Take A Knee

Crisis Management? For the first few years of the Trump regime he faced few external crises.  Sure he had to deal with the Russia investigation and the impeachment, but despite his assertions to the contrary those were largely self-inflicted crises that he could have averted by showing remorse, going with truth telling, or just not strong arming an ally or cozying up to Putin. Now, with the coronavirus death count, or at least the reported death count, up to 103,000, it’s fair to say that Trump and the rest of us are fully mired in a crisis of major proportions, one that would have been much more manageable had Trump spent less time grievance tweeting and golfing and instead paid attention to all the warnings that he chose to ignore.  By the way, the reason I referred to the death count as “reported” is that certain states, most notably Florida, Georgia and Texas have been significantly undercounting their COVID mortality numbers by conveniently classifying COVID related deaths as deaths from pneumonia, either that or those states are suffering through an unprecedented pneumonia epidemic.  For example, in 2018 from February to May Florida had 935 pneumonia deaths, this year during the same period the state reported 4259 deaths.  The Texas and Georgia numbers are similarly absurd.  Freaked out about his economy and his reelection prospects and bored with the challenges of managing the country through the pandemic, Trump is now diverting attention to other things, so yesterday afternoon, as promised, he issued an “Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship” by social media platforms, his response to Twitter labeling some of his tweets as fact-less. Claiming that companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google have been disproportionately making the lives of right wing crazies like him difficult, he’s directing the Commerce Department to request that the Federal Communications Commission draft new regulations limiting the protections granted to media companies through Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.  That measure immunizes online platforms against liability for content their users post.  That’s a long way of saying that he wants to punish the platforms, most notably Twitter, for restricting free speech, primarily free speech he likes.  Essentially, Trump, who is concerned that Twitter’s actions will hurt his ability to push disruptive and anti-Biden/anti-Democrat conspiracy theories into the ether, wants to make sure that he and his cronies aren’t stopped from doing so in the run up to the election. To be fair, a number of politicians on both sides of the aisle have raised questions about those Section 230 protections, but if anyone has benefited from them it’s been Trump and his right wing echo chamber.  Of course, Trump who is addicted to Twitter can’t leave it which is why he isn’t following up on his faux threats to do so.

Fueling the Fire:  Trump’s delayed response to the “death by police knee” of Minneapolis resident George Floyd was that it was a sad, sad thing.  However, by last night Trump, who early in his term alarmingly encouraged police to feel free to not so accidentally bash the heads of perps into police cars, had reverted to “normal.” As state and city officials were trying to deal with increasingly violent protests in Minneapolis, demonstrations further fueled by an odd press conference where federal officials said little that was useful and failed to announce the arrest of any of the already fired policemen involved in the Floyd “arrest,”  he used his twitter finger to throw more of that fuel on some very real, deadly fires by tweeting “I can’t stand back & watch this happen to a great American City, Minneapolis. A total lack of leadership. Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right..... “ and then following up with “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”  Twitter, uncowed by Trump’s threats to rein in social platforms took swift action to his second tweet, flagging it for violating rules about glorifying violence probably because threatening to start the shooting is hardly a way to calm down an incredibly fraught situation.  So now, in the course of just a few days, Trump has given up on fighting COVID, moving instead to threatening the Mayor of Minneapolis, protestors outraged about another race motivated police killing and his one-time favorite platform Twitter.  By the way, the reason the police were sent out to arrest the now very dead George Floyd was due to a report by a local store owner that he had tried to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.  Think about that, the “knee” death penalty for possibly passing a counterfeit bill.  Remember how much trouble Trump gave one time football player Colin Kaepernick for just kneeling?   

Et Cetera:  The White House announced yesterday that it plans to forego issuing the usual mid-year economic update this summer.  That report generally includes updated projections on economic trends such as unemployment, inflation and economic growth so its fair to assume that the unprecedented decision to cancel  its release means even that even Trump’s deceptive economic team doesn’t want to put their ridiculously optimistic predictions of a robust third quarter economic rebound down on paper.  In other news, Trump is still all in on questioning the legitimacy of voting by mail by people other than Republicans so yesterday he tweeted “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone.....  “  That’s the same Trump who had no problem bragging about those “signed” stimulus checks that his Treasury mailed out to the millions without bank accounts.