1. Woodward book: Trump says he knew coronavirus was ‘deadly’ and worse than the flu while intentionally misleading Americans

President Trump’s head popped up during his top-secret intelligence briefing in the Oval Office on Jan. 28 when the discussion turned to the coronavirus outbreak in China.

“This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien told Trump, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. “This is going to be the roughest thing you face.”

Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, agreed. He told the president that after reaching contacts in China, it was evident that the world faced a health emergency on par with the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.

Ten days later, Trump called Woodward and revealed that he thought the situation was far more dire than what he had been saying publicly.

“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said in a Feb. 7 call. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”

“This is deadly stuff,” the president repeated for emphasis.

At that time, Trump was telling the nation that the virus was no worse than a seasonal flu, predicting it would soon disappear and insisting that the U.S. government had it totally under control. It would be several weeks before he would publicly acknowledge that the virus was no ordinary flu and that it could be transmitted through the air.

Trump admitted to Woodward on March 19 that he deliberately minimized the danger. “I wanted to always play it down,” the president said.

In their final interview, on July 21, Trump vented to Woodward, “The virus has nothing to do with me. It’s not my fault.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bob-woodward-rage-book-trump/2020/09/09/0368fe3c-efd2-11ea-b4bc-3a2098fc73d4_story.html

2. Dana Milbank How you can help save the Trump campaign from financial ruin

Well, this is embarrassing.

Seems President Trump has run his reelection campaign into financial distress, a status that will not surprise those familiar with the Trump Taj Mahal, the Trump Castle, the Trump Plaza Atlantic City, the Trump Plaza New York, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, Trump Entertainment Resorts, the Trump Tower Tampa, the Trump Shuttle, Trump: The Game, Trump magazine, Trump Mortgage, Trump Steaks, Trump mattresses, Trump pillows, Trump perfume, Trump shirts, Trump underwear, Trump shoes, Trump eyeglasses, Trump University, Trump Vodka, the Trump Foundation and the U.S. Treasury.

The New York Times’s Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman report that Trump and the Republican National Committee squandered their $200 million cash advantage, spent $800 million of the $1.1 billion raised and now face the possibility of a “cash crunch.” The culprit: “profligate habits” such as a car and driver for the now-former campaign manager, payments to Trump businesses, and a “vanity splurge” on Super Bowl ads.
Now, the cash-strapped campaign has had to abandon a $3 million plan to put the Trump name on a NASCAR race car. Sad! https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/08/how-you-can-help-save-trump-campaign-financial-ruin/

3. Kathleen Parker: A classy Fox News reporter nails Trump

I am eager to defend Jennifer Griffin, the Fox News military reporter whom President Trump has targeted for firing. Though she has plenty of friends at Fox News, several of whom have commented on her behalf, Griffin deserves a robust endorsement from all her colleagues. I’ve followed her closely for more than a decade, and I can say without qualm that she’s as good as it gets — a solid, hard-working, fair-minded journalist and, as others have said, a class act.

Yet, the most powerful person in the entire world has decided to make  Jennifer Griffin, the Fox News military reporter, Public Enemy No. 1. All media are the enemy to Trump, as we know, but singling out an individual reporter for punitive action is tantamount to making her a target at a time when everybody has a short fuse.

Griffin’s offense was confirming some of the allegations published last week by the Atlantic of derogatory remarks Trump had made about members of the U.S. military killed in action. The article, by Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, concerned a 2018 trip to Paris when Trump canceled a planned visit to the World War I Aisne-Marne American Cemetery. Trump, according to Goldberg’s sources, said the graves belonged to “suckers” and “losers.”

Based on her own reporting, Griffin tweeted that two former senior Trump administration officials had confirmed Goldberg’s reporting that “President Trump disparaged veterans and did not want to drive to honor American war dead at Aisne-Marne Cemetery outside Paris.” She also tweeted that, according to one former senior Trump administration official, “When the President spoke about the Vietnam War, he said, ‘It was a stupid war. Anyone who went was a sucker.’ ”

In a normal world, a man like Trump couldn’t get elected to the PTA, much less the White House. But these are far from normal times, thanks in part to the man charged with defending a Constitution he seems so often to abhor. The job of journalists, meanwhile, is to hold people in power accountable, which reporters such as Griffin and Goldberg have done with honesty and accountability throughout their respective and exceptional careers.

A president or political leader with nothing to hide has no reason to fear — nor need to demonize — the press. If some people wonder whether the president of the United States truly used “losers” and “suckers” to describe men and women who died at the behest of their own commander in chief, they might also ask, Why is Donald Trump so afraid? https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-classy-fox-reporter-nails-trump/2020/09/08/f186d786-f209-11ea-999c-67ff7bf6a9d2_story.html

4. Harry LItman: Trump is our first pro-vigilante president. Now stop and think about what that means

Trump’s claim to being a “law and order” president would be risible were it not tragic. His presidency represents the antithesis of law and order. No president has been less respectful of law, both specific legislative enactments and the very concept of the rule of law, not of men.

Is it any wonder that chaos follows him like a bridal train? This is his governing strategy. But the aberration of his presidency goes much deeper than his phony lip service to law and order.

As his comments about Rittenhouse demonstrate, Trump encourages his supporters to take the law into their own hands. It serves his purposes to have them ignite a melee with Black Lives Matter protesters. Trump’s only campaign tactic left at this point, given the COVID-19 catastrophe, is to play out the lie that murderous left-wing mobs are amassing at the gates and only he can stop them.

He is our first pro-vigilante president. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-09-02/donald-trump-kenosha-vigilantes

5. Eric Lutz: Democrats Are Girding For Post-Election Chaos

In mid-August, after Donald Trump endorsed QAnon-supporting Congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene, the president was asked about his own thoughts on the deranged, right-wing conspiracy theory. At one press conference, he mostly demurred, declining to condemn the batshit beliefs and pivoting to praise for Greene. But a few days later, when he was asked more directly about Q, he threw his weight behind the fringe movement. “I’ve heard these are people that love our country,” he said at an August 19 briefing. “If I can help save the world from problems, I’m willing to do it,” he continued, after being told that the cult views him as a warrior fighting a shadowy Democratic cabal of cannibalistic sex traffickers. “I’m willing to put myself out there.”

Trump is no longer simply encouraging rally-goers to commit assault on his behalf. As my colleague Abigail Tracy reported Tuesday, Trump is fanning the flames of domestic terrorism. That would be dangerous at any time. But with the fever rising in the weeks of a testy—and perhaps contested—election, Democrats are bracing for a potential surge in political violence, and grappling with what that could mean for the country.

Even through much of Trump’s norm-shattering and democracy-eroding presidency, the notion of the president refusing to leave office—and the possibility that he could deputize supporters to engage in violence to help him hold onto power—perhaps seemed remote. But amid the trouble and turmoil of 2020, with the nation ravaged by a pandemic and in the throes of a reckoning over systemic racism, the peaceful transition of power Americans took for granted seems far from guaranteed. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/democrats-are-girding-for-post-election-chaos

6. Amanda Carpenter: Get Ready for the Foreign-Ballot Conspiracy. The gaslighting has already begun.

What I’m about to tell you may sound nuts. That is, until you remember who the president is and everything he has done thus far to convince his base that the election is rigged against him. The only question is how far he will push the story.

In this case, President Trump has already given away the plot. Check out this tweet of his from June:

RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES! —Donald J. Trump

So the president has already laid the groundwork for claiming that foreign intervention will damage the integrity of the 2020 election. And he has an incredibly powerful government ally joining him in pushing the foreign-ballot narrative: Attorney General Bill Barr. https://thebulwark.com/get-ready-for-the-foreign-ballot-conspiracy/

7. Rick Wilson: Thought It Was Bad Before, America? Welcome to Trump’s Real Hellscape.

The desperate, dangerous weeks ahead are the most important and fraught since the eve of the American Civil War. Sure, you know there’s a pandemic, a looming crisis in bankruptcies, evictions and homelessness as Washington squabbles. You know we’re sliding into a racial conflict engineered by political hacks and juiced by social media tools in the hands of digital terrorists. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how are you liking 2020?

At a moment when a sensible, smart, decent normal president of either party would be working to face the monsters confronting us, Donald Trump’s hurt feelings and bad electoral prospects are leading us to a moment where the pain we’re suffering will be amplified and we will be pushed at least to our limits.

We’ll suffer because Donald Trump is scared of losing, and he’ll burn down everything to cling to power. We’ll suffer because his administration is filled with ass-sniffing toadies without a whit of courage or integrity. We’ll be put through a ringer of lies, propaganda, and strife designed by the best minds that the Trump campaign, the RNC, and their allies at the Internet Research Agency can muster. (Remember, while Trump may have a shit-tier intellect, the people desperate to keep him in the office of the president are smart, amoral, and absolutely fanatical about using the tools and technologies at their fingertips to ensure victory, no matter the cost. )

He will drag this country into three deep, dark places and his little minions (folks I like to think of as “people who were only following orders” types at the 2023 Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings) will help him every step of the way.

Next, he’ll drag us into the vortex of lies, conspiracy twaddle, scamecdotes (“He was a huge guy with tears in his eyes, saying, ‘Mr. Trump...I’m worried Antifa is in my laundry room.’”) and deadly deceptions. He’ll start lying about a vaccine—a beautiful vaccine, the best vaccine—in the next few weeks, and people in his base will decide that it’s time to cast off their masks and end social distancing. Sure, a lot of them will be dead soon, but it’s a small price to pay for a bump in the Rust Belt, right? https://www.thedailybeast.com/thought-it-was-bad-before-america-welcome-to-trumps-real-hellscape

8. Joan Walsh: A Lawless Attorney General Hits New Lows

It’s tough to choose the worst thing Attorney General William Barr said in a shocking Wednesday interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. He claimed that Jacob Blake, shot seven times in the back by Kenosha police last month, was armed; he was not. He appeared to back up Donald Trump’s demented claim that thugs in black boarded planes headed to Washington bent on mayhem, and then dissolved in “I don’t know what the president was specifically referring to.” When Blitzer asked if Trump’s outrageous suggestion that North Carolina supporters vote twice—ostensibly to check whether voting by mail made it possible—was illegal, Barr repeatedly averred, insisting, “I don’t know what the law in the particular state says.”

I do, and I don’t have a law degree. In none of our 50 states, nor the District of Columbia, is it legal to vote or attempt to vote twice. (That’s actually federal law.) You’re welcome.

A sinister arrogance, the smirking sense that he’s above the law, pervaded Barr’s replies. As well as brazen racism. Like Trump, he refused to admit the country, or law enforcement particularly, suffers from “systemic racism.” Cops don’t treat black men differently from white men because of “discrimination,” he insisted. “If anything’s been baked in, it’s a bias toward nondiscrimination.” Citing a comment the Rev. Jesse Jackson made 30 years ago about how even he sometimes feared young black men, Barr seemed to make the case that the disparity in their treatment by police stems from their own criminality, not police bias. Never mind that research shows that whether they’re obeying the law or breaking it, black men are much more likely than white men to suffer violence and abuse at the hands of police.

We can’t get numb to Barr’s repeated willingness to bend, break, or deny the law on behalf of his boss. This election is going to require us to vote in record-breaking numbers. Use your outrage—“good outrage,” to paraphrase the late John Lewis—to get in “good trouble”: organizing energetically to put an end to the lawless Trump-Barr era. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/william-barr-cnn/

9. Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’

When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.

In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

Belleau Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps. America and its allies stopped the German advance toward Paris there in the spring of 1918. But Trump, on that same trip, asked aides, “Who were the good guys in this war?” He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies.

Trump’s understanding of concepts such as patriotism, service, and sacrifice has interested me since he expressed contempt for the war record of the late Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in 2015 while running for the Republican nomination for president. “I like people who weren’t captured.” https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/

10. Eliot A. Cohen: America’s generals must stand up to Trump

Many senior officers have expressed worry about Trump’s understanding of the rules governing the use of the armed forces. This issue came to a head in early June, during demonstrations in Washington, D.C., in response to police killings of Black people. James Mattis, the retired Marine general and former secretary of defense, lambasted Trump at the time for ordering law-enforcement officers to forcibly clear protesters from Lafayette Square, and for using soldiers as props: “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” Mattis wrote. “Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”

Another explanation is more quotidian, and aligns with a broader understanding of Trump’s material-focused worldview. The president believes that nothing is worth doing without the promise of monetary payback, and that talented people who don’t pursue riches are “losers.” (According to eyewitnesses, after a White House briefing given by the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, Trump turned to aides and said, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?”)

Trump has been, for the duration of his presidency, fixated on staging military parades, but only of a certain sort. In a 2018 White House planning meeting for such an event, Trump asked his staff not to include wounded veterans, on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. “Nobody wants to see that,” he said. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/

11. Greg Sargent: The real lawless extremist in the race is Trump. And he has William Barr’s help.

Barr has repeated his frequent claims that vote-by-mail elections have been riddled with fraud and that a foreign power could fabricate thousands of mail ballots. Both are utter nonsense. But in saying them, Barr is telegraphing his willingness to legitimize Trump’s eventual effort to try to invalidate untold numbers of mail ballots, which Trump has already told us is coming.

Meanwhile, Barr is party to another extraordinary move: Trump just approved a memo declaring the intention to restrict federal funding to Democratic-led cities designated as “anarchist jurisdictions.” Barr will determine which cities earn this label.

Meanwhile, Barr will help delegitimize an official accounting of foreign sabotage of the 2016 election to create cover for another round of it on Trump’s behalf. Barr’s grotesque exaggerations of the leftist threat help give Trump justification for urging right-wing vigilantes to take matters into their own hands, lawlessly.

So let’s be clear on who the real lawless extremists are here. They aren’t Biden and Democrats. They’re Trump and his enablers. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/03/only-one-candidate-is-lawless-extremist-he-has-william-barrs-help/

12. Paul Waldman: Joe Biden is the only one trying to act like a president

When Trump began laying the blame for unrest occurring in a few cities at the feet of the Democratic presidential nominee, referring to the alleged horrors of “Joe Biden’s America,” many found it odd. After all, Biden is not president at the moment; if we’re living in anyone’s America, surely it’s Trump’s.

Trump is now less the manager of a government than the head of an election campaign who involves himself in the work of running the country only when it can be twisted and warped to help his reelection.

He throws insults at governors who fail to bow down to him. He tries to cut off funds to cities run by Democrats. Agencies that had been resistant to political influence are now utterly infected by it, from the Justice Department to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the Food and Drug Administration.

We now take it as a given that, just before the election, Trump will announce some kind of major development on the pandemic, probably related to a vaccine. Indeed, the CDC has issued a guidance to states telling them to prepare for the release of a vaccine “by early November,” a date whose significance no one misses.

Biden isn’t president yet, but at least he’s trying to act like one. And he’s the only one doing it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/03/joe-biden-is-only-one-trying-act-like-president/

13. Susan B. Glasser: The 2020 Election, a Race in Which Everything Happens and Nothing Matters

Previous Presidents—all of them—saw their ratings go up and down depending, at least in part, on their performance in office. Not Donald Trump.

It’s long been apparent how bizarrely consistent and impervious to events Trump’s approval ratings are. Through impeachment and scandal and now pandemic and recession, a more or less straight line of roughly forty per cent of Americans have supported the President, no matter what he does or says and regardless of what is happening in the country or around the world. Previous Presidents—all of them—saw their ratings go up and down depending, at least in part, on their performance in office. Not Trump. He appears to be living a politician’s dream: a Presidency free of consequence and devoid of accountability. What this means for the nation, for American democracy, is a different issue altogether.

The remarkable constancy of America’s division over Trump predates his Presidency, and has nothing whatsoever to do with Joe Biden or the most-important-of-your-lifetime 2020 election. Four years ago, on August 25, 2016, Quinnipiac University released results of a national survey in which Trump trailed his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, by ten points, taking only forty-one per cent to her fifty-one. This Wednesday, Quinnipiac released its latest survey. In it, Trump trails Biden by ten points, with forty-two per cent to Biden’s fifty-two. America, in other words, is in almost exactly the same place as it was four years ago—before Helsinki and Robert Mueller, Stormy Daniels and the Mooch; before Roger Stone’s pardon and Jim Mattis’s quitting and the “perfect” phone call to Ukraine; and before Trump took “no responsibility at all” for the pandemic that has, at least for now, changed life as we know it in America. If a botched government response that contributes to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans can’t move the polls five points against Trump, can anything? https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-2020-election-a-race-in-which-everything-happens-and-nothing-matters

14. Richard North Patterson: Trump’s Racist Referendum

Trump’s aim, quite obviously, is to weaponize white fears of demographic change through simplistic calls for law and order steeped in authoritarian rhetoric and McCarthyesque scapegoating. Black Lives Matter, he trumpets, is a “Marxist organization.” Further, “the violence is fueled by dangerous rhetoric from far-left politicians that demonize our nation and demonize our police. . . . The violent rioters share Biden’s same talking points, and they share his same agenda for our nation.”

“No one,” he warns, “will be safe in Biden’s America.” The only bulwark is Donald Trump, who stands ready to dispatch the National Guard should pusillanimous Democratic governors or mayors but request it. https://thebulwark.com/trumps-racist-referendum/

15. A.B. Stoddard: It’s Still All About Russia—and It’s Outrageous

DHS and the director of national intelligence have decided Russian election interference is no big deal. Hey, it’s not like it’s new. Russia has never stopped working to help Trump, and in four years he has never once rejected their help, instead he has relished it. He has denied intelligence findings, politicized intelligence, sided with Vladimir Putin on the world stage in Helsinki over our intelligence community, and made clear in an interview with George Stephanopoulos last year that any foreign assistance offered to his campaign would be considered.

At every turn Trump has not only helped Putin but thwarted the examination of Russia’s attack on the 2016 election. Trump told White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller and likely obstructed justice in many other ways all recounted in the Mueller report. Even before there was a special counsel investigation, Trump welcomed Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak to the Oval Office by boasting that firing FBI Director James Comey had relieved “great pressure.” https://thebulwark.com/its-still-all-about-russia-and-its-outrageous/

16. Bess Levin: Donald “Grab ’Em By The Pussy” Trump Thinks People Should Be Fired For Disrespecting Women

As many of you know, Donald Trump is a colossal hypocrite with a predilection for accusing people of and attacking them for the very things he does in droves. Despite effectively being the head of a crime syndicate, he tried to get Hunter Biden investigated for wrongdoing in Ukraine. Despite exhibiting all the symptoms of a traumatic brain disease, he’d like people to believe it’s his 2020 opponent who suffers mental deficiencies. He famously watches TV for seven hours a day, responding to various shows in real time, but apparently it’s the Democratic nominee we need to be worried is a TV addict. He spent the majority of the Obama administration attacking the 44th president for golfing and then proceeded to spend 2,580 hours (and counting) teeing off since January 2017. Lately, his campaign strategy is to warn people that if they don’t like the chaos, violence, and destruction happening right now they had better not vote for Joe Biden, even though Trump is literally the president at this moment and responsible for everything going on. And of course, despite being credibly accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women—all of which he naturally denies—and being caught on tape bragging about how it’s fine to “grab” women “by the pussy” when you’re famous, he wants someone else to resign for showing “disrespect” to women. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/donald-trump-sexual-harassment-chris-cuomo

17. Susan Glasser: The 2020 Election, a Race in Which Everything Happens and Nothing Matters

Trump spent the past week betting his Presidency on a notion that Americans—or, at least, that subset of Americans who still might possibly support him in November—can be convinced that “law & order” in the cities is a more urgent and pressing matter than controlling the pandemic and reviving the economy. I reviewed eleven ads that the Trump campaign aired on broadcast TV during and after the Convention. (With the notable exception of Minnesota, these appear to be running mostly in states won by Trump in 2016, a sign of a campaign playing defense.) The word “coronavirus” is never mentioned in a single one of them; in fact, it’s as if the pandemic and the economic crisis simply do not exist. Notably, the phrases and policies most associated with Trump are also missing. There is no “America First,” not even a “Make America Great Again, Again”—the awkward new slogan that Vice-President Mike Pence rolled out at the G.O.P. Convention—just attacks on Biden as a tool of the “radical left” and hellish scenes of unrest in America’s burning cities. Trump even flew to Kenosha, Wisconsin, this week to pose for a picture in front of one such tableau of destruction: a pile of rubble outside a block of looted stores, after protests following the police shooting of a young Black man, Jacob Blake. “Strong leadership when America needs it most,” the generic tagline in the new wave of Trump ads says. This, then, is what the President is betting his campaign’s money on.

Polls, so far, do not confirm that this is a winning hand. In fact, the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, which has Biden up by seven points over all, shows that the issues which Americans care most about right now are the coronavirus, the economy and jobs, and health care. Crime was cited by just eight per cent of respondents as a top priority. A majority of both Democrats and Republicans said that it was not increasing in their communities. A majority unchanged from late July also said that they were sympathetic to the nationwide protests. About the only thing that seems to have changed since before the Republican Convention is Trump’s nickname for Biden. “Sleepy Joe” Biden, it seems, is out. “Hiden’ Biden” is in. Will it make a difference? I’m going to go out on a limb and say no, not at all. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-2020-election-a-race-in-which-everything-happens-and-nothing-matters

18. Stephen Collinson: After wild week, the Trump train looks close to full derailment

There have been many weeks when the Trump train has looked like it's going to jump the tracks. But in the seven days since the Republican convention, the President has come perhaps as close as he ever has to a full derailment.

On Thursday, even the President and the White House seemed to think he might have gone too far with his suggestion that North Carolinians try to vote twice to test election security, a potential crime and the latest attempt by the President to cast as illegitimate an election that polls suggest he may lose. At a rally on Thursday in Pennsylvania, Trump again said mail-in ballots are a "disgrace," charging that dogs have received them in the mail. He advised his supporters to "follow" their ballots and go vote if they're not tabulated.

As well as the North Carolina furor, Trump this wek claimed that plane-loads of dark-clad rioters were crisscrossing the country. He appeared to justify the actions of a teenage vigilante who killed two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He denied he had a series of "mini strokes," sparking speculation about his health. It emerged that the President and Russia, yet again, are on the same page, as an intelligence revealed that Moscow is also spreading misinformation about mail-in voting to harm the integrity of the election. And he mocked Biden for wearing a mask as the country continues to lead the world in coronavirus cases, with more than 6 million infections. https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/04/politics/donald-trump-joe-biden-election-2020-drama/index.html

19. Maggie Haberman and Katie Rogers: Trump’s Tactic: Sowing Distrust in Whatever Gets in His Way

For decades, President Trump has sown distrust in almost everything he touches. From Native Americans and business competition in New York to President Barack Obama’s birthplace to America’s intelligence agencies to the special counsel investigation he calls the “Russia hoax,” Mr. Trump’s goal has been to undermine the opposition, rely on conspiracy theories to discount any evidence that might discredit him — and, above all, leave people uncertain about what to believe.

In the past week, Mr. Trump has reposted messages asserting that the real death toll from the coronavirus was only around 9,000 and not 185,000. He has talked cryptically about a planeload of “thugs” in black uniforms flying to Washington to disrupt the Republican National Convention. And he has asserted without a shred of evidence that his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., was “on some kind of an enhancement” drug.

People who have known the president for years say one of his most sustained assaults, on the integrity of the 2020 election, is straight from his New York tactics. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/us/politics/trump-2020-election.html

20. Steve Coll: Battling Anxiety Over Making Sure Your Vote Gets Counted

Voting this year will be different in ways that could alter past patterns, because it will be more risky and, for many people, more difficult than in any recent Presidential election. The pandemic is one reason; another is Trump’s vocal, unabashed campaign of voter suppression, in which he has denounced well-established and secure practices, and spread misinformation about the potential for fraud in mail voting and in the use of drop-off boxes. Last week, Trump tweeted that “fraud and abuse” from mail voting “will be an embarrassment to our Country,” even as the F.B.I., contradicting earlier Presidential tweets, affirmed that it had no evidence of any foreign plot to manipulate mail voting. Trump’s demagoguery is clearly aimed at delegitimizing the election and intimidating voters, and it may also be designed to sway Trump-friendly judges who will decide myriad partisan lawsuits over voting practices. All in all, it constitutes the most blatant use of Presidential power to prevent lawful voting since the days of Jim Crow. Trump and his allies appear to be succeeding, at least in the realm of perception: the Pew survey found that sixty per cent of Biden supporters expect voting to be difficult this fall, while just thirty-five per cent of Trump supporters do.

That gap almost certainly reflects, in part, the long history of obstacles that Democratic voters of color, particularly African-Americans, have faced when trying to exercise their right to vote. But it also suggests that Trump’s tweetstorms and offhand comments are persuading even many white Democrats that they will have a hard time casting their ballots successfully. According to data assembled by the political scientist Michael McDonald, Democrats are already attempting to vote by mail at higher rates than Republicans in battleground states such as Florida. The anxieties of mail-in voters are hardly irrational: the easiest way to vote safely during the pandemic—by mail—also carries heightened risks of disenfranchisement, because the Trump campaign donor recently installed as Postmaster General has overseen a slowdown in mail-delivery times.

“A lot of confusion has been injected into the process because of bad actors,” Nse Ufot, the chief executive of the New Georgia Project, a nonprofit working for voter enfranchisement that was founded by Stacey Abrams, the former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, told me. Helping low-income voters cast their ballots requires navigating one barrier after another. For example, the state’s Republican governor and legislature have refused to pay for the postage on mail-in ballots, so groups like the New Georgia Project are raising funds to do it. “It is not the work of civil-rights organizations to do the work of government,” she said. “It is not our responsibility to pay for postage . . . and yet that is what we find ourselves doing.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/battling-anxiety-over-making-sure-your-vote-gets-counted

21. John Pavlovitz: Donald Trump Needs “Suburban” White Fear. It’s All He Has Left.

Dear Suburban White People in America,

Donald Trump is right: you should be very afraid.

Though, just not of the people he tells you to fear.

I know this year has been relentless in its terrors and challenges, and in your exhausted state it may be difficult to think clearly but I want to try because it’s important.

I want you to step back and consider the message he’s been sending to you in his press conferences and via overnight tweet storms and through his bottom-feeding surrogates and in his dollar store stormtrooper deployments—and especially with his extremely rare silence:

Police brutality against people of color is somehow always acceptable and justified—but protesting that brutality it is never under any circumstance: not silently kneeling on a football field or wearing a jersey or any other method.

White, anti-mask Americans with weapons on capitol steps are courageous patriots—but disparate citizens marching with children and signs are dangerous subversives.

Killing unarmed civilians with a high-powered rifle is an act of reasonable self-defense—while standing in the streets with locked arms to express outrage at it, is an act of aggressive and lawless provocation.

Property merits curfews and armed defense, while black human beings are left abandoned and discarded. https://johnpavlovitz.com/2020/09/02/yes-suburban-white-people-be-very-afraid/

22. Michael Hiltzik: Trump’s plotting for a pre-election vaccine carries real dangers for your health

The Trump administration is plainly counting on a vaccine for COVID-19 becoming approved by the Nov. 3 election, in the expectation that news of the discovery will inspire a tide of public optimism that will sweep Trump to reelection.

Here’s a more judicious counsel about how you should be reacting to the administration’s push for rapid approval of a vaccine: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Premature approval of a COVID-19 vaccine will sabotage public confidence in its safety. That in turn will give fuel to the anti-vaccine movement, undermining public health by allowing a resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles.

Trump’s attacks on the Food and Drug Administration, which must certify that any vaccine is safe and effective, already have undermined public confidence in the agency’s determination to hew to hard science in approving a vaccine, rather than crumbling to political pressure.

The reputation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a second key federal public health regulator, has also been sapped by indications that it has tailored its recommendations related to COVID-19 to fit Trump’s political strategy.

The consequences of a botched rollout could be dire.

In 1955, one such manufacturing glitch halted the nationwide campaign to vaccinate children against polio in its tracks. A small Berkeley manufacturing firm, Cutter Laboratories, allowed a live polio virus to contaminate some of its batches of the Salk vaccine, which was based on a deactivated virus.

An estimated 40,000 children contracted polio from the Cutter vaccine. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-09-04/trump-vaccine-debacle

23. Juan Williams: Swamp creature at the White House

For all my criticism of President Trump, I’ve got to be honest — I loved the fireworks.

Fireworks swirled around the Washington Monument after Trump accepted the GOP nomination on the White House lawn on Aug. 27. They spelled “TRUMP” in the night sky.

If you are reading this column years from now, you might think this is a parody. You can’t believe that any president got away with turning the White House into a gaudy stage for partisan politics.

Did I mention the opera singer on the White House balcony?

When Trump ran for president he promised to “drain the swamp” of Washington political corruption.

Now, Trump is king of the swamp. https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/515334-juan-williams-swamp-creature-at-the-white-house

24. Peter Baker: More Than Ever, Trump Casts Himself as the Defender of White America

After a summer when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets protesting racial injustice against Black Americans, President Trump has made it clear over the last few days that, in his view, the country’s real race problem is bias against white Americans.

Just days after returning from Kenosha, Wis., where he staunchly backed law enforcement and did not mention the name of Jacob Blake, the Black man shot seven times in the back by the police, Mr. Trump issued an order on Friday to purge the federal government of racial sensitivity training that his White House called “divisive, anti-American propaganda.”

The president then spent much of the weekend tweeting about his action, presenting himself as a warrior against identity politics. “This is a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue,” he wrote of such programs. “Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!” He reposted a tweet from a conservative outlet hailing his order: “Sorry liberals! How to be Anti-White 101 is permanently cancelled!”

Not in generations has a sitting president so overtly declared himself the candidate of white America. While Mr. Trump’s campaign sought to temper the culture war messaging at the Republican National Convention last month by showcasing Black and Hispanic supporters who denied that he is a racist, the president himself has increasingly made appeals to the grievances of white supporters a centerpiece of his campaign to win a second term.  https://www.businessinsider.com/racist-great-replacement-conspiracy-far-alt-right-gop-mainstream-2020-9