AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Trump is not a populist champion of the little guy, nor a closet Nazi working to establish a white ethnostate, nor a Kremlin asset, but is in fact nothing other than a miserable rich man from a miserable rich family who did what it takes to get elected to the presidency of a racist, corrupt, bloodthirsty empire and remain there for a full term. Everything else is narrative which is wholly divorced from reality.

GLEN FORD—Researchers are hoping to find a vaccine for Covid-19, possibly within the year, but the Blue Plague only grows more deadly over time and enjoys a host of immunities. Although Black people had hoped that the historic expansion in the number of Black elected officials would create political antibodies to limit the spread of the Blue Plague, the opposite has happened. In 2014, just months before Michael Brown’s life was cut short by the Blue Plague, in Ferguson, Missouri, 80 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus voted to continue funneling billions of dollars in military weapons, gear and training to local infestations of the plague, despite ample evidence that such infusions have made the scourge even more toxic to Black life.

FINIAN CUNNINGHAM—There is strong suspicion that the Trump administration is deliberately playing the mad man as a negotiating tactic. It’s an unconscionable and extremely dangerous gamble with world security, but this would seem to be Trump’s diabolical art of the deal.

ERIC ZUESSE—So: if Andrew Cuomo is responsible for N.Y.’s having more coronavirus cases (360,000) than all nations but the U.S. (1,700,000) and Brazil (377,000), and Russia (362,000), then is that because all of these places are especially corrupt?

Could be. But the percentages per population are, of course, far more significant a measure, and here those are, expressed as cases per million population: U.S.=5,211; Brazil=1,779; Russia=2,483; N.Y.=19,202.

DAVID W. PEAR—Obama imprisoned and tortured whistleblowers, and he became the deporter-in-chief.  He bailed out the banks, while millions of families lost their homes.  Obamacare enriched insurance companies and Big Pharma.  Gitmo stands as the legacy of Obama’s droning wedding parties and funerals, and for all his broken promises.  His answer to climate change was Arctic drilling, and fracking the USA.