1. Eric Lutz: The White House Thinks Coronavirus Is Gone. It’s Sadly Mistaken

About a month ago, Donald Trump stood in the Rose Garden of the White House and declared victory over the COVID-19 pandemic. “We have met the moment,” the president said, “and we have prevailed.” He’d later claim that he was referring to improvements in America’s testing capacity, and not describing a triumph over the coronavirus itself, but it was clear what he meant: The crisis is over and we’re done worrying about it.

But the cost of Trump’s premature victory lap is beginning to come into view. COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are on the rise across the country, with a dozen states now reportedly seeing their highest averages of new cases since the crisis took hold in March. Arizona, Texas, and Florida—all of which were criticized for reopening before meeting the criteria for doing so—are among the states seeing spikes in cases, which have grown since Memorial Day. Texas, one of the first states to ease its shelter-in-place order, is experiencing the largest increase in new cases nationwide, with a 36-percent rise since last month’s holiday, according to the Washington Post. North Carolina has experienced the second-biggest spike, with its upward trajectory also corresponding with Memorial Day weekend. And, as the Post notes, the rise in cases does not appear to merely reflect ramped-up testing; several states are reporting some of their highest seven-day average increases in cases, which in states like Arizona are again threatening to overwhelm hospitals. “ https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/the-white-house-thinks-coronavirus-is-gone-sadly-mistaken

2.  Jeffrey Toobin: The Georgia Primary and the State of Voting Rights

In Shelby County, the Court’s five Republican appointees declared unconstitutional the core of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most consequential civil-rights law in modern American history. (The four Democratic appointees dissented.) The act, and its subsequent reauthorizations, designated certain areas, mostly the states of the old Confederacy, for special scrutiny of their voting-rights practices. If these states wanted to make any changes with regard to elections—from redrawing the boundary lines for legislative districts to determining the location of polling places—they had to obtain “pre-clearance” from the Department of Justice. (The states could also go to court for pre-clearance.)

According to the Brennan Center, within twenty-four hours of the Supreme Court's Shelby County ruling, in 2013, Texas announced that it would implement a strict photo-I.D. law. Two other states, Mississippi and Alabama, also began to enforce photo-I.D. laws that had previously been barred under federal pre-clearance. As the Brennan Center further noted, these Republican efforts to disenfranchise African-Americans have intensified in recent years.

The majority in Shelby County made sure that those with the worst of intentions—that this, officials who want to manipulate the electoral system to achieve their desired outcomes—have almost unlimited power to do so. The demands of conducting elections in the wake of a pandemic seem certain to make a bad situation worse. The only hope for a fair election in November will rest with people at the local level, who will have to do their best to fight for what the Voting Rights Act once delivered. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-georgia-primary-and-the-state-of-voting-rights

3. Charlie Sykes: Is Trump Losing the Culture War?

While Trump appears fixated on Nixon’s 1968 playbook, there is more evidence that the public is moving in the opposite direction. Polls show nearly three-quarters of Americans say they support the peaceful protests that have spread throughout the country since the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. As the Wapo notes: "he recent demonstrations have bipartisan appeal, with 87 percent of Democrats saying they support them, along with 76 percent of independents. Among Republicans, the majority — 53 percent — also back the protests."

The same poll found that 61 percent of Americans say they disapprove of Trump's handling of those protests, with just 35 percent saying they approve. "Much of the opposition to Trump is vehement, as 47 percent of Americans say they strongly disapprove of the way the president has responded to the protests."

Trump's instincts tell him to keep firing up his base, which is already en fuego. He's bringing back the rallies. He's going to recite the snake poem; he's going to play the hits. He won't move to the center or try to heal. Instead, he'll do what he always does: turn up the volume of chaos and hope that the Democrats will self-destruct. https://thebulwark.com/newsletter-issue/is-trump-losing-the-culture-war/

4. Tim Miller: Our Great President is crushing it.

After getting great counsel from his red-state evangelical whisperers slash former Met Gala attendees Hope, Ivanka, and Jared, Trump hatched His plan. Like a golden calf atop Mt. Sinai, President Trump would signal his deep, abiding faith with a Gold Lamé made-for-TV image of his own.

But in order to do it, he would need to emerge like Lazarus from his panic room and walk to St. John’s church, the site of the disgraceful looting and violence that he had power-tweeted through the night before.

The only problem?

Between him and the church were hippies. And the media.

The Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt might not have known what to do here. But with President Trump, it was on like Donkey Kong.

President Trump told security to strap on the riot gear and clear out these Enemies of the People exercising their “constitutional right” to “protest.”

And then like any other red-blooded Christian-American, Mr. Trump found a Bible, put it in his daughter’s Birkin bag, and walked to the church in the greatest parting of the waters since Moses.

With that on one image, flanked by the Seven Navy Seals and Seven Trumpers with Seven Diadems, Mr. Trump brought the wrath of the Lord down on the haters and the losers.

He has Risen! https://thebulwark.com/thank-you-mister-trump/

5. Susan B. Glasser: Trump Hates Losers, So Why Is He Refighting the Civil War—on the Losing Side?

It was a small moment in a week of craziness, but there is nothing like the rage of Donald Trump when a media outlet publishes a poll proclaiming him an almost-certain loser. There is, after all, no bigger insult in his vocabulary. The “fake news” are “sick losers,” Trump said the other day. Mitt Romney is a “loser.” The protesters calling for racial justice in the streets are “lowlifes and losers.” Not him. When CNN released a national survey showing Trump trailing Joe Biden in the general election, by a hard-to-surmount fourteen points, Trump ordered his campaign to respond. It did, on Wednesday, with almost comical bluster: a letter in which the campaign’s lawyers demanded that CNN not only retract the poll but also apologize for running it. This is petty-tyrant stuff. In response, CNN’s general counsel, David Vigilante, mocked the President. “To my knowledge, this is the first time in its forty-year history that CNN had been threatened with legal action because an American politician or campaign did not like CNN’s polling results,” Vigilante wrote. (What a name for a lawyer guarding the First Amendment in these times.) “To the extent we have received legal threats from political leaders in the past, they have typically come from countries like Venezuela or other regimes where there is little or no respect for a free and independent media.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trump-hates-losers-so-why-is-he-refighting-the-civil-war-on-the-losing-side

6. Rebecca Traister: Racism Doesn’t Blink

Both the Georgia primary and Trump’s Tulsa rally are intended as open performances of white power, meant to threaten and discourage Black voters who overwhelmingly cast their ballots against Trump in 2016 (and Georgia governor Brian Kemp in 2018), and assure white voters who supported these leaders that whiteness still has the nation in a choke hold.

These political shows of force are the hallmarks of the era in which we are living, reminders of what’s not so different from an American past many would like to think of as more undeniably racist than our present. But they recall something very present, very recent: the cold face of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, staring brazenly into the cell- camera held by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier as she captured the murder of George Floyd. Chauvin’s drive to stare straight into Frazier’s lens, to show this young Black girl that she and the camera she was pointing at him held no power over him as he took a Black life, is a particularly American performance of power.

It’s part of what the nation’s white political and economic systems (and the tactics used to police them) have been built around: open intimidation, the ostentatious display of cruelty and dominance, making an example of one to underscore the oppression of many. These exhibits are inherent to the country’s history of lynching, its open and unapologetic suppression of the Black vote, and the unrepentant rhetoric of its most racist political leaders. Even now, Klansmen and white supremacists are unafraid to do glossy photo shoots in full garb in their own homes, broadcasting their aggression as an affirmation of their power. And while these remorseless shows surely offer thrills to the tyrants, autocrats, and murderers performing them, part of that thrill is tautological: They can be cocky about their cruelty because of their certainty that they will be protected by the system they enjoy supremacy within. Their showiness makes their impunity even more real.

Because very often, they have been right. They will face no consequence. That fact is key to what gives them the confidence to keep staring straight into that camera as they loot and maim and disenfranchise. https://www.thecut.com/2020/06/racism-doesnt-blink.html

7.  Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman and Katie Rogers: As Americans Shift on Racism, Trump Digs In

NASCAR is demanding that its fans no longer fly Confederate flags at races. The Pentagon and some Republican senators are open to renaming military bases that bear the names of Confederate soldiers. Corporate America is taking stances against racial injustice. A majority of Americans say the police show racial bias in their use of force, and a majority of self-described conservatives acknowledge protesters’ frustrations are at least somewhat justified.Yet with public opinion shifting quickly on racism in America, and even some of the most cautious leaders and institutions talking openly about discrimination and reconciliation, there is still one glaring outlier: President Trump.

Whether it is suggesting shooting protesters or siccing dogs on them, preemptively defending the Confederate names of military installations or arguing that his supporters “love the black people,” Mr. Trump increasingly sounds like a cultural relic, detached from not just the left-leaning protesters in the streets but also the country’s political middle and even some Republican allies and his own military leaders. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/us/politics/trump-on-race.html

8. Jonathan Chait: Michael Flynn Writes Column Confirming He Is Definitely Insane

For several years, the national-security community has been wondering what the hell happened to Michael Flynn. Once a well-regarded director of national intelligence for the Obama administration, Flynn appeared, according to his critics, to snap. He grew paranoid and obsessed with expanding a war against radical Islam into a Manichaean civilizational conflict. The rest (his work for Donald Trump, a handful of federal crimes) is history.

Flynn has written an op-ed, headlined “Forces of Evil Want to Steal Our Freedom in the Dark of Night, But God Stands With Us,” that resolves the question.

If you haven’t heard of Western Journal, don’t feel bad. I haven’t either, and I work in opinion journalism professionally. Presumably, Flynn shopped his column to several outlets before WJ (as its readers call it, probably) agreed to run it.

How to judge this op-ed? It is difficult to evaluate without knowing whether Flynn’s objective was to advance a policy agenda or to help his legal team plant an insanity defense. On the plus side, his prose is — well, distinctive. And his argument is difficult to rebut. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/michael-flynn-op-ed-insane-national-security-adviser-trump.html

9. Adam Schiff, Jerrold Nadler, Zoe Lofgren, Hakeem Jeffries, Val Demings, Sylvia Garcia and Jason Crow: This is propaganda

Four months ago, we tried President Trump for abusing the power of his office in ways that undermined our country’s national security, the integrity of U.S. elections and the constitutional structure of our republic. Trump’s efforts to coerce an ally to help him cheat in the upcoming election violated the public trust, went to the heart of his unfitness for office — and revealed that he prioritizes his interests over those of the nation.

The president was not changed by impeachment. He is as lawless and corrupt as ever. But his wrongdoing has far greater consequences given the acute challenges facing the nation, the failure of those around him to curb destructive impulses, and the continued unwillingness of many members of Congress to serve as a meaningful check and balance as the Founders intended.

After the trial concluded, Trump focused on undermining institutions that could provide accountability and transparency. He fired or removed five inspectors general for simply doing their jobs: including reporting on shortages of personal protective equipment and other gear in hospitals and investigating potential misconduct by the secretary of state.

The president has made clear his interest in turning the traditionally independent Justice Department into a political arm that can punish enemies and protect allies. In Attorney General William P. Barr, Trump has an enabler of that corrupt mission. Barr allows the president to intervene in criminal cases with implications for his personal interests, and Barr carries out Trump’s orders in shocking fashion.

During his trial, we observed that a man with no moral compass will never find his way. Trump never will. But it is not too late for those leaders who have enabled Trump’s destruction of so much we all hold dear to find theirs. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/10/house-impeachment-managers-trump-is-lawless-corrupt-ever/

10. Frank Rich: What Trump Will Do to Win

“Trump is flailing like an overturned turtle,” wrote the Times columnist Jennifer Senior last weekend, hoping against hope like many of us that maybe, just maybe, this time is different. There is no shortage of evidence. Trump has lost white eminences of the NFL like Roger Goodell and Drew Brees. He has lost the Episcopal and Catholic leaders of Washington after the photo op in which he manhandled the Bible much as he did those women he bragged about grabbing on the Access Hollywood tape. And he adds further proof daily, if any were needed, that he has lost his mind. A man who feels he gets away with lying about anything up to and including the weather thought America would disregard video showing troops under his administration’s order violently attacking peaceful protesters in front of St. John’s Church. Trump thought we’d look at a video of burly Buffalo cops pushing over a rail-thin 75-year-old protester in broad daylight and still buy into his theory that the victim was an “Antifa provocateur” who staged the bloody cracking of his own skull.

No wonder that yesterday the flailing, overturned turtle had his lawyer demand that CNN retract and apologize for a poll showing him with a 38 percent approval rating and 14 points behind Joe Biden. Calling bad news “Fake News” wasn’t enough to curb his anxiety anymore.

But as grim as things may seem for (and to) Trump, if there’s one lesson we can learn from American history — from all of it, from the birth of the nation to this very minute — is that white supremacists will fight with everything they’ve got to preserve their power. And they have done so successfully more often than not, Robert E. Lee’s surrender notwithstanding. Though Trump is trailing in all legitimate polls — if not always by as large a margin as in CNN’s — those same surveys show that one data point hasn’t changed: He retains the near-total loyalty of his own party. His approval rating among the GOP rank and file in CNN’s poll is 88 percent. It’s nearly unanimous among Republicans on Capitol Hill, Mitt Romney and (occasionally) Lisa Murkowski excepted. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/frank-rich-what-trump-will-do-to-win.html

11. Washington Post Editorial: Trump is spreading a dangerous conspiracy theory about antifa

TRUMP spread a deranged and dangerous conspiracy theory this week when he accused a 75-year-old man pushed to the ground by police in Buffalo of faking the force of his fall — as well as attempting to “scan” the cops. The man, claimed the president, was “antifa,” a member of a militant activist network known for violent tactics.

This allegation was entirely baseless, a shameful smear of a victim of state violence. It was also part of a pattern. The White House, with the help of Attorney General William P. Barr, is inventing a domestic terror threat from whole cloth, blaming the loose, left-wing anti-fascist, or antifa, movement for the unrest roiling the country these past weeks. The only thing that’s missing is the evidence.

What Mr. Trump is doing today is even more appalling than an attempt to distract from deeply felt discontent. By inventing a violent, even terrorist, effort with not a scintilla of proof, he makes an excuse for military escalation — and for impunity when the state engages in the same brutality these protests are responding to. The real provocateur here is the president. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-spreading-a-dangerous-conspiracy-theory-about-antifa/2020/06/10/5f9fa342-ab47-11ea-94d2-d7bc43b26bf9_story.html

12. Washington Post Editorial: Republicans are engineering an electoral disaster this fall

AFTER A shambolic election two years ago — and several examples of poorly run primaries leading up to this week — one might have imagined that Georgia would have prepared better for its Tuesday primary vote. Instead, polling places in and around Atlanta were swamped and lines stretched for hours as poll workers struggled with new voting machines and sanitation procedures. Georgia’s experience confirmed that the coronavirus pandemic, combined with the sort of Election Day incompetence that has for years been a sad fixture of American democracy, threatens the integrity of the November presidential election. There is hardly anything more important than getting voting procedures and technology right over the next five months.

Unfortunately, many Republican politicians continue to manipulate voting rules for partisan advantage, exploiting the pandemic as an opportunity to suppress voting. The latest example is in Iowa. The state held a notably successful primary last Tuesday that smashed turnout records despite the closure of many polling places, in large part because the state’s Republican secretary of state sent every voter an absentee ballot application. That allowed local officials to consolidate in-person voting locations without causing the sorts of massive backups that marred primaries in Wisconsin, the District and Georgia.

Republican lawmakers in Iowa saw that success and apparently concluded that it should not be repeated. Just days after the primary, a state Senate committee advanced a bill that would bar the secretary of state from sending out absentee ballot applications to voters who have not requested them. Though voters in many states have complained that they never got the absentee ballots they requested, the Iowa legislation would make it harder for election officials to process absentee voter requests. It would also ban them from consolidating many polling places, even though the pandemic is likely to lead to a pressing shortage of poll workers and intensive pandemic precautions should be observed. The Des Moines Register points out that these moves come on top of the legislature’s probably illegal efforts to force felons to pay restitution before being able to vote. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-are-engineering-an-electoral-disaster-this-fall/2020/06/10/15afd038-ab3b-11ea-9063-e69bd6520940_story.html

13. Eugene Robinson: Trump might go down in history as the last president of the Confederacy

It should have happened 155 years ago, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, but maybe — just maybe — the Civil War is finally coming to an end. And perhaps Donald Trump, not Jefferson Davis, will go down in history as the last president of the Confederacy.

The killing of Floyd has provoked a national moment of reckoning with police violence and white supremacy. But the position of the Trump administration is that systemic racism does not even exist — that our unexamined and unaddressed racial problems all come down to a few “bad apples” here and there.

Perhaps in an attempt to gain political advantage — and perhaps, as much evidence suggests, because it’s what he truly believes — Trump has used this moment to side with Lost Cause white supremacy. His all-caps tweets for “LAW & ORDER” sound like George Wallace when he was governor of Alabama; his demand for a militarized response to the protests reminds me of Bull Connor, the Birmingham commissioner of public safety who attacked nonviolent civil rights protesters with water hoses and vicious dogs.

When it was reported that high-ranking Army officials are open to stripping the names of Confederate generals from military posts such as Fort Bragg, Fort Benning and Fort Hood, Trump reacted instantly. He tweeted Wednesday that he “will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations.”

Trump must be bewildered. Unsubtle appeals to racial animus (remember his “birther” lies) have always worked for him in the past, but now he seems to be flailing. If it turns out that the Lost Cause is finally, truly lost, then so is the president who made himself its champion. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-might-go-down-in-history-as-the-last-president-of-the-confederacy/2020/06/11/590194e2-ac13-11ea-94d2-d7bc43b26bf9_story.html

14. Michael Gerson: Twitter is our window into Trump’s shriveled soul

Witnessing a new low for the Trump presidency means it is a day of the week ending in “y.” But sometimes an offense is particularly symbolic of the man and the moment.

Such is the case with President Trump’s cruel, conspiratorial vilification of a senior citizen named Martin Gugino, as the man lay wounded in a hospital bed.

It is another case of Trump asking Americans to prefer his dystopian fantasies to the evidence before their eyes. Gugino is a 75-year-old Catholic peace activist who fell and cracked his head after he was pushed by two policemen in full riot gear in Buffalo. The officers, as we know from video footage, kept advancing over Gugino’s body in their heroic assault against the dangerous, anarchic forces of Catholic pacifism. Gugino was left with a serious head injury. The officers are facing charges of assault.

Five days after these events, the president of the United States tweeted an accusation that Gugino “could be an ANTIFA provocateur,” and that, by Trump’s own analysis of the tape, his fall appeared to have been a “set up.” This interpretation was drawn from baseless reporting by One America News Network — a television network that is dedicated to making Fox News look like a model of journalistic integrity by comparison.

When it comes to Trump’s charge against Gugino, the interpretative options are limited. If he really believed the OAN report, the president is a credulous simpleton. If he knew the report was a smear and spread it anyway, the president is a cynical weasel. In the end, there is really no need to argue between these views. I operate on the assumption that Trump is both. To him, truth and falsehood are measured only in relation to his person and needs. Anything useful — including conspiratorial insanity — is true. Anything that resists his will — such as bad polling, historic economic suffering or a massive pandemic body count — is false. And Trump measures political loyalty by the willingness of his followers to accept his redefinition of reality.

In November, Americans should remember Martin Gugino and his treatment at the president’s hands. Voters will determine whether we are a nation that punishes lies and cruelty or endorses them. And Republicans in particular will be long defined by what they choose to tolerate. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/twitter-is-our-window-into-trumps-shriveled-soul/2020/06/11/492c84a2-ac11-11ea-94d2-d7bc43b26bf9_story.html

15. George T. Conway III: John Bolton made a tragic mistake. It’s not the one you might think.

If Bolton was trying to preserve and enhance the commercial value of his manuscript by avoiding testifying, he likely blundered: More people may well be dissuaded from buying the book than will rush to snap it up.

The only way to make sense of Bolton’s behavior is to recognize that he actually did intend and expect to testify. He wanted to testify, but wanted to appear to be forced to do it. Perhaps he thought that, as a reluctant witness, he’d be less open to being caricatured as a disgruntled, discharged adviser, and his credibility would have been enhanced. So he insisted on a court order to appear before the House.

When that didn’t happen, Bolton began virtually begging to testify: He announced before the Senate trial commenced that “if the Senate issues a subpoena for my testimony, I am prepared to testify” without any court order at all. During the trial, perhaps not serendipitously, word leaked about how Bolton’s book would establish a quid pro quo linking Ukraine security assistance to Ukraine helping to smear former vice president Joe Biden — and about how Bolton hoped to testify.

But Bolton made one fateful misjudgment. He overestimated the character, honor and patriotism of Senate Republicans. It would have taken just four, joining with Democrats, for the Senate to have issued a subpoena. But only two voted to hear Bolton testify. A Yale-educated lawyer, Bolton perhaps calculated that Senate Republicans would live up to their oaths of office, and to the separate impeachment-trial oath they took to do “impartial justice.” He assumed they would uphold the Constitution. Sadly, he was wrong.

For that miscalculation, both he and the nation — but especially the nation — have paid a great price. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/14/john-bolton-made-tragic-mistake-its-not-one-you-might-think/

16. Michele L. Norris: The diabolical irony of Trump in Tulsa

Perhaps a better date, but still the wrong venue.

Trump has decided to push his first post-pandemic campaign rally to the day after Juneteenth. Known as Freedom Day, Juneteenth commemorates the date in 1865 when the last remaining enslaved blacks in Texas learned, two years late, that the Emancipation Proclamation had set them free. He was wise to listen to his African American friends and advisers on that score.

But he is still plowing ahead with a rally in Tulsa, the wrong city for a “Make America Great Again” event in this incendiary moment for our country. Tulsa was the site of one of the most vicious acts of racial violence in U.S. history. In 1921, an angry white mob attacked homes and businesses in a thriving community known as “Black Wall Street,” killing some 300 people and leaving thousands homeless. In another time, and perhaps with a different president, a trip to Tulsa could be an occasion for absolution or remembrance, a chance to talk courageously about healing America’s gaping racial wound.

But for this administration, the decision to hold a rally in that city constitutes an act of diabolical irony. A man who rode to the White House on a hot gust of racial grievance will be visiting a place where white resentment exploded into two days of epic terror, wiping one of history’s most prosperous black communities off the map.

All these years later, they are still trying to find where the bodies of black victims were buried in Tulsa, still trying to calculate the loss of property and income, still trying to determine who set the fires and flew the planes that dropped burning balls of turpentine onto black-owned buildings, still trying to piece together the full history because there was a concerted effort to erase that, too, from news archives and history books.

You need to earn the right to speak on that soil. You need to step into that space with humility and grace, to honor those who were killed and to show respect for a city that has tried, finally, to confront those days of terror by examining their lingering impact. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-diabolical-irony-of-trump-in-tulsa/2020/06/13/f262122e-ad9e-11ea-a9d9-a81c1a491c52_story.html

17. Philip Bump: Ask Trump and prime-time Fox News hosts, and rampant looting and violence continues unabated

Over the past week and through Monday, Fox News’s prime-time shows have repeatedly shown clips of violence from the end of May — often the same clips, over and over — to depict chaos and terror gripping the streets of the country. As protesters in Seattle took control of a few blocks in that city, it was blended with the scenes of violence from last month to continue the same narrative. Cities are collapsing — and the left is to blame.

“Protests continuing across the country,” host Sean Hannity said on “Hannity” Monday evening, describing new developments in the case of George Floyd who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck. “Anarchy, lawlessness reign supreme in Seattle. The police precinct there has been abandoned by city officials. Another precinct in Minneapolis was burned to the ground just a few weeks ago in riots that had nothing to do with the honor or memory of George Floyd.”

All of it was blended together — and not subtly. From June 8 through June 15, the three Fox prime-time shows showed video clips from violence in late May nearly two dozen times during the hosts’ opening monologues alone — including as Hannity spoke about Minneapolis on Monday.

“The Democrats who tolerated and indeed fomented this violence?” host Laura Ingraham said during “The Ingraham Angle” last week. “We need to teach them a lesson so vivid that they will finally gain the courage to take back their party from the radicals who now dominate it.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/16/ask-trump-fox-news-looting-violence-continues-unabated/

18. Jake Tapper: US needs to let go of celebrating 'dead, racist losers'

It has been a rough period for President Trump and the military leaders with his former defense secretary, retired Marine General James Mattis, assailing him for dividing the country -- a sentiment given an 'Amen' by Trump's former chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly -- not to mention criticisms from Gen. Colin Powell, Adm. Bill McRaven, Gen. Martin Dempsey, Gen. John Allen, [and] Adm. Mike Mullen.

The President and his supporters have had plenty of nasty things to say about these men who have served our country, of course. No need for me to report them. You all have access to Twitter.

There is one group of generals, however, that the President is standing firm with, dead racist losers -- more specifically, the Confederate commanders after whom 10 Army bases are currently named. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/14/politics/trump-confederate-commanders-cnntv/index.html

19. Joe Pompeo: “She Feels Very Determined”: How Mary Trump’s Coming Bombshell Was Built

Donald Trump is a president who’s launched a thousand tell-alls by high-profile journalists and former administration officials alike. What, one might ask, is there left to learn? But Mary L. Trump’s forthcoming memoir about her famous family, Too Much and Never Enough, nonetheless promises to be one of the sizzling must-reads of the summer 2020 election season. The book has something that all the others didn’t: Its author, the 55-year-old eldest grandchild of patriarch Fred Trump Sr., is a member of the dynasty itself, privy to insight and information in a way no outsider could be. She also has a highly unsympathetic view of the moral failings of her uncle, the 45th president of the United States. The subtitle says it all: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.

On Tuesday, following a Daily Beast article that blew the lid off the tightly held project, thereby pushing up the publication date from mid-August to July 28, Simon & Schuster rushed out the purchasing information to Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The boilerplate promises a 240-page “authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him,” including “a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse,” as well as firsthand recollections of “countless holiday meals and family interactions.”

Someone who knows Mary Trump and has read the book similarly described it to me as follows: “The punch of the book, the real symbolic thrust, is about how Donald is really an outgrowth of this complex empire that Fred Sr. built—a pretty dark, win-at-all-costs environment. If there’s going to be a big takeaway, it’s about that emotional DNA of the family.” The narrative, this person said, also touches on Mary’s deep bond with her father, Fred Trump Jr., who died of an alcoholism-related heart attack in 1981 at the age of 42. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/how-mary-trumps-coming-bombshell-was-built

20. John Cassidy: Taxpayers Have a Right to Know Who Is Getting Their Stimulus Money

Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants, as Louis D. Brandeis—the future Supreme Court Justice—remarked, in his 1913 essay “What Publicity Can Do.” Seldom has this dictum been more apposite than it is now, when American taxpayers are handing out gobs of money to businesses affected by the coronavirus pandemic, the vast majority of which remain anonymous. On Sunday, the Treasury Department and the Small Business Administration published an update on the Paycheck Protection Program, which was designed to keep Americans employed during the shutdowns by providing financial support to businesses with fewer than five hundred workers. As of June 12th, the S.B.A., which is administrating the P.P.P., had approved about 4.6 million loans. The average size of the loans was about a hundred and twelve thousand dollars. The total amount committed was $512.3 billion, equivalent to about 2.4 per cent of G.D.P.

That’s a large sum to spend on what are effectively grants. (As long as a business participating in the P.P.P. maintains its payroll, most or all of its loan will be eligible to be forgiven.) And yet, with a few exceptions, taxpayers don’t know who has received all this money. Despite pressure from Congress and the filing of a Freedom of Information lawsuit by a number of media companies, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has refused to publish a list of P.P.P.-loan recipients and the sizes of their loans. The Trump Administration has not yet provided such data to the Government Accountability Office.

The Administration’s hard-line stance has inevitably generated suspicions that it is trying to hide something. Shortly after the P.P.P. was rolled out, in April, it was revealed that three firms controlled by a prominent Trump donor, the Texas hotelier Monty Bennett, had received close to sixty million dollars in loans. (In early May, Bennett’s businesses said that they would return the money.) NBC News reported that at least three other businesses “with ties to the Trump administration received a total of $18.3 million under the program.” None of these firms was connected to the Trump family, however. And, at a press conference on April 21st, Trump insisted that none of his businesses had received money under the P.P.P. program. “Well, I know one thing—I didn’t get any, that’s for sure,” he said. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/taxpayers-have-a-right-to-know-who-is-getting-their-money