisticated intelligence network, and yet continues to get his information not just from television, but from the flakiest corners of the disinformation universe where lies and hoaxes are the currency of the realm....

There are two broad possibilities here: (1) he is so addled and gullible that he actually believes this (actually quite stupid) conspiracy theory, which raises questions about his ability to assess evidence of any sort or, (2) he’s just flinging feces from the bunker to trigger the libs, which Rush Limbaugh assures us is some form of brilliance.

In other words, he either believes it, in which case he’s nuts; or (like his accusations against Joe Scarborough), he doesn’t care if it is true, in which case he is a cynical and vicious sociopath.

I'd offer a third possibility: Trump has concluded that all conservatives -- or at least all true conservatives, whom he defines as supporters of himself -- are uniformly good, while everyone on the left is thoroughly and irredeemably evil. He therefore gravitates to any "news" source that confirms this worldview, however dubious.

This is a habit he shares with much of the GOP's voter base.

Now, I'm much more tolerant of Never Trumpers like Sykes than, say, Driftglass is. I'll take the NTers' help for now, knowing that most of them will revert to being sworn enemies of the good as soon as Trump has left the scene. Why not take their help for the time being, gratefully but warily?

But while Sykes is complaining that a president of his party is a full-time dweller in Wingnut Conspiracyville, what he ought to ask himself is: How did this particular blighted neighborhood get this way? Why are Republican voters so receptive to the craziness of Conservative Treehouse, One America News Network, and similar media outposts?

A major reason is that mainstream conservatives (including, until recently, Sykes) have tolerated this craziness for years -- not just Conservative Treehouse but Gateway Pundit and InfoWars and World Net Daily before them. This doesn't happen on our side. In the early 2000s, responsible liberals and leftists denounced "9/11 was an inside job" conspiratorialism; more recently, in the early months of the Trump presidency, sensible liberals and lefties warned that Louise Mensch was a nutjob and shouldn't be taken seriously.

The right has tolerated conspiracy-mongering because it builds loyalty to conservatism, and thus to the GOP. Republicans wouldn't even break with Fox News when it was peddling Seth Rich conspiracy theories and giving a weekly time slot to Trump, America's most famous birther -- or before that, when Glenn Beck and his lunatic whiteboard drew millions of viewers to Fox five days a week.

I understand the cynical calculus: Right-wing elitists tolerated the peddling of this insanity to the rubes on the assumption that it wouldn't be for sale in their neighborhood. But unfortunately for them, one of the rubes ran for president, and won.

So now they're upset. Sorry, Charlie, but your concern comes years too late.

****

(UPDATE: Headline fixed.)