1. Susan Glasser “It Was All About the Election”: Ex-White House Aide Olivia Troye on Trump’s Narcissistic Mishandling of COVID-19

When I spoke with Olivia Troye on Thursday afternoon, she sounded more than a little scared. She was about to go public with a scorching video, in which she would denounce President Donald Trump and his stewardship of the country during the coronavirus pandemic. Troye, who served as Vice-President Mike Pence’s adviser for homeland security until late July, has witnessed the Administration’s response to the crisis, as Pence’s top aide on the White House coronavirus task force. She had seen Trump rant in private about Fox News coverage as his public-health advisers desperately tried to get him to focus on a disease that has now killed some two hundred thousand Americans. She had decided that Trump was lying to the American public about the disease, and that “words matter, especially when you’re the President of the United States,” and that it was time to speak out. She was nervous and scared and worried for her family and her career. But she plunged ahead anyway.

I asked about her firsthand observation of the President during the crisis. She said that Trump was “disruptive.” That he could not “focus.” That he was consumed by himself and his prospects in November. “For him, it was all about the election,” Troye told me. “He just can’t seem to care about anyone else besides himself.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/it-was-all-about-the-election-the-ex-white-house-aide-olivia-troye-on-trumps-narcissistic-mishandling-of-covid-19

2. Jonathan Chait: Trump Says Reporters Covering Protests Deserve to Be Attacked

At his rally Tuesday night, President Trump delivered an extended riff on the glories of police attacking journalists. First, he repeated a mangled version of a story that he told this weekend, about Ali Velshi being struck by a tear-gas canister while covering a rally, which he called “a beautiful sight.” (Velshi was actually hit by a rubber bullet.) The second version of the story including more details, in which Trump and his audience could delight in Velshi’s pain:

>>>That idiot reporter from CNN [Velshi works for MSNBC] got hit on the CNN with a canister of tear gas, right? And he went down. ‘I’ve been hit, I’ve been hit.’ He’d been hit … but he went down and he didn’t like it, he was hit.

He then proceeded to regale his audience with a story of security forces removing a reporter from covering a protest:

They grabbed ’em. They were grabbing ’em left and right. Sometimes they grabbed, they grabbed one guy, ‘I’m a reporter! I’m a reporter!’ — ‘Get out of here!’ They threw him aside like a bag of popcorn. But honestly, when you watch the crap we’ve all had to take so long … when you see it, it’s actually a beautiful sight. (video at https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1308570366839853056)

Trump is an aspirational authoritarian with a criminal’s contempt for legality, who believes the media and his opponents deserve to be beaten and imprisoned, and is inspiring and defending crazed violence among his supporters. He is a threat to the republic, and everyone who tolerates or minimizes him is irredeemably culpable. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/trump-reporters-covering-protests-deserve-to-be-attacked.html

3. Barton Gellman: The Election That Could Break America

The danger is not merely that the 2020 election will bring discord. Those who fear something worse take turbulence and controversy for granted. The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery.

Something has to give, and many things will, when the time comes for casting, canvassing, and certifying the ballots. Anything is possible, including a landslide that leaves no doubt on Election Night. But even if one side takes a commanding early lead, tabulation and litigation of the “overtime count”—millions of mail-in and provisional ballots—could keep the outcome unsettled for days or weeks.

The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.

“We are not prepared for this at all,” Julian Zelizer, a Prince­ton professor of history and public affairs, told me. “We talk about it, some worry about it, and we imagine what it would be. But few people have actual answers to what happens if the machinery of democracy is used to prevent a legitimate resolution to the election.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/

4. Daniel Dale: A Fire Hose of Lying

Here is a brief summary lies Trump told at a Philadelphia town hall moderated by George Stephanopoulos (those without quotes have been reworded for brevity):

Trump: "I didn't downplay it [the coronavirus]"
Truth: Bob Woodward has Trump on tape saying: "I always wanted to downplay it"

Trump: "Nobody knew the seniors are susceptible"
Truth: Chinese officials emphasized this in public as early as January. The NYT published this on Jan. 23

Trump: Joe Biden said the pandemic was totally over-exaggerated
Truth: Biden said no such thing—ever

Trump: The cupboards were bare of ventilators when I took over
Truth: Trump inherited 19,000 ventilators from the Obama administration

Trump: "We have 20% of the cases because of the fact that we do much more testing"
Truth: Testing does not create cases, it merely reveals them; the U.S.is 20th worldwide in tests per capita

Trump: I put a ban on travel from China and Europe to protect Americans
Truth: The bans had so many holes you could fly a fleet of 747s through them

Trump: I will make a plan that will protect people with pre-existing conditions; Democrats won't
Truth: He's promised a plan for 4 years; Democrats support the ACA, which covers pre-existing conditions

Trump: I ended Obamacare
Truth: Republicans set the tax for not having insurance to $0 but the ACA is otherwise still intact

Trump: Biden has agreed to adopt Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-VT) plan for socialized medicine
Truth: If he'd watched the primary debates, he'd have seen Biden repeatedly oppose Sanders' M4A plan

Trump: "Black communities are 81% in favor of having more police"
Truth: Actually, the poll he referenced said 20% want more police and 60% want the same amount as now

Trump: They [the Seattle protesters] took over a big chunk of the city—20% of the city
Truth: It was six blocks, a tiny fraction of the city

Trump: I activated the Minnesota National Guard after George Floyd was murdered
Truth: Gov. Tim Walz (DFL-MN) is the one who activated the Guard, not Trump

Trump: "I saw one form of crime [in NYC] up 300%"
Truth: No category of crime in NYC is up 300%. It is up slightly from 2019, when it was extremely low

Trump: I fired Jim Mattis
Truth: Mattis resigned because he disagreed with Trump on many issues

And this is only a sampler. But it may also be a preview of the first debate.  https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Pres/Maps/Sep17.html

5. Richard North Patterson: Will Trump’s GOP Turn the Election into a Sham? 

Despite Donald Trump’s pathological unfitness for office, the central issue of the election has become this: Trump and his party mean to steal the presidency through massive voter suppression. This would be a fateful, perhaps irreparable, step toward turning our increasingly imperiled democracy into a Westernized version of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary—wherein the party in power insulates itself from the parlous effects of letting the wrong people vote.

Republican attacks on democratic elections are hardly new. What’s different is that they’ve become so comprehensive and conspicuous.

For years the GOP has largely focused on preventing minorities from voting in person. But in 2020 its machinations impact white Americans: To thwart voting by mail, Republicans are targeting likely Democratic voters regardless of race. Both will degrade our presidential election.

Here’s the measure of America’s decline: The only certain means of protecting our democracy is a margin for Biden so overwhelming that it will survive whatever Trump and his party contrive. Absent that, the Republican template for turning presidential elections into shams may become too embedded to reverse. https://thebulwark.com/will-trumps-gop-turn-the-election-into-a-sham/

6. Eric Levitz: It Is Not Undemocratic to Call Trump’s Presidency ‘Illegitimate’

Last week, the attorney general of the United States argued that mail-in ballots are inherently corrupt, that Democrats will likely produce 100,000 fake votes in Nevada on Election Night, and that liberals are “projecting” when they accuse Republicans of undermining confidence in the integrity of the upcoming presidential election.

Here is how Bill Barr phrased these arguments in an interview with Chicago Tribune columnist John Cass:

“There’s no more secret vote with mail-in vote. A secret vote prevents selling and buying votes. So now we’re back in the business of selling and buying votes. Capricious distribution of ballots means (ballot) harvesting, undue influence, outright coercion, paying off a postman, here’s a few hundred dollars, give me some of your ballots,” the attorney general said …
 
“You know liberals project,” Barr said. “All this bulls— about how the president is going to stay in office and seize power? I’ve never heard of any of that crap. I mean, I’m the attorney general. I would think I would have heard about it. They are projecting. They are creating an incendiary situation where there will be loss of confidence in the vote.
 
“Someone will say the president just won Nevada. ‘Oh, wait a minute! We just discovered 100,000 ballots! Every vote will be counted!’ Yeah, but we don’t know where these freaking votes came from,” Barr said, promising to watch “Key Largo.”

One might write off Barr’s remarks as ironic bluster, but his comments are more concerning in context than they are in isolation. Public polling suggests that there is a stark partisan discrepancy in voting methods; Democrats are more likely to mail in their ballots, and Republicans are more likely to cast them in person. And since several swing states forbid election authorities from processing mail ballots before Election Day, this discrepancy means that it’s quite possible Donald Trump will be in the lead on November 3, only to see his vote tally eclipsed over the ensuing days. Thus, when the head of federal law enforcement suggests that mail-in ballots are inherently suspect (and that any last-minute increase in the Democratic Party’s ballot share is likely to be a product of fraud), he is priming Republican voters to reject the accuracy of any vote that Trump loses. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/trump-electoral-college-illegitimate-bill-bar-authoritarian.html

7. Neal K. Katyal and Joshua A. Geltzer: This Is How Bad It’s Gotten at the Justice Department

In his time as the head of the Justice Department, Attorney General William Barr has alienated many federal prosecutors. The latest appears to be Nora Dannehy, a longtime prosecutor who has resigned from the department, where she was part of a team looking into the Russia investigation.

Her resignation looks like part of an extremely troubling pattern. Earlier this year, highly respected prosecutors in the Michael Flynn and Roger Stone cases dramatically resigned or withdrew. One of them testified to Congress that the Justice Department under Mr. Barr was treating Mr. Stone “differently from any other defendant because of his relationship to the president.” The Justice Department inspector general has opened an investigation.

The resignations are a forceful public signal that something is seriously awry with the Justice Department under Mr. Barr. A hallmark of the department, where both of us worked, is its tradition of political independence, forged over decades since its creation in 1870. Neither of us ever heard of career civil servants resigning because they believed the attorney general was acting politically. Never — and that’s even accounting for the department’s strong conservatives and liberals in its career ranks.

A state prosecutor serving on Mr. Trump’s presidential commission on law enforcement quit, too. And a senior Department of Homeland Security official filed a whistle-blower complaint accusing Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, of ordering him to suppress intelligence on Russian election interference and white supremacist violence, in part because it “made the president look bad.” These unusual actions have one thing in common: In every instance, they put the interests of Mr. Trump ahead of the country’s. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/opinion/trump-barr-justice-department.html

8. Jonathan Chait: A White House Aide Just Warned Us That Donald Trump Is a Sociopath

A procession of former Trump administration officials, speaking both on and off the record, have depicted the president as fundamentally unfit for office. Yesterday, the latest addition to their ranks, former Mike Pence aide Olivia Troye, put an especially fine point on the indictment. President Trump displayed “flat-out disregard for human life.”

We should be precise about what exactly it means to say Trump has disregard for human life. Every president takes actions that put lives at risk (most obviously by using military force.) Many policies unavoidably involve trade-offs with that risk. Management of a pandemic is also going to involve decisions that, in one form or another, will entail some kind of trade-off.

To say Trump has disregard for human life is not to say he is willing to make cold decisions for the sake of a greater good, though. Troye is saying the president literally does not care about American deaths except insofar as it affects his own political standing. “The truth is, he doesn’t actually care about anyone else other than himself,” she says. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/pence-aide-trump-disregard-human-life-coronavirus-olivia-troye.html

9. David Wasserman: Impending SCOTUS Fight Could Split the Trump Coalition

In the hours since Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passing, several analysts have speculated the new, colossal Supreme Court fight will help President Trump by rallying traditional GOP voters behind him and shifting the focus of 2020 from the mismanagement of COVID-19 to a more straightforward partisan cage match. 

That's possible, but given the likelihood of the court to take a sharp right turn, a pre-election Supreme Court fight carries much bigger risks for Trump than the Brett Kavanaugh brawl in 2018.

Namely, there's potential for the Roe v. Wade/abortion issue and the Affordable Care Act to drive a wedge in Trump's coalition. In 2016, much of his support came from voters who disliked Hillary Clinton, liked Trump's rhetoric on trade and immigration, but consider themselves pro-choice — especially non-evangelical, blue-collar women. And, these voters remain up for grabs in 2020. https://cookpolitical.com/node/5836

10. Nicholas Goldberg: Trump flunks American history 101 — again

According to President Trump, American history has been hijacked.

The way he tells it, a cabal of radical educators wielding Marxist ideologies such as critical race theory and brandishing dog-eared copies of Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States” have captured our schools and universities and are indoctrinating our children to believe that the U.S. is wicked, that Americans are racist and that our country was founded on oppression rather than freedom.

The “rioting and mayhem” in the streets, he says, is the direct result of decades of brainwashing by left-wing teachers bent on making Americans “lose confidence in who we are, where we came from and what we believe.”

But have no fear! Trump is going to reclaim our history from the radicals and the socialists, and fight against the “twisted web of lies” that questions the “virtue of America’s heroes” and the “nobility of the American character.” He’s already issued an executive order to protect statues from “mobs incited by a radical fringe.” Now, he said in a speech on Thursday, his administration is supporting the development of a “pro-American curriculum” designed to teach students “the magnificent truth about our country.”

This is vintage Trump. He loves spewing empty patriotic rhetoric. He loves fomenting division and resentment through the culture wars. And he loves portraying the world in the simplest, most reductive terms.

But here’s the thing about history: It’s complicated. It’s nuanced. It’s a tangled web of competing interpretations, clashing facts, alternative perspectives. It is constantly being reconsidered, challenged and revised, and that’s as it should be.

Trump’s notion that the United States is not evil but rather magnificent — and that those are the only choices — is ludicrously simple-minded. The idea that we need to propagandize our children with a jingoistic “patriotic education” is both nonsensical and dangerous. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-09-18/donald-trump-flunks-american-history

11. Gabriel Sherman: “This Nomination Is A F--K-You To The Left”: Trump Campaign Is Itching For A Culture-War Fight Over Scotus Pick

RBG’s death, and the opportunity to push the Supreme Court further right, is a Comey-level election game changer, Trump’s allies insist. “It just changed the calculus for any conservatives who were on the fence,” says one.

There is an element of magical thinking to this rosy view of the race. Biden remains solidly ahead in every credible poll, both nationally and in key battleground states, as early voting is underway in Virginia, Minnesota, and elsewhere. But some echoes of 2016 are impossible to ignore. Trump’s willingness to violate social distancing rules and repeat lies on an epic scale has allowed his rallies and outrageous remarks to dominate the news cycle. Meanwhile, Biden is running a cautious campaign that seems willing to let Trump command the media’s attention. As he barnstorms the country, Trump is putting little effort into readying himself for next week’s debate moderated by Chris Wallace. Sources said Trump is having occasional conversations with chief strategist Jason Miller and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie. “Basically what happens is they sit around and throw questions at Trump. But Trump just kind of does his thing,” the former West Wing official said. Added another Republican source: “Trump is just not taking it seriously.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/trump-campaign-is-itching-for-a-culture-war-fight-over-scotus-pick

12. Jeffrey Toobin: The Legal Fight Awaiting Us After the Election

As Election Day approaches, the President has escalated his level of incitement. With the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, last week, a battle with the Democrats in the Senate is almost inevitable. Trump has already moved from allegations of fraud to intimations of unlawfulness and violence. “Gotta be careful with those ballots,” he said on September 8th, in a speech in North Carolina. “Watch those ballots. I don’t like it.” He continued, “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do.” Trump has advised his supporters to vote twice—once by absentee and once at the polls, to make sure their votes count. (This would be a crime.) He has expressed sympathy for the anti-Black Lives Matter counter-protesters who fired paintballs at their adversaries in Portland, and has defended Kyle Rittenhouse, the pro-Trump vigilante who is accused of killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Trump also retweeted a prediction that political unrest “could lead to ‘rise of citizen militias around the country.’ ” In light of these provocations, it seems that anything short of a landslide for either Biden or Trump could lead to chaos. It’s unsurprising that, when the Transition Integrity Project, a group of a hundred bipartisan experts, ran a series of simulations, they concluded that “the potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.”

One Republican, perhaps the one most knowledgeable about how elections really work, has decided that Trump has gone too far. Earlier this month, Benjamin Ginsberg, the scourge of the Gore forces in Florida, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, calling out Trump’s baseless provocations about the election. “I spent 38 years in the GOP’s legal trenches,” he wrote. “I was part of the 1990s redistricting that ended 40 years of Democratic control and brought 30 years of GOP successes in Congress and state legislatures. I played a central role in the 2000 Florida recount and several dozen Senate, House and state contests.” Ginsberg denounced Trump’s encouragement of double voting and rejected the President’s claim of widespread voter fraud: “The truth is that after decades of looking for illegal voting, there’s no proof of widespread fraud. . . . Elections are not rigged.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/28/the-legal-fight-awaiting-us-after-the-election

13. Ron Brownstein: Fight over Ginsburg succession poses stark question: Can majority rule survive in US?

To a wide array of Democrats and other critics, the possibility of a GOP President and Senate that each has won support from less than half the country locking in a lasting Supreme Court majority crystallizes a much larger dilemma: how quirks in the constitutional system are allowing Republicans to repeatedly wield power in Washington even when more Americans vote for Democrats.

Whether majority rule survives in American politics "is the fundamental question of our time, when you layer on the fact that we are determining whether a multiracial democracy can exist," says Heather McGhee, former president of the liberal research and advocacy group Demos.

The overall tension on majority rule is growing because the Republican dominance of smaller, predominantly White and heavily Christian states has allowed the party to benefit from elements of the Constitution that amplify the influence of small states -- particularly the two-senator-per-state rule and the Electoral College.

From George Washington through Bill Clinton, only three presidents won the Electoral College while losing the presidential popular vote. But it's now happened twice in the past five elections, each time to the benefit of Republicans; Republicans have controlled the White House 12 of the past 20 years despite winning the popular vote only once in the five presidential elections since 2000. https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/20/politics/ruth-bader-ginsburg-supreme-court-successor/index.html

14. Tim Weiner The unanswered question of our time: Is Trump an agent of Russia?

At this point, only a dedicated team of FBI agents, CIA counterspies, and Treasury Department money-laundering experts can solve the mystery of Trump’s relationship with Russia, even if it doesn’t learn the truth for years to come.

The investigators have to follow the money, as they did with Ames and Hanssen, who between them received more than $4 million from the Kremlin. They have to look at Trump and his business empire going back to the 1980s — the casinos that teemed with Russian high rollers and failed to report suspicious transactions, the real estate deals with shady Russians, and every single one of those 500 limited liability companies.

They need to see the secret records of his conversations with Putin, just as they needed to piece together the ripped-up messages Ames wrote to his Russian handler. After his first face-to-face talk with Putin in 2017, Trump confiscated the notes of his interpreter, Marina Gross. And no American but she knows what they said at their second two-hour tete-a-tete in Helsinki two years ago. If the FBI can’t get the records, it needs to talk to Gross. Her code of confidentiality, like those of lawyers and priests, can be breached if need be.

Ideally, the FBI would do what they did in the Hanssen case: recruit a Russian intelligence officer, specifically one with a case file bearing Trump’s name. That person can be bought for the right price. And that file is locked away somewhere in the vast archives of the Russian spy services.

There’s a classic story about an American agent of influence that predates the Cold War — and might presage the strange case of Donald Trump, if these questions about his relationship with Russia go dormant. Samuel Dickstein was a member of Congress from Manhattan, elected in 1922, and chairman of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee in the 1930s. He walked into the Soviet Embassy in 1937 and offered the ambassador his services for $25,000 a year — three times his congressional salary. In exchange, he sold fake passports to Soviet spies. And he held headline-grabbing public hearings investigating Joseph Stalin’s enemies in the United States. Dickstein served 11 terms in Congress. His file lay locked up in the KGB archives for 60 years. Today, if you go down to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to the intersection of Pitt and Grand streets, you’ll be standing in Samuel Dickstein Plaza. He got away with it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/09/21/russian-agent-trump-counterintelligence/

15. Christian Schneider: But No One!

It was the prospect of the new president picking this open seat that drew a lot of skeptical conservatives to unify and back Trump in 2016.

Trump, who is facing an uphill battle to earn re-election in November, has indicated he will make an appointment, and McConnell has pledged there will be a vote on a new justice before a new Senate is seated on January 3.

But if Trump does make his pick and McConnell does push the choice through the Senate, his coalition of traditional conservatives and populist nationalists will likely dissolve. Gone will be the fear that a Democratic president will appoint a justice who will swing the Court so far to the left that gay marriage will be mandatory and abortions will be performed at Costco.

In effect, by making a pick, Trump may be rendering himself obsolete in November. https://thebulwark.com/but-no-one/