Category Archives: Donald Trump

Attorney General William Barr has enabled Donald Trump to use the Justice Department for his own purposes.Photograph by Carlos Barria / Reuters

Three years ago, President Donald Trump appeared to be politically wounded and legally encircled. On May 17, 2017, eight days after Trump had fired James Comey, then the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel, to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Memos written by Comey stated that Trump had asked him to let go of the F.B.I. investigation of Michael Flynn, Trumps national-security adviser, who had been fired after he lied to Vice-President Mike Pence and other officials about the nature of a phone call that hed had with the Russian Ambassador. As 2017 came to a close, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to F.B.I. agents about the call and agreed to serve as a coperating witness for Muellers investigation. Trumps effort to flout post-Watergate reforms, which were designed to prevent a President from pressuring the F.B.I. into halting a politically embarrassing investigation, appeared to have failed.

Yet now, six months before he faces relection, Trump, with the help of Attorney General William Barr, is successfully rewriting that history. Last Thursday, Barr dismissed the charges against Flynn, declaring him the victim of an F.B.I. plot. (The federal judge who oversaw Flynns case said that he would appoint a retired judge to review Barrs action, and whether Flynn should now be charged with perjury.) At Barrs direction, the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation of Comey, the F.B.I. officials who investigated the Trump campaign, and the C.I.A. officials who concluded that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election on Trumps behalf. Barr is flatly rejecting the findings of Mueller and the Justice Departments inspector general: that the F.B.I was justified in investigating the highly unusual contacts between the Trump campaign and a hostile foreign governmentwhich did, in fact, intervene in the race on Trumps behalfand that Trump and his aides had welcomed that aid and repeatedly lied about their own actions.

Instead, Barr, in an extraordinary act by an Attorney General, declared, last month, that the F.B.I. investigation of the Trump campaign was without any basis, an attempt to sabotage the Presidency, and one of the greatest travesties in American history. He added, in reference to his departments new investigationbut without citing any specificsthat the evidence shows that we are not dealing with just mistakes or sloppinessbut that there was something far more troubling here. Those statements violated a long-standing Justice Department practice of not commenting on investigations before they have been completed. In a subsequent interview, Barr hinted that he might release the results of the ongoing probe, led by a federal prosecutor, John Durham, before the election. Barr said that a Justice Department policy prohibiting prosecutors from filing criminal charges or taking investigative steps to impact elections did not apply. The idea is you dont go after candidates, Barr said. But, you know, as I say, I dont think any of the people whose actions are under review by Durham fall into that category.

On Wednesday, the acting director of National Intelligence, Richard Grenell, gave Republican senators records he had declassified that listed the names of three dozen Obama Administration officials, including Joe Biden, who requested to know the identity of an American citizen who had had a series of phone calls with foreign officials after Trump won the election. The citizen was Flynn. On Wednesday, those senators released the names of the officials and accused the former Vice-President of participating in a plot to entrap Flynn. Former national-security officials said that it is routine to request, or unmask, the names of Americans whose conversations with foreign officials contain intelligence, and noted that the practice has increased by seventy-five per cent under Trump. Ben Rhodes, a former top Obama adviser, tweeted, The unconfirmed, acting DNI using his position to criminalize routine intelligence work to help re-elect the president and obscure Russian intervention in our democracy would normally be the scandal here. Grenell replied in a tweet, Transparency is not political. But I will give you that it isnt popular in Washington DC.

Next Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to approve the nomination of John Ratcliffe, a pro-Trump Republican congressman from Texas, to replace Grenell as the director of National Intelligence. Ratcliffe caught Trumps eye when he assailed Mueller on national television during the former special counsels testimony before Congress. An individual involved in Ratcliffes confirmation effort said that the fact that the President trusts Congressman Ratcliffenot because they are friends but because hes observed his good judgment and the way he handles himselfthat affords a great opportunity to strengthen the relationship between the President and the intelligence community.

Former Justice Department and intelligence officials have expressed alarm at Trumps success at appointing partisan loyalists who they say echo the Presidents political messaging. David Laufman, a former head of the Justice Departments counterintelligence section, who worked on the Trump-Russia investigation, told me, I think we need to be careful not to be too lackadaisical in recognizing the significance of what is happening throughout our government, not just in law enforcement and intelligence but the attempted politicization of our public health system, citing attacks by Trump supporters on Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the governments top infectious-disease experts. Its everywhere, and it matters in ways that are increasingly important to the well-being of people in our country.

The transformation has been most striking at the Justice Department, an institution that, after Watergate, both Republicans and Democrats agreed should strive to remain politically neutral. Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at New York University, said that, more than any other modern Attorney General, Barr has enabled the President to use the department for his own purposes. Ive lived through Attorneys General Mitchell and Meese, Gillers said, referring to John Mitchell and Edwin Meese, who served as Attorneys General in the Nixon and Reagan Administrations, respectively. Those guys were choir boys next to Barr. (A spokeswoman for Barr did not respond to a request for comment.)

Barr and some conservative legal scholars contend that the Constitution gives Presidents the power to run the executive branchwhich includes the Justice Department and the C.I.A.as they see fit. They view the post-Watergate oversight bodies created to investigate abuses by Presidents and their aidesfrom special counsels, such as Mueller, to the inspectors general appointed to oversee coronavirus spendingas unlawful infringements on Presidential power. On Tuesday, Justice Department lawyers joined Trumps personal lawyers in arguing, before the Supreme Court, that a House committee and New York City prosecutors should not be granted access to Trumps tax returns, because it would distract the President from his official duties and damage the office of the Presidency. Donald Ayer, who served as Deputy Attorney General under George H.W. Bush, told me that Barrs systematic trashing of the departments traditions of evenhandedness and independence have helped him make significant progress toward his goal of an autocratic President. He added, I think Barr is getting as much out of Trump as Trump is getting out of Barr. All for his own reasons of wanting the President to have complete and unchecked power.

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From the Justice Department to the Intelligence Community, Donald Trump and William Barr Have Won - The New Yorker

The announcement is a win for Trump who has pushed for major chipmakers to set up shop inside the US

Taiwanese computer chip giant TSMC announced Friday it will spend $12 billion on a state-of-the-art semiconductor foundry in the United States, creating thousands of jobs.

The announcement is a win for President Donald Trump who has pushed for major chipmakers to set up shop inside the US.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world's largest contract microchip maker, produces the processors that provide the computing muscle for everything from iPhones, laptops and games consoles to servers and critical internet infrastructure.

Construction for the facility in Arizona is set to start in 2021 with production of 5-nanometre chips -- the smallest and fastest on the market -- beginning in 2024, TSMC said.

"This project is of critical, strategic importance... (for) leading US companies to fabricate their cutting-edge semiconductor products within the United States," a company statement said.

"TSMC welcomes continued strong partnership with the US administration and the State of Arizona on this project."

The firm said the factory would create 1,600 jobs -- and thousands more via supply chains -- and would churn out 20,000 semiconductor wafers a month.

Trump is keen to reduce reliance on Asia as tensions simmer with China over trade, tariffs, industrial espionage and national security.

Most of TMSC's factories are located in Taiwan. The Arizona facility will be the firm's second manufacturing site in the US.

TMSC said support was being offered from both the State of Arizona and the US government but it gave no details or where the plant would be located.

Foxconn, another major Taiwanese electronics company, announced plans in 2017 to build a huge plant in Wisconsin with Trump appearing at the ground-breaking ceremony.

But the project has fallen short of expectations with a smaller plant and fewer jobs than initially announced.

A political row also broke out over significant tax breaks Wisconsin gave Foxconn to set up shop.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

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In Big Win For Trump, New $12 Billion Project To Arrive In America - NDTV

But don't assume that we'll be getting a look at the President's tax returns before heading to the polls on November 3. Chances are we still won't.

1) The Supreme Court could push the decision back down to the lower courts to sort out. And there were indications during Tuesday's oral arguments that we might be headed in that direction.

Later, in his year-end letter on the state of the judiciary, Roberts counseled his fellow judges to "celebrate our strong and independent judiciary, a key source of national unity and stability," and to "reflect on our duty to judge without fear of favor, deciding each matter with humility, integrity and dispatch."

Issuing a definitive ruling on the tax returns of the President of the United States five-ish months before the 2020 election isn't the sort of thing that will knock down the growing perception that the court is too political.

"Chief Justice John Roberts signaled from the start that he is looking for a path that avoids absolute rules and could bridge, to some extent in these polarized times, the dueling sides.

"But even as he appeared ready to reject the hard-line Trump positions in both cases, if he opts for what the Justice Department raises as middle ground, the chief justice would ultimately make it difficult to enforce the subpoenas against Trump."

In short: The possibility exists that the court issues a ruling in late June or early July that forces the White House to comply with the House's subpoena of Trump's financial records. But there are several ways that the justices could get out of offering such a decision in the midst of a presidential campaign -- and it seems likely they will do just that.

Continued here:

Don't hold your breath on seeing Donald Trump's taxes before the election - CNN

THE SEPARATION of powers, the founders bulwark against tyranny, is not what it might seem. As James Madison explained in the Federalist Papers No. 47, the idea is not to keep the legislative, executive and judicial departments absolutely separate and distinct. Rather, Madison wrote, each must exercise a measure of control or agency over its fellow branches. Negotiating the overlapping portions of the Venn diagram has often fallen to the judiciary, as it did on May 12th, when the Supreme Court took up two challenges to President Donald Trumps quest to keep his taxes and other financial records secret.

Mr Trump is the first president since Richard Nixon to refuse to share at least some tax information with the American people. But in April 2019, with the Democrats back in control of the House of Representatives, three congressional committees subpoenaed years of papers from Mr Trumps banks and his accounting firm. A few months later Cyrus Vance, Manhattans district attorney, sought similar records for a grand-jury investigation into Mr Trumps alleged hush-money payoffs to an adult film star and a Playboy model before the election in 2016. Lower courts rejected Mr Trumps pleas to block the subpoenas, leaving the nine justices with the final say.

The first pair of cases, argued by telephone (the court is not meeting in person during the pandemic), concerned House subpoenas to Capital One and Deutsche Bank, two of Mr Trumps lenders, and Mazars USA, his accountant. The Oversight Committee had demanded documents to help it consider revising government ethics laws. The Intelligence and Financial Services Committees said they wanted to investigate money-laundering and foreign interference in the 2016 election.

Patrick Strawbridge, Mr Trumps lawyer, described the House efforts as a dragnet. He seemed to raise the eyebrows of Chief Justice John Roberts, though, when he cast doubt on all congressional oversight of presidents. Quite frankly, Mr Strawbridge said, the House has limited powers to regulate the presidency itself. Jeff Wall, supporting Mr Trump from the Department of Justice, added that the subpoenas were designed to undermine the president and the House had not even come close to explaining why it needs the documents.

The Houses lawyer, Douglas Letter, seemed to have precedent on his side. In 1927 the court observed that the power to secure needed informationhas long been treated as an attribute of the power to legislate. And in 1974 it unanimously ordered Nixon to comply with a subpoena for his White House tapes. But when pressed to identify a limit on Congresss subpoena power, Mr Letter faltered. Justice Samuel Alito, one of the courts most skilful questioners, backed him into a Socratic corner. There is really no protection, he asked, preventing the harassment of a president, because subpoenas require only a conceivable legislative purpose, and you cant think of a single example of a subpoena that wouldnt meet that test?

Justice Elena Kagan sought to elicit more persuasive responses from Mr Letter and vividly depicted Mr Trumps request as placing a ten-ton weight on the scales between the president and Congress. Yet even Justice Stephen Breyer, a member of the liberal wing, worried that the House subpoenas might be unduly burdensome. He was bothered, he said, by the prospect of a red-baiting future Senator McCarthy haranguing a future Franklin Roosevelt.

When rulings arrive this summer, Mr Trump may win a majority in Trump v Mazarskeeping his finances out of the newspapers, for now. But he seems likely to lose Trump v Vance, the clash over the New York subpoena (if so, only the grand jury would be privy to Mr Trumps records while he remains in office). In Vance, Jay Sekulow, Mr Trumps lawyer, offered a royalist vision of the presidency shielded by absolute immunity from criminal investigation. But he struggled to explain how, in 1997, the court could unanimously order Bill Clinton to appear for depositions in a sexual-harassment suit, whereas a grand jury probing Mr Trumps alleged payoffs to paramours was constitutionally barred from peeking at the presidents papers.

Noel Francisco, the solicitor-general, defended Mr Trump on somewhat less outlandish grounds. Carey Dunne, ably representing Mr Vance, argued that the investigation was well within the scope of legal process permitted by this court since 1807. If the justices side with Mr Trump, Mr Dunne warned, presidents may wind up unchecked and above the law.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "On the money"

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The Supreme Court will not agree on the president's taxes - The Economist

American Comeback, the Trump campaign titled a new ad out this week. THIS NOVEMBER, the ad proclaimed, making clear the comeback he is referring to is not just the countrys struggle with the coronavirus pandemic but the restoration of his own political fortune, THE GREATEST COMEBACK STORY IS WRITTEN.

That Trumpin the throes of the worst public health crisis in more than a century and the most devastating economic downturn since the Great Depressionis writing rosy history long before it has actually happened might seem audacious. It borders on the fanciful when considering the slew of numbersthe steadily mounting death toll, near-record unemployment and a majority of Americans dissatisfied with his handling of the crisisthat sketch a future trending in the opposite direction. But this is a page from a playbook Trump has used many times before.

At key points in Trumps long and public lifefrom his nadir in the 1990s to The Apprentice more than a decade later to his embattled campaign a decade after that and finally to his tumultuous presidencyTrump has used the idea of the comeback as a critical weapon in his arsenal of self-invention. A believer in a binary worldview that was a core teaching of his flinty fatherthere are winners and losers, and he always must be the former, not the latterTrump has used comeback as a fortifying piece of rhetoric that masks periods of failure, delaying a reckoning until theres something to brag about. Others might wait for actual evidence that a comeback has occurred, but Trump repeatedly has advertised his comebacks months and even years in advance. He has used it to bend in his favor unflattering media narrativesto tweak perception, to alter realityto conjure power, positivity and a sense of propulsion, especially at junctures when hes running low on all three.

The world that he lives in and projects, there are just two roles in it, Trump biographer Gwenda Blair told me. Youre a winner or a loser. And if theres a moment that youre not quite a winner, youre almost a winner. Youre practically a winner. Its a cloak that contains winning as a part of it.

Its his way of saying, I had a setback, and now Im coming backbut he never says he had a setback, former Trump publicist Alan Marcus told me.

He also uses it as a starting off point to build momentum, added Marcus, who worked for Trump from 1994 to 2000. It was a word that he pushed off on.

Comeback, said Sam Solovey, a contestant on the first season of The Apprentice, who prepped for the show by reading every Trump book and biography, is the placeholder until victory is at hand.

It helped him get to the White House. And now, forced by circumstance to abandon his victory lap messaging of Keep America Great, Trump is reaching for it again as he tries his hardest to stay there.

Its just as critical to 2020 as it was in 2016, if not more so, former Trump aide Jason Miller told me. If hes the outsider, if hes the insurgent, he wins reelection. If hes viewed as the insider, the one whos the power holder in a tumultuous time, then winning becomes much tougher.

My name is Donald Trump, he said in the intro of the first show of the first season of The Apprentice, launching into a quick series of words and pictures associated with success. For Trump, the reality television show on NBC, which debuted in 2004, was a chance to cement his comeback taleand to do it in the way that he wanted, sandwiching what he took to calling his glitch or his blip basically between brackets of unfettered triumph. But it wasnt always easy, he explained. About 13 years ago, I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back. And I won.

In the first half of the 90s, Trump constantly skirted financial ruin, facing for years the possible permanent tarnishing of the image he had cultivated in the 70s and 80s as an infallible deal-doer. Donald was broke, Stephen Bollenbach, the CFO Trumps lenders made him hire, would say. He was worse than broke. He was losing money every day. Even so, Trump talked about his comeback, not when his struggles began to wane but practically from their start.

All Donald knew was that he was still a story, Wayne Barrett wrote in his seminal biography. In the spring of 91, according to Barretts reporting, Trump announced to a consultant that he was determined to return to the cover of Time. He said he would be the comeback of the century.

In 1992, he redoubled his efforts, earning honeyed headlines on the cover of New York magazine and on the front page of the Washington Post. He refused to reflect on the past, skated through the present and relentlessly spun toward the future. Im not going to look back and say it was tough and blame myself, he told the Sunday Times of London. I could be even bigger than ever.

Gossip columnists marveled at Trumps ability to shape the nature of the story. I mean, Linda Stasi of the New York Daily News told the Boston Globe in 1994, its not like hes the president.

Business bigwigs, meanwhile, marveled at it because it wasnt true. I think his recovery is an illusion, a real estate executive who did frequent business with Trump said to the reporter from the Globe. Its like the emperor has no clothes. I guess if you keep repeating it long enough people begin to believe it.

And he did. And they did.

And it worked.

In 1995, not quite five months after Trump successfully started selling stock in his failing casinos in New Jersey and his resurgence was looking legitimately less and less like a mirage, some of New Yorks business and government leaders honored Trump at a luncheon in Manhattan for what they dubbed the comeback of the decade. The lieutenant governor called him the comeback kid. Bill Fugazy, a limo company tycoon and onetime Roy Cohn crony, gave Trump a glass-encased boomerang. You throw it, he said, and it always comes back.

In 1996, in articles about Trump, the Daily News and the New York Times used comeback in headlines. By this time, thanks to the casino deal plus at-long-last development on a plot of land he was involved with on the Upper West Side, those headlines were no longer wrong. I think it says, Trump said, what Ive been doing over the years has been right. (Sound familiar?)

And in 1997, out came The Art of the Comeback, the sequel of sorts to The Art of the Deal. It never occurred to me to give up, to admit defeat, Trump (really Kate Bohner) wrote. He simply skips over the losing part. It is the unspoken chapter in the ongoing narrative, said Solovey, the first-season Apprentice contestant. He left out the Art of Losing.

Hence the intro to the show in 04. That same year, too, on multiple occasions, he made the claim that the Guinness Book of World Records listed him as having made the greatest personal financial comeback of all time. Its true. It did, in 1999 and 2000, a Guinness World Records spokesperson told me, before the Records Management Team decided the concept of a comeback was not standardizable across the globe. To use it the way he wanted to use it, he didnt need it to be.

He kept comeback as a cudgel, of course, when he turned toward politics.

In 2015, a little more than a month before he came down the escalator and officially entered the fray as a presidential contender, he gave a speech to the Republican Party of Sarasota County, Florida. Our country is not going to have a comeback, he said, with any politician.

The rest of 2015 and into 2016, for most of the campaign, he didnt use the word that muchuntil he needed it, in October, when polls pointed to him losing to Hillary Clinton and perhaps by a lot. I know how to make a comeback, he said in a speech October 3 in Loveland, Colorado, referring to his experience in the 90s. I dont even think of it as a comeback, he said that same day in a speech in Pueblo, Colorado. It was just, like, you know, we had tough periods, good periods, tough periods. We just knew that things were going to be just fine.

Americas comeback begins on November 8, he said in a speech in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on October 15, a week after the uncovering of his lewd comments on the Access Hollywood tape, when many figured his candidacy surely was doomed.

Hes never stopped using the word as president. But it started to tick up at the turn of the year. He was always going to run in 2020 by talking about a comeback.

But he wanted to run on one he was saying had just occurredand that he had engineered. Three years ago, we launched the great American comeback, he said in his State of the Union address the first week of February. Were in the midst of the great American comeback, he said repeatedly that month and into early March.

At that point, though, the dire reality of the coronavirus and its consequences began to become clear. It was no longer a credible pitch. The Trump campaign this year was going to be about KAGKeep America Greatbut now its another round of MAGA. Make America Great Again. Again. Trump not only has not shied away from using the word comeback but has doubled down, simply shifting from trumpeting one to forecasting anotherto trying, as is his wont as a devotee of Norman Vincent Peale, to speak it into existence, never, ever losing, always either winning or on the way.

Theres going to be a comeback very, very quickly, as soon as this is solved, he said in a coronavirus briefing on March 18. And it will be solved. We will win. And there will be a comeback.

Were going to have a very quick comeback, he said on Fox News on March 24.

Well be the comeback kids, he said in the briefing on April 15. All of us. All of us.

He has very few moves, Marcus, the former Trump publicist, told me, and one of those moves is the comeback move.

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Donald Trumps Lifelong Obsession with Comebacks - POLITICO

Trump could not possibly have been surprised, either, when CBS News correspondent Weijia Jiang asked a pointed question about why Trump was trying to frame the testing as some sort of global competition. Instead of giving a coherent answer, the president told her twice she should direct her question to China, which many have interpreted as a shot at Jiangs ethnicity. In the exchange that ensued, Trump labeled her question nasty twicehis typical putdown for a question he doesnt likeand then, after calling on CNNs Kaitlan Collins and then uncalling on her, he abruptly shut the presser down by saying, OK, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much, and marched away from the podium.

And this wasnt even the weirdest part of the presser! When a reporter asked about his recent Obamagate tweets and wanted to know exactly what crime he was accusing his predecessor of, Trump avoided answering, shooting back at the reporter, You know what the crime is, the crime is very obvious to everybody. And its not the only crime Trump is bird-dogging. Recent Trumps tweets have reprised his old and completely baseless accusation that MSNBCs Scarborough was culpable in the death, 19 years ago, of a staffer. (For what its worth, Senate Republicans seem to want no part of Trumps Obamagate-mongering, according to POLITICO.)

Embracing mania engaging in pageantry fight-picking conspiracy theorizing throwing a public tizzy. While none of these batty Trump behaviors are new, their current intensity invites us to ask once more why he still goes on like this.

Above all, as Rob Long put it in the May Commentary, Trump likes to be watched. The camera is always your friend, is his guiding principle, Long writes. The more you let people seeeven the nasty stuffthe safer you are. The greater his antics, the greater his exposure, the greater the commentary, and the larger the feedback loop. See, Im writing about him and youre reading about him. Almost 3 years into his presidency, hes learned that theres little political blowback from his followers for whatever lunacy the camera records. In fact, as weve seen from his rallies, the more he lies and blusters, the more they like it.

For the same reason, Trump loves it when we yell back at him about his Obamagate B.S. or his charges against Scarborough or his snit-fits. Making him the subject of our conversations is almost as good to Trump as making him the video cameras focal point. All those op-ed commentaries denouncing him? Obviously, hed like it better if the commentariat praised him, but if theyre going to criticize him, hes content to annotate the insults and censures and repurpose them as offensive weapons. Remember what he did when Hillary Clinton called some of his supporters deplorables? He turned it into a badge of honor.

Trump has long loved stirring the pot with charges of conspiracy. This week the perpetrators of conspiracy are China, Obama, Scarborough and the ravings of QAnon. During the campaign, it was the alleged criminal hijinks of Hillary Clinton and his attacks on the question of Barack Obamas citizenship. Baseless charges like these are the perfect refuge of a rhetorical arsonist like Trump, who scorches the earth with controversy and confusion so nobody knows where to find the truth.

Conspiracy is a self-sealing narrativeit can never be disproven, says Jennifer Mercieca, the author of the forthcoming Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump. The logics of conspiracy cover up the lack of proof (they are hiding the proof) or disconfirming proof (they cant be trusted to tell the truth). He who wields conspiracy is very powerful because he can point suspicion in any direction he likes.

Has Trump really turned up the heat or have we just been sitting in his saucepan so long it just feels that way? My intuition tells me that both his supporters and critics have grown numb to his previous rhetorical excesses and need for him to cross new boundaries, violate new taboos, and break fresh panes of glass in order remain engaged. Then theres the matter of his Trumps recent dip in the polls, reportedly putting him in a foul mood. He knows he cant charm his way back to better numbers, so hes trying furiously to stay in the public eye by displaying more ferocity. And dont forget the Biden problem. Sleepy Joe, as Trump often taunts him, has been hiding like a possum in his basement where Trump cant get to him, and thats got to frustrate him.

So he keeps harping on China as the responsible party for the 80,000-plus coronavirus deaths in the United States. While offering absolutely no proof for the charge, Trump obscures his own neglect of the pandemic and misdirects culpability to a foreign country. These techniques might not work on you, but that doesnt bother Trump. His hardcore supporters are the target of the tweets, speeches, pressers and conspiracy theories. The more he does to make himself look persecuted and reviled by the elites and the press, the more heroic he appears to his base.

As the presidential campaign progresses, look for more of the same from Trump, with an emphasis on Biden, of course. His goal is a permanent schism in American society, a cold civil war, with lots of finger-pointing and yelling and demagoguery. Even if he loses in November, his audience will endure, and hell do whatever he needs to make sure we never take our eyes off of him.

******

Ill be writing more about Jennifer Merciecas Demagogue for President when its published in early summer. (Highly recommended.) Send book recommendations to [emailprotected]. My email alerts blame my Twitter feed for losing China. My RSS feed is a prisoner of rational argument.

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Opinion | Why Trump Is Peddling Extra-Strength Conspiracy Theories - POLITICO

Donald Trump listens during a roundtable meeting with energy sector CEOs on April 3, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Photo by Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images

The staggering responsibilities of the executive office do not appear to have aged President Donald Trump much. Unlike past presidents who have grown visibly wearier on the job, Trump seems to have not aged much over his four years in office. Even in the face of a historic pandemic that has, at the time of this writing, killed over 80,000 people in his country, the president has projected an unflappable vanity. Questioned about the rising death toll at an April press conference, Trump boasted, You cant mourn it any stronger than were mourning it.

Most people no longer seem to be sharing this ghoulishly upbeat attitude. Recent polls show that Trumps support has declined over the past few months, as a wave of suffering from the pandemic ripples across the United States. The administration is widely seen as having botched the response to the coronavirus. And the president himself has compounded the sense of chaos with his incoherent and disturbing messaging during the crisis. Trump has been saying insane things for years, of course, but with tens of thousands of Americans killed by disease and tens of millions more out of work and facing an uncertain future, the joke finally appears to be wearing thin.

Every day seems to be a pivotal turning point for American society lately, but its hard not to look ahead to one autumn day in particular as a momentous occasion that will shape this countrys future: Election Day. There is not much reason to believe that the United States will have recovered by the time of the vote. Under normal circumstances, after such a disaster, the incumbent losing office would be all but assured. But Trump also happens to be facing off against a Democratic Party that is bitterly divided and with good reason. The Democratic split can be attributed both to structural differences as well as those of personality, divisions that have been pored over ad nauseam and need not be relitigated here.

What should be considered is that, one way or another, this election will really be a matter of life and death for millions of people. This is particularly the case for the poor and people in developing countries whose voices are not heard in the electoral process, even though its outcome affects them. The question of whether Trump would be worse on balance than any Democratic candidate is worth sincerely asking. But, when you analyze both Trumps record in office and future trajectory, it hardly seems debatable. In addition to its hideous response to the coronavirus pandemic the suffering of which is falling overwhelmingly on the working poor and minorities the Trump administration is willfully laying the groundwork for global suffering on a scale that will be unprecedented.

Trump ran on a platform that made vaguely populist gestures at times. But in office, he has served as a human ventilator keeping the terminally ill ideologies of neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy alive both in their most rapacious forms. If the forces that latched onto him get another four-year extension, we could pass beyond a point where we have much less left to rescue. There are several fronts on which a second Trump term would guarantee escalated suffering for innocent people, including health care, xenophobia, immigration policy, income inequality, and the courts. For purposes of illustration however, let me focus on two issues that I follow closely, and which progressives have historically expressed concern about: climate change and war.

Every expert has warned that major cuts in emissions need to take place within the next decade in order to avert calamity. An administration interested in even the minimalist goal of keeping civilization functioning in the medium term should feel compelled to register a response. Yet the Trump administration has made it a point of pride to do the opposite of what is necessary as aggressively as possible. Many of its environmental policies seem to have little apparent logic beyond killing endangered species and ramping up CO2 emissions to trigger the libs. The direst warnings from scientists seem incapable of shaking the administration off its current course. And this problem is time-sensitive: Within roughly a decade on our present course, we will have likely passed a point beyond which catastrophic harm is unavoidable.

To be fair to Trump, past presidents had environmental policies that also brought us to this point. Its reasonable to ask, then, whether his approach is meaningfully worse. But, according to climate experts who have tracked this subject for years, it is. Trumps environmental positions go beyond even those of the conservative establishment and corporate America. They align instead with the most extreme fringe of right-wing activists and libertarians opposed to any type of regulatory action to stave off climate disaster.

In 2012, the Obama administration was doing better on climate policy than a Republican administration would have done. But even Mitt Romney was not completely terrible on climate. He wouldve enacted some policies, he wasnt totally retrograde or an outright denialist, said Kert Davies, the founder and director of Climate Investigations Center. When Trump ditched the Paris accords, many major corporations came out and said that this is a bad idea because they had already begun planning for a reduced-carbon future. It tells you a lot about how fringe the president is on this issue that hes not even in line with corporate America.

Over the past few years, in part because of the alarm over the Trump administrations policies, a powerful grassroots movement has grown to force the issue on climate change. It is having an impact. Whereas in previous elections, it was a struggle for activists to get a single question about the issue addressed, climate policy was one of the major topics of discussion during the last set of Democratic primary debates.

The current likely Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, has made weaker commitments on this subject so far than some of his challengers and been justly criticized for his shortcomings by activists. But there is significant reason to believe that he or any Democratic president would do more than Trump on climate and also be susceptible to pressure to improve their stance in office. On this issue, even marginal improvements happen to matter a lot. Even with great effort, we are likely pass the red line that scientists have set: 2 degrees Celsius warming above preindustrial levels. But keeping emissions at a point that takes us up to 2.5 degrees, 3 degrees, or even more warming would make a difference and accelerate the severity of our catastrophe. Its not hyperbole to say that every marginal increase in emissions means death and misery for millions of the most vulnerable around the world. The absolute intransigence of the Trump administration on climate is particularly galling since there is a lot that could easily be done with a little bit of political will.

Damaged military vehicles in the aftermath of U.S. military air strikes at a militarized zone in the Jurf al-Sakhar in Iraq on March 13, 2020.

Photo: AFP/Getty Images

There is an ocean of difference between what a Trump presidency and a Biden presidency would do on climate policy, Davies said. In one youd do zero, even continue moving backwards, while on the other wed at least be moving forward again. Even if people dont think Bidens policies are up to Bernies Bidens progressive rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who ended his presidential campaign in April theres a much higher bar now.

Davies added, People have woken up on this issue in a way that could not have been foreseen years ago. It is likely that climate policy will be a significant node of the Democratic platform in November, and that itll be something beyond getting back into the Paris accords. The dialogue has moved way past that.

The Democratic Partys legacy on war is an ugly one. President Barack Obama was responsible for putting in place a drone warfare program that frequently killed innocent people around the world. After he left office, the terrifying executive powers over life and death that Obama created were then handed over to a man who was perhaps the least morally or temperamentally fit to wield them. While Trump occasionally expressed skepticism of U.S. militarism during his first presidential campaign, in practice he has governed with callous brutality, behaving like the ugliest imperialist possible.

Under Trump, strikes in Somalia have ramped up eight times over what they were under Obama. In all battlefields, he has loosened rules of engagement to allow the greater killing of civilians in American wars. Thousands have died in needlessly brutal operations in Iraq and Syria as a result of slackened targeting standards. As commander-in-chief, Trump has gone out of his way to encourage war crimes and even celebrate those who commit them. Harming innocent civilians is one issue, at least, where he has been keeping his campaign promise.

Trumps foreign policy doesnt get any better when you zoom out from the actual business of killing people. His administration has given an unprecedented blank check for unilateral Israeli land grabs in the Palestinian territories, setting the stage for institutionalized oppression unseen in the past seven decades of conflict. Trump has revoked arms control treaties that form part of the hidden infrastructure preventing the outbreak of nuclear wars. His retrograde approach to these agreements is setting the stage for the renewal of a Cold War-style arms race. Even a relatively small decision to remove restrictions on land mines will likely kill and maim innocents pointlessly for years to come.

But perhaps the single most aggressive policy Trump is still playing out is his approach toward Iran. After tearing up the Obama-era nuclear agreement, which, whatever its shortcomings, was the most significant step to extricating the U.S. from its endless wars in the region, Trump brought the two countries within inches of war this January after illegally assassinating an Iranian general in Iraq. Even more shockingly, the president has maintained crushing sanctions on that country during the Covid-19 pandemic over the pleas of Iranian human rights activists, Democratic senators, and former high-ranking world officials. A leaked Pentagon document reported in April said that these sanctions had crippled the Iranian health care systems ability to respond to the disease, a development that has made even some hawkish anti-Iran figures queasy.

The presidents Iran policy has already resulted in the deaths of innocent people. In a second term, worse is almost assured. On this issue alone, there is a staggering difference with even the most flawed Democratic position on this issue. Anyone looking to express moral outrage over the suffering of civilians due to U.S. foreign policy need look no further than Iran today.

The risk of war with Iran is an issue where there is a huge partisan split, said Stephen Wertheim, deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author of the forthcoming book Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy. Trump has had many years to pivot from maximum pressure to dialogue and he has not done that with Iran, he has not selected advisers that would allow him to do that. The Democrats, on the other hand, started out as the party that supported the nuclear deal and are likely to try to return to it once in office.

Trump has periodically given hints that he favors some type of economic-nationalist retrenchment of American resources away from foreign conflicts. His thoughts on this issue have never been systematized in any clear way. But his rhetoric has sometimes given those who hope for such a policy enough material to project an image onto him as an isolationist, despite daily accumulating evidence to the contrary. It has taken the Covid-19 pandemic and his response blaming it almost entirely on China instead of using it to make the case for domestic retrenchment to put the final lie to this claim.

If Trump were an isolationist, if he were in favor of Fortress America, he would be focused right now on building defenses in America against future pandemics, said Wertheim. That is not what we are seeing.

The Democratic Party has also been historically invested in the dubious goal of U.S. global primacy. Unlike in the GOP, however, there seems to be a meaningful constituency growing against the hawkishness of previous decades, at least on some important issues. The nuclear deal negotiated by the Democrats in particular was the most significant step taken to extricate the U.S. from the cycle of endless war in the Middle East. In general, though deeply flawed and deserving harsh criticism, the Democratic Party consensus is still less hawkish than Trumps, who has served as an empty cipher for the most unhinged extremists in Washington, D.C.

Retrenchment in some fashion is the direction the U.S. should be heading, and the public debate reflects that, said Wertheim, who is a critic of the so-called blob foreign policy consensus in both parties. No one in the Democratic primaries was trying to sound more hawkish on foreign policy; it was all a contest to say who was going to end endless wars. Regardless of what happens, this is how the debate is being framed now.

The most damning indictment of the status quo that preceded Trump is that it ultimately gave rise to his presidency. The proposition of simply returning back to those days and calling it a job well done is untenable. But when it comes to the question of a second Trump term, if there is a lesson we can take from history, including recent history, its that even when things are bad, they can still become much, much worse without getting better again. The accelerationist dream of tearing things down so that something better just might be built in its place is a folly that sacrifices the weakest among us for uncertain gains. Unless you have great personal wealth and are benefiting from Trumps eye-watering tax cuts on the rich, there will not be any safe haven from what a second term will mean.

Electoral politics are not the sum total of political engagement, of course. Mutual aid and local democracy can flourish without getting involved in the dispiriting business of national elections. For anyone who cares about large structural issues like climate change and foreign policy, however, its worth considering how a second Trump term would preclude even a long-term future that is progressive in any sense. From a strategic perspective is also political capital in appearing to be on the right side of history at a pivotal moment. If Trump does overcome the pandemic to win the election and, as would be likely, takes the world further down the path of ruin, amid the pain that ensues it would be good for progressives to look like they had done everything in their power to stop him.

One of my favorite books is the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweigs 1942 memoir, The World of Yesterday. In that book, written shortly before his death at the height of World War II, Zweig decried how the world that he had grown up in had suddenly been shattered by politics, as if it were a hollow clay pot breaking into a thousand pieces. Our world is no less fragile. People can reasonably disagree over the perennial question of what is to be done. But, at the very least, as this pandemic is emphasizing, we should never let the delicacy of the things we take for granted slip from mind.

More here:

No One Is Worse Than Donald Trump on Climate and War - The Intercept

UPDATE: A Senate Foreign Relations committee hearing that included consideration of Michael Packs nomination to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, was postponed as multiple members asked for a hold on agenda items.

A committee spokesperson said that Chairman James Risch (R-ID), received requests from his members that collectively resulted in the full agenda for [Thursdays] meeting being held over. The chairman has honored these requests and will schedule a business meeting for these items in the near future.

Democrats already had raised concerns in a letter to Risch last month, including what they called unresolved questions over Packs nomination. There was complaint that Risch was trying to jam through an extensive agenda of items, particularly in the midst of a pandemic when there already are worries over potential exposure to the virus on Capitol Hill.

PREVIOUSLY, MAY 13, 4:14 PM PT: When President Donald Trump complained last month that Senate Democrats were holding up his nominees in the midst of a global pandemic, he singled out Michael Pack as one of the figures whose confirmation had stalled.

Pack was his choice to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees a number of government-backed broadcasting outlets including the largest, Voice of America, along with other entities like Radio Free Europe and Alhurra.

The choice to single out Pack left reporters puzzled, until Trump took the opportunity to single out VOA for scathing attacks. Trumps complaints appear to have triggered the scheduling of a vote on Packs nomination before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, even as Democrats continue to hold misgivings and others fear that the agency will become a conduit for Trump TV.

Pack does come with government credentials. He served as the director of Worldnet, the United States Information Agencys global satellite network, which has since been folded into VOA, and he also has experience in public media, having held positions at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and as a member of the National Council on the Humanities.

Hes also well known in conservative filmmaking circles for documentaries that he has made, including projects he did in collaboration with Steve Bannon, Trumps former senior adviser who led Breitbart.com. Packs most recent movie is Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in his Own Words, which will air on PBS stations this month.

At his confirmation hearing last year, Pack said that his goals were to improve morale and to clean up scandals that have beset the agency, which was formerly known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors. He also said that he wanted to create a more effective U.S broadcasting effort on the world stage.

But Trumps attacks on the media, and his suggestion of the U.S. starting our own worldwide network, raised concerns of whether Pack would maintain independence from the administration. At his confirmation hearing last September, he was questioned about his collaboration with Bannon and whether he would be able to stand up to demands from the White House.

The whole agency rests on the belief the reporters are independent, that no political influence is telling them how to report the news and what to say, Pack said at his hearing in September. Without that trust, I think, the agency is completely undermined.

Yet those concerns over independence have lingered as Trump has touted the idea of having a government-run global network. The month after Packs confirmation hearing, Trump criticized VOA and touted the idea of starting a global news network.

The White Houses criticisms escalated last month, when it accused VOA of spreading Chinese propaganda in its coverage of the coronavirus, claiming that it spends your money to speak for authoritarian regimes. Among the criticisms was a VOA tweet of a light show in Wuhan to mark the end of a months long lockdown.

In response, Amanda Bennett, the director of the VOA, issued a lengthy defense of the news outlet and its journalistic credentials. She said that one of the big differences between publicly-funded independent media, like the Voice of America, and state-controlled media is that we are free to show all sides of an issue and are actually mandated to do so by law as stated in the VOA Charter signed by President Gerald Ford in 1976.

We are thoroughly covering Chinas dis-information and misinformation in English and Mandarin and at the same time reporting factually as we always do in all 47 of our broadcast languages on other events in China, she wrote.

But the attacks continued. At an April 15 press conference, Trump complained that Packs nomination has been stuck in committee for two years, preventing us from managingthe Voice of America. Very important.

And if you heard whats coming out of the Voice of America, its disgusting Things they say are disgusting toward our country.

After the Foreign Relations committee, led by Sen. James Risch (R-ID), scheduled Thursdays hearing, Democrats objected to convening members given concerns over gatherings amid the pandemic.

In a recent letter to Risch, Democrats also called for a chance to question Pack again, pointing to what they said were unresolved issues over his taxes. According to CNBC, the ranking member of the committee, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) has raised concerns over the award of a contract to Packs production company, Manifold Productions, while he led the Claremont Institute. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Brett Bruen interacted with the agency, then known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors, when he served as director of global engagement for President Barack Obamas National Security Council. He said that there is a reason that Packs nomination, first made in 2018, has lingered. That year, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), who was Rischs predecessor as chairman of the Foreign Relations committee, showed little interest in advancing Packs nomination.

There was not interest on the Republican side to undo what they did at the end of the Obama administration, Bruen said. He was referring to a restructuring of the agency so that it was led by a CEO with a board of governors in an advisory role. But Bruen said that Pack was such a partisan choice that he undermines the effort to reform the agency.

If Pack is confirmed, Bruen said there is the potential for VOA to really transform into a mouthpiece for any administration. There is a real risk that this goes from being a real news outlet that is somewhat credible, to one that is really a production studio for advancing the presidents point of view.

But Bruen believes that the government broadcast entities are not that effective in a much different media environment. He notes that they were set up at a time when they could project information to countries where there was an absence of news sources outside of government propaganda, when now the problem is the avalanche of content competing for attention.

I think the U.S. should get the heck out of the business of producing news, he said. No one thinks they are independent, other than the folks in the Cohen building. The latter is a reference to the VOAs Washington headquarters.

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Senate Committee Expected To Vote On Donald Trumps Pick To Lead Agency In Charge Of Voice Of America - Deadline

Plenty, plenty of issues, James responded. Everything from cutting Great Lakes funding to shithole countries to speaking ill of the dead," apparently referring to Trump's disparagement of the late Sen. John McCain. "I mean, where do you want to start?

"And so yes, there's gonna be places that I disagree with the president and those are just a couple," he added.

James, a 38-year-old Iraq War veteran, also pushed back against what he described as a Democratic talking point that he was bankrolled by the president and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who hails from one of the states wealthiest political families.

I havent gotten any money from Donald Trump. I haven't gotten any money from Betsy DeVos. I havent gotten any money thats political talking points. Very little of that is true, James said during the appearance, a video of which was obtained by POLITICO.

(While James hasn't received funding from the education secretary, her family has contributed heavily to a super PAC supporting his candidacy.)

James faces the hurdle of running in Michigan, a swing state where the presidents popularity has ebbed. A recent Fox News poll showed Trump trailing Joe Biden by 8 percentage points and James lagging behind Democratic Sen. Gary Peters by 10 percentage points.

The candidate made the case that he is taking a balanced approach toward the president and wasnt afraid to disagree with him. He said he wasnt focusing his campaign on Trump, though he acknowledged that many would see the race through the prism of the president.

I do recognize that it's human to disagree with people and like I've said millions of times, I can agree with the president without worshiping him. I can disagree without attacking him, James said.

Trump, James said at one point, "has his own campaign to run."

While the presidents poll numbers are sagging across the country amid the coronavirus pandemic, Trump advisers regard Michigan as a particular trouble spot. Of all the states the president won in 2016, they say, Michigan will be the hardest to carry again. Republicans have also struggled to recruit candidates in a pair of Michigan congressional seats that Democrats flipped in the 2018 midterm elections.

James has made clear throughout the 2020 race that hes willing to distinguish himself from Trump in certain areas and has stressed that he intends to run on local, not national issues.

This race isnt about President Trump, James was quoted as saying during the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference in September. This race is about people in the state of Michigan whove been failed by their leaders for generations. This race is about people who are hurting in this state, and Im going to make this race about Michigan.

Gail Gitcho, a James spokeswoman, said, John James is willing to have these tough conversations with voters. John James is his own man, and he will point out when he agrees with the president and respectfully point out when he disagrees with him.

"I do recognize that it's human to disagree with people and like I've said millions of times, I can agree with the president without worshiping him."

John James

Trump has heavily promoted James, tweeting last month that James will be a GREAT Senator for Michigan!

Trump also endorsed James in his unsuccessful 2018 Senate bid. At one point, he tweeted a picture of him with James in the Oval Office.

James has publicly touted his support from the White House and recently said that Trump has done everything that he has thought was best in his managing of the pandemic.

Democrats say they are eager to paint James as a Trump puppet and frequently highlight his comment during the 2018 race that he was "2,000 percent" with the president's agenda.

During the late April conference, James was peppered with an array of skeptical questions about the president. James, who is African American, was reminded reminded that many in the black community don't trust Trump. James was asked whether he would publicly speak out against the administration and advocate for the needs of African Americans.

James responded that his access to Trump as a Republican senator would be an asset to African Americans in the state.

Look, Donald Trump doesnt need less black folks around him, he needs more, said James.

He added: Hopefully youll see through my actions that I am for you, that I am for black people, and that we share the same destiny. And hopefully as the result of that, you give me the benefit of the doubt.

Your guide to the permanent campaign weekday mornings, in your inbox.

James challenged Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) in 2018 and lost by 6 percentage points. Afterward, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pushed for James to run again. GOP leaders regard the Michigan seat as one of their top pickup opportunities, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee has booked nearly $3 million for ads this fall.

Trump's campaign advisers were less enthusiastic about his second bid. Last year, the presidents political team wrote a memo to the Senate GOP campaign arm making the case that a James statewide candidacy would further amp up Democratic energy and involvement and potentially hurt Trumps prospects in the battleground state. Trump advisers instead pushed for James to run for a House seat.

Trump aides, who are constantly on the lookout for signs of Republican dissent, are suspicious that James is trying to have it both ways.

They were rankled when James, after announcing his Senate bid in June, tweeted, We are heading in the wrong direction as a country and our leaders in Washington are failing to lead us toward a better and brighter future.

Link:

The one Republican Senate candidate willing to call out Donald Trump - POLITICO

The coronavirus pandemic ravaging our nation is impacting all of us, but not equally. Seniors and people with disabilities are most vulnerable to COVID-19, the disease caused by the pandemic. Without targeted relief, these groups will continue to suffer immensely in the coming months and years.

Seniors and people with disabilities need immediate assistance, but Donald TrumpDonald John TrumpHouse Judiciary chairman hints at subpoenaing Barr Florida election supervisors urge DeSantis to 'act immediately' to make voting safe amid pandemic Paul claims Biden 'caught red-handed' eavesdropping on Flynn MORE has now vowed that they wont get any unless Congress bows to his demand to cut Social Securitys payroll tax.

Payroll tax cuts waste money, delivering the wealthy and powerful the largest cuts while providing nothing to those who need it most, as this linked chart reveals. They are slow and inefficient. But they do reduce Social Securitys dedicated funding, a longstanding right-wing ideological goal. That presumably is why Trump is insisting on them.

Not only must the next coronavirus relief package from Congress reject calls to include a cut to Social Securitys dedicated revenue, it must prioritize seniors and people with disabilities by protecting and expanding our Social Security system, eradicating the crisis in our nations nursing homes, and making coronavirus treatments (including an eventual vaccine) available to all.

Protect and Expand Social Security

There is no better way to get aid to people who need it, ensure seniors and people with disabilities have the resources to stay at home, and address the long-simmering retirement income crisis (now exacerbated by the pandemic) than by expanding Social Security and other benefits for seniors and people with disabilities. Several visionary lawmakers have introduced plans to do just that.

In the House, Rep. John Larson John Barry LarsonDonald Trump is proposing attacks on Social Security and seniors; here is what we should do instead Battle brewing over how to get more relief money to Americans Now is the time to strengthen Social Security not tamper with funding MORE (D-Conn.), chairman of the Social Security Subcommittee, has introduced the Emergency Social Security Benefits Improvement Act. This legislation would increase benefits for every Social Security beneficiary, provide an additional increase for low-income beneficiaries, and ensure benefits for grandfamilies, along with improved benefits for widow(er)s and students.

In the Senate, Elizabeth WarrenElizabeth WarrenIt's time to invest in America's future Democratic bill would require cash refunds for all canceled airline tickets during pandemic The Memo: Fauci at odds with Trump on virus MORE (D-Mass.) and Ron WydenRonald (Ron) Lee WydenIn win for privacy hawks, Senate adds more legal protections to FISA bill Trump looms as wild card in Senate surveillance fight Experts sound alarms about security as states eye online voting MORE (D-Ore.) have a proposal to send an additional $200 month to all Social Security beneficiaries (as well as those receiving Supplemental Security Income, Veterans Pensions, and Railroad Retirement Benefits) for the duration of the coronavirus crisis. This plan has the support of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) as well as presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

In addition to expanding Social Securitys modest benefits, Congress must provide additional funding for the Social Security Administration. Seniors and people with disabilities need the highest quality service during this difficult time.

With offices closed to the public and many people unable to access the internet, it is critical that the Social Security Administration get the resources and mandate they need to eliminate the long hold times on the agencys 1-800 number. This is critical to address immediately, because of the haphazard and negligent way that the IRS has handled information dissemination about seniors and people with disabilities critical benefits and economic impact payments.

Investigate, Mitigate, And Eventually Eradicate the Crisis in Our Nations Nursing Homes

Nursing homes are currently experiencing unfathomable levels of illness and death. Nearly 12,000 coronavirus deaths have been linked to nursing homes. Congress must step in to investigate the reason for this tragic outcome, and mitigate the problems immediately.

We need national nursing home guidelines to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, and then Congress must provide the resources to carry out those guidelines, including guaranteeing free testing kits for workers and residents. Patient discharge guidelines should be clarified so families can plan at-home care. Congress must ensure residents are not at risk for neglect or abuse due to the elimination of in-person inspections.

All these priorities and more are covered by Rep. Jan SchakowskyJanice (Jan) Danoff SchakowskyDonald Trump is proposing attacks on Social Security and seniors; here is what we should do instead Privacy hawks willing to see how new contact tracing project plays out Biden's health plan falls short here's how to fix that MOREs (D-Ill.) The Quality Care for Nursing Home Residents During COVID-19 Act, and every member of the House and Senate should support it.

Ensure Treatments and Vaccines are Available to Everyone

Ultimately, the only way to keep seniors and people with disabilities safe is to end the coronavirus pandemic. To do that, we must ensure that once a vaccine is developed, it is available to every person who needs one globally. Our country was a global leader in the eradication of polio and smallpox. We must do the same for the coronavirus.

Congress should follow the leadership of Reps. Schakowsky, Peter DeFazioPeter Anthony DeFazioDonald Trump is proposing attacks on Social Security and seniors; here is what we should do instead House committee investigating Carnival cruise line's response to coronavirus Delta, American Airlines to mandate face coverings during US flights MORE (D-Ore.), Rosa DeLauroRosa Luisa DeLauroThe Hill's Coronavirus Report: Former RNC chief Michael Steele says Trump isn't telling the truth on testing; Fed chair wants Congress to do more The Hill's Coronavirus Report: Rep. Zeldin says Congress must help states; Fauci's warning; Dems unveil T bill The Hill's Coronavirus Report: Sen. Barrasso says it's too soon to consider more funding for states; White House faces new challenges MORE (D-Conn.) and Lloyd DoggettLloyd Alton DoggettProgressive lawmakers want Pelosi to postpone vote on T relief package Donald Trump is proposing attacks on Social Security and seniors; here is what we should do instead Democrats offer bill to undo business tax provisions in coronavirus law MORE (D-Texas), who have laid out three principles on coronavirus treatments and vaccines.

Firstly, pharmaceutical manufacturers should not be granted exclusivity for any coronavirus vaccine, drug, or other therapeuticwhether it has been developed with U.S. taxpayer dollars and publicly funded, or not.

Second, pharmaceutical corporations must not be allowed to sell any coronavirus vaccine, drug or therapeutic at an unreasonable price, whether or not it has been developed with U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Third, for all coronavirus vaccines, drugs, or therapeutics, pharmaceutical manufacturers must publicly report their total expenditures so that it is transparent how much was spent on research and development, and how much on marketing.

Economic security for seniors and people with disabilities has never been more important. It is clear we will not see any leadership from the White House. Only congressional action can alleviate the pain that individuals and families are experiencing due to the coronavirus pandemic.

This moment in our country is historic. If the next legislative package is one that truly meets this moment, it will save the lives of untold numbers of seniors and people with disabilities, and set the foundation for our nations recovery.

Alex Lawson is executive director of Social Security Works.

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Donald Trump is proposing attacks on Social Security and seniors; here is what we should do instead | TheHill - The Hill