Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Paul Krugman: QAnon Is Trump’s Last, Best Chance
The only thing he can hope for is fear itself.
Last week’s Democratic National Convention was mainly about decency — about portraying Joe Biden and his party as good people who will do their best to heal a nation afflicted by a pandemic and a depression. There were plenty of dire warnings about the threat of Trumpism; there was frank acknowledgment of the toll taken by disease and unemployment; but on the whole the message was surprisingly upbeat.
This week’s Republican National Convention, by contrast, however positive its official theme, is going to be QAnon all the way.
I don’t mean that there will be featured speeches claiming that Donald Trump is protecting us from an imaginary cabal of liberal pedophiles, although anything is possible. But it’s safe to predict that the next few days will be filled with QAnon-type warnings about terrible events that aren’t actually happening and evil conspiracies that don’t actually exist.
That has, after all, been Trump’s style since the very first day of his presidency.
Brian Stetler: Trump’s Favorite Four-Letter Word
The president didn’t always love the word, “hoax.” Now it serves him, but not the public, well.
The Trump era is the hoax era. But not in the way he or his cheerleaders claim.
Donald Trump has shouted “hoax” hundreds of times, about everything from climate change to Supreme Court rulings to impeachment. At this point, his copious claims about hoaxes add up to a hoax. And through the history of his use of this single word, we can see how he has fooled his biggest fans but failed to persuade almost everyone else. [..]
We will never know how many people fell for the “hoax” rhetoric. But we do know this: When you’re told every day not to peer outside your own bunker, when you’re told that evil forces are trying to make you the victim of a “hoax,” your world begins to shrink.
You don’t know whom to trust or what to believe. In San Antonio last month, the chief medical officer of Methodist Hospital, Dr. Jane Appleby, told the story of a 30-year-old patient, dying of Covid-19, who looked at his nurse and said: “I think I made a mistake. I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not.”
Charles M. Blow: Trump’s Campaign of Chaos
The president’s behavior is that of a desperate man.
I smell the stench of panic on Donald Trump.
Every week that passes with him trailing in the polls — and with the very real possibility of defeat lurking — his Twitter tirades and public utterances seem to grow more erratic.
He is leaning into a campaign of chaos. He has undertaken an unprecedented attack on the U.S. Postal Service to prevent mail-in voting, trying to force voters to choose between protecting their health and exercising their right to vote.
This is an attempt at voter suppression on a massive scale. It is out in the open, designed to reduce the number of ballots cast (to give him a better chance of winning), and to create a pretext for contesting and delegitimizing the result should he lose.
This is the behavior of a desperate man, but it’s also a repeat of 2016, when Trump, then behind in the polls as he is now, signaled that he might not accept the election results.
Robert Reich: Profiteering off the Pandemic
Since the start of the pandemic, American billionaires have been cleaning up. As more than 50 million Americans filed for unemployment insurance, billionaires became $637 billion richer. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth has ballooned 59 percent. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’s, 39 percent. Walmart’s Walton family has added $25 billion.
Big drug company CEOs and their major investors are doing nicely, too. Since the start of the pandemic, Big Pharma has raised prices on over 250 prescription drugs, 61 of which are being used to treat Covid-19.
Apologists say this is the “free market” responding to supply and demand – the barons of Big Tech, online retailing, and Big Pharma merely providing what consumers desperately need during the pandemic.
But the market also operates under laws that ban profiteering, price gouging, and monopolizing, and that tax excess profits in wartime. Where did they go?
The Trump administration hasn’t enforced them.
Amanda Marcotte: Trump mega-donor Louis DeJoy’s testimony makes clear: He can’t be trusted with the post office
Republicans try to blame pre-election mail slowdowns on anyone else, but the buck stops with this Trump toady
During Monday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on the dramatic slowdowns of the U.S. Postal Service under the leadership of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major donor to Donald Trump who continues to have tight relationships to the Trump campaign, Republicans worked two contradictory claims.
The first claim is that DeJoy is a major expert in logistics and that’s why he was appointed as postmaster general — not because he was useful to the Trump campaign’s efforts to sabotage mail-in voting.
The second claim is that Democrats are being unreasonable in expecting that DeJoy, this supposed expert on the mechanics of delivering stuff, should make sure the mail arrives on time, as it generally did before he was hired. […]
Democrats, who run the Oversight Committee thanks to their overall House majority, had quite a simple and compelling story about what’s going on at the post office: It was working fine until DeJoy took over. Now it’s falling apart, either because of DeJoy’s incompetence, or — as many Democrats on the committee suggested — because DeJoy is deliberately slowing down the mail in order to help Trump subvert an election in which most Americans are likely to vote by mail.