Perhaps Trump's wild lie last weekend that 99% of coronavirus cases are "totally harmless" wasn't a surprise at this point—the man lies about everything and has an exceedingly estranged relationship with objective reality. But watching White House chief of staff Mark Meadows enthusiastically defend the claim revealed just how depraved Trump’s cronies in the administration have become.

Asked whether Trump had simply been generalizing on Fox News Monday, Meadows refused to take that somewhat face-saving out, instead defending Trump's lie with gusto. “I don’t even know it’s a generalization,” Meadows said, adding, “The vast majority of people are safe from this" and "the facts and the statistics back us up there."

No, they don't. It's a bald-faced, life-and-death lie, told with zero compunction or concern for the people Meadows might be leading to their death beds.

Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, retweeted Meadows appearance, saying bluntly, "This messaging will kill people." Tanden added, "I am healthy, under 50, exercise regularly, and this virus hit me for 6 weeks."

Still, Meadows continued pushing his lethal lie with White House reporters. "A lot of these cases are asymptomatic," he said, claiming the 99% figure came from "actual numbers" and adding, "You can look at numbers a number of different ways."

In other words, we're sticking with our alternative facts despite the death and destruction they will surely perpetuate as the coronavirus rips through the country. Indeed, Friday marked the seventh day in the last 11 of record-setting new infection rates nationwide.

But wait, it gets sicker. The Washington Post would also report Monday that the White House goal was to "convince Americans they can live with virus," rather than mounting any concerted effort to stop or mitigate its spread. In fact, the entire White House strategy was to let the pandemic so wildly ravage the country that the data would start to feel meaningless to the electorate, and they'd simply get used to the threat.

White House officials also hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day, according to three people familiar with the White House’s thinking,

Seriously, what kind of dystopian hellscape produces this kind of "thinking"? Only one that is overrun with sociopaths.

But this misanthropic depravity clearly doesn't just start and stop at the White House doors, it has seeped into the DNA of the entire party just the way the sociopathy of Trump's father, Fred Trump, rained down on his family.

Witness Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst claiming last Sunday that Trump has been "stepping forward" on the pandemic in response to a question about 130,000 Americans already dying on his watch. When just 2 Americans died during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, Ernst had said Barack Obama exhibited "failed leadership." But Trump and his cronies intentionally marching more Americans to their graves is apparently "stepping forward." Keep in mind, Ernst gave that response just one day after Trump declared COVID-19 "99%" safe for the public.

But Ernst isn't the exception, she's the rule. Her response is emblematic of an entire conspiracy among Senate Republicans to explicitly avoid drawing the wrath of Trump in pursuit of maintaining their majority.

In a closed-door party lunch last week, veteran GOP pollster Frank Luntz advised Republican senators not to disavow the president, but to put some daylight between themselves and Trump, according to two people familiar with his presentation

The idea is for them to subtly signal their independence on issues that play well back home without ever upsetting madman Trump or his acolytes. Senate Republicans up for reelection this cycle need the votes of his loyal supporters too badly to risk losing them, so instead of taking a decisive and moral stand against Trump’s dangerous disinformation, they're trying to win over independents and swing voters with a trail of breadcrumbs.

“The sweet spot is finding real ways to show your independence and to do it in ways that don’t antagonize the base,” Republican strategist Matt Gorman, vice president at the consulting firm Targeted Victory, told the Post.

In other words, the "sweet spot" is standing silently by while Trump and his top lieutenants lead Americans to slaughter in some sort of wicked frog-in-boiling-water scheme.

That's what's left of the Republican party—silence in the face of death to achieve one's own ends. Sociopaths—all of them—from the White House to the lawmakers to the strategists. It's one big sick family made in the image of the sociopath in chief, Trump.

As for the wrongness of the Court’s decision, the most persuasive argument I’ve read was authored by one of its own members, in dissent. Here’s Justice Elena Kagan:

For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities. And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people.

[snip] And gerrymandering is, as so many Justices have emphasized before,  anti-democratic in the most profound sense….And that means, as Alexander Hamilton once said, “that the people should choose whom they please to govern them.” 2 Debates on the Constitution 257 (J. Elliot ed. 1891). But in Maryland and North Carolina they cannot do  so. In Maryland, election in and election out, there are  7 Democrats and 1 Republican in the congressional delegation. In North Carolina, however the political winds blow, there are 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats. Is it conceivable that someday voters will be able to break out of that prefabricated box?  Sure. But everything possible has been done to make that hard. To create a world in which power does not flow from the people because they do not choose their governors.

Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one.   The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections.

Beyond her broad rhetoric, as powerful as it is, Kagan also got into the details of why the majority’s decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, made no sense. Roberts wrote: “We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” Why? Because, he stated: “There are no legal standards discernible in the Constitution for making such judgments … let alone limited and precise standards that are clear, manageable and politically neutral.”

Roberts is simply wrong, as Kagan made clear:

Checking [extreme cases of gerrymandering] is not beyond the courts. The majority’s abdication comes just when courts across the country,including those below, have coalesced around manageable judicial standards to resolve partisan gerrymandering claims. Those standards satisfy the majority’s own benchmarks.

In other words, the majority claimed there’s no way to come up with a fair process to assess whether a gerrymander is unfair, even though lower courts have already done so. Kagan called the majority out for simply not wanting to. She didn’t speculate as to the reason why the five conservative justices took this position, as that would be beneath a justice of the Supreme Court. It’s not beneath me, so I’ll just say it: It’s the same partisan bullshit we saw 19 years ago when a conservative Supreme Court majority elevated George W. Bush to the presidency.

Please read Kagan’s entire masterful dissent, as I can’t spend the whole post going over it line by line. Trust me, it’s worth it.

Gerrymandering is an important issue, and it’s far from the only one that relates to defending real elections. We don’t have real elections in this country if there is voter suppression (which can take many different forms, starting with bogus, unnecessary voter ID laws that have a discriminatory impact); or if some voting districts in poor, disproportionately minority areas are given fewer resources to work with than others (something done purposefully to create long lines on Election Day that lead some to abandon voting altogether); or if voter rolls are purged in unfair and arbitrary ways aimed at disproportionately affecting black and brown voters. All of these things are happening. Where they have the raw numbers to pull it off, Republicans have combined them with gerrymandering to deny Americans the ability to have real elections.

I’d like to see Republicans successfully convince independent voters that they should vote for a party that wants to ensure that only Republicans should be in charge, forever. Gerrymandering is not only wrong in principle, because it threatens our democracy, it’s a political loser because it’s indefensible. For example, as unprincipled as it is to do so, Republicans can maybe get away with lies about the need for Voter ID laws, or the need to purge voter rolls to prevent fraud, but what lie can they tell to justify gerrymandering?

We know the truth, because we heard it from Rep. David Lewis, a North Carolina Republican who played a leading role in gerrymandering that state’s congressional districts. Lewis said: “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” Can you imagine Republicans having to defend blatantly thwarting of the will of voters while asking those same voters to elect them in 2020? Democrats must make them do so.

Every Democrat running for federal and state office needs to get behind comprehensive election reform, which includes protecting voting rights as well as getting rid of gerrymandering. Yes, even in blue states, Democrats should run against gerrymandering because doing so is not only the right thing to do for our democracy, it will help them win more seats as well.

Running as the defenders of voting rights, in particular the rights of the elderly, the poor, the young, and the voters of color whose rights have been under siege thanks to Republicans in states across the country, is vital to motivating voters who fall into those categories to come out and vote for Democrats. Running as the defenders of real elections and against gerrymandering and one-party rule is also vital to persuading voters who are not partisan to vote for Democrats, exactly because they have promised to defend real elections everywhere, all the time.

An election with a predetermined outcome is what they have in dictatorships that pretend to be democracies, and that’s what I thought of when I read the aforementioned remarks from David Lewis. Until 1984, 100% of the votes in each election for the legislature of the Soviet Union went to the Communists. There was no doubt about the outcome. How different is that really from what gerrymandering and other attacks on real elections seek to achieve?

Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)