Cagle World

Let’s begin today with Joe Biden, who is far too often trumped by the tumultuous roar of the MAGA train wreck. Biden, who currently leads Trump by nine points nationally and by as many as five points in Texas (Texas!), had a few choice things to say about the Trump regime’s treacherous efforts to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The presumptive Democratic nominee tweeted: “Donald Trump needs to spend less time playing golf and more time listening to experts like Dr. Fauci.” And the Biden campaign said: “The president’s disgusting attempt to pass the buck by blaming the top infectious disease expert in the country – whose advice he repeatedly ignored and Joe Biden consistently implored him to take – is yet another horrible and revealing failure of leadership as the tragic death toll continues to needlessly grow.”

Trump’s cultists will surely view those complaints as “partisan,” but let us recall how the senior George Bush responded, during a presidential debate in 1988, when he was asked to name some of his heroes: “I think of Dr. Fauci…He’s a very fine researcher – top doctor at the National Institute of Health – working hard doing something about research on this disease of AIDS.” And indeed he was, while serving the first of six presidents – of both parties.

The problem now is Fauci serves an anti-science ignoramus who can’t abide anyone who outshines him in the public eye, and therefore it was inevitable that he would be marginalized and kept off TV. A national poll recently reported that 67 percent of Americans trust Fauci to deliver “accurate information” about the pandemic, while only 26 percent trust Trump. Nobody who tells the truth – not Alexander Vindman, or James Mattis, or Marie Yovanovich – can breathe free in Trump’s fetid swamp.

Fauci recently told the Financial Times, “I have a reputation, as you probably figured out, of speaking the truth at all times and not sugar-coating things.” No wonder Trump is trying to put him out to pasture.

It does seem foolish, as a re-election strategy, to attack the nation’s top infectious expert in the midst of a roaring pandemic. But this hapless husk of a regime, plagued by a mounting death toll and horrified at the prospect of defeat, has gone off the deep end. In the words of conservative commentator Michael Gerson, who served in the second Bush White House, the baseless assault on Fauci “indicates an administration so far gone in rage, bitterness and paranoia that it can no longer be trusted to preserve American lives.”

Lest we forget, Fauci started to draw heat way back in March, when he was already warning about the dangers of “community spread.” Trump, at the time, was already in sugar-coat mode, dreaming of packed churches on Easter Sunday, and his fans on the rabid right were already circulating the hashtag #faucifraud.

So what we’re seeing now is merely an acceleration of the MAGA rage against reality. Fauci, assessing the pandemic, is trying to warn us that “we haven’t even begun to see the end of it yet,” even as Trump lied last Friday that “we are winning the war.” But what about the titanic spikes in Texas and Arizona, spikes triggered by the insane decision (goaded by Trump) to reopen too early? No problem at all, according to Trump: “They’re going to have it under control very quickly.”

But there’s one cure for the virus of ignorance:

Just ignore Trump and heed Fauci. A landslide share of Americans are doing that already.

Technically, Trump can’t even fire Fauci, at least not without waging a protracted bureaucratic battle that will backfire against the guy whose credibility outside the cult is already nil. Trump can’t thwart Fauci’s impulse to speak truth to power – or stop Americans from listening.

Trump’s sole motive is selfish – to stay in office and out of jail. Fauci’s sole motive is selfless – to keep Americans alive and healthy. Game over.

Of all the stupid things Trump has said and done, fingering Fauci as a fall guy is surely in the top tier.

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Can we finally nix the myth that what this nation needs is a businessman who will “run America like a business”? If mining magnate Herbert Hoover wasn’t sufficient evidence, bankrupt casino hack Donald Trump should be the clincher.

In Florida the other day, a retired banker named John Dudley told CNN why he, like so many other seniors, will not vote for Trump a second time. In his words, Trump “blew it. We were so excited in the beginning. A businessman to run our country like a business, and it hasn’t happened.”

Enough, already, with the nonsensical business-porn! Hoover was the only previous president who’d made his entire living by meeting a business payroll, but he had no leadership instincts and his one-term tenure during the Great Depression was so disastrous that the Republicans got exiled from the White House for the ensuing 20 years.

Here’s a modest insight that should be self-evident: Running a business is very different from running a country – especially when the businessman in question is a well-documented grifter with no social skills.

A lot of people have a knee-jerk antipathy toward “politicians.” In truth, politicians cajole and persuade and make the sausage that grinds governance. The smart ones intuit the national mood and move accordingly. The smart ones know that government, at its best, acts in the public interest, and that people pine for it in times of crisis.

Four years too late, people like that retired Florida banker have woken up. There was scads of evidence in 2016 that if Trump were to run America the way he’d been running his business, he’d run us into the ground. But people didn’t bother to pay attention. They ignored what was patently obvious – that this so-called business “closer” couldn’t close a window if someone showed him the latch.

How could Trump “run America like a business” if he couldn’t even make money running casinos? It was a matter of public record that he’d filed for bankruptcy six times – in 1991, 1992, 2004, and 2009 – a fact that was well aired during the 2016 presidential debates. The Wall Street Journal had reported in detail that none of the U.S. banks would loan him a dime. And it was also well known that, in Atlantic City, Trump had fled his serial failures by stiffing contractors, creditors, and his partners.

It was also common knowledge – or should have been – that Trump the businessman was tight with the mob. He was caught on video partying with mobster Robert LiButti, and in 1991 New Jersey regulators fined a Trump casino $200,000 for indulging LiButti’s demand that all African Americans and women be removed from his gaming tables.

But, alas, too many voters paid no attention, bedazzled as they were by his smoke and mirrors. Granted, there was no pandemic on the horizon (although the Obama administration, mindful of the possibility, had assembled a team that Trump subsequently fired). But there was not a scintilla of evidence prior to the election that Trump, having spent zero minutes in public service, knew or cared about government rules, norms, or constitutional restraints – or understood anything about the difficult but imperative art of governance.

And now we’re sowing the whirlwind, with more than 130,000 dead. He’s fleeing the pandemic the way he fled his business wreckage in Atlantic City, leaving others holding the bag.

A few points of contrast: Franklin D. Roosevelt pulled us out of the Great Depression and won a world war – and he was never a businessman. Twenty three million new jobs were created during Bill Clinton’s tenure – and he was never a businessman. Barack Obama pulled us out of the Great Recession, with a jobless rate as low as 4.7 percent – and he was never a businessman. If you catch my drift.

So let’s bid goodbye, once and for all, to the deified businessman model. Indeed, the warning signs about Trump were evident 33 years ago, in this burst of prose: “You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.”

So said Trump, in “The Art of the Deal.”

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Donald Trump spent Wednesday tweeting about Fox and Friends‘ TV ratings and complaining about “fake news.” Those were safe topics, well within his bunkered comfort zone – because he certainly wasn’t going to tweet about his latest political humiliation.

It happened Tuesday night in deep red Oklahoma – the second time in recent weeks that Oklahoma has humiliated him (the first time, you’ll recall, was when he was greeted by a two-thirds empty arena in Tulsa). At a time when Trump is trying to kill Obamacare in the U.S. Supreme Court, voters in the state decided to enshrine an expansion of Obamacare in the state Constitution.

It’s amazing what can happen when knee-jerk ideological hatred of Obama’s signature achievement gets trumped by the facts of real life. When people desperately need health insurance, they’ll seek out what’s available. And if red-state voters feel it’s imperative to thumb their nose at Trump – and, in Oklahoma, to defy resistant Republican state lawmakers – they’re willing to do it.

Under Obamacare, states can cover low-income citizens via an expansion of Medicaid. But most states run by Republicans have predictably refused to approve that expansion. So Tuesday night, Oklahoma became the fifth Republican-run state (joining Maine, Nebraska, Utah, and Idaho) to take the decision away from the stonewalling lawmakers and endorse Obamacare expansion at the ballot box.

“In an election year that will be focused on health care, Oklahomans just delivered the first big win,” said Jonathan Schleifer, executive director of The Fairness Project, which helped the ballot campaign. “Voters in a deep red state became the first in the country to put Medicaid expansion in their state constitution to protect it. Americans are tired of politicians ignoring the problem or worse, trying to take their health care away. Americans aren’t going to stand for that type of approach anymore.”

Trump doesn’t have many moves left, and if he thinks his umpteenth attempt to kill Obamacare is a political winner that will reverse his plummet, then he clearly doesn’t know how to read tea leaves.

Ten years after Obamacare’s passage, the law that covers 20 million people is more popular than ever. Indeed, the historic 2018 blue wave that drowned the House Republicans was powered in swing districts by support for Obamacare. Trump and the GOP fatally ignored what the polls were telling them.

And now, as evidenced by the Oklahoma results, even the majority of voters in that conservative bastion recognize the value of covering 200,000 impoverished citizens. In the midst of a national health emergency, scary “big government” suddenly seems essential. Which is what happens when ideology collides with reality.

One of Oklahoma’s Yes voters, Christine McIntyre, summed it up perfectly while speaking to a local reporter: “Part of me would vote ‘No,’ but I have an adult son (who) makes borderline poverty income that doesn’t qualify for Medicaid, and he doesn’t have health insurance, and because he doesn’t have health insurance, it affects his family, and upsets me. So, I voted for it even though personally, I probably wouldn’t have.”

The new Oklahoma constitutional amendment requires the resistant Republican governor and Republican lawmakers to expand Obamacare by next summer. That leaves only 13 states in the “No” camp – which is a shame for the folks who live there, because studies show that the mortality rate is lower in the states that have expanded Obamacare.

You’ll undoubtedly be shocked to learn that the naysaying 13 were all red states in the 2016 presidential race. But we’ll see what happens on Aug. 4 in red Missouri, which will vote that day on whether to enshrine Obamacare expansion in that state’s constitution as well.

Trump won Missouri last time by 18 points, but this time people’s lives hang in the balance. Oklahoma just demonstrated how nuts it is to imperil people’s coverage in the midst of a pandemic. Health care is on the ballot this summer, and the stakes could not be higher.

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Oh, so now he tells us.

John Bolton is telling us damning stuff about Trump that we already knew – and he’s doing it five months too late. Timing is everything in life and politics, and this guy’s could not be worse.

That’s not to say that the morsels in his long-awaited memoir aren’t worth binging and purging. Trump, for instance, is so ignorant that he doesn’t know Finland and Russia are separate nations and that Britain is a nuclear power. But we’ve long known that Trump is ignorant.

According to Bolton – veteran conservative, ex-national security adviser, and Fox News contributor – Trump “second-guessed people’s motives, saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run a White House, let alone the huge federal government.”

Trump sucks up shamelessly to brutal dictators – for instance, by telling Chinese leader Xi Jinping that he should build concentration camps and incarcerate the Muslims who live in a northwest province. And in a reference to Trump’s subservience to Vladimir Putin, Bolton writes that “Putin had to be laughing uproariously at what he had gotten away with” at the infamous Helsinki summit. But we’ve long known that Trump is an authoritarian groupie.

Trump hates free and independent journalists so much that he calls them “scumbags” and believes, according to Bolton, that they should be jailed or even executed for using anonymous sources. But we’ve long known that Trump hates the free and independent press.

Trump’s top aides mercilessly mock him behind his back – like the time, according to Bolton, when Trump was being rolled by North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Secretary of State passed Bolton a note critiquing their boss: “He is so full of s—-.” But we’ve long known that Trump’s people disparage him as unfit and full of it.

Trump wants foreign leaders to help him win his elections. Bolton saw him “pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win,” begging the Chinese leader to buy American soybeans and wheat so that Trump could win the farm states in 2020. But we’ve long known Trump twists American foreign policy to serve his personal political needs.

And with respect to that impeachment probe, Bolton has confirmed the damning details of Trump’s illegal behavior toward Ukraine – withholding congressionally-mandated military aid until Ukraine supplied phony political dirt that might help Trump win re-election. According to Bolton, Trump told him that “he wasn’t in favor of sending them anything until all…materials related to (Hillary) Clinton and (Joe) Biden had been turned over” – and that Trump resisted as many as 10 pleas, from Bolton and Defense chief Mark Esper, to release the military aid.

It would’ve been nice if Bolton had deigned to share his Ukraine memories under oath during the impeachment probe. He could’ve come forward and agreed to testify when the impeachment managers sought his help. But he refused.

Instead, he decided to turn a buck by saving it all for his book. Who knows, if he had testified, maybe one or two spineless Senate Republicans might’ve been moved to throw Trump out of office.
I’m especially loath to buy the book because of this passage: “Had Democratic impeachment advocates not been so obsessed with their Ukraine blitzkrieg in 2019, had they taken the time to inquire more systematically about Trump’s behavior across his entire foreign policy, the impeachment outcome might well have been different.”

Bolton was best positioned, by dint of his insider status, to help the impeachment probers craft a more sweeping indictment of Trump’s behavior – and yet he refused to help when he was most needed. What a patriot.

There’s an upside, however. Bolton’s memoir feeds fresh ammo to his GOP brethren – at The Lincoln Project, Republican Voters Against Trump, and Right Side PAC – who are working hard to take Trump down. Every little bit helps.

And every time Trump opens his mouth these days, he runs an attack ad against himself. When he was asked Wednesday to comment about our 2.1 million confirmed COVID cases (spiking right now in southern and western states) and our 118,000 deaths, here’s what Trump said:

“If you look, the numbers are very minuscule compared to what it was. It’s dying out.”

Top that, John Bolton!

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

The good news for America is that Donald Trump is crashing his presidency the same way he bankrupted casinos, with recent polls showing him significantly trailing Joe Biden. His own advisers reportedly say that his internal numbers are “brutal.”

The bad news for America – potentially – is that Trump may have found a life preserver to which he can cling, and perhaps slow his risk of being swept away.

Here’s what Trump said the other day in Maine: “(Protestors) are saying ‘defund the police.’ Defund. Think of it. When I saw it, I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘They say, ‘We don’t want to have any police.’ You don’t want any police?”

“Defund the police” – formerly a cri de coeur in certain activist and academic circles; now painted on a street near the White House – is a bold slogan that’s potential grist for Trumpist demagoguery. Perhaps Trump’s efforts will ultimately fail, given his horrific performance in office, but Biden and the Democrats may need to be careful nonetheless, lest they be tarred as “soft on crime” – one of the GOP’s more durable smear tactics.

When lawmakers start talking about “defunding” a program, it generally means reducing the program’s money to zero. But “defund the police” is not about magically abolishing all police. As Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza said Sunday on Meet the Press, it’s about shifting priorities: “When we talk about defunding the police, what we’re saying is, invest in the resources that our communities need…What we do need is increased funding for housing, we need increased funding for education, we need increased funding for the quality-of-life communities that are over-policed and over-surveilled.”

But fortunately for Trump and his enablers, a three-word slogan can be twisted and caricatured and exaggerated and distorted all kinds of ways, for the purpose of freaking people out. Hence this Trump tweet, posted Sunday: “Sleepy Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats want to ‘DEFUND THE POLICE’. I want great and well paid LAW ENFORCEMENT. I want LAW & ORDER!” And this one: “Not only will Sleepy Joe Biden DEFUND THE POLICE, but he will DEFUND OUR MILITARY!”

Naturally, Trump is lying – Biden is opposed to defunding the police and the military – but Trump may have some room to maneuver. He can demand that Biden denounce the slogan and endorse our men and women in blue. If Biden does denounce the slogan, maybe he’d alienate progressives in his ranks. Alternatively, if he stands with the activists, maybe he’d tick off the majority of Americans – 71 percent – who support their local police departments.

As a slogan, “defund the police” is ripe for right-wing political mischief. Even though it’s generally about shifting some money from police (especially the purchase of military hardware) to a community’s basic human needs, Trump and his enablers will say it’s all about abolishing the police. Monday on MSNBC, the Rev. Al Sharpton admitted that “the slogan may be misleading without interpretation.”

Which means that, politically speaking, is not a good slogan. Not if you have to keep explaining it.

But here’s a good attempt to explain it, courtesy of Georgetown University law professor (and police reform expert) Christy Lopez:

“For most proponents, ‘defunding the police’ does not mean zeroing out budgets for public safety, and police abolition does not mean that police will disappear overnight – or perhaps ever. Defunding the police means shrinking the scope of police responsibilities and shifting most of what government does to keep us safe to entities that are better equipped to meet that need. It means investing more in mental-health care and housing, and expanding the use of community mediation and violence interruption programs…It means recognizing that criminalizing addiction and poverty, making 10 million arrests per year and mass incarceration have not provided the public safety we want and never will.”

In all likelihood, Biden will stay broadly within those parameters. At this point – amidst a pandemic, an economic depression, and widespread civic unrest – the burden is on a failed, lawless president to leverage “law and order” to his benefit. And that’s the good news.

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Timothy Klausutis, an innocent American who was despicably victimized on social media this month by Donald Trump, has written an extraordinary letter to the CEO of Twitter. This excerpt will bring you up to speed:

“Nearly 19 years ago, my wife, who had an undiagnosed heart condition, fell and hit her head on her desk at work. She was found dead the next morning… President Trump on Tuesday (May 12) tweeted to his 80 million followers, alluding to the repeatedly debunked falsehood that my wife was murdered by her boss, former U.S. Rep Joseph Scarborough… the president of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him – the memory of my dead wife – and perverted it for perceived political gain.”

Trump, as part of his ongoing war against the MSNBC host, has baselessy tweeted twice that Scarborough is a criminal on the loose. Yes, it’s just another day at the office for the pandemic president, dragging an innocent family through the mud is his way of making America great again.

This dilemma isn’t new – two years ago, there was a hue and cry over his all-caps tweet threatening Iran with nuclear annihilation (“CONSEQUENCES THE LIKE OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE”). Last fall, Sen. Kamala Harris said Trump should be thrown off Twitter for trying to intimidate witnesses in the impeachment probe.

But soiling an innocent dead woman’s memory, and reigniting her family’s grief, would seem to (finally) be a bridge too far.

Timothy Klausitus, in his letter to Twitter boss Jack Dorsey, merely requested that Trump’s tweets about his family be deleted. He didn’t demand that Twitter kick Trump off the platform – but other critics certainly have. Eric Boehlert, a media and political commentator, wrote the other day: “Trump should be banned. Period. Dumping Trump from Twitter would rob Trump of a critical communications platform. It would also go a long way to restoring some dignity to our public dialogue.”

That seems (at first glance) like a great feel-good solution. Twitter, in its broad terms of service, threatens to cancel the accounts of anyone who threatens other people. Klausitus points out, in his letter to Dorsey, that “an ordinary user like me would be banished from the platform” for concocting a murder charge and traumatizing an innocent family.

But Twitter indulges Trump’s serial smears and lies – because, according to the terms of service, presidents are basically allowed to say whatever they want. Here’s the policy: “Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information people should be able to see.” A leader’s tweets, by definition, have a “clear public interest value.”

Hang on…Does lying about Lori Klausitus’ death, and causing her husband renewed pain and suffering, have “public interest value”? Does spreading a conspiracy theory about Scarborough qualify as “important information”? Perhaps that buttresses the case for throwing Trump off Twitter. This is not a freedom of speech issue, Boehlert says, because Twitter is a privately held, and “private companies are well within their rights to deny service to customers who chronically fail to follow the rules of conduct.”

I wish I could agree. But, philosophically, I tend to believe that the more information we have as citizens, the better off we are – even if the guy in charge happens to be the most subhuman specimen to ever hold office.

My other concern about an outright ban is purely pragmatic. If Dorsey were to boot Trump from the platform, the aggrieved demagogue would exploit it to the max – and confirm the MAGA cult’s worst paranoia about a Big Tech censorship conspiracy. Trump would merely amp the issue on other social media platforms and use it to gin up his base for the November election.

Perhaps the best solution, admittedly unsatisfying, is for Twitter to establish standards by which it can police the most detestable Trump tweets. Granted, the company would require an army of fact-checkers, but surely, at minimum, there must be a way to flag the tweets that victimize innocent bystanders like the Klausitus family.

As Timothy said in his letter to Dorsey, “I would also ask that you consider Lori’s niece and two nephews who will eventually come across this filth in the future. They have never met their Aunt and it pains me to think they would ever have to ‘learn’ about her this way. My wife deserves better.”

As do we.

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

The Trump-fueled pandemic has already claimed 94,000 American lives. And six months from now, the pandemic-fueled election may well wreak havoc with what’s left of American democracy.

Every time Trump opens his big mouth, that dire November scenario seems more likely. As more states prepare for universal mail balloting – understandably, they don’t want citizens to risk their health by voting in person – Trump is becoming more unhinged. He clearly fears he’ll lose if mail balloting expands the size of the electorate. 

Voting should take place in person, Trump riffed, on Wednesday as opposed to “when they send you a pile of stuff and you send it back.” Voting by mail is “a very dangerous thing. They’re subject to massive fraud…tremendous illegality and fraud…It’s not a fair situation…A lot of things can happen…Common sense tells you massive manipulation can take place.”

Trump, of course, is the last person who should be talking about “common sense.” The actual facts prove that mail ballot fraud is exceedingly rare. Hundreds of millions of votes were cast nationwide between 2000 and 2012, with five states (including Republican Utah) conducting virtually all-mail elections, yet the total of nationwide prosecutions for mail ballot fraud was 491. As two voting experts at the Brennan Center for Justice concluded after crunching the data, “It is more likely for an American to be struck by lightning than to commit mail voting fraud.”

Trump’s tweets about Michigan and Nevada were also predictably packed with lies. The Michigan secretary of state has sent mail ballot applications to all registered voters, which Trump said was “done illegally.” In truth, the voters of Michigan, in a 2018 referendum, approved an amendment to the state constitution that gives everyone the right to vote by mail.

Trump tried the same scam with Nevada, fuming in his tweet that Nevada’s secretary of state has sent out “illegal vote by mail ballots” – whereas, in truth, Nevada law clearly states that citizens can vote by mail for any reason.

Trump somehow neglected to denounce Georgia, Iowa, Nebraska and West Virginia – four other states that are mailing ballots to all registered voters. Gee. Why isn’t Trump mad at them too? Perhaps (just a wild guess) it’s because those are red states where his re-election prospects are decent anyway – unlike in Michigan (which he won in 2016 by a razor-thin margin and is now trailing Joe Biden) and blue-trending Nevada (which he lost in 2016 by only three points, and is now trailing Biden).

He’s so panicked about Michigan and Nevada that he threatened to withhold congressionally-mandated money from both states. That action would be unconstitutional, because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that only Congress can impose conditions on a state’s receipt of federal money – before a state agrees to take the money.

And if Trump’s threat sounds vaguely familiar – remember when he threatened to withhold promised military aid to Ukraine unless Ukraine helped him rig the 2020 election against Biden? The people who rightly impeached Trump last winter warned that if he was let off the hook he’d pull the same crap again. Presto!

So what do Trump’s latest tirades tell us? Basically, that he’s terrified of losing in November. So he’s clearly trying to lay the groundwork for denying defeat. The big danger for our democracy – especially if the national vote count is slow, thanks to the surge of mail ballots – is that his cultists will take up the cause.

“Democracy depends upon the losers of an election accepting the election results as legitimate and agreeing to regroup to fight to regain political power in the next election,” Rick Hansen, one of the nation’s top ballot experts, wrote in the Washington Post. “If large numbers of voters believe the winning side cheated in elections, we could have unrest and resistance to lawful government orders.”

I’m reminded of the famous scene in Citizen Kane, when the demagogic mogul faced an electoral defeat, and his newspaper spun the loss with a headline it had prepared in advance: FRAUD AT POLLS! 

That was funny in reel life. It would be worse than tragic in real life

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Trump’s pathetic competitive obsession with his predecessor knows no bounds, and now that his deadly failures are being fully exposed, he actually thinks he can distract the public with yet another lie about the guy who easily tops him as a president and as a man.

With 80,000 Americans dead and no plan to staunch the pandemic, America’s Mortician went wild on Mother’s Day with a fake charge that President Obama committed “the biggest political crime in American history by far” when he (supposedly) conspired to rig the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton by ginning up a Trump-Russia investigation.

Trump had previewed his new con two days earlier, on Fox & Friends: “If anyone thinks that (Obama) and Sleepy Joe didn’t know what was going on, they have another thing coming.”

It’s a waste of time to fact-check that rubbish, because that would be playing Trump’s game. We all know what Russia did in 2016 and which candidate it boosted – as a Republican-led Senate report recently confirmed yet again. And we all know that Obama’s FBI director publicly intervened in the 11th hour of the campaign against Hillary, without telling voters that the bureau was also probing Trump-Russia. And Trump’s lies about Obama have been repeatedly shredded, from the birthplace lie that Trump finally admitted to the scurrilous lie about an Obama wiretap at Trump Tower.

Sorry for all that foreplay. But I needed to set the stage for what happened Monday at Trump’s latest propaganda briefing. After he finished boasting about all the great virus testing that America is doing (another lie), he took a question from Philip Rucker of The Washington Post, who asked what crime exactly he was accusing Obama of committing.

Accusing one’s predecessor of a crime is a fairly serious matter. And since Trump touted himself last Friday as our “chief law enforcement officer,” it’s reasonable to ask what crime he thinks Obama committed. What’s your answer, Officer Trump?

“Uh, Obamagate! It’s been going on for a long time, it’s been going on from before I even got elected, it’s a disgrace that it happened and if you look at what’s been gone on and if you look at now all of this information that’s being released and from what I understand that’s only the beginning. Some terrible things happened and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again and you’ll be seeing what’s going on over the coming weeks and I wish you’d write honestly about it but unfortunately you choose not to – “

That word salad had less nutrition than a bag of potato chips. Rucker waited patiently until the agitprop was over. Then he repeated his question:

“What is the crime, exactly? That you’re accusing him of?”

Trump, apparently drawing on his degree from the Trump University School of Law, responded with this scholarly reading of the U.S. criminal code:

“You know what the crime is, the crime is very obvious to everybody.”

And that was it. Trump’s latest con probably clicks with his cultists, who still believe whatever he says (“Obamagate makes Watergate look small time”), but this is not 2016 anymore. Now he has a track record, and it’s strewed with the bodies of tens of thousands of people who’d still be alive if he hadn’t ignored his winter intelligence briefings; if he hadn’t spent two crucial months lying and living in denial – and many more will die as he pushes to reopen a nation before mass testing is ready. No wonder Obama is calling Trump’s pandemic response “an absolute chaotic disaster.”

But if Trump can’t successfully use Obama to distract us from his failures, perhaps he can try someone else. Maybe Joe Scarborough would work! The host of “Morning Joe” has been holding Trump accountable, so why not baselessly accuse Joe of something serious? Nineteen years ago, a Scarborough staffer died from a heart ailment. Hence, this new Trump tweet:

“When will they open a Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida. Did he get away with murder? Some people think so. Why did he leave Congress so quietly and quickly? Isn’t it obvious? What’s happening now? A total nut job!”

Obama got off easy. At least this time, Trump specified a crime.

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

There are many things I love about my country. But “rugged individualism,” when taken to its extreme, does not make my list. Nor does religious zealotry, when its practice threatens the welfare of other people.

For instance, here’s Nino Vitale, a Republican state representative in Ohio, explaining why he refuses to wear a face mask during the pandemic: “I will not wear a mask. That’s the image of God right there, and I want to see it in my brothers and sisters…No one is stopping anybody from wearing a face mask. But quite frankly everyone else’s freedom ends at the tip of my nose. You’re not going to tell me what to do.”

And here’s Cheryl K. Chumley, the online opinion editor at the conservative Washington Times: Mask requirements are “a blatant violation of an individual’s right to choose – of an individual’s right to self-govern.” Mask requirements are fine “in a socialist country. In an authoritarian society. In a communist, dictatorial, tyrannical kind of country. But this is America.”

Yeah, that’s America all right – the worst of America. “We’re all in this together” is the slogan du jour that speaks to the best of America, but the sadly predictable truth is that millions don’t share that communitarian spirit. Your freedom to stay healthy ends at Vitale’s nose. Chumley thinks the rest of us are “mask nazis.” And Fox News’ Laura Ingraham says that masks are an elitist plot to impose “suppression of free thought” and “sell” the message that “you are not back to normal, not even close.”

Mask defiance has become the latest weapon in the polarized culture war. Not even a deadly health crisis can bring us together anymore. Marching mask-free for the freedom to get a manicure is deemed by many to be more important than the well-documented reality of further contagion. Going mask-free is the new “don’t tread on me.” If more people die on the altar of others’ selfishness, well, I guess that’s the price of freedom.

The anti-mask impulse is partly ideological, a new, lethal way to “own the libs.” Conservative commentator Rob Dreher admits, “It’s hard to deny that many conservatives have reacted to COVID-19 more out of ideology and fact.” And it’s a new way to march in lockstep with Trump, who this week demonstrated his hostility to masks by refusing to wear one while visiting a mask factory. (The factory’s PA system blasted Live and Let Die. As Jimmy Kimmel tweeted, “I can think of no better metaphor for this presidency.”)

But ideology aside, it’s also clear that masks are widely viewed as a sign of “weakness.” Why do you suppose Mike Pence refused to wear a mask while visiting the Mayo Clinic, even though Mayo requires all visitors to wear one, and even though everyone Pence met was masked? Because he didn’t want Trump, or Trump’s cult, to think he was “weak.”

Trump didn’t create the selfish strain in the American character, or the anti-expertise strain, or the God-wants-to-see-my-face strain, or the pigheaded macho strain, but the tone he’s setting is self-evidently toxic. This paragraph, in a new Associated Press story, says it all:

“White House aides say the president hasn’t told them not to wear (masks), but few do. Some Republican allies have asked Trump’s campaign how it would be viewed by the White House if they were spotted wearing a mask.”

That’s pathetic.

Tom Nichols, a national security professor at the U.S. Naval War College, wrote a great Twitter thread this week about why the mask-haters behave as they do: “It’s a child-like understanding of autonomy…Yelling ‘No!’ is empowering, but only in the sense (that) children understand power: The raw ability to defy someone else. It’s not in any way about citizenship, which is how adults balance group obligation and individual freedom…Citizens are adults, and we have to get through this despite the overgrown children among us.”

But can we do that if we’re all not in this together?

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

I get why everyone has been so focused on Trump’s recent insanity spasm about injecting bleach. But we need to remember these riffs and fulminations are ultimately distractions from the substantive havoc he continues to wreak. At a time when we need good government most – with over 61,000 dead and counting – the Trump virus is claiming its own body count. Often without us noticing.

Case in point: Rick Bright. If you’re wondering who that is, then I’ve made my point.

In the parlance of journalism, Bright was basically a “one-day story.” Until last week, he was a key government scientist tasked with finding credible cures for COVID-19. As a high-ranking preparedness official at the Department of Health and Human Services, with a doctorate in immunology and a career devoted to vaccine development, Bright was the top guy at BARDA – the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. He’d run that federal agency for the last four years.

Until last Tuesday, when he was summarily ousted.

No need to guess why. Bright gave us the reason, in a public statement: “Specifically, and contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit…I also resisted efforts to fund potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections.”

Translation: He was fired because he refused to endorse the quack-in-chief’s fake miracle potion. The career scientist disagreed with Trump’s recent podium riff (“hydroxychloroquine, try it if you like…it’ll be wonderful, it’ll be so beautiful”), so therefore, it’s bye bye scientist.

The Trump regime claims that Bright was fired because he was too “confrontational.” Yeah, sure. What’s important to remember is that Bright is only the latest casualty. Trump has been warring on government scientists since the dawn of his reign – more than 1,600 reportedly exited in the first two years – and it’s only now, with Americans’ lives hanging in the balance, that these purges are beginning to get the attention they deserve.

You almost have to feel sorry for Dr. Deborah Birx, the public health expert on Trump’s coronavirus task force. She’s trying to balance fealty to science with fealty to dear leader, and it ain’t easy.

Clearly, Birx doesn’t want to wind up like Bright – or Nancy Messonnier. Remember her? It almost seems like ancient history that the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Control was yanked from her post after stating publicly on Feb. 25 that COVID-19 was coming and that Americans should prepare for “significant disruptions” to their daily lives. Trump was furious about that – he was still living in fantasyland on Feb. 25 – so it was bye bye, Messonnier.

Last week, when Trump was asked about Bright’s firing, he played dumb: “I never heard of (Bright). You just mentioned the name, I never heard of him. When did this happen? I never heard of him. The guy says he was pushed out of a job. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t…I don’t know who he is.”

It’s conceivable that Trump doesn’t know who Bright is – when you spend your mornings and nights watching cable news, there’s little time left to learn the names of your key people – but did someone fire Bright without telling Mr. “I alone can fix it”? Whatever. The upside right now, if there is indeed an upside, is that Bright is not going quietly. He has hired lawyers and demanded an investigation by the Health and Human Services’ inspector general. And his candor is refreshing.

“I have spent my entire career in vaccine development,” he said in a statement. “My professional background has prepared me for a moment like this – to confront and defeat a deadly virus that threatens Americans and people around the globe…Sidelining me in the middle of this pandemic and placing politics and cronyism ahead of science puts lives at risk and stunts national efforts to safely and effectively address this urgent public health crisis…Rushing blindly towards unproven drugs can be disastrous and result in countless more deaths.”

Richard Carmona, who served as George W. Bush’s surgeon general, said it best over the weekend, telling NBC News: “All of the scientists in government today are having a tough time working with the president because it appears that science is not valued. They’re pretty much having to almost twist themselves into pretzels.”

And he had some advice for Trump: Leave medicine to the medical experts. “Be presidential, stay focused on the bigger issues, unite the nation.”

The miracle is that he managed to say that with a straight face.

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]