Malignantly Bad

Musings: While Joe Biden was in Houston yesterday brunching with and soothing the Floyd family, Trump met with a crowd of law enforcement officials, insisting that somewhere between 99 and 99.9% of them were topnotch and, as expected, making hay out of calls from the left to defund the police. Son in law Kushner who, in addition to all his other areas of expertise is apparently a law enforcement “star” said there’s nothing to worry about, because he’s in charge of fixing things, and with a few small tweaks he’s sure he can make the racial bias and police brutality problem go away.  As to the those calls to defund the police, walking a line between keeping his moderates and left wingers happy, Biden’s spokesman said what you’d expect, that Biden “hears and shares the deep grief and frustration of those calling out for change,” that he “supports the urgent need for reform,” but that he is opposed to cutting police funding.  Additionally, the politically shrewd and powerful South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn who knows a political hot potato when he sees one cautioned House Democrats not to get carried away with the “defund” message, to stick instead with reform.  To that end House Democrats are pushing legislation that would reform police practice, making it easier to prosecute police for misconduct, ban chokeholds and address systemic racism.  It’s not clear that they will obtain any support from their Republican colleagues. Nor is it clear that the House bill would get bipartisan support in the Senate, where widely supported anti-lynching remains stalled. On the economic front, Trump’s so called “strong point,” apparently the US economy slipped into a recession in February.  That’s notable because it means that things starting turning down before the virus shutdowns.  Also, though Trump bragged  about unemployment dropping in May, it didn’t.  There’s something funny going on with the way the statistics are being recorded and though there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that the White House manipulated the data, a calculation quirk made the figures look better.  Unemployment was actually up, not down.        

Campaign Central:  Polls showing Trump behind Biden, and right now, right or wrong, virtually all of them do, have spooked and angered Trump so much that yesterday he tweeted that he’s hired pollster McLaughlin & Associates to prove that those polls are “FAKE based on the incredible enthusiasm we are receiving.” He has also taken to calling them “SUPPRESSION POLLS, put out to dampen enthusiasm,” a term that sounds very Kellyanne Conway-ish.  Trump’s campaign team is planning to spend somewhere around $400,000 running political ads in the Washington DC market, not because they hope to convert any of the local largely Democratic residents in the viewing area to their side but to improve Trump’s mood and to bolster support among increasingly concerned and demoralized Republican Congresspeople and Senators.  Vanity Fair reports that Trump is so upset about the “malignantly bad” poll numbers that he’s thinking of firing and/or demoting Kushner and campaign manager Brad Parscale from the campaign team which may explain why he has started reassembling the team that got him elected in 2016, pulling in some familiar, and by familiar think notorious, faces including Jason Miller, who was forced out very early in the administration after it was learned that he tried to lace his pregnant girlfriend’s drink with an abortion causing drug while his wife was pregnant. That now former girlfriend is still trying to get Miller to cough up child support.  Trump has also brought back Boris Epshteyn, the far from smooth spokesperson who for a while worked for the very conservative Sinclair Broadcasting where he produced widely panned two minute pro Trump segments that were tacked onto local news shows before he was “laid off.” And then there’s Fox News host Tucker Carlson, though he’s not part of the official campaign team, he’s doing his best to energize Trump’s voters by instigating a race war, last night he raged against the Black Lives Matter movement, claiming that the movement has little to do with racial justice and police fairness, warning his viewers that “they” are coming to get them, and by them, think white people and that “they” want to replace police forces with armed “woke militias.”

Et Cetera: Yesterday Attorney General Barr threw Trump under the bus a bit, saying that that trip to the White House bunker wasn’t the site inspection Trump claimed it was, that he was rushed there by the Secret Service concerned about the demonstrations going on outside the White House. He said that in order to justify attacking the demonstrators, the action that he still wants us to think that he didn’t order.  Military leadership seems to be showing some independence.  The Marine Corp has ordered the  removal of all Confederate battle flags from all installations, public spaces and work areas, saying it has too often been co-opted by violent extremist and racist groups whose divisive beliefs have no place in our Corps and its reported that US Army Secretary McCarthy and Secretary of Defense Esper are open to holding a "bipartisan conversation" about renaming nearly a dozen major bases and installations that bear the names of Confederate military commanders.  Renaming bases would require White House signoff so that probably won’t happen but it’s hard to miss that the very integrated military is sending Trump the message that they don’t want to get pulled into his racist games or into taking up arms against US citizenry.  Trump’s been too busy focusing on polls and campaign strategy to pay much attention to doing anything on the coronavirus front, which is truly concerning as his strategy of leaving things up to the individual governors doesn’t appear to be working out all that well.  As expected, things aren’t going well in a lot of those never really all that closed but early to open states like Arizona and Florida, and things appear to be getting worse in meat plants as well.  As to the virus, yesterday WHO said that asymptomatic people aren’t really virus spreaders, however others aren’t so sure about that.  Andy Slavitt who headed up Obama’s efforts against Ebola and who is now working with Biden said that he believes that is an irresponsible statement.  He based his comment on conversations with several experts and four other studies that say that asymptomatic people can be spreaders, he said that while pointing out that until last week WHO which is now team facemask didn’t endorse them.  The bottom line – assume asymptomatic people are spreaders until more information is made available.