Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Paul Krugman: American Democracy May Be Dying
Authoritarian rule may be just around the corner.
If you aren’t terrified both by Covid-19 and by its economic consequences, you haven’t been paying attention.
Even though social distancing may be slowing the disease’s spread, tens of thousands more Americans will surely die in the months ahead (and official accounts surely understate the true death toll). And the economic lockdown necessary to achieve social distancing — as I’ve been saying, the economy is in the equivalent of a medically induced coma — has led to almost 17 million new claims for unemployment insurance over the past three weeks, again almost surely an understatement of true job losses.
Yet the scariest news of the past week didn’t involve either epidemiology or economics; it was the travesty of an election in Wisconsin, where the Supreme Court required that in-person voting proceed despite the health risks and the fact that many who requested absentee ballots never got them.
Why was this so scary? Because it shows that America as we know it may not survive much longer. The pandemic will eventually end; the economy will eventually recover. But democracy, once lost, may never come back. And we’re much closer to losing our democracy than many people realize.
Eugene Robinson: Trump might want to get a head start on packing his bags
There is only one logical reason President Trump is so desperately trying to cast doubt on the outcome of an election that’s still seven months away: He knows he is likely to lose.
To use a football analogy, it’s not even halftime and Trump is already throwing Hail Marys. In recent days, he has used his coronavirus updates to rail against mail-in voting, which will probably be the way more Americans cast their ballots in November than ever before. “Mail ballots, they cheat,” he claimed Tuesday. Fact check: They don’t.
From Trump’s point of view, something that must look like a worst-case scenario is coming into focus. [..]
Trump, if he loses, will surely make wild and unsubstantiated claims about widespread fraud: after all, he did that after the 2016 election, which he won. But I believe state election officials will stand by their vote totals. Democrats need to spend the next seven months educating voters on how to cast their ballots in the shadow of covid-19. Trump, rather than trying to stoke fears about phantom fraud, might want to get a head start on packing his bags.
Amanda Marcotte: Trump’s latest crime spree: With pandemic as cover, he’s going for epic corruption
Trump knows he’s in trouble, and wants to fire everybody who might stop him looting the place before November
Donald Trump is on a search-and-destroy mission to remove anyone who might get in the way of him committing more crimes or using the federal government as a personal piggybank for himself and his friends. And he’s using the coronavirus pandemic as a cover, knowing that both the media and Congress are too busy dealing with the crisis to prioritize Trump’s obsession with maximizing his level of criminality and corruption.
Last week, with the media preoccupied with rising death tolls and exploding unemployment figures, Trump fired Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for intelligence services, as a clear cut act of revenge against Atkinson for reporting the original Ukraine whistleblower complaint to Congress last summer. That complaint, of course, exposed Trump’s criminal conspiracy to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into a phony investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden, who is now certain to be Trump’s Democratic opponent in the 2020 election. (Bernie Sanders officially suspended his campaign on Wednesday.) The result was Trump’s impeachment by the House of Representatives, which should have led to his removal from office — if Senate Republicans weren’t willing to sign off on any crime he wishes to commit. [..]
In a statement released after his firing, Atkinson urged government contractors and employees to report “unethical, wasteful, or illegal behavior in the federal government,” because the “American people deserve an honest and effective government.”
“Please do not allow recent events to silence your voices,” he concluded.
But of course that’s exactly what Trump, an opportunistic weasel to the core of his being, hopes will happen during what could be his last year in office. People are dying and losing their jobs, but our president’s principal focus is on grabbing as much silverware as possible before he’s evicted from the White House.
Catherine Rampell: How Trump is sabotaging the coronavirus rescue plan
Last month, when the “phase three” coronavirus relief bill was being negotiated, the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers fought to limit how much public accountability there would be, demanding as few strings attached to bailout funds as possible. Fortunately, congressional Democrats managed to get substantial oversight provisions written into the bill anyway.
Unfortunately, even as problems with the relief bill’s execution mount, virtually none of those oversight provisions is anywhere close to functional, partly due to deliberate sabotage.
Needless to say, in a republic built on checks and balances, independent oversight of executive branch activity is necessary. That independent oversight is especially necessary when the executive branch is tasked with spending an unprecedentedly large fiscal relief package, totaling more than $2 trillion of taxpayer money.
It’s especially, especially necessary when much of that $2 trillion comprises completely new, built-from-scratch, never-before-attempted government programs, prone to glitches and hiccups even when implemented by the most competent administration.
And it’s especially, especially, especially necessary when that program is being managed by an administration riddled with incompetence, cronyism and political vendettas, and led by a president who has refused to rule out benefiting from the program personally.
Dahlia Lithwick: We’re Now Living the American Carnage Trump Promised Would End at His Inauguration
Trump is not responsible for the virus itself, but he must be held accountable for his horrifying response to it.
On Jan. 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump welcomed us to his presidency, and to his worldview. In a 16-minute inaugural address delivered to a nation still surprised by his election, Trump gave a speech about the “American carnage” that was hollowing out the country. In some respects, the carnage he described that day was real: “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge.” But in many ways, he was depicting a dark hellscape of an America that was not really congruent with reality. Nor did it seem to bother itself much with the notion of constitutional checks, or with the basic promise of equality, justice, or oversight, or the rule of law. Instead, it was a populist promise to invisible Americans: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” Trump said. “We are one nation—and their pain is our pain. Their dreams are our dreams; and their success will be our success.” No more would Washington insiders abandon the inner cities to fester in “crime and gangs and drugs.” America would be returned, finally, to “the people.”
For those of us who didn’t quite recognize the shattered ruins of a once-great country that the president described at the time, it’s now arrived on our doorsteps. Even without the juddering trauma of a coronavirus that has closed streets and schools, and asphyxiated the economy, and killed thousands, the world he painted then ended up becoming our world now, but with his response to this crisis, it’s grown ever worse. “For too long,” he warned in 2017, “a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished—but the people did not share in its wealth.” Today we watch as his son-in-law’s attempts to help himself and others profit off the coronavirus, as the federal government strangles states’ efforts to purchase protective equipment. We watch, horrified, as the president fires the inspector general hired to oversee the $2 trillion stimulus package; we watch as our taxes pay for his golf junkets; we watch as his businesses profit from pay-to-play lobbyists and elected officials; and as his cronies profiteer from an immigration policy that stuffs money into the pockets of private prisons.
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