Month: May 2020

I mentioned a while back that the Atlantic’s James Fallows had compared the ongoing stunning reporting about the U.S. government’s catastrophic response to the coronavirus pandemic to the Pentagon Papers scandal, and it’s true. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this in real time before. Media accounts of the administration’s response to the coronavirus crisis are simply devastating.

We’ve learned that in the month of January, intelligence agencies were anxiously informing the president that the virus was exploding even while he was publicly dismissing the threat. Then we had several stories by various media outlets about the “lost month” of February when Trump dawdled and lived in denial that the virus would affect Americans.

The month of March started with footage of Trump finally pretending to take the crisis seriously at a trip to the CDC where he gave away his thinking on how to handle the virus. When asked about whether or not a cruise ship with infected passengers should dock in San Francisco, he said he was against it: “I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

That month he played his last rounds of golf and held his last rallies, clinging to denial until he was finally forced to declare a national emergency. The stock market crashed, the government issued some social-distancing guidelines and Trump launched into his daily briefing ritual, first insisting that he wanted the country to get back to work immediately and then finally agreeing to extend the guidelines through April.

Meanwhile the administration dithered, unable to process the scope of the problem, provide necessary information or deal effectively with the logistical challenge of getting crucial supplies where they were most needed.

Now we have an account of the month of April — and it’s something else. Written by Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey, Yasmeen Abutaleb, Robert Costa and Lena H. Sun for the Washington Post, it’s headlined “34 days of pandemic: Inside Trump’s desperate attempts to reopen America,” It reveals a stunningly dysfunctional White House intensely focused on one thing and one thing only: reopening the economy in order to re-elect Trump in November.

Trump’s team somehow seems to have persuaded itself that the economy will recover by the fall, relying on some dubious data provided by Kevin Hassett, formerly the chairman of the president’s council of economic advisers, who drew up an econometric model to help them make decisions about the response. Although Hassett denies it, numerous sources told the Post that this model projected a much smaller death count than the estimates given to the president by the scientists on his task force. This lowballing of possible fatalities was music to Trump’s ears as well as to Jared Kushner, economic adviser Larry Kudlow and others who are solely or primarily concerned with the economy and the re-election campaign.

Hassett’s projections of the economic fallout were as pessimistic as his death rate was optimistic, which gave the White House the excuse it needed to pivot to opening up the economy even as public health experts warned that a premature withdrawal of stay-at-home guidelines would result in a surge of new cases. That explains why Trump weirdly started to claim that the total death toll would only be between 50,000 and 60,000 at a time when we were clearly closing in on those numbers and likely to blow past them (as in fact occurred during the last week). He was still living in his dream world where he could “keep his numbers down.”

Trump made a valiant effort to push for the hydroxychloroquine miracle cure, in an effort to get this pesky pandemic out of the way so he could get back the economic success he believed was the magic bullet to re-election.

Trump at times went to extreme lengths to promote hydroxychloroquine. Keith Frankel, a vitamins executive who occasionally socializes with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., said the president asked him to call California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) on his cellphone and try to make a deal for the nation’s largest state to buy millions of tablets of hydroxychloroquine from an Indian manufacturer. Frankel said he got Newsom’s phone number from Trump.

This was totally off the books, with no involvement by the government. It was some buddy of Trump’s running around trying to make deals with governors to buy an unproven treatment for a deadly disease. This is a pretty good example of the Trump White House’s reckless, ad hoc, ineffectual crisis management during the month of April. It isn’t getting any better.

And of course there was the testing debacle, which continues to this day. That’s not even really an issue for the federal government anymore. The states have either accepted that they are completely on their own or have just given up on the idea of testing at all. That failure will end up being the most deadly result of Trump’s incompetence.

Meanwhile, Hassett and Kudlow were telling Trump he needed to get the economy open no matter what. And Trump heard from his favorite outside advisers Arthur Laffer, Steve Forbes and Stephen Moore, the latter of whom told the Post that he recalled telling Trump, “Get open, get open, get open — we kept pressing that point. You’ll have a mini-Great Depression. You’ll have body bags of dead businesses and jobs that will never be resurrected.”

That’s right. He actually said “body bags of dead businesses.” Evidently the body bags of dead humans are of lesser concern.

Soon Trump was tweeting for his MAGA protesters to “LIBERATE” their states from their social distancing orders and as April came to a close, states all over the country were starting to tell people to go back to normal, even as the numbers of coronavirus were still going up. (In fact, the caseload is sharply increasing in most places outside the original epicenter in the New York metropolitan area, where the curve has indeed flattened.)

Trump and the administration are now embarked on a “back to work” happy-talk tour to persuade Americans that we’ve recovered and everything’s going to be better than ever.

Trump’s alma mater, the Wharton School, has released a new model which projects that reopening the states now will result in 233,000 additional deaths from the virus by the end of June. Since many states will not completely reopen and others will stay locked down for some time, the actual number probably won’t be that bad. But make no mistake — it’s going to go up, possibly way up, as states open up willy-nilly and many individuals decide they aren’t going to bother with social distancing guidelines anymore. It’s already happening.

Dr. Deborah Birx made it clear on Fox News this weekend that her projections were always between 100,000 and 240,000 American lives. It’s hard to see how the worst-case scenarios aren’t much more plausible now, and she seems to know it.

Since the Trump administration didn’t have the ability to manage the crisis effectively, the decision has obviously been made to accept massive casualties. President Trump clearly sees the growing death toll as nothing more than a political liability he can overcome with a strong economic recovery. Time will tell whether that strategy works, but it appears he no longer cares about keeping his numbers down.

My Salon column reprinted with permission.

Stay home.

TV and screen writer Bess Kalb can have the rest of my space this morning:

Matt Hooper (Jaws): I’m not going to waste my time arguing with a man who’s lining up to be a hot lunch.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

That image is from a letter Trump wrote to Ronald Reagan back in 1987. Saying America is being “laughed at” has been his mantra for decades. (We now know, of course, that for Trump everything is about him so he really means he is being laughed at.)

The Washington Post wrote about this all the way back in 2016:

In speech after speech, interview after interview and tweet after tweet, the Republican party’s leading presidential candidate can’t say it enough: “The world is laughing at us.”

Donald J. Trump has issued that warning in some form at least 103 times, going as far back as 1987, according to a Washington Post review of his public statements. Lately, it tends to come with a follow-up promise: Elect him and the giggling will stop.

The Post’s review of Trump’s statements is far from comprehensive; many are from his Twitter account, and the majority were made in the more easily searchable past five years. Partial though the analysis may be, Trump’s frequent caution that the world is laughing at us reveals something about his worldview, if not his psyche: A once-exceptional America has transformed into the butt of a global joke, Trump believes, and its reputation must be restored.

Recall that there was that hot mic footage of the world leaders laughing about him behind his back. But now the mockery is getting more serious:

That video was produced by Xinhua, the official Chinese News Agency. Anne Applebaum of the Atlantic discusses what that means:

… Anybody who knows any history will be aware that propaganda—even the most obvious, most shameless propaganda—sometimes works. And it works not because people necessarily believe that all of it is true, but because they respect the capabilities or fear the power of the people who produced it.

Propaganda also works best in a vacuum, when there are no competing messages, or when the available alternative messengers inspire no trust. Since mid-March, China has been sending messages out into precisely this kind of vacuum: a world that has been profoundly changed not just by the virus, but by the American president’s simultaneously catastrophic and ridiculous failure to cope with it.

The tone of news headlines ranges from straight-faced in Kompas, a major Indonesian news outlet—Trump Usulkan Suntik Disinfektan dan Sinar UV untuk Obati Covid-19, or “Trump Proposes Disinfectant Injection and UV Rays to Treat COVID-19”—to snide, from Le Monde in France—Les élucubrations du « docteur » Trump, or “The Rantings of ‘Doctor’ Trump.” The incredulous first paragraph of an article in Sowetan, from South Africa, declares that “US President Donald Trump has again left people stunned and confused with his bizarre suggestion that disinfectant and ultraviolet light could possibly be used to treat Covid-19.” El Comercio, a distinguished Peruvian newspaper, treated its readers to photographs of Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus-response coordinator, grimacing as the president asked her whether the injection of disinfectant might be a cure.  

Quotations from the president’s astonishing April 23 press conference have appeared on every continent, via countless television channels, radio stations, magazines, and websites, in hundreds of thousands of variations and dozens of languages—often accompanied by warnings, in case someone was fooled, not to drink disinfectant or bleach. In years past, many of these outlets presumably published articles critical of this or that aspect of U.S. foreign policy, blaming one U.S. president or another. But the kind of coverage we see now is something new. This time, people are not attacking the president of the United States. They are laughing at him. Beppe Severgnini, one of Italy’s best-known columnists, told me that while Italians feel enormous empathy for Americans who have suffered as they have, they feel differently about Trump: “In this time of darkness and depression, he keeps us entertained.”  

But if Trump is ridiculous, his administration is invisible. Carl Bildt—a Swedish prime minister in the 1990s, a United Nations envoy during the Bosnian wars, and a foreign minister for many years after that—told me that, looking back on his 30-year career, he cannot remember a single international crisis in which the United States had no global presence at all. “Normally, when something happens”—a war, an earthquake—“everybody waits to see what the Americans are doing, for better or for worse, and then they calibrate their own response based on that.”

This time, Americans are doing … nothing. Or to be more specific, because plenty of American governors, mayors, doctors, scientists, and tech companies are doing things, the White House is doing nothing. There is no presidential leadership inside the United States; there is no American leadership in the world. Members of the G7—the U.S. and its six closest allies—did meet to write a joint statement. But even that tepid project ended in ludicrous rancor when the American secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, insisted on using the expression “Wuhan virus” and the others gave up in disgust. Not only is the president talking nonsense, not only is America absent, but the nation’s top diplomat is a caricature of a tough guy—someone who throws around insults in the absence of any capacity to influence events.

Others are drawing even more radical conclusions, and with remarkable speed. The “disinfectant” comments—and the laughter that followed—mark not so much a turning point as an acceleration point, the moment when a transformation that began much earlier suddenly started to seem unstoppable. Although we are still only weeks into this pandemic, although the true scale of the health crisis and the economic catastrophe is still unknown, the outline of a very different, post-American, post-coronavirus world is already taking shape. It’s a world in which American opinions will count less, while the opinions of America’s rivals will count more. And that will change political dynamics in ways that Americans haven’t yet understood.

Look beyond the Lego video at China’s more serious public-relations campaign: the stunts at airports around the world, from Pakistan to Italy to Israel, designed to mark the arrival of Chinese aid—masks, surgical gowns, diagnostic tests, and sometimes doctors. These events all have a similar script: The plane lands; the receiving nation’s dignitaries go out to meet it; the Chinese experts emerge, looking competent in their hazmat gear; and everyone utters words of gratitude and relief. Of course some of this, too, is propaganda.

In reality, some of the equipment billed as aid has been purchased, not donated. Some of it, especially the diagnostic tests, has turned out to be defective. Some of those who receive these goods also know perfectly well that they are designed to silence questions about where the virus came from, why knowledge of it was initially suppressed, and why it was allowed to spread around the world. If, in these circumstances, the propaganda “works,” that’s because those who receive it have made a calculation: Pretending to believe it is a way of acknowledging and accepting Chinese power—and, perhaps, a way of expressing interest in Chinese investment.

In the Western world, this dynamic has played itself out with striking success in Italy. Flattened by the virus and depressed by the lockdown, Italians are deeply divided by years of conspiratorial social-media campaigns, some with Russian backing, that have attacked Italy’s traditional alliances, NATO as well as the European Union. China has added its own unsubtle social-media campaign. Bots have been promoting Chinese-Italian-friendship hashtags (#forzaCinaeItalia) and thank-you-China hashtags (#grazieCina). But there is another, less visible layer of activity, too.

A year ago, Italy became the core European member of the Belt and Road Initiative, the Chinese trade-and-infrastructure project designed to create deeper links across Eurasia and to provide an alternative to the transatlantic and Pacific trade pacts quashed by Trump. Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, until recently the leader of Italy’s anti-EU Five Star Movement, has cultivated links to China too. Chinese investment has gained importance. Already, a Chinese oligarch has bought the Inter Milan soccer club; Chinese banks already own big stakes in Italian companies like Eni and Fiat.

Thanks to the economic havoc created by the coronavirus, China’s efforts in Rome may now bear fruit. Maurizio Molinari, the editor of La Repubblica, told me that Chinese businessmen are right now building on their contacts, looking for companies and properties to buy, scouting out factories that are suddenly bankrupt and entrepreneurs who want to sell out. I asked him what the source of China’s appeal was right now: “Money,” he replied. By contrast, the most conspicuous gesture that the U.S. administration has made in Italy’s direction since the pandemic began was Trump’s abrupt decision to ban flights. Apart from a modest and belated aid package, little in the way of friendship came from the United States.  

[…]

To be absolutely crystal clear: I am not praising China’s efforts. I am simply calling attention to the fact that, in a world where people laugh at the American president, they might succeed. Inside the bubble of officials who surround Pompeo, it may well seem very brave and cutting-edge to use the expression “Wuhan virus” or to call for bigger and bolder rhetorical attacks on China. But out there in the real world—out there in the world where Pompeo’s boss is perceived as a sinister clown, and Pompeo himself as just the sinister clown’s lackey—not very many people are listening. Once again: A vacuum has opened up, and the Chinese regime is leading the race to fill it.

Judging from their own recent statements, Trump-administration officials do not yet understand the significance of the chaos they have created in place of what used to be American foreign policy. Pompeo has spent time in recent days trying to organize sanctions on Iran, as if Russia and China or even European allies were still willing to follow his lead. Philip Reeker, assistant secretary of state for Europe (or rather, acting assistant secretary of state for Europe, because the Trump administration is in constant chaos) was recently asked by French journalists whether the coronavirus crisis could repair the poor state of transatlantic relations. His pompous response made him sound like a member of the Soviet nomenklatura at the end of the 1980s: “I don’t agree with the premise of your question,” Reeker said, before claiming that transatlantic engagement, and particularly Franco-American cooperation, is “remarkable.” Yes, it’s remarkable—remarkably invisible.

Even the more learned analyses of U.S.-China relations suddenly look out of sync with reality. It’s all very well for think-piece authors or former Trump-administration officials to suggest that a post-pandemic America must change its relationships with China, rally its allies to defy China, and rewrite the rules of commerce to exclude China. But when Trump seeks to lead the world against China, who will follow? Italy might refuse outright. The European Union could demur. America’s close friends in Asia might feel nervous, and delay making decisions. Africans who are furious about racism in China—African students have been the focus of heavy discrimination in the city of Guangzhou—might well do a quick calculation and seek good relations with both sides.

I wish I could say for certain that a President Joe Biden could turn this all around, but by next year it may be too late. The memories of the prime minister at the airport, welcoming Chinese doctors, will remain. The bleach jokes and memes will still cause the occasional chuckle. Whoever replaces Pompeo will have only four short years to repair the damage, and that might not be enough.

And if Trump wins a second term? Any nation can make a mistake once, elect a bad leader once. But if Americans choose Trump again, that will send a clear message: We are no longer a serious nation. We are as ignorant as our thoughtless, narcissistic, ignorant president. Don’t be surprised if the rest of the world takes note of that, too. 

There is more. And it is well worth reading. We may not have wanted America to be the so-called “indispensable nation” anymore. But it would be good to have allies and friends in a world that’s facing existential global challenges. I think we’re isolated now just like all the isolationists wanted. Let’s see whether or not the right really ever planned not to play with their vast military arsenal or not. I have my doubts.

“Finally, let us remember how small our differences are in the face of this shared threat. In the final analysis, we are not partisan combatants. We are human beings, equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of God. We rise and fall together, and we are determined to rise.” — George W. Bush

That’s nice. Seems uncontroversial in a time of crisis.

But Bush failed to realize that the world revolves around only one thing:

Some interesting new polling data on the Democratic VP choice:

That makes sense to me. The new administration will be inheriting a monumental mess. The VP job won’t just be ornamental. There will be an immense workload and I would guess any VP would have a large and challenging portfolio. There’s not much room for a big learning curve.

Here’s what Democratic voters are thinking:

Economic expertise and crisis management skills are top qualities Democratic voters want to see in a vice-presidential pick for their party — even more so than executive or legislative experience — as concerns about the pandemic and the economy now become a lens through which voters see that selection process.

Some of the other findings follow:

Biden beats Trump in this poll. But I swear to GOD, I will never understand how it can be this close. What in the hell is wrong with that 43 percent of my fellow Americans. We’re even giving them their precious white guy!

This Washington Post piece picks up where the earlier White House tick-tocks of the first two months left off. They didn’t get better. They got worse:

The epidemiological models under review in the White House Situation Room in late March were bracing. In a best-case scenario, they showed the novel coronavirus was likely to kill between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans. President Trump was apprehensive about so much carnage on his watch, yet also impatient to reopen the economy — and he wanted data to justify doing so.

So the White House considered its own analysis. A small team led by Kevin Hassett — a former chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers with no background in infectious diseases — quietly built an econometric model to guide response operations.

Many White House aides interpreted the analysis as predicting that the daily death count would peak in mid-April before dropping off substantially, and that there would be far fewer fatalities than initially foreseen, according to six people briefed on it.

Although Hassett denied that he ever projected the number of dead, other senior administration officials said his presentations characterized the count as lower than commonly forecast — and that it was embraced inside the West Wing by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and other powerful aides helping to oversee the government’s pandemic response. It affirmed their own skepticism about the severity of the virus and bolstered their case to shift the focus to the economy, which they firmly believed would determine whether Trump wins a second term.

For Trump — whose decision-making has been guided largely by his reelection prospects — the analysis, coupled with Hassett’s grim predictions of economic calamity, provided justification to pivot to where he preferred to be: cheering an economic revival rather than managing a catastrophic health crisis.

Trump directed his coronavirus task force to issue guidelines for reopening businesses, encouraged “LIBERATE” protests to apply pressure on governors and proclaimed that “the cure can’t be worse than the problem itself” — even as polls showed that Americans were far more concerned about their personal safety.

By the end of April — with more Americans dying in the month than in all of the Vietnam War — it became clear that the Hassett model was too good to be true. “A catastrophic miss,” as a former senior administration official briefed on the data described it. The president’s course would not be changed, however. Trump and Kushner began to declare a great victory against the virus, while urging America to start reopening businesses and schools.

“It’s going to go. It’s going to leave. It’s going to be gone. It’s going to be eradicated,” the president said Wednesday, hours after his son-in-law claimed the administration’s response had been “a great success story.”

The span of 34 days between March 29, when Trump agreed to extend strict social-distancing guidelines, and this past week, when he celebrated the reopening of some states as a harbinger of economic revival, tells a story of desperation and dysfunction.

The story goes on to show one of the most bone-chilling behind the scenes view of a series of decisions affecting the lives of American citizens I’ve ever read. Literally being a foreign agent working for an enemy could not be worse.

We already knew that January and February were lost months as Trump lived in denial and dithered about doing anything. Now we know that March and April they actually worked to sabotage the response. Trump asked for rosy scenarios and he and the Jared cabal used them to justify their foot-dragging and happy talk.

They knew. They lied. And all because Trump and Jared didn’t know what to do so they decided that the only way to get re-elected was to pretend it wasn’t happening.

It is stunning.

You can find all the others on Youtube. 🙂

Asking people to wear a mask is fighting words:

The mayor of an Oklahoma city amended an emergency declaration requiring customers to wear face masks while inside businesses after store employees were threatened with violence.

Stillwater Mayor Will Joyce announced the change Friday afternoon, less than 24 hours after the declaration took effect.

“In the short time beginning on May 1, 2020, that face coverings have been required for entry into stores/restaurants, store employees have been threatened with physical violence and showered with verbal abuse,” City Manager Norman McNickle said in a statement. “In addition, there has been one threat of violence using a firearm.”

We are doomed.

Wealth is simply a surrogate for power. Commerce is the principle means those not born to it acquire it in peacetime (pillaging and piracy requiring more dirty, hands-on work).

Salon’s David Masciotra joins me in considering our willingness to sacrifice others’ lives in service to the economy. Leilani Jordan, for example. The 27-year-old developmentally disabled woman worked and died of the coronavirus as a grocery clerk at Giant Foods. Her last paycheck was for $20.64. Economic cultists insist the poor and powerless serve the economy that enriches them. Same as it ever was. Thomas Jefferson owned about 200 slaves at the founding of this “economy.”

Masciotra writes:

The majority of Americans have less than $500 in savings. They simply do not experience the same “economy” as Rep. Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana, a Republican who described Americans dying as a result of “opening the economy” as the “lesser of two evils.” Hollingsworth is the 12th-richest member of Congress, with a net worth of $50.1 million, most of it coming from his father — the “silent partner” in Hollingsworth’s investment firm. 

While Jordan and Hollingsworth might share the same country and economy, their conception of whose lost lives are acceptable casualties in propping up the stock market is (or was) likely very different:

The ideological disease that cripples the United States is the belief that society does not exist beyond its commercial activity. President Calvin Coolidge famously remarked that “the business of America is business,” while Joel Millman, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, once wrote, “America is not a nation … America is a market.”

Millman was making a neutral, analytical observation, but a similar thesis has guided America’s long succession of disastrous policy decisions that treat the “economy” — meaning profits for corporations and their owners or shareholders — as sacred. An entire set of religious assumptions follow, most significantly that people like Jordan are martyrs for the God of profit. Their deaths are acceptable losses in the name of God and country, which mutate together into the bloodless idol of commerce.

Masciotra believes the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to confront our market-based theology. But there is little sign of that philosophical reassessment. Because underlying the quest for wealth is something much baser and primal: the quest for power.

I wrote here in December 2017:

Power is why plutocrats and their pet politicians loathe unions; unions counterbalance the power of capital. Whether it is money or civil rights or geopolitics, the specifics are secondary. Power is the bottom line? Congress is filled with alpha males who dream of being the alpha dog.

Republicans know this on a gut level. Democrats think we should all just get along, and government action should lift all boats. What matters more to their rivals is whose boats get lifted most. To the point of sinking their rivals’ dinghies if that’s what it takes to show who’s yacht is master of the seas.

Those possessing the most power nearly always view others as a mean to that end and, if necessary, as acceptable casualties. Like Leilani Jordan, they are more likely to be women, especially women of color, as with promoting photo ID laws that make voting more difficult:

The Republicans’ argument is since voting restrictions in their majestic equality prevent rich and poor, Republican and Democrat alike from participating as full citizens without presenting IDs, nothing is amiss in passing and enforcing them.

But in professing concern for “election integrity,” fearful, white Republican politicians are playing percentages, displaying scorn not just for their opponents but their own supporters. They are willing to sacrifice the franchise of thousands, potentially, as acceptable casualties in elections, if that is what it takes to win, including their own sisters, wives, and daughters.

And in this pandemic season, forcing workers back into meat processing plants as human sacrifices to the Market is equally ecumenical. In demanding states reopen their economies, there may even be a subconscious calculation about whose 2020 voters will perish in greater proportion.

Don’t expect the acting president to mourn the Leilani Jordans any more than those who perish in meat processing plants. It is not in his nature. It would only make you angrier if he tried.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.