VOTER SUPPRESSION NEVER WENT AWAY……IT JUST EVOLVED

 

                          …This is one of Trump’s latest, ridiculous promotions

Top Trump allies place their official duties at Trump’s disposal for 2020

 

Historian Carol Anderson traced the evolution of voter suppression tactics, from poll taxes to poll closures and she argues they are all rooted in White Rage.

Validating fake narratives about Hunter Biden. Trump’s Republican Senate supporters still continue to pursue a phony investigation designed to fake-validate a series of smears about Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine.

These have been thoroughly debunked, and the Treasury Department just issued sanctions against a foreign official pushing similar narratives, calling him a Russian agent pushing Russian disinformation. (Here is one part of government that is doing the right thing against Trump’s Senate cronies.)

But the Senate GOP probe is plainly being pursued with the goal of releasing a report to generate news.  Side-stories that cast a false idea of corruption over both Bidens.

The bottom line is as follows: Trump isn’t trying to persuade a majority of US voters to support him. Instead, he’s trying to get within what you might call, “a cheating distance of pulling another electoral college inside-straight, even while losing the popular vote,” just like last time.

He’s not there yet, but many top Trump officials and congressional allies have placed their official duties and the levers of your government at the disposal of Trump’s reelection effort, which totally depends on closing that gap.

At a packed indoor rally in Nevada on Sunday night punctuated by spittle-spraying and “no social-distancing cheers and jeers”, President Trump ran through his greatest hits list: He largely treated the virus as mostly defeated. He once again vowed to make an issue out of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

He also again claimed the “only way” he’ll lose in November is in a rigged election. And he again insisted that former president Barack Obama got caught “spying” on his campaign, which is untrue, and this unleashed a chant of “lock him up!”

Quick question: What do all these things have in common?

The answer: In all these cases, Trump isn’t just stating claims. He and his cronies are also corruptly manipulating the levers of your government to make them into truths, or he’s inflating them into issues that will give you news coverage that helps him in some way, or both.

Because of the governmental manipulation to serve Trump’s personal and political ends is so relentless, we often focus only on the examples as they move on past.

But we need to connect all the dots. Taken together, they tell a larger story that is truly staggering in its levels of total corruption:

The New York Times just reported that scientists inside Trump’s own government are warning that the White House is laying the groundwork to increase pressure to approve a vaccine before Election Day, “even in the absence of agreement on its effectiveness and safety.”

This manipulation is already happening: Trump has pushed top health officials to approve a plasma treatment for the coronavirus without the full vetting most officials want, and in a way that results in the official’s wildly overstating its benefits.

Trump has tied the vaccine to his reelection timetable and has lashed out at scientists, saying they’re “slow-walking the process to hurt him politically”, which tells them meeting that his schedule is to be a real priority.

Trump is also interfering in public health messaging.  Politico reports that political appointees have been intervening to change the language in the official communications from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to align them with Trump’s rosy claims about the coronavirus, and they’ve had some success.

This comes even as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is seeking to award a $250 million contract to an outside communications firm in part to package a message of “hope” about the coronavirus. Democrats are investigating whether this is a taxpayer-funded “political propaganda campaign.”

This is a reasonable fear, based on other manipulation we’ve already seen: A White House model created to support overly optimistic coronavirus death projections, and the White House efforts to edit CDC school reopening guidelines to downplay the risk.

Twisting the intelligence to support his campaign.  A Department of Homeland Security whistleblower has revealed that top officials pressed for findings about civil unrest to be revised to downplay white-supremacist violence and pump up the illusion of an organized leftist domestic terror threat.

Numerous of Trump’s top law enforcement and national security officials have used their government positions to validate their unsupported claims supporting his narratives, which has been in Trump’s campaign messaging.

Helping put doubt on Russian electoral sabotage, Attorney General William Barr may release an interim report on his department’s ongoing so called “review” of the origins of the Russia investigation before the election.  Barr wants the US attorney doing the review to move much faster.

It is important that this is not just about the 2016 election, or about supporting Trump’s bogus “Obamagate” narrative.  It’s about this year’s election, too: Barr wants to discredit the special counsel’s findings about Russian interference in 2016. But this won’t just make Trump’s last win appear less tainted. By his downplaying Russian responsibility, it would also make it OK for now.

This limits us knowing about any Russian sabotage. Meanwhile, Trump’s intelligence officials have announced an end to in-person congressional briefings on what they’re learning about ongoing Russian efforts to sabotage this election.

This, too, risks further supporting of those efforts, by limiting the understanding of them among Congress and the voters. It comes after Trump had privately raged over previous steps by intelligence officials to inform Congress about them.

Meanwhile, the statements that intel officials have released about Russian interference are muddying the waters with false ideas about Chinese and Iranian efforts, which mislead the public.  This further supports it.

Discrediting vote-by-mail. Barr is also cranking out false public statements to discredit vote-by-mail, whether it’s falsely claiming it’s open to a massive foreign-engineered conspiracy, or openly misrepresenting it to domestic cases f fraud.

This isn’t just about helping Trump mislead. By using his position as chief law enforcement officer to lend false truth to these lies, Barr is creating cover for Trump’s coming effort to try to invalidate countless mail ballots against him, which he has already made clear.

This could end up being the most illegal attempt at an illegal election in US history..

Copyright G. Ater 2020