That could mean a lot of things. None of them good.
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Yeah, that is fuckin scary. Putin is co-authoring US policy??? WTeverlivingF
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Visit Alaska while it’s still part of the USA.
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March 12, 2020 (Thursday)
Trump’s speech last night felt like a watershed. According to accounts today, he agreed to make the public address—his second during his presidency—because he wanted to calm the markets. Instead, the short speech made today’s futures drop precipitously last night. According to reports, Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner wrote the speech, hastily over the course of the day, with input from advisor Stephen Miller. As you know, I was shocked by the speech and saw that it would tank the markets, so I wondered if there had been a concerted plan to do so and make money from the crash. It all seemed contrived. But it appears I was wrong and the disaster was, in fact, simply a reflection of extraordinary incompetence.
(Can I just say that Kushner has astonishingly bad political instincts? How much longer can he screw things up before Trump underbusses him?)
In any case, Trump’s speech seemed to make it clear to people that there was no longer any point in looking to the federal government for aid in managing what the World Health Organization now calls a pandemic. It is still scrambling to provide test kits. While numbers are vague, it appears that America, with a population of about 327 million people, has tested about 8,000 people in total while South Korea, with a much smaller population of about 51 million, has tested more than 210,000 and is testing almost 20,000 people a day.
The realization that they had to take charge meant that today state governors, business leaders, sports team owners, university presidents, mayors, and so on, began quite suddenly to assume responsibility for managing the crisis. Schools closed, Broadway closed, Disneyland and Walt Disney World are closing, March Madness is off, the NBA has suspended its season, Major League Baseball will start at least two weeks late.
It remains unclear why United States officials refused to use the WHO coronavirus tests, which would have helped us get a better sense of where the virus was and to contain it. But while there is a continuing outcry about why there are still so few coronavirus test kits available, states are moving forward to stop social contact and try to stop the community spread of the disease.
The stock market today continued to decline after Trump’s speech failed to reassure investors. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2,352 points, or almost 10%. Midday, the Federal Reserve decided to offer at least $1.5 trillion in loans to banks to smooth out financial markets, but that did not stop the day’s slide.
I didn’t get home until 1:00 tonight, and it is now 3:15 and I simply must go to bed, so no more now. Am now at home for the long-term, though, teaching on-line, so will do better tomorrow.
One last note: it has been my observation that people are angry and touchy and upset these days. We are all on edge. If you can be kind to someone, it will go a long way in this atmosphere. Someone did that for me today, surprising me with flowers when I left the deserted office for what will likely be months, and I promise, they brightened a very grim day.
Hang in there, everyone. I’ll see you tomorrow (er, today. But later).
H.
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I love the coinage underbus. It’s not particularly new, though it is new to me. I googled it and found an amazingly thorough history. Sometimes the internet is awesome.
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Is that unclear?
Well, I guess we don’t have incontrovertible evidence that it’s because Trump wants to keep “the numbers” down.
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Here’s what confuses me — faced with federal intransigence around testing, why didn’t the states try to get access to the WHO test? AFAIK, there’s no requirement that all testing be given the imprimatur of the CDC.
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Washington and California have developed their own tests (at UW & Stanford, respectively). They are based on the WHO test.
Here’s the link to the article, but it’s behind a freewall (you have to register to read).
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Yes. Given the worthless and destructive federal (lack of) response, anything productively counteractive is happening at state and local levels.
Fingers crossed that Trump doesn’t announce today that he’ll be deploying troops to stop such efforts to hurt his re-election chances to counteract the virus.
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He wanted to nuke tornadoes, didn’t he?
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March 13, 2020 (Friday)
“I don’t take responsibility at all.”
This quotation, from Trump’s answer when a reporter asked him if he took responsibility for the lag in testing for the novel coronavirus, will be in every single history book written about this era.
He went on. When PBS White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor asked why he doesn’t take responsibility for the problems combatting Covid-19 when the White House got rid of the pandemic team in 2018, he answered “I just think that’s a nasty question…. When you say me, I didn’t do it…. I don’t know anything about it.” He followed up with “We’re doing a great job.”
This is the same man who said in his acceptance speech for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination: “I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”
Today, at 3:29, Trump held a press conference to announce that he was declaring a national emergency over the novel coronavirus. The national emergency declaration frees up $50 billion in federal resources to fight the novel coronavirus. Immediately after he gave the press conference announcing the designation, the stock market began to rise, and when it closed at 4:00, about a half-hour after he began speaking, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had gone up 1,985 points.
The president immediately sent to supporters—including some congresspeople-- a note with a signed Dow Jones Industrial Average chart, along with screenshots of television coverage of the rising stock market, and a note saying “The President would like to share the attached image with you, and passes along the following message: ‘From opening of press conference, biggest day in stock market history!’” (The market’s 20% decline over the past couple of weeks is the fastest in history, and yesterday’s slide of 2,352 points was the worst day for stocks since the crash of 1987.)
In his press conference, Trump and his advisors also announced that Google had 1700 workers developing a website that would help Americans figure out if they needed a test and, if so, where to get one. His team was actually pretty specific about how that website would work. Unfortunately, the information was simply not true. The company Verily, which is under the same corporate umbrella as Google, is in the early stages of developing such a program for health care workers in the San Francisco Bay area. When New York Times writer Charlie Warzel asked a senior engineer at Google about the program this afternoon, the person answered: “No comment because there is nothing to comment on.”
An article today in The Atlantic, written by lifelong Republican Peter Wehner, who worked in three GOP administrations, summed up what some of this craziness means. The title is over-the-top (authors do not write the titles of their articles), but it reads “The Trump Presidency Is Over.” Wehner does not mean this literally, of course; he is arguing that the pandemic crisis has finally forced Americans to grapple with the fact that Trump is unfit to be president. They have, Wehner says, “seen the con man behind the curtain.” Having recognized that he is worse than useless, he says, they are “treating him as a bystander.” Other community leaders are stepping into the place he should have occupied: governors and businessmen and university presidents and sports commissioners. The Trump presidency, he says, is effectively over, although the president, “enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged.” The piece captures the feeling of this week remarkably well, well enough that lawyer and leader of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, George Conway, tweeted that the article is a must-read.
As I write this, at 12:54, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi marshalled a coronavirus bill through the House by a bipartisan vote of 363-40 (all 40 no votes were Republicans, and 9 Democrats and 17 Republicans did not vote. One Independent voted present). I have not seen the final bill, but its general outline would provide benefits to those at the bottom of the economy, suffering from the economic fallout from the pandemic as well as from Covid-19 itself.
Trump today said he would sign the bill, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is not in Washington, D.C., (he’s at an event in Kentucky with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh) so the Senate cannot take it up until Monday. Yesterday, McConnell disparaged the bill as “an ideological wish list” that added “various areas of policy that are barely related, if at all, to the issue before us.” He added: “As currently drafted, the proposal appears to impose permanent unfunded mandates on businesses that could cause massive job losses and put thousands of small businesses at risk.”
Certainly, the popular mood seems to be changing as hospitals are rushing to set up triage tents in their parking lots and recalling retired doctors, worried the healthcare system is going to be overwhelmed. On Monday, Fox News Channel personality Trish Regan said that Democrats’ focus on the coronavirus was “another attempt to impeach the president.” They were, she said, trying “to demonize and destroy the president.” Today the network announced she is going on hiatus.
One final note. It is my observation that there are two unfortunate things going on in the media right now. First of all, there is a ton of effort to get the administration officials, especially Trump, to admit they screwed up. It’s a waste of time: he is a classic narcissist, and he will never admit blame. Ever. We will certainly need to take stock in the future of what went wrong here, but right now this expenditure of energy ain’t gonna produce much of use. Better simply to pay attention to those leaders who are working to protect us.
Second, we have a weird cycle going on in which experts on just how bad this virus is are trying to convince unbelievers who have watched the president and the Fox News Channel personalities downplay this disease and now dismiss it. As the experts explain, the unbelievers pooh-pooh them. Then the media tries to show those people how really bad it is, and they push back. Caught in that push-pull are those who really do understand that this is bad and are already terribly worried, and find each warning ratcheting up their anxiety. If that is happening to you, do note that there is a tug-of-war going on in the public discussion, and you are not its target audience.
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Yeah, that’s one of those quotes that sums up a period of history. In this case, the Trump administration.
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Well, it is the last line of the article.
Which is a good article:
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Others still want to continue working and make it through online. Lucky are those country who are still negative of virus.
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March 14, 2020 (Saturday)
The reality of the novel coronavirus pandemic is sinking in as our infections continue to rise. Still, a number of people insist that alarm about the pandemic is political, whipped up by the media to weaken the president. When New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez begged people under 40 to stay out of bars, restaurants, and public spaces to keep from spreading Covid-19, Katie Williams, a former Ms. Nevada who was stripped of her title for putting pro-Trump postings on the non-political Ms. America social media accounts, responded “I just went to a crowded Red Robin and I’m 30. It was delicious, and I took my sweet time eating my meal. Because this is America. And I’ll do what I want.”
As Americans either settled into self-isolation or ignored expert advice and hit bars and beaches, the administration’s travel restrictions from Europe, which went into effect today, created chaos in the 13 airports assigned to handle American passengers returning from 26 countries. Those airports were understaffed, leaving passengers at Chicago’s O’Hare to wait for up to six hours for their bags, and then another 2-4 to get through a health screening and customs, all the while packed together. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, finally took to twitter to get Trump’s attention, prompting Pritzker’s political opponents to tell him to fix his own state.
But customs is under federal, not state, jurisdiction. There was nothing Pritzker could do except tweet: “The federal government needs to get its s@# t together. NOW.”
The fight over whether to take the coronavirus pandemic seriously, as well as the administration’s inept handling of it, is the outcome of forty years of assault on the American government. Since 1980, when Ronald Reagan ran for office on the warning that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” Republicans have made war on the idea of an expert bureaucracy in charge of our government.
It was a huge shift for the party, which had come out of World War Two with a deep commitment to a conservatism that focused on using the government to promote stability at home and across the globe by fostering equality of opportunity and rising standards of living for all. Those commitments required extending the government regulations, social safety net, and infrastructure development pioneered in the 1930s by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower did just that, regulating business to protect labor, expanding civil rights, and passing what was at the time the largest public works program in American history: the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which created our interstate highway system.
But a small group of reactionaries who hated business regulation, civil rights, and the taxes that public works programs require, insisted that the growing government infringed on their liberty. They got little traction because Americans liked the new, active government that enabled people to get educations, make a decent wage, and stop worrying they would have to live off their children or root through garbage cans for food when they got too old to work.
But when the Supreme Court, overseen by former Republican governor of California Earl Warren, unanimously agreed that segregated schools were unconstitutional, and Eisenhower enforced that decision in 1957 with federal troops at Little Rock Central High School, these reactionaries tied racism to their hatred of federal bureaucracy. The growing government of “experts,” they said, was taking tax dollars from hardworking white people and using them to give benefits to people of color. They were redistributing wealth. They were snaking communism or socialism into America and would destroy the very individualism that made America great.
That formulation—that an active government run by bureaucrats trying to regulate business, promote social welfare, and develop our infrastructure is socialism that will destroy us—gradually took over the Republican Party. In 1980, Reagan, who used this rhetoric but in fact governed far more moderately than he sounded, brought this ideology into the White House. He began the Republican addiction to tax cuts. When it became clear the cuts were not, in fact, expanding growth and paying for themselves as promised, but rather were cutting programs voters liked, the Reagan team shored up their support by courting evangelicals, marrying religious dislike of secularism to Republican pro-business individualism.
Over the years since, Republican leaders have continued to cut taxes, regulations, social safety nets, and infrastructure, all in the service of shunning socialism and promoting individualism. Whatever needs to be done, businessmen can do it best, they say. Government bureaucrats are inefficient and wasteful.
As this ideology has increasingly degraded our society, more and more voters have turned against it. So Republican leaders have stayed in power first by suppressing opposition voters, and then by gerrymandering districts so that Republicans have a systemic advantage. In 2012, for example, after states drew new districts after the 2010 census, Democratic candidates for seats in the House of Representatives won 1.4 million more votes than their Republican counterparts, and yet Republicans came away with a 33-seat majority.
Republican leaders have worked to pack the courts. too. As Reagan’s attorney general Edwin Meese put it, the idea was “to institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future elections.” Reagan appointed more judges than any other president before him, including three Supreme Court justices and one chief justice. The rightward swing of the court continued when George W. Bush (who lost the popular vote) appointed two Supreme Court justices, including a chief justice.
That swing has gone on steroids under Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). He held up the judicial appointments of Democratic President Barack Obama and finally refused even to consider Obama’s moderate nominee for the Supreme Court. Another Republican elected with a minority of the popular vote, Trump filled that seat and another. McConnell has been rushing through Trump’s judges at an unprecedented pace—almost as many as Obama appointed in his entire 8 years-- and vowed this week that the pandemic will not slow down judicial appointments.
So extreme has the court become in the service of the Republican agenda that on Wednesday, former Judge James Dannenberg resigned his membership in the Supreme Court Bar—lawyers admitted to practice before the high court-- of which he has been a member since 1972. Dannenberg’s resignation charges that the court is practicing “radical ‘legal activism,’ at its worst.” It is an “extension of the right wing of the Republican Party, he wrote, subverting or ignoring the law “to achieve transparently political goals.”
He accused the court of taking us back to the first Gilded Age and warned, “The only constitutional freedoms ultimately recognized may soon be limited to those useful to wealthy, Republican, White, straight, Christian, and armed males— and the corporations they control. This is wrong. Period. This is not America.”
And so, it seems the reactionaries of the 1950s got what they wanted. We have decimated our government bureaucracy and expertise, slashed taxes and the social safety net, and crippled our infrastructure, all in the name of promoting American business and the individualism that, in theory, encourages economic growth. The president, along with his enablers in the Senate, have tried to cement this ideology onto the country through the courts.
And now, the coronavirus pandemic is putting their system to the test. So far, it is failing miserably.
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March 15, 2020 (Sunday, the 200th anniversary of Maine statehood.)
I want to start tonight with a thank you.
Six months ago, on September 15, 2019, painting my house in Maine, I got stung by a yellow jacket. I didn’t dare drive to Boston until I knew how bad my reaction was going to be—I am allergic—so I put icepacks on the sting and sat down at the laptop to write on my professional Facebook page. The previous Friday I had seen the letter that Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, had sent to then-acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire telling him Congress knew that he was illegally withholding a whistleblower complaint and that he’d better hand it over. This was the first time I had seen a government official directly charge a member of the Trump administration with breaking a specific law. I knew it was big, so I wrote about it that day.
And then I was swamped with questions, so I wrote more about it the next day. And then the next. And so these letters were born.
In only six months, we have lived through the Ukraine Scandal, the impeachment crisis, the looming pandemic, and now a precarious economy. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of it. Most days we get several pieces of news that would be defining moments for any normal administration, and we get several a day. It is terribly hard even to keep track of them all, let alone to analyze them. This, of course, is one of the key goals of those who create this sort of chaos: the craziness keeps you so off-balance you cannot react to anything. You are simply surviving.
It is my hope that these posts comb the snarls out of the news coming at us, but also that they help you to see why I love America, and how our history has been one of great promise and principle, as well as of extraordinary failure at times. This country gives us the chance to write our own future, and if we have messed it up, we have the chance to edit and revise.
So I thank you all for six months of observation and learning, and getting to meet and chat with so many wonderful people. It’s been quite a ride. And, since this is starting to sound like a break-up letter, I will add that I expect these letters to continue to some unforeseen natural end point.
And so to today’s news: It’s all coronavirus, of course. Our numbers of infected continue to climb, and more and more public venues shut. In his press conference today, Trump insisted that his story about the Google website was true and that the media had lied about it, then flicked to the floor a paper he was holding that he claimed supported his assertions (the evidence that he was making the story up is unchanged). But he is increasingly seeming like a bystander as governors and businesspeople and school superintendents and so on make their own calls to protect the American people.
The virus has badly hurt the economy, first as the supply chain from China was disrupted, and now as our own services are shutting down. Trump has been worried about the slowing economy since long before the virus hit: he saw a strong economy as his best argument for reelection. So he has been nagging at the Federal Reserve Board that oversees our national banking system to lower interests rates. Theoretically, this should spur borrowing and investment, thus pumping up the economy, and Trump has complained bitterly about the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, whom Trump appointed but who has dragged his heels about lowering interest rates.
On March 3, the Fed, as it is nicknamed, lowered interest rates a half a percentage point to try to prop up the market, tottering as it was under pressure from the coronavirus. The move backfired, as investors saw the cut as a sign things were worse than they thought. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped almost 800 points.
Today, the Fed cut interest rates again, this time almost to zero, and announced a plan to buy at least $700 billion in bonds in an attempt to inject more money into the economy. The Federal Reserve Board had been slated to meet to discuss another rate cut this week, but made the announcement today to stave off a bad Monday in the stock market. It didn’t work, at least not in the short term. Stock market futures dropped 1000 points after the announcement, with investors possibly interpreting the emergency rate cut as another sign of impending crisis.
Finally, a follow up to an older story. Lots of you have asked me to explain the February 28 decision by the federal appeals court saying that Trump’s then-White House counsel Don McGahn did not have to testify before Congress. It seemed to me an extreme decision, and I wanted to wait to see what was going to happen with that case before I chased it down. That caution was rewarded on Friday, when we learned that the full circuit court will rehear the case.
I called in the help of a lawyer friend, Jim McCarrick, to explain what exactly all this means. He says: This is a major separation of powers controversy. In February, by a 2-1 majority, a court panel hearing the case on appeal decided that the House of Representatives could not go to court to force a member of the Executive Branch to testify under subpoena because that would drag the courts into disputes between the legislative and the executive branches of government. This was a triumph for Trump, who could now keep his advisors from testifying before Congress.
But now the full court has agreed to rehear the case. This happens when there are enough judges on the federal circuit court who think a narrow decision could be reversed by the whole court—that means the decision is vulnerable. The February McGahn decision says the administration doesn’t have to honor congressional subpoenas, and it’s a short step from that to saying that the government does not have to honor judicial subpoenas, under the same reasoning. That would put Trump entirely above the law. So the case is back in play. (Thank you, Jim.)
While we are all rightly focusing on the coronavirus and the economy, it is worth remembering that there are a number of legal fights Trump is fighting, and that the conflict with Iran continues, escalating Wednesday with a rocket attack on Camp Taji, a base north of Baghdad that houses U.S. troops, killing two American soldiers and one British soldier. On Friday, the U.S. launched airstrikes against five Iraqi facilities supporting Iranian-backed militias. On Saturday, the Iranians retaliated with another rocket attack on Camp Taji, seriously injuring two Americans. The Iraqi government protested the U.S. retaliatory strikes, calling them “a violation of national sovereignty.”
There are a lot of pieces in play right now. None of them are good, and all of them pressure the president.
This is going to be a really rough week, folks. Hang on to the people you love, be kind to each other, and we will see what tomorrow brings.
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March 16, 2020 (Monday)
I am obsessed with the stock market. Not because I gamble there, or because it gives a true picture of our economy. I am obsessed with it because its rise and fall gives a good sense of how the elites who benefit most from Trump’s policies feel about the current economy. They have stuck with him no matter what else he did so long as their investments paid off. But once those people turn on him, he cannot win reelection. So the volatility of the stock market these days is about politics as well as economics. Trump knows this very well indeed.
The economy is increasingly paralyzed by the world pandemic of novel coronavirus. First supply chains out of China were disrupted, and now our domestic economy is hurting as restaurants close, airport travel declines, and authorities tell people to stay home. Today the administration called for closing schools, avoiding groups of more than 10 people, and ending discretionary travel, eating out, and so on for fifteen days to try to slow the virus, but this will also slow the economy.
This drop has been reflected in the stock market over the past few weeks. To counter that drop, Trump has been badgering the Federal Reserve Board to lower interest rates to free up money for investment. Yesterday, the Fed slashed interest rates almost to zero and pledged to buy at least $700 billion in bonds, which would inject cash into the country. In theory, the loosening of money should pump up the economy and keep the U.S. from falling into a recession (generally defined as a decline in the Gross National Product—that is, the total value of all the products and services produced in a certain period-- for two consecutive quarters, or six months).
But, rather than rising in response to that stimulus, the stock market today began sliding as soon as the opening bell rang. (At the New York Stock Exchange, there is indeed a physical brass bell that sounds, although the ringer is automated.) It slid so fast and so far—more than 2,250 points on the Dow Jones Industrial Average-- that it triggered a trading halt to try to reset the market. The halt stopped the free fall, but the market dropped over the course of the day, ending up 2,997 points down in its worst day since the market crash of 1987. And that’s it. There is little else the Fed can do to shore up markets directly.
So all eyes are turned to Congress, to see if it will pass the relief measures necessary to enable sick workers to stay home, and those hurt by the economic downturn to make payments and eat until the pandemic eases. On March 14, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan measure by a vote of 363 to 40 (and one vote of present) to provide such financial assistance, and to fund free testing for Covid-19. It strengthens unemployment insurance and food security, requires some paid sick leave, and puts money into Medicaid. At the time, news reported that Trump had agreed to sign the bill.
But it has run into trouble. First, opponents tried to kill it by claiming that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was trying to sneak abortion funding into the bill. That boiled down to the fact that the bill provided up to $1 billion to reimburse laboratory claims, but it did not include the Hyde Amendment, first passed in 1977, which prohibits the use of federal money to pay for abortions except in rare circumstances. That amendment has been attached as a rider to every appropriations bill since, including that for the 2020 fiscal year. The coronavirus bill did not have it, because of course it is designed to combat this pandemic, not to override the 2020 budget. To address these concerns, House Democrats amended the bill so that funds could only be used for costs related to Covid-19.
A second issue arose when the House tried to pass as a package a number of technical fixes. Under the rules for unanimous consent, so long as a single representative objects, the bill cannot move to the Senate. Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) insisted on a public reading of all 87 pages of text, which would delay the bill for days. Gohmert apparently backed off after talking with colleagues and Trump.
So the bill is headed for the Senate. Before the House passed a final version, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) dismissed it as a Democratic “ideological wish list” that was unlikely to pass the Senate. The situation has deteriorated since then, though, and the president has thrown his weight behind the bill, so perhaps that is no longer McConnell’s angle.
In the meantime, Senate leaders and Trump are working on another relief package for businesses and families. White House legislative affairs director Eric Ueland said that “The president has instructed his team to look very expansively at what we need to do and not be impeded by the potential price tag of what’s necessary here.” In addition to overall stimulus in the bill, Trump has called for targeted aid to the airline, cruise, and hospitality industry.
The administration’s response to this crisis reveals its priorities: use the federal government to protect business, not people. That reflects a certain ideology, one that says economic growth comes from the top, as a small group of elites runs the economy, using their money, knowledge, and connections to organize the rest of us into an efficient means of production. If that’s the case, government’s job is to protect property and the businesses that enable property to accumulate.
That ideology stands in contrast to a different one that says economic growth comes from the bottom. If the government simply protects equal access to resources and education, and guarantees equality before the law, those with good ideas and the capacity for hard work from all walks of life will innovate and drive the economy forward.
It is well documented by now that Trump did not want to acknowledge the depth of the coronavirus danger because he was worried it would rattle the markets, frittering away weeks that could have bought us more time before Covid-19 got a foothold here. Under Trump, then-National Security advisor John Bolton got rid of the White House pandemic team and White House staff turned over so frequently that those who had been prepped by the Obama administration to combat disease are largely gone.
Left are those with a keen focus on business. When news began to spread of the deadly epidemic in China, if you recall, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross—who attended the Obama administration’s epidemic prep meeting but dozed off—speculated that the coronavirus would be a good thing for the U.S. because it would help bring back American jobs as manufacturers had to figure in the cost of epidemics when they thought about moving their operations to China.
The administration is interested in the stock market, and what it says about the faith of business leaders in the economy, but not terribly interested in leading the fight to save lives. Today, on a phone call with state governors who are scrambling to get adequate equipment to fight Covid-19, Trump told them: “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment—try getting it yourselves. We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves. Point of sales, much better, much more direct if you can get it for yourself.”
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[just an fyi]
Hi Folks:
This is not part of the regular Letters from an American series—WHICH WILL CONTINUE EVERY NIGHT AS USUAL!-- but rather a different thread inspired by the isolation imposed by the novel coronavirus.
The other day, as I was learning to use the software for distance learning, it occurred to me that lots of you are probably shut in and bored, and it might be fun to connect with people who wanted something to do. At first I thought of offering to teach a course, and since I teach both halves of the U.S. survey, as well as a number of courses on my own specialties, we could cover a lot of ground. But the idea of lecturing to a laptop any more than I have to is not particularly enticing.
And then it hit me….
My new book is coming out any minute. Its publication date is April 1 (although some people appear already to have it). The book covers American history from the time of Shakespeare, when Europeans began to imagine a New World, to the election of Donald Trump.
The world as a stage, if you will. In 200 pages.
Since all the publicity has been cancelled, I have lots of new material. Even more fun, though, is all the great stuff I had to cut because I wanted to keep it short. So it occurred to me we could do Facebook live, where I walk anyone who’s interested through American history as I’ve outlined it in the book, sharing the process and the stories that didn’t make it into print. And, on Facebook live, you can comment while I’m talking, so it can be as much like a conversation as we can manage without going to a paid site, which I’m trying to avoid.
So this Thursday, at 1:00 pm Eastern, I will do a Facebook live here on this page. (I’ll start about ten minutes early to work out any glitches.) To test this idea out, I’ll just start with the story of what it’s like to write a book, and answer some of your questions about that and other stuff you’re interested in, and if we all like it, we can ramp up the next week into the actual history.
There is no need to buy the book to participate in this conversation, by the way. Since it goes through the major questions of American history, the conversation should be plenty accessible to everyone. And my publisher is preparing quote cards that will highlight the book’s themes—I’ll post them here. It should be a good chance just to chat about the sweep of American history.
When I was retrospective the other night about the first six months, this was what I was musing over, not quitting the Letters. Sorry to have worried so many people.
This new project will not intrude on the Letters from an American, so if you’re not interested, ignore this side project at will.
Looking forward to getting to “chat” with some of you!
Here’s the new book, by the way. Hard to believe it’s real…
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March 17, 2020 (Tuesday)
The big news, again today, is the spread of the novel coronavirus. There are all sorts of articles out there about how bad things are going to get and how long this will last. I’m not going to repeat the discussion because what’s the point? We know it’s bad. The only thing I can add—and it’s hardly original—is to take this very seriously indeed, and listen to actual epidemiologists and doctors and do what they say.
While I can’t talk about the epidemiological aspect of the pandemic, I can speak to the economic fallout, and politics in its wake.
The economy is contracting at a crippling rate as the country shuts down. Consumer spending drives about 70% of the American economy, and with consumers at home, spending is drying up. As industries slow down, and more and more of those consumers lose their jobs, it will slow the economy even further, in ways it’s hard even to imagine. Fewer cars on the road mean less toll money collected, for example, and less money for the local and state governments that depend on those collections. Here at home, the shutdown of restaurants and cruise lines has torn the bottom out of the market for lobsters; many of the lobstermen are pulling their gear. Economists warn that unemployment could go as high as 20% in this crisis.
These concerns have lit a fire under the Senate. Today we learned that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, formerly an investment banker, urged reluctant GOP senators to support the coronavirus relief bill passed by the House of Representatives. The situation is too urgent for them to dither, Mnuchin emphasized. After suggesting earlier that he was in no great rush, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) apparently got the message. When asked what he would do when he gets the House bill, McConnell told a CNN reporter: “Pass it.”
Florida Senator Marco Rubio noted that the pandemic might soon mean that Congress couldn’t keep reconvening week after week, and that members had better act while they could, in a big enough way that it would make a difference. “I think the assumption is going to be, we’re going to do something [and] it’s going to be big because we can’t assume we can keep coming back here.”
Senate Republicans and White House officials are also talking about another, larger stimulus package of more than $850 billion dollars of relief for airlines, hotels, casinos, and smaller businesses, as well as direct payments to individuals. Republicans want to make sure individuals get more money than the industries—especially the airlines—to undercut concerns that the relief is just a corporate giveaway. They are not holding discussions with Democrats, but are coming up with their own bill without Democratic input. Democrats are preparing their own, apparently smaller, package aimed at hospitals, unemployment insurance, small businesses, child care, and food assistance for seniors.
Altogether, these measures would add up to more than $1 trillion. The proposed package would be bigger than that passed in early 2009 under newly-elected President Barack Obama to address the crash of 2008. That one was slightly under $800 billion.
The other big story today is that Trump and the supporters who for weeks downplayed the seriousness of the novel coronavirus are trying to rewrite that history to say that they always knew it was bad. “I’ve always known this is a real—this is a pandemic,” Trump said today. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
In fact, until the last week or so, Trump insisted that concerns about the coronavirus were overblown. As experts began warning about what was coming as early as January, he continued to insist “We have it very well under control.” He began to pay attention in late February, when the stock market began to slide, at which point he blamed CNN and MSNBC for “panicking markets.” In early March, he insisted that Covid-19 was milder than the flu. It was not until March 11 that he gave his Oval Office address, full of misstatements, that he conveyed to the public that the coronavirus was serious indeed.
Fox News Channel personalities echoed the president’s disinformation and urged their followers to dismiss experts’ frantic warnings. Now they have done a 180. The Washington Post put together a devastating video of the contrasting messages. Just last week, radio host Rush Limbaugh called the coronavirus a scam and told his audience: “We’re shutting down our country because of the cold virus, which is what coronaviruses are.”
The rewriting of history by Trump and his supporters to say the administration was always on top of the situation matters for two reasons. First of all, it overwrites the reality that the administration ignored reality in favor of their rosy hopes. People have died, and will die, because we did not—and are not—sufficiently testing for, and prepared for, the virus. We need to remember the reality of this so that we address such shortcomings and make sure they cannot happen again.
The rewriting of history also matters because reality matters in governance. Administrations based on ideology rather than reality cannot accurately address the country’s needs. The ideology of those now in control of the Republican Party is based on a distrust of any federal government at all, preferring to slash federal action and turn any required governance over to the states. These Republicans reject the idea that the federal government has any role to play in business regulation, social welfare policy, or infrastructure development. They insist they are protecting the individualism that makes America great.
It is revealing that, faced with this crisis, Republicans are advocating an even bigger stimulus package than Obama got. The reality is that we need government spending to lift us over economic crisis, and this situation is forcing Republicans who hate government in theory to say “Spend, and don’t worry about the money.”
It turns out we need a federal government after all, and Americans today are seeing that reality play out powerfully.
In the primary voting for the Democratic presidential nomination today in Arizona, Florida, and Illinois, former Vice President Joe Biden, who was part of the Obama team that pulled America out of the 2008 crisis, won handily over Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
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March 18, 2020 (Wednesday)
Most of the things happening today did not seem to change the trajectory of the news.
There are more infections from the novel coronavirus including two members of Congress, Mari Diaz-Balart (R-FL), and Ben McAdams (D-UT), who now have Covid-19. A report on the possible future of the pandemic, written by UK epidemiologists, has predicted 18 months of illness that will overwhelm hospitals and cause more than a million U.S. deaths. In contrast, social media is erupting in outrage at college students crowding Florida beaches. It is worth noting that the UK study is only one of many, and it has not been peer-reviewed, which such studies need to be. We. Do. Not. Know whether its scenario will come to pass. Our testing is woefully inadequate, and until it is better, and doctors know more, they cannot predict with certainty what will happen.
We do know, though, that quarantines and lockdowns are devastating for women who are experiencing domestic violence, as they are shut in with their abusers, who are already anxious from the pandemic and economic dislocation. If you are at risk, do reach out for help before a lockdown begins.
It is also worth noting that Reuters reported today that Russia is using its disinformation apparatus to sow panic in the EU and the rest of the West. It is using “contradictory, confusing and malicious reports to make it harder for the EU to communicate its response to the pandemic.” Today, Senator Angus King (I-ME) and Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI), the co-chairs of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, a bipartisan, intergovernmental agency for defending the U.S. in cyberspace, issued a statement saying they believed the U.S. is engaged in a “war” against those spreading disinformation around the pandemic. “We know that both Chinese and Russian military and intelligence operators leverage the global internet to spread mistruths and disinformation, seeking to sow uncertainty to destabilize our institutions and populace,” King and Gallagher said.
Trump made it a point to dub the coronavirus the “Chinese Virus,” trying to regain some of his lost ground by appealing to his racist base. He is allegedly furious at Jared Kushner for so mishandling the public relations part of the White House response to the crisis.
After rebounding a bit yesterday, the stock market fell again today, falling below the numbers it was at when Trump took office. Car manufacturers Ford, General Motors, and Fiat Chrysler—Detroit’s Big Three—have temporarily shuttered their North American factories because of the pandemic. Devin Nunes (R-CA), who did his best to dismiss the case against Trump in the impeachment hearings only to be revealed as a confidante of indicted political operative Lev Parnas who was implicated in the scandal, said “The media is absolutely responsible for this… 90% of them are working for the Democrats, working for the left… They’re doing dangerous things in this country by whipping everyone up in this panic. There’s no reason to be in this panic.”
The Senate passed the bill written and passed by the House of Representatives to combat the economic effects of the pandemic, and turned to develop its own bill for a massive stimulus package. The Republicans are shaping the bill without Democratic input right now, and the package currently includes $50 billion to rescue the airline industry and $150 billion for other sectors, including hotels and cruise lines. They are also talking about a direct payment of $2000 to individuals hurt by the economic downturn. This bill is not yet finalized, but at the moment the three recovery bills together add up to more than $2 trillion dollars. “People want to go big,” Trump told reporters. “Everybody seems to want to go big and they want to get to the recovery.”
These are all stories that continue those we already know: the coronavirus is a terrible threat, the Republican administration is incapable of handling it, and leadership is flailing and trying to blame their disastrous failure on someone else. The stock market is falling precipitously as the virus slows the global and the national economy, and Congress—including Republicans who have previously insisted the government had no role to play in the economy—has responded by quickly passing a giant relief package. In general, Republicans have focused on supporting business, while Democrats have worked to make sure regular Americans have money and health care to tide them through this crisis.
While these stories are all more of the same, today feels different because something else is kicking in. In the absence of federal leadership, Americans are reaching out to each other, finding ways to help each other and to socialize “distantly.” I have seen young people offering to shop for older people; business owners delivering to shut-ins; teachers tying themselves in knots to continue to deliver quality education; workers trying to learn new skills to enable them to continue to do their jobs; one of our finest writers, Rebecca Solnit, reading fairy tales to children on-line; friends having beers together on Skype; and remarkable good humor among those of us who are isolated, along with concern for all those whose health and jobs are at risk. And that’s not even touching the service workers and health care professionals who are putting their lives on the line for the rest of us every day.
Today more than 80 national security professionals broke with their tradition of non-partisanship to endorse former Vice President Joe Biden for president, saying that while they were from all parties and disagreed with each other about pretty much everything else, they had come together to stand against Trump. “Our nation’s foreign affairs are in disarray; our alliances frayed, and our national prestige declining. Our approach to both friends and enemies abroad has been chaotic and unprincipled. Our credibility as a nation has been lessened. And, perhaps most importantly, our place in the world as a source of moral leadership has nearly been lost. As a country, we are increasingly less secure and less safe.” Trump has “created an existential danger to the United States, its place in the world, and the values we share. His reelection would continue this downward spiral, and will likely have catastrophic results. Democracy is at stake.”
After more than a generation of a culture that idealized individualism and said selfish greed was good, the coronavirus is forcing us to evaluate whether that is what we want to be as a government, and as a nation.
As reader Joe McDermott summed it up today: “How we deal with it will define us forever.”
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