US President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington on 9 July 2020. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Samuel Corum / Pool) 
It seems like almost every day new and fresh demonstrations of chaos and catastrophic behaviour is now the essential hallmark of the Trump administration. In the days following those rabble-rousing, populist speeches, first on 3 July at Mt Rushmore and then in Washington the following day, the president decided to commute the sentence of his buddy-in-crime Roger Stone. This came along just before Stone was about to begin to serve his time for having done the crime. Well, actually, crimes. Stone had been found guilty of a slew of crimes, ultimately tied to his being the 2016 Trump campaign’s go-between with Wikileaks.
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Despite having missed the hurtling two-and-a-half ton truck coming at him while he was crossing a busy highway, blindfolded, Stone remains (and forever will be), just as Robert Mueller, the former special prosecutor for the Russia election interference investigation, says, a convicted criminal. Finally breaking a taciturn silence, Mueller wrote in Sunday’s Washington Post:
“One of our cases involved Stone, an official on the campaign until mid-2015 and a supporter of the campaign throughout 2016. Stone became a central figure in our investigation for two key reasons: He communicated in 2016 with individuals known to us to be Russian intelligence officers, and he claimed advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ release of emails stolen by those Russian intelligence officers…
“Congress also investigated and sought information from Stone. A jury later determined he lied repeatedly to members of Congress. He lied about the identity of his intermediary to WikiLeaks. He lied about the existence of written communications with his intermediary. He lied by denying he had communicated with the Trump campaign about the timing of WikiLeaks’ releases. He in fact updated senior campaign officials repeatedly about WikiLeaks. And he tampered with a witness, imploring him to stonewall Congress. The jury ultimately convicted Stone of obstruction of a congressional investigation, five counts of making false statements to Congress and tampering with a witness. Because his sentence has been commuted, he will not go to prison. But his conviction stands.”
Still, few Republican senior politicians, save for Senator Pat Toomey and Senator Mitt Romney whom the latter had called it “unprecedented, historic corruption”, have publicly rebuked the president for this decision. One has to wonder what would actually provoke condemnation of the president from that sorry gaggle of Republican politicians.
Meanwhile, the staunch non-Trump-supporting Burkean-style, classic conservative columnist, Max Boot, made the judgment, after learning of Stone’s pardon, that Donald Trump was simply the worst president in history. Even worse than Richard Nixon, James Buchanan, Warren Harding or Herbert Hoover. By a country mile or so. As Boot also wrote in The Washington Post, “But now, with the commutation of Roger Stone’s well-deserved prison sentence and so many other vile acts, he has disgraced the nation’s highest office as no previous occupant has come close to doing.
“Think about all that has happened since April 5. That was before security forces attacked peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square so that Trump could stage a bizarre photo-op. Before he pushed to send the armed forces into the streets. Before he embraced ‘white power’ and called Black Lives Matter ‘a symbol of hate’. Before he vowed to veto the defense authorization bill to prevent the renaming of military bases named after Confederate generals. Before he used the novel coronavirus as an excuse to shut down immigration and threatened to revoke the visas of college students unable to attend classes in the fall. Before he ignored reports that a Russian intelligence unit had placed a bounty on US soldiers in Afghanistan. Before he moved to pull out of the World Health Organisation during the worst pandemic in a century. Before he held rallies that most likely helped to spread the disease. Before he falsely accused MSNBC host and Post columnist Joe Scarborough of murdering a staff member. Before former national security adviser John Bolton revealed that Trump praised China’s prison camps for Uighurs and asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping to help him win reelection.
“Most of all, that was before the coronavirus had infected more than 3.1 million Americans and claimed the lives of more than 131,000. The pandemic was already a disaster on April 5, but back then we still had ‘only’ 331,000 cases and 9,400 deaths. On April 5, 1,344 new cases were reported. As many were recorded in 30 minutes on Friday, when daily new coronavirus cases climbed to a record-breaking 63,900. In early April it was still possible to imagine that the virus really would abate by the middle of summer. That this hasn’t happened — that the virus is still raging out of control in America while being brought under control in so many other countries — is directly attributable to the epic failure of leadership by a president who infamously proclaimed ‘I don’t take responsibility at all.’ ”
Since Boot wrote those words, the Covid-19 pandemic continues to ravage the country without letup. The hoped-for flattened curve is now distinctly unflattened, and is, in fact, sharply rising again, largely because of states — largely Midwestern, Southern, and Western — that reopened parks, beaches, restaurants, stores and the like well before the back of the pandemic has been broken, let alone contained.
With a death toll that has reached over 134,000 by the end of the weekend, the country now also has a total case number of more than 3,200,000. Or, as Dr Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health and the country’s foremost immunologist and a key epidemiologist dealing with Covid-19 has repeatedly explained, the country has not yet even entered into the threatened second wave. Rather, it is still, sadly, in the middle of the first wave of the epidemic.
Public opinion polling shows a very strong majority of Americans now believe the president’s efforts on Covid-19 have been deeply unsatisfactory, and, by a significant majority, the population believes the president’s responses to the current tumult over civil rights and inequality arising out of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis are similarly inadequate.
Astoundingly, in spite of the near-national economic collapse from the Covid shutdown, with more than 11% unemployment, many more than 40 million applying for unemployment compensation benefits, and thousands of businesses teetering on the edge of bankruptcy or collapse, per recent polling, the president still receives a positive response from slightly more than half the population for his handling of the economy.
Given those dire economic stats, the polling result on the president’s economic record seems a feat of prestidigitation or anti-gravity skills of amazing proportions. (Yes, the stock market has not collapsed, but that appears to be a function of the tsunami of funds released by the government in recent weeks largely to support flailing businesses and corporations, rather than a reflection of basic underlying economic health.)
Still, national polling also shows that the challenger, former vice president Joe Biden, currently has a lead over the incumbent president in virtually every demographic category save for the elderly, white, high school educated, rural/small-town-living, male, genetically Republican voters. Yes, it is true that national polling majorities can melt away as the actual election date nears; but, historically, incumbent presidents this far behind at this point in the electoral cycle — Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George HW Bush — have lost their bids for re-election. Accordingly, such precedents must surely be keeping campaign strategists awake at nights.
Now brewing as well is a fracas in waiting over how best to open up educational facilities and schools across the country, once the new school year begins at the end of August. Parents (and students) and teachers are increasingly nervous about what is going to happen when — or if — schools reopen and how physical distancing will take place and infections held down. The president is insisting all schools must open, pretty much come what may, even if this creates a virulent second wave for this virus. It is unclear how presidential petulance that schools must reopen, regardless, is going to help him in the upcoming election, especially if virus transmission starts rising once classes begin. Will his insistence cost him at the polls?
Of course at the university level, the president’s people are now making it still more complex, announcing to foreign students that their study visas will vanish if the universities they are enrolled in decide to stay with online-only education into the fall semester. For many universities and colleges, this will be a real kick in the solar plexus when all that foreign student tuition money disappears as a result of this decision. While places such as Harvard, Stanford, or Princeton may sort things out, some smaller or less well-endowed universities and colleges may even go bankrupt.