- Mike Pence posted and then deleted a tweet of the Trump campaign headquarters. In a tightly packed room with a large crowd, not a single person is wearing a mask. The administration has effectively abandoned efforts to contain the virus. Dr. Fauci has not met with the president in weeks and the coronavirus task force is winding down operations. While the Trump administration (along with most states) is focused on re-opening, infections are now rising in 21 states. As of writing, nearly 113,000 Americans have died from Covid-19. Trump visited a factory manufacturing medical supplies for the Covid-19 crisis. He did not wear a mask and held some of the supplies close to his face. The factory therefore had to throw out the entirety of that production run which was contaminated by the president. During a speech, the president remarked that things must be improving since the press were now seated close to each other. The chairs were set up with appropriate distancing then moved by the White House.
- A Q-anon supporter is the frontrunner in a Republican primary. If she wins, she is all but assured a seat in congress. Q-anon is the conspiracy theory based on anonymous 4-chan posts which believe Democrats are part of a massive cannibal pedophile child sex trafficking ring that Donald Trump is going to expose with thousands of arrests… any day now. A Republican Senate candidate won her primary who also believes in the batshittery but she won’t win the seat. The president often retweets Q-anon accounts.
- The president retweeted his son advertising one of their golf courses re-opening, while bragging they did not take any stimulus funds. The president has often advertised his businesses using his office. No president in modern history has refused to divest from private business ownership and operation until Donald Trump who has dozens of conflicts of interest, including the government spending a huge amount of money at his clubs.
- The third party judge in the Mike Flynn case who was tasked with analyzing whether or not the case should be dismissed as requested by the Department of Justice has filed his response. In a scathing rebuttal to DoJ claims, Judge Gleeson argues that the sentencing should be carried out.
- Trump wanted 10,000 troops patrolling BLM protests throughout the country. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Milley got into a shouting match with the president over the issue but ultimately prevailed.
- The Washington Post has assembled a minute by minute guide to last week’s attack on peaceful protesters in DC. An Episcopal rector who was there posted a detailed account on Facebook. The National Guard is now conducting an investigation into their own actions dealing with protesters including who ordered helicopters to hover low over protesters in an intimidation attempt. AG Barr has gone back and forth as for claiming responsibility for the Lafayette Park, saying he told the police there to “get it done” but did not say “go do it” which are equivalent phrases.
- Current Trump campaign staffer and former White House staffer Mercedes Schlapp retweeted a video of a man in Texas threatening protesters with a chainsaw. The man in the video used homophobic and racial slurs. Schlapp claims not to have watched the entire video before posting it. She deleted it, then reposted a version that edited out the offensive language. She then deleted the censored version.
- At a press event, the president was asked about the fact that black and Asian American unemployment both rose last week as the general unemployment number decreased. His response was, “You are something else.”
- Trump was asked about tackling systemic racism by Brian Kilmeade on Fox. I’m quoting the interview verbatim below:
TRUMP: Well I think it’s a very sad problem. As you know as a Republican I’m doing very well with African-Americans and with the vote with the — in polls and everything — especially I mean I haven’t seen one very recently because you had the plague come in from China.
So that changed things up, but we had the best economy ever. We had the best numbers for African-American on employment and unemployment in history. Best homeownership — best everything. We had the best numbers in everything — not only African-American, but the African-American numbers were great.
KILMEADE: How do you handle the law enforcement part?
TRUMP: Well I think you have to get better.
KILMEADE: How do you handle the law enforcement part of this?
TRUMP: They have to get better than what they’ve been doing. I mean obviously that was a terrible thing. And I’ve spoken about it numerous times in various speeches.
And what’s interesting is I spoke about it when we launched a very successful rocket — a tremendous program that culminated on that day and obviously it goes on from there.
But I then made a speech and it was a speech about the rocket, and I devoted 25 percent of the speech probably to what happened — or more — to what happened with respect to George — George Floyd, and it was — and then you listen to this, he doesn’t talk about George Floyd. The rocket went off, I then I made a speech, and I talked about George Floyd, but they said he didn’t talk about George Floyd.
Half — maybe even almost half of the speech, but a large portion of the speech was devoted exactly to that. And so, you know, with — with the media you basically — and basically no matter what you do, it’s never going to be good enough. But the people understand it.
- Press Secretary McEnany, who has been voting by mail for over a decade, was voting in Florida while living in DC with a New Jersey driver’s license.
- Just hours after saying that George Floyd was “looking down” from heaven in appreciation of the jobs report (which had a massive error), the president retweeted a Glenn Beck interview where Candace Owens attacked Floyd’s character, one of over 200 tweets the president sent that day. In a similar smear, the president tweeted that Martin Gugino, the 75 year old protester hospitalized (still) by two Buffalo Police officers, may have actually been an Antifa agent who was trying to jam police radios with a handheld scanner. (This is nonsensical from a technological stance). The president’s source on this is a Russian OANN reporter who literally works for an outlet there run by Putin’s government. That reporter got his information from an anonymous post on a right-wing conspiracy site. The president said that Gugino was falling faster than he was pushed which is not possible outside of a video game. Press Secretary McEnany defended the president’s attack on Gugino, saying that Trump’s statements were based in fact. They were not. They’re lies.
- To sum that up, the president has attacked the character of a man murdered by police and said a man hospitalized by police actually slammed his own head into the pavement while trying to jam police radios as part of some Antifa plot to make police look bad.