Trump’s boasts of power are not all just hot air

Donald Trump loves to boast about the immense powers at his disposal. As Andrew Cockburn writes in the November 2020 issue of Harper’s Magazine (subscription may be required):

“I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about,” he boasted in March, ominously echoing his interpretation of Article II of the Constitution, which, he has claimed, gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” He has also declared his “absolute right” to build a border wall, whatever Congress thinks, and even floated the possibility of delaying the election “until people can properly, securely, and safely vote.”

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Massive early voting in Texas

Texas has long been a strongly Republican state. Although every recent election has brought predictions that the changing demographics of the state will turn it Democratic, those tantalizing promises have invariably fallen short when it comes to actual elections. Part of the reason may be that the change in demographics is largely due to the increase in Hispanic voters and they are not as strongly Democratic as (say) African American voters. There are various explanations given for this, the main one being that the Hispanic community is socially quite conservative and Catholic, and Republican stances of opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights may resonate more strongly with them, even to the extent to overcoming the racism that underlies many Republican policies and the explicit racism of Trump.
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Two comedies about meals gone seriously wrong

I recently watched two comedies that have as their premise a fairly familiar plot line but each takes it in unexpected directions. In both a group of people who know each other well get together for a meal and then something triggers increasingly heated exchanges during which secrets and long-suppressed resentments are revealed in anger as people strike back at those whom they secretly dislike or think have hurt them.
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Bolivia, lithium, and Elon Musk

Oligarchs tend to be jerks in general and Elon Musk is clearly one of the biggest jerks. One of his big jerk moves was in blackmailing Alameda county where the city of Fremont is the city of Oakland that if they did not lift their covid-19 restrictions, he would move his Tesla manufacturing plant out of the city. So it should be no surprise that he is also an example of the arrogance of US imperialists.

Recall that the US was an enthusiastic supporter of the coup last year in Bolivia that overturned the election results that had socialist Evo Morales winning easily. Morales has speculated that one reason that the US wanted him out is that, in addition to his policies that benefited the long-neglected poor and indigenous people of his country (the kinds of policies that the US absolutely detests), he had also made a deal with China for the export of the element lithium. It appears that Bolivia has great reserves of this element which is an important component of batteries.
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The real Abbie Hoffman

The release of the film The Trial of The Chicago 7 that I reviewed here has renewed interest in the life of Abbie Hoffman. Nathan J. Robinson writes that while this is to be welcomed because there is much to be admired about Hoffman, the film also downplays some of the more radical of Hoffman’s ideas because writer-director Aaron Sorkin is someone who feels that the US institutions are fundamentally sound and that it is the people who run it that are the problem, while Hoffman felt that the system was rotten through and through and needed fundamental restructuring.
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Trump and white women voters

One of the big stories in the 2020 election is how so many white women who voted for Trump in 2016 have defected to Joe Biden. This has resulted in Trump pleading with them to vote for him. (He uses the euphemism of ‘suburban women’ because explicitly asking for white women’s votes would be a racist rhetorical bridge too far even for him.) His pleading to them borders on the pathetic.
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Early voting trends

According to the site maintained by Michael McDonald who is keeping track of early voting, in the 2016 election, 47,015,596 people voted early out of a total of 136,669,276, which works out to about 34.4%.

For this year’s election, as of today, 52,643,908 early votes have been cast, rocketing past the 2016 total with still another 10 days left to go, and the numbers have been rising at the rate of about 3-4 million votes a day. While that rate will likely drop as the days go by, we might well see over half the votes handed in before election day, even allowing for more total votes being cast in this election than 2016. This is clearly a sign of both determination to vote as well as the belief that many minds are well and truly made up.

McDonald also provides data on the party affiliation of the people requesting ballots and who have returned them, provided that that information is provided by the state.

I am getting a huge amount of election related material in the regular mail, much more so than when I was in Ohio. Much of it is related to the many ballot initiatives in California but most of it is arriving after I have voted. It seems like the campaigns were either caught by surprise by the popularity of early voting or felt that the only persuadable people are those who wait until the last minute.