Dark Shadows

Civil Wars: Despite requests from local officials including Governor Tony Evers, Trump is on his way to Kenosha, Wisconsin today to meet with law enforcement and store owners and stir up trouble.  As of now he has no plans to meet with the family of shooting victim Jacob Blake. He hasn’t even spoken with them, saying that he wouldn’t because they insisted on having their lawyer on any call; for the record their lawyer was on the call when they spoke with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris so the request was not unique to Trump.  Yesterday Trump also made it clear that he is team Rittenhouse.  Kyle Rittenhouse is the 17 year old who shot three and killed two people in Kenosha, who has been charged with murder.  Echoing Rittenhouse’s lawyer and right wing media, Trump called the situation “interesting” going on to assert that Rittenhouse was just trying to get away from the crowd that was “violently” attacking him, that he fell and then “he was in big trouble.  He would have been – probably would have been killed.” To be clear, Rittenhouse who traveled to Kenosha from Illinois for all the wrong reasons was running with an illegal automatic rifle, and yes he tripped but after he had already shot one of his victims. And those Trump supporters shooting paint balls and pepper spray at protesters in Portland, that’s okay because unlike any of the demonstrators in Portland or Kenosha they’re the good guys.  How do we know that, because to Trump his supporters are always the innocent good guys, those demonstrators, even the peaceful ones, not so much.  In an effort to rebut Trump’s allegations that he’s all in on radical, leftist demonstrators and violence, Joe Biden forcefully delivered some very impressive remarks yesterday afternoon.  Biden hit back at Trump and at violence in general, saying that while he endorsed peaceful demonstrations, violent ones and property destruction was wrong. He opened his speech by citing FDR and saying the “job of a president is to tell the truth.  To be candid. To face facts. To lead, not to incite.”  Almost four years into the Trump administration, that sounds so novel.  He asked “Do I look like a radical socialist who likes looters and rioters”…. “I want to be clear about this: Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting — it’s lawlessness — plain and simple. And those who do it should be prosecuted.”  He attacked Trump as weak for supporting those gun toting militias who keep showing up in places like Portland and Kenosha and pointed out several times that Trump’s insistence that escalating violence would be part of Biden’s America, totally ignored that it’s Trump’s America right now, and that the violence is happening on his watch. He spoke of his long term support for law enforcement, or at least those in law enforcement not shooting Black people in the back and then pivoted saying what Americans are really afraid of right now is getting the coronavirus, the medical crisis that Trump has, and continues to totally mismanage.  He also got in a few words about how Trump’s cutting of payroll taxes is bankrupting social security, something that really should concern everyone but especially those older voters in states like Florida.  Biden’s speech writers were totally on target and Biden, despite the right’s narrative that he’s hiding in a basement and can barely speak, delivered his message flawlessly from Pittsburgh.

Conspiracy and Pizza:   Biden also delivered some pizzas to some first responders, perhaps trolling those Q Anon supporters who think that radical Democratic pedophiles hide in the basement of pizza parlors, or more likely just delivering pizzas to some hungry, deserving fire fighters.  As to conspiracy theories, last night during an interview with Fox TV’s Laura Ingraham, Trump asserted that Biden is being controlled by unnamed people in “dark shadows…..people that you’ve never heard of are pulling his strings.” The kook=a=loo Trump went on to say “We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend. And in the plane, it was almost completely loaded with thugs, wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms, with gear and this and that.“  When Ingraham, who looked like she was trying really hard not to crack up and/or dial up the guys in the white coats, asked for more information, Trump said it was all under investigation and that he’d get back to her. On the physical health front, according to NY Times Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Michael Schmidt who has a book coming out this morning, that time when Trump was rushed to Walter Reed Medical Center for what he claimed was only the “first half” of his annual physical, the White House put VP Pence on alert, fearing that Trump might need a procedure requiring anesthesia.  Might have been nice if Schmidt had shared that little nugget a bit earlier.  Among other things, Schmidt also reveals that Trump really did try to get the Justice Department to prosecute Hillary Clinton and James Comey, and was quite distressed to learn that he couldn’t and that the reason that Special Counsel Mueller never investigated Trump’s financials or the possibility that he was working on behalf of Putin is because former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein limited his mandate to the uncovering of overt criminal acts rather than counter-intelligence issues.  So finding out about Trump’s financial involvement with Putin and his bankers was not on the table, nor was uncovering why Trump has such an affinity for all things Putin.   

Viral Musings:   Yesterday the Washington Post reported that Trump’s newest virus advisor, Scott Atlas, the radiologist with no epidemiological training, is pushing for a herd immunity strategy, that’s a plan that absent a quickly released immunization would likely result in hundreds of thousands, and maybe even a million or two more deaths.  Sweden went that route, and has experienced higher death rates than its European counterparts without achieving any of those “offsetting” economic benefits that folks like Atlas prioritize over minimizing death rates.  Later in the day Atlas denied that he was pushing that plan however, its hard to ignore that Trump has been dissing virus testing, encouraging states to open too early, and most recently retweeted a since deleted by Twitter tweet asserting that all but 60,000 or so of the departed died because of their “pre-existing” conditions rather than their COVID infections.     

Et Cetera:  Hard to believe but it’s still primary season. There are two big races to watch in Massachusetts.  In the first, Democratic Congressman Joe Kennedy III is challenging incumbent Senator Ed Markey in a race that’s all about generational change, Kennedy entitlement and throwing millions of dollars away attacking each other rather than policy. Initially it looked like the Kennedy name would lift Joe to victory, but over the past month or so Markey has risen and now appears to be polling ahead of Kennedy.  In the other race, long term Democratic Congressman Richard E Neal, Chair of the Ways and Means Committee, is being challenged from the left by Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse. With a lot of ballots being cast by mail, it may take a while to know who emerges victorious, a harbinger of things to come in November. The attempt by Barr’s Justice Department to let National Security advisor for a minute Michael Flynn off the hook hit another snag yesterday when the full Appeals Court said that it would be appropriate for the very persistent Judge Emmet Sullivan to try to figure out why Barr was so keen on dropping the charges against Flynn, as if we don’t know why. Unfortunately, the House ran up against a few Trump Circuit Court appointees who questioned in a 2 to 1 decision their authority to subpoena former White House Counsel Don McGahn.  The House will be appealing that decision.