1. Maureen Dowd: A.O.C. and the Jurassic Jerks

As Republicans sniped, one Democrat soared.

Ted Yoho, a Florida Republican, tried to slap down Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A reporter overheard him muttering that the congresswoman was “a fucking bitch” as Yoho walked away after having an argument with her about crime and policing on the steps of the Capitol. (Yoho denies he said it.)

The youngest woman to ever serve in Congress is so full of natural political talent, burning so bright, that the 2020 field seems dull next to her luster. It was a remarkable moment on Capitol Hill, where for years super-achieving women have let such sexist remarks slide.

She went to the House floor Thursday and schooled Yoho the Yahoo and the retrograde crowd.

“Mr. Yoho mentioned that he has a wife and two daughters,” she said. “I am two years younger than Mr. Yoho’s youngest daughter. I am someone’s daughter, too.” She added, “I am here because I have to show my parents that I am their daughter, and that they did not raise me to accept abuse from men.”

Showing her skill in a generational dimension foreign to Congress until now, A.O.C. posted a video of herself on Instagram Stories strutting to the rap tune “Boss Bitch” by Doja Cat, her long hair whipping to the music, with the Capitol in the background. “I’m a bitch and a boss, Im’a shine like gloss.” She captioned it: “Shine on, fight for others, and let the haters stay mad.”

And that’s the way you make Paleolithic men understand that they are history. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/opinion/aoc-yoho-trump-2020.html

2. Amanda Carpenter: Let Them Expense Cake!

If anything represents the bass-ackwards approach Republicans are taking to the coronavirus response, it might be the proposal, supported by President Trump, that Senator Tim Scott put into the latest round of coronavirus relief.

Scott wants to raise the deduction for business meals from 50 percent to a full 100 percent, which he says “will lead to more customers, more opportunities for hardworking waitstaff and kitchen staff, and much-needed revenue for small businesses across the country.”

Um, what? Almost 150,000 Americans are dead, millions of kids won’t be able to attend in-person classrooms this fall, people still can’t get fast accessible testing—and one of our top priorities is allowing a full deduction for business meals? Calling this “out-of-touch” would be generous because it would imply it was somewhere within the realm of actually being “in touch.” The only way this makes sense is if you want to skew “relief” towards steakhouses in Washington and New York. Trump Hotel may be a lobbyist hotspot, but your local pizza place most assuredly is not.

Besides, who in the world is traveling around the country, hosting client meals and events, in the middle of a highly-contagious and deadly pandemic? For goodness sake, Google is keeping its employees home until July 2021.

At the same time, billionaire hedge fund manager-turned Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has a plan! Cut the $600 per week federal unemployment benefit to $200 a week. “It wouldn’t be fair to use taxpayer dollars to pay more people to sit home than they would get working and get a job,” Mnuchin told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. Yes! Fairness! That’s what Republicans are after!

Well, if that’s the case, do the restaurant workers, retail workers, and other working-class folks the Trump administration thinks are busy milking the system for a paid vacation get the meal deduction? BWAHAHAHAHAHA. Don’t bother keeping those McDonald’s receipts. These benefits aren’t for the Dollar Menu crowd, you fool. https://thebulwark.com/let-them-expense-cake/

3. Richard North Patterson: Donald Trump vs. Democracy

Trump and his party are fundamentally opposed to that most basic tenet of democracy: an honest and inclusive election. Instead, they want to choose their own electorate through selectively excluding probable Democratic voters—minorities, urbanites, and the young—by making it more difficult for such people to vote and, in this year of COVID-19, more dangerous.

The GOP’s methods for restricting in-person voting are a time-tested product of its reliance on a shrinking demographic of older, often less educated white people: Enforcing discriminatory voter ID laws that target minorities. Closing polling places to make voting in Democratic areas harder and more time-consuming. Limiting early and absentee voting. Paring voter rolls on pretexts that disproportionately disenroll eligible voters of color.

But the pandemic hands Republicans potent new weapons: Eschewing public health measures in overcrowded polling places predominantly used by Democrats, thereby endangering voters and poll workers. And, most critically, amplifying the impact of in-person voting by Republicans through the suppression of mail-in balloting.

The strategy rests on four related premises. First, that making voting tougher for presumptive Democrats than Republicans can tilt closely contested states. Second, that Trump voters are more enthusiastic, and thus more likely to vote in person. Third, and less flattering, that—conned by their ignorant and derelict leader—his base voters are simply too dumb to appreciate the risk of in-person voting. Fourth, that mass voting by mail would undercut Republican efforts to disenfranchise Democratic voters. https://thebulwark.com/donald-trump-vs-democracy/

4. Jonathan Chait: Why Trump’s Protest Crackdown Keeps Blowing Up in His Face

An administration official recently told the Washington Post the White House “had long wanted to amplify strife in cities,” and that “it was about getting viral online content.” A confession that the president is provoking violent confrontations on American soil in order to seed campaign propaganda would tear apart a normal president, but has already been half-forgotten against the backdrop of a presidency in which scandals of this scale occur several times a week.

But the reason Trump’s tactic fails is that, by deploying troops to fight the anarchists, he broadens the issue into a fight about Trump himself. This inevitably draws more, largely nonviolent protesters into the streets. “The numbers of protesters had dwindled substantially in recent weeks,” one reporter in Portland observed last week, “but reports of heavily armed, unidentified, camouflaged federal officers abducting people off the street into unmarked vehicles and meting out violence on the people of Portland have thoroughly re-energized the populace.”

The same thing happened further north. “Nightly protests since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis had dwindled in recent weeks in Seattle but were reinvigorated in the wake of federal action in the Portland protests and after Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) tweeted that President Trump had sent federal law enforcement agents to the city,” reported the Post.

And so the scenes that Trump craves, pitting soldiers against black-clad radicals, have transformed quickly into troops against veterans, moms, and other antagonists who cut a more sympathetic profile. The protesters report that they have joined the protests because of Trump’s response to the protests. Tessa and Leshan Terry formed the “Wall of Vets” in Portland, and came to their first demonstration, after seeing video of agents beating a fellow Navy veteran. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/trump-protesters-portland-troops-police-protests.html

5. Catherine Rampell: Trump knows he’s going to lose. He’s already salting the earth behind him.

How can you tell President Trump thinks he’s going to lose in November? Because he has already begun salting the earth behind him.

And his fellow Republicans are helping by sabotaging key institutions that the next (presumably Democratic) president will inherit.

On Tuesday, the Republican-controlled Senate Banking Committee approved Trump’s latest two picks for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. One of these nominees, Christopher Waller, would be a competent, reasonable, totally qualified addition to the most powerful economic body in the world.

The other is Judy Shelton.

Shelton, a professional crank, has previously suggested that the Fed shouldn’t exist. She has repeatedly likened the Fed to a “Soviet State Planning Committee” because the central bank, rather than the quantity of gold, controls the money supply. Shelton has spent her career trying to bring back the gold standard, a monetary system abandoned worldwide and roundly rejected by economists.

Those were her views until recently, anyway. Once Trump nominated her to the Fed, she changed her tune. Now the key problem with the central bank, she says, is that it is not political enough and ought to “pursue a more coordinated relationship with” the president. Which happens to be exactly what Trump wants: a Fed that serves his narrow political interests, rather than the economy’s. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-knows-hes-going-to-lose-hes-already-salting-the-earth-behind-him/2020/07/23/9a506016-cce5-11ea-91f1-28aca4d833a0_story.html

6. Greg Sargent: Trump’s frantic new effort to win back seniors is already failing

Here’s President Trump’s new reelection strategy, in a nutshell: Convince vulnerable seniors who rightly fear getting killed by the pandemic that Trump let rampage out of control that they should instead fear getting killed by criminals who would supposedly rampage out of control in a future post-police dystopia that is entirely invented.

You can see this in Trump’s campaign ads. He is running a new spot that depicts an elderly woman calling the police in terror as a marauder circles her house like a vulture, only to find that in “Joe Biden’s America,” the police are no longer there.

In recent weeks, Trump’s campaign has spent $20 million on the ad and others like it. But that ad is based on a lie: It falsely claims Biden would defund the police. Tellingly, if you listen closely, you’ll note that the person who voices this lie is Trump’s chief propagandist, Sean Hannity.

The fear of death hovers over that ad. It’s no accident that this comes as Trump is bleeding support among seniors, very likely due to his catastrophic mishandling of the virus, because they have the most to fear from it. One threat to seniors is supposed to magically supplant the other. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/23/trump-frantic-new-effort-win-back-seniors-is-already-failing/

7. Jonathan Chait: Trump Brags That He Repeated 5 Words in a Row on ‘Difficult’ Dementia Test

In a new interview with Fox News, President Trump again repeated what is becoming his proudest triumph as president — allegedly passing a test for cognitive impairment. (We don’t know that Trump passed the test; the only corroboration is his former doctor, Ronny Jackson, who is obviously beholden to the president whose endorsement set up his new career.) The test Trump took is not a test for geniuses. Its questions, such as pointing to a picture of an elephant and saying “elephant,” are designed to screen for dementia. But Trump took pains to note that some of the questions are harder. Several days ago he insisted to Chris Wallace, “I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last five questions.” Now he has revealed the most difficult of these questions.

“The last questions are much more difficult,” he said. “Like a memory question. It’s, uh, like you’ll go, ‘Person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ So they say, ‘Could you repeat that?’ So I said, ‘Yeah.’ So it’s ‘person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ ‘Okay, that’s very good.’”

It seems perhaps unfair, given Trump’s hours of daily television consumption, that 40 percent of the words he had to repeat involved television. Nonetheless, it is an achievement. Of sorts. Though I would argue that Chris Wallace probably could repeat those words as well.

“The doctors said very few people can do that, very few people get that,” Trump elaborated, with evident pride. It seems as if the actual test here is whether or not a person who passes the dementia screening boasts about his performance in public as if it is proof of his genius, rather than evidence that his doctors suspected he is suffering serious cognitive impairment. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/trump-repeated-5-words-person-woman-man-camera-tx-dementia-cognitive-test.html

Sarah Cooper: How to person woman man camera tv:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8oaaP68i4s

8. Jonathan Blitzer: Is It Time to Defund the Department of Homeland Security?

In early June, after the killing of George Floyd, when tens of thousands of mostly peaceful demonstrators assembled in cities across the country to protest police brutality, the Department of Homeland Security sent hundreds of its agents to patrol the crowds. They cleared space for a Presidential photo op in front of St. John’s Church, in Washington, D.C., by forcibly removing demonstrators, and in New York City they reportedly made at least one arrest at gunpoint. The legal rationale for their being on the scene was a statute from 2002 that gave them broad authority to protect federal property and personnel. This mandate sounded just vague enough to escape mainstream notice at the time, when police officers were being filmed tear-gassing and beating protesters. But a pressing question remains, which the D.H.S. leadership can’t easily answer: What are agents from Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement doing in the streets of U.S. cities nowhere near the border, policing citizens who have broken no laws? https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/is-it-time-to-defund-the-department-of-homeland-security

9. John Cassidy: America Is a Country Besieged by Its Own President

This week marked the fifty-first anniversary of the moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin. I am just about old enough to remember how, in Leeds, the city in northern England where I grew up, people gathered around their radios and television sets to witness the historic event. To most of the world, the landing symbolized American leadership and power. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that most of the people I grew up with loved the United States, or even openly admired it. Barely disguised resentment at the manner in which this country had eclipsed the British Empire was combined with a widespread contention that America was a shallow place beset by crass commercialism, high crime rates, and gaping racial rifts. But beneath the British condescension, there was also a respect for America: its technological know-how, its organizational efficiency, its democratic traditions, and its sheer heft. When my dad was away, working in Scotland, he saw the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy sail up the Firth of Forth. The vast aircraft carrier was almost a quarter of a mile long, he reported back to us in wonderment.

A half century later, the rest of the world is looking on in horror as this country lurches from one disaster to another. Trapped in a leadership vacuum created by the narcissistic reality-TV star who occupies the Oval Office, the United States seems powerless to arrest the spread of a pandemic that most industrialized countries contained months ago. As the cumulative number of infections surpasses four million, an economic rebound that began when many states prematurely reopened their economies appears to be stalling. And, with an election just three and a half months away, that same President, in a desperate effort to save his political skin, seems intent on creating violent clashes in some of America’s biggest conurbations. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/america-is-a-country-besieged-by-its-own-president

10. Zack Beauchamp: Portland, polarization, and the crisis of the Republican Party

What we’re seeing, according to experts on comparative democracy and American politics, is our polarized political system reaching its breaking point — and our democracy buckling under the pressure of Trump’s authoritarian impulses and near-total control of the Republican Party.

There is no legitimate justification for deploying these federal troops over local objections. The protests in Portland are limited to a small area and are primarily peaceful protests rather than riots. The violence that does grow out of those protests, like the recent rise in gun violence in Chicago, is a quintessentially local issue; the federal government has no business getting involved absent local request.

But Trump is running a “law and order” reelection campaign that works by entrenching partisan divides and stoking racial resentment. His unprecedented deployment of federal law enforcement personnel is a means to that end; he gets away with it because American politics is so dangerously polarized that Republicans are willing to accept virtually anything if it’s done to Democrats.

“Accepting this type of ‘occupation’ of American cities by unidentified federal agents requires such an extreme level of dehumanization of the citizens — which is probably why Trump repeatedly labels these cities as being run by ‘liberal Democrats,’” says Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland.

“At this point in our political circumstances, that label alone is enough to allow law-abiding Americans in those cities to be viewed as less worthy of basic democratic protections — and to permit harm to come to them at the hands of the state.”

“It’s not just about partisanship — it’s about who gets to be considered a ‘real’ American, with the full rights and privileges that entails. But it also clears the way for Trump’s push toward authoritarian rule,” Mason concludes. “It feels like the brakes are off.” https://www.vox.com/2020/7/24/21335887/portland-trump-dhs-federal-polarization?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4

11. Dana Stevens: Held back

As parents realize how badly the U.S. botched the next school year, we’re furious

Having utterly failed to contain the virus, the administration is now employing the crafty tactic of attempting to draw attention away from the pandemic — as if we could be distracted out of noticing that we can no longer safely leave our homes, we have no functioning public institutions (libraries, museums, schools), we have lost more than 139,000 American lives, and we are well on our way into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Early on, the administration shrugged its responsibility off onto the states, leaving Americans with a wildly inconsistent patchwork of policies that varied according to their governors’ political affiliations, the population’s trust in science and the degree to which their states had shut down, or not.

An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll this week found that most Americans are concerned that reopening schools for in-person learning will lead to a coronavirus surge, and 35 percent of parents think they shouldn’t open at all. Another 41 percent of parents think they should only open with “major adjustments.” My daughter’s school-to-be recently gave families an early August deadline to choose all-online or “blended” classes for the fall. We’re hesitating, keeping an eye on the city’s case numbers as we weigh the familiar misery of Zoom against the incalculable risk of contracting or spreading a potentially fatal disease. Whichever we go with, we will no doubt spend the semester wondering if we harmed either our child’s education or our community’s health by not picking the other option.

Now, with case numbers rising in 44 out of 50 states, the White House, abruptly abandoning its always spotty commitment to federalism, has begun issuing marching orders about opening schools full-time and on schedule, masks and social distancing be damned. In a classic bit of Trump gaslighting, not only has any hope for increased school funding dematerialized, but the administration is threatening to defund individual school districts if they don’t comply with the order to reopen. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/24/remote-school-parents-rage/

12. Roger Cohen: American Catastrophe Through German Eyes

No people has found the American lurch toward authoritarianism under President Trump more alarming than the Germans. For postwar Germany, the United States was savior, protector and liberal democratic model. Now, Germans, in shock, speak of the “American catastrophe.”

A recent cover of the weekly magazine Der Spiegel portrays Trump in the Oval Office holding a lighted match, with a country ablaze visible through his window. The headline: “Der Feuerteufel,” or, literally, “the Fire Devil.”

Trump provokes outrage in a cascade designed to blunt alarm. He deadens reactions through volume and repetition. But something about the recent use of unmarked cars and camouflage-clad federal agents without clear identifying insignia detaining protesters shattered any inclination to shrug.

From the deployment of those federal units in Portland, Oregon’s largest city, where protesters have been demanding racial justice and police accountability, it’s not a huge leap to the use of paramilitaries (like the German Freikorps in the 1920s) to buttress a “Law and Order” campaign. The Freikorps battled communists. Today, Trump claims to battle “anarchists,” “terrorists” and violent leftists. It’s the leitmotif of his quest for a second term. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/opinion/trump-germany.html

13. Peter Baker: ‘Mugged by Reality,’ Trump Finds Denial Won’t Stop the Pandemic

He insisted that it was safe, that people could go back to work, that schools could reopen, that he could hold packed indoor campaign rallies, that he could even hold a full-fledged, boisterous, bunting-filled nominating convention as if all were well.

Only now, it is all crashing down around President Trump. The president who shunned masks and pressured states to reopen and promised a return to the campaign trail finds himself canceling rallies, scrapping his grand convention, urging Americans to stay away from crowded bars and at long last embracing, if only halfheartedly, wearing masks.

It may not be the death of denial, but it is a moment when denial no longer appears to be a viable strategy for Mr. Trump. For more than three years in office, he proved strikingly successful at bending much of the political world to his own vision of reality, but after six months the coronavirus pandemic is turning out to be the one stubborn, inalterable fact of life that he cannot simply force into submission through sheer will. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-denial.html

14. Ali Noorani: 100 Days Out from the Election, Immigration is on the Ballot

It is getting harder and harder for the vulnerable to seek protection in the United States from persecution of any kind—religious, political, or social. Attorney General William Barr is reopening asylum cases to potentially remove protections. Children as young as 1 year old, are being detained in hotels. Our immigration courts are stacked with leadership focused on denying cases and curtailing due process. “Enforcement” at the border now means deporting people without following the law. Under the president’s April proclamation even family members of lawful permanent residents may not be able to enter the country, and also affects recipients of diversity visas. And, barring action from Congress, the administration’s approach to immigration is in danger of bankrupting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services before the summer is over.

America is clearly better than this. Because, much to his chagrin (and political peril), President Trump has forged a new consensus on American immigration.

In polling completed at the end of May, as the nation continued to be racked by COVID-19 and as George Floyd’s death was launching a new kind of conversation about racial justice, Gallup found that more Americans wanted an increase in immigration than a decrease—a first since Gallup started asking this question in 1965.

Look closely and you see something surprising: a 7-point rise since 2018 in independents’ support for increased immigration. Among people older than 55, 63 percent want the present level or an increase and 73 percent think immigration is a good thing. The numbers are 77 percent and 80 percent among those with “some college” education, and 79 percent and 86 percent among moderates.

The very coalition that boosted Trump to victory in 2016 is cracking under the weight of his hardline immigration policies. https://thebulwark.com/100-days-out-from-the-election-immigration-is-on-the-ballot/

15. Eric Lutz: What If Trump Had Actually Responded to Coronavirus Like a Rational Person?

Poll after poll—including new reports from NBC News/Marist and the Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research out on Monday—shows Donald Trump falling further behind Joe Biden, thanks in large part to the pandemic he has steadfastly mismanaged. With fewer than 100 days until election day, support for his handling of the pandemic has hit a new low, and Biden continues to outstrip him in crucial states. The solution to the president’s dimming political prospects, then, would seem simple: just do something about the coronavirus. But Trump, true to form, has continued to dismiss the dangers of COVID-19, to face the pandemic with little more than wishful thinking, and to treat it as a political problem rather than the devastating public health crisis that it is.

His inability to change course for the public good, even when doing so is in his best interest, reflects his lifelong objection to admitting failure, not to mention his refusal to hear bad news. “The irony is that if he’d just performed with minimal competence and just mouthed words about national unity, he actually could be in a pretty strong position right now,” Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser under Barack Obama, told the Washington Post. “And he just could not do it.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/what-if-trump-had-actually-responded-to-coronavirus-like-a-rational-person