Bunker Boy

General Revolt:  There were many more demonstrations yesterday, largely peaceful but with some disturbing confrontations mostly around curfew time.  On the legal front, Minnesota prosecutors charged three more of the former police officers involved in George Floyd’s death while also upgrading the charge against the former officer who had already been charged. Though the importance of the continuing demonstrations and the significance of the charges can’t be ignored the real story of the day centered on the Defense Department and the number of current and former military officials who are distancing, or trying hard to distance, themselves from Trump.  Early in the day, Defense Secretary Mike Esper told reporters that despite Trump’s threat to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to deploy the military if state and local governments aren't able to “squash violent protests,” and by violent Trump means all protests even the ones that aren’t violent, he doesn’t currently support doing so because he believes that the “option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort and only in the most urgent and dire of situations," and he doesn’t believe that we are “in one of those situations now." Esper also tried to clean up his earlier statement about the need to “dominate the battlespace” saying that though that was a common military phrase he shouldn’t have used it in reference to the domestic situation.  Esper had no answer for why a National Guard medevac helicopter appeared to have been inappropriately used to threaten Washington DC demonstrators and said that he was currently waiting for the results of an investigation into that occurrence.  Most notably he also announced his intention to send troops perched outside of DC back to their home bases.  Esper’s statements, especially his comments about the inappropriateness of using the Insurrection Act and his planned troop withdrawal caught the White House by surprise and not in a good way.  We know that because later in the day, Esper reversed his troop decision amidst reports from the White House whisper gallery that his days as Secretary of Defense are now numbered.  Unfortunately for the White House, Esper wasn’t the only military man speaking out yesterday.  General Mattis, the former Defense Secretary who resigned after Trump abandoned our Syrian Kurd allies, went public with his disdain for Trump in The Atlantic, the media outlet of choice for former military officials disgusted with Trump’s dictatorial moves.  Among other things the usually reticent Mattis, who really should have spoken out way sooner, condemned Trump for making a "mockery of our Constitution" saying he was "appalled" at Trump’s response to the Floyd related protests and that never did he “dream that troops….would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.” Adding to the military pushback, Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who’d been criticized for being one of those “military leadership standing aside” for accompanying Trump to the St John Church photo op while wearing combat fatigues weighed in too, he released a message to top military commanders affirming that every member of the armed forces swears an oath to defend the Constitution, which “gives Americans the right to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly.”  He did that in part because his commanders had started to freak out that Trump’s dangerous antics were alienating the public as well as the 40% of the troops who are people of color. 

The Ex-Presidents: It’s not just military leaders, all of the former live presidents, including Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George Bush and, now Barack Obama, have weighed in, each in their own way.  Obama’s way involved participating in a virtual town hall where he talked about the efforts that he and his administration had made to spur the reform of police practices, another one of those “playbooks” shredded by Trump and his various Attorneys General.  Trump of course responded to all of this by name calling and attacking Mattis and Obama by tweet and in a bizarre Newsmax interview with former Press Secretary Sean Spicer.  By the way, Trump, who can’t tolerate that  #BunkerBoy is now a trending twitter hashtag wants us to know that he didn’t run to the White House safe space over the weekend over fears that some demonstrators were getting too close to his residence, all he did was take Melania and Barron on a bunker tour for a few minutes because why not.  On the press secretary front, his current one the obsequiously awful Kayleigh McEnany insists that tear gas wasn’t used against any of those peaceful demonstrators but if it was it was okay because they deserved it as well as the rubber projectiles sent their way. As to those mysterious forces defending the expanded White House perimeter, the guys who look like Putin’s Green Men Ukraine attack force,  apparently they are Bureau of Prison Crisis Management Teams from Texas resourced by Trump’s trusty Attorney General Barr.  Wouldn’t it be nice to think that being surrounded by prison guards is something that might happen again to Trump and his crime family at some future date?   One more thing, yesterday Trump’s physician announced that he is fitter than ever, that he’s still 6’3” though he’s not, that he’s only gained one pound though we can all see that he’s expanding daily, and that his other vital signs are unbelievably, with the emphasis on unbelievably, perfect.    

Et Cetera:  The Lindsey Graham led Senate Judiciary Committee hosted former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, part of the Republican effort to besmirch the Mueller investigation and each and every former Obama official possible, including Obama’s VP, presumptive Democratic candidate Joe Biden.  Graham plans to start subpoenaing all of those Obama officials ASAP possibly because polls show Trump sinking, losing to Biden in Arizona, Ohio, Wisconsin, and even Florida, all states he won last time and needs to win again.  Polls also show Trump perilously close to losing Texas, something that is unlikely to happen but that has down ballot implications and has got to be causing lots of angst and will result in a need for the expenditure of defensive campaign funds that the Trump campaign hoped to spend elsewhere. On the drug front, the results of a large study of the use of Trump’s favorite hydroxychloroquine are in and they indicate that the drug does not prevent healthy individuals from getting COVID. Not a problem for Trump who, unlike most people, was heavily monitored during the time that he ingested those unnecessary and ineffective tablets. And the New York Times is coming under heavy criticism for publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton, one that advocates the use of military forces to “quell the uprisings.” That’s the same NY Times that spent most of 2016 focused on Hilary’s emails while making light of Trump’s failings.         

    

 COVID:  US deaths are up to 109,000 with more than 20,000 new cases and 1000 deaths every day, especially notable because daily deaths in NY, the prior hotspot, are down to around 50.  Nothing to worry about here,  the official in charge of virus testing has been reassigned, the virus committee doesn’t meet with Trump anymore, and demonstration related spikes are likely to show up in around two weeks.