OPINION - Brooks and Capehart 4/2/2021

"Brooks and Capehart on Biden’s new infrastructure plan, Georgia’s voting law" PBS NewsHour 4/2/2021

SUMMARY:  New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week in politics, including President Biden’s infrastructure plan, the pace of COVID-19 vaccinations amid spikes in infections, and Major League Baseball's reaction to Georgia's new voting law.

Judy Woodruff (NewsHour):  With the release of President Biden's infrastructure plan, states reopening, and boycotts brewing, we look to the analysis of Brooks and Capehart.

That is New York Times columnist David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart, columnist for The Washington Post.

Hello to both of you.  So good do see you, as always, this Friday.

And there is, as always, a lot to talk about.

Jonathan, I want to start with you on the President's big infrastructure plan, over $2 trillion.  What do you make of it?  Does it meet the need or does it overshoot?

Jonathan Capehart, The Washington Post:  Well, if you listen to progressives, Judy, it doesn't meet the need.  It doesn't go far enough.  If you listen to Republicans, it spends way too much.

I think the way you described the plan is perfect, actually, because you described it as an infrastructure plan.  But the actual name of this package is the American Jobs Act.  And that, I think, when you think of what the President proposed in terms of jobs, it all fits together.  It all makes sense.

One of the knocks against the President's plan is that, well, only a certain amount of it is spent on infrastructure.  Most people, when they think of infrastructure, they think of roads, bridges, seaports, airports, those types of things.

But what you see in the American Jobs Act is a broader definition of what infrastructure is.  Yes, it's roads and bridges, but it is also wind turbines and solar, green energy things, wiring the country with broadband, having broadband be for 2021 what the interstate system was in the mid-'50s, connecting the country, but connecting the country electronically, and also the electric power grid.

So, I think the President's going for a big, bold plan.  The key question is, can that big, bold plan actually become law?

Judy Woodruff:  And, David, Jonathan makes a points.  There is more in here than what's traditionally been thought of as infrastructure, hundreds of billions for caregiving for seniors and others.  What do you make of this?

David Brooks, New York Times:  No, I do worry about the debt.  We're spending almost $10 trillion, if all the Biden things pass.

That's a lot.  It's just a historical fact that rising debt contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire, the decline of the Spanish, imperial Spain, France in the 18th century, China in the 19th century.  History is replete with nations who hurt themselves by going into too much debt.

Nonetheless, I think, in these circumstances, the Biden plan is worth it.  And I say that for a couple of reasons.  One, we have simply underinvested in infrastructure and basic research and all such things for decades.  And that's just a fact.

Second, if you ask me to tell the economic story of America over the last 50 years, I would say that we have built a gigantic funnel that has funneled money and resources and wealth to highly educated people in large metro areas.

This plan funnels money to all the people who are not in those categories.  And so I think it rebalances our society in an important way.

And, finally, Jonathan and I were on a call with Anita Dunn, the President's adviser earlier in the week.  And she made the point that listen, we're — we have got to show democracy works.  There's a Chinese system out there that a lot of people think that's what works.  And we're just in this contest to show that democracy can get big things done.

So, given the circumstances, I overcome my incredibly high aversion to all this debt.

Judy Woodruff:  So Jonathan, does this look like it has a chance of getting — becoming law?

(LAUGHTER)

Jonathan Capehart:  Judy, right now, no.

And I say no because the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, has already said that he's not going to support it.  I have not heard one Republican in the Senate step forward and say that he or she will support it.

That means the President is going to have to depend on a couple things, one, maintaining all 50 Democrats to vote for this plan.  But the other thing is that, in order for all 50 Democrats to have any say over this, the Senate parliamentarian has to rule whether the American Jobs Act, like the Recovery Act, can go through reconciliation, which is just a simple majority vote.

So, there are a lot of hurdles here.  And that's why I say, right now, the American Jobs Act is big and bold.  And, as necessary as it is, as it stands right now, I don't see how it becomes law.

Judy Woodruff:  David, your forecast?

David Brooks:  A tad more optimistic.

I hear a lot of moderates who are supporting it, moderate Democrats who are saying positive things about it.  So that's a good sign.

I think one of the challenges is going to be, this is just going to take a long time.  Nancy Pelosi said she hoped to get it out of the House by July 4, which is an ambitious timetable.  Then it goes to the Senate.  So we're looking at a six-month process.

And suppose we're generating 900,000 jobs a month, as we just did, over all that time.  A lot of people are going to say, why are we spending all this money?  The economy's really roaring.

And so that could drain away support.

Judy Woodruff:  All right, two other things I want to ask you both about.  We will try the squeeze them in.

First to you, Jonathan, on where we are with COVID.  We see more people are getting vaccinated, good signs.  What, over 100 million Americans now have been vaccinated.  But we are also seeing rise in the number of cases.  We're hearing talk about vaccine passports, requiring people to show a passport that they have been vaccinated before they can travel or go into a place of work, potentially.

And you also see states where the governors are opening up before Washington says they're ready for that.  Where do you see all this headed?

Jonathan Capehart:  I feel like Groundhog Day, because I believe I said this a few weeks ago.

We are so close.  We're always so close to getting to the other side of this pandemic, in terms of cases going down, hospitalizations, deaths, businesses being able to reopen.  And then states end up doing something to kind of mess it all up.

And for states to undue their mask mandates, open things wide open again, as cases are going up, as variants are running rampant across the land, when you have the CDC director going off-script and saying that she's extremely worried about what's going to happen, I don't think we're out of the woods yet.

And I think people are being a little too optimistic about how much they can do because of the vaccines.  I, like anyone, would like to get the vaccine and get back to normal.  But I would love for things to get back to normal when every — when the country can actually do it in a uniform way.

And I'm not seeing right now how we're going to be able to do that, in — by the time of the President's goal of July 4.

Judy Woodruff:  David?

David Brooks:  Yes, I think we need to make life a lot better for people who have had the vaccine.

I think we need vaccine passports, so they can go to gyms and restaurants.  And I say that as one who is too young to have the vaccine, which — the last time I have been too young for anything.

(LAUGHTER)

David Brooks:  It's…

(LAUGHTER)

David Brooks:  But we have got to induce the people who are vaccine-hesitant to say, wow, it's really great on the other side of the vaccine.

And one way to do that is to have these vaccine passports, so people can go and enjoy life.  The research has now, it's, as far as I understand it, become very clear.  You do not get the disease — at least your chances are fantastic — and you do not spread the disease.

So, if that's the case, then I say to all of you with the shots, party on.

(LAUGHTER)

Judy Woodruff:  David, Jonathan and I think of you as always young, so it's all good.  It's all good.

(LAUGHTER)

Judy Woodruff:  Just quickly, finally, we have talked about Georgia's voting law and the pushback against it, but now we have big corporations like Delta, Coca-Cola saying they don't like it.

And, today, Major League Baseball, Jonathan, announced they are pulling their All-Star Game out of Atlanta.  It was going to take place this summer.  They're going to find another home for it.

Is this kind of pressure likely to make a difference in Georgia and other states where they're looking at tightening voting?

Jonathan Capehart:  Well, in terms of the law, the Georgia law is the law.  And it is highly unlikely that Governor Kemp is going to go back or the legislature is going to go back and say, we will do — we will have a do-over.

But I do think it's very important for corporate America to take stands on issues that are of importance, not only to their customers, but to their employees.  And so, for Delta and Coca-Cola and Major League Baseball to take the stands that they have taken, I think, is very important.

I think what is also important was the letter from the 72 Black business executives, from Ken Chenault and Ken Frazier, American Express and Merck respectively, the president of the Ford Foundation, Darren Walker, Ursula Burns a former CEO of Xerox, putting pen to paper and saying, what's happening in Georgia is an attack on democracy.

And where are the business leaders, all business leaders in raising their voices about this?

And I think what's happening in Georgia should be a template for all the other states where what's happened in Georgia is happening in those states right now.

Judy Woodruff:  What effect, David, do you see this kind of corporate involvement having?

David Brooks:  Yes, I spoke very negatively, critically of the law last week, and I'm still very much against it.

I worry about this.  I worry about — we have seen one institution after another in American society get politicized, the church, the press.  I worry about corporations suddenly taking political sides.  I worry about boards of directors and CEOs who've got a lot of economic power wielding it in ways that's political.

And so I'm just nervous to see yet another institution gets super political.  They just don't do it well.  Delta, Coke, Major League Baseball, they all work in China, a country now committing genocide.  What standards do we hold people to?  So, I'm just a little nervous about people with a lot of power wielding it in this way.

I just — I'm more comfortable that we settle our differences, even if we hate the results, through politics and through persuasion and through votes and for activism and trying to get people to come out to the polls.  I'm just more comfortable with that as a means of social change.

Judy Woodruff:  A serious note to end on.

David Brooks, Jonathan Capehart, thank you both.  And have a good weekend.

Jonathan Capehart:  Thanks, Judy.

David Brooks:  You too.

THE GOP - Republicans Need to Fess-Up

IMO:  While I agree with the sentiment of this article, it fails to take into account that Republicans have been infected with greed for power and Trump gave them a way to do that.  The GOP will not change until they put America and our Constitution ahead of the party.

"Republicans need to show voters how badly Trump led them astray" by Henry Olsen, The Washington Post 1/14/2021

Republicans who want to move the party forward after impeachment will have to confront the election fraud myth that sparked the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.  That will require courage, because Republican voters have been fed a steady diet of lies and untruths about the vote since Election Day.  Tackling the issue head-on, however, will both show moderate Americans that Republicans love democracy and highlight to rank-and-file GOP voters how badly President Trump led them astray.

For months, the typical Republican has been steadily hearing that the election was stolen.  Few can probably recite specific facts to support that claim, but they know that people they trust, from Trump to his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to conservative media personalities, say this happened.  For many, liberals and Democrats are the only people they have heard say otherwise.  Naturally, they believe the people they trust over the ones they don’t.

Combating this means Republican officials must take to the conservative media to aggressively push back.  That, in turn, will mean confronting each of the voter fraud myths head-on, armed with clear and persuasive evidence.  The facts are there to support them, but they need to be aware of what the Trump propaganda machine has been spewing to make the case.

The fraud arguments fall roughly into three categories.  The first is that mail-in ballots — regardless of whether they were solicited by the voter or sent unsolicited by election officials — were misused to cast fraudulent votes for Joe Biden.  Specifically, it’s alleged that many states did not rigorously match signatures on the ballot envelopes to those on a voter’s registration card, thereby allowing votes cast by fraudsters to get into the mix.  It’s true that some states have lower rates of ballot rejection from mail ballots than they have in the past, but that could be due to a number of circumstances — the most important being that so many more people used mail ballots in 2020 than previously.  In any event, even applying prior rejection rates to the total of mail ballots cast in 2020 would not have changed the result of the election.  Biden’s margin in virtually every swing state far exceeds the number of votes that theoretically could have been disqualified under this fraud myth’s contention.

The second pro-fraud argument is that election officials in selected cities stuffed the ballot box during election-night counting.  The only evidence given to try to back this allegation are the alleged absence of GOP vote monitors in some locations and the videotape that supposedly shows an election worker in Fulton County, Ga., finding a stack of ballots under a table once GOP monitors were gone.  Neither allegation holds up under close scrutiny.

None of the counts produced by the supposedly fraudulent vote counters in Democratic (and usually Black-dominated) cities are inconsistent with those produced in prior elections.  Moreover, precinct data from large cities around the country show the same trends as those in the cities labeled as fraudulent by Trump.  This strongly suggests that the vote counts in the targeted cities were accurate, regardless of the presence of GOP monitors, unless one wants to believe that every single election authority in the country was in on the steal.  The Fulton County videotape is also easily explicable, as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has argued and Georgia law enforcement has found.

Finally, the claim that Dominion voting machines switched votes from Trump to Biden is also laughably easy to dismiss.  Dominion produces a number of machines, and the ones most commonly in use are ballot preparation machines and counting machines.  Ballot preparation machines record a voter’s choices and print the actual ballot.  If the alleged switching occurred then, the voter could have spotted it and protested, which would lead to him or her getting a new ballot.  Vote-counting machines are checked after the election during the canvassing period, when randomly selected precincts are hand-counted to match the hand counts to the machine counts.  Again, unless everyone, including the Republican Party canvassers, are in on the steal, machine count fraud would be caught.  Indeed, an analysis of Michigan’s county returns by the conservative election website RRH Elections ["Candidates, Elections, and Politics from the Right Perspective"] found no difference between counties that used Dominion machines and those that did not.

Republican officials who aggressively make this case will slowly but surely change Republican voters’ minds.  Once that happens, the people whose minds have changed will understand that they were duped by the man they trusted.  Once burned, twice shy — these people will never fall for Trump’s lies again.  That turn of mind is essential to taking the party back from the brink and preparing it for future election victories.

AMERICAN POLITICS - Election 2020 Coup Attempt

"The Senate’s coup-staging ‘Dirty Dozen’ shouldn’t be allowed to hold office" by Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post 1/4/2021

In a world in which lawmakers honored their oaths, Republicans would have voted to impeach President Trump for his conduct detailed in the Mueller report or for attempting to extort Ukraine to help his reelection.  They would have forced him to resign or induced him not to run in 2020.  In the real world, Republicans — in rationalizing his unacceptable behavior before the election and supporting his efforts to overturn the election results based on no evidence afterward — remind us they have irrevocably forfeited their moral authority to lead.  (Yes, I laughed putting “Republicans” and “moral” in the same sentence.)

The “Dirty Dozen” or the “Sedition Caucus,” as the senators who declared their plan to challenge the electoral college votes have been tagged on social media, has been attempting an anti-democratic putsch.  Remember the names of the Republican senators who seek to violate the results of an election and install their preferred candidate: Ted Cruz of Texas, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Cynthia M. Lummis of Wyoming, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Steve Daines of Montana, John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Mike Braun of Indiana, and Roger Marshall of Kansas.  It may become a baker’s dozen with Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) telling Fox News on Sunday, “I’ve said from the start, everything is on the table here, and I’m seriously looking at that.”

It makes no difference if they pledge as Hawley did to challenge the results or, as the rest of the Sedition Caucus, challenge the results unless Congress gives way to their demand to set up a commission to investigate (nonexistent) fraud.  The votes have been certified, the electoral votes cast and a new President has been elected.

There is no basis for overturning the presidential results in an election in which, mind you, a third of the Senate (including many of the Dirty Dozen) and every House member were elected or reelected.  The argument to justify such seditious activity — that there are lots of “complaints” or “people don’t believe the results” — is circular and ludicrous.  People may believe something crazy because Republicans raised entirely crazy and baseless allegations of fraud.  In about 60 cases brought to contest the election, not one produced evidence of fraud.  In many instances, Trump’s lawyers did not bother to raise the allegation of fraud since they could not point to any.

In any event, it makes a mockery of our legal system to think that four of the Dirty Dozen — Cruz, Kennedy, Hawley and Blackburn — sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee.  These four have shown themselves to be incapable of fairly deciding whether to confirm judicial nominees or considering legislation to protect the integrity of the courts and the rule of law.

The Dirty Dozen and reportedly 140 or so House members who also plan to challenge the results are attempting to obtain the same results Trump did by threatening Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a phone call on Saturday.  These spurious challenges to an election should remind us that the GOP has become an authoritarian, unprincipled party whose only purpose is to retain power by whatever means possible.  It should permanently disqualify these Republicans from holding office.

Those who are lawyers — such as Cruz and Hawley, who both clerked for Supreme Court chief justices — should know better.  Their actions should result in serious professional sanctions up to and including disbarment.  Section 8.04 of Texas bar’s ethics rules says a lawyer shall not “engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.”  Deceiving the public about the outcome of an election and attempting to overthrow the duly elected President surely would qualify.  Likewise, in Missouri, the ethics rules state, “A lawyer shall not bring or defend a proceeding, or assert or controvert an issue therein, unless there is a basis in law and fact for doing so that is not frivolous, which includes a good faith argument for an extension, modification, or reversal of existing law.”  That perfectly describes the utterly unmeritorious challenge to the electoral college.

In casting their ballots in the Senate runoff, Georgia voters should take care not to elect any more Republican senators whose victories would protect their majority.  They have shown themselves as unfit to hold office as Trump.  While we cannot remove them until they come up for reelection, Georgia voters at the very least can deprive them of the majority and control of the committees.

VOTE2020 - Trump Turns Presidential Debate into a Brawl

 "Trump sets the tone for the worst Presidential debate in living memory" by Dan Balz, The Washington Post 9/2/2020

Excerpt

No one alive has ever seen a Presidential debate like Tuesday night’s unseemly shout fest between President Trump and former vice President Joe Biden — 90 minutes of invective, interruptions and personal insults.  It was an insult to the public as well, and a sad example of the state of American democracy five weeks before the election.

On the margins, the debate probably did more to help Biden than the President, at a moment when Trump needed to change the shape and trajectory of the campaign.  But that’s not what people will remember.  Even partisans locked into their choices were probably dispirited at what they were witnessing.  One can only imagine what the next two debates between the two men will look like.

For decades, general-election debates have provided Americans with the opportunity to measure the candidates in an open forum, with moderators aiming to stay out of the way when possible.  They have always included showmanship and sharp exchanges, but within the boundaries of what people expect of their Presidents.  All of that went out the window Tuesday night.

The tone of the debate was established by Trump in the opening minutes, and it never changed to the end of the evening.  The President constantly ignored moderator Chris Wallace’s repeated pleas to maintain order as he took every opportunity and more to verbally hector Biden, throw his rival off balance and take up as much space as possible.  This was the Trump who lives on Twitter, not someone who occupies the highest office in the land.

Biden, advised to maintain his cool, constantly looked peevish at Trump’s behavior, responding at times with well-prepared rejoinders but also with dismissive verbal broadsides.  Exasperated at one point, he shot back at the President, “Will you shut up, man?”  Biden cleared the low bar of expectations that the Trump campaign had inexplicably set for him but hardly delivered a shining performance.

The dreary debate fittingly ended as it began, in a moment that foreshadowed a tumultuous and divisive end to the election, as Trump pressed his argument, without evidence, that mail ballots are rife with fraud and the election therefore will be invalid.

Trump declined to say that he would ask his supporters to stay calm until a final count had been validated and instead chillingly indicated that he plans to rile up his backers to challenge and contest the counting everywhere possible.  He said he would accept the outcome only if he believed the election had been fair.

Biden said he would accept the outcome and predicted that Trump would too, once the votes were counted, no matter the winner.  Perhaps.

The reality TV star President knows one speed on a debate stage: to attack, to bully his opponent and to ignore the rules.  For Wallace, a tough and skilled interviewer, the debate was a nightmare.

“Mr.  President! Mr. President,” he exclaimed at one point as Trump refused to stay silent when Biden was answering a question.  “Gentlemen!” he said at another moment as the two sparred loudly about Trump’s attack on Biden’s son Hunter.

Rare were the moments when the two nominees actually discussed their differences calmly and clearly in a debate that ranged across several topics, including the coronavirus pandemic, the Supreme Court, the economy, racial justice, and violence in American cities.  More often than not, rather than engaging in exchanges that even bordered on civil, Trump and Biden talked over and past each other.

Judging the debate by traditional standards gives the evening more credit than it deserves.  For most people, this was unwatchable, a grab-the-remote, change-the-channel moment in a forum that in past election years has served the country well.  What two more debates like this will accomplish is hard to imagine, other than to heighten tensions in a country already on edge.

Biden came ready to make his points and at times was far more focused in doing so than was the President.  In an opening question about the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, he touched on the Affordable Care Act, abortion, public health and the 200,000 deaths from COVID-19.  He repeatedly branded Trump a liar who didn’t know what he was talking about.

Trump played a different game, one of attack and belittle.  He hit Biden hard, particularly on law and order in the one moment when he seemed to have a prepared and consistent line of criticism and that his supporters were probably applauding.  He tried repeatedly to hang the socialist label around his rival, and Biden, perhaps to the dismay of some on the left, ran away from any suggestion that he is captive to the liberal wing of the party.

At times, each declined to answer direct questions about his positions and policy proposals.  Biden wouldn’t say whether he would support expanding the Supreme Court if he won the election and Democrats captured the Senate.  Trump wouldn’t answer a direct question about whether, as the New York Times reported, he paid just $750 in federal income taxes for 2016 and 2017.

Trump needed this debate more than did Biden, given the current shape of the race.  Four years ago, he came to the first debate with the polls narrowing and in a year when there was more movement and seeming volatility in his contest with Hillary Clinton.

This year there has been only modest movement in the polls, with Biden steadily leading by an average of nine points before the two national conventions, according to a Washington Post average of polls, and now leading by eight points.

Potentially more troubling for Trump has been his inability to break across a barrier that would move his support into the high 40s.  He has been stuck in poll averages somewhere around 43 percent or 44 percent since the late spring, while Biden has been around 50 percent or above since the beginning of last summer.

Trump’s challenge Tuesday was to change the race from a referendum on his presidency into a clear choice between him and Biden.  That is the goal of any incumbent President but especially for this President, who has used his office to make himself front and center in every way he can but in ways that now are hurting him politically.

Instead he [Trump] chose otherwise, and it could cost him.  Biden may have missed opportunities, but his only real goal was to do nothing to change the race.  On that minimal goal, he succeeded.  But that’s not what will be remembered about Tuesday night.  Instead it will be the degree to which democracy itself has suffered and could suffer more as the election plays out to its conclusion.

This has been called the most important election in generations — some say in the life of the country.  But that’s not what people who tuned in saw.  Partisans will call winners and losers as they see them, and those judgments will be predictable.  Collectively, this was not a night when the country could claim victory.  Instead, it was quite the opposite.

TRUMP FUEL - The Promotion of Violent Imagery

"Trump employs images of violence as political fuel for reelection fight" by Michael Scherer, The Washington Post 9/8/2020

President Trump has reverted to using graphic depictions of violence as a centerpiece of his reelection campaign strategy, using his Twitter account, his stump speech and even the White House podium as platforms for amplifying domestic conflict.

His 2016 focus on radical Islamist terrorism and undocumented-immigrant crime, which he credited with helping him win the Republican nomination, has been replaced by warnings of new threats as he elevates gruesome images of Black-on-White crime, street fights involving his supporters and police-misconduct unrest nationwide.

The pattern continued over the holiday weekend, when he tweeted video of a melee in Texas between protesters and security officers during an event for a Trump-affiliated group and two celebratory videos of a protester in Portland, Ore., with his feet on fire.  One of the videos was scored to the Kenny Loggins song “Footloose,” and the second featured mocking play-by-play commentary by a mixed-martial-arts announcer.

“These are the Democrats ‘peaceful protests,’?” Trump wrote.  “Sick!”  On Monday, he retweeted a prediction that political unrest “could lead to ‘rise of citizen militias around the country.’?”

The strategy echoes the approach that fueled his climb in politics as he shocked the political world with graphic warnings about “rapists” crossing the border illegally from Mexico, welcomed the families of crime victims to speak at his events and said he favored instructing the military to target the families of Islamist extremists, a probable war crime.  He also repeatedly encouraged assaults on protesters at his events.

In each case, the unprecedented focus on violence by a high-profile American politician allowed Trump to attract attention, turning his rallies into unpredictable and raucous affairs that were widely viewed.  It also set the stage for Trump to establish his political persona as a strongman itching to dominate threats foreign and domestic.

Nearly four years after winning that race, Trump is making the same argument, albeit about different dangers, using the specter of violence amid Black Lives Matter protests to claim superior toughness and promising forceful resolution if given the chance.

“These people only know one thing, and that is strength,” he said Wednesday in Wilmington, N.C., of violent street protests in Oregon and Wisconsin.  “That’s all they know — strength.  And we have strength.”

On Monday, Trump retweeted footage of Black protesters in Pittsburgh screaming at White outdoor diners, drinking from their glasses and knocking over their dishes during a protest over the weekend.

“Disgraceful.  Never seen anything like it.  Thugs!” Trump wrote.  “And because of weak and pathetic Democrat leadership, this thuggery is happening in other Democrat run cities and states.  Must shut them down fast.”

Amid a pandemic that has killed more than 186,000 Americans, the jarring political gambit has shifted the focus of the Presidential campaign, forcing Trump’s Democratic opponent, former vice President Joe Biden, to air an ad, titled “Be Not Afraid,” [video link] focused on his own opposition to the recent violence in Oregon and Wisconsin.

“The President is on offense, and that is always a good thing,” said Roger Stone, a former Trump political adviser who received a presidential commutation after seven felony convictions this summer.  “The law-and-order issue really motivates the President’s base, and it also appeals to independents.”

Although Trump has received no big boosts in polling, he unapologetically promoted a video last week of his supporters attacking protesters in Portland, later arguing at the White House that their firing of paintball guns and pepper spray in city streets from the back of pickup trucks was “defensive.”  On Twitter, he said the conflict was a logical response to provocation by liberals.

“The big backlash going on in Portland cannot be unexpected,” Trump wrote in a tweet that included a video of the incident.

He also has returned to using his Twitter account to broadcast falsehoods that perpetuate racial conflict.  For the third time this summer, on Aug. 30 he retweeted a video of a Black man brutally attacking a White person, this time with a caption falsely suggesting that the assailant in a New York subway assault in 2019 was connected to Black Lives Matter or antifa.

The posts echo a 2015 Trump retweet that showed a picture of a Black man with a gun and falsely claimed that Black people commit a majority of homicides against White people, a racist trope for which he never apologized.  The White House argued this month, as Trump did in 2015, that he was not responsible for the accuracy of his retweets.

Politically motivated street fights have become more common during his presidency.  Conflicts at protests have led to injuries in recent weeks in places such as Kalamazoo, Mich.; Bloomington, Ind.; and Weatherford, Tex., as protesters of police misconduct have clashed with counterprotesters who are sometimes dressed in Trump-branded apparel and claim to be helping to keep the peace.  In one case, a gun-wielding Trump supporter in Kenosha, Wis., was charged with murder after allegedly killing two protesters and injuring a third.  (A supporter of a far-right group was fatally shot during a counterprotest by Trump backers in Portland last month.  The suspect, a backer of the far-left antifa movement, was killed by law enforcement Thursday.)

In the face of this violence, Trump has condemned the actions of left-wing rioters but declined to condemn violence by his supporters, even as he falsely claims that Biden is refusing to denounce violence on the left.

“I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point,” Trump said last year in an interview with Breitbart News when asked about fights over free speech on college campuses.  “And then it would be very bad, very bad.”

From his start in politics, Trump has brushed aside the idea that he has a responsibility for any violence that results from his campaign style.  When a reporter asked in 2015 whether he was concerned that his rhetoric against protesters and immigrants might lead to additional violence in American streets, he recoiled at the question.

“People are getting hurt.  People are being decimated by illegal immigrants.  The crime is unbelievable,” he said, an argument belied by statistics.  “Now in my way, I don’t want anybody hurt.  But people are being hurt.  So when you ask that question, it’s very unfair.”

His answer was notable for its zero-sum view: Suffering in the country was inevitable — the question was who suffered more.

Trump’s return to focusing on violent threats and conflict follows summer months in which he appeared politically adrift as the coronavirus pandemic overtook the nation, infecting at least 6.2 million people and dampening the economy.

He initially wavered about whether to focus campaign advertising on touting his pandemic response or on attacking his opponent, before eventually launching attacks on Biden’s ties to China, his mental acuity and his policy positions.  Biden’s polling advantage widened.

When nationwide protests against police misconduct led to violence this summer, Trump’s strategy shifted again.  A July 9 set of talking points distributed around the White House by Stephen Miller, an adviser who wrote Trump’s 2016 nomination speech, previewed the message that Trump would settle on for the final push to the Republican National Convention.

The solution Miller described, which Trump soon incorporated into his rhetoric and advertising, was to portray Biden as a fundamental threat to public safety.  “No one will be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” the document read.  The Democratic nominee, Miller’s document continued, “will surrender America and its citizens to the violent left-wing mob” and “abolish the American Way of Life.”

The shift sought to rehabilitate Trump’s political message of dominance and turn the discussion away from the pandemic, which public polling showed had become a drag on the President’s support.

“You can’t really tell people that there is no COVID crisis, because they are surrounded by it.  The only thing you can do is make something else louder,” said Matthew Baum, a political scientist at Harvard University who studies political persuasion and misinformation.  “You don’t have to persuade people.  All you have to do is say: ‘Don’t look over there.  Look over here.’?”

Biden has argued that Trump is trying to distract Americans from his inability to better address the health, economic and race-relations crises facing the nation.

Trump’s message is, “?‘The whole country is up in flames.  Everything is burning.  Law and order,’ ” Biden said Friday at a news conference in Wilmington, Del., “because he doesn’t want to talk about anything, anything at all, about the job he hasn’t done.”

Biden has mocked Trump’s effort to cast him as responsible for any street violence, no matter the alleged perpetrator.

“Ask yourself: Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters? Really?” Biden asked during a speech on Aug. 31 in Pittsburgh.  “I want a safe America — safe from COVID, safe from crime and looting, safe from racially motivated violence, safe from bad cops.  Let me be crystal clear — safe from four more years of Donald Trump.”

Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said the President is focused on helping communities affected by the violence.  “These riots are destroying the life’s work of Black, Hispanic and Asian business owners, and they have to stop,” he said.

Expressions advocating violence were central to Trump’s early political endeavors.

“I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you,” Trump said about a protester at an event in Las Vegas.  When a nonviolent Black protester was beaten at a rally in Birmingham, Ala., by a White crowd, Trump responded the next day, “Maybe he should have been roughed up.”

He argued repeatedly at rallies for the extrajudicial abuse or even killing of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who had left his post in Afghanistan.  “Thirty years ago, he would have been shot,” Trump said.  At another event, he said of Bergdahl’s capture by the Taliban, “They beat the crap out of him, which is fine.”

Rather than recoil, his crowds embraced the tough talk, and Trump has delivered more as President.  After Greg Gianforte, then a Montana congressional candidate, physically attacked a reporter in 2017, Trump turned the incident into an applause line.  “Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my type!” the President said.

When Trump addressed a law enforcement group in 2017 on Long Island he urged incaution in policing.

“When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon,” he said, “you just see them thrown in, rough.  I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’?”

The new threat Trump has focused on is depicted as no less ominous than his previous targets — and it is similarly inflated with rhetoric that mixes descriptions of actual events with conspiracy theories for which he offers no evidence.  In recent days, he has described “rioters, anarchists, agitators and looters” who he claimed in a Fox News interview, without evidence, have been traveling the country in commercial planes to create havoc, funded by “people you have never heard of” who operate in “dark shadows.”

He also has tried to adjust the historical record by claiming federal actions he instigated have proved that his solution of physical toughness and law enforcement domination is responsible for clearing streets of violent protesters.  On a visit to Kenosha, he claimed that his push to deploy the National Guard saved the city from further rioting after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man.

“If I didn’t INSIST on having the National Guard activate and go into Kenosha, Wisconsin, there would be no Kenosha right now,” Trump tweeted last week.  Federal officials did work with local law enforcement in quelling the protests, but Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) had ordered the Guard to the city a day before Trump’s public call for their deployment.

Pollsters have noted a shift in polling around the Black Lives Matter movement, which was initially broad and bipartisan in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody in May.  Support for the movement in Wisconsin, according to a Marquette University Law School poll, fell from 59 percent to 49 percent between June and August.

But national polls continue to show that Biden leads Trump on questions of which candidate would make the country safer.  A recent national Quinnipiac University poll found that 50 percent of likely voters said Trump made them feel less safe, compared with 35 percent who said he made them feel more safe.

By contrast, 42 percent of voters said Biden would make them feel more safe as President, compared with 40 percent who said they would feel less safe.

DEPLORABLE - The GOP's Even Worst Behavior

"I speak with a computerized voice.  Republicans used it to put words in my mouth." by Ady Barkan, The Washington Post 10/2/2020

Ady Barkan is a lawyer and co-founder of the Be A Hero PAC.

I speak with a computerized voice — think Stephen Hawking.  It’s a result of ALS, the neurological disease I’ve had since 2016.  And of all the painful parts of this entire ordeal, which has now almost completely paralyzed me, one of the worst is the way the disease has robbed me of my natural voice.

Last week, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise tried to use my computer-assisted voice to rob me of my agency, too.  In a video aimed at Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, Scalise, a Republican from Louisiana, shared his team’s manipulated footage of an interview I conducted with Biden to make it appear I had said words that I never uttered, in an effort to distort Biden’s views and harm his electoral prospects.

Scalise eventually scrubbed the video from his Twitter feed after being criticized for the manipulation, but the ominous lessons of the episode remain: the ability to use technology not only for good but to mislead and manipulate; the willingness of those with political agendas to resort to such disinformation and propaganda; and the way in which America has cleaved into two separate information universes, with a conservative media ecosystem amplifying falsehoods that then take root.

The entirety of the Scalise video painted a bleak picture of the country, with cleverly spliced scenes designed to make major cities look like places of anarchy and violent chaos.  That’s already disingenuous; protesters demanding an end to centuries of racial violence have largely been peaceful.  But what made it so remarkable wasn’t just that Scalise twisted the truth about Black Lives Matter.  His video went a step further, altering a question I had asked Biden about law enforcement to make it sound as though Biden had agreed to defund the police.  I’m in favor of defunding the police, so I wish that were the case.  But Biden has been clear that isn’t his position.

Now, I am of course grateful I can still speak, even if very slowly, using eye-gaze technology: A camera tracks the movements of my eyes on a screen-based keyboard, and then the resulting text is converted into speech by a synthetic voice generator.  But because of my Hawking-esque voice, it’s particularly easy for others to manipulate what I say.  Scalise’s team just went the extra mile in seeming to find the exact voice generator I use when they whipped up the extra words meant to damn Biden.  (Scalise’s team denies this.)

Scalise has since conceded the video “shouldn’t have been edited” in an interview on Fox News — even as he attempted to claim there was an underlying truthfulness to the message.  That isn’t the same as an apology to me, or, more important, the more than 2 million people in this country who communicate using assistive technology like I do.

It’s specifically insulting to witness actors with the worst intentions hijack the technology that has allowed me to speak to try to speak for me, but this duplicity also exposes the broader information crisis in our society.  When President Trump claimed, as he did in the run-up to the 2018 election, that a “migrant caravan” threatened the safety of the United States, he was bolstered by a vast conservative media that runs coverage amplifying his claims from morning to midnight.  The inauguration crowd size, the repeated lies about voter fraud, claims about wiretapping, all of it is part of an attempt to shear one half of America away from the other by creating an alternate reality for Trump’s supporters.

That reality isn’t based on facts, but on polarized partisanship.  Trump, like many other leaders around the world with authoritarian aspirations, understands that shaping reality is the most powerful tool at an autocrat’s disposal.  His goal is a society in which it doesn’t matter whether what you say is true as long as your side loves it.

In that context, “deepfakes” such as the one Scalise posted aren’t missteps.  They’re disinformation test balloons that should put every single one of us on alert.  If they can without consequence make it seem as though I said something I didn’t, what else can they do?  What else will they do?  What fearmongering words can they put in Biden’s mouth in a video doctored to tip the election?

I’m not sure I know how to solve this problem.  The collective outrage that got the video stricken from Twitter is a good place to start; that must not let up.  Another might be looking at the polarizing effects of Facebook.  Scalise took it off his page, but elsewhere on the site, the video remains, gathering views.

That’s just the beginning, though.  We need far more aggressive action across the board to identify and stop the spread of false information, because more is coming.  But I can’t do that on my own.  Every letter I’m typing here is difficult, each sentence its own hurdle, and my words aren’t enough.  What we desperately need is others ready to speak their own — not speak false ones for me.