POLITICO NIGHTLY: How we treat Covid now

BY RENUKA RAYASAM Presented by With help from Myah Ward STRONG MEDICINE — For weeks doctors and nurses around the country had no real handbook for how to treat the Covid patients that started showing up in their emergency rooms. They had some insight from clinicians in Italy and China and experience treating patients with respiratory ailments, but early treatments included a lot of frantic guesswork. Now, five months after the first Covid patient walked into a clinic in Everett, Wash., there’s still no FDA-approved therapy or treatment for the virus. In fact, there are two fewer drugs with even a preliminary nod from the agency: The FDA pulled its emergency use authorizations today of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug touted by President Donald Trump as a Covid treatment. There are still far more questions than answers when it comes to managing Covid patients. But doctors have made some progress. About 560,000 Covid patients are known to have recovered, according to Johns Hopkins University, though the figure is almost certainly higher because not all states track recoveries and not every infected person goes to the hospital. Here’s a look at what we’ve learned about treating Covid, and what doctors have yet to figure out. What we got wrong — In the early days of the pandemic, doctors were more willing to try off-label drugs without the usual vetting process, said Daniel Culver, a pulmonary and critical care physician at the Cleveland Clinic who leads a committee that evaluates Covid clinical trial research. That’s partly behind the rise and now fall of hydroxychloroquine. Clinical trials are still ongoing, but the drug’s effectiveness at treating Covid remains questionable. What we are learning — Evidence is mounting that the antiviral drug remdesivir is effective at helping severely infected Covid patients with low oxygen levels. It’s now the only drug with emergency use authorization from the FDA. There are hundreds of trials underway for dozens of Covid treatments. Some therapies, like using convalescent plasma from recovered patients to treat the critically ill, are being studied but so far there’s no definitive evidence on whether they are effective. What we learned not to do — Doctors now believe it’s no longer a good idea to intubate — meaning put on a ventilator — all patients with low oxygen, said Amy Compton-Phillips, chief clinical officer for Providence Health System, which has 51 hospitals including the one that treated the first U.S. Covid patient. Early on, Compton-Phillips said, her system relied on the advice of doctors in Italy and China to quickly put patients on a ventilator because it was thought to better protect health care workers and because the disease progressed so rapidly. But over time, the health system, which created a registry to track care for Covid patients across its hospitals, realized many patients didn’t need the invasive procedure, which comes with its own risks, right away. Instead the hospital tried other procedures to help patients boost oxygen levels, like proning patients — putting them on their stomachs — to help them inflate their lungs. Over the time, the health system cut its intubations in half, and mortality rates also declined. What we know now about treating complications — Doctors also began to realize that Covid was more than just a respiratory disease — it can affect all organs and in particular kidneys. Up to 15 percent of patients hospitalized with Covid develop acute kidney injury and many need dialysis. Intensive-care doctors now pay more attention to how much fluid they are giving patients, being more careful not to flood their lungs and other organs. And they focus more on keeping Covid patients from developing blood clots, which have led to amputations, strokes and other complications. And hospitals are working on preventing infections by reducing the use of invasive procedures like catheters and better isolating infected patients. “It’s a question of being systematic and careful rather than a eureka thing,” Culver said. “Everyone wants to focus on bells and whistles, but the blocking and tackling part is the most important.” What we still don’t know — “We’re not even at the end of the beginning for learning about this virus,” Compton-Phillips said. Researchers are trying to figure out answers to the biggest questions including how to intervene early to keep the virus from becoming severe, what are the long-term complications of a Covid infection and why it has been more lethal in black and Hispanic populations. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. My nine-month-old son took his first steps this weekend! Reach out with tips: rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam.   A message from PhRMA: America’s biopharmaceutical companies are sharing their knowledge and resources more than ever before to speed up the development of new medicines to fight COVID-19. They’re working with doctors and hospitals on over 1,100 clinical trials. Because science is how we get back to normal. More.   A woman reacts as she gets her temperature checked outside the Apple store in Covent Garden in London. The British government relaxed coronavirus lockdown laws significantly today, allowing zoos, safari parks and non-essential shops to open to visitors. | Getty Images FIRST IN NIGHTLY INSPECTION FAILURE — Thousands of nursing homes across the country have not been checked to see if staff are following proper procedures to prevent coronavirus transmission, Rachel Roubein and Maggie Severns write. Only a little more than half of the nation’s nursing homes had received inspections, according to data released earlier this month, which prompted a mandate from Medicare and Medicaid chief Seema Verma that states complete the checks by July 31 or risk losing federal recovery funds. A POLITICO survey of state officials suggests that the lack of oversight of nursing homes has many roots. Many states that were hit hard by the virus say they chose to provide protective gear to health workers rather than inspectors, delaying in-person checks for weeks if not months. Some states chose to assess facilities remotely, conducting interviews over the phone and analyzing documentation, a process many experts consider inadequate. “It is not possible or believable that the infection control surveys accurately portray the extent of infection control deficiencies in U.S. nursing facilities,” the report states. The American way of dying — Hancock County, Ga., a predominantly African American jurisdiction where most deaths have occurred in nursing homes, has the most rapidly growing Covid death rate in the country. McKinley County, N.M., and Hancock County are among the many low-income areas in the U.S. with swiftly growing death rates.   HAPPENING TOMORROW at 12 p.m. EDT/9 a.m. PDT: A VIRTUAL INTERVIEW WITH LOS ANGELES MAYOR ERIC GARCETTI: Los Angeles is grappling with a rising number of Covid-19 cases and a wave of protests for racial justice after the killing of George Floyd. California Playbook authors Carla Marinucci and Jeremy White will find out how Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is dealing with these twin crises during a virtual interview TOMORROW. REGISTER HERE.     AROUND THE NATION DARK CLOUDS IN GOLDEN STATE — More than 200,000 Americans are likely to die from Covid by Oct. 1, up from a previous estimate of just under 170,000, according to newly updated projections from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. The projected deaths in California have almost doubled: About 15,155 Californians are predicted to die, up from 8,812. Despite rising case loads, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom offered his most vigorous defense yet today for reopening California’s economy, writes California Playbook co-author Jeremy White . “There’s a certain point where you have to recognize you can’t be in a permanent state where people are locked away for months and months and months on end,” Newsom said, warning of the broader public health impacts of seeing “lives and livelihoods completely destroyed.” Whether California’s economy bounces back could rest on one sector in particular: child care. Steep revenue losses and costly new health and safety requirements are putting beleaguered child care programs out of existence in the high-cost state just as more parents return to the workplace, California consumer regulation reporter Katy Murphy writes. Even a relatively small percentage of closures could sideline workers and hamper the recovery, particularly in California's tourism, entertainment and dining sectors, where remote work is not possible. Slots towns go bust — In January, 2020 was looking like it could be the sixth straight year of revenue growth for the U.S. gambling industry, especially after more states approved legal sports betting. In 2019, $10.2 billion was paid in gambling taxes to state and local governments. The virus brought these dollars to a screeching halt, Myah Ward writes. The billions brought in by gambling to states and cities helps pay for education initiatives, health insurance programs, infrastructure and more. Gambling destinations have been especially traumatized. Reno, Nev., saw 337,000 come through its airport, or 11,000 a day, in April 2019, Reno Mayor Hillary Schieve said. In April 2020, just 17,000 visited the “Biggest Little City in the World.” In April last year, gambling revenue in the Reno area was more than $65 million, Schieve said. For April 2020, it was zero — with a nearly $80 million loss. Rob Cashell, Jr., who owns three casinos in northern Nevada, and one outside of Carson City, spent almost $600,000 paying employees for six weeks before he furloughed them once he realized how long the shutdown would last. The state’s casinos shut down March 18, and were allowed to reopen June 4. In Reno, the family-owned Bonanza Casino had never before closed its doors during its 47-year existence, general manager Ryan Sheltra said. It’s dire in Atlantic City as well, where casino operators are advocating for a reopening on July 4, historically the city’s most profitable weekend, said Jane Bokunewicz, a professor at New Jersey’s Stockton University and a former executive at Atlantic City’s Tropicana casino. The city where Donald Trump owned three casinos accounts for 20 percent of New Jersey’s tourism revenue. In Biloxi, Miss., gambling accounts for upwards of 40 percent, or $20 million, of the city’s budget, Mayor Andrew Gilich said. He said it’s going to be hard to recover that money as the city scrambles to fill the hole. Casinos nationwide have been reopening this month, following state and local guidelines. Cashell has seen signs of a promising rebound in Reno, but he worries his business couldn’t weather another shutdown. “I've depleted all of our cash reserves, so I'm hopeful that between now and the end of the year we'll be able to rebuild those cash reserves and get back on our feet,” he said. “But if that shutdown were to come again between now and the end of the year at some point, I'm not sure what that would mean for us.” ‘Very powerful decision’ — LGBT rights advocates triumphed at the Supreme Court today, winning a sweeping decision from the justices that protects gay, lesbian and transgender employees from being disciplined, fired or turned down for a job based on their sexual orientation. Two of the court’s Republican appointees, Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts, joined the court’s Democratic appointees to deliver the surprising 6-3 victory to those arguing for anti-discrimination protections. When asked about the ruling, Trump offered a mild response. “I've read the decision,” the president said of the various opinions, which ran to 119 pages. “Some people were surprised, but they’ve ruled and we live with their decision. That’s what it’s all about. We live with the decision of the Supreme Court. Very powerful, very powerful decision, actually.” FROM THE HEALTH DESK GOOD ENOUGH TO BE A TRACING — Contact tracing is essential while we wait for a coronavirus vaccine. But it requires a lot of work — and a lot of people. “It’s all about notifying people as early as possible that they’ve potentially been infected, so that they can quarantine themselves or take other precautionary steps to stop the spread of the virus, says Steven Overly in the latest POLITICO Dispatch. Steven explains how smartphone apps could save the day, and why a lack of coordination between states could spell trouble. Listen to the latest POLITICO Dispatch podcast       THE GLOBAL FIGHT BORROW, TAX OR BOTH — Total global government debt totaled $188 trillion by the end of 2018, and now Covid-19 is adding tens of billions to that number, through a combination of extra spending (more than $11 trillion) and lower tax revenues. There are two dominant economic schools of thought in democracies about how to deal with that, Ryan Heath writes: The first says keep spending while debt is essentially free (with interest rates at or near zero), and the second says pay it back by raising taxes on those who can afford it. Left-wing Nobel Prize-winning economists Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz are advocating recommendations in a new report published today by a group of international NGOs, including Oxfam. The top goals are to close digital tax loopholes and increase corporate tax receipts. They argue that the biggest economic winners from the pandemic — digital companies that don’t depend on face-to-face interactions or physical goods for their revenue — are the same ones that find it easiest to minimize or evade tax. On a Zoom call about the report, Stiglitz called the revenue gap “100 times worse” than in 2009 after the financial crisis. There’s a decent chance Big Tech will be hit. Big individual countries like U.K. and France have moved ahead with national digital taxes, while the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — a Paris-based economic advice club for rich governments — has been working toward a global deal to tax digital companies. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told the French Senate last Thursday that only the U.S. is holding up a deal. Raising corporate tax rates “is not enough,” Piketty argues: He says wealth taxes and “a global system with global registry to track income flows and asset ownership” are needed. “The case for a wealth tax has become stronger since the pandemic,” Piketty said on the Zoom call, and is popular among both Democratic and Republican voters, if not the parties themselves. International Monetary Fund chief Kristalina Georgieva warned a roundtable of economists hosted by the GLOBSEC think tank today that “money cannot be free forever,” but while it is, governments should use it to protect economic growth. “We should be careful not to withdraw support too quickly,” Georgieva said, because that would kill off the fragile economic recovery.   Protect Yourself and Others From Coronavirus: Even if you don’t have symptoms, you could spread the coronavirus. Practice these physical distancing and hygiene tips to keep yourself and your loved ones safe: Stay 6 feet away from others in public; wash your hands often for 20+ seconds; disinfect frequently touched surfaces like cellphones and light switches; and wear a cloth face covering when out in public. Together, we can slow the spread. Visit coronavirus.gov to learn more.     NIGHTLY NUMBER 85 percent The proportion of the U.S. beef slaughter and packaging industry controlled by the four largest meatpackers — Tyson Foods, JBS, National Beef and Cargill — according to USDA data. These larger companies have garnered strong federal attention in trying to get back online after pandemic disruptions, but smaller firms have struggled to gain the same regulatory easing and financial aid. PARTING WORDS WHEN VACCINES AREN’T NEEDED — Scientific advances have put us closer than we’ve ever been to the end of AIDS. Ethical concerns could still push it out of reach. Advances in prevention and treatment have lessened the urgency in finding a vaccine or cure for the disease, writes senior European health care reporter Sarah Wheaton, but they’ve also complicated the clinical trials needed to prove that a potential breakthrough is effective. “Our success is the thorn in the flesh,” said Linda-Gail Bekker, deputy director of the University of Cape Town’s Desmond Tutu HIV Center. AIDS revolutionized drug research, as desperate patients raged at regulators for denying them access to experimental drugs that might not work, or could even be dangerous, but often represented the only chance of saving their lives. Activists in the 1980s and 1990s convinced governments and drugs regulators to let them take untested medicines even if it might undermine the strict process for clinical trials. The uncertainty of an unproven treatment was better than a death sentence. The widespread adoption of antiretroviral drugs — to manage or prevent the disease — have turned that logic on its head. People on treatment can essentially live a normal life with HIV — and be confident that they won’t pass the virus on to others, leaving scientists and drugmakers facing a different ethical dilemma: How do you justify testing a vaccine that might not work when we know a daily pill can prevent HIV?   A message from PhRMA: America’s biopharmaceutical companies are sharing their knowledge and resources more than ever before to speed up the development of new medicines to fight COVID-19. They’re working with doctors and hospitals on over 1,100 clinical trials. And there’s no slowing down. America’s biopharmaceutical companies will continue working day and night until they beat coronavirus. Because science is how we get back to normal. See how biopharmaceutical companies are working together to get people what they need during this pandemic.   Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam   FOLLOW US

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RSN: FOCUS: Charles Pierce | It Appears Republicans and Democrats Were Both Justified in Worrying About John Bolton's Book

15 June 20

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FOCUS: Charles Pierce | It Appears Republicans and Democrats Were Both Justified in Worrying About John Bolton's Book

Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "It was a foregone conclusion that John Bolton's book was going to infuriate everyone."

Because, wow.

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

t was a foregone conclusion that John Bolton’s book was going to infuriate everyone. It was going to infuriate the folks at Camp Runamuck because the president* is a boob and a crook and the people at Camp Runamuck hate anyone who points that out. And Democrats were going to be infuriated because they were trying to relieve the Republic of this walking catastrophe and Bolton clearly saved the really good stuff for his book. In their own ways, it appears, both sides were entirely justified in their pre-emptive fury, because, well, wow. From Politico:

Bolton writes that the House should have broadened its impeachment inquiry to other areas of his foreign policy, contending that he can document — and identify witnesses to — "Ukraine-like transgressions ... across the full range of his foreign policy," according to a description by Simon & Schuster released Friday. The revelations are likely to reverberate on Capitol Hill, where Democrats have warned that Trump's conduct toward Ukraine was far from isolated and that he presents an existential threat to the country if allowed to remain in office. House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff declined to comment, but others involved in the impeachment inquiry were livid that Bolton delayed revealing potentially pertinent evidence until months after it would have bolstered their case. "At the time the country needed him most, and history will reflect, he chose to sell books," said Rep. Mike Quigley, a member of the House Intelligence Committee. "It wasn't a question in his mind of whether or not he should talk about it. It's whether or not he should profit from talking about it. Not exactly 'Profiles in Courage.’"

No question, Bolton is a greedy poltroon, but he is a greedy poltroon who owes the president* and the administration* absolutely nothing, and to whom they cannot exact revenge commensurate with the damage he can do. I have no intention of buying this book, but rumor has it that it runs almost 600 pages, so when I go browse it in whatever is left of bookstores after the pandemic, I’m packing a healthy lunch.

This week’s political poor soul is Denver Riggleman, a first-term Republican congresscritter from Virginia, and his plight is a good window into how much work the GOP has to do on itself in areas that have nothing to do with the incumbent president*. Riggleman is in danger of losing his party’s nomination because he officiated at a same-sex wedding, an activity that is, of course, completely legal in the United States. (The principals were two men who’d worked for Riggleman’s campaign, so good for him.) From Politico:

“The Republican Party, when you look at the creed to protect civil liberties and religious liberties, could be the most inclusive party in the country,” Riggleman said in an interview. “And you know, why aren’t we a big-tent party? Why aren’t we looking at liberties first? Why aren’t we allowing people to live the way they want to live and stopping the government from reaching into every aspect of our lives?”

Because your party has made an insane asylum out of itself over the past four decades? Just spitballing here.

The vote will be a signal about whether socially conservative positions out of step with the majority of Americans are still considered wedge issues for GOP voters. But Good, who stepped down from the Liberty University athletic department to run, has said his opposition to Riggleman extends beyond his willingness to officiate a gay marriage. “What does Denver stand for?” Good said in a radio debate between the two candidates last month. “What conservative Republican issue is he strong on? What can you point to? He’s out of step with the base of the party on life. He’s out of step on marriage. He’s out of step on immigration. He’s out of step on health care, on climate, on drug legalization.”

Res ipse loquitur, Denver. Sorry, man. Chickens, roosts, and all that.

A still crazier story unfolded this week when the president* tweeted out his gratitude for an unsolicited mash note from a retrograde Catholic archbishop, who seems to be conducting services at the Basilica Of St. Bannon. From the Washington Post:

“On the one hand there are those who, although they have a thousand defects and weaknesses, are motivated by the desire to do good, to be honest, to raise a family, to engage in work, to give prosperity to their homeland, to help the needy, and, in obedience to the Law of God, to merit the Kingdom of Heaven," read the June 7 letter to Trump from Archbishop Carlo Vigano, a former Vatican diplomat to Washington. “On the other hand, there are those who serve themselves, who do not hold any moral principles, who want to demolish the family...In society, Mr. President, these two opposing realities co-exist as eternal enemies, just as God and Satan are eternal enemies...it is quite clear that the use of street protests is instrumental to the purposes of those who would like to see someone elected in the upcoming presidential elections who embodies the goals of the deep state."

Vigano is a notorious crackpot, but I didn’t know he was quite as much of an Essene in his theology as he apparently is. The famous War Scroll discovered at Qumran near the Dead Sea goes on and on about the war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. I guess the ancient scribes didn’t have the imagination of the folks at OAN because they didn’t come up with The Deep State. Nonetheless, it’s unnerving to hear an archbishop shouting out wingnut talking points at a president* of the United States. Steve Bannon has been playing footsie with fringe conservative Catholics for a while now. I sense his presence in every line of this letter.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “The Devil’s Food Tastes Like Cake” (Mercy Brothers): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here is General Edwin Walker, arriving back in Dallas in 1962 after helping to incite violent insurrection at the University of Mississippi in opposition to the enrollment of James Meredith. Nice flag-waving, no? Depending on where you come down on the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald in the events of a year later, Walker was the first guy he supposedly took a shot at. History is so cool.

Historian Douglas Brinkley got a sitdown with The Master for The New York Times, and the results are yet another stroll through a very interesting—and quintessentially American—mind. For example, check out what Dylan says about bluegrass music.

Bluegrass music is mysterious and deep rooted and you almost have to be born playing it. Just because you are a great singer, or a great this or that doesn’t mean you can be in a bluegrass band. It’s almost like classical music. It’s harmonic and meditative, but it’s out for blood. If you ever heard the Osborne Brothers, then you know what I mean. It’s an unforgiving music and you can only it stretch so far. Beatles songs played in a bluegrass style don’t make any sense. It’s the wrong repertoire, and that’s been done. There are elements of bluegrass music for sure in what I play, especially the intensity and similar themes. But I don’t have the high tenor voice and we don’t have three-part harmony or consistent banjo. I listen to Bill Monroe a lot, but I more or less stick to what I can do best.

He always has been the best musicologist ever among his peers. If the previously released tracks are any indication, the upcoming album should be a monster. He never will stop surprising us, and now, as the Old Man Of The Mountains, he’s more of a trickster than he’s ever been before, a mystery even unto himself.

“I Contain Multitudes” is more like trance writing. Well, it’s not more like trance writing, it is trance writing. It’s the way I actually feel about things. It is my identity and I’m not going to question it, I am in no position to. Every line has a particular purpose. Somewhere in the universe those three names must have paid a price for what they represent and they’re locked together. And I can hardly explain that. 

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Nature.com? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

These tracks are more than twice as large as any previously reported batrachopodid tracks and closely resemble Batrachopus with well-preserved pes footprints with clear digital pad impressions and localized skin traces. Surprisingly the trackways never include manus imprints and therefore appear to indicate exclusively bipedal progression, a gait not known or previously inferred from fossil crocodylomorph trackways, or argued convincingly from the functional morphology of potential trackmakers.

In other words, the ancient crocodiles used to walk on two legs and chase their prey. I’m glad evolution took the course it did or else we’d be down quite a few golfers by now and, in that, some way, it can be argued still that they lived then to make us happy now.

I’ll be back on Monday and I’m sure the speech at West Point will be a large burrito full of half-mad bullroar. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and, remember, play “Down In The Boondocks" for Terry Malloy.

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RSN: FOCUS | Greg Palast: Here's How Trump Will Steal the 2020 Election

15 June 20

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FOCUS | Greg Palast: Here's How Trump Will Steal the 2020 Election

Chauncey DeVega, Salon

DeVega writes: "Greg Palast warns that Joe Biden's chances against Donald Trump are worse than the polls suggest because millions of Democrats will have their votes thrown out on Election Day. Moreover, many of those voters will have no idea that their votes were purged and therefore not counted."

Palast's new book, "How Trump Stole 2020," outlines a nightmare: Trump loses the electoral vote and wins anyway

s Election Day 2020 approaches, it would appear that presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his party have much to celebrate. 

Biden leads Donald Trump by an average of eight percentage points in national polling, with some surveys showing Biden ahead of Trump by as many as 14 percentage points.

Biden also enjoys huge leads among the Democratic Party's key constituents, including black voters, Latinos and other nonwhites, college-educated white women and younger voters. Polls also show Joe Biden making gains among older white voters, a group that consistently supports Republicans and has been especially loyal to Trump. Biden also leads Trump in key battleground states such as Michigan and Wisconsin.

On closer inspection, however, matters are more complicated.

Election Day is still more than four months away, almost an eternity in electoral politics. Previous Democratic nominees such as Hillary Clinton and Michael Dukakis are object lessons in the cruel and mercurial ways of the political fates: Both appeared to hold big leads over their Republican opponents at this approximate point in the cycle, only to lose on Election Day. 

There is also a not-insubstantial gap between what prospective voters tell pollsters and how they will actually decide to vote — if they vote at all.

Greg Palast is an investigative journalist whose work has been featured by the BBC, the Guardian, the Nation, Rolling Stone and here on Salon. He has become one of the nation's foremost experts on vote suppression, vote theft and vote fraud. He is the author of the bestselling books "Billionaires & Ballot Bandits" and "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy." His new book is "How Trump Stole 2020: The Hunt for America's Vanished Voters."

In our most recent conversation, Palast warns that Joe Biden's chances against Donald Trump are worse than the polls suggest because millions of Democrats will have their votes thrown out on Election Day. Moreover, many of those voters will have no idea that their votes were purged and therefore not counted. 

Palast explains how the Republican Party has refined its strategy of voter suppression, voter intimidation and vote theft in elections across the country. Palast also highlights how the planned chaos during the recent Georgia Democratic primaries is a preview of how the Republican Party intends to steal the 2020 presidential election for Donald Trump.  

Finally, Palast issues an ominous warning: Trump and the Republicans, he believes, are plotting to use the 12th Amendment to the Constitution to declare the popular vote and Electoral College results invalid, so that the 2020 presidential election will be decided in the House of Representatives — which, believe it or not, may well vote in Trump's favor. 

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

One of the dominant narratives in the news is that last week's Democratic primary in Georgia is a preview of the sabotage, chaos and interference that Donald Trump and the Republicans will be using against Joe Biden and the Democrats in the general election this November. Is that conclusion correct? 

Absolutely. And it's going to be worse.

The Republicans have been practicing this since 2018 in Georgia. What happened there was a test run for the entire nation. Brian Kemp won [the Georgia gubernatorial election] in November 2018 because of mass voter purges. The Republicans also tried other tricks.

Brian Kemp has been playing these games with voter rolls for seven years. He is governor of Georgia and he stole that election from Stacey Abrams, the first black woman to run for that office.

One of the primary things the Republicans tested in Georgia would be to see if the news media or others would try to find out just why the lines to vote were so very long. Forty precincts in Atlanta had no voting machines. That creates long lines especially when there are no paper ballots. If the machines break, they are supposed to have backup paper ballots. Of course, there were no paper ballots.

Why were all those people out there in the middle of the COVID-19 virus? Why were they waiting in line for a voting machine? The answer is that millions of Georgians asked for mail-in ballots and then hundreds of thousands of people did not get their ballots and were not told why. The answer is that these voters were purged. Hall a million of them! If you are purged, then you do not receive a mail-in ballot. If you do not get your ballot, you cannot mail it back in.

In Georgia and in Ohio, and who knows how many other states — those state officials will not tell me what their rules are — ballots are no longer being sent to people on the so-called inactive list. That is very strange. "Inactive" means that you missed the last two elections, in 2016 and 2018. According to federal law — it is actually in bold type in the National Voter Registration Act — a person cannot lose their right to vote by not voting.

If you fail to vote, these states are not going to send you a ballot and you will not know why. Then it's too late, and you are forced to physically go to the polls to vote. There you will join all the black and brown folks who also did not receive their ballots. All of you will be forced to wait in long lines.

In 2020 we are heading into a disaster, and it's a very well-designed and intentional one. The Republicans thought it all through and tested it in Georgia and Wisconsin and elsewhere. In 2020 when Trump is up for re-election, this chaos will be everywhere.

Donald Trump and the Republicans have been very public about the fact that if most Americans could vote, especially nonwhite Americans, they would be doomed as a political movement and a party. Naked white identity politics and white supremacy is now the mission statement of today's Republican Party. Republicans and Trump are cheating to win elections and have faced no consequences for it. Why should they stop?

Vote theft is the perfect crime. If you successfully steal the vote you have stolen the vote cops, the people who are supposed to monitor the voting to ensure that the rules are being followed. For example, the Department of Justice is supposed to arrest the vote thieves. Does any one thinking and reasonable person actually believe that Donald Trump's Justice Department, led by Bill Barr, is going to do that?

We are the only nation other than the recognized fake democracies such as Russia and China and Iran where the vote-counters are chosen by the political operatives.

Republican secretaries of state such as Brian Kemp (who is now governor of Georgia) and Kris Kobach [formerly of Kansas] are highly vicious partisan operatives who are given the power to determine who gets a vote, when you get to vote, where you get to vote and whose vote gets counted. Even the Wall Street Journal said that Brian Kemp holding that title [as Georgia secretary of state) while running for governor was unethical. Having politically appointed voting officials in the United States is something that must be put to end.

During an interview several years ago, Donald Trump literally said that he wanted riots and social unrest, presumably as a way for him to take power and "make America great again." With the United States in a state of economic calamity, a pandemic and social unrest, is this an opportunity for Trump and his movement to advance their goals?

These are politicians, along with the billionaires who back them, who thrive off chaos. That's how they make their money. It is also how they win their elections. It is the same process of chaos and mayhem. First of all they use the bogeyman of illegal voters, fraudulent voters, dead voters, foreign voters and double voters to create hysteria. It is a type of right-wing hysteria factory, the goal of which is to change voting requirements.

What I am very worried about is how Donald Trump and the Republicans could use the 12th Amendment to the Constitution to steal the 2020 election. We have had two presidential elections in the United States in which a candidate won both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote but did not become president.

The 12th Amendment states that if the Electoral College does not reach a majority, which is 270, the election then goes to the House of Representatives. How could that possibly happen with Trump and Biden in 2020? The answer is the rabidly right-wing legislatures in Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida say that there is so much voter fraud and that the mail-in ballots are not to be trusted. Trust me, those states are going to do things such as misprint ballots. Many "mistakes" are going to occur in those red states.

So the result could be that Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida do not certify their electors, and Biden has lost those three states' votes. There are still not enough votes for Trump, but Biden does not hit the 270 threshold in the Electoral College to be elected president.

The 2020 election now goes to the House of Representatives, where every state gets a single vote. New York, California and Illinois each get a vote. Wyoming, South Dakota and Oklahoma each get a vote. Who wins? Most state delegations are majority Republican, even though the Republicans don't control the House and have far fewer voters in America. But by the rules of the Constitution, Donald Trump could be re-elected even if he loses both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

In his campaign emails, Trump has been threatening to raise a "MAGA-Trump Army." He has encouraged violence by his paramilitaries and other street thugs. Trump and his operatives are also saying that they want 50,000 Republicans to serve as "voter observers" at the polls on Election Day 2020. The goal there is obvious — to intimidate, terrorize, and try to stop Democrats from voting. Given that Trump will be targeting black and brown people for such terrorism, it really is a form of Jim Crow in the 21st century.

America with Donald Trump is going back to the old White Citizens' Councils and other ways of intimidating black and brown voters during Jim Crow. Threats and intimidation are also being used in places like Arizona to keep Hispanics and Latinos from voting. Some of this voter intimidation by Republicans are just pure physical threats.

But even more important than intimidation of Democratic voters are demands for proof of residence and proof of citizenship. There are other ways to keep people from voting, such as checking to see if a person has paid their alimony or court fines. Voters could be arrested. In the upcoming 2020 election there Is going to be mayhem. There will be a large number of complaints about voting stations being closed two hours early, and claims that there are all these "illegal voters." Trump and the Republicans are going to say that the election outcome was illegitimate. This will throw it to the House and Trump gets re-elected.

How will these enforcers actually try to stop Democrats from voting? What does that look like on the ground?

There will be a massive official contesting of votes. In almost every state, the political parties are allowed to assign official poll workers who have the right to challenge a vote. According to my research, this person does not even have to live in the area. Some of these official poll workers are going to automatically challenge any voter they can.

Unfortunately, many of the poll workers will just go along with it and say, "OK, we'll give you a provisional ballot." One million provisional ballots were thrown in the garbage in 2016. It is very important for people to talk to other poll workers and summon the election judge and demand that you are allowed to vote. Do not accept a provisional ballot. They are effectively useless. It is a type of placebo that makes people think they voted when they really have not. The reality is that these provisional ballots are not counted, because whatever stopped a given voter from being allowed to vote normally in the first place is going to be the same reason the provisional ballot is rejected.

Recently in Wisconsin, the Democratic Party and its voters were able to win a seat on the state Supreme Court. This was very important in terms of stopping Republicans' efforts to purge Democratic voters and likely supporters from the voting rolls. The Republican Party of course is pushing back. What is going on in Wisconsin at present?

The Democrats are in real trouble. I just spoke with one of the election commissioners in Wisconsin. There is a right-wing group suing to force the state to remove a quarter of a million voters. This group was able to get a court to agree with them.

Now the case is going to the Wisconsin State Supreme Court — which is what that whole primary in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic was about. The Republicans insisted on having a vote during the virus because they thought that would block voters in Milwaukee who would be too afraid to come out and vote. It was partly true, but enough people in Milwaukee risked death to come out and vote. The number of polling stations in Milwaukee went from 180 to just five.

The Democrats were so happy because despite the Republican Party's impediments and interference, the Democratic-backed judge won. The Democrats thought that would be the end of it and that the voter rolls were safe. That would not be the case. The Republican candidate who lost then did something unheard of in my years of being involved with the courts: He un-recused himself.

The very man who lost that election is now going to hear the case in July and vote on it. Wisconsin may still remove 250,000 voters. This is extremely dangerous for democracy. If the Republicans succeed in removing those quarter million voters — concentrated in Madison, where the students are, and in Milwaukee, where African-Americans are concentrated — that is 10 times Trump's 2016 vote margin in the state. How do you overcome that thumb on the electoral scale? We have got to be very concerned about how the Republicans are using mass purges of voters in swing states to stay in power.

Given Donald Trump and his Republican Party's use of voter suppression, gerrymandering, vote theft and other efforts to "win" elections in Georgia and many other states, there have been demands by activists and others that the United Nations should send observers to monitor voting in this country. What would that look like in practice?

The UN would not be able to monitor American elections. The United Nations subcontracts to the Carter Center in Atlanta. The Carter Center's and the UN's rules require that there be a minimum standard of democratic-voting procedures. They report that the United States does not meet those standards.

The UN and the Carter Center cannot monitor an election that they have already certified as being broken. The biggest single problem with voting in the United States is the massive purging of voter rolls, and that has already been done before Election Day. All the UN and the Carter Center observers would be able to do in America would be to sit there and monitor the fact that millions of people who thought they could vote are being told that they cannot vote.

The second serious problem with voting in America is shown by how the news media relies on the State Department to certify foreign elections. The State Department uses exit polls to determine the veracity of an election. But in this country, we have seen a phenomenon in the past few presidential elections where exit polls report that the Democratic candidates won.

For example, in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, exit polls show that Hillary Clinton won a huge victory over Trump. But the official count shows Trump squeaking by in those states. If such a thing happened in Ukraine or Peru or Serbia — I cite those three countries because exit polls there conflicted with the official tally and the United States refused to recognize those governments. Our government actually declared those victories to be phony. Yet in 2016, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and several other states showed Donald Trump losing in the exit polls. By the State Department's own rules regarding elections, Donald Trump lost.

Respected public opinion polls show Joe Biden with a double-digit lead over Trump in the 2020 election. Right now it looks like Trump will be routed in November. I will be transparent: I predicted that Trump would win in 2016 and I was correct. I believe he will win again in 2020. I hope I am wrong. Through skullduggery, trickery, foreign interference and other means, Trump is likely to win — assuming there even is an election and that he leaves the White House when he is defeated. Biden's lead feels to me like a repeat of Democratic defeats in the past. Michael Dukakis was way ahead of George H.W. Bush in early polls in 1988. Hillary Clinton was also way ahead of Donald Trump for most of the 2016 campaign.

Joe Biden's lead right now is not only completely meaningless but something far worse, because it is putting the Democrats to sleep. There were almost 7.9 million ballots that were either not counted or where voters were blocked from voting in 2016. If you were to call those voters up, like a pollster, many of them would tell you they were voting for Hillary Clinton. But those same people did not know that they would be blocked from voting on Election Day or that their votes were thrown out.

The non-count of voters, where people are either outright blocked from voting or their votes are thrown out by Republicans, undermines the predictive power of any poll that predicts a huge Biden victory. The Democrats must confront these structural impediments, many of which are driven by white supremacy, if there are going to be truly free and fair elections in the United States.

The Democrats are acting like they are still at Hillary Clinton's inaugural and they haven't left. They don't know why the balloons didn't drop through the glass ceiling.

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SENATOR DAVID PERDUE [R-GA]

SENATOR DAVID PERDUE [R-GA]

profited and you got sick?

Did he forewarn you? NO!

SENATORS KNEW!

That was before Americans DIED.