Nigerian Princes

Viral Musings:  Yesterday an unmasked Trump traveled to Atlanta’s Airport something Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms noted as a violation of the city’s face mask mandate.  Trump’s spokespeople of course defended his failure to mask up as okay because he and his squad are constantly COVID tested, an excuse that makes about as much sense as saying that you don’t use birth control because you take frequent pregnancy tests.  Later in the day Georgia’s Governor Kemp weighed in, banning cities and counties from imposing mask mandates.  Idiotic but totally on brand for another Trump’s mini-me. Apparently, Alabama Governor Kay finally gets it.  Noting that the coronavirus is spreading like wild fire through her state, she announced a statewide mask order noting that while it will be hard to enforce, “the numbers don’t lie.”  Adding “you shouldn't have to be ordered to do what is in your own best interest, and in the best interest of those you know and love." Though he’s still not pushing face covers, although if he had a conscience he would be, Kevin Stitt, the Governor of another red state, Oklahoma, announced yesterday that he’s tested positive for COVID.  The Governor has been out and about shopping in Walmart, dining in restaurants and tweeting out encouragement for others to do the same over the past two weeks.  Not to worry though so far he only feels a little achy and so what if it turns out that he was a super spreader.  As to Walmart, the company has stopped waiting for the federal government to standardize face masking regulations and has instead announced that starting next week shoppers in all their stores will be required to be masked.  Walmart joins Kroger, Sam’s Club, Kohl’s, Best Buy and Starbucks among others.  Taking into consideration the lack of a national mandatory mask-wearing policy, easing lockdown restrictions and spikes in states like Texas, California, and Florida the widely cited University of Washington health model now projects that the US death toll from the pandemic could climb as high as 240,000 by November 1.  That’s the pandemic that Trump said would be no worse than the seasonal flu and that VP Pence and son in law Kushner promised would be over by now. Trump who has moved on to tweeting out pictures of himself with Goya beans and the like still has no national pandemic policy, unless of course you think that encouraging aides to bad mouth Dr Fauci and hiding hospital statistics is a policy.  On the Fauci front, Trump denies that he authorized trade advisor Peter Navarro’s scathing USA Today op-ed attack on virus guru Fauci and Chief of Staff Meadows says that he knew nothing about it, but unnamed insiders in the White House say Trump did know and more notably since Navarro hasn’t been kicked to the curb for what other administrations would have considered a dismissal worthy offense, it’s fair to assume that Trump is prevaricating and that Meadows is either a liar or really bad at his job. Fauci, who has weathered a lot of storms, seems to be holding on as best he can, dancing on a Trumpian tightrope.  Though he’s no longer authorized to give on-air TV interviews, he’s talking everywhere else. He called the White House’s efforts to undermine him and Navarro’s criticism “bizarre,” something that “reflects negatively on them” telling The Atlantic that “It distracts from what I hope would be the common effort of getting this thing under control….We’ve got to almost reset this and say, ‘OK, let’s stop this nonsense.’ We’ve got to figure out, how can we get our control over this now, and, looking forward, how can we make sure that next month, we don’t have another example of California, Texas, Florida and Arizona?”  If only those in charge were listening and as focused as Fauci.

Politics Unusual:  Trump continues to sink in the polls, yesterday a new one from NBC/WSJ shows Biden holding an 11 point lead nationally, 51% to 40%, with 7 in 10 voters saying the country is on the wrong track and majorities disapproving of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus and race relations. Trump is also behind in key swing states. It’s not that people love Biden, they have just given up on Trump, at least for now.  Oddly enough, despite the economy’s current and possibly long term swoon, voters still give Trump the edge on economic issues. Though we all know that polls can be wrong, Trump appears to be taking these recent ones seriously.  That’s why he went to Georgia yesterday, to pitch another one of his many unfulfilled infrastructure plans in a red state that appears to be dangerously close to turning purple.  He also demoted campaign manager Brad Parscale, replacing him with Bill Stepien, the one-time aide to former NJ Governor Chris Christie who’s best known for thinking that creating a traffic nightmare at the George Washington Bridge, the mess that ended Christie’s presidential ambitions and came to be known as bridgegate, was funny.  Parscale, who is responsible for campaign data and funneling payments to Jr’s girlfriend Kim Guilfoyle and Eric’s wife Lara, still has a job, he’s just not running things anymore.  Trump made his announcement over Twitter but, as a result of yesterday afternoon’s “brazen”  Twitter hack, had to have someone else send out his tweet. Someone, or some group of someone’s managed to hack into Twitter, taking control of the accounts of a number of fairly notable people including Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Bill Gates.  The hackers posted tweets akin to those old Nigerian Prince email scams, promising to send people $2000 in Bitcoin if they’d first send $1000. Twitter shut down a number of prominent people’s accounts while it unwound the mess so Trump couldn’t use his for a while giving us a brief respite from his usual mania until he figured out that he could borrow a staff account.  Though its easy to laugh at the hack, and the fact that a lot of people were foolish enough to actually send Bitcoin to the hackers, the implication for Twitter and the rest of us is concerning given that Trump and a few other national leaders now use Twitter as an official platform.  Imagine if the hackers had decided to declare war on North Korea instead of just go personal enrichment.  Security folks are now trying to get to the bottom of the hack, figuring out if it was caused by some rogue hackers or a rogue nation.

Et Cetera:  Kanye West is no longer running for president.  His candidacy didn’t even last one Scaramucci.  The NY battle for Trump’s financials is still going on and is likely to last for lots and lots of Scaramuccis assuming Trump and his lawyers get their way.  While Manhattan DA Vance is pushing the courts to dismiss Trump’s newest reasons to stop the turning over of his financial information to the NY grand jury as just another stalling tactic from the staller-in-chief, it’s not clear that Trump’s tactics won’t work, at least until after the election.  On a more pleasant note, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is home from the hospital.