This Is How We Beat Trump and the Killer GOP
Send to everyone you know
Welcome to the big Wednesday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
We have some exciting exclusive news to announce and some important headlines from around the country to discuss, so let’s get into it!
(By the way, is there any dumber name for a hate group than the Proud Boys? They’re just laughable. It sounds more like an offshoot of the Village People than a bunch of racist tough guys.)
Thank you to GoFundMe donors: Irene, Oscar, Diane, and Jayme!
This Is How to Beat Trump, No Matter What He Says In A Debate
First, I’ll cut to the chase: We’ve launched a new site called COVIDSuperSpreaders.com. This new, meticulously researched destination lists out, in gruesome detail, just how Donald Trump and his sycophant, blood-thirsty Republican goon squad set the conditions for an extreme COVID pandemic and made it worse and worse over the last eight months.
Trump and the GOP are responsible for the deaths of over 200,000 Americans and the sicknesses suffered by seven million more. They own this wrecked economy, fractured populace, and devastated nation. This is all on them.
It’s taken me weeks to put the dossiers of the first eight Republicans together — for as close as I cover this stuff, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of horrible, knowingly deadly decisions made by Trump, members of Congress, and governors like Ron DeSantis and Brian Kemp. It’s easy to allow the last eight months to dissipate into a fog of despair, but they need to be called out again and again for every single vicious call they made. The Trump entry alone took me several days to write.
I will be adding new names and dossiers to the list over the next few weeks, highlighting members of Congress, governors, and state lawmakers who very knowingly put their constituents in danger. Already, I’ve got a whole crew from Pennsylvania to add later tonight. By tomorrow, the number of people on the list should double.
Keep tabs on it and send it to everyone you know — it’s horrifying stuff, but absolutely necessary.
Real Quick, Before More Good Stuff: Wanna chip in?
Together, we’ve raised nearly $2.7 million now for progressive candidates and causes, plus $1.5 million for bail funds and civil rights groups. That’s $4.2 million raised! Plus, we’ve debuted projects like the one above as well as AbsenteeBallots.info!
To make this sustainable, I need your help. I don’t get paid by any politician for this work. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So, I’m offering a premium subscription — it’s just $5 a month for six newsletters a week. That’s 24 newsletters a month filled with essential news you won’t find elsewhere PLUS lots of great, impactful projects for just $5!
OK, About That Debate
The debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden almost isn’t worth discussing, except that it’s all anyone wants to discuss even 24 hours later. Trump acted like a sociopathic bully, spewing lies and barking overt hate speech over both Vice President Biden and moderator Chris Wallace. It was a disgusting display of nuclear-level toxic masculinity, but the most surprising aspect of it was the fact that the chattering classes on cable news seemed at all surprised by it.
This is what Trump does. This is who he has always been. He is the guy who used to call the NY Post gossip page to place rumors about himself under a ridiculously obvious pseudonym. He just spent four years being flown around and saluted and worshipped by fringe lunatics and firing anyone who dared to question him, and yet Biden and Wallace did not seem at all ready for his barrage.
Over the past five years, it’s been made abundantly clear that Trump doesn’t just refuse to play by the rules, he prefers to set the rules on fire for all to see. Yet again and again, everyone else continues to follow these traditional standards of decorum and then acts shocked when he burns the place down. It’s exhausting and dangerous. Allowing Trump to act unhinged and spread his lies on national TV only normalizes it. Until Democrats and the media recognize that they need to stop providing him that platform and then merely acting outraged when he does exactly what he’s always done, they will be playing on his turf.
That’s not to say that Biden performed poorly, though. He’s not built for these kinds of steel cage matches, but he got in some good zingers, channeled audience exasperation, and while he didn’t mention Trump’s taxes or corruption nearly enough (he passed up a golden opportunity when Trump went after Hunter), Biden did return time and again to the president’s disastrous response to COVID-19.
As you might imagine from my announcement above, I believe that hitting Trump on COVID again and again and again is the key to beating Trump this year. They tried the whole “Trump is a jerk” thing in 2016, and while it’s even more true now, it’s clear that going after his personality isn’t going to seal the deal. Instead, we need to remind people time and time again that Trump and the GOP are responsible for the deaths of over 200,000 Americans and illnesses of over 7 million more (see, I’m already repeating it!).
I do wish Biden had brought some more facts at Trump — for example, a new report just revealed that 2.5 million people lost health insurance even before COVID-19 due to Trump and the GOP’s policies. That could have come up when they discussed the Affordable Care Act and the public option. There was no mention of Mitch McConnell’s blocking of Obama’s judicial appointments when discussing Amy Coney Barrett and other members of the judiciary. I won’t go on, but I do hope that Biden gets some retorts ready for the next debate.
On the bright side, Trump was so damn awful that Biden was the clear winner in a poll conducted by Data for Progress. I can’t imagine Trump behaving any better next time, even if they do change the rules, so at least we’ve got that going for us.
Important News You Need to Know
National: The Elizabeth Warren-Katie Porter relationship reminds me of Obi-wan and Anakin during the Clone Wars, except without the eventual tragic evil turn. What I’m saying is that Katie Porter, a former student and then prodigé of Warren, kicks ass.
Watch what she did today:
Democrats need to be dragging every pharmaceutical company executive through hearings like this as they build support for a public option and drug pricing reform. When you lay it all out there, their greed is just so undeniable that reform suddenly seems inevitable.
Florida: Gov. Ron DeSantis, part of the original class of COVID Super Spreaders, reopened Florida last week despite still-elevated virus numbers. Now, he’s tossing Floridians under the bus once again, allowing the state’s eviction and foreclosure moratorium to expire today.
DeSantis suggested that the CDC’s limited moratorium made it OK and even advantageous for him to allow the local order to expire. But as rising star State Rep. Anna Eskamami (a Progressives Everywhere fundraising alum!) points out, that federal order is in serious legal danger.
Over 14,000 Floridians have died of COVID-19 and over 700,000 have been diagnosed with the virus. New daily cases are still at over 3,000 per day. Thousands of people in Orlando are about to be laid off by Disney. And yet DeSantis is fine with putting people in danger of losing their homes.
Florida, again: In other news that will make you super-pissed at DeSantis and the Florida GOP, Pinellas County, which is on the outskirts of the Tampa-St. Petersburg metro area, announced that it had collected $290,000 in fines and fees from former felons, which has enabled 290 people to register to vote.
Why would this get you mad? Seeing that poll tax in such real mathematical terms makes it clear just how craven the GOP’s racist, anti-democratic policy really is.
Over 1 million Floridians should have been able to register to vote. Instead, at best, it’ll be 35,000, if Michael Bloomberg’s checks clear in time and the paperwork goes through.
Progressives Everywhere, by the way, has raised nearly $14,000 for this cause, something that fills me with both pride and gratitude!
Texas: So, this is also one of those stories that is nice to read on its own but only possible because Republicans are racist monsters who hate democracy.
As we noted last week, Arnold Schwarzenegger is digging into his own sizable pocket to help southern counties restore polling sites that they lost after the Supreme Court gutted the Civil Rights Act.
On Tuesday, Schwarzenegger announced his first grant, a gift of just over $250,000 to Cameron County in Texas. The grant will provide two voting “super-center” sites that will be able to handle up to 24,000 voters each.
Even better, Cameron County, which is at the very bottom tip of Texas, is very much a Democratic stronghold. Donald Trump won just 32% of the vote there in 2016 and I can’t imagine his policies on the Mexican border will even inspire that much support there this time around.
New York: Trump’s full-on, relentless attack on mail-in voting is a bad-faith tactic to undermine faith in the election. That said, the New York ballot fiasco he mentioned last night was a major screw-up — 100,000 people in Brooklyn got ballots with the wrong names on them.
Sadly and a bit inexplicably, the governor that’s loved by everyone but his own constituents has been trying to stop the Board of Elections from fixing the situation.
OK, perhaps it’s explainable: Cuomo wouldn’t mind seeing a few Democrats losing in legislative elections. Thankfully, the new progressive lawmakers who took back the legislature for Democrats in 2018 are not afraid to challenge him. Here’s one awesome state senator who Progressives Everywhere supported in 2018:
.@NYGovCuomo, send the right ballots or I'll primary you myself.We are hearing reports that @NYGovCuomo wants to prevent the @BOENYC from rectifying the issue by stopping them from sending corrected ballots. This is straight up disenfranchisement and an affront to our democracy. The vendor screwed up and is trying to fix it. Let them!
Senator Zellnor Y. Myrie 米维 @zellnor4ny
Georgia: If we get a national wave election, Georgia could very well go blue for Biden this year.
In a poll released yesterday by Quinnipiac University, Biden leads Trump 50-47 in the state. Biden is up 57-39 with women, while Trump is up 56-41 with lunkhead men. Biden is up with independents by 9 points, while Trump leads with non-college whites by a whopping 76-23 margin.
A few new polls of the state (including the Quinnipiac one cited above) indicate that between just 2% and 4% of voters there are undecided between Biden and Trump.
One voter that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution highlights says that he was a big Bernie supporter in 2016 and has been turned off by the Democratic Party since then.
I agree that the national Democratic Party leaders have treated progressives very poorly. But I also think, like so many of these progressive leaders highlighted by NBC News, that we need to get behind Biden now, help him win, and then resume the fight to make the Democratic Party more aligned with the interests of working people, environmentalists, and minority communities.
Can You Help Us?
Together, we’ve raised nearly $2.7 million now for progressive candidates and causes, plus $1.5 million for bail funds and civil rights groups. That’s $4.2 million raised!
To make this sustainable, I need your help. I don’t get paid by any politician for this work. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So, I’m offering a premium subscription. If you become a member of Progressives Everywhere, you’ll get:
Nightly emails with deep dives into elections and the crucial political stories not getting enough attention.
Exclusive updates from candidates and interviews with other progressive leaders.
A new best friend (me).
It’s just $5 a month and one of the best investments you can make this election season. Why? For your $5, you help:
Raise money for great candidates being ignored by national donors.
Power campaigns across the country.
Finance new projects like:
AbsenteeBallots.info, which is helping to inform and register voters nationwide.
COVIDSuperSpreaders.com, which is making sure everyone remembers how the GOP killed over 200,000 Americans.
More original projects that are on the way
We’ve got one shot at saving this country. Let’s work together to make it happen. I’m excited for you to join our team.
You can also make a one-time donation to Progressives Everywhere’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in an upcoming edition of the big newsletter!
Love super spreaders. If there is a way to break up The article into separate super spreader pieces for each politician that can be shared, I wonder if it would get more amplification.