RR Memory Bank (Early October, 2020)

October Surprises

Today is my 74th birthday (“Will you still love me. . . when I’m Sixty-Four” plus 10!) and I’m on vacation with friends in Quebec. And Lisa still loves me. 

So no new Redburn Reads until we return, but I wanted to bring up a couple of posts from the past.

I began my newsletter in March 2020, just as the Covid pandemic was beginning. I started out writing far more regularly than today, often putting something out three to five times a week. It kept me sane. From time to time, I’m planning to continue to post some previous chronicles from that election year (mistakes and all intact), as a reminder of what it felt like to me at the time.

Here are two complete posts from my plague year chronicle. These are from almost exactly four years ago, as the campaign between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was heating up.

Redburn Reads is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Oct. 5, 2020

What will we remember of the last wild week? What should we remember?

Sure, it’s impossible not to talk about Trump’s illness (physically, yes, but also his sickness in insisting on risking the health of others to feed his ego and for the sake of a photo-op outside Walter Reed Medical Center). 

But the week (I’m using that term loosely) really began last Saturday with the announcement of Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court and the White House event, that from all evidence, appears to have exposed Trump and many others to the coronovirus. In the Washington Post, their team of White House reporters reconstructed how that karmic ceremony helped spread the disease.

Attendees were so confident that the contagion would not invade their seemingly safe space at the White House that, according to [Notre Dame president Rev. John I.] Jenkins, after guests tested negative that day they were instructed they no longer needed to cover their faces. The no-mask mantra applied indoors as well. Cabinet members, senators, Barrett family members and others mixed unencumbered at tightly packed, indoor receptions in the White House’s Diplomatic Room and Cabinet Room. . .

The White House’s handling of the period between the first known [for now] symptoms — those of Hicks on Wednesday — and the president’s infection, which was confirmed about 1 a.m. Friday, is what experts considered a case study in irresponsibility and mismanagement.

Despite the infection of at least two members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mitch McConnell is determined to ram Barrett’s confirmation through the Senate. She, along with the four other hard-right Justices on the Supreme Court (I’m not including Chief Justice John Roberts in that group) will try to pull the country backwards. 

That will happen on two fronts: creating a business friendly Court and imposing Antonin Scalia’s retrograde views on American society.

Here’s Jeffrey Tobin in the New Yorker, writing just before Barrett was named: 

Still, it’s worth remembering the real priorities of Trump and Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, in this nomination. They’re happy to accommodate the anti-abortion base of the Republican Party, but an animating passion of McConnell’s career has been the deregulation of political campaigns. . . 

The judge has described herself as a “textualist” and an “originalist”—the same words of legal jargon that were associated with Scalia. (She believes in relying on the specific meaning of the words in statutes, not on legislators’ intent. She interprets the Constitution according to her belief in what the words meant when the document was ratified, not what the words mean now.) But these words are abstractions. In the real world, they operate as an agenda to crush labor unions, curtail environmental regulation, constrain the voting rights of minorities, limit government support for health care, and free the wealthy to buy political influence.

And Ruth Marcus, a Washington Post columnist, cut through the obfuscation that characterizes Court confirmation battles: 

The best way to predict how Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett would behave as a justice is to listen to her — and take her words seriously. She hasn’t been mysterious about it: Speaking in the Rose Garden after President Trump announced his selection, Barrett invoked the “incalculable influence” of her “mentor,” Justice Antonin Scalia, adding: “His judicial philosophy is mine, too — a judge must apply the law as written.” . . .

One thing that’s striking about all four of these areas [abortion, gay rights, gender discrimination, affirmative action] is that Scalia was in dissent. One thing senators should explore — and that the public should weigh — is what could happen now, when the court’s conservative composition means that his former clerk could translate his angry dissents into controlling law.

Then, on Sunday (on the Web) and Monday (in print) the New York Times exposed Trump’s money-losing business practices and tax avoidance for all to see. In The Atlantic, David Frum drew out some of the implications.

Second, and perhaps more important, the ink-on-paper confirmation of Trump’s indebtedness, tax dodging, and all-around crookedness will get into Trump’s head. His political project through the pandemic has been to mess with his opponents by hurling one crazy distraction after another. Now, suddenly, it’s his own decision loop that has been disrupted. On the preexisting trajectory of the 2020 campaign, Trump was going to lose—and probably lose big. He needed something to happen either to help him or, more plausibly, to push the Biden camp into some mistake or misstep. Now the banana peels have been dumped beneath his own feet.

Whatever initiative he possessed as the incumbent president, it’s suddenly vanished. Instead, every step threatens disaster. At a press conference on the afternoon the New York Times Trump tax story broke, he denounced as false the report that he had paid only $750 in tax in 2017. Watch his face as he issued the denial, though, and you can see him belatedly foresee the follow-up question: “But can you give people an idea of how much you actually are paying?” Trump was visibly scrambled.

And we’re all paying the price, writes Brooke Harrington in a NYT op-ed,  for a broken tax enforcement system that lets people like Trump get away with murder.

This country lionizes those who rebelled against taxation without representation centuries ago, but we have ended up with a system providing ample representation without taxation for our elites, at the expense of the rest of us.

On Tuesday, we watched Trump melt down during the debate with Joe Biden. In The Atlantic, Andy Serwer, reminded us of an especially cruel and telling exchange: 

More than any other moment of the debate, Trump’s response to Biden’s invocation of his dead son—attempting to make him ashamed of his surviving one—threw the dispositions of the two men into sharp relief. I wondered how Hunter must have felt to see his father speak of his pride in his brother, only for his own name to be brandished as a weapon to inflict shame on his father. And I thought about Biden’s response, which was to reaffirm his pride in Hunter, the troubled son living in the indelible shadow of a departed war hero. In the midst of being attacked by a president trying to wield his own family against him, Biden’s instinct was to reassure Hunter that he is also loved, that nothing could make his father see him as a loser.

Biden acted like a father, doing what almost any parent would have done. And yet because Trump is the kind of man who wonders at the moment of his child’s birth whether the child will someday mortify him, he did not anticipate that response. He did not expect that, instead of embarrassing Biden, he would merely advertise the callousness that has made him unable to govern the country with any sense of duty or responsibility, the narcissism that makes him see those concepts as foolish and naive.

And all the time, Trump was getting sick from the Covid-19 virus he has tried to wish away. Let’s hope he doesn’t die from the disease, but it’s the fitting end of his presidency. Again, here's David Frum in another piece from The Atlantic:  

You cannot expect this White House to tell the truth about Trump’s health. . . You cannot expect the White House to produce any orderly plan for the execution of Trump’s public duties, even to the very limited extent that Trump executed public duties in the first place. . .

You cannot expect the White House to exhibit any regard for the health of others. . . You cannot expect Trump to gain any wisdom, empathy, or compassion for others. . .

What you can expect is a lot of victimhood and self-pity. . .

Trump should never have been allowed anywhere near any public office. Wish him well, but recognize that his deformed spirit will never be well—and that nothing can be well for the country under his leadership.

Lest we forget, last week was also the two-year anniversary of the date when Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist working for the Washington Post, was murdered in Turkey by agents of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

I’m hoping this week will be much less eventful, because I’m planning to take it easy, in part to celebrate my birthday on Wednesday, when I turn 70. I may write one more newsletter this week, on Thursday, but no guarantees.

Take care, wear a mask and vote,

Oct. 9, 2020

With less than four weeks to go, Republican politicians are giving up on President Trump. Wall Street is starting to look forward (positively) to a clear election victory by Joe Biden. Even Donald Trump, who just shot himself in the foot by killing any hope for a politically-popular economic relief bill (though now he’s twisting back and forth) and refusing (at least for now) to debate Biden again, appears to be giving up on Donald Trump. 

Trump’s campaign is starved for cash. He appeared, in a rant to Maria Bartiromo, to be spinning out of control, though perhaps that’s due to the steroids he’s taking. He’s gotten to the point where he’s pleading with his own Cabinet officials, Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo, to indict Obama and Biden and implicate Hillary Clinton, for supposed crimes (they didn’t commit) against him in 2016. So far, neither has responded.

Not that Trump won’t keep trying to steal the election, but, as Greg Sargent lays out in the Washington Post, his various anti-democratic ploys just keep backfiring.

When you step back and survey the last two years of U.S. politics, one of the biggest story lines that comes into view is this: One after another, a whole string of deeply corrupt schemes that President Trump has hatched to smooth his reelection hopes have crashed and burned.

In all these cases, Trump has either blown up the schemes himself or compounded the damage they did to him when they self-destructed. In some cases he did both.

About the only one who keeps plugging away for Trump is Mike Pence, who so successfully (not!) managed his pandemic task force. But even there, a fly keeps getting in the ointment.

So what’s going on? 

Ideally, Republicans would like to retain control of the Senate, but even that goal seems secondary to confirming Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. After all, if they lose the Senate this year, they’ll have a reasonable shot at getting it back in 2022. And even if they don’t, enshring a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court could advance Republican goals for decades.

Let’s start with Mitch McConnell’s political calculation, which is astutely explained by Eric Levitz in New York magazine.

Senate Republicans now consider aid to states so outrageous they’re willing to let the economy crumble one month before Election Day just to avoid dispensing such relief.

The most plausible explanation for this state of affairs is this: Most Senate Republicans face no great risk of losing their seats to a Democrat this year or any other. For them, the main threat to their power is a primary challenge. And right now, conservative media has turned opposition to fiscal aid into a cause célèbre, casting support for “blue-state bailouts” as treasonous. Thus, to pass a Pelosi-friendly stimulus deal out of the Senate, McConnell would have to bring a bill to the floor that a majority of his caucus would vote against. This would imperil his leadership. And so he is not going to do it. . .

And that’s key to McConnell’s calculus. Even without passing a stimulus, he still has a decent shot at a 51-vote majority. The races in North Carolina, Maine, and Iowa are all close. And the Democratic candidate in the Tarheel State is mired in an adultery scandal. What’s more, even if McConnell loses his majority, Democrats’ odds of holding more than 52 seats next January are quite low. Assuming a Biden victory, the GOP would have an excellent chance of winning back Senate control in 2022, as the opposition party almost always enjoys a major turnout advantage in midterm elections. By walking away from the stimulus, McConnell is prioritizing conservative ideology over personal power. But the political cost of doing this is relatively low. . .

The problem with a congressional chamber heavily biased in the GOP’s favor is not merely that it disenfranchises America’s Democratic plurality. The problem is also that the Senate’s bias deforms the GOP by enabling it to ignore public opinion — and utterly betray the material interests of its own voters — without ever putting itself out of contention for federal power.

In a two-party system, voters who identify strongly with conservative positions on cultural issues have only one partisan option. Combine this fact with the heavy overrepresentation of such voters, and you end up with a Senate GOP that can sabotage the economy a month before Election Day and still retain a shot at retaining power. That is a problem for the Democratic Party. But it’s also a problem for the American polity — one that will cost many Americans their businesses, jobs, homes, and lives in the weeks to come.

Even if all is lost for them on the campaign front this year, Republicans still think they can count on Republican-appointed judges to obstruct popularly-elected Democrats in office. In The Atlantic, law professor Nicholas Bagley says the Michigan Supreme Court’s effort to prevent Gov. Gretchen Whitmer from enforcing public safety rules designed to save lives provides a preview of what a 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court can be expected to pursue.

[A] Republican-controlled court handcuffed a Democratic governor as she moved to address a global pandemic that, to date, has killed more than 7,100 Michiganders. The court’s opinion is almost devoid of citations of Michigan case law, as the law professor Rick Hills has noted. Instead, the court lovingly quotes [Supreme Court Justice Neil] Gorsuch. . .

The larger lesson is that Republican judges are serious about using their power to obstruct Democrats in office, even when doing so is legally indefensible and blatantly undemocratic — indeed, even when it jeopardizes human life. There’s no reason to expect a conservative supermajority on the United States Supreme Court to act with more restraint. The Republican-appointed justices have the votes to impede pretty much anything Democrats aim to do, whether that’s mitigating climate change, expanding access to health care, or extending statehood to Puerto Rico or Washington, D.C.

We may all be Michigan soon.

Trump has used the instruments of government mostly to make things worse. For example, we learned this week from a team of NYT reporters -- Mike Shear (who was infected with Covid-19 at one of Trump’s events), Katie Benner, and Mike Schmidt -- that his two top Justice Department appointees at the time, Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein, forced their own officials to carry out Stephen Miller’s child separation policy at the border with Mexico.

The five U.S. attorneys along the border with Mexico, including three appointed by President Trump, recoiled in May 2018 against an order to prosecute all undocumented immigrants even if it meant separating children from their parents. They told top Justice Department officials they were “deeply concerned” about the children’s welfare.

But the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, made it clear what Mr. Trump wanted on a conference call later that afternoon, according to a two-year inquiry by the Justice Department’s inspector general into Mr. Trump’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy.

“We need to take away children,” Mr. Sessions told the prosecutors, according to participants’ notes. One added in shorthand: “If care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids.”

Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, went even further in a second call about a week later, telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were. He said that government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute two cases simply because the children were barely more than infants.

And he has utterly failed at carrying out nearly all of his campaign promises. Eric Lipton’s deeply reported long read in the NYT on the steady decline of the coal industry lays out one such example. 

“We’re going to put our miners back to work,” Mr. Trump promised soon after taking office.

He didn’t.

Despite Mr. Trump’s stocking his administration with coal-industry executives and lobbyists, taking big donations from the industry, rolling back environmental regulations and intervening directly in cases like the Arizona power plant and mine, coal’s decline has only accelerated in recent years.

And with the president now in the closing stages of his struggling re-election campaign, his failure to live up to his pledge challenges his claim to be a champion of working people and to restore what he portrayed four years ago as the United States’ lost industrial might.

In the last four years, we’ve seen just about everything. But the two minutes that the fly sat on Mike Pence’s head (at least it knew when it’s time was up) was something new, wasn’t it? Yet, as the invaluable David Frum wrote in a quick take for The Atlantic, it seemed perfectly apt for our shocking times.

We saw a weird moment when a fly landed on Pence’s snow-white hair—and the vice president did not react at all. No doubt, it’s a conundrum, what to do in such a situation. If Pence had shooed the fly and the fly had refused to shoo, that would have been bad. So he did nothing. And that doing nothing somehow in one powerful visual moment concentrated everything. It symbolized the whole Pence vice presidency, the determined, willful refusal to acknowledge the most blaring and glaring negative realities. Through all of the scandals and the crimes and the disasters of the past four years, Mike Pence was the man who pretended not to notice. And now there was a fly on his head, and he pretended not to notice that too.

I have no idea what else will happen in the next few weeks, but one way or another Trump is heading to the ash can of history. [TR comment in 2024: If only. . .] The bigger question now is what comes next. One thing Trump has managed to accomplish is to open the door to far more radical change than moderate liberals like me (or more importantly people like Joe Biden, Barak Obama and Nancy Pelosi) were once willing to consider. In the Atlantic, Luke Savage of Jacobin, the smart socialist magazine, thinks mainstream liberals are still stuck in the old mindset, but I’m not so sure. And maybe he isn't either. 

It’s all well and good to recognize the structural constraints imposed by America’s political system, and the difficulty of passing major reforms in the face of organized opposition. But for too many of America’s leading liberal politicians, “realism” has become an identity unto itself, unmoored from any programmatic orientation toward the future or sustained effort to bring about significant change.

Transformation on the scale necessary to undo the ravages of the Trump presidency will certainly be difficult to achieve, the fight for larger objectives such as health-care reform and a green industrial revolution harder still. But given what the leaders of 21st-century liberalism themselves tell us about the state of things, what is the alternative? There’s no reason to surrender when you can fight.
 

Maybe the next four years will be a shock, too. In a positive way.

Take care, wear a mask, and vote,

Tom