Everyone Hates Trump Now
Friday, Jan. 8: Break out the profiles in courage … Biden’s 18 months to save democracy … Cooper extends the curfew … NC’s women’s prison nails the windows shut … DPS stays online
Friday, Jan. 8, 2021
The first week of 2021 felt like it lasted a month — which is to say, like any given week in 2020. We’ll take a sip from the insurrection aftermath’s news tsunami but also sneak in some stories that got lost yesterday.
Today’s newsletter is about a 10-minute read.
Weather: SNOW DAY! Actually, rain and snow in the morning, turning to snow and/or sleet in the evening, mostly north of I-85. Maybe a light dusting. High of 38.
Quote of the Day:
“This is not America. They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.” — Unidentified woman during Wednesday’s coup attempt. (The Nation)
+TODAY’S TOP 5
1. Everyone Hates Trump Now
At 4 a.m. Thursday, 10 hours after the MAGA mob was run out of the Capitol, Congress finally certified Joe Biden’s election. Donald Trump’s media guy tweeted a half-assed acknowledgment on his behalf. And no sooner did the sun rise than Trump’s rats begin jumping ship:
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao — aka Mrs. Mitch McConnell — said Wednesday’s coup attempt “deeply troubled me in a way that I simply cannot set aside.”
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who told Trump: “There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation.”
Several lesser-knowns departed, too.
Reality check: These people aided and abetted Trump for years. There are 12 days left. There are no profiles in courage here.
The exodus left some senators anxious:
“At least four conservative Senate Republicans are privately urging key senior White House officials not to resign. … [The reasoning] is that despite Trump’s behavior Wednesday, there needs to be ‘strong leadership’ remaining at the White House in the final days of the Trump presidency.”
Translation: They’re terrified of what a devolving president with no adult supervision could do.
Both Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi asked Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment now and said they would impeach Trump if he didn’t. (NC Dems are mostly on board.)
Trump officials have reportedly talked about the 25th, though I’ll sooner believe the moon is made of cheese than Mike Pompeo and John Ratcliffe will bounce Trump from the Oval.
“Aides mortified by their boss’s conduct said they were weighing whether to resign or to stay in office to help ensure the transition to the Biden administration. One official said Trump would have to issue a statement committing to a transfer of power and to prosecuting the rioters to keep some of his top aides on the job for his final 13 days in office.”
Trump did so: “In the face of growing calls for his removal, President Donald Trump finally acknowledged on Thursday night that he’d lost the presidential election to Joe Biden and called for the country to come together.”
It’s unclear whether that will get the Dems to back down. (It shouldn’t, but they are congressional Democrats.) In any event, Trump might soon have bigger things to worry about:
“The top federal prosecutor in D.C. said Thursday that President Trump was not off-limits in his investigation of the events surrounding Wednesday’s riot at the U.S. Capitol, saying ‘all actors’ would be examined to determine if they broke the law.”
That statement will likely add urgency to Trump’s plan to pardon himself, which may or may not be something he can do.
On that note: Biden has nominated Merrick Garland to be his attorney general.
—> OKAY, NOT EVERYONE HATES HIM: Members of the RNC applauded when Trump called into their meeting yesterday.
“Trump briefly called in to the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting Thursday morning — and received a loud and overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception when RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel put him on speakerphone, according to people in the room. ‘We love you!’ some in the room yelled.”
2. Biden’s 18 Months to Save Democracy
With Congress in hand and most of his administration in place — Biden will tap Boston Mayor Marty Walsh for labor secretary and Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo for commerce — the president-elect and the party he leads have a very short window to protect democracy, writes political scientist David Faris, who’s been preaching this sermon for years.
The threat to American democracy, before this year, was a built-in unfairness working against the country’s center-left coalition, exacerbated by the deliberate normative and legal warfare waged by the Republican Party for more than two decades. The result was a gathering crisis of democratic legitimacy, as institutions failed to translate majority sentiment into majority rule, and policy stasis at the national level so destructive that multiple looming national problems went blithely unaddressed by our elites. Yet the situation is now even more urgent. The Republican Party is in the late stages of being conquered by dangerous, unapologetic authoritarians. …
The [Democrats] will own whatever happens for the next two years, and if they don’t take measures to reinforce their power by making the political system itself more resilient and fair, they will have no one to blame but themselves when it all slips away in 2022. A set of reforms to do just that is now de rigeur on the activist left, including D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood and the enlargement of the U.S. Supreme Court. The most important, though, might be a new Voting Rights Act to cut off the now-inevitable state-level GOP push to eliminate things like mail balloting and to impose even more draconian restrictions on in-person voting.
They will need to move swiftly. The election cycle is merciless, and Democrats will have, at most, 18 months to save American democracy before the 2022 election cycle kicks into high gear.
3. Cooper Extended the State’s Stay-at-Home Order
Right around the time the Keystone Coup was getting started, Governor Cooper announced that he was extending the state’s stay-at-home order for three weeks, through Jan. 29, including the 10 p.m. curfew.
DHHS Secretary Mandy Cohen added a directive telling people to, you know, actually stay at home unless they’re getting groceries, exercising, attending to medical needs, or going to work or school.
Cohen: “This is the most worried I’ve been through this pandemic. I think our hospitals are managing, but it’s going to take all of our work to make sure we don’t overwhelm our hospitals.” (N&O)
Yesterday, North Carolina saw 10,398 new cases and 137 deaths.
4. North Carolina’s Women’s Prison Nailed the Windows Shut, Despite COVID
Every winter, NCCIW nails the windows shut to keep from having to run the heater all the time. But most years, there’s not a pandemic. The women in the medium-security Pheonix Unit are a little freaked out about the lack of air circulation, WRAL reports.
“‘We are breathing air on top of each other, pretty much,’ said Diana Escobar, who lives in NCCIW's medium-security Phoenix Unit.”
“A few hours after this story published, [state prison spokesman John] Bull reached back out to say air purifiers are being installed in the ductwork at NCCIW.”
“For inmates, these are just two complaints on a long list of concerns about cleanliness, treatment, and safety. They sleep in close quarters, and there's an ongoing lawsuit from advocacy groups seeking more coronavirus prevention efforts in prisons across the state.”
5. Durham Elementary Schools Will Stay Online
In the fall, the DPS Board of Education decided that while middle and high schools would stay online all year, K-5 students could go back to classrooms part-time in the spring if the county’s positive case rate dropped below 4%. It’s currently at 9.5%. So yesterday, DPS decided to stay remote for the rest of the school year.
Superintendent Pascal Mubenga: “We will be able to keep our students and staff safe while ensuring continuity of learning. We will keep improving online learning, and we will come back to the board next month with proposals to provide safe, voluntary opportunities for English language learners and students in self-contained classrooms.” (N&O)
Meanwhile, Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools plan to reintroduce in-person learning in March, while Wake schools are determined to get kids in classrooms by the end of January.
—> RELATED: UNC-Chapel Hill will go remote for the first three weeks of its spring semester, which begins Jan. 19.
+NEED TO KNOW
—> Local & State
A Yadkin County creative writing teacher filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the creators of the Netflix show Outer Banks — the one where they took a ferry to Chapel Hill — ripped off his 2016 self-published novel that they definitely read, citing similarities in characters (“the novel and the series contain two characters whose parents are absent”) and plot (“the protagonists find clues to the treasure in a mausoleum and a church”). (W-S Journal)
DC cops arrested seven people from North Carolina on curfew violations after the attempted coup. (N&O)
A Virginia teenager may have been killed by a grenade sold at a North Carolina auction mall. (N&O)
A Raleigh youth pastor was arrested on child porn charges. (CBS17)
The Clayton Town Council appoints a town manager who didn’t apply for the job. (N&O)
The Durham City Council wants to give more money to violence interrupters, but it can’t agree on how much. (WRAL)
Raleigh and Durham say they won’t force city employees to get COVID vaccines. (N&O)
—> Nation & World
Trump Burns It Down on His Way Out, Exhibit 327: The Justice Department wants to stop enforcing anti-discrimination protections that help minorities. (NYT)
Trump Burns It Down on His Way Out, Exhibit 328: The administration will no longer punish companies for killing migratory birds. (NYT)
Trump Burns It Down on His Way Out, Exhibit 329: The administration auctioned oil and gas drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Wednesday — even though nobody was really interested, so they sold on the cheap to Alaska’s state agency and a couple of tiny firms. (WaPo)
The U.S. recorded more than 4,000 COVID deaths on Thursday, making it the pandemic’s deadliest day yet. (WaPo)
The House sergeant-at-arms and chief of the Capitol Police are resigning after Wednesday’s security failure. As many as 60 officers were injured, and one died. (WaPo, WaPo, Twitter)
In response to Democratic victories on Tuesday, Georgia Republicans are proposing severe restrictions on mail-in voting and stripping elections from the control of the secretary of state. (Twitter)
Boeing will pay $2.5 billion to settle criminal conspiracy charges related to the 737 Max. About $500 million will go to the families of the people who died when two 737 Max flights went down. (BBC)
The police chief who stepped down after the killing of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta will take over the Louisville Police Department, which killed Breonna Taylor. (NYT)
The same UK judge that blocked Julian Assange’s bail request also denied him bail, calling him a flight risk. (NPR)
Kim Jong Un admitted that the country’s policies had failed in an address the ruling party. (NPR)
Josh Hawley has lost his book deal. Tiny violins, y’all. (WaPo)
Neil Sheehan, the NYT reporter who obtained the Pentagon Papers, died at 84. (NYT)
—> Science & Tech
Facebook has locked Trump’s accounts at least through Inauguration Day. (Politico)
A viral Washington Times story claimed that a facial recognition company had identified antifa members among the Capitol crashers. The facial recognition company says that’s bullshit. (Buzzfeed)
Elon Musk has overtaken Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest person, apparently. (Al-Jazeera)
Airplane companies are experimenting with new, sleeker, lighter, greener plane designs. Don’t expect more legroom. (BBC)
COVID anti-vax bullshit is spreading on social media despite Facebook’s pledge to take it down. (Guardian)
—> Culture & Entertainment
The Grammys have been postponed until March 14. (AV Club)
After he was taken to the hospital with a brain aneurysm Monday, Dr. Dre’s Brentwood house was targeted by burglars. (Radio.com)
Wrestler Mick Foley wants Donald Trump kicked out of the WWE Hall of Fame. (AV Club)
+WHAT I’M READING
1. “Trends in American Politics Make Violence More Likely”
Our research leads us to believe that the past four years aren’t just a predictable reflection of long-standing changes in American politics. Rather, they illustrate something that pundits and political scientists have a harder time understanding than do historians and complexity scientists: Chance events — things that could have gone differently under slightly different circumstances — can have big consequences in politics. And that makes us worry about an underappreciated long-term trend in American democracy: The U.S. is shifting in ways that magnify the consequences of apparently random events. …
Long-term trends in our system are making it more vulnerable to disruption by chance events such as Trump’s election. First, the party elites have much less power in selecting candidates than they once did — and that makes it more likely that outlier candidates will make it onto the ballot. Elites long helped keep would-be demagogues off general election tickets. As they stepped back, ideologues gained influence. …
Finally, the electoral college has become an institutional amplifier of chance events. Just a few voters can swing presidential elections. Trump’s 2016 victory by 80,000 votes in three states surprised most pollsters and election forecasters. His loss was also a chancy affair.
2. “1898 Wilmington Massacre and Capitol Hill”
Even a day later, Wednesday's stunning events still bore striking similarities to what happened in Wilmington. In 1898, the white supremacists movement that led the massacre and coup immediately worked to reframe their actions as an effort to "take back their city" from unruly African-American residents. That is not what happened and they knew it.
On Thursday, less than 24 hours after police finally pushed back the crowd from the Capitol and Congress resumed certifying the election, an attempt to again rewrite history was already underway, with some participants and Republican officials claiming the violence was not the insurrection it was. Some even shifted the blame for the violence to rumors of false actors who infiltrated the crowd to cause unrest and damage.
3. “Last Known Surviving Widow of a Civil War Veteran Dies”
Helen Viola Jackson, the last known widow of a Civil War soldier, has died. She was 101. …
Though she kept details of her life mostly private, Jackson recently disclosed to her minister while working out the details of her funeral that she had married James Bolin, a 93-year-old Civil War veteran, when she was 17 years old, the statement read.
At the time, Jackson had been providing daily care for Bolin, a widower who served as a private in the 14th Missouri Cavalry through the Civil War.
Because the war veteran "did not believe in accepting charity," he asked Jackson "for her hand in marriage as a way to provide for her future," according to the statement.
"I never wanted to share my story with the public," Jackson reportedly said during an oral history recording in 2018. "I didn't feel that it was that important and I didn't want a bunch of gossip about it."