1. Richard Wolffe: Trump's sweaty Fox News interview shows his 2020 chances melting away

At this point in Trump’s Twilight Zone, the audience has a good sense of the plot twists that lie ahead in the next four months. It consists of as much concocted chaos as humanly possible.

There will be terrorist protesters in every major city, whisked off the streets by Trump’s paramilitaries in rented minivans. Thank goodness we have machine-gun-toting goons to protect us from all that graffiti.

There will be caravans of coronavirus-filled immigrants scaling the freshly-painted border wall, which has done such a fantastic job of protecting us all from the pandemic.

After Nixon sweated his way to defeat against Kennedy, he returned to win the presidency eight years later with a law and order campaign that promised to shut down civil rights protests and stop enforcing civil rights laws.

Our Trumpified version of Tricky Dick is a little less subtle than the original.

He claimed that people flying the confederate flag were “not talking about racism”. But when asked about removing the names of confederate generals from US military bases, Trump could only think about race. And some weird stuff about a couple of world wars. https://www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2020/jul/20/trump-interview-fox-news-election-polls-chances-melting-away

2. LA Times Editorial: Trump’s crackdown in Portland shows his wretched talent for making everything worse

The deployment of federal agents in Portland, Ore., over the objection of state and local officials, to shoot and gas protesters and to snatch people from the street to stuff them into unmarked vans is an unconscionable assault on democracy and a dangerous and needless ratcheting up of tension.

President Trump’s action in defiance of Oregon’s governor and Portland’s mayor has predictably given new life to nonstop protests that began after the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody but had begun to peter out. The president has thus employed his wretched talent for exacerbating division and discord at precisely the time the nation needs a leader to calm overheated passions and fears.

Presidents have broad power to deploy troops to quell lawlessness, but they generally exercise that power only when governors request help or when the commander-in-chief himself determines that state authorities are failing to deal with the problem. They send in federal forces to protect people or to enforce the Constitution, as when President Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 to enforce the right of Black students to enroll in a previously all-white high school and to make clear that the Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education would be enforced, that the doctrine of “separate but equal” had been overturned, and that state segregationists could not defy the basic American principle that all people are equal under law.

Trump, by contrast, directed federal agencies to use their muscle to protect statues and other federal properties, not people or the Constitution. And he says he plans to do this in more cities — evidently, because he thinks displaying force against the citizenry is going to help him in November.

This has become part of his pattern. In the weeks before overreacting to the Portland protests, Trump used troops to clear his path for a photo op near the White House. He set forth his doctrine that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” He articulated his principle that states should “dominate the streets,” and if they didn’t, that he would override their authority. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-07-20/portland-worsens-under-trump

3. Peter Wehner: Donald Trump Is a Broken Man

The most revealing answer from Donald Trump’s interview with Fox News Channel’s Chris Wallace came in response not to the toughest question posed by Wallace, but to the easiest.

At the conclusion of the interview, Wallace asked Trump how he will regard his years as president.

“I think I was very unfairly treated,” Trump responded. “From before I even won, I was under investigation by a bunch of thieves, crooks. It was an illegal investigation.”

When Wallace interrupted, trying to get Trump to focus on the positive achievements of his presidency—“What about the good parts, sir?”—Trump brushed the question aside, responding, “Russia, Russia, Russia.” The president then complained about the Flynn investigation, the “Russia hoax,” the “Mueller scam,” and the recusal by his then–attorney general, Jeff Sessions. (“Now I feel good because he lost overwhelmingly in the great state of Alabama,” Trump said about the first senator to endorse him in the 2016 Republican primary.)
Donald Trump is a psychologically broken, embittered, and deeply unhappy man. He is so gripped by his grievances, such a prisoner of his resentments, that even the most benevolent question from an interviewer—what good parts of your presidency would you like to be remembered for?—triggered a gusher of discontent. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/trump-wallowing-self-pity/614434/

4. Eric Lutz: Trump’s Campaign Strategy: Scare The Bejesus Out Of Older Voters

In Trump's advertisement, an elderly woman sits on the couch in her darkened living room. She’s watching Fox News, where Sean Hannity is taking Joe Biden to task for seeking to defund police departments—a position that the Democratic nominee has not actually adopted, much to the chagrin of some in his party’s progressive wing. As she shakes her head at the television, a masked man creeps around her house and attempts to jimmy open her door with a crowbar. She tries to call the police, but to no avail; the phone rings in an empty station. “Hello, you’ve reached 9-1-1,” says a voice on the answering machine. “I’m sorry that there is no one here to answer your emergency call. But leave a message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.” The intruder finally breaks in and comes after the woman, who drops the phone in horror.

“You won’t be safe,” the tagline reads, “in Joe Biden’s America.”

Even by the standard of political ads, the president’s recent campaign spot is ham-handed. But it is emblematic of Donald Trump’s apparent effort to revive his flagging re-election bid by scaring the shit out of Republican voters, particularly the older ones who help form the core of his base. Unable and unwilling to address the coronavirus crisis that has killed 144,000 Americans and counting, and out of step with a growing number who support the nation’s reckoning over racism, the president has cast himself as a defender of “law and order” against the violent anarchy that he says is plaguing the nation. In this alternate universe his campaign has constructed, Portland, Chicago, and other cities are “totally out of control”—and would get worse if Trump weren’t there to send in his secret police. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/trumps-campaign-strategy-scare-the-bejesus-out-of-older-voters

5. Ron Brownstein: Trump Is Determined to Split the Country in Two

Trump’s alarms about “angry mobs” and “violent mayhem” in Democratic cities might allow him to recapture some Republican-leaning white suburbanites and energize his rural and small-town support, analysts in both parties told me. But as I’ve written before, his belligerent tone simultaneously risks hardening the opposition he’s facing from the many suburban voters who feel that he’s exposing them to more danger—both in his response to the policing protests and his unrelenting push to reopen the economy despite the coronavirus’s resurgence. In last week’s national Quinnipiac University poll, just over seven in 10 white voters holding at least a four-year college degree disapproved of Trump’s handling of both race relations and the outbreak.

The larger political implication of these battles is to deepen the sense that the nation is hardening into antagonistic camps separated by an imaginary border that circles all of the major population centers, dividing the metropolitan core within from the less densely settled places beyond.

Trump is determined to widen that trench. He is trying to rally red America by portraying blue cities as a threat, and then positioning himself as the human wall against them. Until now, Trump has advanced that divisive vision through rhetoric denouncing cities and through policies that cost them money and influence, such as eliminating the federal deduction for state and local taxes, trying to block Justice Department grants for cities that don’t fully cooperate with federal immigration authorities, and his renewed efforts to strip undocumented immigrants from the census.

But in these final months before the November election, Trump’s deployment of federal forces is transforming his political war on big cities into something much closer to the real thing. “It’s breathtaking in its danger,” said Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor. And if Trump wins a second term—especially if that victory relies on another rural surge to overcome massive opposition across the big metros—the chaos in Portland might look like only the preliminary skirmish for an even more incendiary collision to come. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/07/trumps-portland-offensive-fits-long-pattern/614476/

6. Abigail Tracy: “We Need Them to F--king Do Something”: Former Pandemic Officials Call Trump’s COVID-19 Response a National Disaster

After months of mixed messaging from the White House, any expectation that Trump—seemingly singularly focused on restarting the economy, once his best hope of winning reelection in November—will suddenly lead the country out of this pandemic feels misguided. After all, more than 130,000 Americans had to die from COVID-19 before the president donned a mask in public. “This is horrifying, the situation we’re in right now, and is a direct result of a White House failing to take ownership of [its] role as the lead in a national disaster, a 50-state disaster, and to provide strong, clear policies that would guide an entire nation,” Juliette Kayyem, a former Department of Homeland Security official in the Obama administration who played a critical role in the H1N1 crisis, told me. “Instead you had a president who was fighting the science, questioning the scientists, undermining what we knew would stop the virus, pushing for early openings and seeming untouched by the impact that this was having on the American public. Just seems impervious.” In recent days, Trump has appeared more focused on beans than the coronavirus crisis.

Shockingly, the administration seems to be turning away from science and public health experts instead of running toward them as the virus ravages the country. “There’s such a lack of clear thinking by people that are in positions of leadership,” the former official told me. “Either they’re totally stupid or they’re totally corrupt.” White House officials, under a cloak of anonymity, kept busy planting attacks in the press against Dr. Anthony , head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, earlier this week.

One official, trade adviser Peter Navarro wrote an op-ed for USA Today, in which he said, “Fauci has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.” Fauci, for his part, continues down the high road. “I don’t like the conflict. I’m an apolitical person. I don’t like to be pitted against the president,” he told Norah O’Donnell in an interview for InStyle magazine. “It’s pretty tough walking a tightrope while trying to get your message out and people are trying to pit you against the president. It’s very stressful.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/trump-administration-coronavirus-response

7. Karen Tumulty: The Trump campaign is the grift that keeps on grifting

There has long been an element of grift to political campaigns.

But there has never been anything quite like the racket that President Trump appears to have going.

In two days alone during March, the president’s reelection effort forked over roughly $380,000 of its contributors’ money to his hotels for “facility rental/catering services.”

The Trump Organization told my colleague David Fahrenthold that this paid for a “donor retreat” to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. A source familiar with the arrangement explained to Fahrenthold that the figure had to be broken into 43 separate payments, because Mar-a-Lago can’t handle credit card transactions of more than $10,000.

The campaign has also been paying more than $37,000 a month in rent to Trump Tower in New York, which is odd, considering that the campaign’s headquarters is in an office building in Rosslyn.

The Center for Responsive Politics has been keeping track of all of this on its OpenSecrets website. During this election cycle, the center reports, the president’s campaign and its related committees have steered $2.6 million of their donors’ money to Trump’s family-owned properties and businesses. The Republican Party has spent nearly $1 million as well, and GOP candidates, elected officials and their political action committees have spent another $391,000.

Trump’s donors, big and small, apparently are so dazzled by the aura of celebrity he has created around himself that they don’t care how much of their own money goes directly into his businesses. It’s all part of the experience. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/17/trump-campaign-is-grift-that-keeps-grifting/

8. Barbara McQuade: Why Trump’s Military Tactics in Portland Will Likely Backfire

The first rule of effective law enforcement is to gain the trust of the community you serve. Former FBI Detroit Special Agent in Charge Andy Arena frequently said that law enforcement officers can never be successful if they are perceived as an occupying army. Law enforcement is a social compact between community and police to protect the peace. Policing agencies derive their power from the consensus of the governed. As a result, the best law enforcement leaders spend countless hours meeting with community stakeholders, understanding their needs and using discretion to decide which arrests serve the best interests of the people. Overly aggressive tactics against certain groups can undermine the trust that is essential to serve effectively. Trust takes years to build and an instant to lose.

Even if the aggressive federal tactics are successful in suppressing violence in Portland, that success comes at a price. In addition to compromising protesters’ First Amendment rights to demonstrate, federal law enforcement is eroding public trust. When agents knock on doors to investigate crimes in the future, how many residents will open up and talk? When agents testify on the witness stand in courtrooms, how many jurors will believe them? Law enforcement relies on tips and leads from witnesses to crime. How many Portland residents will volunteer information to agents who act like authoritarian thugs? Law enforcement agencies lose their legitimacy when they are perceived as acting outside the best interests of the communities they serve. The resulting lack of respect for the law leads to less compliance.

Building trust is an important part of the work of law enforcement. But the federal agents in Portland are engaging in the exact opposite strategy. This political stunt may have some appeal to those who preach law and order, but not to those who practice it. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/trumps-military-tactics-in-portland-will-likely-backfire.html

9. Amanda Carpenter: Get Ready for the 2020 Election Recount

If you thought the 36-day national agony over “hanging chads” in the 2000 presidential election was bad, imagine what President Trump might do if the 2020 election is too close to call on Election Night. He’s already preparing the script for a remake of the 2000 election with his own authoritarian twist.

By now, it’s easy to ignore Trump’s angry, conspiracy-laced tweets about a rigged election. We shouldn’t, though, because it very well could be a preview of what’s to come. For example, here’s a tweet from last Friday:

Mail-In Ballot fraud found in many elections. People are just now seeing how bad, dishonest and slow it is. Election results could be delayed for months. No more big election night answers? 1% not even counted in 2016. Ridiculous! Just a formula for RIGGING an Election........Absentee Ballots are fine because you have to go through a precise process to get your voting privilege. Not so with Mail-Ins. Rigged Election!!! 20% fraudulent ballots? — Donald J. Trump

He’s right about one thing. Election results are likely to be delayed this year. Coronavirus concerns have prompted states to expand mail-in voting options, and millions of Americans have taken up the offer. Those ballots take much longer to count than in-person votes. When the 2000 election became “too close to call,” everything came down to a trio of Florida counties where lawyers wrangled over butterfly ballots, miscounts, undervotes, overvotes, hanging chad, swinging chad, tri chad, dimpled chad, and pregnant chad, too. This time, President Trump is already questioning ballots three months before a single vote is cast.

So, go on and get your anti-anxiety meds ready because the stage is set for a democratic crisis far worse than what we lived through in 2000. This time around, Trump has every lever of the federal government at his disposal. Smear merchants and bots will drive social media discussion, not James Baker and Warren Christopher in the courtrooms. Forget the so-called “Brooks Brothers riot” by a bunch of GOP staffers on a floor of a drab bureaucratic building in Miami. This time around, the Proud Boys and Antifa will be warring in the streets. Do you feel the walls closing in yet?

The 2020 stage is a tinderbox compared to 2000. As of today, over 138,000 Americans have died from COVID-19. The commander-in-chief Republican candidate is egging on his base in speeches and tweets depicting his opponents as radical left mobsters hell-bent on destroying the country. Pro-gun activists have swarmed state capitols to protest pandemic lockdowns. Mass protests and violence have broken out in cities across America in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. To top it all off, President Trump deployed soldiers to gas peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square. And for what? A freaking photo op.

The 2020 election is our country’s last, best hope to stop President Trump. Still, there are no guarantees if he contests the outcome. Those who wish to defeat Trump need to make it a blowout. This election can’t be too close to call. https://thebulwark.com/get-ready-for-the-2020-election-recount/

10. Juan Williams: We must not become numb to Trump's abnormality

Trump’s Cabinet features “a former coal lobbyist as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, a former lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon Technologies as defense secretary, a lobbyist for the auto industry at the helm of the Energy Department and a former oil and gas lobbyist as interior secretary.”

This administration is a gusher of conflicts of interest.

That’s why it is easy to become numb to the Trump administration crossing red lines that define normal, ethical behavior by people at the highest level of government.

At this point you might be scandal fatigued. You might agree that it is bad but excuse it as not the end of the world. But then you find out there is more.

How about the attorney general pressuring career prosecutors to recommend a lighter sentence for Roger Stone, an old friend of the president who had been convicted of lying to Congress?

Yes, Attorney General William Barr twisted the arm of federal prosecutors to take it easy on Stone on the basis of “political considerations,” according to congressional testimony from an assistant U.S. attorney, Aaron Zelinsky.

Then Trump took it to the next level. He commuted Stone’s sentence.

Even the conservative editors of National Review couldn’t swallow that one. They wrote that “Trump’s handling of the matter is indefensible. It is another indication of his perverse, highly personalized view of the criminal justice system.”

“An American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president,” is the way Sen. Mitt Romney (R- Utah) described the astonishing act. He summed it up as an act of “unprecedented, historic corruption.”

While that was taking place, the attorney general also looks to have been trying to help another of the president’s friends get out of legal trouble.

In that case, Barr tried to force out the prosecutor reportedly investigating the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Barr wanted to install a new U.S. attorney with no experience as a criminal prosecutor.

Geoffrey Berman, who was the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Manhattan, told Congress that Barr made him an unseemly offer if he agreed to quit.

Berman testified that Barr told him he could take over the civil rights division of the Justice Department but really use his time to build up a “book of business,” or list of clients that could help him get a big payday when he took a job at a private law firm.

Now that is a scandal in any other administration. But, again, it is just another day in the Trump presidency.

After all, this is the attorney general who ordered federal troops to use chemical agents and smoke bombs against Americans protesting police brutality. Why? So, the president could create a photo-op. Really.

This is not normal. https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/508047-juan-williams-we-must-not-become-numb-to-trumps-abnormality

11.  Jonathan Chait: American Death Cult 

Last October, the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security compiled a ranking system to assess the preparedness of 195 countries for the next global pandemic. Twenty-one panel experts across the globe graded each country in 34 categories composed of 140 subindices. At the top of the rankings, peering down at 194 countries supposedly less equipped to withstand a pandemic, stood the United States of America.

It has since become horrifyingly clear that the experts missed something. The supposed world leader is in fact a viral petri dish of uncontained infection. By June, after most of the world had beaten back the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S., with 4 percent of the world’s population, accounted for 25 percent of its cases. Florida alone was seeing more new infections a week than China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, and the European Union combined.

During its long period of decline, the Ottoman Empire was called “the sick man of Europe.” The United States is now the sick man of the world, pitied by the same countries that once envied its pandemic preparedness — and, as recently as the 2014 Ebola outbreak, relied on its expertise to organize the global response.

Our former peer nations are now operating in a political context Americans would find unfathomable. Every other wealthy nation in the world has successfully beaten back the disease, at least significantly, and at least for now. New Zealand’s health minister was forced to resign after allowing two people who had tested positive for COVID-19 to attend a funeral. The Italian Parliament heckled Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte when he briefly attempted to remove his mask to deliver a speech. In May — around the time Trump cheered demonstrators into the streets to protest stay-at-home orders — Boris Johnson’s top adviser set off a massive national scandal, complete with multiple calls for his resignation, because he’d been caught driving to visit his parents during lockdown. If a Trump official had done the same, would any newspaper even have bothered to publish the story?

It is difficult for us Americans to imagine living in a country where violations so trivial (by our standards) provoke such an uproar. And if you’re tempted to see for yourself what it looks like, too bad — the E.U. has banned U.S. travelers for health reasons. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/republican-response-coronavirus.html