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Disaster Disinformation Is This Year’s John Podesta Emails

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I’ve already focused on these three paragraphs, but want to return to them. They’re from NYT’s article anticipating how the apparently tied race will roll out in the next 30 (now 28) days.

With polling averages showing all seven battleground states nearly tied, many Democrats believe their biggest advantage may be an extensive ground game operation that their party has spent more than a year building across the country. Mr. Trump’s campaign thinks that recent events — the escalating conflict in the Middle East and deadly hurricanes that have killed more than 200 people across the Southeast — will give them an edge in the final weeks.

[snip]

Their field operation stretches from turning out staunch Democrats to persuading moderate Republicans who supported Mr. Trump in previous races but disapprove of his indictments, impeachments and general conduct since leaving office.

In contrast, Trump aides see recent events as reinforcing their central campaign message that Ms. Harris is unprepared, weak and incapable of restoring the sense of calm that the Biden administration promised when elected four years ago.

The entire article contrasts the extensive Democratic ground game with sketchier GOP infrastructure. Importantly, Republicans do not contest that Democrats are better prepared to turn out their seemingly equal share of voters.

In response, Republicans first claim they’re better positioned on the issues, pointing to immigration and the economy but not abortion.

They believe they are competing in a country that has become more conservative over the past four years — pointing to surveys showing that more voters now identify as Republican — and more likely to side with them on the issues.

As I’ve been tracking, Trump’s one-time lead on the economy has been shrinking. This Cook Political Report podcast provides more nuance, one that explains a great deal of the polling we’re seeing in polls based on different turnout models. Among college-educated people, Harris now does better than Trump by 4% points. Among non-college voters, Trump retains a 10% lead. The trick, though, is that the former are far more likely to turn out than the latter. The differences you’re seeing on this issue may stem from likely voter models.

But that means that GOP certainty that they’re fine because Trump leads on the issue that is most important for the largest number of people — the economy — depends on their ability to turn out low-propensity voters.

Yet they admit they don’t have the GOTV infrastructure in place that Harris has.

Instead, Trumpsters told the NYT (again, Maggie Haberman is on the byline) that their plan to make up for that deficit is Bibi’s war (which works — and it may well work — primarily in MI) and disasters.

On one level, it was an utterly ridiculous claim, though the NYT didn’t blink. It’s a non-sequitur.

On another level, they were telling the truth. They admit they don’t have the ground game necessary to turn out voters who are disproportionately low-turnout voters. But their answer to that is to exploit two devastating hurricanes as a basis to argue, “that Ms. Harris is unprepared, weak and incapable of restoring the sense of calm.”

If NYT were engaged in journalism, they would have noted that even by the time Trump’s people made this claim, the affected GOP governors had already publicly commented on how satisfied they were by the Federal support they were getting.

That is, it is insane for Republicans to assume, as a matter of faith, that disasters will serve a narrative that VP Harris in unprepared. It’s just as likely that some swing voters in North Carolina and Georgia will see in the Biden-Harris Administration a level of responsiveness they wouldn’t otherwise, if they were simply following reporting of an event twelve states away.

But we’ve seen why they said it. Trump and hackish Republicans are treating this in the same way that they treated John Podesta emails and wanted to treat Hunter Biden’s laptop, as an opportunity to distract attention with make believe stories in the weeks before the election. He knew the things he was Tweeting about John Podesta’s emails weren’t true, Microchip testified at Douglass Mackey’s trial, but he didn’t care. He wanted, “To cause as much chaos as possible so that that would bleed over to Hillary Clinton and diminish her chance of winning.” This is precisely what they’re doing by making shit up about the Helene (and soon, the Milton) response.

To be fair, because the stakes are life and death, Republicans are getting a lot more pushback on their lies this time around. There have been a slew of Republican local officials calling on other Republicans to stop. A fact check Glenn Kessler did — noting that while Joe Biden hasn’t diverted FEMA money to immigrant detention, Trump did — has gotten a lot of attention (though Trump’s abysmal record on disaster response generally and hurricane response more specifically, such as when Trump threw paper towels at Puerto Rican hurricane survivors, deserves far more systematic attention).

Indeed, Trump’s choice to make disaster response this year’s distraction effort in the month of October presents an opportunity to hold not just Trump, but especially members of Congress, accountable for their refusal to govern.

But make no mistake what he’s doing. A fair assessment of the disaster response, so far, would in no way help Trump; indeed, it creates a topic on which Trump fails any meaningful comparison of outcomes. But that’s not what Trump’s team meant when they said impending disaster creates an opportunity to attack Harris.

They have learned to succeed in recent years by taking packaged up events — John Podesta’s risotto recipe, Hunter Biden’s dick pics, and now deadly hurricanes — as a hook on which to hang disinformation. Holy hell, Senator John Kennedy was wailing about tampons on Hannity!

They are not making a rational argument. They are using disinformation to create distrust and a sense of unease. That’s what the NYT would have said if they were reporting reality rather than spin.

The Republican party is treating deadly hurricanes like they treated John Podesta’s risotto recipe and Hunter Biden’s dick pics in past elections.

Reporters (including the NYT here) too often treat Trump as if his utterances involve truth claims, rather than efforts to use noise to create chaos. But even now, even as a second deadly hurricane bears down on Trump’s own state, Trump is making it clear he intends to use the disasters as another opportunity to create noise.

Mark Meadows and the Potemkin Shut-Downs: Welcome to the April’s Fool White House

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I know the White House has been running on Trump’s fumes for so long we’ve forgotten that Chiefs of Staff can exercise real power.

I’d like to suggest two things we’ve seen in the last week may reflect the hand of Mark Meadows.

The first is Monday’s campaign video played in the middle of Trump’s briefing, something Trump said Dan Scavino made inside the White House — a violation of the Hatch Act.

In a mash up of clips and audio that amounted to campaign ad, Trump lashed out at critics and returned to his favorite past time of going after reporters. The video began with a white screen saying “the media minimized the risk from the start.” At one point, it showed news clips of different governors giving kind remarks about the president’s response to the pandemic.

[snip]

When a reporter pressed him about the video resembling a campaign ad, Trump said it was done in the office. “We’re getting fake news and I’d like to have it corrected,” he declared.

The president also claimed that White House Director of Social Media Dan Scavino created the video, prompting reporters to question the fact that he had government employees put together what was essentially a campaign advertisement.

There’s nothing that suggests Meadows determined the content of it, but several of the decisions made in the almost two weeks since Meadows has been in place involve merging the White House and the campaign — most notably, the replacement of Stephanie Grisham with his campaign press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.

But I also suspect Meadows is behind a far more important strategy on shut-downs, in which Trump allies carry out a Potemkin shut-down, only to reopen quickly, probably in the context of graft as payoff. For this one, there’s explicit evidence in the Bloomberg coverage of his first week: Meadows convinced a number of hold-outs to enact stay-at-home orders.

Meadows has also gotten involved in the administration’s coronavirus response, calling Republican governors who have held out against issuing stay-at-home orders in their states to ask them to implement the policies immediately, according to two people familiar with the calls. The president has said such decisions are up to state leaders and has not publicly criticized those who decline, who are all Republicans.

[snip]

Meadows has also tried to persuade a group of holdout Republican governors that they should issue shelter-in-place orders to help curb the coronavirus outbreak. It isn’t clear if the new chief of staff has Trump’s blessing for the calls. The president has publicly said it is up to governors and local leaders to decide whether stay-at-home orders are appropriate and has declined to criticize the holdouts, all of whom are his political allies.

The governor of one of the holdout states, Kristi Noem of South Dakota, tweeted Wednesday that she’d spoken with Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who is a top medical adviser to the president. “Thankfully, he AGREES that a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t the answer in our state,” Noem wrote.

The tweet, according to one person familiar with the matter, was read by some as a signal to Meadows.

The week that Meadows started, a bunch of Trump flunkies issued stay-at-home orders: Arizona’s Doug Ducey (which was issued before Meadows officially started on April 1 and which extends through April 30), Florida’s Ron DeSantis (issued on April 1 and effective through April 30), Georgia’s Brian Kemp (which he has already extended through April 30), Mississippi’s Tate Reeves (imposed April 1, effective April 3, effective through April 20), Missouri’s Mike Parsons (imposed April 3, effective April 6, effective through April 24), South Carolina’s Governor Henry McMaster (imposed April 6, effective April 7, effective until rescinded). On March 31, Texas’ Governor Gregg Abbott issued an order that has been taken as a stay at home order which stops short of that; it remains in effect through April 30.

At least some of these governors, given the timing and the Bloomberg report, were cajoled by incoming Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to do so.

Last Thursday, days after his stay-at-home order, Ron DeSantis started talking about reopening schools in May (to be clear: this shut-down is having the greatest impact on children, especially those who don’t have WiFi at home and rely on schools for other services, like hot lunches). Yesterday, Gregg Abbott told Hannity most states don’t need to wait until May 1 to reopen (even though his own order goes through May 1). And of course, Mississippi and Missouri’s shutdowns don’t even last that long (indeed, they were never long enough to do any good).

So it seems likely that the same governors whom Meadows convinced to impose stay-at-home orders will shortly rescind them, giving Trump the story that he wants, that some of the nation’s biggest states have come through the COVID crisis. In Texas and Florida, in particular, a governor’s recision of a stay-at-home order might supersede those in badly affected cities (and both states are artificially limiting the number of official positive cases, in Texas by not testing likely cases in Houston, and in Florida by playing games with snowbirds.

I also suspect that one reason Mitch McConnell is refusing to negotiate with Nancy Pelosi over the other things she’d like to include in the next COVID relief package — which would include, among other things, $150 billion for state and local governments. McConnell wants to deal with such aid in a fourth aid bill and simply expand the funds available for the Paycheck Protection Program relief for small businesses, which is predictably already running out of money. The obvious reason to do that would be to withhold something that Trump can use as leverage over states and cities to do what he wants, rather than to give funds to them now without strings attached.

Trump believes, the Constitution notwithstanding, that he has either the authority or power to make states reopen. And given that Meadows was involved in getting a handful of states to impose what will amount to shut-downs that don’t appear to be good faith efforts to achieve the goal of shut-downs (though Kemp may have realized he has a bigger problem on his hands than he originally claimed), my suspicion is that those shut-downs were part of a plan to achieve some kind of leverage over reopening the economy.