Bob Woodward interviewed Donald Trump back in January and February and now tells us that, way back then, Trump realized that the coronavirus was not only quite deadly and would infect even children, but also was airborne and highly contagious.

Let us not forget on this day that we memorialize the people lost on 9/11, that, because Donald Trump lied to us about the severity of this virus, we are today losing two 9/11's worth of Americans every single week...

-Thom

Our country, at the beginning of this year, faced four major threats: Climate change, COVID-19, Russian election meddling, and a worldwide nuclear arms race.

Donald Trump lied to us about all four of them. As a result, each, today, represents a larger threat than it did before he became president and hundreds of thousands of Americans have or soon will die because of his lies.

Big business in America has informed the Republican party that their top priority is making sure that if they essentially force people back to work, provide them with a workplace lacking protections against the coronavirus, or negligently expose their customers to coronavirus, there will be no way to hold them legally responsible.

The cover story of the December 2019 edition of The Atlantic magazine, founded itself in the years just before the Civil War, was ominously titled, "How to Stop a Civil War."

If we are, indeed, on the brink of a second Civil War, it's already being waged as a "cold war," with the occasional armed skirmish being provoked by the so-called Alt-Right movement, which, as of summer, 2020, had murdered thousands of Americans since Tim McVeigh kicked off the modern "boogaloo" white supremacy era.

Last night in Portland, as the winds kicked up to 50 miles an hour, our sky turned a dark golden brown and the air filled with smoke. California is getting all the national news coverage, but the reality is that wildfires have consumed virtually every western state this summer.

This is what early-stage global warming looks like.

So, our president committed a felony yesterday, right out in the open, encouraging Republican voters in North Carolina to vote twice. That's a felony, and encouraging people to commit a felony is a felony.

Typically he commits his crimes in somewhat less visible fashion, but this is a man clearly comfortable with committing crimes.

The Guardian is reporting that Trump's Postmaster Louis DeJoy basically ripped off his brother to steal the company they had inherited from their father. Sort of like the way The New York Times reported that Donald Trump and his brother Robert conspired to rip off their brother Fred's estate and commit massive tax fraud by illegally stealing hundreds of millions of dollars out of their dad's estate.

These rich men who inherited their wealth from their parents and then turned into, essentially, monsters are the best evidence we need for a meaningful estate tax.

Donald Trump has told us that only 9000 people have died of the coronavirus in the United States, that shooting an unarmed man in the back seven times is like a bad putt at golf, that protests are being led by an airplane full of black-jacketed "thugs," and refused to condemn a vicious murderer who killed two people and blew the arm off a third. Now, he is threatening the Mayor of Portland with federal troops again.

Which raises the question, is this the America the majority of voters want to live in?

George W. Bush had 9/11, and Adolf Hitler had the burning of the Reichstag. In both cases, an attack on the nation brought people together behind their leader.

White nationalists, including those embedded in police departments, have been attacking Black Lives Matter protestors in high profile ways the last few months, and Donald Trump is hoping it will help him. Over the weekend, both Kellyanne Conway and Laura Trump said as much, even implying that people being killed in the streets is good for Donald Trump.

The first job of a president is to be the president for all Americans. To bring people together. Like Lincoln talked about in the Gettysburg address, to bind our wounds and heal us.

Donald Trump just guaranteed more Americans will die.

Trump has been saying for some time that he wishes there was less testing for coronavirus in America, because that would reduce the number of cases that we find, which would improve, in his mind, his numbers compared to other countries.

As I pointed out in my book "The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment," the reason the Second Amendment was written and passed was to protect the slave patrols of Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia.

In most cases, the slave patrols were volunteer vigilante groups, drawing from the population of local farmers and other white people whose economic survival depended on the larger plantations.

The Republican convention's first day was filled with sturm und drang, warnings and fear, hysteria and demagoguery. And what were they so concerned about?

The largest fear seems to be that Black people would move into the suburbs, with Black Senator Cory Booker telling them which white houses to take over.