Not so Good Trouble

Elephant Spotting:  It’s hard to imagine why anyone in the White House thought that having Trump participate in an interview with Chris Wallace was a good idea. Sure Wallace is a Fox guy, but he’s also a skilled and professional interviewer so while Trump’s dedicated base probably thought that his bizarre performance was spot on just about everyone else, including Joe Biden’s campaign and those renegade Republicans who’ve been producing those killer anti-Trump ads were grateful for the Trump mocking fodder the interview produced.  If you missed it or any of the selected promotional clips, then you also missed Trump bragging about his great score on the mental acuity exam that tested his recognition of elephants and his ability to subtract 7 from 100 as well as Wallace’s sly comment that he too could ID large mammals and perform elementary school math. Trump also spouted some false statistics about the coronavirus, claiming that mortality rates in the US are lower than anywhere else, they’re not and Wallace had the charts to prove it and also pointed out that 1000 Americans are dying from it daily. Also on the virus front, Trump asserted that we’ve turned a corner and that the virus was on its way to extinction.  When challenged on that he smiled and said that it will be gone someday.  Trump claimed that a Biden/Bernie Sanders policy statement called for the defunding of the police only to be once again challenged by the very prepared Wallace who noted that the plan called for more funding in the form of rewards for improved policing. Unwilling to accept that, Trump called for help from nearby Kayleigh McEnany in finding proof that Biden had promised to do otherwise, but couldn’t find any because there was none to find.  Of more concern, Trump refused to say that he would accept the results of the election if he loses while once again attacking the legitimacy of absentee ballots.

 DACA and ACA:  Trump made another statement that seemed odd on its face by asserting that he would be replacing Obamacare with his own health care plan in two weeks because the Supreme Court’s decision on DACA, another thing he said he would be replacing in two weeks, allows him to.  At first that sounded like a bizarre conflation of the two subjects, but it’s actually more concerning than that.  Axios reports that Trump has been advised by John Yoo, the former Bush administration Justice Department lawyer who justified waterboarding, that the Chief Justice Roberts authored opinion in the DACA case provides a roadmap as to how he can act without legal authority to enact new federal policies on things like immigration and health care and since we know that acting without legal authority is right up Trump’s alley, its not a reach to assume that Trump is about to do something on both fronts, starting with immigration where he might grant some privileges to DACA recipients to boost his polls with the Latino community while further clamping down on immigration. Lastly, Trump once again defended the Confederate flag and threatened to veto any military funding bill that called for the renaming of bases.  

 Viral musings:  Before the Wallace interview hit the news cycle the focus was rightfully on Trump’s total abandonment of all things related to the virus.  To that end the NY Times published another one of its multi sourced articles detailing how Trump has moved on to focusing on the economy, leaving solving the virus crisis behind to his underlings and how one of those underlings Dr Debbie Birx, as opposed to that Debbie Downer/alarmist Virus Guru Fauci, has turned out to be more of a Trump pleaser than a truth teller.  It turns out that all of those fancy charts and graphs that she used to pull out at those daily press conferences on the virus back when the White House and Coronavirus Task Force actually held daily conferences on the virus assumed behavior adaptations that the public never adhered to.  So who would have guessed that when people don’t social distance, don’t wear masks, and go out to bars and parties instead of restricting their activities that the virus would be hard to suppress.  Who but almost everyone in Europe and Asia and much of New York and New Jersey and the other parts of the country where at least for now people have gotten the message.  On the mask front, while more retailers are requiring masks, during his interview with Chris Wallace Trump once again refused to insist that everyone wear one.  The administration isn’t all that into testing and tracing either.  The Washington Post reports that Trump plans to block additional funds going towards testing, tracing and the CDC because, you know, testing causes virus outbreaks and the CDC recommendations on school reopenings are tougher than Trump wants.  Apparently Trump is also sitting on another report, from his own Coronavirus Task force, that calls for the shutting down of 18 of the hardest hit states, the ones that Trump says are only suffering from a few embers and maybe, just maybe a small spike or two, but are really in dire straits but only if you consider running out of ICU beds a problem.  We only know about that report because the Center for Public Integrity got a copy and published it, not because of any official notice from the VP led task force.   
           

People:  Rough weekend on the hero front.  First we learned that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is being treated for still another reoccurrence of cancer.  While she insists that she is fully capable of doing her job, and in fact was responsible for more than her share of decisions during the Court’s last term, it’s growing increasingly clear that she’s holding on, hoping to make it through January.  Then John Lewis, the Civil Rights icon, one of the original Freedom Riders who was known as the conscience of Congress, died of cancer on the same day that Revered CT Vivian another Civil Rights activist died of natural causes.  Of course while testimonial tweets celebrating Lewis’ life rolled in from all the ex-presidents and many members of Congress, Trump went golfing with one of his Senate facilitators Lindsey Graham, finally tweeting out a brief poorly written message later in the day.  It looks like reports of the death of Kanye West’s odd presidential run were “greatly exaggerated.”  He’s still on the campaign trail or having a psychotic episode or both.  Yesterday during a campaign rally in South Carolina he attacked both abolitionist Harriet Tubman and abortion.   Lastly, late yesterday a shooter masquerading as a Federal Express driver murdered the son and critically injured the husband of a NJ Federal Judge who was, get this, recently assigned the Deutsche Bank/Jeffrey Epstein case.
  

Bad Trouble:  The paramilitary forces that Trump has unleashed on Portland Oregon, sourced from the Department of Homeland Security, are sweeping people off the streets, running around without appropriate IDs and acting like thugs. Not surprisingly, instead of squelching the protests that had been on their way to dying out, these heavy handed tactics have had the reverse effect and now everyone, including the city, state and ACLU are suing and, at least until AG Barr removes him, the local US Attorney Billy Williams is investigating. DHS Acting head Chad Wolf and Acting Deputy DHS head Ken Cuccinelli, the hate all immigrants guy, neither of whom is Senate confirmed, insist that they have the right to act like thugs and plan to continue to do so in other Democratic run cities.  So the virus is only one of the existential problems facing the country right now.