Former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, a registered lobbyist for a foreign government that Donald Trump’s Justice Department has implicated in a corruption scandal, used her speech at the Republican convention on Tuesday to criticize former vice president Joe Biden for alleged self-dealing abroad.“I fought corruption and I know what it looks like, whether it’s done by people wearing pinstripe suits or orange jumpsuits,” Bondi declared. “But, when you look at his 47 year career in politics, the people who benefited are his family members, not the American people.”Bondi rehashed dubious allegations about Biden’s policymaking role in Ukraine, which mirrored arguments made by her and others throughout this year’s impeachment trial against President Donald Trump. Bondi was hired by the White House to assist with impeachment messaging late last year.When she took the White House job, Bondi wound down her work on behalf of the government of Qatar, which U.S. authorities recently implicated in a corruption scandal involving their hosting of the 2022 World Cup. In March, Bondi left the White House and restarted her work for Qatar. She remains a member of the President’s Commission on Opioids.An executive order imposed by Trump in the early days of his presidency ostensibly bars former administration officials from lobbying for foreign governments, but Bondi appears to have benefitted from a loophole in the rule.Bondi’s relationship with Trump goes back years and has itself been the target of corruption allegations. In 2013, Trump’s since-dissolved foundation made an illegal $25,000 contribution to a political group affiliated with Bondi as the then-attorney general was weighing whether to pursue a fraud investigation against the notorious Trump University. Bondi subsequently passed on the investigation.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

The convention will be a ghastly reminder of what happened to the party of Lincoln – even as it desperately grabs for his mantleThe Republican convention that nominates Donald Trump for a second term will be the greatest event in the political history of cancel culture. What Trump is cancelling is nothing less than the Republican party as it has existed before him. He ran in 2016 in the primaries on cancelling the GOP and in 2020 he ratifies his triumph. After the election, political scientists and historians will study his obliteration of the Republican party as his greatest and most enduring political achievement.The Republican party has been on a long journey away from being the party of Abraham Lincoln, accelerating since Barry Goldwater and rightwing cadres captured it in 1964 in reaction to the civil rights movement. After Richard Nixon embraced the southern strategy and won the nomination in 1968 with the help of Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the Dixiecrat segregationist presidential candidate in 1948, the party increasingly radicalized in every election cycle and became gradually unmoored. In 1980, Ronald Reagan opened his general election campaign at the Neshoba County Fair, the place where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. Surrounded by Confederate flags, he hailed “states’ rights”. As brazen an appeal as it was, Reagan felt he had to resort to the old code words.Central to Trump’s unique selling proposition is that he dispenses with the dog whistles. His vulgarity gives a vicarious thrill to those who revel in his taunting of perceived enemies or scapegoats. He made them feel dominant at no social price, until his catastrophic mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic and economic crisis. Flouting a mask is the magical act of defiance to signal that nothing has really changed and that in any case, Trump bears no responsibility.But there has also been a political cost to Trump’s louche comic lounge act that still transfixes a diehard audience lingering like late-night gamblers for the last show. Trump is the only president since the advent of modern polling never to reach 50% approval. Despite decisively losing the popular vote in 2016, he said he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally”. This time, fearing an even more overwhelming popular rejection, he says the outcome will be “rigged” and he has pre-emptively tried to cancel the US Postal Service, to undermine voting by mail.From Reagan onward, even as the fringe moved to the center and took it over, the party did not anticipate that it was slouching toward Trump. Conservatives have consistently failed to grasp the unintended consequences of conservatism. Even when Reagan fostered the evangelical right, George HW Bush appointed Clarence Thomas to the supreme court, George W Bush invaded Iraq and neglected oversight of financial markets that collapsed, and John McCain named Sarah Palin as his running mate, Republicans believed they were expanding the attraction of the conservative project. When Newt Gingrich, Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh methodically degraded language, it seemed a propaganda technique to herd supporters. When the dark money of the Koch family and the wealthy reactionaries of the cloaked Donors Trust bankrolled the lumpen dress-up Tea Party to do their bidding on deregulation of finance and industry, the munificently funded conservative candidates did their bidding as retainers of privilege.> In the wasteland, only cockroaches and Mitch McConnell may surviveAt the presidential level there still remained residual elements contrary to what metastasized into Trumpism. Reagan represented free trade and western firmness against Russia. George HW Bush was a paragon of public service. George W Bush was an advocate for immigrants. John McCain was the embodiment of patriotic sacrifice.After Trump, all that has been cancelled. Since he first rode down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, to declare his candidacy against Mexican “rapists”, there has always been a new escalator downward. After overcoming his initial hesitation, the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, welcomed the election of a QAnon conspiracy-spouting candidate from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Then McCarthy condemned QAnon and stated that Greene wasn’t part of a movement she continued to defend.Trump hailed her as a “future Republican star”. For months, he has been tweeting messages to encourage the racist, antisemitic cult. “There’s a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it,” Greene proclaimed. “I’ve heard these are people that love our country,” Trump said. In the wasteland, only cockroaches and Mitch McConnell may survive.Stuart Stevens, a prominent Republican political consultant, eyes startled wide open, has entitled his exposé of the party It Was All A Lie. He describes the conservative Trump apologists, the adults in the room, as latter-day versions of Franz von Papen, the German chancellor who enabled the rise of Hitler in the complacent belief that he could be controlled and the conservatives would maintain power.On 4 July, at the mammoth stage set of Mount Rushmore, Trump mugged for his photo op by posing his face next in line to the carving of Abraham Lincoln. He had earlier told the South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, “‘Did you know it’s my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?’” “And I started laughing,” she recounted. “And he wasn’t laughing, so he was totally serious.” (Trump tweeted that it was “fake news” that he had ordered an aide to inquire about immortalizing his face on the mountain.)Ostensibly, Trump came to deliver his ideological message. He denounced “cancel culture”, which he said was “the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and to our values, and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America”. He attributed it to “a new far-left fascism”. And he spelled out its punitive nature: “If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted and punished.” Thus, he offered a concise description of his own cancel culture’s methods.Trump’s cancel culture deals in aggressions, not micro-aggressions. The only safe space is where Trump is worshipped. Before, during and after the death of McCain, Trump unleashed tirades of insult. He finally complained that the McCain family never thanked him for approving the senator’s funeral arrangements, even though it was Congress that gave approval. For years, Trump has disparaged the Bush family. At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, when George W Bush called for setting aside partisanship and embracing national unity, Trump tweeted, “but where was he during Impeachment calling for putting partisanship aside”.> Trump’s cancel culture deals in aggressions, not micro-aggressions. The only safe space is where Trump is worshippedTrump has invoked Reagan only as a stepping stone of his own monumental pedestal. At a rally in 2019, Trump mused: “I was watching the other night the great Lou Dobbs [of Fox News], and he said, ‘When Trump took over, President Trump,’ he used to say, ‘Trump is a great president.’ Then he said, ‘Trump is the greatest president since Ronald Reagan.’ Then he said, ‘No, no, Trump is an even better president than Ronald Reagan.’ And now he’s got me down as the greatest president in the history of our country, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Thank you. We love you too.”When Trump sought to profit for his 2020 campaign by selling a gold-colored Trump-Reagan commemorative coin set, the Reagan Foundation sent him a curt letter, telling him to cease and desist. Trump has constantly retailed a false story about Reagan supposedly remarking after meeting him, “For the life of me, and I’ll never know how to explain it, when I met that young man, I felt like I was the one shaking hands with the president.” The chief administrative officer of the Reagan Foundation felt compelled to note that Reagan “did not ever say that about Donald Trump”.Trump’s petty, vindictive and exploitative abuse of the Bush presidents, McCain and Reagan pales in comparison to his raging obsessions about Lincoln. He has boasted his poll numbers are better than Lincoln’s ever were (true), claimed he is more a victim than the assassinated martyr (untrue), and declared he has done more for Black Americans than Lincoln (untrue).Trump, the would-be Great Emancipator and upholder of Confederate monuments, has lately ruminated about giving an address at Gettysburg. There are many such monuments there to the thousands of poor white southerners who gave their lives for the Slave Power and to overthrow the democracy of the United States. Perhaps, contemplating his last campaign, Trump could trudge across the rutted field of Pickett’s Charge. He might ask what his bikers and self-styled militia would be willing to do for him. What Lincoln consecrated, Trump would desecrate. But he would undoubtedly speak longer.Trump’s compulsive need to elevate himself as greater than the greatest president does not stand alone among strange statements about Lincoln from members of his inner circle. Some fancy that they too resemble Lincoln, alongside Trump. Some insist they are bravely fighting the civil war, on behalf of Trump. Some depict Trump as the reincarnation of Lincoln, to justify his dishonesty. Some summon Lincoln to claim God is on their side. The disconnect of these incoherent and eccentric gestures from any reality past or present is a telltale sign of terminal party identity. Each weird distortion marks the progress of Trump’s cancel culture, the eclipse of history bred by one-man misrule that is a half-cocked aspiration to an authoritarian system that might be codified by the likes of William Barr.Stephen Bannon, Trump’s now-indicted former campaign manager and senior adviser, appeared in a 2019 documentary about his post-White House crusade to organize an international neo-fascist alliance. The film opens with Bannon cradling a volume of Carl Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln. Bannon says portentously that it’s 1862. Then he reads Lincoln’s words: “They wish to get rid of me and I am sometimes half-disposed to gratify them. We are now on the brink of destruction. It appears to me the Almighty is against us and I can hardly see a ray of hope.” Lincoln’s “fiery trial” to preserve the union is reduced to Bannon’s dark apocalyptic mutterings against the forces conspiring against him and Trump: the “Deep State”, rootless cosmopolitans, globalists and liberal elites. We’re a long way from, as Lincoln said, “the last best hope of earth”.> Betsy DeVos's definition of freedom as 'what we ought', that is, what she determines, is more Orwellian than LincolnianIvanka Trump has turned to Lincoln for the occasional non-sequitur defense of her father. Her vacant voice and immobile expression augment the surprise effect of her inapt citations. After Attorney General Barr issued a deceptive characterization of the Mueller Report to mislead the public about its actual content, Ivanka rushed to support Barr’s falsehood. She tweeted a quote: “Truth is generally the best vindication against slander – Abraham Lincoln.” The difference between Barr and Lincoln was that Barr covered up the truth.During the impeachment inquiry into Trump’s withholding of nearly $400m in military aid to Ukraine, to coerce its government to launch an investigation that would smear Joe Biden with fabricated accusations of corruption, Ivanka leaped to protect her father. She claimed the incontrovertible facts were nothing but a partisan attack contrived to malign him, originating from a whistleblower within the intelligence community who was “not particularly relevant”.“Basically since the election,” she said, “this has been the experience that our administration and our family has been having. Rather than wait, under a year, until the people can decide for themselves based on his record and based on his accomplishments, this new effort has commenced.” Once again, she reached for Lincoln as her father’s model. “This has been the experience of most,” she observed with the sagacious tone of a student of history. “Abraham Lincoln was famously, even within his own cabinet, surrounded by people who were former political adversaries.” Ivanka’s smug confusion was complete. She had mistaken the whistleblower whose memo triggered the impeachment process with Lincoln’s “team of rivals”.On 23 January, Betsy DeVos, Trump’s secretary of education, a billionaire heiress and funder of rightwing causes, spoke at the Museum of the Bible in Washington to a group from the Colorado Christian University, to claim Lincoln as the imaginary leader for the anti-abortion movement.“He too contended with the ‘pro-choice’ arguments of his day,” she said. “They suggested that a state’s ‘choice’ to be slave or to be free had no moral question in it.” According to DeVos, women asserting their reproductive rights are engaged in a “vast moral evil”, equivalent to slavery.“Lincoln was right about slavery ‘choice’ then, and he would be right about the life ‘choice’ today,” she said. “Freedom is not about doing what we want. Freedom is about having the right to do what we ought.”DeVos’s mangling of Lincoln, who was an early advocate of women’s rights and suffrage but never said a word about abortion, is intended to legitimate the anti-abortion agenda of granting personhood rights to fetuses, which she and other zealots equate to enslaved African Americans. Her definition of freedom as “what we ought”, that is, what she determines, is more Orwellian than Lincolnian. Historically, claiming that law should be rooted in theological dogma is in the tradition of the southern theologians Lincoln condemned, who justified slavery by biblical references and divine sanction.Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president, a former rightwing radio host, travelled in January to Ripon, Wisconsin, site of the founding of the Republican party in 1854, garrulously to praise Trump as the true heir to Lincoln in “the advancement of our highest ideals”. Once again, Pence explained, we are at a “crossroads of freedom”. Trump, the Lincoln manqué, is all that stands between America and the threat of Joe Biden and “socialism and decline”. Months before the murder of George Floyd and the wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations that swept across the country, Pence charged, “Joe Biden believes America is, in his words, systemically racist. And despite historically low crime rates prior to this pandemic, Joe Biden believes that law enforcement in America has a, quote, ‘implicit bias’ against minorities.” In conclusion, the evangelical Pence declared, “The Bible says, ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom’, and “with President Donald Trump in the White House for four more years, we’ll make America great again, again.”In the long-ago days when there was only one “again”, during the 2016 campaign, Pence defended Trump’s shout-out to Vladimir Putin to hack and release Clinton campaign emails: “Russia if you’re listening …”“You know,” Pence explained, “Abraham Lincoln said, give the people the facts, and the republic will be saved. I mean, I think that’s the point that [Trump is] making. He’s not encouraging some foreign power to compromise the security of this country.” Bowdlerizing a dubiously sourced Lincoln quote, Pence portrayed Trump as the simple protector of facts and denied he was “encouraging” Russian intervention. Pence’s statement was a cover-up in real time. We now know from the Senate intelligence committee report that Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political operative and dirty trickster, was directly in touch with Trump on the theft of the Clinton emails by Russian intelligence and their release by WikiLeaks. To quote Marx – Groucho – “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” If Trump has a faithful servant, it is Mike Pence.Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state and yet another evangelical crusader, has raised Lincoln to justify his own brand of dogma. In a speech entitled “Being a Christian Leader”, to the American Association of Christian Counselors at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel at Nashville on 11 October, he explained how God directs him to be humble, forgiving and thrifty.“I know some people in the media will break out the pitchforks when they hear that I ask God for direction in my work,” he said. “But you should know, as much as I’d like to claim originality, it is not a new idea. I love this quote from President Lincoln. He said … quote, ‘I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.’”Unfortunately, in their Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, the historians Don and Virginia Fehrenbacher rate the words Pompeo spoke with a grade D: in other words, bogus. Lincoln is in fact recorded to have referred to “knees” only three times, all involving jokes. The Fehrenbachers also give a D to another well-used “Lincoln” quotation: “You can fool all the people some of the time; you can fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior adviser, originator of the Muslim ban and separating migrant children from their families, author of the cancel culture speech at Mount Rushmore, is impatient for the apocalypse. Observing the protests at Portland before the federal courthouse that were met with a show of armed force, Miller went on Tucker Carlson Tonight to explain why this was Fort Sumter.“The Democratic party for a long time historically has been the party of secession,” he said. “What you’re seeing today is the Democratic party returning to its roots.”In his compact and inverted analogy, the protest against police violence was a battle in a new civil war and the ragtag shifting bands of protesters including the “Wall of Moms” were the restoration of the pro-secession Southern Democratic party, which would of course transform Trump into Lincoln. The identity of the enemy may change – Muslims, Mexicans or Moms – but Miller is prepared to draw the sword for whatever clash of civilization may come. He’s just not prepared for a virus.During his 2016 campaign, Trump plagiarized not only Reagan’s slogan, “Make America Great Again”, but also Nixon’s appeal to “the silent majority”. He also boasted: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Trump’s attorney, asked about “the Fifth Avenue example” by the judge presiding in the case of the Manhattan district attorney seeking Trump’s tax returns, argued that Trump would have legal immunity if he killed somebody.Since March, more than 170,000 Americans – the New York Times estimates more than 200,000 – have died of coronavirus. On 20 June, Trump kicked off his campaign with a rally at Tulsa. Campaign workers tore stickers off the seats that encouraged social distancing. In the sparse but closely packed crowd sat Herman Cain, proudly grinning, not wearing a mask. For a brief moment in 2012 the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza and fast-talking Tea Party advocate had been the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. Disillusioned after he quit the race when accused of sexual harassment, he called for a third party. Then came Trump.For 2020, the man who said his Secret Service code name as president would be “Cornbread” became chairman of Black Voices For Trump. A month later, he was dead of coronavirus. Cain would miss his speaking slot at the Republican convention. He had joined what the ancient Greeks called “the silent majority”. Yet 20 days after Cain’s death, on 19 August, his Twitter account posted Trump’s latest ad: “Boy, it sure looks like Joe Biden is losing his mental faculties.” In death, nobody, not even Mike Pence, could claim greater devotion to the party of Trump. * Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth

Republican pundits accept success of Biden’s convention address as Trump’s bid to portray Democratic rival as radical leftist falls flat * Iowa: Trump clings to narrow lead as Biden closes inUnder pressure on the last day of the Democratic convention, Joe Biden “hit a home run” with an “enormously effective” speech that blew “a big hole” in Donald Trump’s efforts to paint him as a mentally faltering captive of his party’s left wing.And that was to hear Fox News hosts Dana Perino and Chris Wallace tell it.“It was a very good speech,” added Karl Rove, a Republican strategist respected and reviled on either side of the aisle.Democratic hopes were riding high that when Biden rose to accept the presidential nomination on Thursday night, he might deliver the kind of speech to get voters nodding their heads instead of nodding off, and cable pundits talking about “momentum”.Broadcast to tens of millions, Biden’s speech marked the first truly national moment of the 2020 campaign, with the formal conclusion of the Democratic primary on one hand, and the first clear picture of the presidential showdown – Biden v Trump, Uncle Joe v Maga Don – on the other.At a minimum, Democrats hoped, Biden would avoid the kind of verbal slips the Trump campaign has been using eagerly, if ironically given their own candidate’s cha-chas with incoherence, to attack him.But when Biden was done speaking on Thursday in Wilmington, Delaware, with one arm around Dr Jill Biden, fireworks in the background and his smile as wide as the country, Democrats were not alone in realizing that their nominee had not only connected – he had nailed it.“I went in there with expectations of adequate, and he knocked it out of the park,” said longtime Republican strategist Mike Murphy, a harsh Trump critic, on an overnight podcast Hacks on Tap. “It was so authentic to who Biden is, and … it caught the mood of the country, which is unity, steady, competence, ‘We can rise above this’.“I thought Biden had the moment of his life, and he ought to feel really good about that.”Trump sought to steal Biden’s big moment with campaign stops outside Biden’s home town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, that afternoon. After a speech at an airstrip the president visited a pizza parlor, where he was filmed hoisting a pie, without a face mask, as staff members, all wearing masks, snapped photos and waved excitedly.“They supposedly have the best pizza,” Trump told reporters. “We’ll let you know in about a half-hour.”Alert on Friday morning to a need to nip Biden’s moment in the bud, the Trump campaign deployed Vice-President Mike Pence on five morning shows, where he argued that Biden, a known quantity in Washington for 50 years, was a lurking socialist.“It’s a choice between President Trump’s record and agenda of freedom and opportunity, versus a Democrat agenda driven by the radical left and Joe Biden’s vision that will result in socialism and decline for America,” Pence told Fox News.In reply to criticism by Biden of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, Pence demonstrated the extraordinary ability of the two parties to talk past one another.“The president keeps telling us the virus is going to disappear,” Biden said in his speech. “He keeps waiting for a miracle. Well, I have news for him, no miracle is coming.”Pence told CNN: “We think there is a miracle around the corner.”The biggest near-term opportunity for Trump and Republicans to draw a contrast with Biden will be through their own convention, which is scheduled to begin on Monday with more in-person, physical elements than the all-virtual Democratic event.Controversially, Trump plans to accept the nomination on the grounds of the White House on Thursday, in apparent violation of laws requiring that political campaigning be kept separate from the conduct of office.The president and vice-president are exempt from the law, but broad party participation in such a major campaign event is inevitable. Trump has invited most Republican lawmakers (though not Senator Mitt Romney, who voted for his impeachment and removal from office) to the White House lawn to watch his speech. The campaign plans to set off fireworks on the National Mall.Unlike Democrats, Republicans also plan to convene delegates in-person in Charlotte, North Carolina. Trump had unconfirmed plans to visit the 336 delegates on Monday, although the Democratic governor of the state has led an effort to ensure that Republicans abide by public health guidelines.“We were not going to let the governor’s partisan politics come between us and our commitment to North Carolina,” Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee – and Romney’s niece – told the New York Times.That commitment had wavered. Trump announced earlier this summer that the convention would be moved to Florida, where a Republican governor had proposed no coronavirus restrictions. A large Covid-19 outbreak in that state returned the event to Charlotte.With the force of his speech on Thursday night, Biden, 77, was seen as implicitly rebutting Trump’s accusation that he had lost a step. But Biden’s rebuttal of Trump’s other attack – that the former vice-president and six-term senator is a Trojan horse for the terrors of “socialism” – was explicit.“While I will be a Democratic candidate, I will be an American president,” Biden said. “I will work as hard for those who didn’t support me as I will for those who did. That’s the job of a president. To represent all of us, not just our base or our party.”Biden appeared to have won some converts. “Joe wows critics,” the Drudge Report, usually a clearinghouse for the most astringent conservative messaging, exclaimed on Friday morning.Its banner headline? “Biden Barn Burner”.

The crisis at the Postal Service has been building and accelerating for months with virtually no official response. Over the past two weeks, however, it reached a crescendo that even the country’s remarkably confrontation-averse opposition party could not ignore. In a matter of days, overwhelming grassroots pressure pushed House Democrats from seemingly having no plan to executing a rapid return to Washington, D.C., getting a hearing with the postmaster general on the calendar for next week and winning a promise from Louis DeJoy to cease operational changes until after the election. But, despite these early wins, protecting the USPS will require a steadfast commitment to seeing concessions implemented and getting to the bottom of this woeful series of events to make sure the caucus doesn’t lose its resolve, it’s essential that we keep up the pressure through the November finish line and beyond. In 2018, Democrats promised that, if propelled to a House majority, they would take on Trump. But it wasn’t long before it became clear that their actions in office would fall far short of their campaign trail promises. Starting from Rep. Richard Neal’s initial failure to request Trump’s tax returns through to pursuit of the narrowest possible impeachment strategy, Democratic leadership failed to deliver. Up until just a few days ago, the Postal Service story was shaping up to be a repeat of this lackluster oversight pattern.Within weeks of the pandemic’s onset, the Postal Service was warning that lower mail volumes put it at risk of collapse by summer. As we argued at the time, Democratic lawmakers had enormous leverage to protect elections and the USPS, and provide much-needed relief in March. With stock markets (and thus, the rich) a mess along with the real economy, Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump needed Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.In the blink of an eye, however, Democratic leadership traded postal service relief away at Trump’s insistence. Funds wouldn’t surface again in proposed legislation until May, by which time Democrats’ leverage was gone. With the stock market still flying high (thanks in part to the CARES Act’s generous corporate relief measures), it’s unclear when Democrats will have negotiating power again. In the meantime, the situation at USPS has only grown more dire. The little help that the CARES Act provided to the Postal Service—a $10 billion loan—ran through the Treasury Department. Predictably, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin leveraged the funds to extract concessions. In June, Trump appointed Louis DeJoy, a major GOP donor, as postmaster general. He quickly set about shifting the agency’s priorities and upending usual practice. Before long, reports of protracted delays began surfacing across the country.Over the last couple of weeks, the steady drip of bad news has become a flood. DeJoy oversaw a worrying organizational shakeup, reassigning or displacing 23 postal service executives, including two who managed day-to-day operations. Mail sorting machines in several distribution centers are being dismantled and sold, limiting the service’s capacity to rapidly sort flat mail (like absentee ballots). In Oregon and Montana, envelope collection boxes are being picked up and hauled away. Oregon, notably, votes entirely by mail. On Friday, we learned that the USPS has warned states that mail-in ballots in 46 states may not arrive in time to be counted. For those still unconvinced by this mountain of evidence, President Trump spelled out the logic of these attacks and his stubborn opposition to Postal Service funding last Thursday: “They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots. If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.” And just two days later he warned, almost gleefully, that problems with mail-in voting could delay November’s election result for “months” or even “years.”This is a direct, undisguised assault on the basic democratic process. Yet, until this weekend, Speaker Pelosi leaned almost exclusively on standard tactics to respond, issuing sternly-worded statements that seemingly seek to appeal to the president’s still hidden (after four years!) sense of decency. This is how one plays against a political opponent who is negotiating in good faith, not a would-be demagogue dismantling the very process of democratic elections. For months, other members of the caucus seemingly toed leadership’s line.But, over the last few days, as the crisis spiraled further and further out of control, a rebellion was brewing. From the grassroots up through the Democratic caucus, people who had long been willing to trust Pelosi’s lead were fed up. Major people-powered organizations demanded action, pushed calls into members’ offices and poured out into the streets, including in front of Postmaster General DeJoy’s home. In turn, Democratic House members from the left to the center grew more strident in their calls for action and creative oversight tactics.  This pressure worked. After days of unacceptable dithering, Pelosi agreed on Sunday night to re-gavel the House into session to confront the USPS crisis. She also greenlit an “emergency” Oversight Committee hearing with DeJoy and USPS Board of Governors Chairman Robert Duncan for next week. Facing credible threats from newly rebellious members to issue subpoenas and deploy the Sergeant-at-Arms in the case they’re ignored, DeJoy has already agreed to appear. Tuesday, he went a step further, promising to suspend operational changes until after the election to avoid “the appearance of any impact on election mail.”These wins are consequential but they shouldn’t blind USPS’ valiant defenders to the need to keep the pressure on. A promise to end the operational overhauls does not necessarily mean that it will be implemented, nor that harmful changes already enacted will be reversed. To win this battle, House Democrats are going to need to be pushed to take up the fight on multiple fronts. Oversight must press full steam ahead with its investigation by, for example, issuing subpoenas to any and all potential sources for information on the ongoing disaster. Democrats can start with the other members of the USPS Board of Governors, an independent, bipartisan body with six sitting appointees (four Republicans and two Democrats), including Chairman Duncan, who voted to approve DeJoy’s appointment. Members are insulated from the president’s influence by measures that protect them from firing, except “for cause.” That raises the question: why would the governors, even the president’s co-partisans, go along with the plan to install the obviously unsuitable DeJoy? Their role in this should not be lost.In addition, hearings with Postal Service workers, local election officials, and any other relevant players would elicit consequential information about the shape and scope of the threat. Members are seeking out this information as we speak—on Saturday night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used her Instagram story to encourage postal workers to describe the changes they were seeing on the ground. Such inquiries are likely to be even more consequential with the weight of the oversight committee (of which Ocasio-Cortez is a member) behind them. These hearings should begin this week, not in a month. And they should not end until USPS’ operational integrity and election security have been achieved.Several lawmakers have called for the postmaster general to resign or be removed. But Democrats shouldn’t be waiting for Trump or DeJoy to act. If they’re worried about his fitness for office, whether because of his leadership or his blatant conflicts of interest, they should open an impeachment inquiry to dig deeper. Even after DeJoy’s reversal Tuesday, it’s essential that House members get to the bottom of the operational changes (and any ongoing problems). These committees represent the natural first lines of defense but the full caucus will need to provide reinforcements if they want to have any hope of success. Last fall, Speaker Pelosi tried a different strategy, explicitly closing impeachment proceedings off from the rest of the caucus’ work. Even as the White House refused to provide any cooperation, House Democrats acceded to demands for appropriations, thus trading away any leverage they had to compel compliance. This time around, House Democrats cannot let a cent out the door until Postal Service funding and operational integrity have been assured (along with aid to states to ensure they can implement necessary changes to their voting systems). With the fate of another relief bill uncertain and government spending set to expire at the end of September, this could not be more important. Drawing this clear line in the sand will also signal to states and localities that reimbursement later for outlays on election infrastructure now are a near certainty, thereby incentivizing earlier preparations. (States that wait until a budget or continuing resolution is passed in, say, October, will struggle to prepare no matter the volume of aid provided.) While congressional Democrats wait for their colleagues across the aisle to cave, they can keep passing a package with the necessary funds for USPS and voting to ensure their priorities are at the top of the American public’s mind (no, no one outside of the Beltway remembers that the HEROES Act exists, let alone what’s in it).Members can also look to the indirect convening and organizing authorities that come along with being a federal politician. They can, for example, meet with state and local officials to develop other creative strategies. They can also call upon figures from both sides of the aisle, from ex-military commanders to former presidents, to lend public support to the caucus’ efforts to safeguard the election. And speaking of the presidency, Biden and Harris must make clear that in case the election is bent but not broken, any lawbreakers from Trump and DeJoy on down will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. That could influence the risk/reward calculations of key figures in this attack on democracy. But even if they can be convinced to do all this and more, House Democrats need to also prepare for the possibility of a contested election this fall. A statement of standards that outlines scenarios in which they would judge a broken election illegitimate and details responses in each case, will lessen the degree to which they can be accused of establishing post-hoc metrics. Perhaps just as importantly, such a step would signal to the American public that lawmakers recognize the gravity of the situation. After over a year and a half of hoping otherwise, millions have seemingly come to the hard realization that Democratic leadership is not going to save us from Trump of its own volition. Only with overwhelming pressure will House Democrats rise to the occasion. As the number of days before the election dwindle and many lawmakers inevitably gravitate back towards their habitual complacency, it is essential that we keep the pressure on. Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Former diplomats from both sides of the aisle presented a unified case against President Trump on Tuesday at the Democratic National Convention.The DNC's second night featured a whole section focused on presidential nominee Joe Biden's foreign policy experience and Trump's apparent lack of it. Former Secretary of State John Kerry kicked off the diplomatic smackdown, a selection of former foreign service officials came next, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell — a lifelong Republican — finished the segment with a dose of bipartisanship.In his address, Kerry, a former presidential nominee himself, delivered an excoriating rebuke of Trump's diplomatic record — or his "blooper reel," as Kerry called it. "Donald Trump pretends Russia didn’t attack our elections. And now, he does nothing about Russia putting a bounty on our troops," Kerry said, declaring "the only person he's interested in defending is himself."A video montage followed featuring a number of career foreign service officials, including Marie Yovanovitch, whom Trump removed as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Yovanovitch, who testified against Trump in his impeachment trial, went more positive on Biden than negative on Trump, saying Biden would "do the right thing, no matter the cost."Then came Powell, who served under former President George W. Bush.He praised Biden's "values," and then declared "we are a country divided, and we have a president doing everything in his power to make it that way and keep us that way."More stories from theweek.com 5 brutally funny cartoons about Trump's assault on the Post Office Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slams NBC News for 'totally false and divisive' clickbait on her DNC speech Joe Biden is already planning a failed presidency

Few things could have actually enlivened the funereal proceedings that were the second night of this year’s virtual Democratic National Convention. But one thing that might have gone a long way in that direction was hearing from Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, the one 2020 primary candidate who was awarded delegates but not given a speaking role.It is strange to think that only four years ago Gabbard was still considered a rising star in the Democratc Party. At the DNC in 2016, it was Gabbard who was chosen to nominate Sen. Bernie Sanders as the official second-place finisher in the delegate tally, the role taken on Tuesday night by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.These days Gabbard is a pariah in her party. There are some fairly obvious reasons for this. Not only did she tear apart Kamala Harris' record as a prosecutor during last year's debates; she also voted against one of the articles of impeachment against President Trump back in February. Like most principled critics of America's foreign policy, her lack of interest in knee-jerk partisanship has done her no favors.Foreign policy is a topic about which we've heard little so far at this year’s convention. If nothing else, Tuesday night's endorsements from John Kerry, Cindy McCain, and Colin Powell served as a reminder that a Biden administration would be committed to the same interventionism that left us with an unwinnable war in Afghanistan and perhaps the most geographically expansive refugee crisis in human history in North Africa and the Middle East.Tulsi is not the only former Democratic presidential candidate who would have made Tuesday night better television. I would have paid $50 for a pay-per-view convention in order to hear Marianne Williamson talk about the power of love.More stories from theweek.com Jill Biden and Michelle Obama used their DNC speeches to appeal to voters who hate politics Women's skydiving group marks 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment with special jump Bill Clinton is getting sidelined at the DNC

Sen. Kamala Harris reacts to the use of the term ‘lynching’ by former Vice President Joe Biden to describe the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998.

Even before last week's intelligence assessment on foreign election interference, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson was facing criticism from Democrats that his investigation of presidential candidate Joe Biden and Ukraine was politically motivated and advancing Russian interests. The investigation is unfolding as the country, months removed from an impeachment case that had centered on Ukraine, is dealing with a pandemic and confronting the issue of racial injustice.

It's been more than a year since the Trump administration blocked House Democrats' attempt to secure testimony from former White House Counsel Don McGahn, a pivotal figure in the Mueller investigation. At the time, it appeared to be what former U.S. attorney Preet Bharara called a "stalling tactic," and a way for the Trump administration to "run out the clock" to a point where McGahn's testimony didn't matter anymore.Indeed, President Trump's impeachment trial came and went without a word from McGahn. And even though U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled Friday that the House could enforce its subpoena against McGahn, dissenting judges in the case acknowledged that the House's chances of hearing from McGahn soon are "vanishingly slim."Barb McQuade, a professor at the University of Michigan's law school, said in a tweet it was clear that Trump still "wins by losing" in this case. The House still has to formally sue McGahn, "causing further delay," McQuade continued. "Trump's bad faith stall game needs to be called out and the rules changed to defeat it," McQuade continued. Harvard University law professor Laurence Tribe echoed McQuade's sentiment, tweeting that McGahn's case was sure to continue past Trump's term. And Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who led the impeachment hearings, called on Congress to make sure McGahn's subpoena stalling never happened again. > Another court victory: Trump's former White House counsel Don McGahn must testify before Congress.> > But it's been over a year since he was subpoenaed--exactly what Trump wanted.> > We must reform the law to expedite Congressional subpoenas so no president can run out the clock. https://t.co/aeAPewazMZ> > -- Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) August 7, 2020More stories from theweek.com Trump's latest fundraising attempt is reportedly a Facebook scam against his own supporters Biden campaign reportedly making 'ruthless cuts' to convention speaking list The case against American truck bloat

The impeachment of President Trump brought the former Orlando police chief and her oratory skills to a national audience; Douglas Kennedy reports.