Macho Man?

Annus Horribilis:  Just when you thought that 2020 couldn’t get any worse, it did, bigly. Racial injustice, a killer virus, historic unemployment, and a hate tweeting Trump, incapable of doing anything to calm a jittery nation and now we are living through an epic national breakdown.  Borrowing a term popularized by Queen Elizabeth, we are truly having an annus horribilis, only our horrible doesn’t involve royal intrigue, it involves a national tragedy.  Naturally Trump, who still thinks that the exonerated Central Park Five are guilty, is ill equipped for dealing with anything having to do with race, so instead of empathy he stuck with racist tropes from his formative years. On Friday, he doubled down on his “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” tweet, reissuing it out of his less frequently used official White House twitter account after officials at Twitter marked his @RealDonaldTrump tweet for inciting violence only to try to walk it back later by saying that that he didn’t know that he was quoting a 1960s era racist. He then spent the rest of the weekend bouncing between forced, faux compassionate comments and inflammatory tweets, threatening to set vicious dogs on Washington DC demonstrators, blaming liberal mayors and governors and antifa radicals “from Seattle and Portland” for the demonstrations that kept turning violent whenever the sun set, calling for military intervention, while at the same time saying that “MAGA loves the black people.” Late Saturday, after he returned from watching the successful launch of the Space X rocket ship, a visit his handlers set to the blaring sound of his campaign favorite “Macho Man,” Trump was rushed into the safe room in the bowels of the White House by the Secret Service as a precaution to protect him from the encroaching crowds demonstrating outside, hardly the way anyone, least of all the short fused Trump would want to end “a triumphant, campaign moment” day.  Several outlets report that a number of Trump’s handlers wanted him to deliver a calming speech to the nation last night, but threw that idea out the window because warring factions in the White House couldn’t agree on whether he should take a stab at uniting us or stick with something that would further energize his base and that the “unite the nation” crowd feared that even if they prevailed Trump would veer off script, making things worse.  For his part, Joe Biden, who spent much of his weekend at home in Delaware, calling those “liberal, radical” mayors and governors and issuing his typical carefully worded calming statements, left his basement cave to go to a black lives matter protest site where the appropriately masked candidate was seen kneeling across from an equally appropriately masked Black man holding a child, another picture likely to show up in campaign ads.  As to those facemasks, let’s hope they work without social distancing, because if they don’t the virus will be staging a comeback across a lot of cities in a couple of days.

 Usual Suspects: Trump did do one thing yesterday, with the help of his dutiful ally Attorney General Barr, he declared Antifa as a terrorist organization, his way of shifting attention away from the racial discord and police brutality underpinning the demonstrations to those radical elements that a number of people from both sides of the political equation are now blaming for the violent eruptions that severely marred the otherwise peaceful demonstrations.  Antifa makes for a good target because who doesn’t want to point the finger at those amorphous violent agitators.  By blaming them Trump gets to target the radical left, a group that in his mind includes all Democrats, while downplaying racial problems, and the left gets to say, look we didn’t cause the violence it was those other guys. It’s worth noting that Antifa is vaguely defined, not an actual organization and that the law that lets the US government deem groups as terrorist only applies to foreign entities but who cares about those details, certainly no one in the Trump administration which likely explains why Trump’s current national security advisor Robert O’Brien said that there isn’t “systemic racism” in the US police forces, "it's the violent Antifa radical militants that are coming out under cover of night, traveling across state lines, using military style tactics to burn down our cities" that’s the problem. For the record, the Trump administration disbanded Obama era efforts to improve police practices and it’s the administration's own intelligence that shows that far-right groups and even white supremacists are also attempting to take advantage of the unrest and, sadly, we were all watching the horror of the weekend play out on screen and know that a lot of people were responsible for the fires and destruction.  One other thing, for some reason too many members of the press were targeted over the weekend, shot at with rubber bullets and in the case of one CNN correspondent, arrested for no reason. Who would have guessed that when the leader of the country calls out the press as enemies of the people, others down the food chain follow his lead?

 Sneaky Acts:  While all eyes were focused on Minneapolis and the spreading demonstrations, the Trump team did a few other not so pleasant things under the cover of the racial divide.  Trump announced that he was withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization.  He claims that he will be redirecting funding to other organizations that help with world health issues such as immunization of children and the fight against AIDs and polio even though he probably won’t.  In any case withdrawing from WHO during a pandemic is a totally ignorant thing to do with long term ramifications but very on brand.  After German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that she wouldn’t attend the G7 meeting that was to be hosted by Trump at Camp David this month, attributing her decision to current social distancing requirements, Trump announced plans to reschedule it to the fall, saying that he thinks the gathering could take place in September, around the time of the annual meeting of the United Nations in New York, or after the US election in November and that the invite list should include Russia, Australia, South Korea and India because the current makeup of the group is "very outdated" and doesn't properly represent "what's going on in the world.  He’s been trying to get Vlad back in to the group for some time, so its fair to say that he doesn’t really care about the others as long as he can have his buddy at the table.  On Friday, Trump’s newest DNI John Ratcliffe released transcripts of former national security advisor Michael Flynn’s conversations with then Russian Ambassador Kislyak.  Although the transcripts confirm that Flynn did actually discuss all the things that he denied discussing with Kislyak, like sanctions, relations with Russia and an Israel related UN vote, Trump’s allies in Congress and the media claim that they proved Flynn’s innocence.  To be clear they do not prove Flynn’s innocence, if anything they prove that he did in fact lie when he denied the subject of the conversations which of course raises the question, why were they released.  The answer to that is that we were probably about to learn about their content due to the battle between Judge Emmet Sullivan and the Justice Department over their request to drop the charges against Flynn and that the devious Barr thought that getting the texts of the calls out now, with appropriate spin, would be the best course to follow.  Also on the Flynn front, while no one was paying attention, Dana Boente, the FBI general counsel, who has served 38 years in a variety of career posts at the Justice Department was forced to resign, likely because he’s the last person at Justice who had anything to do with the Russia investigation. Don’t feel bad if you missed any of that, you were supposed to.