[fyi, heather is doing a livestream on fbook right now]
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March 19, 2020 (Thursday)
Today began with the news that three weeks ago, Republican Richard Burr of North Carolina, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and therefore privy to classified intelligence reports about the novel coronavirus, warned a small group of wealthy and well-connected constituents that the disease was much more serious than public reports suggested.
The same day that Trump told the nation, “It’s going to disappear. One day, like a miracle. It will disappear,” Burr told members of an exclusive club that the novel coronavirus was fast moving, like the 1918 pandemic, and could lead to school closings and military mobilization to combat it. Thirteen days before the State Department warned against European travel, Burr suggested business leaders should not send their employees to Europe.
Interestingly, this story broke because someone leaked a secret recording of the speech-- just who is unclear. It does, though, raise the possibility that even one of Burr’s wealthy constituents is unhappy with the disinformation coming from Republican leadership.
The story that the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee was saying one thing in private to businessmen and another thing in public to the rest of us was bad enough, but then it got worse. Thursday evening, ProPublica noted that Burr sold off between $600,000 and $1.7 million in stock during this period, an amount that made up almost all of his assets. The sales were a set of 33 transactions that were the most stock he had sold in a single day in 14 months. So while he was privy to daily security briefings on how bad things were going to get, he reassured the public and sold his own stock. A week later, the market began its historical slide, losing about 30% of its value since he sold. When NPR asked his spokesperson to comment on the stock sale, Caitlin Carroll responded “lol.” She later said that was in response to the story itself and was intended to be off the record.
But then it got weirder. It turns out that Burr was not the only one. Apparently Senator Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) also dropped seven figures worth of stock the day that she, as a member of the Senate Health Committee, heard a private briefing on the coronavirus from administration officials including the CDC director and Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. She then turned around and bought stock in Citrix, a technology company that makes GoToMeeting software for telecommuting, and another technology company, Oracle. She, too, continued to downplay the coronavirus, claiming “Democrats have dangerously and intentionally misled the American people on #Coronavirus readiness. Here’s the truth: [Trump] & his administration are doing a great job working to keep Americans healthy and safe.”
When asked about her stock transactions, Loeffler tweeted: “This is a ridiculous and baseless attack. I do not make investment decisions for my portfolio. Investment decisions are made by multiple third-party advisors without my or my husband’s knowledge or involvement.” In fact, her initial disclosure of the stock sales said they were her husband’s stocks; she later revised it to say they were jointly owned. Loeffler is married to the chairman and CEO of the New York Stock Exchange. Her worth is estimated at $500 million. She was not elected to her seat, but was appointed by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to the seat of retiring Senator Johnny Isakson, likely in hopes of attracting more suburban women to the Republican standard in 2020. Loeffler has pledged $20 million of her own money to hold her seat in November.
On his show on the Fox News Channel tonight, personality Tucker Carlson said that Burr had betrayed the country and must resign and await prosecution for insider trading. But Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor and legal analyst for CNN, explained that it would be really hard for prosecutors to prove insider trading in his case. He noted first of all the insider trading by members of Congress was legal until the STOCK Act of 2012, and that Burr was one of the only three senators who voted against it, arguing that insider trading laws already applied to Congress. STOCK stands for “Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge.” But then Mariotti explained how a prosecutor would have to prove that Burr had a specific piece of knowledge that the public did not, and that that information would drop stock prices. Burr could simply say there was a lot of information about the coronavirus out there, and that he could not have predicted what would happen to the stock market because of it. There is no doubt the SEC (the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission), which oversees the stock market, should look into it, Mariotti says, but it’s premature to jump to the conclusion that Burr can be charged with insider trading.
This matters, though, because it sure looks bad, and it brings to mind what happened in the U.S. after the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression. During the heady days of the 1920s, people hadn’t paid a lot of attention to how leaders were making money. When they started to pay attention after the Crash, they discovered that the leaders who were preaching to them about austerity had been cheating. When the Senate held hearings about how to resolve the crisis, the former president of the Stock Exchange, a man named Richard Whitney, told senators the only way to fix the problem was to cut government salaries and veterans’ benefits. (When senators asked him why he couldn’t take a pay cut himself, he told them he made “very little,” only $60,000 a year, which was six times what a senator made.) Six years later, Americans learned that Whitney had been stealing assets and investing the money in failing companies. He went to prison for embezzlement.
Whitney’s story, and others like it, destroyed the reputation of the American businessman, the figure who had come to symbolize the genius behind what had seemed to be the prosperity of the 1920s. From being lionized as the nation’s leaders, they became symbols of what had gone wrong with America. In October 1936, after four years of New Deal programs, Franklin Delano Roosevelt illustrated this change. He noted: “They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”
A similar redefinition seems quite possible now. On Twitter, David Frum noted that “we need to see the stock trades of President Trump and his family in the month of February,” to which writer Greg Olear responded: “And January.”
Today in coronavirus news, California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered the state’s 40 million residents to stay at home except for essential trips for supplies; the Trump administration asked state labor officials to be vague about how many unemployment claims are coming in; the State Department has urged Americans abroad either to come home now or plan to stay where they are; and while Italy’s deaths continue to climb, China today reported that it has had no new local cases in the past 48 hours (although 39 people had brought the disease in from overseas). The U.S. now has more than 10,000 confirmed coronavirus infections and has suffered 140 deaths. The surge in cases is likely a result of increased testing.
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This was a brilliant rhetorical strategy by FDR, wasn’t it…
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We already knew that, as soon as non-evil leadership returns to the US, we were going to have to codify the financial divestment and disclosure requirements for the incoming president into law. Might as well include Congress and SCOTUS, for that matter. Want to be in public office? Great. Divulge your finances and put everything into a savings account for as long as you serve.
Anyone who wouldn’t agree to those terms is not fit to be a public servant.
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Now there’s a quaint concept that I hope we can some day revive. 
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March 20, 2020 (Friday)
If there is a story today, it is in how fast our news cycles are changing. Last night I wrote of the news that Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) appear to have capitalized on private information about the dangers of coronavirus they received as senators by selling off stock and, in Loeffler’s case, buying stock in a company that makes telecommuting software.
Some of you expressed dismay that I did not include in my list Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), James Inhofe (R-OK), or Ron Johnson (R-WI). But the stories that they had sold stock in the crucial period broke after I wrote last night, posting at 3:00 a.m., so I did not see them until after I had posted (and couldn’t bear to go back in and revise at that hour). And then the story changed again: it appears that the transactions of the last three were legitimate: Feinstein did not attend the briefing where the senators heard of the dangers of the coronavirus, her holdings are in a blind trust and her sales were in unrelated stocks, and she lost money; Inhofe had been systematically selling stocks for a while; Johnson, too, had been selling stocks and continued to sell after the market began dropping.
Burr and Loeffler, though, remain on the hook with abrupt transactions that appear connected to the coronavirus briefing. Burr responded to the reports today with a weak defense that said he had relied only on “public news reports” of the seriousness of the issue and that he wants the Senate Ethics Committee to open “a complete review.”
This story has been in the news cycle only 24 hours, and it seems already to be behind us. One thing that has stuck, though, is that our Intelligence agencies were warning the president and members of Congress as early as January that the coronavirus would be a deadly pandemic, even as those same lawmakers continued to downplay the danger and claim that concerns about it were a Democratic hoax.
The rest of the day’s news is more of the same that we have been getting for the past few weeks, all on steroids:
Our coronavirus numbers are up again, with more than 19,200 diagnosed cases in the United States. At least 258 have died. California and New York have ordered their inhabitants to stay at home except for imperative trips for supplies or medical care; New Jersey, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, as well as the city of New Orleans, have issued similar restrictions. The administration has closed the borders to Canada and Mexico to all nonessential travelers starting at midnight on Saturday.
The stock market is down again, stumbling lower as investors tried to figure out where the coronavirus would leave the world economy. On February 12, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit an all-time high of 29,551.42, but on Friday, March 20, it closed at 19,173.98, capping a loss of a third of its value. It is now below where it was when Trump took office, erasing the gains that he has boasted of as a sign of the strength of his administration.
The strain on the president showed today in his press conference when he lashed out at NBC News reporter Peter Alexander. Alexander lobbed a softball question at Trump, giving him an opening to reassure Americans with a positive or uplifting message. Alexander asked him “What do you say to Americans who are scared…? I guess, nearly 200 dead, 14,000 who are sick, millions, as you witnessed, who are scared right now. What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?” Rather than answering with a calming, quotable sentence or two, like FDR’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” Trump attacked Alexander. “I say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I say. I think that’s a very nasty question.” Vice President Mike Pence recognized the question for the opportunity it was and later answered the question: “Do not be afraid, be vigilant.” He then went on to explain that the risk for most Americans is low.
Trump’s petulance has left a leadership vacuum in the country, into which others are stepping, notably New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has been carefully explaining to New Yorkers the pandemic and steps he is taking to fight it. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is now hoping to step into the vacuum Trump is leaving. Biden has kept quiet in this pandemic to keep from looking like he was making political attacks during a time of crisis, but as Trump has used his “bully pulpit” to mislead Americans rather than to inform them—saying, for example, that a vaccine is “very close” (it’s not), and that everyone can get tests (they can’t)-- Biden evidently feels that caution is no longer necessary. He has announced he will start his own briefings as early as Monday, informing Americans of the truth but also likely expecting that he will look more presidential than the actual president as Trump continues to mislead his audience, bully the experts, and lash out at reporters.
The Senate today passed the House coronavirus bill by a vote of 90-8. Voting no on this second coronavirus relief package, which is expected to cost around $104 billion, were Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), James Inhofe (R-OK), Ron Johnson (R-WI), James Lankford (R-OK), Mike Lee (R-UT), Rand Paul R-(KY), Ben Sasse (R-NE), and Tim Scott (R-SC). Trump is expected to sign it. The Senate is working on a third, far more expensive, coronavirus bill, but Republicans, who hold the majority, wrote it without input from Democrats. Now, Democrats believe it is helping business more than regular Americans and want changes, and the two sides cannot find common ground. Still, the Republicans believe the Democrats will accept the $1 trillion dollar bill rather than face popular anger if they block it.
Meanwhile, Trump continues his effort to mold the Intelligence Community to his own ends, purging career officials and replacing them with cronies. Today, nine former intelligence leaders—virtually all of them-- wrote a letter warning Americans that the Trump administration is pursuing a “deeply destructive path” by getting rid of the “nonpartisan experts who serve the president and the American people with no regard to personal politics.” The politicization of the intelligence community “is destructive of our nation’s ideals, and it puts us all at risk,” they wrote.
History has an annoying way of moving glacially, glacially, glacially… until it suddenly turns on a dime. We are in one of those sudden changes. Nothing brought that home to me more than a question from a reader asking where Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani had gone. Just over a month ago he was in the headlines as we learned that the Department of Justice had set up a system to receive information from Giuliani about Hunter Biden and Giuliani’s insistence-- contrary to all our Intelligence agencies-- that it was Ukraine and not Russia that attacked our 2016 election. Today, just over a month later, I had to google him to find out where he’d gone. He has apparently started his own youtube channel to show that the conspiracy he claims to have uncovered in Ukraine reaches all the way through the Democratic party leadership.
Our world is moving fast.
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March 21, 2020 (Saturday)
Today’s big news came from Politico writer Betsy Woodruff Swan, who broke the story that the Department of Justice has quietly asked Congress for dramatic new powers during emergencies… emergencies like the coronavirus pandemic. She has reviewed documents from the DOJ asking Congress to give top judges the power to pause court proceedings during emergencies. This would include “any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil process and proceedings.”
The executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Norman L. Reimer, explained that this “means you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over. I find it absolutely terrifying," he said. "Especially in a time of emergency, we should be very careful about granting new powers to the government.”
The House of Representatives, controlled by Democrats, is extremely unlikely to pass any such measures, and Mike Lee, a libertarian-leaning Republican Senator from Utah, tweeted in all caps: “OVER MY DEAD BODY.” (This prompted reminders that he had voted to acquit Trump during the impeachment trial and thus keep him in office, so, as one tweet read: “If this happens you own it.”)
Lee demanded that Trump disown the idea-- he did not-- and the DOJ declined to comment on the story, so it may be a trial balloon, inaccurate, or even false.
But it has gotten attention because it dovetails with recent stories that suggest those currently in power feel it is their right, and maybe their duty, to run the country in their own interest, ignoring-- or suppressing-- dissent.
In the last two days, we learned that the administration and Republican members of Congress heard dire warnings about the coming coronavirus and continued to lie to the American people, telling us the Democrats trying to alert us were simply bent on undermining Trump.
We also learned that Trump has refused to use the Defense Production Act, passed under President Harry S. Truman, who used it during the Korean War. This law would enable Trump to demand that American industries produce the medical equipment we currently need so badly. Business leaders say the invoking the law isn’t necessary, and Trump claims they are volunteering to produce what the nation needs in a public-private partnership. Currently there is such a critical shortage of medical equipment that some hospitals are asking people to sew basic masks at home, but today Trump announced that the clothing manufacturer Hanes is retrofitting factories to make masks; it has joined a consortium that is expected to produce 5-6 million masks weekly.
These two stories reveal the same ideology that would underlay a law permitting arrest and imprisonment without trial: that society works best when it defers to a few special people who have access to information, resources, and power. Those people, in turn, use their power to direct the lives of the rest of us in larger patterns whose benefit we cannot necessarily see. We might think we need medical supplies but, in this worldview, using the government to force individual companies to make those supplies would hurt us in the long run. This ideology argues that we are better off leaving the decisions about producing medical supplies to business leaders. Similarly, we need leaders to run our economy and government, trusting that they will lead us, as a society, toward progress.
But there is another way to look at the world, one that is at the heart of American society. That ideology says that society works best if everyone has equal access to information and resources, and has an equal say in government. In this worldview, innovation and production come from people across society, ordinary people as well as elites, and society can overcome challenges much more effectively with a multiplicity of voices than with only a few who tend to share the same perspective. To guarantee equal access to information, resources, and government, we all must have equality before the law, including the right to liberty unless we have been charged with a crime.
For decades, now, America has increasingly moved toward the idea that a few people should consolidate wealth and power with the idea that they will most effectively use it to move America in a good direction. But the novel coronavirus pandemic has undercut the idea that a few leaders can run society most effectively. The administration’s response to this heavy challenge has been poor. And now we know that the very people who were publicly downplaying the severity of the coronavirus were told by our intelligence agencies that it was very bad indeed, and they were sharing that information with a few, favored individuals. Their leadership will literally, and quite immediately, cost a number of our lives.
But even as those embracing the idea of a hierarchical society have fallen down on the job, ordinary Americans are stepping up and demonstrating the power of the other worldview. State governors—Gavin Newsom of California, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Jay Inslee of Washington, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, David Ige of Hawaii, Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, Andrew Cuomo of New York, and Mike DeWine of Ohio—have distinguished themselves. (I’m sure I’ve forgotten some; please add them in the comments.) Not just governors, but also mayors and city councils have stepped up to the plate. So have business leaders and unions, figuring out ways to work from home and to pay workers whose jobs suddenly disappeared. Teachers have moved their classes on-line overnight; National Guard troops are delivering necessary supplies. Ordinary people all over the country are helping each other however they can.
And then there are the health care workers. What they are doing, leaping into the breach to save us all, despite their dire lack of protective gear, is heroic.
This pandemic, and the accompanying economic downturn, are a turning point. Just as Americans have done in other crises in our history, we are rediscovering that our greatest strength is not in how rich and powerful we can make a few, but rather in all of us, working together. It strikes me as no accident that it is at this moment a report has surfaced that Attorney General William Barr, a leading member of this administration, has asked for the ability to arrest and imprison people without trial, for to preserve a hierarchy under these conditions will require an extraordinary assumption of power to suppress dissent.
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March 22, 2020 (Sunday)
This will be short tonight as I’m still prepping for tomorrow’s on-line university courses.
The biggest news today is that the Senate has been unable to move forward with its massive economic stimulus package because the Democrats refuse to accept a $1.6 trillion bill they say is largely a handout to corporations with little protection for ordinary Americans hurt in the economic crisis created by the novel coronavirus. Democrats hold more power than usual because five Republican senators are in isolation because of exposure to the coronavirus—Rand Paul (KY), Mike Lee (UT), Mitt Romney (UT), Cory Gardner (CO), and Rick Scott (FL)—which means that the GOP majority is now only 48-47. The stimulus bill needs 60 votes to pass the Senate, so it needs bipartisan support.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell developed the bill without Democratic input, arguing that such a move would be faster than trying to negotiate with Democrats in the writing phase, but what has emerged is a bill that Democrats won’t choke down. Among other things, it gives Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin extraordinary power to use up to $500 billion with little oversight to shore up teetering businesses. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has been vocal in her disapproval of an expensive bill that does not protect ordinary Americans.
Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has suggested the House will write its own bill. This measure will include an expansion of unemployment insurance, funding for hospitals and medical supplies, grants for small businesses that are in danger of going under in this crisis, and cash payments to poorer Americans.
It sure looks to me like the national mood is changing from a determination to protect those at the top of the economy to protecting ordinary Americans. We’ll see what Monday brings.
I’m teaching one class on the 1950s tomorrow and another on the rise of the cattle industry and the cowboys. It’s gonna be a good day. And then, starting Tuesday, I’ll be doing more live streams here. Will make an announcement about that tomorrow.
Off to polish some powerpoints.
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March 23, 2020 (Monday)
Hoo, boy, it’s been quite a Monday.
Members of the Senate continued to argue over the almost $2 trillion dollar coronavirus relief and stimulus package, with tempers running so high that the senators-- who were actually debating a piece of legislation, which hasn’t happened in a while-- yelled at each other. There are two visions at stake in the struggle. The Senate Republicans, who wrote their bill without input from the Democrats, are focusing on bailing out the corporations whose collapse in this crisis will crater the economy. The Democrats want to focus on the ordinary people hit with unemployment and illness, arguing that by providing funds for workers, as well as supporting hospitals and health care workers, the government will save lives as well as the economy.
A big sticking point is a $500 billion provision that would permit Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to dole out loans to corporations with very little oversight. The companies that took such loans would remain secret for six months after they tapped into the money. Republicans argue that this secrecy would keep the stock of such companies from dropping as people realized their financial straits. Democrats are leery of such secrecy—what would stop Mnuchin from handing out government largesse to Trump’s key supporters… or even to the president himself, whose hotels have been hard-hit by the pandemic? (Trump refused on Sunday to promise he would not take any federal aid.) “The American people don’t want another corporate bailout,” Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown said. “They don’t want a bailout for Wall Street. They don’t want a bailout for the airlines. They want money. If we’re going to do a relief package, the money needs to go in the pockets of workers.”
When asked about the provision allowing the Treasury to dole out this money without oversight, Trump said: “Look, I’ll be the oversight. I’ll be the oversight.”
The fight over this bill says a lot about the country’s changing politics. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has become accustomed to getting his way, and the fact that all but one Democrat (the exception was Alabama Senator Doug Jones) voted against the bill in a procedural vote (they were not actually voting on the bill itself), suggested that the Democrats were not going to cave to him. McConnell has taken to the media to charge Democrats with playing politics, but this admonition is rich, coming from McConnell. So, too, was his claim that the Democrats’ refusal to approve a bill they were excluded from writing was “the most outrageous behavior I’ve seen.”
Trump was nowhere to be seen in this struggle. Normally, presidents work to get their party’s legislation passed, making phone calls, talking to congress members. Trump has never done much of this, but now seems to have abandoned it altogether, focusing instead on his press briefings. For him, these seem to be replacing his rallies, and media outlets are grappling with how both to cover them and to prevent the dissemination of dangerous information as Trump overrides medical advisors to share his own gut sense of the crisis.
Meanwhile, Democrats in the House of Representatives have written their own massive stimulus bill. Covering more than 1400 pages, its summary reads like a campaign document, laying out Democratic priorities in contrast to those enumerated in the Senate coronavirus bill. It directs more than $2.5 trillion to health care, individuals, small businesses, unemployment compensation, food security, state and local governments, schools, and mail-in voting in the 2020 election.
Congress is eager to move things along as coronavirus infections have spread into their own ranks. Yesterday, we learned that Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) tested positive for coronavirus, but did not self-isolate while waiting for the test results. He met with colleagues, ate in the Senate lunchroom, exercised in the Senate gym, and worked on the Senate floor, thus exposing his colleagues to the virus. Many of the senators are older, and they or their family members fall into the most vulnerable categories for complications of Covid-19. They are angry enough at Paul’s irresponsibility—he’s a doctor, after all—that he felt obliged to explain that if he had actually followed the testing rules, he would not have been tested and would still be walking around among them. This is little comfort as the disease moves closer to them and those they know: Senator Amy Klobuchar’s (D-MN) law professor husband is in a Virginia hospital with coronavirus-related pneumonia. At least 31 members of Congress were self-isolating or sick before Paul’s diagnosis; his news added both of Utah’s Senators-- Mitt Romney and Mike Lee—to those self-isolating.
The stock market dropped again today. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished the day 583 points down, about 3%. The Federal Reserve tried to shore it up again by announcing it would buy a wide range of investments to inject more cash into the economy, but investors are crossing their fingers that Congress will pass a massive relief bill.
The U.S. now has more than 42,600 cases of coronavirus and at least 540 people have died. But while senior health officials insist we must continue to self-isolate to slow the pandemic here, Trump appears to be prioritizing the falling stock market (and perhaps his own shuttered hotels, including his prized Mar-a-Lago). Sunday night, he tweeted: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” and then said today he might override the advice of the health professionals to end the lockdowns after just fifteen days and try to get the economy moving again. “Our country wasn’t built to be shut down,” he said today. “At some point, we’re going to be opening up our country. It’s going to be pretty soon.”
This idea is getting traction among Trump supporters. This evening, Larry Kudlow, Trump’s Director of the National Economic Council, was on the Fox News Channel saying “The president is right. The cure can’t be worse than the disease. And we’re going to have to make some difficult tradeoffs.” Just what those tradeoffs might be became clear when the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick told FNC personality Tucker Carlson Monday night that he thought there were “lots of grandparents” who would be “willing to take a chance on [their] survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren.” He went on: “I want to live smart and see through this, but I don’t want the whole country to be sacrificed. And that’s what I see.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and a voice of calm reason in this crisis, is not on board with Trump’s increasing flirtation with the idea that the country can abandon its isolation policies after fifteen days. Fauci was not at today’s press briefing, and while Trump brushed off his absence, there were signs today that he might be on his way out of his prominent role in combatting the coronavirus. Fauci has advised every president since Ronald Reagan and brings much credibility to Trump’s team, but he has corrected the president repeatedly in public, and his insistence that the coronavirus is more dangerous than Trump says is increasingly unwelcome.
In all my reading today, one thing jumped out. In an interview, Dr. Fauci pointed out that every president he has served, starting in 1984 with Reagan, has had to deal with epidemic disease: Zika, AIDS, SARS, Ebola, H1N1, MERS. Some have handled their crises better than others, but after Reagan botched the AIDS crisis, they have always prioritized public health so effectively that most of us have had the luxury of forgetting that we live under these grave threats.
No longer.
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Heather is doing another live Facebook talk right now.
There’s something soothing about just listening to her discuss things in their historical context so cogently.
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March 24, 2020 (Tuesday)
After yesterday’s news avalanche, today was a remarkably straight forward news day. Cases of coronavirus infection and the Covid-19 disease continued to mount in America, the Senate came close to finalizing its coronavirus relief and economic stimulus package, sparking a huge rally in the stock market, and, to the dismay of health care officials, Trump suggested we could stop isolating by Easter (April 12 this year).
A little more detail:
Coronavirus infections are increasing dramatically, along with the related disease Covid-19. The US now has more than 53,000 confirmed cases and more than 700 deaths. In New Orleans, over half of EMS personnel are under quarantine and in New York City, about 10% of the force is home sick.
While the Senate did not finalize its massive coronavirus relief and stimulus bill today, negotiators came close enough to a deal that the bill seems likely to pass. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is negotiating for the White House with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY). Today the White House made a significant concession to the Democrats, abandoning the dispersal of funds without oversight. Now, rather than permitting the Treasury Secretary to offer $500 billion of loans to troubled businesses secretly, there will be an independent inspector general and an oversight board to keep tabs on the program.
The bill will provide direct payments to American households and offer $367 billion to small companies. It will also increase unemployment insurance, provide $130 billion for hospitals and $150 billion for state and local stimulus, both Democratic priorities.
As expected, the bill the House Democrats offered yesterday, a bill that was essentially a Democratic wish list to contrast with McConnell’s original Republican bill in the Senate, will be abandoned. The House will press forward with the now revised Senate bill as soon as it passes.
With the news of the impending passage of the bill, along with the massive debt buyback launched by the Federal Reserve yesterday, the stock market rallied today. The Dow Jones Industrial Average posted its biggest point gain on record. It rose 2,113 points, or by about 11.4%.
Trump’s indication that he wants the country back at work by Easter to revive the economy has attracted a number of prominent Republican supporters, but it flies in the face of advice from heath care professionals. Many people are appalled at the idea, not least because while it is widely conceded that such a move would dramatically increase the numbers of victims of Covid-19, there is no guarantee that such a move would, in fact, benefit the economy. Just because restaurants and shops reopen, it is not clear that people would emerge from isolation to visit them until they know they will not be endangering their health.
As Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who now leads a global health foundation, put it today: “There really is no middle ground, and it’s very tough to say to people: ‘Hey, keep going to restaurants, go buy new houses, ignore that pile of bodies in the corner. We want you to keep spending because there’s maybe a politician who thinks GDP growth is all that counts.”
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March 25, 2020 (Wednesday)
The news as I write tonight at 11:50 pm is that the Senate has just passed the biggest relief and stimulus bill in U.S. history. The bill dedicates $2.2 trillion dollars to set up loan programs for struggling businesses, reinforce unemployment insurance, shore up hospitals, and make payments to Americans suffering in the economic downturn. The bill now heads to the House of Representatives, which is not currently in session, making its passage somewhat complicated but still likely.
On the strength of the looming passage of the bill, the stock market rose for a second day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average went up 495 points, or slightly more than 2%.
Infections and deaths from coronavirus continue to rise as well. Shortly after midnight on March 25, the United States had more than 69,000 cases and at least 1000 deaths. New York has emerged as the current center of the disease, with 30,811 infections and 285 deaths, but other areas are expecting their numbers to climb quickly. Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, warned about mass death as the numbers there rise to 662 cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and 11 deaths. He says the city will be shut down for at least two months.
Nonetheless, some Republicans insist that the cure of trying to stop the spread of the illness by shutting down society is worse than the disease. Today Governor Tate Reeves of Mississippi, who has been lambasted for insufficiently responding to the crisis as Mississippi’s cases of coronavirus have started to spike, issued an executive order that he claimed would create new restrictions to combat the spread of the virus, but it exempted retail shopping, media, trash collection, education, construction, accounting services, churches, restaurants with 10 or fewer diners at a time, and so on. (Unsure if this order overrides their own stronger rules, many leaders of towns and cities in Mississippi that have taken stronger measures have chosen to keep their own rules in place.)
Reeves did, however, join Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the Republican state attorney general of Ohio to order that any abortions in their states that were not medically necessary to save the life or health of the mother were “non-essential” medical procedures and thus should not proceed during the crisis.
Trump is using his daily briefings on the coronavirus in place of his rallies, and media channels are trying to figure out how both to cover the briefings and to avoid spreading disinformation that will hurt Americans’ ability to respond to the crisis. It is clear Trump is relishing the constant television coverage, and is using it to advance his reelection campaign. In the process, he is playing fast and loose with the truth. Media channels are aware that Trump got scads of free press coverage by engaging in shocking behavior, and are trying to cover the news without repeating that mistake. Today an NPR station in Seattle announced that it will no longer cover his briefings because they disseminate misleading or false information. On Monday, CNN and MSNBC cut away from the briefing after an hour, saying that “the information no longer appeared to be valuable to the important ongoing discussion around public health.” Deputy White House Press Secretary Judd Deere said their decision was “disgraceful.”
Increasingly, the reality is that Trump is outside the real action in the fighting against the pandemic. As the federal government has dropped the ball, state governors and local leaders have stepped in. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican who leads the National Governors Association, dismissed out of hand the idea of ending the national lockdown by Easter, as Trump has suggested, and Republican and Democratic governors both have prioritized public health over the national economy.
Similarly, Trump played little if any role in drafting and passing the stimulus packages, leaving the largest stimulus bill in history in the hands of Congress and his Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, while he tweeted (incorrectly) that “the United States has done far more ‘testing’ than any other nation, by far!” and that the “LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before!”
The country is reordering itself as we hunker down for this crisis. Already our work habits, our social habits, our shopping habits, and our personal lives have been knocked into new grooves. It is a mistake, I think, to imagine that when we finally get a handle on this disease, America will go back to what it was before coronavirus. Observers cannot help but note that such profound dislocation presents a perfect opening for an authoritarian power grab. The Department of Justice’s recent attempt to get Congress to pass legislation permitting the arrest and detention of defendants at will during a time of emergency is a troubling step in that direction. (I thought the DOJ story might well be untrue and said so when I wrote about it; I was wrong, it is true.) During past crises, a number of Americans have welcomed such authoritarianism, hoping to ditch the slow messiness of democracy in favor of quick, strong fixes. Notably, during the Depression, fascism didn’t strike everyone as a bad idea.
But while it is imperative for citizens of a democracy to watch for and resist the rise of such authoritarian power during a crisis, these times are also open for a redefinition of the nation, not only of our government, but also of how we live. We are learning that many of us can work from home—how will that change our urban and rural spaces? We are learning that our lives depend on a strong government response to pandemics and economic dislocation—how will that change our government? We are learning that our families and friends are even more important than even we knew—how will that change our priorities?
The questions raised by this life-changing crisis are open… and so, suddenly, is America’s future.
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March 26, 2020 (Thursday)
The United States now leads the world in confirmed coronavirus cases. At least 83,377 people have tested positive for the virus, a leap of 17,166 cases. At least 1,295 have died. As nurses and doctors struggle on the front lines of this pandemic, Trump and his supporters insist that fears of the disease are overblown. In Louisiana, a pastor of a Baton Rouge megachurch is continuing to hold services in defiance of orders from Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards against large gatherings. Pastor Tony Spell of Life Tabernacle Church says he is not worried about Covid-19. “The virus, we believe, is politically motivated. We hold our religious rights dear and we are going to assemble no matter what someone says.”
The Labor Department reported last week’s unemployment claims, and they are higher by far than expected. More than 3.28 million workers filed unemployment claims, and the system is so backlogged many cannot get through. The unemployment rate jumped to 5.5 from last month’s 3.5%.
Despite the jobs numbers, investors regained faith in the markets. On Thursday, the stock market rose again for the third day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished up 1,351 points, or about 6.38%. With an all-over rise of more than 20% since Monday, the market is out of the bear territory it had entered with the falls of recent weeks.
Investors might have been cheerful about the market in part because the Trump administration has drastically rolled back rules for polluters in this crisis. Companies can now monitor themselves during the outbreak. The Environmental Protection Agency will not issue fines for breaking certain laws for reporting violations of air, water, or hazardous waste violations. The new order asks companies to “act responsibly.” Compliance is retroactive to March 13.
This EPA order dovetails with other regulatory rollbacks taking place while we are focused on the deadly pandemic. The administration is rushing through regulations to weaken environmental laws since Congress can overturn a regulation or federal rule within 60 days of it being finalized, and Republicans are increasingly concerned that voters will turn against them in the 2020 election. So they are in a hurry to get their rollbacks on the books before the 60 day mark.
The House of Representatives is set to take up the Senate’s $2 trillion emergency relief bill. The House is not currently in session, so House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy agreed to a voice vote, which would not require all 430 members of the House to return to Washington. But at least one representative, Thomas Massie (R-KY), is considering opposing the bill out of concerns about its cost, which would require the presence of all the representatives for a roll call vote.
All eyes are on the coronavirus as we become the nation hardest hit by it.
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Does Kentucky just crank out obstructionist assholes who want to run for office or something? McConnell, Paul, now this dipshit. JFC.
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March 27, 2020 (Friday)
Today the House of Representatives passed the Senate’s massive coronavirus relief and stimulus bill, the CARES Act. This $2.2 trillion bill is an attempt to address the massive economic dislocation caused by the pandemic now convulsing America. Lots of people have written to me to ask about all the “pork” that Democrats demanded in this bill and how they were playing with Americans’ lives for their own interests. This, once again, is Republican messaging, not reality.
Remember, this is the third of three relief bills. The first two originated in the House of Representatives, and there was remarkably little complaint about them. The first, the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2020 (H.R. 6074) provided $8.3 billion to provide money for medical supplies, treatments for Covid-19, and vaccines. It was written as a bipartisan bill, it received bipartisan support, and it was signed into law.
The second, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (H.R. 6201), provided basic support for ordinary Americans in this crisis, providing for coronavirus testing, paid leave under certain circumstances, and food security and unemployment benefits. This bill, too, was bipartisan, passing the House by a vote of 363 to 40, with 140 Republicans and 223 Democrats voting in favor of it.
And now we have the third major piece of legislation designed to combat the medical and economic crisis created by the novel coronavirus. The Coronavirus Aid, Recover, and Economic Security Act (CARES) (H.R. 748), passed by a voice vote on Friday, and the president signed it Friday night. The writing and passage of this bill is a little complicated, so bear with me if you want to understand the accusations that Democrats were manipulating it, and ignore this if you’re not interested.
While this bill has a House of Representatives number (that’s what the H.R. means), the bill actually originated in the Senate and went on to replace a “shell bill” in the House (this is complicated, but since all bills appropriating funds must originate in the House, the House had to agree to an original bill that then got replaced by the Senate bill). Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republicans wrote their own relief bill without input from Democrats, arguing that such a process would be faster than a bipartisan committee. When the bill emerged, it was unacceptable to Democrats, who worried it handed too much to corporations and not enough to ordinary Americans hurt by the economic downturn in the wake of the coronavirus.
Discussions hit a stalemate over a number of things, but primarily over the provision for a $500 billion fund to be used by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to shore up businesses (whose applications to that fund would be secret for six months) with little oversight. This was a nonstarter for Democrats, who pointed out the money could be funneled to Trump’s financial supporters, or even to Trump himself (it did not help that the president refused to pledge that he would not accept bailout money).
As the Senate debates were hitting a wall, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) introduced a Democratic proposal from the House. This 1400-page bill was explicitly not a bipartisan bill, and was pretty clearly intended to outline a Democratic vision for the country against that of McConnell’s Senate Republicans. This is what pundits on the right are citing as evidence the Democrats were making extreme demands for passage of the larger coronavirus bill (for example, it provided that internet companies could not cut off service for those who could not pay during the coronavirus, a provision that got twisted in right-wing emails to a demand for “free internet”), but there was no actual attempt to pass this bill. Instead, the Senate negotiators began to talk in earnest, and the Democrats got their primary concern taken care of in the Senate bill: it would have oversight of the $500 billion fund for businesses. An independent inspector general and an oversight board would oversee the dispersal of funds.
They also got a number of other items in the bill, making it look in many ways like a normal appropriations bill, with both parties getting appropriations for things they prioritize. There was no “Green New Deal” in the bill, and no “windmills,” as Trump charged. There was money for the Transportation Security Administration to test for explosives, for the Agriculture Department to grade beef and pork, for NASA construction, for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and for the National Endowment for the Arts, all entities the Democrats think have been starved in the recent past. The idea that this was some sort of Democratic coup is belied by the fact that this was a bill written without Democratic input in the first place. It is also belied by the fact the bill passed the Senate by a bipartisan vote of 96-0.
Then it went to the House. Since the House had disbanded on March 14 to protect its members from the novel coronavirus, it was expected that the bill would pass by voice vote in the House, meaning that it would have unanimous consent and the members would not have to come back for a roll call vote. But a single representative could block that, and one did, Thomas Massie (R-KY), who demanded that his colleagues return to Washington, D.C. to vote. He could be voted down by a quorum, and was, as members of the House returned to vote against him, and hoo, boy, were they angry that he had demanded a grandstanding vote that would threaten their health. House members came back into the chamber to make a quorum, standing apart from each other, and attacked Massie for the arrogance that made them take airplanes and meet in close quarters against medical advice. Still, it was former Secretary of State John Kerry who had the last word. He tweeted: “Congressman Massie has tested positive for being an asshole. He must be quarantined to prevent the spread of his massive stupidity.”
The House then passed the bill and sent it on to the president who signed it.
But.
When Trump signed it, he included a “signing statement.” These used to be quite innocuous statements in which a president would thank the people involved in writing the bill, or talk about how important a bill was. President George W. Bush began to use these statements to challenge the content of a bill without being forced to veto the entire thing, saying, for example, that he would not honor certain portions of it. And that’s what happened tonight. Trump issued a signing statement saying he would ignore the law’s provisions for an independent inspector general overseeing the disbursal of funds for corporate bailouts. His argument is that such a provision intrudes on the rights of the executive to block information from Congress. If this holds, it would erase the Democrats’ key victory in the negotiations over the bill.
Trump’s attempt to reject congressional oversight is “not a surprise to anyone,” Pelosi said tonight, and a Democratic aide said they had anticipated such a move and so had put multiple layers of oversight in the bill. But Trump said that federal agencies must be allowed to act without consulting Congress and that he would not treat “spending decisions as dependent on prior consultation with or the approval of” Congress.
It is not the House Democrats, but rather the president, who is playing politics with this massive relief bill that was so painstakingly negotiated. He remains eager to gather power into his own hands.
In other news, tonight Trump told reporters he would not talk to the Democratic governors he thought were insufficiently grateful for his help fighting the coronavirus. “All I want them to do—very simple: I want them to be appreciative.”
And today America’s coronavirus numbers leaped again. We now have more than 100,000 infections, and a death toll of more than 1,500. Officials in more than 200 cities say their cities are short of masks, ventilators, and personal protective equipment. After his efforts to negotiate with industry to produce needed supplies fell apart, today Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to force General Motors to produce badly needed ventilators. None of this was enough to steady the skittish stock market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 925 points today for a drop of 4.1%.
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Fucking hell.
It’s absurd, ridiculous and frightening to me that our only option for overthrowing this monster, no matter how bad he gets, appears to be waiting until November and hoping that Republicans don’t manage to steal yet another election.
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There are others, but I will not say them out loud.
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March 28, 2020 (Saturday)
People are asking how it is that Trump’s approval ratings are higher than ever: an average of all the polls has him at 47%, a three-point increase. Two things: it is completely normal for a president to get an approval bump during a national crisis, and Trump’s is actually smaller than the bumps other presidents have gotten in crises. Leaving aside the extraordinary 39-point bump President George W. Bush got from 9-11 because it skews everything, President George H. W. Bush’s approval rating jumped 16 points at the start of the Gulf War, and that range is pretty typical. Trump’s bump still leaves him within the realm of his usual support levels, and, in any case it is unlikely to last.
The second point is more interesting. Why are some ordinary people supporting Trump more and more fervently, when most observers think his presidency has been, at best, troubled?
Over the course of today, a story began to emerge that illustrates the answer to that question. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ®, who took Russian money from indicted political operative Lev Parnas,* began to argue that the reason the novel coronavirus is spreading rapidly in Florida is not because he refused to close the beaches, which are still crowded, (but not as crowded as they were during spring break, when masses of young revelers flocked to the state), or because he has refused to issue a statewide lockdown, as other governors have done.
Instead, DeSantis is blaming Florida’s troubles on New Yorkers flying to Florida and “seeding” the virus there. “How is it fair to them to just be air dropping in people from the hot zones, bringing infections with them and seeding the communities with new infections that they’re trying to stamp out?” DeSantis said. DeSantis has deployed the National Guard to seven major Florida airports to identify New Yorkers who fly in, and has ordered travelers from New York City to “self-declare” and to agree to a 14-day quarantine when they arrive. Now he is apparently setting up a checkpoint on I-95 to screen for New Yorkers.
Later in the day, Trump also began to talk of a quarantine over the entire New York area, tweeting, “I am giving consideration to a QUARANTINE of developing ‘hot spots’, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. A decision will be made, one way or another, shortly.” He later said: “We might not have to do it, but there’s a possibility that sometime today we’ll do a quarantine, short-term, two weeks on New York. Probably New Jersey, certain parts of Connecticut. This would be an enforceable quarantine. I’d rather not do it, but maybe we need it.”
This was news to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who pointed out the move would paralyze the nation’s financial sector, was likely illegal, and that it “would be a federal declaration of war on states.” Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe tweeted that it is legal only to quarantine “any individual reasonably believed to be infected with a communicable disease,” not states, and that the president has no power to do so. Shortly afterward, Trump backed off and said that “a quarantine will not be necessary.”
This attempt to blame New Yorkers for the crisis when, in fact, it is unclear that there is any great exodus to Florida from New York as few people want to fly, contrasts strikingly with the approach of Maine’s Democratic Governor Janet Mills, whose state is indeed facing an influx of people. She has closed all nonessential businesses and restaurants, and simply asked all of the summer people jumping the gun on the season to self-quarantine.
The attempt to blame New Yorkers for the rapid spread of the coronavirus in Florida illustrates the political rhetoric that has kept Trump’s ordinary supporters so fiercely loyal to him.
Key to Trump’s popularity has been a rhetorical strategy identified in 1951 by political philosopher Eric Hoffer in a book called The True Believer. Hoffer noted that demagogues needed a disaffected population whose members felt they had lost the power they previously held, that they had been displaced either religiously, economically, culturally, or politically. Such people were willing to follow a leader who promised to return them to their former positions of prominence and thus to make the nation great again. But to cement their loyalty, the leader had to give them someone to hate. Who that was didn’t really matter: the group simply had to be blamed for all the troubles the leader’s supporters were suffering.
Trump has mastered this technique. He has kept his base firmly behind him by demonizing immigrants, the media, and, increasingly, Democrats, deflecting his own shortcomings in office by blaming these groups for undermining him. But the coronavirus crisis is making it hard to do. Immigration stories are running against Trump as his own acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has said that immigration authorities will stop most of their enforcement efforts during the crisis. The media is pushing back hard against his lies and Americans seem to be on the media’s side as the administration’s response to the coronavirus has been scattershot.
But New Yorkers represent Democrats and the urban life so many of Trump’s supporters distrust. Identifying them as the cause of Florida’s troubles both deflects attention from DeSantis and Trump’s missteps and reinforces loyalty to the president.
According to Hoffer, there’s a psychological trick to the way this rhetoric works that makes loyalty to such a leader get stronger as that leader’s behavior deteriorates. People who sign on to the idea that they are standing with their leader against an enemy begin to attack their opponents, and to justify their attacks, they have to convince themselves that that enemy is not good-intentioned like they are, but evil. And the worse they behave, the more they have to believe their enemies deserve to be treated badly.
According to Hoffer, so long as they are unified against an enemy, true believers will support their leader no matter how outrageous his behavior gets. Indeed, their loyalty will only get stronger as his behavior gets more and more extreme. Turning against him would force them to own their own part in his attacks on those former enemies they would now have to recognize as ordinary human beings like themselves.
It was learning about Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower that introduced me to Hoffer. Eisenhower, who had battled both fascism and communism, passed out copies of The True Believer to friends, including to a former veteran, Robert J. Biggs, who begged Eisenhower to stop “hedging” and tell people firmly what to think. Eisenhower warned Biggs that while such authoritarian leadership was important for the military, it was fatal to a democracy in which “debate is the breath of life. This,” Eisenhower wrote, “is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’”
Lincoln also made an appearance in Hoffer’s book. Not all who rose to lead a mass movement were dangerous, Hoffer said. “[R]are leaders such as Lincoln, Gandhi, even FDR, Churchill, and Nehru… do not hesitate to harness man’s hungers and fears to weld a following and make it zealous unto death in service of a holy cause; but unlike a Hitler [or] a Stalin…" they did not demonize their opponents. “They know,” Hoffer said, "that no one can be honorable unless he honors mankind.”
*I’m totally not making this up.
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March 29, 2020 (Sunday)
For all that Trump gave a press briefing tonight, backing off the suggestion that the country could reopen for business on Easter, April 12 (perhaps after he heard Dr. Anthony Fauci’s estimate that the nation is looking at 100,000 to 200,000 deaths over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic), what is seared in my mind from the day is Trump’s morning tweets.
On a day that our coronavirus cases topped 139,000 and at least 2425 people in the United States have died, while our health care workers are on the front lines fighting this deadly disease with inadequate protection and few supplies, Trump tweeted: “Because the “Ratings” of my News Conferences etc. are so high, “Bachelor Finale, Monday Night Football type numbers” according to the [New York Times], the Lamestream Media is going CRAZY. “Trump is reaching too many people, we must stop him.” said one lunatic. See you at 5:00 P.M.!”
I think I can leave it right there for tonight.
I’m going to hit the hay early and come back raring to go tomorrow.
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March 30, 2020 (Monday)
Tonight the top of the Empire State building flashed red and white like an emergency beacon, and the interpretations of that new signal encapsulated the nation’s varying responses to the coronavirus. The Empire State Building’s Twitter account explained that the new lighting was supposed to represent “the heartbeat of America with a white and red siren in the mast for heroic emergency workers on the front line of the fight.”
But it looked far too much like an emergency signal for some observers. Yale Professor Joanne Freeman tweeted “I have never seen the Empire State Building do this. Definitely sending the message: ALARM.”
In contrast, Fox News Channel personality Martha MacCallum simply reinterpreted it for her viewers, telling them the clearly red and white lights were actually red, white, and blue. It was “lit up in red, white, and blue," she said, "in recognition of the nationwide effort to combat Covid-19.”
There were more than 160,000 coronavirus cases in the United States today, and the death toll is close to 3,000.
But while all eyes are on the coronavirus, there are a number of other stories that bear watching.
March was supposed to be the month when a number of legal cases involving the president came before judges. The Supreme Court was due to review Trump’s effort to shield his tax returns and financial records from Congress, as well as his insistence that a sitting president should be immune from any criminal proceeding related to any conduct before taking office or during his term, even if he were to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. But the pandemic has forced the Supreme Court to postpone oral arguments. This is rare but not unprecedented: the Supreme Court postponed sessions during the 1918 influenza epidemic and in 1793 and 1798 during an outbreak of yellow fever.
That was not the only legal action expected in March and now postponed. Tuesday, March 31 was the deadline for the Department of Justice to turn over an unredacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report so Judge Reggie Walton could read it himself and determine whether or not the Justice Department’s continuing unwillingness to make public crucial parts of the report is justified. Walton has expressed concerns about Attorney General William Barr’s “lack of candor” in the matter. Today, the DOJ turned over the report, but the court is largely closed because of the pandemic, and the review cannot now begin until April 20, 2020 at the earliest.
March 31 was also the date scheduled for Barr himself to appear before the House Judiciary Committee for the first time in his 14 months in office. Barr was set to talk about how he handled the Mueller report and the Ukraine Scandal whistleblower report, and Trump’s interference in the sentencing of his associate Roger Stone. With the House out of session until at least April 20, though, that hearing has been postponed, with no new date yet set.
The issue of Russian sanctions has not gone away, either. Trump called into Fox and Friends this morning to chat with the personalities there who, unlike the reporters at his briefings, will not ask him uncomfortable questions. On air, he announced that his next phone call would be to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Then, after attacking the report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump defended his advances toward Russia. He said: "They love to be able to do trade with our country. It’s been very much hindered by the nonsense that’s been going on. Russia, Russia, Russia, which has turned out to be a total hoax when you look at what happened with Comey and McCabe and you look at all the things that happened with Mueller and the Mueller report.”
Putin has worked for years to get rid of the sanctions placed on his country after it invaded Ukraine, sanctions that make it impossible for him and key allies to move money, and has recently insisted that the coronavirus makes the lifting of sanctions a “matter of life and death.” Trump would not answer a question about what he would say if Putin asked him to lift sanctions. Instead, he harked back to World War Two, reminding the hosts that Russia was an American ally then and Germany was an enemy. He dismissed the idea that Russia was still engaging in disinformation campaigns in the United States–although intelligence agencies have said they are—saying “They do it and we do it…. Every country does it.”
Reports of the call itself say the two leaders discussed oil prices, trade, and the coronavirus.
Apparent corruption is still around, too. Last Friday, at 4:00, the Bureau of Indian Affairs told Cedrick Cromwell, the chair of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe that the tribes 321-acre reservation would no longer be considered sovereign land. The Secretary of the Department of the Interior, David Bernhardt, had decided to remove the reservation from federal trust. But why?
The tribe has been trying to get approval for a casino on its land, which is about 18 miles from Rhode Island, where men close to Trump already operate two casinos. Their company, Twin River Worldwide Holdings, hired as a lobbyist Matthew Schlapp, chair of the American Conservative Union and a big Trump supporter, whose wife Mercedes is Trump’s director of strategic communications. Loss of sovereignty over their land will hurt the Wampanoag’s bid for the one remaining casino license in Massachusetts, thus leaving the Rhode Island casinos without competition and the remaining license up for grabs.
The Fox News Channel is still spouting disinformation, but it might be in trouble. Its abrupt about face on the dangers of Covid-19 had a legal angle. Yesterday, Vanity Fair special correspondent Gabriel Sherman told MSNBC “I’ve been talking to Fox insiders over the last few days, there’s a real concern inside the network that their early downplaying of the coronavirus actually exposes Fox News to potential legal action by viewers who maybe were misled and actually have died from this.” Sherman pointed out that the Murdoch family, which owns the channel, had privately taken the virus very seriously and protected themselves even while downplaying it to viewers.
Michael Bromwich, former Inspector General for the Department of Justice and Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York noted: “Fox is right to be concerned. Very concerned. This could be a legal bloodbath. Discovery will undoubtedly show that its personnel were putting out falsely comforting information it knew to be false and misleading in order to sync up with WH messaging.”
And finally, in his call to the Fox News Channel this morning, Trump said out loud something that has been on the table in the Republican Party since the 1980s when leaders began to talk about winning by suppressing the Democratic vote. Talking about the recent coronavirus relief and stimulus bill, Trump said: “The things they had in there were crazy. They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
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