So much more yet to be written but for now:
Clare Malone/FiveThirtyEight:
After Minneapolis, Can Trump’s Law-And-Order Strategy Work?
It was a familiar law and order message from Trump. But he tweeted it into an unfamiliar America: Over 100,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 in the past few months. One out of every four workers has filed for unemployment. As the country lives through actual American carnage, will Trump’s law and order message resonate as it once did? Or will the bleak realities of 2020 prove inhospitable to the man who once proclaimed, “I alone can fix it”? …
The law and order message might not sit so well in 2020. The country has now lived through years of controversies over video-taped killings by police, and the pandemic makes the world feel more chaotic day by day. We’ll have to wait to see the social and political reaction to the demonstrations in Minnesota, but there might be more sympathy for the turbulent feelings that make people riot or protest. While many will still roundly condemn looting, it’s perhaps easier for a greater number of us to imagine the kind of jagged anger — grief, if we’re being concise about it — that causes it than it was four years ago.
The contrast with Joe Biden could not be clearer.
Vote like your life depends on it, because it might.
Susan B. Glasser/New Yorker:
The Most Mendacious President in U.S. History
On Trump, his Twitter lies, and why it’s getting worse.
This is not the first time when the tweets emanating from the man in the White House have featured baseless accusations of murder, vote fraud, and his predecessor’s “illegality and corruption.” It’s not even the first time this month. So many of the things that Trump does and says are inconceivable for an American President, and yet he does and says them anyway. The Trump era has been a seemingly endless series of such moments. From the start of his Administration, his tweets have been an open-source intelligence boon, a window directly into the President’s needy id, and a real-time guide to his obsessions and intentions. Misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies were always central to his politics.
In recent months, however, his tweeting appears to have taken an even darker, more manic, and more mendacious turn, as Trump struggles to manage the convergence of a massive public-health crisis and a simultaneous economic collapse while running for reëlection. He is tweeting more frequently, and more frantically, as events have closed in on him. Trailing in the polls and desperate to change the subject from the coronavirus, mid-pandemic Trump has a Twitter feed that is meaner, angrier, and more partisan than ever before, as he amplifies conspiracy theories about the “deep state” and media enemies such as Scarborough while seeking to exacerbate divisions in an already divided country.
The City of Houston pic by cartoonist Nick Anderson: a personal favorite.
Nick Anderson sings a new toon for the Office of Government Relations
In a city workforce of more than 21,000, dozens of employees are bound to have hidden creative talents and artistic pursuits. But it’s not every day that you could bump into a nationally syndicated, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist at the watercooler.
Nick Anderson, who joined the Mayor’s Office of Government Affairs as a senior communications specialist in 2019, does far more than doodle in the margins of his meeting notes. His cartoons offer a witty perspective on critical current affairs, and have been published in Newsweek, the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and Chicago Tribune.
The above is about Trump’s distraction war with Twitter.
Joe Davidson/WaPo:
Former CDC director says U.S. led the world before becoming a global health ‘laggard’
When Tom Frieden looks at the agency he once managed, he’s like a former coach of a championship team watching it suffer under a domineering, impetuous team owner.
The results can be disastrous, not just for the team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which Frieden led during the Obama administration, but for a nation whose 100,000 covid-19 deaths lead the world.
Frieden, an infectious-disease physician, now is president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, a global public health initiative of Vital Strategies based in New York. You’d expect him to have a positive view of his 2009-2017 CDC tenure, but his praise for America’s recent past during pandemics is bipartisan.
“Look at the U.S. role in HIV and malaria under George W. Bush …. Look at Ebola under President Obama. The U.S. was clearly the global leader,” he said during an interview. “Now, with covid-19, we’re a global laggard.”
George Packer/Atlantic:
We Are Living in a Failed State
The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broke
When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Trump just threatened to have looters shot. Biden urged calm. That says it all.
We need to more fully come to terms with an unpleasant truth. It begins here: Donald Trump simply does not accept that he has any institutional obligation of any kind as president to use the White House’s formidable communications powers to calm the nation at moments of severe tension and hardship.
Instead, he views it as beneficial to his reelection to actively incite further hatred. Because Trump’s self-interest matters incalculably more to him than the national interest does, so he will act.
Trump issued new tweets overnight that explicitly threatened military violence against looters in Minneapolis, where protests have erupted over the police killing of George Floyd.
“Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz, and told him that the Military is with him all the way,” Trump said, in a reference to the governor of Minnesota. “Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”
Adam Serwer/Atlantic:
Trump’s Warped Definition of Free Speech
The president is attempting to bring social-media platforms into his authoritarian infrastructure—or otherwise censor them.
Sarah Palin knew her rights had been violated.
Just days before the 2008 election, the Republican vice-presidential nominee told a conservative radio host that the press was trampling on her right to free speech.
“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin said, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”
Palin’s remarks were widely ridiculed at the time. The First Amendment, commentators on the right and the left pointed out, protects the freedom of speech, not the freedom from criticism. You have the right to speak, and others have the right to praise, mock, or ignore you as they see fit.
As absurd as it may sound, Palin’s bizarre interpretation of the First Amendment has now been adopted by the president of the United States. On Tuesday, the social-media company Twitter added a label to one of the president’s tweets, which falsely declared that mail-in ballots would be “substantially fraudulent,” urging users to “get the facts about mail-in voting.” Twitter did not ban Trump from the platform, or censor his tweet, although it would have been fully within its rights to do so, and in accordance with its own terms of service. It merely appended additional context showing that the president’s claim was false.
Steve Sills, Neil Young, Richie Furay, et al: