It now seems likely that President Trump will lose his bid for reelection in November and perhaps by a margin large enough to head off any effort to contest the results and unconstitutionally hold on to power. But even if this doesn’t happen in November it will happen one day. Now is the time to plan for accountability for and recovery from the catastrophe of Trumpism.
One of the most abiding criticisms of the Obama administration is that no one was held accountable for the actions that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Relatedly, but addressing a different set of equities, others criticized Obama for ‘turning the page’ on the manipulated intelligence scandals that led to the Iraq War. These are complicated questions that are beyond the scope of this discussion. But there are at least potent reasons to avoid the cycle which has plagued so many countries in which losing power means vulnerability to political prosecutions and the necessity of exile.
But we often get this part of the civic accountability calculus wrong. Prosecution and criminal punishment play an important role in combating public wrongdoing. But they are not the most important tool. Indeed it often operates at cross purposes to the far more important goal of public exposure.
At this point, multiple Republicans and Trump allies have done their damnedest to quietly nudge President Trump on masks — all without actually calling him out for it.
Join“Woodrow Wilson was in wide company in being a white supremacist at the turn of the 20th century, but he stands apart in having overseen the triumph of this ideology at home and abroad,” writes journalist and author Colin Woodard for Cafe.
TPM Reader JO, a lawyer, reacts to this morning’s Supreme Court decision on stare decisis (and abortion, of course!):
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TPM Reader BL writes in to offer a clarification on the gun-toting couple in St. Louis. It’s potentially important context in a legal sense, but in the larger context I’m not so sure that armed residents of a Gilded Age knockoff of an Italian Renaissance palazzo defending their own private street patrolled by private security guards changes the essential meaning we can draw from this cartoonish encounter:
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Back in the days of now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s contentious Senate confirmation, the Washington Post killed a story that could’ve exposed a striking example of Kavanaugh’s public disingenuousness.
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Here is a new source of COVID data I want to share with you: outbreak.info. There are a lot of these sites and I try to dig into just who is running them and what standards they’re using for their data. This one appears to be the work of a team headed up by Andrew Su at the Scripps Research Center Institute in La Jolla. A lot of the data is what you find at other great sites like The COVID Tracking Project, the Johns Hopkins data site, etc. But this is a team specializing in bioinformatics. So they’ve worked on creating uniform formats for COVID data so the data can be efficiently and accurately meshed together – so the data can talk to each other.
JoinAll that stands between us and a conservative revolution on the Supreme Court is one John Glover Roberts, Jr.
TPM Reader MD writes in with his personal account of the St. Louis protest that featured the gun-waving Bonnie and Clyde in front of their “Midwestern palazzo”:
JoinTrump just re-tweeted images of the gun-toting St. Louis couple, so this seems destined to become a national obsession. Might as well send you my two cents.
I was in St. Louis last night. In fact, I attended the protest. Let me give you a play-by-play.