And yet, the Orange One is even worse.
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April 28, 2020 (Tuesday)
As of today, at least 58,356 American have died from the coronavirus.
58,220 Americans died in the Vietnam War.
As the numbers of infections are steadying in some places, states are gradually reopening, against the advice of public health advisors, and despite the fact that between 60% and 81% of Americans (depending on the poll) agree they want to “continue to social distance for as long as needed to curb the spread of coronavirus, even if it means continued damage to the economy.”
At stake appears to be the same ideological struggle that has existed between Republicans and Democrats since the 1980s. Should government provide a social safety net for its people to carry them through this pandemic—a social safety net that will cost tax dollars-- or should people support themselves, regardless of the danger?
Beginning with Georgia’s Brian Kemp, Republican governors began the process of ordering open retail establishments like nail salons, restaurants, malls, and so on, last week. Immediately, critics charged that the premature reopenings were an attempt to keep people off unemployment rolls, where the exploding number of cases was running state finances dry. These state coffers could only be repaid by imposing higher taxes.
When asked last week whether or not employees could refuse to go back to work out of fear of contracting Covid-19, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, a Republican, said no. “If you’re an employer and you offer to bring your employee back to work and they decide not to, that’s a voluntary quit," she said. “Therefore, they would not be eligible for the unemployment money.” The same is true in Texas, where Republican Governor Greg Abbott recently called for retail establishments to reopen on Friday. To collect unemployment benefits in Texas, a worker must be “willing and able to work all the days and hours required for the type of work you are seeking.”
Workers at meat processing plants have been hit especially hard by Covid-19, and at least 13 have had to close. The processing plants in most trouble have been pork plants, where employers have been cutting costs and speeding up production for years, increasing efficiency by stationing workers side by side. As employees sicken and die from coronavirus, employers face liability for risking their workers’ lives. They have said they would have to close more plants, choking off the nation’s meat supply.
Today, Trump announced that he will use the Defense Production Act to force meat processing plants to stay open. “We’re going to sign an executive order today, I believe, and that’ll solve any liability problems,” Trump said.
By declaring meat packing a part of the nation’s critical infrastructure, the president can demand it continue to operate in an emergency. Since Congress passed the DPA in the 1950s, presidents have used it to keep vital supplies moving, and food is certainly a vital supply. But never before has a president had to grapple with what it means to invoke this law when a pandemic puts its burden not on business leaders but on American workers, whose lives are at stake. That Trump’s primary concern was over employer liability in this case is revealing.
Protecting businesses from liability if their workers or customers get sick is on the table in Congress, as well. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said there is no way he will consider another bill to address the dislocations caused by the coronavirus unless it protects businesses that reopen from liability if someone in them catches Covid-19. “We have a red line on liability,” McConnell said. “It won’t pass the Senate without it.”
At the same time, it turns out the $500 billion in emergency aid to large corporations provided in the $2.2 trillion coronavirus package does not carry certain restrictions. The aid is a loan. The Federal Reserve will buy up to $500 billion in company bonds to provide cash for the corporation, and the money must be repaid with interest. But the law does not require a corporation using this program to protect jobs or to limit compensation for executives or shareholders, unlike the programs for small and midsize businesses.
The Payment Protection Plan requires that small businesses certify they will use the money to “retain workers and maintain payroll or make mortgage payments, lease payments, and utility payments.” The program for midsize businesses—the “Main Street” program—requires recipients to try to keep their workers on, and it limits executive compensation and forbids dividends until a year after the loan is repaid.
Cornell economist Eswar Prasad talked to Washington Post reporters Jeff Stein and Peter Whoriskey about the leniency of the program for large corporations. “I am struck that the administration is relying on the good will of the companies receiving this assistance. A few months down the road, after the government purchases its debt, the company can turn around and issue a bunch of dividends to shareholders or fire its workers, and there’s no clear path to get it back.”
What Democrats want in a new coronavirus package is to bail out state governments crippled by a lack of the tax dollars that fund their states. This request is what has sparked the criticism from McConnell, Florida Senator Rick Scott, and Fox News Channel personalities about “blue state bailouts,” as well as the backlash from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who point out that their Democratic states put more money into the federal government than they take out, while Republican states Kentucky and Florida do the opposite.
The fight over state relief brings into focus the ideological struggle between the parties. In a really terrific article in The Atlantic this week, conservative writer David Frum explains that McConnell’s call for blue states to declare bankruptcy has been a pet project of Republican Party leaders since 2011. Compared to Republican states, Democratic states provide generous benefits to state retirees, including health care packages (a deal that is implicit when state workers accept lower salaries throughout their careers than they would earn in the private sector). Those pensions are supported with tax dollars, which currently have dried up. At the same time, health costs continue to go up.
Bankruptcy would not mean states defaulted on all their debt. Bankruptcy is a legal process that would permit a federal judge to decide what bills would be paid, so it would essentially allow Republican appointees at the federal level (remember all those judges?) to impose their ideology on Democratic states by determining their spending. Republican judges would protect wealthy bondholders but slash pensions and healthcare. Frum notes that Republican calls for state bankruptcy are explicit that “a federal law of state bankruptcy ‘must explicitly forbid any federal judge from mandating a tax hike.’”
McConnell is unlikely to get the idea of forcing states into bankruptcy through Congress, but his reluctance to bail out suffering states is nonetheless instructive. The pandemic has given him the chance to empower Republican lawmakers from poor states to dismantle the social safety nets of wealthy Democratic states. Frum notes that McConnell is likely worried that Democrats will end his Senate leadership by taking the Senate this fall, so he is working as hard as he can “to refashion the federal government in ways that will constrain his successors.”
Trump has his own angle on using the pandemic to cement Republican ideology. Today he suggested that federal aid to rescue states would depend on their willingness to adopt his policies. In order to receive emergency money to survive the pandemic, they would likely have to stop protecting undocumented immigrants from arrest and cut payroll taxes.
It is, one might say, a quid pro quo.
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April 29, 2020 (Wednesday)
A short letter tonight as I have just finished teaching my hardest semester ever and am officially cooked. The mid-semester shift to online teaching was neither good nor bad for me; it was just different. But the amount of work was mind boggling, and the relief on its end is palpable. I need a good night’s sleep.
The biggest news today is Trump’s “pivot” away from talking about coronavirus and toward talking about the economy, touting what he says is its rebound after the pandemic.
The coronavirus has crippled the economy, which shrank 4.8% in the first quarter of 2020. This is the worst quarter since 2008, wiping out nearly all of the job gains the nation has made since then. The International Monetary Fund is predicting that the global economy will do worse during the pandemic than it did after the crash of 2008, contracting by 3%. This decline is in part because of the stay-at-home orders issued by governors to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
Trump sees the economy as the key to his reelection, and is desperate to reverse the economic contraction. “Expect to see a pivot from the White House in the days ahead, focusing on the economy and a more hopeful, forward-looking message,” an administration official told Axios reporter Jonathan Swan. The White House briefings will downplay the virus and focus on an economic rebound.
At White House briefings on the coronavirus, health experts Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx are getting less attention as the administration shifts focus instead to corporate leaders touting their contributions to combating the coronavirus and restarting the economy. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who generally stays out of range of television cameras, went on TV twice this week to declare that the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic was “a great success story.” When a reporter asked why it has taken so long to get testing underway, Kushner answered that the true question should be “how did we do this so quickly?” “What’s really happened, it’s really extraordinary,” he said.
Experts have said that in order to reopen safely, the nation needs widespread testing and contact tracing, and that a state must see at least 14 days of decreasing numbers of infections. Instead, states have been reopening while numbers of infections have climbed to more than a million and death has claimed more than 60,000 Americans. Today news broke that in Florida, one of the first states to reopen, state officials have stopped releasing medical examiners’ statistics on numbers of Covid-19 victims after those numbers have been higher than the state’s official count, and that in Brooklyn, New York, officials discovered that an overwhelmed funeral home had stored one hundred bodies in two unrefrigerated trucks.
On Monday, Trump downplayed the need for widespread testing and cheered on states that were reopening despite growing infection rates. His eagerness to put the pandemic behind him, even as it rages on, reflects internal polling that shows him losing to former Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race.
We know about his anxiety over this poll thanks to leaks from people who work in the White House.
And that is the second story that jumped out at me today. People with good access to circles of power at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are leaking major stories to the media. On Monday, they offered up the story that Trump’s Presidential Daily Briefings had warned of the deadly danger of the coronavirus since January and that Trump had ignored the warnings. Today they leaked that Trump is so upset about his internal polling numbers that he ranted last week to Kushner and head of the Republican National Committee Ronna McDaniel, as well as other officials, before attacking Brad Parscale, his campaign manager, and threatening to sue him.
Trump’s polling is bad, to be sure, but it’s too far out from the election to conclude much about those polls. More significant in these stories right now is that people in the White House are leaking sensitive stories to reporters. That says either that they want to undermine Trump or that they think he is already such a bad bet for future employment that they are auditioning for their next job.
That’s it. Stick a fork in me; I’m done.
Will see you, back in fine fettle, tomorrow.
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He is gaslighting us in real time there… JFC.
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April 30, 2020 (Thursday)
In America, we elect our lawmakers, and the winners are supposed to be supported by a majority of voters. Once elected, leaders from different parties are supposed to come to agreements about policy through informed debate. That system sometimes frustrates people who hold extreme views that they think should be at the heart of our laws. They can’t get what they want through the democratic process, because most people disagree with them. So they try to get their way by threats.
This is exactly what happened today in Michigan, where armed protesters stormed the statehouse. Legislators there were discussing whether to extend Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home orders past their expiration date at midnight tonight. To stop debate and get their way, men with guns paced the balcony above the lawmakers, some of whom had donned bullet-proof vests. Others, held back by the capitol police, tried to break into the legislative chamber.
Later in the day, Trump tried a more genteel version of the same intimidation. Republican leaders are angry that Democratic states have social welfare systems paid for by taxes, a system they insist hurts the country by redistributing wealth from those at the top of society—the “makers,” who are the ones that truly understand how an economy functions best—to the “takers,” who simply fritter money away. Until the coronavirus, there was little Republicans at the national level could do to bring Democratic state governments like those of New York, Massachusetts, and California to heel.
Now, though, states are reeling as the cratering economy has sapped the tax dollars that make up their main stream of revenue. They estimate they need $500 billion to tide them over until the economy picks back up. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has suggested they should be forced into bankruptcy, which would permit federal judges, many of whom share the same ideology as Republican leaders, to choose which parts of their debt the states would be able to honor. According to former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, they have made it clear that they would not accept any new taxes under such a reordering, and that the first things on the chopping block would be social welfare programs.
Today, Trump tried a new tactic. He told reporters that he would be willing to consider funding for the states—he defines them as “Democrat states”-- but “if we do that we’re going to have to get something for it.”
This is, of course, the same sort of quid pro quo (I hate that term: it just means “something for something," as in, “I do something for you; you do something for me.”) Trump demanded from Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. In that case, his effort to use the power of the federal government to force an ally to manufacture dirt on his opponent led to his impeachment for abuse of power.
The Senate acquitted him, but in a remarkably prescient moment, Stanford Law Professor Pamela Karlan said to the House Judiciary Committee: “Imagine living in a part of Louisiana or Texas that’s prone to devastating hurricanes and flooding. What would you think if you lived there and your governor asked for a meeting with the president to discuss getting disaster aid that Congress has provided for? What would you think if that president said, ‘I would like you do to us a favor?’…. Wouldn’t you know in your gut that such a president has abused his office? That he’d betrayed the national interest, and that he was trying to corrupt the electoral process?”
Indeed, Trump is willing to use any means he can to ensure his reelection as polling shows him underwater pretty much everywhere. Big in the news today is that he has asked intelligence agencies to assess whether the coronavirus began in an ill-managed Chinese lab, although scientists say the genetics of the virus indicate it began in bats.
Trump has blamed the World Health Organization for America’s dire straits, and now is blaming China (which certainly was too secretive about whether or not the disease could be transmitted from person to person). He insists he has seen evidence that the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab—although US intelligence services deny it—and his administration is talking about demanding reparations from China, a move that can only be seen as propaganda for the upcoming election. (China would never consider such payments, and pushing the issue will likely hurt our ability to figure out how to combat the virus.)
The other big story today is Trump’s attacks on presumptive Democratic presidential nominee former Vice President Joe Biden, designed to inoculate Trump against similar attacks. Trump insists that Biden has mental impairments that make him unsuitable for the presidency, an echo of the many stories of Trump’s own mental impairment. Neither are young men, but Biden’s stuttering is well-known, and likely behind some of his problems speaking. This attack on Biden’s health is similar to the attacks the Trump campaign made on Hillary Clinton in 2016, arguing that she was too ill to serve as president.
Second, Trump and his supporters are hammering on Tara Reade’s accusations that Biden raped her. This accusation would inoculate Trump from the sixteen credible accusations made against him, and is harder for Democrats to address, especially as supporters of Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders have joined in the chorus for Biden to resign in favor of their candidate.
Democrats are torn between their support for the #MeToo Movement in which myriad women related their experiences with sexual harassment and assault, and their concern that Reade’s vague accusation is related to the 2020 campaign, especially since her story has been inconsistent in ways that are unlike the usual inconsistencies in traumatized rape victims. There are a number of smart explications of the Reade accusation that I will link in the notes, most of which suggest there are serious problems with her account, but I thought the smartest approach to these accusations came from women’s health journalist Lindsay Beyerstein.
The problem with the way we approach cases of sexual assault, she says, is that we treat them as if they are uncommon. In fact, they are quite common, and women are as unlikely to lie about them as they are about any other common crime. We should start from a presumption that they are telling the truth, as you would if someone told you they had been mugged. But those claims of a common crime should still be evaluated if they are questioned. If I tell you I was mugged, and you say, “But you were with me the whole time and no one bothered us,” my claims need to be investigated. I am not entitled to be believed automatically.
The Biden camp has been quiet on the issue, determined not to let Trump shape the issues of the 2020 election as he did that of 2016, but as Trump continues to harp on it, it might well weaken support for Biden on the left.
Still, Trump’s narrative is not gaining the traction it might have before the pandemic. Today, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican, told reporters that he had the plane with 500,000 coronavirus tests his wife procured from South Korea land at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI), rather than Dulles international Airport in Virginia, to make sure the federal government would not seize the shipment. He went on to say the National Guard was protecting the tests at an undisclosed location out of fear that the federal government would swoop in to take them after all. Such a public accusation, based as it is in verifiable other cases of feds taking state shipments, suggest that Republicans so distrust the president they are willing to break with him.
Perhaps even more of a bellwether than Hogan was that one of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham’s big donors has decided to support Graham’s challenger, Democrat Jaime Harrison, in the 2020 contest. The former chairman and president of Michelin in North America, Richard Wilkerson, said of Harrison on Tuesday that “I am confident that as our next U.S. Senator he will be a tireless advocate for creating well-paying jobs, improving our state’s healthcare system, and training the next generation for the jobs of tomorrow. Jaime is the perfect candidate to bring together South Carolinians from all walks of life. I am proud to endorse Jaime today, and I know first hand he is the change South Carolina needs.” While the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan election observer, says that Graham has his victory locked up, Wilkerson’s public shift suggests that Wilkerson thinks the state might flip, and wants to be covered if it does.
A final note: on this date in 1789, George Washington was sworn in as American’s first president. He later wrote to a friend about the new system: “That the Government, though not absolutely perfect, is one of the best in the World, I have little doubt.”
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This part is particularly damning. As if Trump hasn’t already done enough to kill tens of thousands of Americans through inaction and outright inept mismanagement of the epidemic, bashing China just risks their cooperation on the vaccine. China is months ahead of the US on developing that vaccine. Researchers from both countries, and globally, are collaborating on vaccine candidates, but if he keeps up the anti-China rhetoric, he risks that collaboration and the likely first-completed vaccines out of China being shared with the US.
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May 1, 2020 (Friday)
The United States is in the midst of a pandemic that has, so far, claimed more than 65,000 lives and infected more than 1 million people.
We have officially lost more people in four months than we did in the entire eight years of the Vietnam War, and there is good reason to believe the official counts are low. This is a disaster of unimaginable proportions.
More. Than. 65,000. Americans. Have. Died. In. An. Epidemic. That. Was. Largely. Preventable.
And yet, news media is beginning to turn to other topics. After suffering ridicule last week for suggesting that doctors should investigate whether injecting disinfectants into patients could kill coronavirus, the president decided this week to drive the news cycle away from the pandemic. It is working beautifully.
Although officially the White House has released guidelines for reopening states that suggest none is yet ready, Trump has encouraged states to go ahead and end their stay-at-home orders. Some have already begun, and more than 30 states will begin to ease social distancing restrictions this weekend, although by large majorities, Americans want restrictions to stay in place until the spread of the virus has slowed.
Right-wing political groups have organized protests of governors who are not opening the states fast enough for their liking. It is, of course, possible to save both lives and the economy with social welfare legislation, as other developed nations have done, but that strikes to the heart of their ideology.
Yesterday, armed men stormed the Michigan statehouse to protest restrictions imposed by Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer. They shouted “Lock her up!” while the Republican legislature offered by email to cut her a deal. “The following is what we propose:,” Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey’s chief of staff wrote, “two one-week extensions in exchange for a public agreement that all future stay-at-home-type orders (and only those) be enacted through bipartisan legislation and the democratic process rather than executive order.”
Whitmer replied: “While I welcome partnership, information sharing and robust discussion with the legislature, I cannot abrogate my duty to act in an emergency to protect the lives of Michiganders…. We are in the midst of a global pandemic that has already killed 3,670 people and COVID 19 numbers continue to climb in parts of our state. Michigan remains in a state of emergency regardless of the actions you decide to take or not take.” With 40,399 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Michigan and at least 3,670 dead, Whitmer said, “This is not a political problem, it’s a public health crisis…. We’ve already lost over 3,700 Michiganders — that’s more than we lost in Vietnam.”
Whitmer extended the state’s state of emergency orders. Today, Trump tweeted: “The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire. These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal.” In Orange County, California, where local health officials announced a new spike in cases, thousands gathered in Huntington Beach to flout Governor Gavin Newsom’s closure of all beaches and parks in the county.
Infectious disease specialists warn that reopening the country is a “big mistake” that will “cost lives.” Juliette Kayyem, CNN’s national security analyst, said today: “There will be more dead people. Just say it. It’s an experiment we’re living in real time.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the administration’s leading infectious disease specialists, warned that reopening was “a really significant risk.” Trump today revised estimates of dead upward, saying “hopefully” we will lose fewer than 100,000 people.
Indeed, infections are increasing in the reopening states. Today, Iowa reopened 77 counties on the same day the governor reported 740 new infections, a one-day high, and warned that a backlog on test data would likely mean higher numbers over the weekend. She then began to talk of reopening of churches. In Georgia, where Governor Brian Kemp was among the first to reopen his state, there were 618 new cases Thursday, and 1,228 new cases Friday.
The Governor of New Mexico, Michelle Lujan Grisham, has locked down the city of Gallup at the request of its mayor, restricting business hours and ordering residents to shelter in place except for health, safety, or medical emergency. “The spread of [Covid-19] in McKinley County is frightful,” she tweeted. “Physical distancing has not occurred & is not occurring. Stricter measures are necessary to stop the virus. A problem in one part of our state, with a virus this dangerous & contagious, is a problem for our entire state.” A twitter user responded: “Good luck, fascist.”
News photos from the White House indicate a nation gone back to normal. This week Vice President Mike Pence refused to don a mask when he visited the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, despite being alerted to the hospital’s policy that all visitors must wear masks, sending a clear signal that coronavirus safety rules are optional. In explanation, he said: “As vice president of the United States, I’m tested for the coronavirus on a regular basis, and everyone who is around me is tested for the coronavirus." Indeed, Pence, Trump, and their aides all get tested regularly, and anyone coming to meet them has to have an on-site rapid test that yields results in 15 minutes.
We all need such widespread testing to reach the sort of confidence in returning to our normal lives administration officials enjoy. But tests remain out of reach. The White House promised 27 million test kits by the end of March; by that point we had a million. As of today, the US has completed about 6.5 million tests. There are not even enough tests for the country’s 100 Senators when they go back to work on Monday approving Trump’s judges. (Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told radio host Hugh Hewitt: “Of course we will go back to judges…. My motto for the rest of the years is to leave no vacancy behind.”)
On April 19, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican, told CNN’s Jake Tapper “Every governor in America has been pushing and fighting and clawing to get more tests.” And yet, when he secured tests for Maryland himself, through the help of his Korean-born wife Yumi Hogan, Trump was furious. Remembering Trump’s initial refusal to let passengers from a cruise ship land in America because “I like the numbers being where they are,” reporter for Politico Dan Diamond told NPR’s Terry Gross that Trump doesn’t want aggressive testing because he’s “made clear the lower the numbers on coronavirus… the better for his potential reelection this fall.” Similar political concerns were likely at work in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration today finally released information about deaths at long-term care facilities only to have observers quickly note the numbers were lower than previous numbers already public. “Questions received,” a spokesperson told a reporter. “We are looking into this.”
In the White House, anyway, it appears all eyes are on reelection. The president yesterday claimed “a high degree of confidence” that a Chinese lab created the coronavirus—an accusation that the chair of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff (D-CA) quickly contradicted. Today the White House has blocked Dr. Fauci, who has been critical of reopenings, from testifying before the House. White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere said: "While the Trump Administration continues its whole-of-government response to COVID-19, including safely opening up America again and expediting vaccine development, it is counter-productive to have the very individuals involved in those efforts appearing at Congressional hearings…. We are committed to working with Congress to offer testimony at the appropriate time.”
Tonight, in a spectacular Friday night news dump, Trump moved to get rid of Christi A. Grimm, the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services who had documented the lack of supplies and testing delays during the coronavirus pandemic. Trump intends to replace her with a loyalist.
Antietam, bloodiest day of Civil War: 2100 Americans dead. Battle of the Bulge, the bloodiest single battle the US fought in WWII: 19,000 Americans dead. Vietnam War: 58,000 Americans dead. September 11: 2,977 Americans dead.
Coronavirus 2020: 65,000 Americans dead… so far.
Also available as a free newsletter at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com.
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How close are we to having two-thirds of states in favor of passing a constitutional amendment? It seems like we need one right about now.
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May 2, 2020 (Saturday)
It has jumped out to me today how Trump and his GOP enablers are controlling today’s political narrative, just as they did before the 2016 election.
First up is the demand coming from the right, as well as from media outlets, to open former Vice President Joe Biden’s personal papers that have been donated to the University of Delaware to search for records that might mention Tara Reade, who has accused Biden of sexually assaulting her 27 years ago. Fox News Channel contributor Ari Fleischer has gone so far as to suggest that Biden should turn the files over to the FBI, the same FBI that is, at this moment, controlled by Trump loyalist Attorney General William Barr.
Biden has called for a thorough search of the National Archives, where such records would be stored, for any materials relating to Reade’s claim. But she has now said that any complaint she made did not mention a sexual assault, and she has cancelled a scheduled appearance tomorrow on Chris Wallace’s show on the Fox News Channel. Yet the call to open the University of Delaware files, which are currently scheduled to open two years after Biden leaves public life, continues. Those demanding such action say there might be staff memos in the papers about Reade’s complaint, which contain transcripts of his speeches, records of private conversations with world leaders including Russian President Vladimir Putin, daily schedules, and staff memos from his years as a Senator from 1973 to 2009.
But a senator’s papers would not include any personnel files which would mention an assault claim; personnel files are part of a completely different storage system. And it is 100% normal to close the files of elected officials (and other people, too) for a period of time before they can be examined, and archivists take that charge very seriously indeed because of the ethics involved.
The files will contain the sausage making of various political issues that can be cherrypicked to destroy careers (not just Biden’s). Of course Trump people want to expose everything Biden did as a senator. Media outlets are salivating to get into the papers for their own reasons: can you imagine the stories detailing rivalries from the thirty years Biden was in the Senate? It would rival the hay made off the stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee in 2016 which, after all, revealed nothing illegal, but embarrassed Hillary Clinton and the DNC.
The pressure on Biden to release his papers strikes me as the bad faith use of an important political conversation to score political points. It is vital to uncover the truth of what happened between Biden and Reade, but that’s not what’s going on here. Observers are demanding the release of material that has been donated in good faith for future researchers, to uncover information that we know full well would not be stored there. But it would certainly weaken Biden as a candidate.
At the same time, Trump simply refuses to show anyone anything. Once again, the media is dancing to his tune, making Biden’s reluctance to open his Senate records look nefarious while giving Trump a pass, not just on the women who have accused him of sexual assault, but on issues throughout his administration, issues that we, as citizens, deserve to know.
Where are the tax returns Trump promised to release? Where are the investigations of any of the literally dozens of accusations of rape and sexual assault made against Trump? Where is John Bolton’s book? Why is everyone who worked for Trump bound to secrecy? And key: where are the medical supplies the federal government has seized?
Please follow me here: I am not speaking of the claims of Ms. Reade, which are a separate conversation. I am talking about the use of her story to control our political narrative. The attempt to get Biden to jump through hoops Trump ignores is classic gaslighting. It keeps Biden on the defensive and makes sure he is reinforcing Trump’s narrative, thus strengthening Trump even as Biden tries to carve out his own campaign. It is precisely what the Trump campaign, abetted by the media, did in 2016.
The political conversation is also shifting to benefit the president in a second way: the now repeated warnings that the coronavirus might have a “second wave” and peak again in the fall. Here’s the thing: we never finished the first wave. Our highest daily number of deaths was… yesterday, when 2,909 Americans died. We are still very much in the heart of this first wave, but by shaping this conversation as looking ahead to concern in the future, it rhetorically accomplishes what Trump set out to do just a week ago—convince us that we have successfully lived through the worst part of the pandemic and that it is safe to reopen the economy.
Finally, the political conversation is shifting in a way that undermines our nation’s deepest principle. People are actually arguing about whether it might be a good thing to kill off society’s weakest members. A member of a planning commission from the San Francisco area took to Facebook to suggest we should just let coronavirus take its course. Lots of people would die, he wrote, primarily old and sick people, but that would take the pressure off Social Security and lower health care costs. There would be more jobs and housing available. And as for homeless people, when they died it would “fix what is a significant burden on our society….”
This man was removed from office, but his sentiments are not isolated. It is impossible to overlook that the people demanding states ease restrictions are overwhelmingly white, when both African Americans and Native Americans are badly susceptible to Covid-19. In Chicago, for example, 32% of the population is African American; 67% of the dead have been black. Further south, the Navajo Nation is behind only New York and New Jersey for the highest infection rate in the US.
White supremacists are celebrating these deaths, and calling for their supporters to infect minorities with the virus. But even those who insist they simply want society to open up again are demanding policies that will disproportionately kill some Americans at higher rates than others. Some are overt about their hatreds—like the Illinois woman who carried a sign with the motto from Auschwitz and the initials of the Jewish governor—and others simply sacrifice minorities in the course of business, as Trump did when he used the Defense Production Act to keep infected meat processing plants operating, plants overwhelmingly staffed by black and brown people.
If we accept the idea that some of us matter more than others, we have given up the whole game. This country was—imperfectly, haltingly—formed on the principle that we are all created equal, and equally entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If we are willing to admit that our founders were wrong, that we are not equal, that older Americans, Black Americans, Brown Americans, sick Americans, all matter less than healthy white Americans, we have admitted the principle that we are not all created equal, and that some of us are better than others.
This is, of course, the principle of white supremacy, but it does no favors to most white people, either. Once we have abandoned the principle of equality, any one of us is a potential sacrifice.
And then it will not matter anymore what our political narrative is, for it will be as much as our lives are worth to disagree with whatever our leaders say.
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May 3, 2020 (Sunday)
Jeff Kowalsky’s photograph of the “American Patriot Rally” at the Michigan statehouse on April 30 shows a large, bearded man, leaning forward, mouth open, screaming. Positioned between two police officers who are staring blankly ahead above their masks, he is focused on something they are preventing him from reaching: the legislature. His fury is palpable.
The idea that such a man is an “American Patriot” is the perverted outcome of generations of political rhetoric that has celebrated a cartoon version of “individualism.” That rhetoric has served a purpose: to convince voters that an active government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, and promotes infrastructure—things most Americans actually like—is socialism.
Americans embraced an active government in the 1930s and 1940s to combat the Depression and fight World War Two, and by 1945, that government was hugely popular among members of both parties, but not with the businessmen who resented government interference in their industries. To get voters to turn against a system they liked, in the 1950s, leaders eager to destroy business regulation linked their mission to racism.
After the Supreme Court, headed by former Republican Governor of California Earl Warren, unanimously ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional, reactionaries determined to undercut the New Deal government told voters that this is what they had warned about all along: an activist state would redistribute white people’s money to black people through taxes, levied to do things like provide schools, or the troops necessary to protect the black youngsters trying to enroll in them.
That rhetoric resonated with certain white Americans because it echoed that of Reconstruction, when Democrats opposed to black rights insisted that Republican policies to level the playing field between formerly enslaved people and their white former owners were simply a redistribution of wealth. Money for roads and schools and hospitals that would now be accessible to black Americans would have to be paid for by tax levies. Since most property owners in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War were white, this meant a transfer of wealth from hardworking white taxpayers to lazy African Americans. As one reporter put it: socialism had come to South Carolina.
In contrast to the East, with this crushing system, stood the postwar West, where Democrats admired the cowboy. The actual work of a western cowboy in the short period of the heyday of cattle ranging from 1866 to 1886 was dangerous, low-paid, and dirty; the industry depended heavily on government supported-railroads and military support; and a third of the cowboys were men of color. But people eager to criticize the Republicans’ social welfare policies insisted that the cowboy was the true American individualist. Almost always white in this myth, he wanted nothing from government but to work hard as he tamed the land and the “savages” on it, provide for the wife and children he someday hoped to have, and be left alone. The image of the cowboy became such a dominant myth during Reconstruction that it turned Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show into the nation’s first mass entertainment spectacle.
It was no wonder then, that in the 1950s and 1960s, those eager to destroy an active government tapped into the image of the American cowboy as their symbol. Gunsmoke debuted on the new-fangled television in 1955, and by 1959, there were 30 prime time Westerns on TV. These westerns portrayed the mythical cowboy much as he had been after the Civil War: an independent white man fighting the “savages” of the plains to provide for his eventual family. A man who wanted nothing of government but to be left alone.
Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, with his square jaw and white Stetson, tapped into this mythology as the Republican presidential candidate in 1964. He assured white southerners that the adjustment of race relations was an unlawful assumption of power by the federal government. So, too, was business regulation. Goldwater lost the election, but turned five deep South states from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, a pattern Ronald Reagan capitalized on in 1980. Swapping his usual English riding outfit for jeans and a western saddle, Reagan personified the mythological American cowboy. He assured Americans that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” then began the process of dismantling the New Deal state, slashing taxes and programs to restore to glory the American individualist.
Reagan’s election saw the first gender gap in American voting, as women hesitated to sign on to a program that was working against their ability to provide for their families. Lots of men weren’t so sure they wanted to slash workers’ protections and government regulation of business, either. So those eager to reinforce the image of the American individualist against a socialist government upped their game. In 1984, we got Red Dawn, the bloodiest movie made up to that point, featuring high school boys in the West standing against an invasion of communists after the town government sells everyone out.
In 1992, the idea of a western individualist standing against an intrusive government got a real demonstration when government forces tried to arrest a former factory worker, Randy Weaver, who had failed to show up for a trial on a firearms charge, at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. An 11-day siege killed Weaver’s wife, fourteen-year-old son, and a deputy marshal. Far-right activists and neo-Nazis swarmed to Ruby Ridge to stop what they saw as the overreach of government as it attacked a man protecting his family.
The next year, government officers stormed the compound of a religious cult whose former members reported that their leader, David Koresh, was stockpiling weapons. A 51-day siege ended on April 19, 1993, in a gun battle and a fire that killed 76 people. Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh told his listeners that the government had invaded Waco to “murder” a citizen. The modern militia movement to protect individuals from government tyranny took off.
Now, having sown the wind, we are reaping the whirlwind. Anti-government cowboys are protesting the tyranny of government measures designed to protect citizens from dying. The right of governors and legislatures to protect health is well-established, of course, but that doesn’t matter to men steeped in the rhetoric of the past generation.
This now-famous image of the screaming “American Patriot” is a portrait of the failure of the individualist image. This is a man who punches down, not up, and who wants to have the power to decide whether his neighbors live or die. He is a bully and a coward.
You know who’s brave? The doctors and nurses who get up every morning and go to their jobs. The bus drivers who have continued to work without either hazard pay or sufficient protection, at least 94 of whom we have lost to Covid-19. The janitors and housekeeping staff who combat the virus all day, every day. The meat cutters and fishermen, shippers, drivers and store clerks who are keeping us alive, some only because it is the only way they can feed their children, which makes it all the braver. The Navy sailors trying to contain the virus so they can complete their mission. The teachers who stay upbeat for the students they terribly miss. The parents who are so very tired as they try to work and teach and parent and shop, but who get up every morning and do it again. And, yes, the political leaders trying to legislate to protect us as a handful of screaming anti-government activists terrorize them… and the photographers who record it.
These true American Patriots-- not a screaming bully whose “rights” require others to die-- are the very good people Abraham Lincoln meant when he called for a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
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May 4, 2020 (Monday)
The big news today is that there has been another leak from the White House, and this one is colossal. The New York Times obtained a document suggesting that the administration has misrepresented the numbers of American deaths expected from this pandemic by pushing an artificially low estimate for close to a month.
Modeling by the Federal Emergency Management Agency now projects 200,000 new coronavirus cases a day by the end of the month (we currently have about 25,000 new cases a day), and by June 1, about 3000 deaths every day from Covid-19. Trump revised estimates of the dead upward to 100,000 yesterday, but the new document suggests even those are optimistic. The White House pushed back against the leak, saying that the document had not been vetted or presented to the coronavirus task force.
We also learned today that the new White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, must give his express approval for members of the coronavirus task force or their aides to appear before Congress this month, so it certainly looks as though we will not be hearing an explanation of the discrepancy between Trump’s projections and this document anytime soon.
Historians are prophets of the past, not the future, and I am completely unqualified to assess this released model. But I am indeed qualified to note the political importance of the fact that the administration appears to have seriously downplayed its own estimates of the projected death toll from this pandemic. As Andrew Slavitt, acting administrator for Medicare and Medicaid under President Barack Obama, explained, Trump’s team told him to expect 100,000 to 250,000 dead, horrific numbers, numbers from which Americans would recoil. But he revised that number downward based on a model that assumed, for example, that states without social distancing would not have outbreaks. The number he offered was around 60,000, a number that convinced his supporters that Covid-19 was no more serious than a bad flu, and that Democrats were exaggerating the danger for political gain.
That was enough to start a push to reopen states.
While there is a lot of talk about Trump wanting to reopen the states to repair the economy, it’s hard to see how that can happen if the pandemic continues unabated or even gets worse. Others have suggested that the president might simply live so entirely in the moment he cannot adequately assess cause and effect. He wants the economy to get better, so he is trying to will that into reality despite the death toll.
But I wonder—and I’m really only wondering tonight, because it’s already 2:00 and I am too tired to start chasing down the speeches and statistics I would need to make this as an assertion—if what is really driving this mad push, funded as we know it is by right-wing political groups, is a frantic determination to make sure the country does not turn again now, in the midst of this pandemic, to a government that regulates business and provides a basic social safety net, a government like the one we created during the Great Depression.
I mean, if the protesters really wanted to protect workers, wouldn’t they be demanding laws that replaced lost wages? Other developed countries have passed exactly those sorts of measures, putting their economies into a holding pattern as the pandemic passes, but the Trump administration has focused largely on protecting those at the top of the economy. Reopening states will also keep us from expanding unemployment programs, since they will keep workers from being able to claim unemployment benefits. They must work or starve, as opponents of welfare legislation used to put it. And, of course, people are waiting too long to get medical care for Covid-19, and thus are spreading it, not simply because we have insufficient tests but also because they have no healthcare insurance for treatment anyway.
“It’s not a pandemic,” said a speaker at a rally at the Boston State House today demanding that Republican Governor Charlie Baker reopen the state. “The reason why they’re doing this… to turn the United States of America into the United Socialist States of America.”
This is ridiculous of course, but it sounded very much like what Republicans said in the 1930s as they insisted first that there wasn’t a Depression, and then that if there was a Depression it was the job of the destitute states to fix it because federal government intervention in the economy was socialism. Indeed it sounded so much like Republican speeches from the 1930s that it instantly brought to mind Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech when he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in 1932.
“Out of every crisis, every tribulation, every disaster, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge, of higher decency, of purer purpose…. I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”
EDITED THREE MINUTES AFTER POSTING: I cleared up the implication in the original post that the FEMA document was a month old. It is recent.
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after writing that same thing a day or two ago, ive really been wondering. is that actually the inner and outer monologue for devos, mcconnell, trump, kemp, abbott, even musk, etc?
maybe?
i think there’s got to be simply… panic. that their push for unfettered profit has led to this. and that the only thing to do is listen now to all those people ( scientists, press, workers, bureaucrats ) they’ve denigrated their entire lives.
they’ve staked their personal self worth on their ability to extract wealth, and they’re seeing the next depression looming
i think they’re terrified. and so it’s back to business as normal because they already long ago convinced themselves nobody else matters, least of all the little people.
so i guess i don’t think it’s fear of socialism. i think it’s fear of the repudiation of their whole lifetime. who wouldn’t double down and go for broke when those are the stakes?
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May 6, 2020 (Wednesday)
What a difference a day makes. Yesterday, Trump was talking about disbanding his coronavirus task force because it had outlived its usefulness and the administration was going to go full speed ahead on rebuilding the economy; today, Time magazine issued this week’s cover: an “OPEN” sign with the N ripped off and put in front of the other letters to spell “NOPE.” The administration’s attempt to pivot from a focus on the botched response to the virus toward a triumphant story of the economy has foundered as reality has caught up with Trump’s cheery narrative.
Yesterday we learned that Rick Bright, the scientist who directed the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the federal agency charged with developing a vaccine for this coronavirus, has filed a whistleblower complaint. The complaint alleges he was demoted for refusing to spend his agency’s money on developing hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug the administration was promoting for use against Covid-19. But the complaint goes on to charge that the administration pressured him “to ignore expert recommendations and instead to award lucrative contracts based on political connections and cronyism.”
In a very detailed 63-page report, Bright claims that he warned the leadership at Health and Human Services about the coronavirus on January 10, but was first ignored and then ostracized for his insistence that action to prepare for an epidemic was crucial. He says the everyone in the administration except trade advisor Peter Navarro simply refused to take his warnings seriously. Throughout February, Bright peppered administration officials with memos, begging them to secure medical equipment to prepare for the epidemic. Finally, they lost patience with him in March, when he refused to back hydroxychloroquine when the president was touting it as a possible cure for Covid.
Bright told a reporter about the dangers of the drug, and days later was removed from the directorship of BARDA to a post at the National Institutes of Health, because political appointees Alex Azar, the head of HHS, and Dr. Robert Kadlec, Bright’s immediate boss, suspected him of being a source for the article. Bright claims to have been retaliated against for his role as a whistleblower, and is demanding his old job back.
Bright’s whistleblower report was only one of two that offered a window into the administration’s fumbling of the epidemic. We learned that on April 8, a volunteer on Jared Kushner’s coronavirus task force, filed a whistleblower complaint with the House Oversight Committee. Kushner’s group took the place of established channels staffed by experts in order to coordinate a private sector effort to find the medical supplies America needed. The complaint, supported by anonymous individuals in the government, says that the people working with Kushner were young volunteers from consulting and private equity firms with no significant experience in health care, procurement, or supply-chain operations, and had no knowledge of relevant laws or regulations. They were ill equipped to do their jobs, and were also ordered to pay particular attention to tips from “VIPs,” including conservative journalists like Brian Kilmeade and Jeanine Pirro, as they searched for medical equipment.
Today, Politico published a story based on audio tapes leaked from three conference calls between HHS and Federal Emergency Management Agency officials and federal officials around the country fielding calls from governors trying to find medical equipment. The calls highlight that as Trump was saying the nation had plenty of equipment, his officials were scrambling to try to provide it. The leaked tapes also show officials privately acknowledging that reopening the states would lead to a higher rate of coronavirus infections.
In an interview with ABC News yesterday, Trump himself admitted the reopening of states for business could cause people to die. At a briefing, when reporter Jim Acosta asked why it was important to end social distancing right now, Trump told reporters “I’m viewing our great citizens of this country to a certain extent and to a large extent as warriors. They’re warriors. We can’t keep our country closed. We have to open our country … Will some people be badly affected? Yes.”
But Trump didn’t offer much to provide confidence that the government was on top of the ongoing coronavirus response. In the ABC News interview, when Trump blamed President Barack Obama for leaving the “cupboard” of the Strategic National Stockpile “bare” of medical supplies when he left office, anchor David Muir asked him what he had done to restock it in the three years he’s been in office. The question appeared to catch the president, who is accustomed to a friendly audience on the Fox News Channel, off guard. “Well, I’ll be honest,” he said. “I have a lot of things going on. We had a lot of people that refused to allow the country to be successful. They wasted a lot of time on Russia, Russia, Russia. That turned out to be a total hoax. Then they did Ukraine, Ukraine and that was a total hoax, then they impeached the president of the United States for absolutely no reason.”
A Washington Post article by Dr. Zack Cooper, associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale’s Economics Department, says that we do, in fact, have the ability to test at the rate of 20 million tests a day, which is what experts say we need in order to reopen the economy safely. But the rub is that it would cost about $250 billion, and there has not, so far, been sufficient political will to spend that kind of money on testing, especially when those most affected by the reopening of states have been poor Americans and workers who are disproportionately people of color. A Rockefeller Foundation committee on reopening the economy has published a report on how to do so safely; Cooper was a member of the committee.
But for all these events undercutting Trump’s push to reopen the economy, what got under his skin most dramatically was an advertisement released Monday by the Lincoln Group entitled “Mourning in America.” This one-minute spot plays on President Ronald Reagan’s famous “Morning In America” reelection campaign ad, showing Trump’s term as the opposite of the rosy vision people associated with Reagan. “There’s mourning in America,” the voice in the ad intones over shots of Covid-stricken patients and folks in unemployment lines in masks, “and under the leadership of Donald Trump, our country is weaker, and sicker, and poorer. And now, Americans are asking, ‘If we have another four years like this, will there even be an America?”
It took Trump four tweets to express his fury adequately, calling Lincoln Project founder George Conway a “deranged loser.” Ten hours later, he was still fuming, and ranted about the Lincoln Project to reporters for two minutes on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews. This gave Conway the opening to hit him again in an op-ed in the Washington Post today. The article used Trump’s behavior to illustrate Conway’s usual concerns about Trump’s fitness for office, but it began with a new focus on the coronavirus: “Americans died from Covid-19 at the rate of about one every 42 seconds during the past month. That ought to keep any president awake at night.”
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That alone persuaded me to make a donation 
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May 7, 2020 (Thursday)
There were three big stories today, and they added up to a fourth.
First, the Department of Justice, overseen by Attorney General William Barr, filed documents today to drop its case against Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. This reverses years of work on the Flynn case, and has shocked experienced prosecutors, who say it reveals that Barr is now simply working for Trump. The filing was signed by Timothy Shea alone, Barr’s hand-picked US Attorney for the District of Columbia. No career prosecutors signed on.
Flynn was a lobbyist for the Turkish government and had spent time at a state dinner with Russian President Vladimir Putin when the FBI opened a case on him on August 16, 2016, out of concern he might be working with Russia even as he was campaigning for Trump (with his famous “Lock Her Up” chants). On November 10, after Trump was elected, President Barack Obama warned Trump not to hire Flynn for a national security post, but on November 18, Trump named Flynn his National Security Advisor. On December 29, the same day the Obama administration announced retaliatory measures for Russian interference in the 2016 election, Flynn caught the attention of the FBI by making five phone calls to the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak. FBI officials and Obama officials thought the conversations sounded like he and Moscow had made a secret deal.
The FBI interviewed Flynn on January 24; he lied about those calls, saying they did not talk about lifting Russian sanctions after Trump was elected. After the interview, acting attorney Sally Yates made an urgent visit to White House Counsel Don McGahn warning him that Flynn was “compromised” and vulnerable to blackmail by the Russians. On February 8, Flynn publicly denied he had spoken to Kislyak about sanctions, but when news broke the next day that he had, his spokesman said he could not “be certain that the topic never came up.” He resigned on February 13. (The next day, Trump met with FBI Director James Comey and asked him to let the Flynn case go. When Comey continued to investigate Russian connections to the Trump campaign, Trump fired him, and the outcry led to the appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Counsel to take over the investigation.)
Flynn offered to testify about the campaign’s connections to Russia in exchange for immunity from criminal prosecution, but was turned down. In November, after news broke that Mueller had enough evidence for criminal charges against Flynn and his son, he began to cooperate with the investigation.
In December 2017, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, but was not sentenced because he had not yet finished cooperating with the special counsel’s office. Then, after the Mueller investigation ended, in June 2019, he fired his lawyers and hired Sidney Powell, who had criticized the Mueller investigation. Soon, Flynn backed away from his guilty plea, his lawyer claiming that he had been “ambush[ed]” by FBI agents trying to “trap… him into making statements they could allege as false.” In January 2020, Powell accused the government of “egregious government misconduct” and moved to withdraw Flynn’s guilty plea.
And now the Department of Justice is moving to withdraw the case. It is highly unusual to try to undo a guilty plea, and the switch signals a dramatic shift in the DOJ. The career prosecutor on the case formally withdrew from it just before the Justice Department stopped the prosecution, just as career prosecutors stepped aside when Barr interfered in Trump confidante Roger Stone’s sentencing. The filing claims that FBI agents unlawfully pursued Flynn—that there was no just cause for an intelligence investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, and that therefore his confession is immaterial.
Did you get that? The Justice Department is saying that any investigation into Russian interference into the 2016 election was illegitimate, despite the report of the inspector general saying the opposite. And now, with a Trump crony at Director of National Intelligence there is little hope we will hear more about Russian interference. Both acting DNI Richard Grenell and the man Trump has nominated to replace him, Representative John Ratcliffe (R-Tx), neither of whom have experience in the intelligence community, have been vocal in their disbelief that Russia threatens our elections.
Still, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan will decide whether to accept the dismissal of the case. Sullivan ripped into Flynn in his 2018 hearing, telling him “I want to be frank with you, this crime is very serious…. Not only did you lie to the FBI, you lied to senior officials in the incoming administration…. I am not hiding my disgust, my disdain for your criminal offense.”
Trump said today that the Justice Department’s decision just adds more evidence to the idea there was “no collusion” between his campaign and Russia (which was, remember, not what the Mueller report said). All the Pulitzer Prizes people won for those stories should be given back, he said, because they were fake news. Trump is talking about reinstating Flynn into the administration.
And that, sadly, is not the end of the day’s news.
The next big story is the coronavirus. We are up to 76,000 deaths, and the cases show no sign of slackening. Projections for the summer are grim, with most models estimating we will well surpass 100,000 deaths.
On Tuesday, Trump justified opening businesses because he said “We can’t keep our country closed for the next five years.” But that’s not what’s on the table. What we are trying to do by holding down deaths now is to buy time before a vaccine is available, which experts said about six months ago would take at least 12 to 18 months. Trump, of course, has an interest in trying to reopen the country quickly because he sees the economy as the key to his reelection and wants it recovering by the fall. But he has admitted this will costs lives, a sacrifice he is more ready for others to make than for himself. Today, he got “lava level mad” when he learned one of his personal valets had tested positive for Covid-19, accusing his staff of not taking sufficient precautions to keep the virus away from him (despite frequent testing of everyone in his orbit).
And certainly, the economy is in free fall. Tomorrow, we get the jobs report for April. It is expected to show that the US economy lost about 21.5 million jobs last month. If that is correct, it indicates we have wiped out all of the job gains in the U.S. since mid-1999. It also puts the unemployment rate at 16%, the highest since 1939. There are answers other than sending people back to work without testing or contact tracing, however. We could, for example, provide a wage guarantee until infections recede enough to enable people to go back into the workforce with some sense of security.
The third big story is that the Republican National Committee and the Trump reelection campaign have budgeted $20 million to fight Democratic attempts to make remote voting easier during the pandemic. Although there is no evidence that mail-in voting causes fraud, and although some states already do it with no ill effects, RNC chief of staff Richard Walters fell back on the idea that easing restrictions to make it easier to vote would contaminate elections. “Democrats may be using the coronavirus as an excuse to strip away important election safeguards, but the American people continue to support commonsense protections that defend the integrity of our democratic processes,” he said, and Republicans were willing to sue Democrats “into oblivion and spend whatever is necessary.”
These three stories seem to add up to a fourth. Trump and his people are grasping power, but he knows he must resurrect the economy to win reelection. That will not be enough if the carnage of the pandemic grows, so he is determined to suppress the vote.
At least that’s what it looks like to me.
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These are getting more and more depressing. But thank you for reposting.
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Glossing over the particulars, these are really starting to sound like the sci fi and fantasy novels I read as a teen, where a long-standing, powerful and peaceful kingdom/government/planet is threatened by the ascension to power of the corrupt uncle under suspicious circumstances. Just as the evil uncle’s true nature becomes clear, an even greater threat strikes the weakened and leaderless country, wiping almost everyone out or enslaving them, but the protagonist escapes.
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As I was driving to the grocery store’s safe in-car pickup location (the sensible option during the global pandemic), I slowed down as a mechanical form hovered in front of us, gliding across the street. It paused as it reached the other side of the street to turn and orient its camera on us.
“Oh look, a Drone”, I idly observed to my wife, who did not bother to look. I kept driving.
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Other data that bolsters this idea of their “panic”:
Interest rates cannot rationally go lower than they are now.
Taxes cannot go lower and still provide the corporate welfare and funding for the military-industrial complex.
Yes, they could theoretically go lower, but we are at the theoretical threshold of absurdity for these two key indicators now.
We have hit the bottom and there is nowhere to go from here but up. As in higher interest rates and higher taxes. Or to not go anywhere. So, they are fighting tooth and nail for the status quo. To keep things the same: interest rates, tax rates, incomes, etc.
I would say, watching the stock market that is behaving opposite of unemployment and revenues: we are in an irrational bubble that only exists because of the bailout. That will fizzle during the second wave of the virus.
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