Trump 47: The Covidiot's Traveling Circus Is Back On The Road

[smittykins]

On 7/19/2020 at 8:14 PM, Cartmann99 said:

Team Trump should quit wasting time making ads that are going to be pulled down over copyright violations, and contact The Deplorable Choir for permission to use this godawful song.

 

I could only make it through about half the song, and I felt my IQ dropping by the second.

I much prefer Roy Zimmerman’s “Vote Republican.”
 

 

Edited July 21, 2020 by smittykins

[fraurosena]

His cries of rigged election -- pardon, #RIGGED ELECTION have already started.

 

[fraurosena]

Delusional distraction from the Trump-SS actions in Portland and Chicago:

 

[Alisamer]

16 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Ooh, I bet twitler is going to be unhappy...

 

I am not the least bit surprised by this. I work in Charlotte, NC, where it was supposed to be held.

Charlotte also hosted the DNC when Obama was elected for his second term, so a very similar situation to this - and as our office at the time was within the security perimeter for where the event was to be held, we had a pretty close look at the preparations. 

Even before COVID struck, the Republicans seemed WAY behind the 8-ball on this to me. We're no longer in the security area, so we didn't have as close a look - but we'd heard from absolutely nobody. We did a ton of printing for the DNC, and it was all quoted and arranged at least 6 months ahead. No printers in our area seem to have been spoken to at ALL about the Republican convention (and print shop owners all know each other and talk). Secret Service agents for the DNC were visiting the area and helicopters were circling months ahead of time to plan out what needed to be done - no word of that from the RNC that I've heard.

I suspect one of the reasons they were able to just pick up and move to Jacksonville was that they had barely done anything in Charlotte anyway beyond reserving the arena.

Honestly, these people can't even properly plan a convention - something that is done every 4 years on the dot and should be pretty standard procedure by this point. Sure, COVID threw a wrench into things, but the DNC seems to have had no problem switching over to a safer format and I've heard no news of them having difficulties setting up their convention - and they are the ones who didn't have 4 years notice of exactly who was going to be there! 

I don't get why anyone thinks a party who can't plan a convention could properly run an entire country. 

[SPHASH]

Mango Mussolini tried to pressure Ambassador Johnson to move the British Open to his Scotland golf course

Quote

LONDON — The American ambassador to Britain, Robert Wood Johnson IV, told multiple colleagues in February 2018 that President Trump had asked him to see if the British government could help steer the world-famous and lucrative British Open golf tournament to the Trump Turnberry resort in Scotland, according to three people with knowledge of the episode.

The ambassador’s deputy, Lewis A. Lukens, advised him not to do it, warning that it would be an unethical use of the presidency for private gain, these people said. But Mr. Johnson apparently felt pressured to try. A few weeks later, he raised the idea of Turnberry playing host to the Open with the secretary of state for Scotland, David Mundell.

In a brief interview last week, Mr. Mundell said it was “inappropriate” for 

for him to discuss his dealings with Mr. Johnson and referred to a British government statement that said Mr. Johnson “made no request of Mr. Mundell regarding the British Open or any other sporting event.” The statement did not address whether the ambassador had broached the issue of Turnberry, which Mr. Trump bought in 2014, but none of the next four Opens are scheduled to be played there.

Still, the episode left Mr. Lukens and other diplomats deeply unsettled. Mr. Lukens, who served as the acting ambassador before Mr. Johnson arrived in November 2017, emailed officials at the State Department to tell them what had happened, colleagues said. A few months later, Mr. Johnson forced out Mr. Lukens, a career diplomat who had earlier served as ambassador to Senegal, shortly before his term was to end.

The White House declined to comment on Mr. Trump’s instructions to Mr. Johnson, as did the ambassador and the State Department.

Although Mr. Trump, as president, is exempt from a federal conflict of interest law that makes it a criminal offense to take part in “government matters that will affect your own personal financial interest,” the Constitution prohibits federal officials from accepting gifts, or “emoluments,” from foreign governments.

Experts on government ethics pointed to one potential violation of the emoluments clause that still may have been triggered by the president’s actions: The British or Scottish governments would most likely have to pay for security at the tournament, an event that would profit Mr. Trump.

It was not the first time the president tried to steer business to one of his properties. Last year, the White House chose the Trump National Doral resort in Miami as the site of a Group of 7 meeting. Mr. Trump backed off after it ignited a political storm, moving the meeting to Camp David before canceling it because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr. Trump also urged Vice President Mike Pence to stay at his family’s golf resort in Doonbeg, Ireland, last year during a visit, even though the vice president’s official business was on the other side of the country. That trip generated headlines for the golf club, but also controversy. And Mr. Trump has visited his family-owned golf courses more than 275 times since he took office, bringing reporters with him each time, ensuring that the resorts get ample news coverage.

The Trump International Hotel in Washington has done a brisk trade in guests, foreign and domestic, who are in town to lobby the federal government. Turnberry itself drew attention when the Pentagon acknowledged it had been sending troops to the resort while they were on overnight layovers at the nearby Glasgow Prestwick Airport.

But Mr. Trump and his children have struggled for more than a decade to attract professional golf tournaments to the family’s 16 golf courses, knowing those events draw global television audiences and help drive traffic. They own most of the courses outright — as opposed to simply selling the family name, as is the case with several of their hotels and residential towers — and the courses generate about a third of the family’s revenue, with tournaments seen as a crucial way to publicize them.

This has been particularly important for the two Trump resorts in Scotland and one in Ireland, which have been losing money under Mr. Trump’s ownership. Mr. Trump himself was intensely involved in promoting them before he was elected, regularly pushing golf writers and the editors of golf magazines to play with him, often after whisking them to Scotland on his private jet.

The losses at the British resorts have come even after the family made costly investments to build or upgrade their courses, including $150 million at Turnberry. The most recent annual report for Turnberry shows it lost nearly $1 million, on $19 million in sales, in 2018.

 

 

Edited July 22, 2020 by GreyhoundFan
Place text in quote box

[fraurosena]

States can prosecute the federal trumptroopers like those in Portland and DC:

The question is, who will enforce the law when the court rules they have to leave, and they refuse to comply?

Also, we all know how Trump’s tactics of drawing out things in court as long as possible. If he can, he’ll take it right up to the Supreme Court and by that time the elections may have come and gone already.

Only public outcry that threatens the position of many repug politicians will force them to pressure Trump to withdraw his trumptroopers from states.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump wants to be king. Did John Yoo just hand him the crown?"

Spoiler

Presidents rely on John Yoo for legal advice at their peril. Ask George W. Bush, who used Yoo’s memos from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel as justification for his program of “enhanced interrogation.” The memos were later repudiated by Bush’s own Justice Department.

Now another president is poised to seize on Yoo’s work as justification for . . . well, God knows what. President Trump, who likes the lawyers who tell him what he can do, not the ones who instruct him what he can’t, has seized on Yoo’s contorted argument that the Trump administration’s loss at the Supreme Court in the “dreamers” immigration case is actually a win — albeit a misguided one — for presidential power. Yoo, now teaching law at Berkeley, can find presidential power anywhere, for anything. But this argument is a stretch even for Yoo.

Yoo’s argument, in National Review, goes like this: President Barack Obama lacked the legal authority to implement, by executive fiat, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to protect from deportation dreamers brought to the United States as children. The Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., joined by the liberal justices, found that while Trump had the authority to revoke DACA, he hadn’t gone through the proper administrative procedures to do so lawfully.

Thus, Yoo argues, “Suppose President Donald Trump decided to create a nationwide right to carry guns openly. He could declare that he would not enforce federal firearms laws, and that a new ‘Trump permit’ would free any holder of state and local gun-control restrictions.”

Under Roberts’s approach, “Even if Trump knew that his scheme lacked legal authority, he could get away with it for the length of his presidency. And, moreover, even if courts declared the permit illegal, his successor would have to keep enforcing the program for another year or two.”

Expanding on this fantasy in Newsweek, Yoo adds that under the ruling, “Trump could unilaterally cut income taxes by 50 percent, accelerate infrastructure projects and cut red tape for starting new businesses. He could create a ‘recovery permit’ that would give businesses the right to sidestep agency red tape, burdensome environmental regulations and onerous obstacles to opening new enterprises.” All, says Yoo, because “according to the Supreme Court’s DACA opinion, presidents now can use their prosecutorial discretion to set the enforcement level for any federal law at zero.”

This is ridiculous. Yoo dismisses DACA as “illegal presidential action,” which is mighty rich coming from someone who concluded that the president, as chief executive, could not be bound by a criminal statute outlawing torture — indeed, could order the massacre of a village of civilians.

Yes, before Obama formulated DACA, he acknowledged limits on his power to act. “I’m president, I’m not king,” he said at one point. But in crafting the program, Obama relied on a careful opinion by the Office of Legal Counsel detailing how he could — and couldn’t — use prosecutorial discretion to defer immigration enforcement. The opinion emphasizes what the Supreme Court has described as “the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials”; it is confined to that context. In any event, a president has the sworn constitutional duty to faithfully execute the law, not to, as in Yoo’s fanciful hypotheticals, knowingly violate it.

No matter. Trump appears poised to out-Yoo Yoo. The law professor, at least, was warning of the dangers, as he saw it, of the Roberts opinion. Trump is taking Yoo as a potential road map for executive lawlessness. According to Axios, Yoo’s National Review piece has been “spotted atop Trump’s desk in the Oval Office,” and the president “has brought up the article with key advisers.” Yoo told the Guardian that he has been consulting with White House officials on the matter.

And so there was Trump, on Fox News Sunday, law-splaining to Chris Wallace: “We’re signing a health-care plan within two weeks, a full and complete health-care plan that the Supreme Court decision on DACA gave me the right to do. So we’re going to solve — we’re going to sign an immigration plan, a health-care plan, and various other plans . . . The Supreme Court gave the president of the United States powers that nobody thought the president had, by approving, by doing what they did — their decision on DACA.”

Powers that nobody thought the president had, indeed. For good reason — the president doesn’t have them. Obama acknowledged he wasn’t king. Trump, of course, would like to be. But no Supreme Court ruling, no matter what Yoo might have to say about it, no matter what Trump may argue, has handed him the crown.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s lies are getting too big to be believed — even by those who really want to"

Spoiler

Lately, I find myself thinking about a certain real estate agent. Back in 2007, she showed me a basement apartment that had sounded terrific in the ad: cheap, spacious and possessed of a parking space. The only catch, it turned out, was that the ceiling was exactly 74 inches high.

And how do I know this so precisely, you may ask? Because I am also exactly 74 inches high, and my head brushed the ceiling when I stood upright.

Whereupon the real estate agent looked straight at me, smiled and gestured around the room. “Isn’t this great?” she enthused. “You don’t usually get such high ceilings in basement apartments!”

It was the first time I had ever seen a salesman attempt to execute a real-life version of the Jedi mind trick. And I suppose it worked, after a fashion; I nodded and smiled rather than point out that she was, umm, lying. I suppose I wasn’t the first to go along, and perhaps this led her to imagine she was Obi-Wan Kenobi, persuading people to disbelieve their own eyes simply by waggling her fingers and saying, “These aren’t the droids you are looking for.”

This, of course, has been brought to mind by our real estate promoter in chief. Other politicians are inveterate shaders of the truth, but President Trump frequently dispenses with it entirely and invents something more to his liking — even when there is undeniable evidence to the contrary, such as aerial photographs showing that the crowd at his inauguration did not, in fact, stretch “all the way back to the Washington Monument.”

By now, however, his whoppers are getting too big to be believed, even by people who really want to.

“You will never hear this on the Fake News concerning the China Virus,” he tweeted on Tuesday, “but by comparison to most other countries, who are suffering greatly, we are doing very well — and we have done things that few other countries could have done!”

This is false. Indubitably, indisputably false.

Sure, we did better during the first wave than most major European nations, largely because our initial outbreak moved more slowly, giving us more warning to lock down. But those other countries now have their first waves under control; we don’t. Our death rate per 1 million citizens has surpassed that of Switzerland and will soon overtake that of France. Data show we are not only one of the worst performers in the entire world, but the only rich economy in which the death rate is both high and climbing.

Of course, those statistics depend on having a health-care system able to do widespread testing and a government willing to publish the results. Probably, we’re still outperforming some developing countries run by incompetent strongmen — Iran, say, or Brazil. But that’s not really a comparison we should brag about. Americans don’t aspire to do a hair better than a handful of the world’s worst governments, even if Trump is content to rest there.

Which is why his polls now look so grim. Finally, we have discovered the limits to Trump’s spin strategy.

The truth is that many political questions reward flagrant falsehoods, especially in the policy arena. The results of a new policy take so long to materialize that the prevaricating politicians can hope people will forget or at least be pleased enough with the outcome that they’ll be willing to overlook a few fibs. Moreover, it’s quite possible that the results will be ambiguous, allowing both sides to claim victory for their prior narrative.

Too, the public is inclined to forgive many of the lies, as long as the stakes are low enough. The media and the professional class may have seen a clear and important difference between “If you like your plan, you can keep it” and “Everybody that wants a [covid-19] test can get a test.” The public didn’t seem to care nearly as much as we did. At the time Trump made that statement, his polls were actually on the high side of normal for him, and stayed there weeks longer.

Three months later, of course, the president’s polling numbers are not so good, because a half-controlled pandemic is still burning through the country. Covid-19 is moving too fast, and its results are too grim, for anyone to ignore.

Responding to a pandemic is just one of those things you can’t fake, or spin, or bluster into submission. If every other country in our economic class is controlling the virus while Americans continue to die, no amount of presidential prevarication will distract voters from that essential fact. And there are no magic words, no outlandish accusations against immigrants or Democrats or the mainstream media that can persuade them to care about something else instead. With reelection looming, Trump is finally learning the lesson that most salesmen learn in their 20s: In the short term, expedient lies may get you the deal, but in the long run, the only way to keep the customer is to actually deliver.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

So, let me get this straight...because the president (sic) is an idiot, the general briefed melania, who doesn't have a security clearance? What the damn hell?

[GreyhoundFan]

One dose of penicillin doesn't do crap:

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Cartmann99]

Had to include the Dave reference.

 

Edited July 23, 2020 by Cartmann99
added stuff

[fraurosena]

7 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

So, let me get this straight...because the president (sic) is an idiot, the general briefed melania, who doesn't have a security clearance? What the damn hell?

What kind of dumbfuck general is that then?Did he learn nothing at the military academy about never talking about security measures to unauthorised or uncleared people? What if (emphasis on if) Melania is a sleeper cell? Or, more likely, corruptible?

And to make things worse, not only did he divulge defence secrets to people he shouldn't have, he also enabled a man whom he himself had identified as a dangerous idiot to remain in office, further endangering the country.

That general needs to loose his stripes.

[fraurosena]

Sweet Rufus! 

I'm beginning to believe Faux is deliberately undermining him.

[Smash!]

Quote from todays (July 22) Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson. Are we heading towards a one party system in the US? Full letter under spoiler.

Quote

What is really at stake is the delegitimizing of Democrats altogether before the 2020 election. Today Jenna Ellis, senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign and one of Trump’s personal lawyers tweeted: “No Democrat should EVER AGAIN be elected in the United States in any capacity. The government’s constitutional obligation is to preserve and protect OUR rights, not to preserve and protect their own power. They are willing to sacrifice America and our freedom and liberty. NO!!!”

Spoiler

Today Trump announced that he will send federal agents to Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico, as part of his push to advance the idea that he is a “LAW & ORDER” president. Trump insists that “violent anarchists” allied with “radical left” Democrats have launched “a shocking explosion of shootings, killings, murders and heinous crimes of violence.” “This bloodshed must end,” he said. “This bloodshed will end.”

To hear the president tell it, the country is at war against a leftist enemy that is destroying us from within.

But his dark vision is simply not true.

While crime is indeed up in some cities in the last month or so since the stay-at-home orders lifted, crime is nonetheless down overall for 2020. Indeed, violent crime has trended downward now for decades. And more crime in the short term is not exactly a surprise, as we are in an unprecedented time of social upheaval, with a pandemic locking us in our homes, the economy falling apart, and police violence—particularly against Black people—in the news day after day.

What has changed in the last few months, though, is Trump’s strategy for the 2020 election. It is notable how desperate he appears to be to win reelection. While all presidents running for a second term want to win, most of them are also willing to lose if that’s what voters decide. Trump, though, has withheld military funding from an ally to try to rig the election—that was what the Ukraine scandal was about—and, according to John Bolton, begged Chinese leader Xi Jinping to make a trade deal to help get Trump reelected. The insistence that he absolutely must win sets the stage for the federal troops in our cities.

Trump had planned to run on what he believed to be a strong economy, for which he took the credit (although he inherited a growing economy from his predecessor, President Barack Obama). But then the coronavirus hit.

Determined to keep the economy humming along, Trump downplayed the dangers of the virus, convincing his supporters that it was not as serious as Democrats insisted it was; they were, he said, hoping to sabotage his reelection. Then, when it was clear the disease was not a hoax, he was unwilling to use the federal government to address the crisis, and his administration botched early testing and isolation. Death rates spiked as we locked down, but then, as it seemed that infections were leveling off, states reopened quickly, despite warnings from experts that they were opening too soon.

Now, of course, cases are skyrocketing. While the rest of the developed world has corralled the virus, we have had close to 4 million infections and more than 140,000 dead. Today more than 1000 people died of the disease. After weeks of refusing to wear a mask, Trump was finally forced to acknowledge that it is imperative for us to slow the spread of the coronavirus after prominent supporter and former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain apparently contracted Covid-19 at Trump’s Tulsa rally. Cain has been hospitalized since early July.

And yet, Trump is desperate to get children back into school and their parents back to work, in part because Republicans object to government social welfare programs like unemployment insurance, and in part because he wants the economy to rebound before the election. But on this, too, he has been stymied, as most parents are worried about exposing their children to the disease. More and more school districts are opting to start the school year online.

So, Trump’s campaign is trying to rally voters with the idea that American cities run by Democrats are seething with violence. And to create that violence, the administration is sending in law enforcement officers that belong to departments within the executive branch of the government.

Trump included the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, in his photo-op on June 1, after officers cleared peaceful protesters out of Washington D.C.’s Lafayette Square with tear gas and flash-bangs. But military officers and defense officials past and present pushed back strongly against the attempt to politicize the military, and made it clear they would not permit soldiers to be used in ways they considered unconstitutional.

So Trump is turning the officers of the executive branch into the president’s private army.

On June 26, Trump issued an “Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence.” That is the document supporting the deployment of officers from what appears to be Custom and Border Protection, wearing military uniforms, in Portland, Oregon. Their original mission was to defend the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse, which had sustained vandalism and thrown fireworks.

The Executive Order blames the protests in Portland on “rioters, arsonists, and left-wing extremists who… have explicitly identified themselves with ideologies — such as Marxism — that call for the destruction of the United States system of government.” It says that those calling out racial bias in America are seeking “to advance a fringe ideology that paints the United States of America as fundamentally unjust and have sought to impose that ideology on Americans through violence and mob intimidation.” It claims: “These radicals shamelessly attack the legitimacy of our institutions and the very rule of law itself.”

The administration justifies the operations in Chicago and Albuquerque differently. On July 8, Attorney General William Barr announced a Department of Justice initiative called “Operation Legend,” named for a four-year-old victim of gun violence. Operation Legend began in Kansas City, Missouri, “to fight the sudden surge of violent crime.” Under the initiative, Barr is deploying federal agents from the FBI, U.S. Marshal Service, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) to “surge resources” first to Kansas City, and now to Chicago and Albuquerque. The DOJ also promised to move personnel to Kansas City—and now, presumably to the other cities— “to handle an anticipated increase in prosecutions.”

All the affected cities are run by Democratic mayors.

The Trump administration is hammering again and again on the idea that Democrats will bring chaos and violence to American streets. To illustrate that argument, it is instigating violent encounters. In Portland, officials said that the protests were calming down before the new federal force moved in. They asked for the officers to be removed, but Trump refused. His acting director of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, says: “I don’t need invitations by the state, state mayors, or state governors to do our job. We're going to do that, whether they like us there or not.”

(Wolf is not Senate-confirmed, and there is question about whether or not he’s even legally in his job, since he has now been 251 days in a post that can only have an “acting” director for 210. With no experience in intelligence or security, it is unlikely the former lobbyist could make it through the Senate, but Trump likes his loyalty.)

Today, Tom Ridge, the country's first Director of Homeland Security, who served under President George W. Bush, warned that the department "was not established to be the President's personal militia." "It would be a cold day in hell before I would give consent to a unilateral, uninvited intervention into one of my cities," he said.

What is really at stake is the delegitimizing of Democrats altogether before the 2020 election. Today Jenna Ellis, senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign and one of Trump’s personal lawyers tweeted: “No Democrat should EVER AGAIN be elected in the United States in any capacity. The government’s constitutional obligation is to preserve and protect OUR rights, not to preserve and protect their own power. They are willing to sacrifice America and our freedom and liberty. NO!!!”

The Trump campaign has released an ad suggesting that the choice in 2020 is between “PUBLIC SAFETY” and “CHAOS AND VIOLENCE.” But observers quickly noted that the image of street violence in the ad was not from America, it was from Ukraine in 2014.

And the image was not of respectable police officers defending the rule of law. It was the opposite. It was a picture taken when democratic protesters were trying to oust corrupt oligarch Viktor Yanukovych from the Ukraine presidency. Yanukovych was an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and fled to Russia when he was thrown out of office in Ukraine. Yanukovych was in power thanks to the efforts of an American adviser: Paul Manafort, the same man who took over Trump’s ailing campaign in June 2016.

So to illustrate “chaos and violence,” the Trump campaign used an image of a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch’s specialized federal police wrestling a pro-democracy protester to the ground. And Donald Trump and that oligarch won power thanks to the same advisor.

Honestly, it’s hard to see the use of the image as a mistake.

 

[formergothardite]

5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Sweet Rufus! 

I'm beginning to believe Faux is deliberately undermining him.

I don't know who the guy interviewing him is, but he looks like he is trying to not laugh at Trump very seriously claiming that remembering a couple words is very hard. 

Trump is obsessed with this test and the more he talks about it the more obvious it is that he did poorly. 

[onekidanddone]

4 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

I don't know who the guy interviewing him is, but he looks like he is trying to not laugh at Trump very seriously claiming that remembering a couple words is very hard. 

Trump is obsessed with this test and the more he talks about it the more obvious it is that he did poorly. 

Funny how he couldn’t remember the name of the memory test that proved he has the best bigly memory 

[Becky]

6 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Sweet Rufus! 

I'm beginning to believe Faux is deliberately undermining him.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States, proud of himself for remembering a few words for a period of time and getting "extra points."  Jesus.   This is incredibly sad.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump keeps boasting about passing a cognitive test — but it doesn’t mean what he thinks it does"

Spoiler

As President Trump and his team began attacking former vice president Joe Biden’s mental and physical fitness this summer, Trump began pondering his own cognitive abilities.

As part of his annual physical two years earlier, the president had taken the Montreal Cognitive Assessment — a 10-minute test designed to detect mild cognitive impairment such as the onset of dementia — and he believed he could weaponize his performance against Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

During a private campaign meeting in the Cabinet Room in early June, Trump brought up the test unprompted. In an extended riff, he talked about how well he had done — boasting that he’d been able to remember five different words, in order — and suggested challenging Biden to take the assessment, saying he was certain the former vice president would not fare as well.

Since then, the president has been speaking about the test publicly, telling Fox News’s Sean Hannity in a July 9 phone interview that he’d “aced it,” and again on Sunday, when he told the network’s Chris Wallace that he doubts Biden could answer all of the questions. On Wednesday evening, in another Fox News interview, Trump couldn’t resist revisiting what he said was the hardest part of the test — repeating the five words, in order.

Trump said he was first asked to repeat a set of words — “person,” “woman,” “man,” “camera,” “TV,” he said, offering a hypothetical example — and then, later in the assessment after some time had elapsed, he was again asked whether he remembered those same words, in order.

“And they say… ‘Go back to that question, and repeat them. Can you do it?’ ” Trump said, mimicking the doctors administering the exam. “And you go, ‘Person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ They say, ‘That’s amazing. How did you do that?’ I do it because I have, like, a good memory, because I’m cognitively there.”

But medical and public health experts stress that the cognitive exam is not what Trump seems to think it is — an indicator of IQ or a cudgel to be wielded against a political opponent like a debate challenge.

Experts say the president’s fixation on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment — or MoCA, as it is sometimes called — is particularly puzzling because the test is normally administered only if someone is concerned that they or their loved ones may be experiencing dementia or other cognitive decline. Getting a perfect score — as Trump has repeatedly claimed he did — merely signifies that the test-taker probably does not have a cognitive impairment as measured by the exam.

“It’s not meant to measure IQ or intellectual skill in anyway,” said Ziad Nasreddine, the neurologist who created the test. “If someone performs well, what it means is they can be ruled out for cognitive impairment that comes with diseases like Alzheimer’s, stroke or multiple sclerosis. That’s it.”

Nasreddine continued: “The reason most people take the test is they or others start noticing mental decline. They forgot where they parked the car, can’t remember what groceries to buy by the time they get to the store. They keep forgetting to take their medication.”

The MoCA is often administered at memory clinics or by primary care physicians or geriatricians. Trump’s was administered at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in early 2018 by Navy Rear Adm. Ronny L. Jackson, then the White House’s top physician, who is now a Republican candidate for Congress in Texas.

At a news conference that year discussing Trump’s physical, Jackson described Trump as “mentally very, very sharp” and “very intact” and said he would not have given Trump the cognitive assessment but that the president himself requested it. At the time, Trump was reeling from the fallout of Michael Wolff’s book, “Fire and Fury” — a best-selling account of life inside the White House that depicted a maelstrom of chaos and incompetence — and was eager to demonstrate that he was, as he had claimed on Twitter, “a very stable genius.”

Though Trump this month said he had taken the test “very recently,” it was unclear whether he was referring to his 2018 physical or has taken the MoCA a second time. The White House declined to comment.

The questions are designed to evaluate short-term memory, visuospatial abilities, executive functions, language and orientation. They often include being able to draw a clock with the hands set at a certain time, to recall a list of words and to repeat phrases such as, “The cat always hid under the couch when dogs were in the room,” according to one sample test.

Frequently, patients are asked to look at three drawings of animals and identify them — a lion, camel and rhinoceros, for instance. “We don’t use cats and dogs because they’re too common and easy,” Nasreddine said.

Patients receive a score of zero to 30 points. A score of 26 or higher is considered normal, and the average score is 27, Nasreddine said, with about 10 percent of patients receiving 30 out of 30 — as Trump has bragged he did.

But because many people who take the test are suspected to have mild dementia, the sample pool is dominated by people with cognitive problems, making a perfect score less likely, experts said.

Health experts also say that the MoCA focuses on cognitive impairment and is not a psychological exam, so scoring well on it does not automatically rule out other mental health problems, such depression, mania, narcissistic personality disorder, schizophrenia and other disorders.

In the “Fox News Sunday” interview, Wallace, who said he had taken the test online, was notably skeptical that Trump’s alleged top-notch performance on the MoCA was particularly meaningful.

“Well, it’s not the hardest test,” Wallace said. “They have a picture and it says, ‘What’s that?’ And it’s an elephant.”

But Trump was insistent. “Yes, the first few questions are easy, but I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last five questions,” the president continued. “I’ll bet you couldn’t. They get very hard, the last five questions.”

“Well, one of them was count back from 100 by seven,” Wallace quipped, before deadpanning the answer: “Ninety-three.”

The exchange wound down when Trump declared: “I’ll guarantee you that Joe Biden could not answer those questions.”

Though Trump and his team have labored to raise questions about Biden’s fitness for office, in recent weeks those attacks have boomeranged on Trump. After he struggled with a glass of water — using two hands to lift it to his mouth — and walked haltingly down a ramp at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where delivered the commencement address in June, Trump’s own fitness became part of the cable news narrative.

The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, launched a 45-second ad echoing those themes. “The most powerful office in the world needs more than a weak, unfit, shaky president,” the ad’s narrator intones.

Recent surveys show that voters believe Biden’s mental acuity either matches or exceeds Trump’s. In a Fox News poll released Sunday, registered voters said by an eight-point margin that Biden has the mental soundness to serve effectively as president, while voters doubted Trump’s mental soundness by eight points. And a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted at the end of May found that 46 percent of voters thought Trump had the “mental sharpness” necessary to serve effectively as president, compared with 49 percent who thought Biden did.

T.J. Ducklo, a Biden campaign spokesman, dismissed Trump’s challenge, saying, “The only testing Donald Trump should be focused on is the kind we need to get the covid-19 crisis under control.”

“The thousands of Americans who are contracting this virus each day don’t care whether or not the president can identify a photo of an elephant — they care their federal government is doing everything possible to keep them safe and right now, under this president, that is not happening,” Ducklo said in a statement.

Concerns about the health of America’s leaders are a long-standing phenomenon, said Jeffrey A. Engel, director of Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History and author of “When Life Strikes the President: Scandal, Death, and Illness in the White House.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, for instance, was physically impaired by polio, which he kept largely hidden from public view. In the final days of Richard M. Nixon’s presidency, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger was so concerned about the president’s mental state that he told military commanders that if the president gave any nuclear orders, to first check with him or Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state, before executing them.

And during his last years in the White House, Ronald Reagan’s aides also grew concerned about his cognitive abilities. Reagan was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s five years after leaving office.

But a sitting president bragging about his test results for cognitive impairment, and taunting his political opponent to take a similar exam, is unprecedented, Engel said.

“Among presidential historians, we all trained in graduate school to never to use the word ‘unprecedented’ because we’re told that there’s always a precedent,” Engel said. “But the truth is Trump does any number of things every week that are unprecedented, including the boasting of things that have no basis in fact. This boast that a cognitive test somehow is a sign of his intelligence? You can chalk this up as one of them.”

He added that Trump’s entire obsession with the MoCA is “incredibly bizarre.”

“This is a basic cognition test that any reasonable adult should be able to pass,” Engel said. “I don’t understand why he’s bragging about it, but there are many things this president does that are hard to understand.”

 

[fraurosena]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump knows he’s going to lose. He’s already salting the earth behind him."

Spoiler

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.

Never mind that the Fed must be politically independent in order to function; as Argentina, pre-euro Italy and other basket-case economies have illustrated many times over, a central bank cannot credibly commit to stable prices if the money supply is even mildly suspected of being controlled by politicians.

Republicans have indulged Trump’s choice to install charlatans elsewhere in the executive branch. But GOP senators had previously drawn the line at unqualified picks for the Fed. The central bank was too powerful, too important, to leave in the hands of buffoons and yes men.

So, as with some other quacks Trump had advocated for the Fed, until quite recently it looked as though Shelton’s nomination would fail. Especially, perhaps, when the economy hit its worst numbers since the Great Depression and it became clear the Fed was the country’s only competent economic policymaking body.

After all, Shelton has long been considered fringe even by hard-line Republicans. In fact, she was previously considered too outlandish to merely testify before the committee that just approved her for a Fed seat. “The idea of even calling her as a witness for something was beyond the pale,” a former Republican Senate Banking Committee aide said as Shelton faced confirmation hearings earlier this year.

So what changed?

For one thing, Trump’s poll numbers.

There is, even according to Republican lawmakers, no economic upside in putting Shelton on the Fed. In praise so faint it’s inaudible, Republican senators have suggested the best thing about her is . . . she’d be just one voice among many and would therefore be unable to unilaterally implement her worst ideas, such as reinstating the gold standard.

That’s their best-case scenario: that Shelton has no influence whatsoever. The worst: She could cause some chaos, including by making discussion among (understandably paranoid) Fed officials less candid. But perhaps a less functional Fed is desirable, if you’re expecting Joe Biden to be president come January.

It’s reasonable to suspect that Republicans might advocate personnel or policy changes damaging to the economy simply because a Democrat is president. They’ve done so before, when Barack Obama was in office. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, such advocacy came in the form of open letters and crabby op-eds fearmongering that low interest rates and Keynesian stimulus would stoke (in Shelton’s words) “ruinous inflation.”

If Shelton is ultimately confirmed to the Fed by the full Senate, those crank calls would be coming from inside the house.

Outgoing presidential administrations have engaged in petty, puerile pranks against their successors, such as stealing W keys from computer keyboards. This administration may be seeding something more sinister, across multiple critical institutions:

This landmine in the Fed. A hollowed-out State Department. Brain-drained statistical and scientific agencies. A shredded social safety net. A gutted immigration system, so financially mismanaged that about 75 percent of its employees are slated for furlough in two weeks. A hobbled higher-education system, once the envy of the world, now struggling to attract global talent because the administration has made it so difficult for that talent to study here. Perhaps a permanently lost tax-revenue stream from the past several decades of unrealized capital gains.

Of course, much could change before November. What might Trump do if, after so much destruction and earth-scorching, he wins reelection?

Perhaps he hasn’t thought that far ahead. Or maybe he’d revel in the “Mad Max”-style landscape he’s now cultivating. William Tecumseh Sherman left flames in his wake; Trump appears to prefer everything on fire, at all times, around him.

 

[Cartmann99]

8 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Trump keeps boasting about passing a cognitive test — but it doesn’t mean what he thinks it does"

"Isn't it the biggest one you've ever seen?"

[GreyhoundFan]

A good read: "Trump’s assault on election integrity forces question: What would happen if he refused to accept a loss?"

Spoiler

President Trump’s relentless efforts to sow doubts about the legitimacy of this year’s election are forcing both parties to reckon with the possibility that he may dispute the result in November if he loses — leading to an unprecedented test of American democracy.

With less than four months before the election, Trump’s escalating attacks on the security of mail-in ballots and his refusal again this week to reassure the country that he would abide by the voters’ will have added urgency to long-simmering concerns among scholars and his critics about the lengths he could go to hold on to power.

“What the president is doing is willfully and wantonly undermining confidence in the most basic democratic process we have,” said William A. Galston, chair of the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program. “Words almost fail me — it’s so deeply irresponsible. He’s arousing his core supporters for a truly damaging crisis in the days and weeks after the November election.”

Most legal experts said it is hard to envision that Trump would actually try to remain in office after a clear defeat by former vice president Joe Biden, considering the uproar that would follow such a challenge to U.S. democratic norms. Trump has previously said he offers up inflammatory ideas to provoke the media and his critics.

But his unwillingness to commit to a smooth transition of power has forced academics and political leaders — including, privately, some GOP lawmakers — to contemplate possible scenarios.

The resulting turmoil could surpass the contention over the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, confounding the legal system, Congress and the public’s faith in how the country picks its leaders. Such a crisis could also have long-lasting consequences for a nation that has already been rocked this year by the coronavirus pandemic, an economic collapse and a reckoning over racial injustice.

Among the possibilities: Trump could claim victory before the vote in key states is fully counted — a process that could take days or even weeks this year because of the expected avalanche of absentee ballots.

He could also spend weeks refusing to concede amid a legal war over which votes are valid and should be included in the tally, according to legal and constitutional experts who are tracking Trump’s statements.

Or he could simply refuse to leave on Jan. 20 — a possibility Biden has discussed publicly.

“This president is going to try to steal this election,” the presumptive Democratic nominee told Trevor Noah of “The Daily Show” last month.

Biden said he is convinced that if Trump loses but won’t leave, military leaders “will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”

Anxiety about Trump’s intentions has grown as he seizes on the shift to absentee voting during the coronavirus pandemic as a sign that the election’s outcome will be rigged, claiming without evidence that this year’s race will be “the most corrupt election in the history of our country,” as he put it last month.

This year, the president has attacked the security of voting by mail at least 50 times, according to a tally by The Washington Post, repeatedly making unfounded claims that it will lead to rampant fraud.

There is no evidence that mail voting leads to the kind of massive fraud Trump has described. Election officials throughout the country have challenged the president’s assertions, saying that with the right safeguards, mail voting is secure. Data from several states with all-mail elections show they have had a tiny rate of potentially fraudulent ballots in recent years.

But in an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace that aired Sunday, Trump reiterated that he thinks “mail-in voting is going to rig the election” and refused to commit to accepting the results.

“I have to see,” Trump said. “No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no.”

His intensifying rhetoric comes in the wake of a chaotic primary season in which many local election officials have struggled to keep up with the deluge of absentee ballots.

Trump’s attacks on voting by mail have been amplified by the Republican National Committee and conservative groups, which are spending tens of millions of dollars on a multi-state legal strategy to limit the expansion of absentee voting.

Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said the president is acting responsibly when he raises doubts about loosening restrictions on voting by mail.

“We don’t know what kind of shenanigans Democrats will try leading up to November,” Murtaugh said in a statement. “If someone had asked George W. Bush and Al Gore this same question in 2000, would they have been able to foresee the drawn-out fight over Florida? The central point remains clear: in a free and fair election, President Trump will win.”

The president’s allies say they can envision this year’s election ending in the kind of protracted legal fight that played out 20 years ago.

“What Trump is saying is that much of what happened in 2000 could play out again, in terms of the election ending up as a Supreme Court case,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R) said in an interview. “He’s not saying he wouldn’t accept the results, but he’s saying he could imagine an election so chaotic and with so many contested ballots that you’d be fighting it out all the way to the inauguration.”

In 2000, however, even as Gore and Bush waged a fierce legal fight over the vote count in Florida that ultimately went to the Supreme Court, neither threatened to reject the final outcome.

Senior Republicans have often distanced themselves from Trump’s claims of a possible “rigged” election, but they have echoed his claims about alleged voter fraud. Speaking last month to CNN, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), a member of GOP leadership, did not rebuke Trump and said that there has been “evidence of election fraud in the past and we want to make sure that everything is on the up and up.”

Trump’s loyalists have gone further. “It’s perhaps Joe Biden’s failures as a candidate that animate the left’s desire to get these vote-by-mail provisions in coronavirus legislation,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told Fox News in April, warning of “the greatest opportunity for fraud in our election system.”

Top Democrats and Biden supporters are now bracing for what former Ohio governor Ted Strickland said could be “dark days going forward.”

“I fear this election could lead to civil unrest in this country because Trump would happily be a cheerleader for that kind of response,” said Strickland, a Democrat. “We are facing circumstances in this country we have probably never faced in our history, because we have a president who has no regard for our constitutional system of government. . . . He is fully capable of putting his own ego and perceived self-interest above what’s right for the country.”

A pattern of raising doubts

Since entering political life, Trump has questioned the integrity of the country’s voting system and suggested he might not accept an electoral loss.

“I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election if I win,” Trump said in October 2016 at a rally in Delaware, Ohio.

He said something similar in a debate with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton that month.

“What I’m saying now is I will tell you at the time,” Trump said. “I will keep you in suspense, okay?”

Winning the presidency did not stop Trump from claiming that millions of votes were fraudulent. He blamed his defeat in California on voting by undocumented immigrants, providing no evidence for the claim. He said he lost in New Hampshire because thousands of Massachusetts voters were bused there to cast ballots illegally, offering no proof.

This year, Trump began issuing salvos against mail ballots in March, just as states announced they were relaxing restrictions on absentee voting for the primaries in response to the pandemic. As his poll numbers began to slide this spring, the attacks became a mainstay of his Twitter presence and a refrain in his interviews and remarks to supporters.

Attorney General William P. Barr has echoed Trump’s allegations about fraud, making unfounded claims that foreign governments could hijack the election with counterfeit mail ballots.

At times, Trump and his allies have said he would not challenge a loss in November.

After Biden’s comments last month suggesting Trump might refuse to leave office, the president told Fox News: “Certainly if I don’t win, I don’t win. I mean, you know, go on and do other things.”

His campaign was also definitive, with Murtaugh calling the imagined scenario of Trump refusing to leave the White House “another brainless conspiracy theory from Joe Biden.”

“President Trump has been clear that he will accept the results of the 2020 election,” Murtaugh said in a statement then.

But Trump appeared to reverse that position during the Fox News interview that aired Sunday.

“Are you suggesting that you might not accept the results of the election?” Wallace asked.

Trump responded: “No. I have to see.”

In GOP circles, private talk about Trump’s assertions veers from alarm to shrugging off his comments as simply incendiary political salvos. One moderate Republican House member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment candidly and avoid Trump’s wrath, said he expects Trump to “leave quickly” if it is a blowout defeat. But he said he worries about a narrow election and whether Trump would go to extreme lengths to “protect his personal brand.”

“It’s something we’d all rather not think about, but it’s there,” he said.

The president is being backed by a bustling Republican operation in 15 states to monitor voting locations and ensure a heavy GOP presence at polling sites.

Trump’s reelection campaign and the RNC are working together to recruit 50,000 volunteers to serve as “poll watchers,” according to advisers to both groups, with $20 million set aside for courtroom fights, underscoring the legal arsenal at the party’s disposal.

Democrats and voting rights advocates, meanwhile, are mustering their own legal effort to make it easier to cast ballots by mail, filing more than 50 lawsuits in 25 states. They argue changes are needed to make sure that voters are not disenfranchised because of factors outside their control or arbitrary enforcement of the rules.

Though there is no evidence that absentee voting benefits one party over another, the president’s rhetoric is persuading some GOP voters that mail ballots are untrustworthy.

Veteran conservative activist Richard Viguerie called this year’s shift in voting practices “terrifying to us.”

“Every conservative is concerned about these mail-in ballots,” he said. “And our issue isn’t whether he leaves office but whether Democrats will accept the legitimacy of a Trump reelection. They didn’t in 2016 with the resistance and the Russia investigation and all of that, in our view. Will they let him govern if he wins again, or will they be the ones saying it’s illegitimate?”

Experts across the political spectrum worry that Trump’s latest remarks not only will erode confidence in this year’s election but could further weaken the democratic norms that have long held the country together.

“We’re headed into an election where it’s reasonable to expect logistical challenges due to the pandemic,” said Yuval Levin, a conservative policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute. “Leaders should prepare the public to expect that and help them understand that logistical problems do not mean an election is illegitimate. To see the president doing the opposite is a big problem.”

Bracing for possible chaos

It would be historically unprecedented for an incumbent president not to accept a loss. Even in presidential elections with close margins — such as John F. Kennedy’s defeat of Richard M. Nixon in 1960 or Bush’s defeat of Gore in 2000 — the losing candidate has always conceded the race.

Yet with the dramatic shift to absentee voting, the division of partisan power in swing states and weaknesses in the law that governs how Congress handles disputed presidential elections, the circumstances of this year’s general election could converge in a way that allows Trump to foster public doubt about the outcome, experts said.

Lawrence R. Douglas, a professor at Amherst College and author of the new book “Will He Go?: Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020,” said there are a range of scenarios that could leave the country without a clear victor.

One possibility, Douglas said, is that Trump has a lead on Election Day that erodes as mail-in ballots come in over the subsequent days, breaking for Democrats in what experts have called the “blue shift.”

Many states have seen record-busting totals of absentee ballots in this year’s primaries, prolonging their vote counts. Pennsylvania processed 1.5 million mail ballots, compared with 84,000 in its 2016 primary. In Nevada, this year’s number was 483,788, compared with about 25,000 in 2016.

New York election officials have spent weeks tabulating some results for last month’s primary after voters requested more than 1.7 million absentee ballots, compared with about 115,000 submitted during the 2016 presidential primary.

In November, if Trump tries to declare victory before all those absentee ballots are counted, he could pressure Republican legislatures to certify slates of electors who would support him. And in turn, if Democratic governors of those states disagree, Congress could receive conflicting electoral certificates — something that has happened a handful of times in U.S. history, Douglas said.

Trump has a history of casting doubt on the validity of absentee ballots that are tallied after the Election Day vote.

In 2018, as ballots in Florida’s U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races were being recounted, days after voters had gone to the polls, the president tweeted that Senate candidate Rick Scott and governor hopeful Ron DeSantis should be declared the winners.

He claimed that “large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged.”

“An honest vote count is no longer possible — ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!” he tweeted. Both Scott and DeSantis won their races in the end.

If Trump chooses to make similar comments as the vote is being counted in November, he could weaken public confidence in the process and cause his supporters to doubt the ultimate result, Douglas said.

“We have a president who, really for years now, has been running down the trustworthiness of our electoral process,” he said. “It certainly has gained traction with his base, but it is also incredibly dangerous.”

More-complicated scenarios could involve the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which was passed in response to the contested presidential election of 1876 and attempts to clarify what Congress should do in case of a dispute over a state’s electoral-college votes.

The law directs the House and Senate to separately debate and vote, but a scholarly consensus has declared the law defective for several reasons, including its failure to define what makes an electoral vote legitimate for counting purposes.

Douglas warned that the deficiencies in the law could make an electoral crisis worse, not better. Its provisions have been triggered only once, after a faithless Republican elector from North Carolina cast a vote for George Wallace instead of Nixon in the 1968 presidential election.

“In 2000, when the ECA threatened to kick in, jurists and commentators were unable to agree about the meaning of even its most basic provisions,” Douglas wrote in his book, referring to the contested Bush-Gore election.

The law was not triggered because Gore, “to his credit,” provided closure before that became necessary, Douglas said.

'There is a process'

The way to avoid such a crisis, Democrats say, is for Biden to win in a landslide, by a margin so large that legal challenges contesting ballots in various states would be moot.

The Constitution’s 20th Amendment helps provide for the peaceful transition of power, ordering that the president’s term “shall end at noon on the 20th day of January . . . and the terms of their successors shall then begin.”

In a Monday interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said of Trump: “Whether he knows it yet or not, he will be leaving.”

“There is a process,” Pelosi added. “It has nothing to do with [whether] the certain occupant of the White House doesn’t feel like moving and has to be fumigated out of there.”

To that end, Biden’s campaign is pushing for a decisive victory in key battleground states, aware that the comfortable lead he has in polls now could shrink, according to his advisers.

The former vice president also said this month that his campaign had recruited 600 lawyers to fight possible “chicanery” and protect voter access. The campaign has also received volunteer sign-ups from 10,000 people and plans to train them to “be in a polling place” on Election Day, he said.

“It’s going to be hard. And if it’s close — watch out,” Biden said at a July 1 fundraiser.

Legal and political experts said it is important to wrestle with the possibilities of what could unfold in November — however unlikely.

Dan Baer, senior fellow in the Europe program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Democratic Senate candidate in Colorado, compared the thought experiments to insurance.

“It is unlikely that our house is going to burn down this year, but we still buy insurance against that,” said Baer, who recently wrote a piece titled “How Trump could refuse to go” for the website UnHerd.

“One of the lessons of this presidency is that we should think about the most insidious opportunities, the most egotistical course of action and make sure we’ve thought through what could follow from that,” he said. “If we haven’t done that at this point, shame on us.”

 

[Cartmann99]

The responses are epic:

Spoiler

 

[Becky]

“Suburban Housewives? ? Calling  June Cleaver in her dress and pearls!