Month: July 2020

I agree with everything Nathan Gonzales writes in this Roll Call piece, including the following passage:

If Joe Biden wins the White House, and particularly if they also gain control of the Senate and expand their majority in the House, Democrats will be tempted to (and progressives will likely) claim a mandate. They might believe that voters love them and all the liberal policies they’ve been talking about lately.

In reality, Democratic victories this fall will likely happen because enough voters are fed up with Trump’s first four years in office and are tired of Republicans making excuses for him or ignoring his most polarizing actions.

That means if Democrats in Washington next year push forward with legislation akin to the Green New Deal or a single-payer health care system, they risk a backlash from voters who never wanted the party (or the country) to go that far to the left. They had just reached their limit with Trump. And that means Republicans would have an opportunity to immediately rebound in the 2022 midterms.

Democrats don’t enjoy getting slaughtered in the first midterm after they succeed in winning the presidency, but it’s happened consistently going back all the way to 1966. You can say this demonstrates a refusal to learn, but it’s really more about getting shit done when you have the power to accomplish it. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation was made possible by ginormous majorities the party won in the 1964 election. Perhaps some of it could be considered overreach, but the number one priority wasn’t maintaining their numbers in Congress. There was civil rights legislation to pass and a war on poverty to wage.

Carter and Clinton also experienced a backlash that was at least partly a reaction to their early legislative agendas. Barack Obama was warned that pursuing the Affordable Care Act in a global recession was dangerous politically, and he didn’t care. We had waited a half century for the chance to make big strides toward universal coverage and he wasn’t going to lose the chance.

Democrats can be smarter about protecting their most vulnerable members, but it’s in the nature of winning landslide elections that a lot of people vote for you who aren’t really supportive of your agenda. You shouldn’t govern with them in mind, even if there’s no reason to needlessly antagonize them.

If Biden wins big, he might be able to go further on climate change than is politically wise, and he should just go ahead and do that anyway because he has the power to do it and it needs doing. Sometimes, the right policy eventually becomes popular. Oftentimes, it takes longer than two years to make that journey. Certainly, Obamacare is better-liked today than it was when voters went to the polls in 2010.

What I’m saying is that you don’t have to have a mandate, or even to believe you have a mandate. What you need is power.

I will say that one reason I am reluctant to jettison the legislative filibuster is that it will give the Republicans an easy way to undo every accomplishment if they ride back to power on backlash against policies that haven’t had time to ripen and gain widespread approval. Our problems may be urgent enough to justify it, put it isn’t a cure-all. Doing the right thing usually gets punished in the short-term, and that’s not a reason for inaction.

There are a few odd but interesting things in Nate Cohn’s analysis of recent polls. For example, Joe Biden is now close to erasing the Republicans’ traditional advantage with white voters, but he’s underperforming Hillary Clinton with blacks and hispanics. While it’s been widely reported that Biden is winning with voters over 65, ordinarily the GOP’s strongest demographic, he actually hasn’t made any new ground with them since May. His recent gains are coming from improvement with younger voters.

This last point doesn’t surprise me and I predicted that young supporters of Bernie Sanders would get over their hurt feelings well before November. They still are more reluctant than older voters to give Biden positive favorable numbers, but that should also continue to improve. As for the over 65 crowd, it could be that Biden just maxxed out. If I have a possible explanation for why Biden isn’t doing as well with minorities, it might be that polls show they simply aren’t as engaged or “paying attention” at the same rate as whites. As Election Day nears, everyone will be engaged, and it’s likely that undecided blacks and hispanics will solidify behind the former vice-president.

What appears to be the most consequential change is Republicans’ dwindling advantage with whites. As Cohn points out, this could lead to previously unimaginable losses for the GOP in congressional and Senate races. It could turn states like Texas, Kansas and Alaska blue. But I also think it’s part of the reason we’re seeing a mood change on white supremacy in general. It helps explain why Confederate statues are coming down and Congress just passed a defense spending bill that mandates that Confederate names are removed from military bases and ships. It helps explain why police unions are suddenly on the defensive against demands for reform. And, I think, it is also behind the general feeling by a lot of folks that they’re being “canceled.”

David Brooks is whining in the New York Times that people like Andrew Sullivan are suddenly unemployable, but this isn’t an example of the left suddenly becoming intolerant of diverse viewpoints. That’s like arguing that police chokeholds are being banned because the left suddenly discovered that they kill people. What actually happened is that public opinion finally tipped in the left’s direction, and a practice that was formerly tolerated because whites supported it, is no longer tolerated because whites changed their mind. The same can be said for publishing people who argue for the inherent superiority of white people. The same can be said for naming your sports team the “Redskins” or having a racist mascot like the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo.

These things were “normal” and accepted only so long as whites accepted them in large numbers. Trump’s excesses have jolted enough whites to not only lose him support, but to lose support for many of the structurally racist things that have gone unexamined outside of leftist circles.

The change can manifest in simple ways, like people losing jobs they previously would have kept after saying or doing racist things. But the overall impact is complex and hard to predict. What we’re seeing is a lot of people who were previously safe and comfortable now getting called out for holding certain beliefs. It’s not a surprise that they howl like a scalded cat when they suddenly get burned.

This change in public opinion is going to change the country. The base and sports name changes are a precursor for the political realignment that’s coming in the election. Once political power resides on the left, we’ll see more transformation, and a lot more howling.

My father is 87 years old and living with my mother in an assisted living community. I haven’t seen either of them since March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but we have plans to meet up this weekend. In the meantime, I’ve been enjoying reading chapters of my father’s autobiography which he’s been sending along at a steady clip. There are a lot of amusing anecdotes and plenty of history I did not know. So far, he’s only covered the period between his childhood in Iowa City, Iowa as the son of an art professor, and the beginning of his college years at Oberlin. If fortune smiles on him, he’ll eventually get to what I call his “Mad Men” period.

My father is about as different from that cast as it is possible to be (or, at least, that’s what he wants my mother to believe) but he did work at the advertising agency depicted on the show in the relevant time period. While I think it’s safe to say he wasn’t sexually harassing the secretaries and lunching at whorehouses, he was still a part of that culture, and that means that a lot of my experience in life owes something to the general outlook of successful professional white men at the peak of their postwar power and privilege.

If you’re familiar with Mad Men, you know it highlights a lot of retrograde attitudes, which isn’t surprising since it begins in the early 1960’s before the war went bad, before women’s lib, before gay rights, and before the Civil Rights Era had run its course. But there was also a general acceptance of the political order, which was a liberal order at the time. The 89th Congress, which sat between 1965 and 1967, began with a 295-140 Democratic majority in the House and a 68-32 Democratic majority in the Senate. As you might expect, the upper echelon at Manhattan advertising agencies included plenty of country club Republicans who weren’t sold on John F. Kennedy or certainly the boorish Texan, Lyndon Baines Johnson. On the whole, though, these were Kennedy men. The New Deal had not been bad for business, and it therefore had not been bad for the advertising industry. For them, the system was working.

They most definitely looked askance at the conservative takeover of the GOP that occurred at the Cow Palace in San Francisco during the 1964 Republican National Convention.

Goldwater’s tone reflected the tenor of this ugliest of Republican conventions since 1912, as entrenched moderates faced off against conservative insurgents. In an era in which a national consensus seemed to have coalesced around advancing civil rights, containing Communism and expanding government, the moderates believed they had to win to preserve the Republican Party. The conservatives—who wanted to contain the role of the federal government and roll back Communism—believed they were saving not just the party but Western civilization.

In the years since the 1964 election, the conservatives have dominated not only the Republican Party but, since 1981 at least, our national political conversation. They flipped the South from solid Blue to solid Red, built their own media empire, crushed unions, seeded the courts with true believers, and elected a string of corrupt and mostly ignorant presidents who have gutted the brains of our government.

This happened because business leaders who remained opposed to the “national consensus” that had emerged by 1964 discovered that the GOP did not have to remain a permanent minority. By making common cause with conservative Christians and diehard racists, they could win the presidency and eventually get durable majorities in Congress.

By the mid-1980’s, the business culture in New York City was more supportive of Ronald Reagan than old New Dealers like Walter Mondale. Yet, they were also comfortable with Bill Clinton, for the most part, since he was better aligned with their culture than the conservative opposition led by people like Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay.

It was only when a conservative president was matched with a conservative Congress after the contested 2000 election that the pendulum started to swing back in a progressive direction. Barack Obama easily carried the affluent suburbs around the city where most upper management types live.

This has now gone national, as white, well-educated professionals of all types have abandoned the GOP. It didn’t cost the party the presidency in 2016 because the losses were made up among white working class folks who had previously been heavily unionized and incredibly hostile to the party of management. This worked out to a degree for the finance types, but it really represented a loss of control.

To see what I mean, consider the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The 2020 election cycle is on pace to be the most expensive in the nation’s history. But there’s one major political spender that’s been largely missing in action: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

As the main advocacy arm for corporate America, the Chamber traditionally has few competitors when it comes to wielding power in the nation’s capital…And when it comes to the Hill, few entities have shown a better ability to shape legislation, in part because of the millions of dollars that the Chamber is willing to spend in order to do so.

…But for reasons that have baffled and intrigued seasoned operatives, the group has stopped writing those checks. So far, for the 2020 elections, the Chamber has reported just $1.6 million in political spending to the Federal Election Commission. By this point in 2016, it had spent more than $16 million. For context, it’s spent less this cycle than super PACs backing the short-lived Democratic presidential campaigns of former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee. So far this cycle, the Chamber is just the 43rd largest independent spender, according to CRP data.

They’ll get more involved as things go along. They still see the value in having a Republican majority in the Senate.

“We recognize that the Senate is the backstop,” said Scott Reed, the chief strategist for the United States Chamber of Commerce, calling it the group’s “top priority” in 2020.

With some glaring exceptions, the Senate Republicans still behave like normal pro-business conservatives, and they haven’t obliged some of President Trump’s more heterodox positions. But the Senate is the last place remaining where the U.S. Chamber of Commerce still feels like its interests take precedence over the fire-breathing Tea Party lunacy that has overtaken their party. They’re actually more comfortable with the Democrats, provided that the Sanders/Warren faction doesn’t become too ascendant and the Occupy protestors remain at bay.

It’s not just that the Republican Party no longer reliably serves finance. Even if they did remain useful, they’re on the verge of losing Texas as the anchor of the right. The alliance with fundamentalists and racists was always a means to an end, and if that end can no longer be achieved within the alliance, then it just makes more sense to lobby within a new national consensus than to throw rocks from the outside.

There will always be a diehard core of financial elites who are ready to spend billions on politics to preserve and increase their status. But without a party to spend that money on, their influence wanes and will eventually go back to 1964 levels.

Now one of two things will happen. Either a new restorative national consensus is built and contained with a large, if unwieldy, Democratic coalition, or the dam breaks as the old structure built by postwar white men is swept away by something new and unrecognizable.

My money is on the latter scenario, but Biden looks to be a possible bridge who can ease the transition and avoid a potent backlash that prevents a new consensus from forming. To many, this will look like what it is…someone holding up the stream of progress. To others, it will also look like what it is…a responsible effort to control chaos so that everything isn’t wiped out in a deluge.

Either way, the more than half-century alliance between cultural conservatives and business elites is coming to end. I hope the last chapter in my father’s autobiography will tell me how it turned out.

With the 2020 elections only a little more than three months away, now is not the time to be giving the Republican Party advice, but I am willing to question their judgment in one respect. With 30-40 million Americans out of work, why are they obsessed with the idea that someone might get paid more to stay at home than to take a job?

Let me put it this way. If someone has a job to offer, that job is going to get filled in half a second. If the government wants people to work, they should create their own jobs. That’s what FDR did when unemployment was through the roof and the private sector was on its knees.

Instead, we get this, as reported by the Washington Post:

Republicans have continually argued that the enhanced benefits create a disincentive for people to return to work, because many can make more on unemployment. Mnuchin said Thursday that the GOP plan would include 70 percent wage replacement, which could reduce the $600-per-week payment to closer to $200 per week, although the precise details were unclear.

“We’re not going to continue in its current form because we’re not going to pay people more money to stay at home than work,” Mnuchin said on CNBC. “We want to make sure that the people out there who can’t find jobs do get a reasonable wage replacement — so it will be based on approximately 70 percent wage replacement.”

The issue here is the expiration at the end of July of a $600 federal enhancement of notoriously stingy state unemployment benefits. The Republicans wanted to scrap this payment completely, but now they’re coalescing around a reduced benefit closer to $200. People are going to notice that change and it’s not going to make them more likely to vote for a Republican.

It’s true that there are some people who have a little more money in their pockets right now than they would have had if there had never been a global pandemic. That said, a few stray rays of sunshine are better than unrelenting misfortune. If this is such in intolerable injustice, then why are the Republicans for sending out another round of stimulus checks? According to the Post:

In recent days, Trump had insisted that he might not sign an eventual bill if it did not include the payroll tax cut, but the plan was extremely unpopular with Republicans. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on CNBC on Thursday morning that the White House still liked the idea and could pursue it in potential future legislation — although McConnell has repeatedly indicated that the legislation taking shape now will be Congress’s last major coronavirus relief bill.

“It won’t be in the base bill,” Mnuchin conceded.

He said the decision was made to instead focus on sending another round of stimulus checks to Americans, because that approach would put money in people’s pockets more quickly.

“Let me be clear: We think the payroll tax cut is a very good pro-growth policy, but the president’s focus is he wants to get money into people’s pockets now,” Mnuchin said.

The payroll tax cut was a moronic idea on every level, and especially because you need a job in order to see any benefit. Just writing everyone a check regardless of need is the bluntest of instruments, but it’s way more progressive and stimulative than cutting taxes. It also has the advantage that people will notice. This approach is better policy and it’s smarter politics. But it doesn’t do away with the problem of some folks having more money while they’re unemployed than they had when they were working.

This whole debate is a good example of the way ideology twists the Republican Party in knots. They wind up worried that they’re disincentivizing work when no one can find work. Then they settle on paying people for nothing because they prefer that to creating a government job.

By my count, there have been six polls released in July that look at the Trump/Biden matchup in Texas, including a Quinnipiac survey that was released Wednesday. With the exception of the Gravis Marketing poll that had Trump up by two point, all of these surveys were conducted by reputable and well-rated outfits.  Biden led in three and Trump led in three.

The best result for the former vice-president came from a B/C-rated University of Texas-Tyler survey that had him up by five points. Trump led in two B-rated YouGov polls, the first of which found him up by four points and the second of which found him leading by one. Gravis, which is basically Trump’s C-Rated personal pollster, gave Trump a two point lead.

The B-rated Public Policy Polling survey found Biden up by two and the B+-rated Quinnipiac that came out on Wednesday has Biden in the lead by a single point.

Add that all up and you have a dead heat, but it’s not kind of dead heat that should comfort the president. First of all, this is Texas. Trump shouldn’t be struggling here. Then there’s the direction of the polls. It’s true that YouGov still has him ahead, but he’s lost three points since the beginning of the month. Public Policy Polling shows essentially the same thing. They had him up by two in late-June and now has Biden up by two. The Texas-Tyler survey from May had the race tied and now they have Biden up by five. So, there’s a consistent finding that Trump has slipped several points as spring turned to summer.

Quinnipiac provides plenty of evidence that this is primarily related to the COVID-19 pandemic hitting Texas hard in this time period. A plurality of respondents are still net-positive on Governor Abbott, but his approval rating has slipped a net twenty points. Most Texans are very concerned about the virus, know someone who contracted it, and believe that Abbott is responsible because he opened the economy up too soon. Trump has a negative 45-51 percent job approval rating and independents back Biden 51-32 percent.

Texas is the biggest prize the Democrats could win, and it’s completely within reach. One more month like July and Biden should be opening a narrow but discernible lead. If you’re looking for hope, here’s hope.

 

 

Annie Karni of the New York Times reports that the president is bluffing when he says “I’m not losing” to Joe Biden. He knows that he’s down because his own pollsters have been honest with him about it. They apparently feel the need to sugarcoat the situation and reassure him that he’s not to blame, but he’s definitely losing.

So, he’s been solicitous of advice on how to improve his standing, and appears to made a decision to recommend the wearing of masks for purely political reasons.

[Trump’s] internal numbers still show him trailing Mr. Biden, and he is worried about his standing. He asks his advisers with more regularity, “What do we need to do?” and grills his friends about “how is it looking?” while making public course corrections, the advisers said.

Over the past several weeks, he changed his stance on promoting masks, claiming that it was “patriotic” to wear one, and resuscitated the daily coronavirus news conference — both an acknowledgment that he needs to be seen as taking the virus seriously again.

Evidently, he’s also been told that he gives the strong impression that he doesn’t give a shit that more than 130,000 people have died and thousands more are clinging to life in hospitals. This isn’t a good look, and he has to make it clear that he understands what people are going through.

This is cited as the reason he has “resuscitated the daily coronavirus news conference.” But, of course, Trump can’t fake empathy, which was clear in announcement of the resumption:

“I think it’s a great way to get information out to the public as to where we are with the vaccines, with the therapeutics, and, generally speaking, where we are,” Trump told reporters Monday. “I’ll do it at 5 o’clock, like we were doing. We had a good slot. And a lot of people were watching.”

This isn’t new. Back in March, during the first iteration of his nightly coronavirus press conferences, Trump also bragged about his ratings. But eventually those briefings because so glaringly self-injurious from Trump, especially after he recommended people ingest disinfectant, that he was convinced to stop attending them. Then they were cancelled altogether, since the health experts’ information didn’t support the president’s desire to quickly reopen the economy. It’s important to remember that a key reason people were able to persuade Trump to abandon his highly-rated show is that they corresponded with a slump in his polls.

Yet, now he has revived the show sans health care experts in an effort to revive his poll numbers. That seems counterintuitive, but I suppose Trump can’t come up with a better option.

He held his first solo briefing on Tuesday and won some praise for taking a more somber and appropriate tone, but he still spread disinformation, and he actually got the most headline for something completely unrelated to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Donald Trump has bestowed his good wishes on Ghislaine Maxwell, who faces federal charges for allegedly enabling the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of minor girls.

At a press conference ostensibly to discuss the coronavirus crisis gripping the US on Tuesday, Trump took questions from reporters, one of whom asked him about Maxwell’s recent arrest and whether she might implicate some of the “powerful men” who formed part of Epstein’s jet set social circle.

“I don’t know – I haven’t really been following it too much. I just wish her well, frankly,” Trump responded. “I have met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well, whatever it is.”

Many people interpreted this as a signal to Ms. Maxwell that she shouldn’t divulge what she knows about the president’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, and I’m pretty sure that’s not what the Trump campaign was hoping he would accomplish in the briefing. He seems to only have nice things to say about acquaintances who have been arrested or are under criminal investigation. Well, he’s also fond of Confederate generals, racist sheriffs and war criminals, but he doesn’t have a kind word for anyone else.

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, and Trump’s new coronavirus briefings are not going to be any more informative, reassuring, or helpful to his poll numbers than the ones he abandoned in the Spring.

First, let’s look at some of the recent late night talk show hosts. Let’s start from Seth Meyers:

John Oliver on coronavirus conspiracy theories:

Steven Colbert has his take on current events:

Sorry, no new Sarah Cooper videos. We’ll have to wait a bit, but it’ll be worth it.

At some point, I’d like to shift back to music videos, etc., but just staying informed a bit and perhaps finding a moment to chuckle a bit at a very absurd situation is something anyone could probably use right now. And let’s face it, the last few months in particular have been off the chain crazy. I’ve seen some musical performers get pretty creative. If you’ve ever wondered what a zoom jam session would sound like (after some professional mixing gets done), I can safely say I have seen it, and I am here for it.

I think the nature of comments in this series of posts will be different for a while. I really don’t want to step on the toes of our blog’s host, as he’s got so much on his plate that pressing him on the matter is simply not something I’d do or advocate, but for the time being the days of posting multimedia (e.g., YouTube videos, Twitter posts, etc.) in the comments themselves are over (hopefully not permanently). That does change the character if this little section of the blog a bit. Last week, I experimented a whole bunch that I just got fed up. So it goes. Small problem in a world full of many bigger problems.

But if nothing else, we can always talk amongst ourselves, and maybe take a moment to decompress.

In the meantime, since the virtual jukebox is broken, drinks are on the house. Just put it on Booman’s tab. He won’t mind. Just don’t tell him I said that. It’s our little secret.

The following observation from New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is almost completely accurate:

“There is no strategy that this president could adopt, no policy choice that he could make, no tweet of himself in a mask that he could issue, that would fundamentally alter his political position. Trump is incapable of normal presidential action, and even if his aides and handlers concocted such a strategy, the man in charge would make sure it would fail … ”

“But that doesn’t make his defeat inevitable. It only means that to speculate about a Trump comeback is to necessarily speculate about possibilities that are outside the president’s control.”

I’d say it was 100 percent accurate, but there is always hacking and cheating to consider, and Trump would presumably have to sign off on that, wouldn’t he?

Perhaps not, actually, since he’s no more capable of concocting a sophisticated and successful plan to steal an election than he is of running a honest solvent business. If something like that were to work, it would be executed by people Trump doesn’t control.

Assuming there is an honest count, even taking into consideration all the typical voter suppression shenanigans of the Republicans, it’s almost impossible to conceive of Trump winning the popular vote. It’s also nearly as difficult to see him winning the Electoral College. He isn’t going to do anything to help himself, either, so the odds heavily favor a steady worsening of his position rather than any improvement.

But it’s conceivable that Joe Biden could stumble badly or that the mood of the country shifts hard against the Democrats. Douthat suggests that a sudden improvement in the coronavirus crisis combined with an uptick of social protest could provide this kind of mood change, and I think that’s correct. I also think Douthat is right to be skeptical that urban unrest would be as impactful as it was in the late-1960s, since white flight has already occurred in this instance. It’s probably true, too, that a magical disappearance of the virus through a vaccine or lower-than-expected herd immunity would probably have a calming effect, making widespread looting less likely.

Trump’s biggest problem is himself, but the Democrats knew what they were doing when they chose Biden to run against him. As Douthat says, “There still remains the difficulty that not enough Americans are afraid to vote for Joe Biden, notwithstanding the Trump campaign’s attempt to brand him as the candidate of Antifa.”

Choosing a likable candidate to run against Trump was the magic kryptonite missing from the 2016 election. It renders the president virtually powerless, and now he’s just hoping that Biden’s choice of a running mate will give him a batter opportunity to attack. Preventing that possibility must be part of the thinking behind Senator Tammy Duckworth as a potential pick. A multi-racial disabled woman who was wounded in the line of duty in Iraq is not someone who can be effectively mocked and ridiculed. More kryptonite.

Duckworth would fit a do-no-harm strategy, but Biden probably has the luxury of picking anyone he deems qualified and suitable as a partner. What should keep him up at night are the things he can’t control.

Try not to die  laughing or admit that I told you so:

The sheriff of Jacksonville, Fla., said he can’t provide security for the Republican National Convention because of a lack of clear plans, adequate funding and enough law enforcement officers.

“As we’re talking today, we are still not close to having some kind of plan that we can work with that makes me comfortable that we’re going to keep that event and the community safe,” Duval County Sheriff Mike Williams told POLITICO.

“It’s not my event to plan, but I can just tell you that what has been proposed in my opinion is not achievable right now … from a law enforcement standpoint, from a security standpoint.”

The controversy deals one of the biggest potential blows to Trump’s decision to hold an in-person nominating convention during a pandemic.

Back on June 29, I speculated that the GOP “convention” in Jacksonville was shaping up to be such a big humiliation for Trump that he might quit the race altogether just to avoid it. Perhaps the sheriff’s decision will give him the face-saving excuse to cancel the thing and remain in the campaign.

For starters, the guy is supposed to provide security for some of the most important people in the country and he can’t get Florida police departments to loan him the help he’d need. And then there’s the fact that Team Trump won’t give him any plans and put conditions on contracts that make them impossible to fill.

“We do need law enforcement officers and we’ve gotten commitments, but not to the level that we thought we needed. And a lot of that is people having virus concerns from their communities, and I understand that,” Williams said.

“But there’s a lot of things that need to happen: an event schedule nailed down, and being able to sign contracts and spend money so that we can prepare for this event. And none of that has happened yet,” he said. “So here we are inside of 40 days, and I haven’t really pulled the trigger on anything RNC-related when it comes to finances or contracts and so, you know, only related to security, mind you, nothing, nothing related to any of this.”

Not having enough time to pull this off is exactly what I expected to happen as soon as Trump impulsively moved the “convention” from Charlotte to Jacksonville. The reason he did it was obliterated when the COVID-19 outbreak overwhelmed Florida and it impossible to hold a massive indoor rally with no masks and no social distancing.

Now he can’t even tell the sheriff what venue they’re going to use.

So, it will take some serious lifting to get any kind of event organized and approved, and the sheriff is saying Trump should just forget about it because it can’t be done. This makes the president look like a colossal jackass but it’s still better than having a convention as lightly attended as his rally in Tulsa.

Here, for once, Trump is paying for his idiocy and incompetence instead of the rest of us.

The Roman Empire would have a better reputation if it had enjoyed more leaders like Augustus and Marcus Aurelius and fewer like Caligula and Nero, and someday a couple of thousand years from now there will be some blogger saying the same about America. Bad leadership matters, and George W. Bush and Donald Trump have provided the kind of leadership that leaves an indelible stain.

Sure, we have the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation and the “I Have a Dream” speech, but we also have this incredible interview that President Trump did with Chris Wallace of Fox News over the weekend. It’d be nice if all records of it were lost, much like the chapters of Tacitus’s Annals that no one can seem to find. As things stand, all the history books will say about us is that we were very foolish people led by a certifiable sociopathic moron.

This begins to become apparent in the interview’s first exchange where Mr. Wallace wants to talk about “the surge of the coronavirus across the country” only to be met with “Chris, that’s because we have great testing, because we have the best testing in the world.”

Never mind that is like Trump explaining he has syphilis because he took a very accurate test that told him he had syphilis, it’s not even true that our tests are better than the tests being used in other countries. But, if you’re going to read the transcript of this interview, you’re just going to have to accept that the president combines ignorance, dishonesty, bad faith, cruelty and indifference in ways never before seen in an American leader.

On the ignorance and bad faith fronts, this initial salvo was just a warm-up for a more comprehensive treatment of his Grand Theory of Testing. Despite its childlike simplicity, it’s actually hard to explain. Here’s his synopsis:

We go out and we look and then on the news — look if you go back to the news, all of your — even your wonderful competitors, you’ll see cases are up. Cases are up — many of those cases shouldn’t even be cases. Cases are up because we have the best testing in the world and we have the most testing.

So, here we see that we not only have the best testing but also the most testing, and this latter point is really the key. If, say, your spouse has COVID-19, it’s quite possible that she shouldn’t be counted. If for some reason we didn’t count her then not only would reporters not be able to say she has the virus, but she wouldn’t have it.

Oh, sure, maybe in some technical and meaningless sense she’d be infected, but many people “heal in a day” and “like 99.7 percent, people are going to get better.” The problem is that we shouldn’t be identifying these people and counting them as cases because it looks bad and they’re going to be just fine.

Of course, the fatality rate from COVID-19 is a lot higher than 0.3 percent, and the virus spreads most effectively from people who show few or no symptoms, so it’s absolutely critical that he find them, and testing is the only way to accomplish that.

What Trump is demonstrating here is a refusal to understand the most basic and crucial idea behind containing the spread of the virus. As I wrote in a subscription piece over the weekend, this is precisely why Mitch McConnell is proposing a lot of money for testing and contact tracing in his upcoming COVID-19 spending bill. It’s the model that has worked everywhere that the virus has been contained. But Trump opposes all of this spending, and the reason is that he’s convinced it will just lead to a higher official count of positive cases, without any benefit to himself.

It doesn’t help that Trump is wrong about every other aspect of the pandemic. It’s not just that we don’t have better tests. We haven’t done the most tests on a per capita basis. We certainly haven’t done the most contact tracing. He’s also completely wrong about the mortality rate we’re experiencing here in the United States.

When Wallace pointed out that we have the seventh highest mortality rate in the world, Trump insisted he was wrong and they had to stop the interview while the president tried to prove his case. In the end, he produced a document that excluded some key countries like Russia, but which still showed that American has far from the “number one low mortality rate” that he initially claimed.

Nonetheless, Trump insisted that we are “the envy of the world” and that the death count is down. Wallace became embarrassed for the president at this point and it led to the following exchange:

WALLACE: I’m, I’m going to do you a favor, because I’m sure a lot of people listening right now are going to say, “Trump, he tries to play it down, he tries to make it not being as serious as it is.”

TRUMP:  I don’t play it — I’m not playing — no, this is very serious.

WALLACE:  75,000 cases a day.

TRUMP:  Show me the death chart.

WALLACE:  Well, I don’t have the death chart.

TRUMP:  Well, the death chart is much more important.

WALLACE:  But I can tell you, the death chart is a thousand cases a day.

TRUMP:  Excuse me, it’s all too much, it shouldn’t be one case. It came from China. They should’ve never let it escape. They should’ve never let it out. But it is what it is. Take a look at Europe, take a look at the numbers in Europe. And by the way, they’re having cases.

WALLACE: I can tell you cases are 6,000 in the whole European Union.

TRUMP:  They don’t test. They don’t test.

WALLACE:  Is it possible that they don’t have the virus as badly as we do?

TRUMP:  It’s possible that they don’t test, that’s what’s possible. We find cases and many of those cases heal automatically. We’re finding — in a way, we’re creating trouble. Certainly, we are creating trouble for the fake news to come along and say, “Oh, we have more cases.”

So, that is the totality of Trump’s Grand Theory of Testing. That’s why he says he’ll veto any bill that provides money for testing and tracing.

But the interview did more than display his infinite stupidity and bad faith, it also put on a remarkable display of his racism. It began with Trump asserting that Joe Biden wants to defund the police, to which Chris Wallace replied, “No, sir, he does not.” They then shut down the interview a second time while Trump tried and failed to prove his talking point. In an effort to recover, Trump began a new riff, “when people proudly have their Confederate flags, they’re not talking about racism. They love their flag, it represents the south, they like the south.” When asked if Black people have some justification in being concerned that they’re on the receiving end of a disproportionate number of violent acts by police, Trump’s reply was one for the ages:

TRUMP: I mean, many, many whites are killed. I hate the sad – but this is going on for decades. This is going on for a long time, long before I got here. You know, if you look at what’s gone on in Portland, those are anarchists and we’ve taken a very tough stand. If we didn’t take a stand in Portland, you know we’ve arrested many of these leaders. If we didn’t take that stand, right now you would have a problem like you, you – they were going to lose Portland. So let’s see…

To summarize: Black people have no reason to be protesting and that’s why he sent secret police to Oregon to arrest anarchists.

As for military bases named after Confederate heroes, Trump said “I don’t care what the military says. I do – I’m supposed to make the decision. Fort Bragg is a big deal…We’re going to name it after the Reverend Al Sharpton?”

The rest of answer was par for the course, with him first assuring us that the people agree with him before saying the polls are inaccurate and finally that he was surprised to see a survey where 64 percent of the people disagree with him but that he doesn’t care.

In keeping with his indifference to taking popular positions, he hasn’t changed his position on school reopening one bit. For some reason, this first came up as a word salad non sequitur to a question about why the hell he is so resistant to mask-wearing.

Everybody who is saying don’t wear a mask – all of sudden everybody’s got to wear a mask, and as you know masks cause problems, too. With that being said, I’m a believer in masks. I think masks are good.

But I leave it up to the governors. Many of the governors are changing. They’re more mask into – they like the concept of masks, but some of them don’t agree. I do say this – schools have to open…

…when they don’t open their schools. We’re not going to fund them. We’re not going to give them money if they’re not going to school. If they don’t open.

Wallace objected that it would be a better idea to spend money on making schools safer than to withhold funding that mostly goes to needy students. This led Trump to once again show his unfamiliarity with how viruses spread.

TRUMP: Chris, let the schools open. Do you ever see the statistics on young people below the age of 18? The state of New Jersey had thousands of deaths.

Of all of these thousands, one person below the age of 18 – in the entire state – one person and that was a person that had, I believe he said diabetes.

The actual number is two children, both of whom were under five, but New Jersey has had more than 4,700 documented infections in people under the age of 18. Those 4,700 children have bus drivers and lunch ladies and teachers and parents and grandparents. This matters because a new study from South Korea that finds children “between the ages of 10 and 19 can spread the virus at least as well as adults do.”

For some reason, Trump doesn’t care about this and believes that reopening schools will work out better for him than reopening the nation’s state economies did. But parents care. Teachers care. Voters will care.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of the humiliation contained in this interview. There is also a discussion of how difficult it is to identify a picture of an elephant or count backwards from 100 by seven. There is a debate about Joe Biden’s “senility” and ability to do similarly tough interviews on Fox News. There’s an accusation that the observant Catholic Joe Biden will “end religion.” There are the obligatory riffs on the “the Russia hoax,  “the Mueller scam” and the myth that you can cover pre-existing conditions without an individual mandate. There is also another insistence that the election will be rigged against him through vote-by-mail and that he may not accept the results.

Everything Trump said throughout the hour was wrong, and often catastrophically wrong. For whatever combination of reasons, he is opposed to doing all the things that would hold down the COVID-19 death count and help this country get back to normal.

Mitch McConnell now has to fight him on these fronts as he tries to pass a coronavirus bill that he hopes will save his Senate majority. No one can escape this vortex of stupidity and evil. It’s so bad that millennia from now people will look back and be immensely unimpressed with what became of the American experiment.