On Friday, OPEC-the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries-which includes Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq, met in Austria and proposed to cut oil production to stabilize prices. Oil prices have been dropping as the coronavirus has weakened economies and slowed demand. And then a friend in Ukraine alerted me to the night’s news. When asked to speculate on why the Russians are backing both Trump and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, she said, “What the Russians are looking for is the two candidates who are kind of the polar opposites… So that it exacerbates… the polarization in the country.”īut Hill didn’t say much new that would shed light on the weird meme. Tonight, she reiterated that Putin was deliberately pitting the extremes of American society against the great middle to tear us apart and destroy democracy. In her testimony before Congress, Hill warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin was attacking our elections. Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Arizona Representative Paul Gosar are in self-quarantine after shaking hands with someone who tested positive for the novel coronavirus at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, last weekend.Īs I wondered, I listened tonight to Leslie Stahl’s interview on 60 Minutes with Russia expert Fiona Hill, who served on Trump’s National Security Council and testified in the impeachment hearings about the Trump administration’s plot to get Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Joe and his son Hunter Biden. death toll rose to 21 today and the total number of cases is over 530. State Department warning older people not to take cruises. Did they mean that Trump would fiddle while the coronavirus burned? News on the coronavirus front has been bad all day, with Italy quarantining millions of people and the U.S. It’s entirely likely that Trump did not understand the reference, and it’s even possible that Scavino didn’t. The image clearly depicted Trump as the murderous Roman emperor Nero, fiddling while Rome burned. And then Trump retweeted it with the comment, “Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me!” Dan Scavino, Trump’s director of social media, tweeted an image of Trump playing a violin, with the meme: “My next piece is called… nothing can stop what’s coming.” That meme-nothing can stop what’s coming- is common among the QAnon crowd. Today, there was a tweet that has had me on edge all day.

In September 2019, the story that the chair of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff had written an angry letter to acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire telling him to turn over the whistleblower’s complaint as the law required-that is, a story about a leading congressman charging a member of the executive branch with breaking the law- made me sit up and take such notice that I began these Letters From an American.

In July 2016, in the midst of an angry nomination season, I sat up and took notice of the story that Russia was interfering in that year’s election. Nothing that stands out, that is, until something does, like a child’s bright plastic dump truck in that mix, or a live cod leaping out of the mud. I often think of it as the mixture that comes out of cement truck: lots of gray muck flowing fast, but while there are individual granules, there is nothing that stands out. As a political historian, I am accustomed to seeing a lot of political news, even political news that riles other people up, as run-of-the-mill, not worth noticing.

Ukraine president ted cruz meme