Good morning. 
Labor Day in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of seventy-four. Sunrise is 6:27 AM and sunset 7:17 PM, for 12h 49m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 76.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand three hundred ninety-ninth day.
On this day in 1776, according to American colonial reports, Ezra Lee makes the world’s first submarine attack in the Turtle, attempting to attach a time bomb to the hull of HMS Eagle in New York Harbor.
Recommended for reading in full —
Michael Kranish reports Trump, under fire for alleged comments about veterans, has a long history of disparaging military service:
Long before Trump’s views of the military would emerge as a flash point in his 2020 reelection campaign — before he would shock the political world with the more widely seen 2015 attack on McCain, in which he said the senator was “not a war hero” and declared, “I like people who weren’t captured” — Trump had a long track record of incendiary and disparaging remarks about veterans and military service.<
Many of his remarks are memorialized in television interviews and the tapes of radio conversations with shock jocks, dating to his years as a private citizen and businessman.
Trump, who avoided military service by citing a bone spur in his foot, has disparaged veterans who were wounded or captured or went missing in action and even compared his fear of sexually transmitted diseases to the experience of a soldier, saying in 1993, “if you’re young, and in this era, and if you have any guilt about not having gone to Vietnam, we have our own Vietnam. It’s called the dating game.”
It is a history filled with contradictions, of a man who denigrates his handpicked generals while saying no one supports the military more than he does, and of a commander in chief who questions the bravery of some soldiers even as he reversed disciplinary action against a Navy SEAL over the objections of Pentagon officials. He was raised in a family that criticized the value of military service, according to niece Mary L. Trump, but nonetheless he was sent to a military academy for most of his teenage years.
Catherine Rampell writes Standard metrics won’t suffice. Here’s how to measure Trump’s failures so they register:
Maybe what’s needed are different units for measuring the Trump administration’s failures and scandals, since the standard metrics aren’t registering. His record should be quantified in scales that a Fox News viewer might be more familiar with: not body counts or dollars, but Benghazis and Solyndras.
For instance, sometimes pundits try to put the 183,000 covid-19 deaths in context by noting that cumulative deaths per capita in the United States are double those of Canada, quintuple those of Germany, 20 times those of Australia, 90 times those of South Korea, and so on.
But let’s be real: Lots of Americans don’t care about international comparisons. So here’s a different way to contextualize this national trauma: The number of lives lost to covid-19 is roughly equal to the death toll of 60 9/11 attacks.
Or, if you’d prefer a more recent ghoulish reference for quantifying mortality, the coronavirus death toll is about 46,000 Benghazis. Somehow, for years, the four tragic deaths in Benghazi consumed the agenda of six GOP-controlled congressional committees and the programming of the most-watched cable news channel. But today, a deadly shock magnified by government ineptitude that has led to 46,000 times as many lives lost “is what it is.“
Does this whole “Trump hates the military” reveal seem exquisitely serendipitously timed? And pretty seriously sourced, as well? Multiple sources are talking to anyone that will listen, including FOX! Trump is denying it all and calling it a hoax, but that is his default position, and does nothing to refute the claims.
It sure appears like a military coup is being staged against Trump. At the very least it is a large-caliber shot across his bow to not plan on them backing him, should the Boogaloo come. It seems to be a well-coordinated and well-timed campaign to both discredit Trump among the active military, and particularly veterans, and make it much less likely that they will join any Trump insurrection.
Kinda seems like a September Surprise to me…
A message now, perhaps, to let him know that they’ll not support any call he might issue for the military to support a coup on his behalf (a call that would come publicly after November 3rd and before January 20th). Trump’s evident desperation grows greater each month, as a consequence of his own negligence: hundreds of thousands dead, an economy he cannot adequately repair, appeals to racial animosity that are both immoral and ineffective at securing him majority support.
Interesting Twitter thread from Nate Cohn on Trump’s fumbling strategy to appeal to Midwestern whites: https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1302983042567475201
Trump’s chances of winning the election legitimately (after four years as incumbent, notably) are poor. Yet norms of legitimacy don’t matter to Trump, so institutional signals to him now that he will not have their support for illegitimate acts may lessen the chances (by some unknown amount) of disorder from November to January.
But one cannot doubt that he’ll grasp at any straw rather than accept the crushing verdict of a free people that awaits him.