Good Morning, everyone!
Michael A. Cohen/Boston Globe- You can’t simply look at Trump and those in government that support him. You have to look and call out his voters and current supporters as well.
There was one unmistakable takeaway from Tuesday night’s first presidential debate: Donald Trump is a bad person, and if you watched that debate and still intend to vote for him, you are too.
These are harsh words but what the president subjected the country to on Tuesday went far beyond politics. It spoke to Trump’s fundamental absence of character, decency, and morality — but also of those who refuse to recognize and condemn his abhorrent behavior.
It’s bad enough that for almost the entire 90 minutes of the debate, Trump interrupted, spoke over, and tried to bully Democratic opponent Joe Biden, disrespecting both the process of a presidential debate but also the millions of Americans who tuned in to learn more about the two candidates. It’s beyond obscene that with more than 205,000 Americans dead from COVID-19, Trump took a victory lap bragging about his self-proclaimed phenomenal response to the pandemic. It’s maddening that he continues to tell lie after lie about mail-in voting and still won’t commit to a peaceful transition of power. It’s incomprehensible that when asked to condemn white supremacists — perhaps the easiest slam dunk question any politician can ever receive — the president refused to do so. In fact, he appeared to encourage them to be on alert by calling on them to “stand back and stand by.”
Brooke Harrington/New York Times- This actually connects with the Cohen piece. Far from the CW that people won’t like Trump’s tax fraud, far too many people think that it’s OK.
Having spent the past 13 years studying and writing about these elite professionals who help the ultrarich reduce their tax bills as close to zero as possible, I understand how the game of “creative compliance” is played: They adhere to the letter of the law while violating its spirit. The tax avoidance professionals say, as Mossack Fonseca did after the Panama Papers broke, we complied with the law, so what’s the problem?
Many Americans seem to accept this argument. Some even greet news of tax avoidance by the ultrarich with admiration and envy, instead of the anger they would show to someone who skipped out on a group dinner and left them with the bill. Rather than condemning those who take advantage of their society, many Americans say instead: “Good for them! I’d do it myself if I could.” Those attitudes are reflected in our politics and have contributed to our handing over the most powerful elected office in the world to a man who bragged about not paying a dime of federal income tax for years.
Indifference or praise in response to our president’s low income tax payments is not limited to conservatives who believe taxes are too high in the first place or rich people who believe they end up paying their fair share of taxes; I have seen those reactions from Americans across the political spectrum. In 2012, one of my own colleagues — a supposedly progressive academic sociologist — responded to news that the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney paid just a 14 percent tax rate on his multimillion-dollar annual income by saying: “Who cares? He didn’t break any laws.”
Dylan Scott/Vox- There will only be two fates for the Affordable Care Act with the ascension of Amy Coney Barrett to SCOTUS.
Trump would be the silent author of a ruling striking down Obamacare if the three justices he’s appointed — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and, assuming she is confirmed in time to hear the case, Amy Coney Barrett — side with the archconservatives Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to overturn the law. A decision would likely come in the spring of 2021.
In that scenario, more than 12 million people who gained coverage through Medicaid expansion could lose their coverage. And so could most of the 11.4 million people who purchase coverage on the law’s private insurance markets, because they rely on federal subsidies that would also be nixed. Protections for preexisting conditions would be wiped off the books. The provision that guarantees free preventive care, including contraception, would be gone. The US would be effectively starting over, as if a decade of health reform never happened.
But if the Court rules as Trump is asking them to, his administration does not actually appear to have a plan to replace the ACA. The president is promising something “much cheaper and far better” — such a ruling “would be a big win for the USA,” as he recently tweeted — but the White House has offered no evidence such a plan exists.
Jennifer Rubin/Washington Post- The media continues to need to get themselves together (but we knew that).
The compulsion to attribute intentionality to Trump’s behavior leads to ludicrous explanations. Pundits, for example, too often claim that Trump tries to scare suburban women, a large and critical part of the electorate, so that he can pump up his base — White males who have never abandoned him. This is irrational, but worse, it is almost certainly false. Trump does what he does because he cannot help himself. Does anyone really believe that he looks at polls objectively? It seems he cannot plan a day ahead — let alone a month ahead. He certainly cannot control the impulse to insult and degrade others. His narcissism and lack of conscience — not calculation — lead him to do things that are self-destructive. There was no benefit for Trump in refusing to denounce white nationalists at Tuesday’s debate. That moment was about Trump refusing to be told to denounce racists.
Likewise, many pundits were compelled to give former vice president Joe Biden the nonsensical advice to not show up for more debates, even though his lead is steadily building and instant polls suggest he clobbered Trump. Granted, none of us wants to watch another debate, but that does not mean it is in Biden’s interest to avoid giving Trump every opportunity to offend voters and depress Republicans. It has become a running joke that practically everything conventional-wisdom-spouting pundits say is bad for Biden — e.g., Trump’s rushing through a Supreme Court nomination, Biden’s decision to respect covid-19 precautions while campaigning — turns out to be a positive for him. Polls show large majorities of Americans want the next president to nominate the new justice, favor Obamacare (which Judge Amy Coney Barrett has said is unconstitutional) and oppose reversing Roe v. Wade.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Noah Weiland/New York Times- The biggest purveyor of COVID-19 disinformation is the President of the United States, according to a study.
“The biggest surprise was that the president of the United States was the single largest driver of misinformation around Covid,” said Sarah Evanega, the director of the Cornell Alliance for Science and the study’s lead author. “That’s concerning in that there are real-world dire health implications.”
The study identified 11 topics of misinformation, including various conspiracy theories, like one that emerged in January suggesting the pandemic was manufactured by Democrats to coincide with Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial, and another that purported to trace the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China, to people who ate bat soup.
But by far the most prevalent topic of misinformation topic was “miracle cures,” including Mr. Trump’s promotion of anti-malarial drugs and disinfectants as potential treatments for Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. That accounted for more misinformation than the other 10 topics combined, the researchers reported.
They found that of the more than 38 million articles published from Jan. 1 to May 26, more than 1.1 million — or slightly less than 3 percent — contained misinformation. They sought to identify and categorize falsehoods, and also tracked trends in reporting, including rises in coverage.
Matthew Herper/STATnews- Trump hasn’t always had as good a relationship with drug companies as he claimed in the debate.
Moderator Chris Wallace said Trump had “repeatedly either contradicted or been at odds with some of your government’s own top scientists.” He mentioned comments from Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, saying that a vaccine would not be widely available until summer. Trump had said he was confused and mistaken. But Moncef Slaoui, the chief advisor to the government’s Operation Warp Speed vaccine effort, had said exactly the same thing, Wallace said. Trump reiterated that his top scientists were wrong.
“Well, I’ve spoken to the companies and we can have it a lot sooner,” Trump said. “It’s a very political thing because people like this would rather make it political than save lives.”
“God,” Biden interjected. Trump insisted: “I’ve spoken to Pfizer, I’ve spoken to all of the people that you have to speak to, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and others. They can go faster than that by a lot.” The president went on to say that he disagreed with both administration officials, and that Slaoui didn’t say that. Later on, Biden returned to the topic. “In terms of the whole notion of a vaccine, we’re for a vaccine, but I don’t trust him at all,” Biden said about Trump. “Nor do you. I know you don’t. What we trust is a scientist.”
Trump replied: “You don’t trust Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer?”
One person who previously didn’t trust drug companies: Donald Trump.
Angry Grammarian/Philadelphia Inquirer- The history and usage of “stand back” and stand by.”
Phrasal verbs combine a verb, like stand, with a word in another part of speech—in this case, the respective adverbs back and by. This Angry Grammarian has condemned the weakness of plenty of adverbs, but here, they’re essential to establishing what exactly Trump was asking the Proud Boys—a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group—to do. So they deserve some scrutiny.
The two phrases both go back to the late middle ages/early Tudor years, albeit with goofy spellings like “stonde bac” and “standyne by.” But stand by is the more complicated phrase, laden with considerably more meaning—which helps explain why it will likely be cited alongside phrases like “very fine people” and “suburban housewives” to describe Trump’s racism.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives just one definition for stand back, but stand by goes on for six different entries—several of which will give plausible deniability to those who disclaim racist intent on Trump’s behalf. But today’s most common understanding of stand by—"to hold oneself in readiness, be prepared (for something, to do something)"—came along in the 17th century. The definition adds, “Often in imperative = be ready!”—notable because Trump used it in the imperative, and because who knew that the OED uses exclamation points within its definitions? Guess that old dictionary is wilder than we thought.
Remember that in The Angry Grammarian’s 9/16 column, he wrote this
And just because you use bigger words doesn’t prove you know what those words mean. Merriam-Webster tracks when lookups of certain words increase. Earlier this month, Biden’s use of foment (“[Trump] can’t stop the violence because for years he’s fomented it”) and obsequious (“What is he so afraid of Vladimir Putin of? … It’s almost obsequious”) caused lookups of both words to spike. Biden is typically thought of as a plainspoken orator, yet when he uses $10 words like foment and obsequious, people expand their vocabularies.
Biden did exactly that in the debate.
Teo Armus/Washington Post
“Millions of dollars, and you’ll get to see it,” Trump said of the amount he claims to have paid.
“When?” the Democratic presidential nominee interjected. “Inshallah?”
Suddenly, many Arab American viewers (and plenty of others) were collectively doing a double-take on the Internet. Did Biden — yes, the 77-year-old, gaffe-prone, Roman Catholic native of Scranton, Pa. — really just use “inshallah,” arguably the most ubiquitous phrase in Arabic?
Hours later, his campaign confirmed to NPR that it was true: Biden had in fact used the phrase — which literally and seriously means “God willing” in Arabic and Farsi — but can also take on a sharp, sardonic tenor that has led the writer Wajahat Ali to call it the “Arabic version of ‘fuggedaboudit.’ ”
That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you throw shade.
Wajahat Ali said so.
Inshallah is the Arabic version of “fuggedaboudit.” It’s similar to how the British use the word “brilliant” to both praise and passive-aggressively deride everything and everyone. It transports both the speaker and the listener to a fantastical place where promises, dreams and realistic goals are replaced by delusional hope and earnest yearning.
Hamed Aleaziz’s comment thread is a riot.
Everyone have a good morning!