Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive science, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
DP Etiquette
First rule: Don't be a jackass.
Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.
I was going to attempt a relatively serious discussion today about a very relevant topic – The Easter Bunny. However, things slid downhill faster than my car without brakes when I Googled legend of the Easter Bunny.
You’ll never guess what I learned. Brace yourselves.
The Easter Bunny is an anthropomorphic rabbit. Shocking, isn’t it!
Anthorpomorphic? I didn’t realize the Easter bunny suffered from an incapacitating fear. He probably drops a fortune in his shrink’s office. I wonder if he pays in chocolate? I was convinced anthropomorphia had to be a disease of mind or body. Sometimes I’m so ignorant, I wonder how I function in life.
I’m happy to report the Easter Bunny is not contagious. In fact, he’s disease free (for this year anyway).
Back to our discussion.
Have you introduced your children to the Easter Bunny or are you anti-bunny?
I realize many parents do not like to lie to their children or foster false notions in their impressionable minds. I applaud and respect these parents; however, I’m apparently not so honest.
Each year the Easter bunny drops off a basket for each child filled with all the candy I love. How considerate of him. We also have an Easter Egg hunt each year. I’d like to skip this tradition, but FringeBoy likes tradition. He thrives on tradition. As a toddler he’d cry for the same cup every morning. In order to avoid a holiday meltdown, we hunt for eggs.
For our family this does not detract from the true meaning of Easter. The celebration of the resurrection takes center stage in our home. Bunnies, eggs, and yes, even chocolate take a back seat to the One who conquered death and the grave.
What Easter traditions do you celebrate? Please tell us if you hate the Easter Bunny, you wish he would choke on a carrot, or you think peeps are of the devil.
I know. Financial stuff bores most people to tears or sleep. Unfortunately, is it in financial stuff that taxpayers get ripped off of trillions of dollars that flow in opaque, secret, behind closed doors sorts of ways. Darned financial stuff. Darned opacity. Darned corruption.
Bailing out households backed by junk bonds
Wall Street on Parade (WSOP) reports that the Fed is planning to put lipstick on a very large pig. The Fed announced today that it will start buying junk bonds. Junk bonds, as we all know, had been, according to WSOP, “cratering for most of the month of March. That was the pig. The lipstick it applied was worded like this: ‘The Federal Reserve on Thursday took additional actions to provide up to $2.3 trillion in loans to support the economy. This funding will assist households and employers of all sizes and bolster the ability of state and local governments to deliver critical services during the coronavirus pandemic.’”
In the colorfully titled WSOP article, Fed Chair Powell Tells Whoppers This Morning on the Brookings Institution Webcast, commented that households, small businesses and most state and local governments do not issue junk bonds. So, that $2.3 trillion in funding will not assist households and employers of all sizes, or bolster the ability of most state or local governments to do squat. It will help big businesses in financial distress. WSOP argues that instead of the Fed bailing out failing companies with junk bond credit ratings, those companies should use the option that our president has used on many occasions. It is called filing for bankruptcy.
And other whoppers and deceit
WSOP also pointed out that Fed chair Powell fibbed about the loans being paid back. Much or maybe most of the money is unlikely to ever be repaid. Powell said this morning that “the Fed can only make secured loans to solvent entities with the expectation that the loans will be fully repaid.” But on March 26, Powell said this about loan repayment expectations: “We’re required to get full security for our loans so that we don’t lose money. So the Treasury puts up money as we estimate what the losses might be…Effectively $1 of loss absorption of backstop from Treasury is enough to support $10 of loans.”
Sounds like us taxpayers are going to get trillions more in debt stemming from the president’s failure to deal with coronavirus seriously or competently.
Finally, Powell commented this morning that “We entered this turbulent period on a strong economic footing, and that should help support the recovery. In the meantime, we are using our tools to help build a bridge from the solid economic foundation on which we entered this crisis to a position of regained economic strength on the other side.”
If that is true, and it probably is, this coronavirus thing and federal incompetence in dealing with it could end up costing maybe as much as $10 trillion or even more.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be spending some time trying to figure out just how many trillion dollars is going to bail out businesses without much or any oversight. It is starting to look to me like we're in way more trouble than just coronavirus and a mounting death toll. We may be on the verge of trashing our entire economy and entering into a depression on the scale of 1929 or something even worse.
This book helps explain the fundamentally moral, intuitive, emotional, biased and unconscious nature of humans dealing with politics. Existing evidence indicates that our minds are basically “narrowly moralistic and intolerant” when dealing with political matters. Political issues are now routinely weaponized by moralizing them. This tends to reduce conscious reasoning and gives more control to our far more powerful unconscious minds. That tends to make politics more irrational than if issues had not been weaponized. The matter of morality in politics, how to think about it and how to deal with it is arguably urgent and rapidly becoming more important.
Book review
Johnathan Haidt’s 2012 book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, argues that politics is largely a matter of moral thinking and judgment, most of which (~99%) is unconscious for most people most of the time. 2012 Haidt is a social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business. He wrote The Righteous Mind to “at least do what we can to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, each one certain of its righteousness.” He explains: “My goal in this book is to drain some of the heat, anger, and divisiveness out of these topics and replace them with awe, wonder, and curiosity.”
Given the increasing rancor in American politics since Haidt wrote in 2012, it appears that his goal is not being met. In view of America’s increasing political polarization, Haidt clearly has his work cut out for him.
To find answers, Haidt focuses on the inherent moralistic, self-righteous nature of human cognition and thinking about politics and religion. Through the ages, there were three basic conceptions of the roles of reason (conscious reasoning) and passion (unconscious intuition, emotion, morality, bias, self identity, tribe identity, etc.) in human thinking and behavior. Plato (~428-348 BC) argued that reason dominated in intellectual elites called “philosophers”, but that average people were mostly controlled by their passions. David Hume (1711-1776) argued that reason or conscious thinking was nothing more than a slave to human passions. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) argued that reason and passions were about equal in their influence.
According to Haidt, the debate is over: “Hume was right. The mind is divided into parts, like a rider (controlled processes) on an elephant (automatic processes). The rider evolved to serve the elephant. . . . . intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Therefore, if you want to change someone’s mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant first.”
Our intuitive (unconscious) morals and judgments tend to be more subjective, personal and emotional than objective and rational (conscious). Haidt points out that we are designed by evolution to be “narrowly moralistic and intolerant.” That leads to self-righteousness and the associated hostility and distrust of other points of views that the trait generates. Regarding the divisiveness of politics, Haidt asserts that “our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife.”
Our unconscious “moral intuitions (i.e., judgments) arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.” Initial intuitions driving later reasoning exemplifies some of our many unconscious cognitive biases, e.g., ideologically-based motivated reasoning, which distorts both facts we become aware of and the common sense we apply to the reality we think we see.
The book’s central metaphor “is that the mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.”
Haidt observes that there are two different sets of morals and rhetorical styles that tend to characterize liberals and conservatives: “Republicans understand moral psychology. Democrats don’t. Republicans have long understood that the elephant is in charge of political behavior, not the rider, and they know how elephants work. Their slogans, political commercials and speeches go straight for the gut . . . . Republicans don’t just aim to cause fear, as some Democrats charge. They trigger the full range of intuitions described by Moral Foundations Theory.”
The problem: On reading The Righteous Mind, the depth and breadth of problem for politics becomes uncomfortably clear for anyone hoping to ever find a way to at least partially rationalize politics. Haidt sums it up nicely: “Western philosophy has been worshiping reason and distrusting the passions for thousands of years. . . . I’ll refer to this worshipful attitude throughout this book as the rationalist delusion. I call it a delusion because when a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds. The true believers produce pious fantasies that don’t match reality, and at some point somebody comes along to knock the idol off its pedestal. . . . . We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment. . . . . The rider is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done, and it is good at finding reasons to justify whatever the elephant wants to do next. . . . . We make our first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments.”
In other words, conscious reason (the rider) serves unconscious intuition and that’s the powerful but intolerant and moralistic beast that Haidt calls the elephant.
Two additional observations merit mention. First, Haidt points out that “traits can be innate without being hardwired or universal. The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth . . . . But not a single chapter . . . . consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words. . . . Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. . . . . ‘Built-in’ does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience.”
Second, Haidt asserts that Hume “went too far” by arguing that reason is merely a “slave” of the passions. He argues that although intuition dominates, it is “neither dumb nor despotic” and it “can be shaped by reasoning.” He likens the situation as one of a lawyer (the rider) and a client (the elephant). Sometimes the lawyer can talk the client out of doing something dumb, sometimes not. The elephant may be a big, powerful beast, but it’s not stupid and it can learn. Haidt’s assertion that we “will always be cursed by moralistic strife” is his personal moral judgment that our intuitive, righteous nature is a curse, not a blessing or a source of wisdom. In this regard, his instinct is closer to Plato’s moral judgment about how things ought to be than Hume or Jefferson. Or, at least that’s how I read it.
Questions: Does Haidt’s portrayal of the interplay between unconscious intuition and morals and conscious reason seem reasonable? Is it possible that a society can partly tame the elephant and shift some mental power to the rider in hopes of at least partially rationalizing politics compared to what it is now?
Original Biopolitics and Bionews post: August 29, 2016; DP posts: 3/16/19, 4/9/20
“President Trump and his Republican allies are launching an aggressive strategy to fight what many of the administration’s own health officials view as one of the most effective ways to make voting safer amid the deadly spread of Covid-19: the expanded use of mail-in ballots.
The scene Tuesday of Wisconsinites in masks and gloves gathering in long lines to vote, after Republicans sued to defeat extended, mail-in ballot deadlines, did not deter the president and top officials in his party. Republican leaders said they were pushing ahead to fight state-level statutes that could expand absentee balloting in Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona and elsewhere. In New Mexico, Republicans are battling an effort to go to a mail-in-only primary, and they vowed on Wednesday to fight a new move to expand postal balloting in Minnesota.
The new political effort is clearly aimed at helping the president’s re-election prospects, as well as bolstering Republicans running further down the ballot. While his advisers tend to see the issue in more nuanced terms, Mr. Trump obviously views the issue in a stark, partisan way: He has complained that under Democratic plans for national expansion of early voting and voting by mail, ‘you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.’
At his daily news briefing on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he believed vote-by-mail had been abused to hurt Republicans, and ‘I will not stand for it,’ though he allowed that mail ballots could help some older voters — an important part of his voting base. It was a slight modulation that came at the urging of his advisers.
In their efforts to fight expanding vote-by-mail, Republican officials are counting on a crucial and powerful ally: like-minded judges.”
If the president is right that republicans are unelectable in free and fair elections, the Trump Party is defunct except by authoritarian measures to suppress voting. ther than declaring martial law and suspending elections, the Trump Party literally has no other choice but to suppress as many democratic voters as possible, even if it suppresses some Trump Party voters in the process. The Trump Party presumably sees suppressed Trump Party votes as just regrettable collateral damage, while suppression of democratic voters is seen as patriotic and good.
As usual, the president presents no evidence to support his bald-faced lie that vote-by-mail had been abused to hurt Republicans. And, once again, the president’s self-interest above democracy, voting and the rule of law is clear and undeniable. Undeniable, that is, except by the president and his supporters and enablers.
In short, the Trump Party is willing to suppress millions of votes and even endanger voter’s lives in their desperation to remain a viable political party. What a pathetic remnant of what once was a principled institution.
“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.” -- Democracy For Realists: Why Elections Do not Produce Responsive Governments, Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, 2016
Morality: principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior; a particular system of values and principles of conduct, especially one held by a specified person
Evil: a manifestation of profound human immorality and wickedness, especially in people's actions; intending to harm; human malevolence
Malevolence: having or showing a wish to harm or do evil to others
Can anything be agreed on?
Concepts of morality, immorality and evil can possibly be defined such that most people would agree on the definitions. But because these concepts are essentially contested, there will always be significant disagreement on what the definitions mean and how or whether they apply in specific real world situations. For example, some people believe that abortion is immoral and others believe it is moral. This concern applies to politics, which is generally more subjective than objective and more irrational than rational.
Is there anything at least semi-objective about politics that a solid majority of people, say more than about 75%, would agree on? From what I can tell, there probably are some at least partly objective concepts that most people would agree are important to believe in or adhere to. They include respect for facts, respect for truth, reliance on sound reasoning, service to the public interest, respect for the rule of law and a belief that democracy is better than authoritarianism and demagoguery.
Of those, only respect for facts come close to solid objectivity, at least in theory. In practice, what is fact and what isn't is now usually bitterly contested. But at least people claim to be fact-based, just as they claim to rely on true truths and sound reasoning. Conversely, most people claim they dislike being lied to and being deceived. That includes including deceit by flawed partisan reasoning. As discussed before, truths can be true or false in whole or in part, and political reasoning usually isn’t mostly logical.
Is moral authority inherent in fact, truth and sound reasoning?
If it is true that most people (~95% ?) believe that facts, true truths and sound reasoning are preferable to lies and partisan bogus reasoning, then one can argue that rare but near-universal belief is a source of moral authority or a good moral value. One can also think that denying or distorting facts and truths and irrational emotional manipulation is also immoral. So is applying unreasonably flawed, biased or partisan thinking. Collectively, all of those tactics constitute dark free speech.[1]
Obviously, people will disagree on what is unreasonably flawed, biased or partisan and what is not. People in political disagreements tend to dismiss opposing facts, truths and arguments as faked or unreasonably flawed, biased or partisan. In my experience, their own invariably arguments pass muster. I do not recall even one person who ever told me that they rely on fake facts, false truths or bogus reasoning. A few have come close to that. They assert that their sacred ends justify almost any means, and thus lies and deceit are acceptable tactics. However, even those people always back away and claim they themselves are fact and reason based.
In view of the foregoing, one can conclude that dark free speech is immoral, even when the end is believed to be sacred or so important that honest speech has to be sacrificed for the greater good, God’s will, racial purity or whatever the sacred end might be.
History on tyranny vs democracy
Demagogue: a political leader or a person trying to gain political power by seeking support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument; a person who relies heavily on dark free speech (DFS) to try to rise to power
People who study these things usually show variations on a rather simple repeating pattern. An aspiring demagogue (tyrant wannabe) builds a core of support among people who become ardent supporters or fanatics. The demagogue uses DFS to attract the initial group of followers. The demagogue is a relentless but talented liar and deceiver capable of painting false realities to support his agenda, which is accumulation of power and usually also wealth. Over time the demagogue weasels his way into power, sometimes when existing political parties have become spent or immoral-corrupt forces and they see the demagogue as their salvation. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power this way.
Once in power, the demagogue seeks to consolidate and accumulate more power, The most common power-accumulating tactic is heavy reliance on DFS to distract, divide and confuse society. The point is to create distrust in existing institutions, political opposition and whatever target group the demagogue chooses to scapegoat for real and imagined wrongs and evil deeds. With few or no exceptions, the demagogue is deeply authoritarian. Because of that, his mortal enemies include democracy itself, social harmony, social trust in government and social institutions that defend the rule of law. Inconvenient facts, truths and logic have no place in this and all are drowned in a proverbial bathtub overflowing with DFS. Simply put, lies and deceit swallow and kill facts and sound reasoning.
One cannot deny that societies are quite susceptible to DFS wielded by a ruthless but talented demagogue. We are witnessing this right now in America. The recent increase in the president’s public approval is driven by a false belief that he is doing an excellent job in dealing with the coronavirus. That false perception has persuasive power despite a mountain of evidence showing that the president has been utterly incompetent in dealing with the crisis right from the beginning and continuing to this very day. The president’s endless lies and deceit about his own performance is persuading some Americans to adopt a false belief in his non-existent competence and maybe even honest altruism for some.
In a democracy, the end game for demagogue tyrant wannabes amounts to destruction of the rule of law, political opposition and the free press, while dividing and polarizing society into warring tribes. Those tribes tend to see their tribe through an intolerant, irrational, moralistic and righteous lens. In that social milieu, facts and rationality are simply swept away when they are inconvenient or threatening to the tribe or its sacred beliefs. That is where America is today.[2]
This is where America is today
What about the demagogue’s rank and file supporters?
In democracies, the demagogue needs at least some public support to accumulate and maintain power. America’s demagogue president is no exception. His rise to power and his current situation today have been bolstered all along by unflinching public support by people who see him as having some combination good, competence or nationalist belief. Those people were necessary to put the president in the White House.
We are at a point where essentially no lie, corrupt act, incompetent act or incitement to hate or distrust fazes hardly any supporter. That the president is a chronic liar, corrupt, a lawbreaker, a traitor, incompetent or mentally unfit for office are things the president’s rank and file supporters just deny, ignore or downplay into insignificance. Those facts have been drowned in the tub full of DFS.
How can one apportion responsibility (blame?) for the role the president’s supporters have played in all of this? Is it even rational to try to assess responsibility and moral culpability? Few or none of the president’s supporters see essentially the reality of what their leader really is. Most (~97% ?) strongly deny that he uses DFS against the American people, the rule of law or anything else. In their minds he speaks truth and fights for what is honest and decent. They dismiss criticisms of the president as just meaningless political white noise, a pack of lies or whatever else they need to believe to make concerns about the president basically go away in their minds.
There is no way to ever reconcile the two different perceptions of exactly who and what the US president really is. His supporters have some degree of responsibility for the situation we are now in. If one believes that DFS is immoral, then one can conclude that his supporters openly support immorality or even evil, but are basically unaware of it. Does that make them immoral or even evil?
Maybe the answer to that lies at least partly in what is in their minds. Some of the president’s supporters are truly oblivious to the evidence of his immoral-evil character, or they hear it but reject it as lies or whatever. Those people have been deceived and betrayed by DFS.
On the other hand, some of the president’s supporters are aware of who and what he is and they support that. They may not be openly honest about this, but they nonetheless give their support. After all, few or no Americans would ever admit that they follow a corrupt, lying dictator wannabe because they want racial purity, American global dominance, more Christian God in government or whatever it is they want. Can those people be seen as immoral or evil to any extent?
In the law, there is a concept called strict liability. It applies to some laws such as statutory rape. Legal liability can attach when a person has sex with an underage person. That person can be legally liable even though they (1) thought the person was not underage, and (2) did not know they were breaking any law. The logic is simple: If you did the act, you broke the law and are liable. It doesn't matter what was in the perpetrator’s mind.
Is it reasonable to apply the same logic to people in a democracy, with a free press and easy access to information? Are the president’s supporters responsible for the corrupt, incompetent mess America has sunk into, regardless of what they think about the president, good, bad, confused or nothing at all? What about people who do not vote? Are they culpable in some way? Is there a civic moral responsibility for people in a democracy like the US to not be so hopelessly deluded by a such an obviously corrupt, lying demagogue as the president is? What about supporter and non-voter culpability for a demagogue who is much more subtle about deploying DFS against a democracy and its society as he tries to bring it to its knees?
My assessment
A lot of Americans have little or no time for politics. Millions live paycheck to paycheck and are strapped for time. Millions of others who are better off do not care about politics, have no interest in it or are otherwise disengaged. At present, there isn’t even a law that punishes unexcused non-voting by eligible voters. Millions of Americans just blow elections off and live their lives as best they can. For various reasons that the president’s time in office has made clear, American democracy is largely defenseless against a demagogue-tyrant. Norms that used to restrain tyrant wannabes have fallen with the full support of the Trump Party.
Given how far and fast America has fallen, how obviously evil the president is, and how fast America is moving toward some form of kakistocratic, kleptocratic tyranny-oligarchy, people who do not oppose what is happening share some moral responsibility. Supporters of this share even more responsibility, and it amounts to some degree of immorality that varies with what is in their minds. Knowing support is more immoral than deceived support, which is more immoral than confused or uncertain support, which is more immoral than not participating at all. Opposition to evil is not immoral at all.
Obviously, this kind of analysis can get very complicated. For example, what about people who oppose DFS, but are authoritarians? Is authoritarianism, depending on how it is defined, even compatible with democracy? Is authoritarianism alone immoral? I believe authoritarianism alone is immoral or evil, depending on how brutal and/or corrupt it is. DFS alone is immoral or evil, depending on how reality and/or reason-detached it is, even if only a few people are exposed to it.
Footnotes:
1. Dark free speech: Constitutionally or legally protected (1) lies and deceit to distract, misinform, confuse, polarize and/or demoralize, (2) unwarranted opacity to hide inconvenient truths, facts and corruption (lies and deceit of omission), (3) unwarranted emotional manipulation (i) to obscure the truth and blind the mind to lies and deceit, and (ii) to provoke irrational, reason-killing emotions and feelings, including fear, hate, anger, disgust, distrust, intolerance, cynicism, pessimism and all kinds of bigotry including racism, and (4) ideologically-driven motivated reasoning and other ideologically-driven biases that unreasonably distort reality and reason. (my label, my definition)
2. That is not to say that the president alone is responsible for America’s situation. For decades, American conservatism relentlessly used DFS to build false, reality-detached sacred beliefs and foment deep public distrust and disrespect for inconvenient truth, science, expertise and democratic government itself. In essence, the old GOP (a corrupt, morally bankrupt institution), now the Trump Party, worked long and hard to get us here. The demagogue Trump and his run at corrupt, authoritarian single-party rule is its crowning achievement. I am not the only person who sees the ugly reality of modern American conservatism with such cold clarity.
Aspirational: Ten Years After, I'd Love to Change the World
The chaos and confusion rocking President Donald Trump's administration on the most tragic day yet of the coronavirus pandemic was exceptional even by his own standards.
Trump set out Tuesday to cement his image of a wartime leader facing down an "invisible enemy" at a dark moment as the country waits for the virus to peak and with the economy languishing in suspended animation.
"What we have is a plague, and we're seeing light at the end of the tunnel," the President said, on a day when a record number of Americans succumbed to the wicked respiratory disease.
But instead of putting minds at rest, Trump's wild performance instead put on a display many of the personal and political habits that have defined his tumultuous presidency. It was a troubling spectacle coming at such a wrenching chapter of national life, the kind of moment when Presidents are called to provide consistent, level leadership.
To begin with, Trump sparked concern that he will prevent oversight of the disbursement of economic rescue funds by removing a watchdog official responsible for overseeing the $2 trillion package. The move, coming after Trump ousted an intelligence community inspector general last week, was yet another sign that an already impeached President is using the cover of the worst domestic crisis since World War II to further erode constraints on his power.
Trump's acting Navy secretary quit after an episode in which he called an aircraft carrier captain dismissed for raising the alarm about virus infections among his crew "stupid."
Then Trump insisted he hadn't seen January memos by a top White House official warning about the pandemic at the same time the President was dismissing it as a threat.
He also announced he was placing a "very powerful hold" on funding for the World Health Organization, even though it correctly identified the scale of the virus and he didn't. Then moments later, he insisted he did no such thing.
Adding to the sense of farce, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham was moved out, without ever having given a briefing, on yet another day of staff turmoil. CNN's KFile reported Tuesday that her replacement, Kayleigh McEnany, recently said that thanks to the President, "we will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here."
Trump's top economic adviser Larry Kudlow admitted that a small business rescue program was off to "a bad start" after recipients struggled to register funds, only for the President to celebrate the program's roaring success -- and to credit his daughter Ivanka with personally creating 15 million jobs.
To top off a disorientating day in the West Wing, the President presided over an unchained news conference in which among other topics, he lashed out at mail-in voting, making claims about fraud that don't square with the facts, even though he recently cast such a ballot himself. The comment followed extraordinary scenes in Wisconsin, after Republicans blocked the Badger State's Democratic governor from delaying the state's primary over concern that voters could infect one another with the novel coronavirus.
Trump's daily jousts with the media recreate the adversarial dynamic of his 2016 campaign and much of his earlier presidency and invite his supporters to adopt his narrative of events rather than fact-based critiques of his conduct. This has been a successful device in the past to cement the anti-establishment President with his followers.
But a new CNN/SSRS poll Wednesday finds increasing overall concern about Trump's handling of the coronavirus crisis following an initial spike in his ratings in recent weeks.
A majority of Americans -- 55% -- now say the federal government has done a poor job preventing the spread of the disease in the United States, up eight points in about a week. And 52% say they disapprove of the way Trump is handling the outbreak. As usual, assessments of Trump break on partisan lines. Some 80% of Republicans say the federal government has done a good job, and Trump's approval rating is steady at 44%.
Also Wednesday morning, a prominent model that tracks the coronavirus pandemic in the United States has updated its projections to predict that the nation will reach its peak number of daily Covid-19 deaths in four days and its peak use of resources -- such as hospital beds and ventilators -- in three days.
The model also predicts that far fewer people -- 60,415 -- than have been previously projected will die due to Covid-19 by August.
That model, from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle, previously projected on Tuesday that about 82,000 people would die by August and that the country wouldn't reach peak resource use until next week.
A dark day in the fight against Covid-19
In many ways, it was just another inexplicable day of the Trump presidency.
Trump did mention Americans grieving the loss of loved ones in his scripted remarks, but the intensity of Trump's clashes with reporters and litany of outrageous claims seemed incongruous with a backdrop of such human tragedy with more than 1,800 deaths reported in a single day.
The chaos and contradictions coming from the administration do not just raise questions about the White House's current management of the pandemic. They will cause concern because the second stage of the national effort -- reopening the economy and keeping a second wave of infections at bay -- will require focused and subtle leadership that can win the confidence of the nation.
No White House has ever faced the task of ensuring such an expansive economic package is properly implemented and does not fall prey to corruption. There is little in the history of the Trump administration that suggests this will go smoothly.
The President sparked fresh fears about his capacity to properly oversee previous rescue packages and those to come when it emerged he had removed Defense Department Inspector General Glenn Fine from a post monitoring the stimulus funds.
The move prompted Democrats to warn that Trump is seeking to oversee the package himself. Trump had already warned he will ignore a provision in the bill requiring the special inspector general to report to Congress on the handling of the funds.
His dismissal of Fine was the latest swipe against the structures of government meant to hold him accountable -- that peaked with his defiance of the impeachment inquiry.
On Monday, Trump personally attacked a Health and Human Services inspector general who uncovered massive shortages of vital protective equipment at hospitals battling Covid-19.
On Friday night, the President fired the intelligence community inspector general who alerted lawmakers to a report about his pressure on Ukraine to dig up dirt on his Democratic foe Joe Biden.
Trump dismisses Navarro memos
With the pandemic taking a tighter grip on the United States, Trump has taken vigorous steps to cover up for his multiple statements earlier this year downplaying the virus.
The question of his responsibility for a lack of preparation for the crisis intensified on Tuesday when The New York Times revealed that a top economic official, Peter Navarro, had written a memo to the President in January warning coronavirus could become a "full blown pandemic" causing trillions of dollars in economic damage and risking the health of millions of Americans.
The revelation undercut the President's repeated declarations that nobody could have foreseen the consequences of the virus. It also left him in a tricky spot. Either he had to admit that he had seen the warning, or if he said it didn't reach him, he would paint a picture of dysfunction at the White House.
He did neither, seeking to foster misinformation and confusion around the document designed to disguise his own culpability.
The President maintained that he did not see the memo or memos until several days ago.
"I didn't see them. I didn't look for them either," the President said, then argued falsely he had reached the same conclusion as Navarro, citing his decision to stop flights from China. In fact, Trump was downplaying the impact of the virus as recently as early last month.
When asked why he did not level with Americans about the potential impact of the crisis if his unexpressed thoughts aligned with Navarro, Trump said: "I'm not going to go out and start screaming, this could happen."
"I'm a cheerleader for this country. I don't want to create havoc and shock."
Trump nominates a new foil -- the WHO
Unlike the President, the World Health Organization has warned for weeks about the gravity of coronavirus.
The WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of International concern on January 30 after sending a team to Wuhan and to meet Chinese leaders in Beijing.
On the same day, at a rally in Michigan, the President said of the virus, "We think we have it very well under control."
But on Tuesday, the President lashed out at the global health body, claiming it had underplayed the threat of the virus and that he had got it right.
"We're going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO. We're going to put a very powerful hold on it," the President said in his briefing.
"They called it wrong. They missed the call. They could have called it months earlier," Trump said.
"It's a great thing if it works but when they call every shot wrong that's no good," he said, accusing the WHO of being biased towards China, which Republicans have accused of trying to cover up the virus.
Given the President's long timeline of false statements and predictions, that must go down as one of the most audacious comments of his presidency. It was also reflective of his own tendency to nominate an enemy and accuse it of the very transgression that he is accused of perpetrating.
He added to the confusion by denying that he had said that he would halt funding to the WHO -- a move that would be counterproductive in a pandemic and would undermine already compromised perceptions of US leadership on the crisis.
"I'm not saying I'm going to do it, but we are going to look at it," the President said.
The President was also unable to provide much clarity on the chaos afflicting the Navy, following the resignation of Thomas Modly. The acting Navy secretary quit a day after leaked audio revealed he called the ousted commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt "stupid" in an address to the ship's crew.
This came a little more than a week after Capt. Brett Crozier sent a memo warning of coronavirus spreading among the sailors. The memo leaked and Modly subsequently removed Crozier from command.
"I had no role in it. I don't know him but I've heard he was a very good man," the commander in chief said.
But Trump also rebuked Crozier.
"He didn't have to be Ernest Hemingway. He made a mistake but he had a bad day. And I hate seeing bad things happen."
