Weekend Update: The Reckoning

The past week was remarkable for the number of polls released on the 2020 elections, and their nearly unanimous conclusions.  In one poll after another, Joe Biden was ahead by double digits nationally, as many as 14 points in several. There were some 20 polls of battleground states--and Biden was ahead in all of them (though not necessarily all of the states.)

The conventional wisdom is that polls tighten closer to election day.  The prominence now of mail-in votes is prompting the caution also that election night this year may not name a winner.  The logic of what's happening says that both of these could well be wrong.  Biden's lead may even increase.  And if so, it would be a landslide that might well yield enough "called" states that Biden will be President-elect by midnight Pacific.

And nothing less than a landslide will suffice to overcome the obstacles being placed by Republicans in the administration--particularly Barr at Justice--and in the states, including practically inviting more Russian disinformation and interference.

A landslide will turn the Senate, perhaps by a lot.  In any case, the first thing a Democratic majority will do is jettison the 60 vote threshold for lawmaking.  So even if Moscow Mitch is re-elected he won't be able to wreck things so easily anymore.

For this to happen, Americans are going to have to do more than exhibit a little buyer's remorse.  Certain voters and especially non-voters are going to have to face up and own up to their responsibility for Trump, and try to make up for it by voting this time.  These polls show signs this is starting to happen.

Events in the real world as well as polls have weakened Trump considerably, and people may be listening to the very clear message that is being provided about what 2016 placed in motion.

For instance, Ezra Klein: "Trump has spent the past three years and 158 days playing president on TV and social media. But he has not spent that time doing the job of the president. A strong economy that carried over from Barack Obama’s presidency hid Trump’s dereliction of duties. But then a crisis came, and presidential leadership was needed, and the American people saw there was no plan, and functionally no president.”

As Klein points out, all the insider accounts as well as professional external observations support this view.

Former Republican campaign operative Steve Schmidt wrote this week: “Donald Trump has been the worst president this country has ever had. And I don’t say that hyperbolically. He is. But he is a consequential president. And he has brought this country in three short years to a place of weakness that is simply unimaginable if you were pondering where we are today from the day where Barack Obama left office.

“When you listen to the President, these are the musings of an imbecile. An idiot. And I don’t use those words to name call. I use them because they are the precise words of the English language to describe his behavior. His comportment. His actions. We’ve never seen a level of incompetence, a level of ineptitude so staggering on a daily basis by anybody in the history of the country whose ever been charged with substantial responsibilities.  It’s just astonishing that this man is president of the United States."

And as others have pointed out, other Republicans aren't much better, particularly the leader of the Senate.  The result is the most destructive cult in this country since the Civil War.

This cult has inspired, accommodated and to some extent been part of violent rabid right militants who (according to the new report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies) accounted for 2/3 of the terrorist plots in America in 2018, and 90% of them in 2019. 

And it's Trump and the Republicans who are warping the lives of everyone in the country, causing fear, suffering and death.  With one or two possible exceptions, only in the US is the covid crisis so out of control. "This isn’t happening in every country around the world," Schmidt points out. "... The United States. We are the epicenter. We are the place where you’re the most likely to die from this disease. We’re the ones with the most shattered economy. And we are because of the fool that sits in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk.”

But it's not Trump alone. There are his minions, the AlwaysTrumpers and all the crazies who have latched onto his cult and used social media mob violence against those earnestly trying to save lives.  Paul Krugman: “I keep seeing statements to the effect that Americans were too impatient to stay the course, too unwilling to act responsibly. But this is deeply misleading, because it avoids confronting the essence of the problem. Americans didn’t fail the Covid-19 test; Republicans did.”  

The most recent Pew poll as well as other polls bear him out.  Apart from Republican officeholders in Washington and the states, most of those who refuse to wear masks and take other precautions are AlwaysTrumpers.  However, those who were merely variations of naive or stupid--who held and attended parties or clubbed and barhopped without masks and distancing--are likely responsible for much of the current infection.

Because of Trump and his Republican cult, surviving until election day, surviving past the Inauguration in January, continues to be an iffy thing.  Towards the end of the past week, several states began throttling back on their re-opening plans.  The horrendous numbers in Florida, the terrible numbers in Arizona and Texas and southern California, are reflected elsewhere to a lesser degree.  We've even had a surge here in Humboldt--we went from 2 active cases to 20, though it appears most of the new cases are related to travel or contact with a known case.

The conventional wisdom at the moment is that the surge everywhere is among people between 20 and 40 or 50.  So hospitals in places like Arizona and Houston, Texas are frighteningly stretched, but generally the hospitalization and death rates aren't climbing as fast as infections.  So we'll see whether the pandemic itself can be controlled.  Even so, Black and Latinx communities are suffering disproportionately.

Meanwhile, the first cases of infection by people who attended the Tulsa disaster now include a local reporter. This early it's not possible to say he was infected at the rally.  Six members of Trump campaign staff and two Secret Service agents were previously reported as testing positive after being in Tulsa, though not all of them were at the rally. More staff and dozens of agents have self-sequestered.

 CNN reports that another White House staffer has more recently tested positive, and that while Trump refuses masks and disdains distancing for others, measures to protect him from the virus have been considerably scaled up though out of public view, while less care is taken for his staff.