Let Them Eat Cake

Smoke and Mirrors:  It’s August, more than 162,000 have died from the coronavirus, early balloting starts soon and Trump is keenly aware that he’s not doing well in the polls in those key states he needs to win to pull off a legitimate victory so he’s doing all he can do to disrupt the electoral process.  He’s not so clandestinely supporting a third party run on the Birthday ticket by Kanye West, reorganizing and downsizing out career professionals from the Postal Service, playing some more footsie with Vlad and issuing toothless, possibly illegal executive orders.  For some reason he and his campaign wizards thought that issuing those orders from his costly to join Bedminster country club was such a good idea that they stretched his let them eat cake performance into two nights, a teaser on Friday followed by a detail encore on Saturday.  On Friday, the suited up Trump performed in front of an almost all white crowd of club members who were hastily given masks when the Trump team realized that the press was broadcasting their bare mouths and noses. Notably their presence in the indoor facility was a violation of NJ’s coronavirus guidelines but no problem as Trump insists that those rules don’t apply to “demonstrators” and that his golf patrons were just demonstrating for their right to act like spoiled privileged people during a pandemic. Trump lashed out at the Democrats, asserting that it was their intransigence that had caused the breakdown of negotiations with his Republican contingent, not true as the Democrats had offered to meet in the middle, but a terrific sound bite.  Then while teasing that he was on the verge of doing things himself via executive action, he added that he planned to tell health insurance companies that they have to cover pre-existing conditions, ignoring that Obamacare, the plan he’s still trying to have declared unconstitutional, has already done that.  His Bermuda shorted crowd of golfers ate it up. Trump reemerged on Saturday to announce those promised executive actions except for the health care one because maybe someone pointed out that it had already been done in 2010 by that Kenyan guy Obama.

 

Devilish Details:  The executive actions addressed, or at the very least pretended to address the following: replacing the expired $600 supplemental unemployment insurance payment, cutting the employee portion of the payroll tax, halting evictions, and providing student loan relief.  Trump’s plan is to replace the $600 weekly payment with a $400 payment, $300 of which would come from money currently earmarked for disaster relief because who needs that during hurricane and apparently earthquake season anyway and $100 of which would come from state matches.  Putting aside the legality of repurposing federal money, it’s not clear that the states given their already coronavirus stretched budgets even have the resources to fund the required $100 match.  In any case, implementing Trump’s payment would take time, so those desperate for the cash wouldn’t see any for a while, only a problem for those who want to eat or avoid homelessness.  The payment plan is so sketchy that Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow couldn’t explain its terms on Sunday morning although to be fair that could have just been Kudlow being Kudlow.  As to those cuts to the payroll tax, Trump’s been pushing that for some time, but neither Democrats nor Republicans have been supportive.  Moreover, the cuts aren’t even cuts, they’re just a deferral which would eventually be due, would apply only to those making less than $104,000 per year and would benefit only those on a payroll, doing nothing for the unemployed.  Additionally, those tax revenues go to support Social Security and Medicare, two programs that need all the money they can get. Trump’s additional statement that he wants to make the payroll tax cuts permanent in the new year, which some of his spokespeople tried to walk back on the Sunday morning talk show circuit, sounds an awful lot like a plan to cut Social Security and Medicare payments and is hardly a winning move under any circumstances but especially during an election year.  Trump’s executive action on evictions was just vague and meaningless, it calls for the HHS Secretary and the CDC Director to “consider whether any measures temporarily halting residential evictions of any tenants for failure to pay rent are reasonably necessary to prevent the further spread of COVID-19."  At least the student loan deferral is for real though it would run for only three months, unlike the year proposed by the Democrats. Speaker Pelosi called Trump’s actions “absurdly unconstitutional” and Republican Senator Ben Sasse called them “unconstitutional slop.” True but in all likelihood Trump voters believe that they’re all legit and don’t get that they’re mostly smoke and mirrors.  It’s not clear what happens next, but there probably will be more negotiations on a real solution, or then again not.

 

Déjà vu Again: The Director of National Counter Intelligence and Security Center issued a statement on Friday warning that the Russians are at it again, working to influence the outcome of the election and that Trump is their intended beneficiary.  The statement cited efforts coming out of pro-Russia forces in Ukraine to damage  Biden and Kremlin-linked figures who “are also seeking to boost President Trump’s candidacy on social media and Russian television.” Basically a confirmation that the garbage being pushed by Senators Ron Johnson, Lindsay Graham, and Chuck Grassley with an assist by AG Barr is coming from Vlad’s machine.  That’s the same AG Barr who told  conservative pundit Mark Levin that “Democrats have pulled away from classic liberal values and now were akin to the Rousseauian Revolutionary Party aimed at destroying the institutions upon which the country was built.” He went on to call out the Democrats for replacing religion with secularity.  Where does he get this crap, did anyone understand his Rousseau reference and, more importantly, why is the Attorney General spouting faux intellectual partisan gibberish? Getting back to the statement from the counter intelligence guys, they also noted that other countries like China and Iran would prefer that Joe Biden win in November.  Notably, they didn’t say that China was engaging in the “range of measures” being undertaken by Vlad and his crew just that they have a preference. Experts say that China’s preference is driven by a desire for rationality and predictability, not because they think that Biden would cut them more slack and, in any case, it’s likely that the reference to China was only included to placate Trump who once again denies that the Russians prefer him.   

 

Et Cetera:  Jerry Falwell Jr has been placed on indefinite leave from Liberty University.  It turns out that those pictures of him inappropriately attired standing next to a similarly clad young woman who he later asserted was “just” his wife’s assistant who couldn’t zip her pants all the way up because of her pregnancy were the straw that broke the Christian university’s back.  Those are the pictures that Falwell, who says that his pants were similarly unzipped only to make the assistant feel more comfortable, posted and then unposted from his Instagram account possibly under the influence of the “dark” liquid in the glass that he was holding in the pictures.  No comment yet from the Miami pool boy who allegedly was the beneficiary of some of his financial largesse last year.