Liz Cheney has charted her own path. She is not willing to lie, at least about one thing, the results of the last presidential race and the former president’s role in fomenting the January 6th assault on the Capitol. She voted to impeach him for that act of sedition. The party of which she’s a leader in the House has chosen a different route. They want to remake the truth about the events on January 6, jumping wholeheartedly into the giant footprints of the master fabricator, the Pied Piper of MAGA Land. They can’t bring themselves to denounce the myth of the stolen election for fear that the MAGA mob will unseat them. And so the pilgrimages to Mar-a-largo; the echoing of themes, now so familiar to the whole country.
Their two paths, the Congresswoman and her party, have headed in opposite directions. Cheney concedes that she is not the person to carry the message of a party bent on Trumpism, meaning a change in leadership is appropriate. She’ll have to take her fight to a different audience. Perhaps the anti-Trump forces, which seems so demoralized at this point, are quietly organizing ahead of the approaching midterm election campaign season. It makes no sense for her to run for re-election, but she might, just to show her defiance, if she can raise the money. Perhaps, the enthusiasm for the Pied Piper will have cooled or current leadership will have shot itself in the foot.
Even now, there is polling that suggests that his popularity is waning among those who consider themselves Republicans, if not with governors, in state houses and Congress. Take the ludicrously mischaracterized audit of Maricopa County ballots in the 2020 races of Biden and Mark Kelly. Apparently they’re looking for traces of bamboo in the ballot paper to confirm that thousands of ballots were imported from China, an imaginative conspiracy theory if ever there was one. Clearly, these politicians are all about retaining power while the electorate may be increasingly interested in making their lives better, however they concieve of that.
Pundits are batting around the question of the future of the GOP and our two party democracy. That’s difficult to say; the country has never stumbled to this juncture before. But it feels inherently dangerous. Will Fox News and Qanon carry the day? Or will a considerable number of Americans come to their senses? The clock is ticking.
On May 10, 1740, South Carolina enacts the Negro Act of 1740, allowing masters to whip and kill those enslaved who violate the law by growing their own food, learning to read, assembling in groups or earning money.
When Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex sat down with Oprah Winfrey, she was a David facing off against a Goliath, the British monarchy. Newly freed from a royal agreement to hold her tongue, she was anxious to regain her voice. And she did, in a quiet, measured manner that along the way released a Kraken. She appeared earnest, although because she’s an actress, any certainty about her sincerity is speculative.
It did seem curiously naive that Meg didn’t Google Harry because actresses need to be careful about these things. But then again, maybe it’s not necessary for a prince. As for the royal family, most Americans know very little about them except the pomp and circumstance in news clips. As a busy Afro-American actress, there’s no reason why the British monarchy would attract her interest. Actors are often not particularly well educated, not simply because many drop out of school but also because their focus is on the craft of entertainment, not history or current events. Entertainers are often assumed to have a level of sophistication that is more a product of their image than their daily lives. Meg was busy filming her TV series “Suits” with the attendant publicity obligations. Add in the fog of new love, it’s only in retrospect that a bit of preparation seems like it would have been a good idea. The kind of stuff she needed to know can’t be found on Google.
Of course, once they were engaged, she might have dug deeper, and perhaps she did, but details about the royals are sparse beyond the superficial. It was on Harry to fill in the important bits. Maybe the fear of being turned down tempered his early disclosures. After she accepted was when the real orientation should have started. For instance, she had no reason to know the British national anthem if she’d had no occasion to sing it? How many Americans do? Still, his ignorance strains credibility a bit since he must have had run-ins with the Firm in the past over his bachelor exploits exposed in the tabloids.
The Duchess chose her words carefully, in an attempt to shield herself, the couple and the royal family. Oprah’s reaction to the bombshell about the concern over Archie’s skin color was not the surprise that much of the press assumed. She’s lived enough life to have expected the question. No, Oprah’s shock was that Meg said it out loud so nakedly, a shock magnified by Oprah’s considerable acting chops. Yes it came with considerable softening, not the bare worry that he would look Black, but an inquiry about complexion, kind of like one would think about Harry’s anomalous red hair. Given Meg’s origins, it’s likely that her parents faced similar questions which sprung from the exact same origins. (This is an experience that I share.)
But the significance of the disclosure was important in exposing the relentlessness of the racially biased attacks, not simply from without by the press but from within the family and the Firm. None of those entities is sympathetic or kind. If “The Crown” is to be believed, this is an institutional order that quietly erased two family members with genetic handicaps from their tree, hiding them away in a mental institution.
Always disposed to a negative perspective, the press accused the couple of not naming the person(s) involved in the “complexion discussion” so the press could not investigate it. And yet it was very clear from Harry’s remarks that it was to protect them from the public shaming that would reverberate across the Commonwealth most importantly, if not in the US and the world in general. This is after all, his family for better or worse. Even in the distance that royal parents maintain from their children, children love their parents no matter what. Often they are driven into bizarre behaviors to elicit some expression of parental love. Here too, “The Crown” weaves some nifty tales.
Harry and Meg should probably spend more time catching up on episodes of “The Crown”. The series has drawn a clear picture of Queen Elizabeth’s battles between duty and her personal feelings. She has acted to do what she thought would sustain the monarchy. She drove her sister to alcoholism and numerous unhealthy romantic relationships. She arranged for Charles’ love Camilla to marry someone else and then forced him to marry Diana, setting up the marriage for 3 that crushed Diana. All of these maneuvers were designed to keep the royal entourage in their proper place. That Elizabeth had the stones to make these decisions was set in sharp contrast with her uncle Edward VIII who pursued the personal, i.e., Mrs Wallace, over the interest of the crown. When the Firm pushed back against his intentions to marry, he wanted to change the institution. But he lost that battle big time and so jumped ship. That’s how Elizabeth eventually came to the throne.
Elizabeth has wanted to change nothing, but she was dragged into beginning an era when the royal family became available to the regular public, sending the family on rounds of official appearances after a wave of unpopularity threatened the institution. She responded to a tsunami of grief over Princess Di’s death with a public funeral when she wanted to ignore the death of a traitor to the family, yet another follower of the personal over duty to the crown.
Harry could have seen his own oppressive trap laid bare in “The Crown” as well. An accident of birth that left him outside the line of succession made his escape possible. The centuries-old pomp and circumstance, the protocols, the traditions are the trap, outside the control of any one player, even the reigning monarch. Gone are the halcyon days of Henry VIII when the monarch actually controlled the fate of the nation. Now the monarch is a figurehead, commanding legions of men and women decked out in centuries-old costumes for rituals of state. Everything related to the queen like how to approach, how to address and how to leave the room is controlled by protocols not of the queen’s making but which she relishes. The monarchy is an institution that’s built to last, as it has, for centuries despite momentous historical changes. But Harry’s father Charles and brother William are locked in. Perhaps Charles has made his peace in his decades-long wait to assume the throne, having been allowed to finally marry his beloved Camilla and see her public acceptance, no matter how tepid.
“The Crown” nailed one other important piece, the role of the press, all of it, not just the tabloids. The press is the window into the monarchy and the family is acutely aware how much their image and popularity is dependent on them. The press is the only interface the public has with the menagerie of characters who, after all, are a gaggle of ne’er-do-wells who contribute nothing to the country’s well being. They sit around, eat, drink, hop in and out of numerous beds, party, fund raise for charities, cut a few ribbons and put on a public face. Their exploits come with an enormous price tag, which is why they have to at least be entertaining. The British public hungers for juicy bits of gossip made all the more salacious by the tabloid press. It’s like watching the Kardashians, except the Brits’ taxes are floating their bills and the Kardashians are free. They want something back for their cash.
The tabloids like to get ugly, because ugly sells. So the royals have to smooze them and titillate them with harmless tips. They also have to treat their royal staff right, least they sell out to the very generous tabloids. But all those sumptuous dinners can’t buy compassion or loyalty. It’s like feeding a pack of wolves and hoping they won’t get hungry again.
Okay, “The Crown” is fiction. It’s well researched and based on actual events, but the creators weren’t in the rooms. They didn’t hear any of those conversations that fill the dialogue in their scripts. But they seem to have captured the essence of the lives of a pampered, self-obsessed nobility, an anachronism in and of itself, with nothing to do except what they call “public service”. On the other hand, what do we really know? Except that the couple’s experience seems to mirror what’s on the small screen.
The British press consistently refer to Meg as biracial, a not so subtle reminder that Meghan is a product of “racial mixing”, a cardinal sin in the eyes of many concerned with separation by skin color. This trope from the very beginning of white superiority propaganda is deeply embedded in the brain’s neural networks that coalesce into implicit racial bias. In the US, with its one drop rule, Markle is simply Black. Meg committed another cardinal sin, not knowing her “place”. Black people are supposed to understand their subordinated position and give way to the dominant white caste. Place is acknowledged by both attitude and deferential self-censorship. But she just wouldn’t shut up, insisting on talking about justice and the circumstances of women around the world, too “political” for a royal. For the Brits, class adds another layer to status in society. Like in the US, a commoner retains more status than a darker skinned person but both must continue to defer to the aristocracy. A commoner with the privilege of entry into the royal family is supposed to count their blessings, look decorative and keep their mouth shut.
The queen’s official response stated that the royal family was saddened and would address the questions raised by Markle within the family. Boom! She immediately shut down any discussion of racism. The family, raised in a bubble that has no real interaction with any normal Britons, has literally no idea of the racism that pervades their subjects. They are, after all, descendants of the purveyors of the big lie, that of the inferiority of people of color, on which the Empire is based. They’ve seen no reason to reconsider the ideas in which they believe so deeply. They are the end of a line of monarchs who believe in the God given right of Britons to subjugate the rest of the world and extract the wealth from it for the country’s own growth. The Queen continues to believe in her right to reign over the people of color that populate the countries that remain in the Commonwealth, the remains of their tattered empire reduced by Britain’s fall from global significance. Emigres from Commonwealth countries have felt the sting of imperial white supremacy as they’ve come to Britain’s shore, where whites refuse to examine their attitudes or their historic role in the oppression of people of color.
The entire royal frame of reference renders the family incapable of understanding racial prejudice. They literally can’t see it. It’s as invisible as coronavirus. Their lives would have to be cracked open, like Harry’s, in order for them to begin to dig into their history. And they can’t look at something they can’t see. The cerebral gyri are neatly twisted upon themselves but the mental paradigms that govern the ways our minds work would have to be turned inside out for that kind of inquiry. This is not something that people between 60 and 80 like Prince Charles and the monarch, raised in a lifetime bubble akin to that of the MAGA cult, can do. And so the royal family will further bury their heads in the sand, stiffen their upper lip, batten down the hatches and wait for the storm to blow over as it always has. Because they can’t see that they’ve done anything wrong.
This is not the missed opportunity to confront racism that the American press wants to pretend it is. There isn’t even a ripple of that in the British press. Queen Elizabeth is not the person who can lead or even participate in discussions of race in the UK or the Commonwealth. Prince William’s “my family is not racist” response to a question from the press is a good example. First of all, it’s a stupid question. No one, not even the late George Wallace, ever answers yes. Any automatic response that claims a white individual is not a racist is disingenuous. Both the question and the answer demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of the many faces of racism. As premiere representatives of British institutions, the family can’t be anything but. Although the British tend not to be copious conversationalists, there are no doubt millions of microaggressions scattered throughout the royal families’ lives, of which they are probably blithely ignorant. That is in the face of their very limited exposure to people of color. And without even considering their innate sense of superiority.
Black British activists have been beating their drum for a long time and no one in the government has listened. This may be an issue that the younger generation can tackle, but the time has not come yet in the country as a whole and nothing the Queen or Harry can say will jump start a reckoning. Our hearts and support go out to the UK Afro- and Caribbean communities in their struggle against the national deafness, but we are in a period of retrenchment of our own here.
Perhaps, the couple’s ironic flight to the US is an indication of their desperation, for Meg knows all too well that racial animus is alive and well and now more explicitly expressed in her country. Celebrity combined with a security detail and an entourage of assistants provides some shield (she is unlikely to be stopped by a cop for a broken taillight), but the editorial frame of the media can be no less relentless even if it is more subtle. However, the crushing influence of a titled nobility that sits atop a rigid class system is absent here, allowing space for the worship of celebrities, regardless of color, as nobility if not royalty. In fact, Canada, their first choice, was a better one, not because it is a Commonwealth nation, but because their racial antipathies tend to be directed toward citizens of First Nations rather than the tiny Black community, 3.5% by 2016 census data. On the other hand, there might be a residue of loyalty to the Queen that would have tainted their residence there even as murmurs about leaving the Commonwealth are spreading there in the wake of the whole affair.
Royal watchers have speculated that most members of the royal family didn’t watch the interview, an activity they consider beneath them. For them, it’s part of a media circus that is reminiscent of the disruption wrought by Princess Di. Their concern is not really what happened, but how they can protect themselves, i.e., the cover-up. They’ve plucked out the key words forbidden for them to respond to (oops to William’s faux pas) and garnered deflection strategies outside silence, i.e. Meghan’s cruelty to the royal staff.
The very fact that they announced an investigation of Meghan as a staff bully to head off any negative publicity before the interview speaks volumes about the likelihood that any investigation into how the Firm dealt with the duchess’s charges will happen. The fact that her pleas for psychiatric support for suicidal ideation, a life threatening emergency, went ignored should assume a high priority. If the Firm, with little interest in the individual person that is passing through in the long arc, is to spearhead that investigation, it will die a quiet death. It’s concern is the maintenance of the institution apart from any individual cog particularly when they’ve escaped their control.
In truth, the complaints from the staff themselves are probably another manifestation of racial animus within the household staff. The diversity of the staff, a place where jobs are handed down, raises the question of the lens through which the complaints will be viewed. As for the commoners who make up the staff, no doubt they were affronted by their new duties to serve a confident Black woman who wasn’t cowed by the privilege of being let into the royal family. We know that whites interpret the exact same behaviors differently when they come from the dark skinned rather than people who look like them. It’s highly likely that they saw that stereotypical angry Black woman, a level of presumptiveness they would have found hard to stomach. And from an American divorcee to boot. This stereotypical temptress, a Black Jezebel, mesmerized their poor Harry to force her way into their paradise. Needless to say the duchess will be found guilty, if not in the findings themselves, then in the tabloid press. The narrative will go something like, “if you think she’s an innocent, look how mean she was to people [like you]. If she can do that, can you even trust that she was suicidal? Can you trust anything she says?” She’ll be done and dusted. No stone will be left unturned to vilify her person because the words of the vilified can be ignored. Voila! “What racism, what is that?” Britons will continue to live in their cozy national coma. Their love-hate fascination with the royal family, their national treasure, will go on and on or at least the Prince of Wales hopes it will extend to his coronation if not beyond. Britons love Elizabeth; they hate Charles, simply because he was mean to a canonized Diana.
But Meghan is not Princess Di. She was one of them; Meghan is not. And Brits can’t get over her brown skin. Harry thinks only the tabloids are racist, but he’s wrong about that. After all, his experience with real people is pretty limited. He admitted during the interview that his wokeness mostly came from the couple’s collision with the tabloids, his family and the Firm. He must have seen plenty of it in his military experience in Afghanistan, but perhaps he hasn’t reprocessed it yet in light of his new reality.
Harry doesn’t want to believe that his family is racially biased either. For him to understand that will require him to delve into his upbringing and education and to flip flop on British imperialism, an enormous task for any individual. Still, the question why his wife was hung out to dry with the British tabloids has to be asked. As Meg put it, why would the Firm choose to lie about her while correcting the record about other family members? Could it have been to provide Meghan as chum to distract away from the Prince Andrew debacle. Andrew is a perfect example of “pulling back from the public” to let the storm blow over. And yet, shouldn’t the public remain outraged over the presence of a pedophile in the royal family or is it simply tolerance of the many vices within the monarchy over the centuries. No doubt, Andrew is not the first. Our present age of enlightenment has been exposed as a fraud once again.
Or maybe, despite the Queen’s personal feelings for the Duchess, the Firm felt she was the one who didn’t belong and just like Diana, wanted the wrath of the nation and the tabloids to wash over her. The Firm was successful in their efforts with the tabloids then but instead of wrath, the nation embraced Di as “the peoples’ princess”. But as the essence of British imperial racism, it calculated correctly in the case of Meghan, particularly among elderly residents of the UK, the Queen’s staunchest supporters who have fond memories of their glorious empire. Those memories are the counterweight to their feelings of national and personal powerlessness that precipitated Brexit and now cloud their days as pensioners.
The Black community watch the press coverage and recognize its racist roots. Those in mixed marriages instantly recognized the comments about Archie’s complexion because it was part of their experience too.
The Brits will rally around their queen. Meg insulted her, headlines cried, so she’s toast, except within the Black community. They love her and they love Harry for loving her. They saw themselves in her and hoped that her presence heralded a new day for the monarchy and possibly for them. The ripple of the BlackLivesMatter movement suggested that finally, the country might hear them and come to see their plight. Those in mixed marriages instantly recognized the comments about Archie’s complexion because it was part of their experience too. They’ve watched the press coverage and recognize its racist roots; they haven’t been fooled by the volley of superficial denials. The comparisons with Kate Middleton are particularly revealing; same behavior, radically different interpretations.
One royal watcher, Peter Westmacott, interviewed by Christiane Amanpour tried to dismiss the concerns over Archie as an expression of unconscious bias that meant no harm. He’s a little foggy on what racism is and how it manifests. Implicit bias is racism and it is never harmless. Intention has nothing to do with it, since implicit bias is unconscious. In contrast, explicit racial bias, like that of the British press is very conscious and all too intentional. In either case, the hurt is always real. In Archie’s case, it went beyond a naive remark. His mother determined his place within the royal family, not because of her person but the color of her skin. No princely title, no protection detail, not because of protocols, but because the queen had decided to change the protocols.
Meghan’s presence was a boost with residents across the Commonwealth as well. She pointed out during the interview that if Archie had a light brown face, it would change how Commonwealth residents would view the monarchy. But that was not an advantage to the monarchy, uncomfortable about change, because their presence in the Commonwealth is the embodiment of their whiteness and tan skin would upset the balance of power. That distinction is precisely why Meg could never think like a royal. The interview has rekindled interest in some Commonwealth countries to follow the Duke and Duchess out of the realm. Caribbean Islanders and Africans are asking themselves why shouldn’t their titular head of state be one of their own, not a reminder of a colonial past laced with bad memories of forced subservience.
The tabloids are well versed in British racism. Many of those attitudes abound in their newsrooms, where Black faces are at best a rarity if present at all. They are masters at focusing, framing and reflecting English racism back on itself. Rupert Murdoch is a magician at shaping public opinion and recycling it. But he didn’t create the deep seated racism that has permeated Britain forever. Remember, these are the same people who thought the Irish were a different race, lower than the dirt they planted their potatoes in. And then there’s the whole Brexit thing, sold to the public through anti-European rhetoric prominently against Eastern Europeans. Brits have been reluctant to roll out the welcome mat to others, preferring instead to invade other countries rather than welcome their natives onto their own shores. Maybe it’s an island thing.
The British tabloids will never let up. If the couple is to make their way in the world, capitalizing on their fame and Meg’s connections in the entertainment industry, they will have to maintain a high public profile. Every time they stick their heads out, the tabloids will come hunting and they’ll be hostile, like sharks circling in the water. The couple can try to shape their narrative, and outside Harry’s home country, they may have some success. Americans have no love for the monarchy; they mostly just enjoy the big spectacles. At the same time, the couple will need to harness the American eye that first came to know them as part of royalty in order to make a living. They’ll have to compete with a crap load of other celebrities, from Instagram influencers to Oprah.
I empathize with Meghan because of our common ancestry and the burden it brings with it. She was blindsided by vicious racist behaviors that she never imagined and further devastated by a monarchy that refused to have her back. She seemed genuinely rocked emotionally by that betrayal as was Harry, their disappointment repeated several times during the interview. And Harry who is a newcomer to the venomous bites of anti-Black racism is only discovering its many faces and flavors. All that in the midst of trying to reckon with the generational trauma of the paparazzi and tabloid “reporters” that killed his mother, not to mention the parallels with his mother’s treatment by his family members and the Firm. I feel an emotional connection to them as an interracial couple having travelled that path myself. Neither had the parental guidance as children that would help them cope with their life together on the huge world stage. They have the resources to survive economically which should buy them the psychological support they need. I have to root for them, the way a parent roots for a child. But they’ll be alright, whether I do or not.
From the Equal Justice Initiative calendar 2021
During the week of March 14, 2015, protestors march after University of Oklahoma’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity is taped singing a song that includes the n-word and “You can hang him from a tree, but he’ll never sign with me.”
When Republicans talk about last week’s insurrection, Abraham Lincoln comes up. He called for the forgiveness of Confederates after the Civil War, they say. They don’t mention that Lincoln was shot dead by a Confederate supporter mourning their surrender. John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators who injured 3 other Cabinet members were hunted down and hanged. Instead, Republicans want to use, ironically, the Confederacy as an example for how the nation should proceed in the wake of Trump’s call to insurrection at the Capitol building. After all, the former CSA president Jefferson Davis was briefly jailed and then pardoned. It was Andrew Johnson who made the decision to allow Confederates to be accepted as full citizens in the country that they had conducted a 4 year war against months before. He decided to reclaim lands already distributed and planted by the formerly enslaved and return them to their enslavers. These ideas are a natural outgrowth of party supporters among the Civil War reenactors and Lost Cause proponents integral to the MAGA movement, misled about the nation’s true history.
To all of this, I call bullshit! Look where that postwar approach has led the country. It began 100 years of the apartheid police state that was the Jim Crow South. Outside the South, segregation and overt racial discrimination reigned throughout the rest of the country for over 100 years. Despite the 15th amendment, it took 100 years before the formerly enslaved gained the right to vote. It has worked out well for Republicans in whose minds systemic racism doesn’t exist. But it’s been a disaster for the descendants of the formerly enslaved, native born and those who immigrated from the Caribbean.
Our present catastrophic state is why racial justice demonstrations erupted across the world after the whole nation was invited to watch the lynching of George Floyd without the careful tutelage lavished on the youngsters who were taken to public lynchings in the 19th and 20th centuries. Children were brought to join in the “festivities” so that lynching traditions could be passed down. Today, young adults and their parents without that experiential lens were enraged that a Minneapolis cop invited them to participate in his act of state sponsored terror. How dare he implicate other white people in his inhumanity! He was supposed to be serving the community. Nonwhite BLM marchers were saying Hell, No! I don’t want to be any part of that.
How ironic for Republican senators to now say that impeachment will increase division in the country! The party that has stoked division for decades thinks divisiveness will be exacerbated by holding the president accountable for sedition. The divide, already as wide as the Pacific Ocean, has no room to expand. This is more political gamesmanship from those who should be ashamed that they have not united with the rest of the country in defense of our security, similar to the unity after 9/11. Their attempt is reminiscent of the Lost Cause rewrite of the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction as befits their La-La-Land bound supporters. They are trying to hide in plain sight. Yes they enabled the president in every way, shape and form for over 4 years. Yes they have promoted an agenda of disinformation and actively sought the right wing media bubble to spread manufactured scandal and conspiracy theories. No, they have not spoken out against any of it. Even after their lives were endangered during the assault on their workplace, a co-equal branch of government, Senators Hawley and Cruz kept on with business as usual, spreading the big lie of the theft of a Trump victory. No, they have not rejected the election fraud lie as 8 Senators and 139 Representatives voted against certification of the Electoral College certificates. No, some have not stopped spreading it.
It has taken longer for the nerves of others to settle, but as the days tick by, many have recovered their GOP mojo to begin whirling like dervishes. They’ve come out swinging with the party line of promoting national unity. It’s a testament to their moral bankruptcy and partisan gamesmanship. They’re in it for the long haul, anchored in preserving their minority party as the only one meant to rule, even as their numbers are shrinking. Trump allowed them to reach their pinnacle. Republicans believe they can’t allow his influence to wane if their dominance is to continue. There is nothing more divisive than the Divider in Chief.
Contrast the Trump response to that of the Democratic Party in 2016. Yes, the election was stolen from Clinton through Russian “active measures” that goosed the political divide. Liberals and progressives demonstrated, protested and moved to the courts in an attempt to block the major tenets of the president’s reign of cruelty. The supposedly independent legislative branch kowtowed to the executive branch, passing their signature legislative achievement, tax cuts for the rich, and then holding off any other legislation after their 12 year crusade against the ACA died under John McCain’s down turned thumb. Moscow Mitch’s own pet project, crippling the federal court system with partisan hacks for decades to come, has been the sum total of Senate accomplishments outside a ludicrous parade of faux Senate investigations designed to undermine the Mueller investigation. In the face of near economic collapse and escalating COVID19 deaths, they did pass a relief bill that managed to make their rich friends richer. And last but not least, the faux Impeachment trial.
Liberals concentrated on the voting booth to overturn this GOP hell and were ultimately successful in dislodging the devil, but losses at the state and local level show the power of the presidential bully pulpit to spread chaos and mental mania across the land. But that’s the American way; when you lose an election no matter the reason, you try again. At no point did democrats ever consider organizing an armed coup, an idea that would only occur to a party steeped in autocracy like Republicans. They convinced their constituents that elections are only valid when they win because they told them that. They told them that only they have the right to govern. They told them that the Democratic Party are demons that will destroy them. And they believed.
After the failure of their armed insurrection, the Republican Party is now at a fork in the road. To the right, the path to the Trump train. Straight ahead, Dump Trump and find a new leader to regain one party rule. Right now, cabinet and administration officials can’t abandon the ship fast enough, hoping the slime won’t seep into any future economic opportunities first and political prospects secondarily. But the majority of those in office, both federally and locally, elected for their fealty to Trump, have no choice. In their vacuous minds, unencumbered by a political ethos, they are unable to envision a path apart from the cult of Trumpology marching orders. Lifted by radiating the cult aura, the candidates attracted to elected office were either true believers or ambitious, self absorbed nihilists searching for fame and fortune. The attack on Capitol Hill hastened the timeline; surveys show that only 15% of Republicans disapprove of the incident, a measure of the extent to which the party is ensconced in La-La-Land.
As the House forged toward Impeachment, Congressional Republicans were being forced to take a side, even as they are witnessing the monster that they created devouring them. The harassment and intimidation of legislators and their families, at the state and federal levels has struck fear in the hearts of those who might be considering abandoning the ship. Lindsay Graham harassed in the airport. Social media trolls threatening kidnap, torture and death to those who don’t tow the radical extremist line. Rep Alyssa Slatkin, a Democrat from a red district in Minnesota, says that she has been subject to death threats for years. She told Christine Amanpour that her Republican colleagues told her that their safety was uppermost in their minds as they considered their vote on Impeachment. There is no way to thread a path in the middle when the Mafia has a person in their sites. Typical political maneuvering through wordsmithing is not possible in a yes or no vote. A vote to impeach represents the quickest route to being “primaried” out of their seats as well as a life threatening act for their families.
Legislators sincerely wanting to jump out of the Trump gang should contact the FBI to investigate their tormentors and prosecute them. There is probably some federal law against intimidating the votes of legislators. They should then vote against sedition and ultimately resign if they can’t live without fear. They should honestly self-reflect on their path into their predicament and literally repent. However, given the intestinal fortitude within the group, the probability that some members of Congress and the Senate are taking shelter in a popular excuse is high. As fellow seditionists, they should simply resign, as unlikely as a pig taking flight.
So as the impeachment debate proceeded, it was clear that most Republicans were forking right, as would be predicted. Their most coherent argument against impeachment boiled down to this is time to lower the temperature and strive for unity. Apparently, Pelosi is supposed to reach out to them and they have only to accept graciously. Republicans have made no pretense of an ounce of self reflection. I call bullshit political gamesmanship! If they are serious, they have one simple thing to do. Republicans, tell your supporters you lied, as Mitt Romney suggested. Get on Twitter with a simple statement, “there was no election fraud. Joe Biden legitimately beat our guy by 8 million votes.” Stand in your legislative chambers and at your governors’ podia and simply tell the truth. They lost and they can try again in 2024. Of course, this would be most effectively done by their fearless leader. But he has found no way to flip this loss into a win except to lie about it. He sees it as his continuing base of power. So he’s out. But rather than tell their supporters to go home and join the battle against COVID19, many Republicans have refused to abandon the election fraud lie. Some have yet to acknowledge Joe Biden as the legitimately elected president. They simply can’t remember how not to lie.
Leading those on this fork diverging to the far right are Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, positioning themselves to be the next autocratic leader. They radiate ambition and nihilism. Cruz has deluded himself into believing he is charismatic; he is not. This supposedly moral crusader has evolved into a simple power grabber as scraggly as his unkempt beard. There’s something sinister about him. Hawley considers himself a fast rising phenom and bright Harvard educated star meant to outshine the sun. Harvard makes its graduates believe that kind of horseshit in their mantra that it is training leaders even as it doesn’t implant the ethics that should guide leaders through the idea of service. It’s a hard sell, given the wealthy, white entitled clay they have to mold.
It’s unlikely that the party lead will fall to the Jr who is only a moon that reflects back the sun’s light. If elected, Don Jr would be a front man for his father whom he can’t refuse. But for him to be elected, Agent Orange would have to surrender a piece of the spotlight, an impossibility. That wing of the party has no one else because Trump quashed anyone who got any attention at all. He built a movement about him, not the party. He doesn’t care what happens to it when he’s gone. This wing of the party has nowhere to go in electoral politics. Not even the party’s best efforts to shrink the electorate to only those who support them appears to be a recipe to return to a dominant position in national government in the absence of the threat of widespread domestic terrorism. Here, think about The Troubles in Ireland and Irish terrorism in England. The penetration of La-La-Land should not be underestimated given that they started at almost 40%. On the other hand, many of them don’t often vote unless TheRealityTVPresident whistles them to the polls and he’s whistling only for himself. It seems clear that a bunch of them have opted out altogether, preferring violent guerrilla warfare to the voting booth.
Trump quashed anyone in the party who got any attention at all. He built a movement about him, not the party. He doesn’t care what happens to it when he’s gone.
The White Supremacist in Chief may not have anticipated a competitor that threatens to subsume even his influence. He was the hub where a range of radical right extremist causes could cross pollinate mainstream Republicans. But then there was Q. Qanon centered Trump’s name, the only time that he’s allowed it’s use without an attached financial remuneration, in a far out conspiracy theory that posited Democrats as a group that trafficked in children whose blood they drank. From there it has mushroomed in scope to embrace all kinds of other concerns like anti-vaxxers, supporters of silencing women who have been sexually harassed, abused or raped and involuntary celibates (Incels). The forces have all coalesced in the “Stop the Steal Movement”, it’s primary focus since the election. Trump’s stolen election lie has galvanized and radicalized a large cross section of people who have been mesmerized by ever widening conspiracies. To commit to Q is to walk through the looking glass, into an underground bunker in La-La-Land with an automatic self locking vacuum sealed door. There may be no way out.
Qers may even be beyond Trump’s influence. Qers have their own way to interpret his words. For instance, his announcement that he would skip the inauguration was a signal that he would be safely out of the way of any attempted action. His latest statement that violence did not represent what he stood for they understand as something he just has to say to tamp down criticism. They know he has promoted and supported violence in the past, from beating up protesters in his rallies to the killing of a demonstrator in Charlottesville to aggressive police attacks on peaceful BLM demonstrators. They see it as just another wink, wink. And if that is true, there may be no way to stop the wave of domestic terrorist attacks that will surely come. In recent polls, 64% of Republicans agreed with the statement that the traditional way of American life is disappearing so fast that they may have to use force to save it.
People like Mitt Romney and Jeff Flake may try to gather up the leftovers on the Dump Trump fork. At some point, though, they will have to reckon with the reality that the majority of citizens aren’t buying what they’re selling. As we’ve been tumbled in thunderous seas with waves of deaths from COVID crashing over us, economic depravity from viral fallout, a momentary recognition of economic and health disparities and the long history of racial violence at the hands of law enforcement, people are less likely to be receptive. The “real” conservative movement will have to reckon with their role in repackaging overt anti-Black racism into the dog whistles of Ronald Regan and his successors then flipped back into overtness by the White Nationalist in Chief. It’s just hard to sell their disdain for people of color in a country that is becoming majority nonwhite. They’ve been trying to adopt the verbiage but it rings hollow in the mouths of those who blame minorities for being the stereotypes that the conditions Republican governance has created when there are NO alternatives. (Not that Democrats haven’t made their own contribution.) The missing ingredient is empathy, the emotion that our caste system has given the upper caste permission to deny in the continuing war to keep the lowest caste in its place through degradation.
The importance of government to our survival was made manifest as dependence on the largess of corporate America in the COVID response exposed the inherent inequality baked into the prioritization of profit over people. Conservatives’ small government is incapable of meeting the overarching challenges of climate change and racial justice and is in large part responsible for the hole that we now have to dig ourselves out of. The fact that some still refuse to acknowledge climate change in order to recruit new members is appalling and speaks to the party’s propensity for disinformation.
The conservative hew and cry about budget deficits will be central to either path of the splintered GOP. It wasn’t real, just an excuse to divest in the country’s resources. We know that because George Bush 43 built an enormous federal deficit playing with war toys even before the response to the Great Recession. The size of the deficit has never prevented a massive tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthy, the last one creating the foundation for an even larger one as both humanity and the economy yields to the virus. One other critical factor, times have changed. The fact is, with 0% interest rate practically globally, the newest borrowings are a steal. There hasn’t been a better time in the last couple of decades to accumulate a deficit. The smart money would borrow more to repay older debt service.
These conservatives will have to abandon their attachment to the clearly bankrupt theory of trickle down economics, now thoroughly debunked in practice by the evidence that the wealth stays at the top. That fact is in large part responsible for the emergence of their nemesis, the RealityTVPresident who scooped up all those who saw their government wasn’t listening to them and didn’t give a shit about them. It is the decades of Republican penny-pinching governance that allowed the deterioration of infrastructure, the public school and public health systems among other governmental functions.
They must acknowledge and disavow their role in building the infrastructure for one party rule through guaranteed districts. They shouldn’t hope to claw back to national prominence by retelling the lie of voter fraud in order to restrict voting in elections and repackaging votes to undercut one man, one vote. They must support a level playing field for all candidates. This may be the most difficult step because they have grown up in a party that understood that its message was not a winning one unless they focused on molding the electorate to the most likely susceptible and eliminating those who were not.
“True” conservatives must honestly reexamine their role in facilitating the rise of Donald Trump and coddling him in office, before they begin to determine the new direction for conservatism in the fragment of the Republican Party that dumps Trump. But they must also understand that if their arguments don’t win over a sufficient majority in the country as it evolves, they must either be happy with minority status or alter their stances to win over more people. That’s electoral politics. If they can’t, they are just another autocratic party vying with a stronger one with more name recognition and the right wing media bubble in tow.
In the interim since January 6, more and more evidence is emerging that some Congressmen and perhaps some staff assisted in the planning and execution of the Capitol assault. Some Capitol police have been implicated in providing maps or instructions for moving around the building, reflecting the historical reality that law enforcement has often been supporters if not members of white supremecist groups. There may be some members in the National Guard tasked to defend the inauguration and state capitals who are playing for the other team as well. Republicans should be apologizing for leading their supporters to treason. But Republicans have not yet admitted that they were wrong in supporting and speaking at the rally. They will not admit that they enabled Agent Orange for 4 years or that their failure to convict at the first Impeachment trial led us to this moment. Instead they are trying to isolate January 6 as the first bad act that 45 committed.
The initial horror over January 6 suggested that the divide might produce some interesting results. Mitch McConnell had given up the stolen election lie just moments before the Capitol was breached. Recently it’s been reported that he thinks 45 should be impeached but that seems to have been a political trial balloon. He then announced that the trial would be delayed until after the Biden-Harris inauguration, seemingly denying the urgency to remove a traitor from office.
McConnell, always a political survivor without philosophy, ethics or principles seems to be trying to find a middle course outside either fork in the road. In truth, he’s old, he won a 6 year term and is unlikely to run for another. He has lost his majority position which he can hope to recover in 2022; he has no other political aspirations. He can just sit quietly in waiting for that leadership position, particularly if the impeachment trial falls under Shumer’s purview.
Liz Cheney stuck her neck out to support impeachment, a move that could earn her a place in the leadership of a newly constituted conservative party. However, her political pedigree smacks of strong autocratic tendencies, including her father Dick who pioneered the unitary chief executive, as close to a monarch as one can imagine. In the near term, it could result in the loss of her party leadership position, death threats and loss of seat.
Elected office is not where the newly constituted Republican party, probably with a new name to erase their shame, will draw new members. It will be in convened meetings with those who left the party under the Trump siege like the people in the Lincoln Project and Jeff Flake. They will have to compete with the wing under Trumpian influence for people who flake off from the cult of Trump. However, they should ask themselves whether they want to welcome chameleons like Lindsay Graham who wants to be anything politically advantageous to anyone. They have to decide if they want to add some principles back into their politics or just bodies.
In the meantime, elected officials in the grips of the Trumpology cult, either as believers or people trying to take advantage of them, will be a fifth column in government under Joe Biden. Hopefully, investigations will expose those who aided and abetted the terrorists and the legislative bodies will expel them. Two newly elected Qanon disciples in the House, Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA) and Lauren Boebert (CO) are lost in the wilderness. Greene says she will propose a bill to impeach Biden for abuse of power on Inauguration Day. The idea demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of the term, given that Biden, a private citizen, will only have been president for an hour or two. Ok, so it’s a publicity stunt where she’s using Congress like Twitter, pushing her brand for maximum likes to raise her profile. Greene refused to wear a mask in a safe room and so may have infected 3 Democratic colleagues to date. She has also refused to go through the newly installed metal detectors and pushed back against Capitol police along with her Colorado colleague who swore she would bring a gun to the Capitol. Guns are allowed in member offices, but not the chamber. Goebert is also being investigated for tweeting out Pelosi’s location in the building during the riot in direct violation of police instructions not to disclose their secure location. It just has to be said, Qanon believers have lost their minds, but they bring 2 more Republican votes to the House to nibble away at Democratic initiatives. At the same time, they are implants of the radical right sworn to tear down the United States government.
People like Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy, Hawley and Cruz will retain a powerful platform in legislative investigations to distribute KGB planted propaganda and they will pursue the objective McConnell laid out against Barack Obama, to make Biden a one term president. Although the party will not be able to mount investigations, Hunter Biden will return as a topic in any place where conspiracy theories can be snuck in. They will insert their disinformation into confirmation hearings and legislative debates. (Great news that there will be legislative debates in the Senate.) They will use the filibuster to slow legislation in the Senate. They will be the Twitter feed for Trump; they will do the interviews on Trump/FoxNews and OAN.
More nefariously, these foes of democracy represent a significant security threat. They will have access to secure information that there is no assurance that they will not feel above the law to share. If you support and aid insurrection, a few laws about security should be no barrier. But outside Congress, there are the hundreds (some estimate 25 million Americans are Q at least partial believers) of law enforcement and former military, potential National Guards who believe in #stopthesteal if not Q. One fireman was arrested for beating a cop with a fire extinguisher at the Capitol. At least 3 policemen have been terminated from their local departments for participation in the Capitol storming and it’s still early in arrests of what will hopefully be thousands. Every person who broke through the barriers was at a minimum trespassing; hundreds of Black youths daily are arrested for much less.
On the other hand, the “true” conservative fork will likely lay low, as the Trump inspired violence peaks and coronavirus subsides. They have time. Think about this, doctors say that COVID19 can have long term effects that have not yet been defined. The virus attacks every organ, including blood vessels and the heart. As a survivor, Trump may have some illness in his future and that could change the political calculus completely.
On January 17, 1834 Alabama legislature passed a law that effectively bans any free Black person from residing in the state.
The outgoing President of the United States called from a rally podium for his supporters to go to the Capitol Building and claim the election that he convinced them he won. All the available evidence contradicts his fantasy but his cult has lost touch with reality, bubble wrapped in his LaLaLand. He told them he would walk with them down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, but strangely enough, he piled into his presidential motorcade and drove off with his Secret Service agents and a police escort that blocks traffic on every street he crosses.
Sometime later, the Secret Service had to quickly whisk VP Pence from the Senate chamber. Grassley, Pelosi and McConnell in the line of presidential succession had to be yanked away as well. They were in the midst of an attack on the people who run the government by those very same MAGA rallyers on a mission to Keep America White. A mortal strike would have created a leadership vacuum. Perhaps it was meant to be a demonstration that the Trumpology cult believes the country needs only one ruler, El Trumpe!.
It’s no accident that the crowd was dotted with Confederate flags, a symbol of the guiding light for this act of sedition. A woman interviewed leaving the building with tear gas reddened eyes said, “We were storming the Capitol. This is a revolution!”, pretty much summing up. These people broke windows to gain entry and then looted the offices of the country’s representatives, carrying out chairs and pieces of furniture. The assumption must be made that they also examined documents before they scattered them all over the floors in the offices, left in haste as members of Congress and staffers ran in fear for their lives. We know one man took a piece of Speaker Pelosi’s mail, proudly displayed for an interviewer. Pelosi’s laptop is also reported missing. The obvious intent was violence on our elected representatives. They meant to stop the certification of Joe Biden, our newly elected President. Rather than “Stop the Steal”, they were intent on their own theft, the voice of the country’s majority. We voted and answered that impeachment question Republicans had asked us to settle. Guilty! You’re Fired! It may have looked like an aimless mob, but many were dead serious, in fact fatally to 5 people. A woman was shot. Two IEDs were found on the ground. A Capitol policeman was killed.
Trump, in his Jefferson Davis persona, tweeted for his band of traitors to stand fast before, almost 5 hours into the rampage, releasing a video that pumped up the stolen election lie and empathized with his people over their frustration before telling them to go home. This expression of empathy stands out starkly from the BullyPresident’s usual rhetoric. And yet, it was a typical speech with forked tongue, the admonition to leave, a cover for his support of violent acts against our government mixed with praise for people he called special. In case of any legal recriminations, that will be his defense. It provides a veneer of deniability. 45 will say that he didn’t know the crowd would be violent although he later characterized their sedition as an act of patriotism in a tweet (that was later deleted as Twitter banned him for 12 hours):
“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.”
It’s reported that he laughed and cheered the rabble on while watching from the comfort of a couch shared with Kayleigh McEnany and Mark Meadows. The chief executive delights in watching violent actions, the way many cowards who could never deliver a physical blow themselves often do.
As I watched the Capitol police clear the steps of demonstrators outside, some rioters punched at the officers, but there was no attempt to detain anyone. Rioters were quietly and patiently escorted to different positions. One officer kindly held the hand of a woman helping her down the Capitol steps. These people have broken the law, unlawfully trespassing into an area that was designated as off limits and cordoned off by police whom they attacked. Recall the paddy wagons used to transport peaceful BLM demonstrators who had attacked no one but were being attacked by police. There were none at the Capitol. The police finally cleared the area around the building, but they let the crowd mill around in the streets, despite violating the 6 pm curfew imposed by the DC mayor. No zip ties; no billy clubs. No armored vehicles; no rubber bullets. Sparse use of batons. The cops in riot gear formed a line but they just looked at the crowd. Thousands of white lawbreakers were allowed to fade away in their own time, leaving primarily for points outside DC. They were free to drive or fly home.
All Americans, white and Black, have the same expectations of law enforcement, summed up by one of the mob interviewed by the media, “They shoot BLM; they don’t shoot us.” These folks had no fear. They were confident that they could go maskless in easily identifiable clothing and get off scot free. And why not. They did it at the Michigan state house in Lansing, and there they had automatic weapons and long guns. (I imagine an armed shootout between the Proud Boys, assorted militias and law enforcement. It’s complicated, what with the sympathy among officers for militia groups. Who has the most guts? Alas, that will never happen. The cops would be de-escalating their asses off.)
They should have seen it coming. Republicans did see it coming because Trump consistently telescopes his behavior. They chose not to believe.
One has to ask how this happened. The FBI and intelligence community was well aware of the preparations of the radical right. The President himself said he would create something spectacular on the day in his invitations to participate. The signs were everywhere. Homeland Security was Johnny on the spot to clear Lafayette Square, but they were nowhere in sight to defend the Capitol building. Nor did they arrive later. Mayor Boyser and Nancy Pelosi had to call for the National Guard; Governor Northam of Virginia kicked in an additional complement of state troopers while being sidestepped by Pentagon command. The question has to be asked if the DOJ purposely did not prepare a security plan and deploy a force to protect a joint session of Congress attended by the country’s leadership directly below the president that was the target of right wing social media chatter and a speech that incited violence by the president’s henchmen, Rudy G who called for a “trial of combat” (more Trump deniability). A gesture of deference to the president, perhaps from an obsequious partisan official. Law enforcement on site amounted to Capitol police and Secret Service agents who left with the vice president. There was not even a DC police presence. Streets around the area that were supposed to be barricaded were not. The possibility that some partisan employees within the building may have assisted the terrorists with entry must be investigated as some police were seen taking selfies with seditionists.
Throughout the whole day, there were no public remarks from the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, Homeland Security or other members of the executive branch. (In the revolving door of agency heads during the waning days of the administration, it wasn’t worth the time to find the names in these positions; no one’s heard of any of them anyway.) We had only the press to inform us of events without the input of any government officials except those trapped inside. Remember the days when Obama communications officials would keep us up to date on these kinds of momentous events. As reported by MSNBC, the entire supplemental law enforcement response circumvented the PiedPiperPresident by using consultation with DOJ and Pence, not the Commander in Chief and that is why most of it was initially non-federal. Where is Bill Barr’s assembled DOJ hodgepodge force of ICE, DEA and multi-agency SWAT teams when they’re needed? Answer: some of them are probably in the crowd inside the building.
Apparently, the feds were wary of appearing to overreact against “demonstrators” given the blowback from their violent treatment of social justice demonstrators and so had planned a minimal presence. This is an example of straight line thinking in law enforcement, unable to extrapolate the obvious differences between the two groups. Alas, here’s where their implicit racial biases screwed them. Law enforcement sees a dark face and they immediately fear for their lives. It’s automatic, their societal stereotypes reinforced, no hammered into their heads, by their militarized police training. The basis of policing since the 1960s is theoretically crime prevention based on the assumption that Black youth have a propensity for criminal behavior; if you don’t catch ‘em early, they grow up into felons.
Never mind that they live in segregated neighborhoods with lousy schools where they’re hounded by police masquerading as school guards and teachers who “discipline” them for the same behaviors white kids get away. Not that there are many white kids in their 85% segregated schools. And then there is the lack of jobs, economic development, transportation. Let’s not forget institutionalized racial bias that means that D’Quan will get fewer job offers, in fact responses to application because his name identifies him as an African American. Those prejudices combined with the scientifically documented physiological changes caused by coping with them, contribute to a higher burden of disease among descendants of the enslaved and a shorter life span. Those conditions say more about exclusion of dark skinned people from American society and the economy than about a genetic propensity to criminal behavior.
In contrast, white faces get the benefit of doubt with law enforcement unless they’re with Black people or closely allied with them. The Capitol police somehow were expecting the 2016 Women’s March crowd when they should have been thinking of the Charlottesville Tiki Torch folks with concealed weapons.
Unfortunately, conflicts over the response to BLM demonstrations have apparently strained communications between the various agencies in DC. So the Capitol police seemed unaware of the social media chatter about the plans for the day’s event. I guess they don’t read the newspaper either. Even members of Congress were nervous that something untoward could happen. So the game plan was to use a force of about 500 of their 2000 officers. After the mob had broken in, the DOJ was apparently still worried about appearing heavy handed and didn’t want to permit mobilization for what they called a limited mission. Seems like the ransacking of the Capitol wasn’t a high priority, even after 2 IED had been found on the grounds and been disarmed.
Somehow the Capitol police were expecting the 2016 Women’s March crowd when they should have been thinking of the Charlottesville Tiki Torch folks with concealed weapons.
In the end, the mob succeeded in delaying Congressional acceptance of the electors count just as the present resident in the White House intended. But life threatening experiences tend to change calculations, particularly privileged legislators who live in cocoons of safety, including their own dedicated security force. Congress vowed to get back to work and complete the task working through the night. The GOP enablers of the stolen election fantasy, led by Cruz and Hawley seem to have decided to continue their act of theatre without admitting that what they have advanced as harmless is in fact aid and comfort to seditionists. Hawley, photographed with his fist raised in front of the mob like he’s some kind of freedom fighter rather than destroyer, is ready to ride this wave to a presidential campaign in 2024. He was sending out fund-raising emails and trying to campaign among the mob as they stood in front of the Capitol. If the Senate had guts, they would eject him from the body. After all, 5 people died in what they call a caper; one seditionist shot by police and one policeman beat to death with a fire extinguisher. That’s aggravated assault and murder, you purported Republican defenders of the thin blue line!
All of these GOP enablers, the McConnells and Grahams and Meadows and Loefflers etc should be punished in some way, even if it is simple censure in the chambers. ( Loeffler got her comeuppance with her defeat by Raphael Warnock). But that too is white privilege. It’s just not true that bad people will meet justice in this world. There have been so many examples in just the last year, that adage should be deleted from the lexicon. Think of all the white cops that murdered or maimed Black men and boys who have gone on to keep working their jobs and even be promoted. The Ku Klux Klansmen who have murdered thousands of descendants of the enslaved who went on to long happy lives, even community veneration. I don’t believe in an afterlife and even if I did, the people hurt by bad people will never see that evil punished. If there is no god, then christianity is just a bunch of rules that white people have written to protect their power. If there is a god, he must be white if he sanctions the torture of people of color all over the world for the history of civilization. God’s sanction is the narrative that empire builders and enslavers laid out for centuries.
Now that the RealityTVPresident has made his most radical move to overthrow democracy, some in the GOP have decided that he exposed their mission of one party rule too overtly. The GOP has used him to unleash his corp of cultists at the state, local and national levels in ways that will continue their one-party autocracy despite the impression that he has them corralled. Republicans want their autocracy to look like an organic evolution of American democracy, not a coup. They should have seen it coming; they did see it coming because he consistently telescopes his behavior. They chose not to believe. They have let the BullyPresident take the lead because he doesn’t take direction. They have only been able to follow because the cult listens to its leader alone. But that doesn’t relieve them of the responsibility to try, first by abandoning the lie and then by reputiating their insistence that only their party should rule.
Although Republicans appear to be frightened to cross El Trumpe!, the fact that he has consistently accomplished the party goals of supporting the rich and taking down government, has meant they would just let him spin his bizarre web. The phone calls to Georgia and canoodling state legislators at White House meetings could be rationalized to stay in power. But a physical assault on the seat of government with a band of ragtag miscreants is a PR nightmare. There are those, Hawley and Cruz for example, who hang in there, relying on their media rabbithole to transform the coup attempt into something else as if most of us weren’t watching it in real time. But even cult members who were there are willing to follow their spokesmen anywhere and have joined into the social media hype that it was anit-fa.
As the GOP has evolved into the party of Trump, the cult has elected the most despicable self aggrandizing gang of national thugs who will watch the country wither away as they suck out every ounce of wealth they can. Going forward, the Sedition Caucus of over 100 members of Congress and 7 Senators who voted against accepting the challenged elector certificates remains in the legislative branch, much like the Congress of 1859. Those men left in 1860 with the election of Abe Lincoln, but the fate of the current contingent is still unclear. While Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz should be drummed out of the Senate for feeding the flames of sedition through providing the event and raising hopes that the election lie could escape the cult bubble for the outside world. But they won’t be. They won’t even be censored. They will remain with their traitorous comrades to pollute congressional debate with propaganda emanating from the Trumpology cult, continuing to rock the democratic applecart hoping to tip it into overt autocracy in 2022 or 24. They are the snake in the grass poised to strike at any moment.
And what of Rudy Giuliani? Why has he not been arrested for incitement to riot for his remarks at the rally, calling for “trial by combat”? He is the principal purveyor aside from Trump of the stolen election lie that fed the drive to attack the Capitol. And yet his name has not come up at all. Shouldn’t the FBI shut him down so he can’t cause more potential fatal mayhem on Inauguration Day.
As President Biden takes the oath of office on January 20, the battle for all of us who hope democracy will survive must be committed to actively continuing the battle. We can not sit back and hand it over to the politicians. To win, the radical right wing media bubble must be dismantled, a delicate task given the importance of maintaining the free press. But Fox News is not the press or journalism. It is a corporation that profits from spreading disinformation that they know is patently false. Our window into what is happening around the world has been fogged by the hunt for advertising dollars. Fox News is a knowledgeable peddler of fantasy constructed from rumors, doctored and mislabelled images and pure fiction. Rupert Murdoch and sons are holding at least 3 countries, Australia, the UK and the US, hostage to his quest to make more money than anyone can spend in several lifetimes. A former prime minister in Australia has launched a legal and legislative assault on Murdoch’s monopoly of that country’s press. We need something similar here.
The other target is Facebook which is central to creating nests of many bad actors from porn to politics. Globally, it has been instrumental in toppling governments and inciting genocide. Its reactive model of dealing with problematic posts can never fix the problem. The problem is their business model itself that sells its users’ lives to whoever is willing to pay. Their objective is to keep people watching to maximize the advertising dollars. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech. The Bill of Rights precludes the government from abridging speech. A corporate entity can decide what is and is not acceptable and those unhappy with that decision can shop in the free market for an alternative. It will not be sufficient to break up the Silicon Valley giants, their products must be regulated. Any regulation will be aggressively opposed by Republicans who have used this oasis to achieve their one party hegemony. Without the bubble, Americans will have to confront reality and other Americans honestly, not anonymously. With the bubble, the right wing La-La-Land will continue to suck the life out of democracy.
Anti-democratic foreign countries are watching carefully and want to weigh in. Social media platforms continue to be the cheapest highway. The war to secure American democracy is a multi-faceted, multi-year perhaps decades long war that will see an uneven mix of battle victories and defeats. American democracy, now only 55 years old, will be a true democratic republic when every eligible voter is given equal and easy access to the voting booth, encouraged by the knowledge that their participation in the process will determine their governance. Otherwise, voter turnout will remain among the lowest in the world; why vote if it’s hard to do and won’t affect the outcome anyway. The low turnout is not only a result of Republican voter suppression initiatives, but a disillusionment with the impact of that vote, both on the right and the left. Republicans see the Biden win as a bump in the road to one-party rule, much like they viewed the Obama years. Their objectives have not changed nor will they until they pay the political price that dislodges them from their minority rule built on low voter turnout. The fight has only haltingly begun.
On December 15, 1917 Claxton Dekle was lynched in Candler County Georgia.
A recent article in the Atlantic magazine sparked me to ponder the question, how can the US emerge from the chaos of the first, or perhaps second or maybe third wave of coronavirus infections without hundreds of thousands of more deaths? Seven months into the SARS-COVID-2 pandemic, knowledge about this novel virus has exploded as have treatments and effective strategies to slow viral spread across a variety of settings.
Death rates have fallen as the chaos of the initial waves in NYC, California and Washington gave way to less hectic conditions. The atmosphere in hospitals was ripe for medical errors, which in normal times is a significant cause of injury and death. Understaffing, extended shifts, provider fatigue, time crunch, unclear protocols, fear of infection and the attendant fear of infecting one’s family are all factors that can lead to medical error. And the staggering number of deaths left providers reeling. They save lives; they had never been swamped by such an avalanche of corpses piling up in refrigerated trucks.
These same conditions have magnified the disparities in outcomes for darker skinned people. The urgency in overwhelmed conditions is the setting where implicit racial biases thrive, quietly creating different standards of care by skin color. Most providers are completely unaware of how their biases operate and are surprised when their outcomes are presented to them, something that hasn’t happened often as neither the data nor the time to review it has been available in the crunch. They meant no harm; they want to give the best care.
The media has helped support providers’ first reaction–deflection. It’s the risk factors in their communities they say, acknowledging but completely ignoring that the very existence of separate communities is the gift of systemic racism that keeps on giving. It’s the socioeconomic conditions, a piggybacked gift. Few providers know the scientific evidence that the daily battle to cope with racial prejudice is literally making Black and brown people sick through a process known as weathering. Weathering creates hypertension and cardiac disease while it accelerates aging. As adults age, their immune responses become blunted as evidenced in their increasing susceptibility to disease. This happens earlier in African Americans and contributes to their shorter life spans.
All of these themes blame the victims for fulfilling stereotypes sprung from white minds when their only options lie within societal conditions that force the vast majority of sufferers to resemble those stereotypes in the eyes of people primed with the superiority of whiteness. Nowhere in the narrative is the role of that priming in the implicit biases in all medical providers; a role that has been acknowledged by the medical community countless times. Somehow it never penetrates to the personal or the crisis at hand. George Floyd was not a thug; he was a gentle giant who struggled to recover from youthful mistakes and create a useful life.
The effects of medical chaos were magnified in hospitals that were not large, because they had fewer personnel with direct experience. Medicine is best learned by doing, in situations that reinforce knowledge; those who don’t use an area of expertise lose how to apply it. They are less equipped for the unusual and unfamiliar; normally those patients would be transferred to other providers but there was no room in those facilities. These were traumatic circumstances for health care workers and the mental impact can not be underestimated. They never feared being infected if they followed proper protocols; they never felt their institutions could not protect them. They felt betrayed in the midst of new PPE restrictions that they knew were unsafe to their patients and themselves. This pandemic will have a lasting effect on healthcare over the next decade.
Having weathered that awful first wave in sequential locations as it rolled through different states, this new wave of viral infections will produce better outcomes, hopefully for everyone. But as infection rates are rising in over 41 states totalling over 80,000 new cases per day and 25 states are at >80% ICU bed capacity, the death rates will begin to rise again from the current approximately 1000/day. Whether states or perhaps individual facilities have used the time to plan and stockpile appropriately for a resurgence can only be revealed as the story unfolds. Given the Coronavirus Task Force disappearance from the news cycle and the administration’s insistence that the pandemic is no more, it seems unlikely that FEMA or any federal agency will provide any better assistance than in the first round. In fact, it seems unlikely that governors will even look in that direction unless they’re chalking up points in a campaign.
In the meantime, the Superspreader in Chief is holding multiple rallies a day to crowds packed in like sardines yelling at the top of their lungs as they respond to the PiedPiperPresident’s manic mixture of disinformation, personal injury narratives and falsehoods from unmasked lips scattering aerosols which he claims are virus free. On the theory that he is now immune, is he even maintaining a testing regimen? His emittances may be sterile, but there is no objective source to verify his assertions about this or anything else. In general, 45’s pronouncements have been more false than true. His rallies are in open defiance of state regulations and unfortunately, when the president leaves after a couple of hours, state health officials, often in surrounding states, will be reporting these cases and resulting deaths over the next month.
So let’s take a deep breath before all hell breaks loose again, no we haven’t gotten there yet, and take time to review what new information about SARS-CoV-2 has accumulated since January, 2020.
Remember this is a novel virus to humans and we had absolutely no information about it. We were starting from scratch, even after the Chinese made available sequenced RNA to create laboratory tests. There is scientific research on other SARS viral subtypes; there is one that infects pigs and even one that is part of the array of viruses responsible for colds in humans. Cases of MERS continue to occur, particularly in areas with camels. But COVID19 is not like any of those other viruses; it spreads asymptomatically. It can cause severe disease but it’s lethality remains unclear as cases mount but interventions and medical protocols and treatments have been evolving to lower death rates. We are still unsure of the range of short term complications let alone had time to assess long term complications and morbidities.
It’s hard to remember that early in the pandemic the importance of asymptomatic community spread was unknown. In the initial wave of testing, particularly with the shortages of supplies, criteria for testing were symptoms and a history of foreign travel. Those narrow indications meant that many cases went undetected but worse, many African Americans were excluded from testing and turned away from hospitals until their symptoms became severe or they died at home, adding to their higher death toll. Reports indicate that 41,533 of about 48,222,000 African Americans in the US, or almost 1 in 1000 have died from COVID19 so far and that by the end of 2020, that number will rise to 1 in 500.
Asymptomatic spread increased the urgency of viral testing to determine who was spreading the disease. From the beginning, testing was a disaster. In making the decision to create its own test rather than use the WHO test which was up and running very quickly, the CDC displayed a stunning lack of vision about the dimensions of the pandemic. The CDC test was meant to be used by CDC labs meaning that all specimens would be processed through the agency with assistance from public health labs. Remember how critically underfunded public health departments across the country are. It is simply the wrong model for the billions of tests needed in recurrent testing regimens.
After steering in the wrong direction, the CDC had the option of switching to the WHO test when it’s own test proved to be contaminated but bullheadedly forged right ahead. At the same time, it was refusing to allow academic centers to develop their own tests or to expand their viral tests used in research labs more broadly to the population. Fortunately, the University of Washington was able to release some research findings to the health department which helped the state to move early to try to contain community spread of the disease. Afterwards the early problems with supply shortages slowly resolved into such long turnaround times for results that they became essentially worthless for isolation strategies to limit the spread of disease.
Lately issues surrounding testing have disappeared from public attention. A recent Google search for my area listed almost exclusively private sites which required a referral and payment. Many drive-in sites have closed. Most hospitals including Emory Healthcare’s multiple facilities restrict testing to their patients only. Fewer people are getting tested even as the number of cases are rising precipitously in my state. In conjunction and more disturbing is the escalation in the percentage of positive tests, in some states exceeding 20%. Remember when one criteria for reopening states was a positivity rate less than 5%, and then Republican states simply ignored it.
In states where cases are spiking, testing centers are being overwhelmed; ironically, that may not be as bad as it could be because politically invested right wingers who have asymptomatic and mild disease will take a “principled” stand against it. As long as El Trumpe hawks the inane idea that high COVID19 case numbers are the result of extensive testing rather than disease revealed in people who are the first part of a strategy to limit disease, that core will hold. This situation will complicate assessing the impact of disease and dampening the spread, but those people were never going to comply with quarantine anyway unless placed under house arrest or a life altering experience.
In the interim, there has been considerable research in developing new COVID19 tests. Early FDA abandonment of pre-market evaluation of new products led to a proliferation of invalid and inaccurate tests that were being marketed over the internet to a frightened public and even government agencies. But the FDA’s retrenchment has created hurdles for subsequent inventors. The gold standard test, a PCR, has high sensitivity, meaning it correctly identifies people with infection, as well as specificity, meaning people who don’t have COVID19 infection will test negative. But it is so sensitive that a tiny amount of viral RNA will result in a positive test long after viral loads are so low that the person is no longer infectious. One NY Times investigation found that the number of positive PCR tests with low counts and therefore no longer infectious may be as high as 50%. And because PCR requires specialized reagents and equipment, it’s expensive and difficult to perform. Those characteristics limit who and where as well as the maximum number of tests that can be done. As for the big picture, the objective is not to document who has been infected, it’s to stop the spread of disease by removing infectious people from contact with others. Isolating people with positive tests who are not infectious costs both people and resources needlessly,
Lab tests that measure anti-COVID19 antibodies are also available. These are more rapid than PCR, but the test’s target is not the virus itself; it’s human antibodies formed in response to viral invasion. With COVID19, a novel virus, this means that infection could only have occurred recently. Since antibodies form only after viral invasion has occurred and remain after it has been purged from the body, their presence indicates that the virus has been present but not that it remains or whether the person is infectious. And that ultimately is the goal, to stop the virus from jumping to other hosts. At the same time, the type of antibodies measured, immunoglobulin G, take 1-3 weeks to develop; a person with a negative test could still fall ill if they have been exposed recently. They may be transmitting the virus while they are being tested. In the grand scheme of things, it is better to have a test that over-identifies positives than negatives since no one with a false positive will transmit the virus but someone with a false negative can.
Two Abbott Pharmaceutical rapid antigen tests which test for viral particles have been used at the White House for screening visitors and staff under FDA Emergency Use Authorization. The problems of false negatives were clearly demonstrated in recent White House superspreading events although it is not clear that the MAGAPresident was even getting tested regularly. Hope Hicks did have a positive test result which was hidden at the time she developed symptoms, but if she had daily testing, she would have been infectious in the days before that when her tests were negative because it takes 3-5 days before symptoms appear.
There are a couple of other types of rapid coronavirus tests in development and awaiting FDA approval that are even cheaper than the Abbott tests which cost around $5, although undoubtedly that is not what a patient would be charged. The newer ones are rapid lateral-flow antigen tests which can be done at home and produced in tens of millions or more per week. Lateral-flow antigen tests detect 100th or 1000th as many viral particles as PCRs, but if the goal is to identify people who are currently transmitting virus, that is adequate because COVID19 grows rapidly within the body and is transmitted when present at high levels. These tests improve with repetition, providing a map of increasing viral load and infectiousness which can change from morning to evening but that map more precisely pinpoints the infectious period and what contacts are at risk of disease.
Once Transactional Donald decided to privatize the federal response, the picture emerged that multiple private entities often requiring physician referral as part of the criteria, severely limited access to testing further. But it also corrupted the data flowing to the CDC and public health agencies because many private requisitions lacked standard demographic information, obscuring further the scope of the disease. Thus early in the pandemic, the number of cases going undetected may actually have exceeded those that were, a result of the restrictions limiting testing to the most severe cases. In June 2020, the CDC estimated the actual number of cases is probably 10X more than those reported. Not even COVID19 deaths could be determined properly because many home and nursing home deaths did not get tested.
A couple of small studies using high doses of virus concluded that the virus could be spread on surfaces, but this mode of transmission has proven rare outside the lab. A recently released study found that viral particles can survive on cell phones for up to 28 hours and on other surfaces for as long as 48 hours. However, the crucial question is whether the presence of coronavirus on surfaces can be linked with cases of infection, a particularly daunting question to answer when asymptomatic spread is a significant mode of disease dispersion and viral testing has been so limited. Unfortunately this early perception has led to an enormous amount of time and energy wasted on obsessive surface cleaning, huge costs for just about every entity that interacts with the public and gigantic profits for disinfectant manufacturers.
We better understand risk factors for severe disease, comorbidities like obesity, diabetes, cardiac disease, hypertension and age over 65. Younger children are less likely to become infected but adolescents are as similarly contagious as adults. Both groups tend to have mild or asymptomatic infection, but occasionally will develop severe disease.
Authorities do agree that the rate of viral transmission is lower outdoors than in enclosed spaces, even large ones. Intuitively, this makes sense, particularly if the area of main concern is within 6 feet. An outside area allows for social distancing. One can envision in the open air, viral particles are blown away. That probably depends on the duration of the proximity and the activities occurring. We have seen that indoor choir practices have been the center of multi-victim infections. Is the same true for outdoor choral events, if they are on a stage displaced from an audience, if they are socially distanced? Those questions send us into the transmission twilight zone.
Also established early was that the risk of viral transmission is minimal with short exposure intervals, even close ones without face masks. Atul Gwande reviewing practices in Singapore and Taiwan, both countries that have controlled their epidemics successfully despite their proximity to China, wrote that officials aggressively trace contacts and isolate only those who have had close contact with that infected person. Close contact was defined as at least 15 minutes at less than 6 feet without a surgical mask in Hong Kong while Singapore uses 30 minutes. If the exposure lasted less than that time period at less than 6 feet but more than 2 minutes, a worker could continue to work if they wore a surgical mask and had temperature checks twice a day. Those with only brief, incidental interaction could self monitor for symptoms. The CDC has recently altered its definition of close contact for contact tracing to include one or more encounters less than 15 minutes at less than 6 feet.
Photo by Denise Raynor
Of course, there were the initial recommendations that the general public should not wear masks in an effort to reserve surgical masks for medical personnel as large shortages in supplies were emerging. Traditionally, surgical masks have been reserved for the healthcare space, although they have come into common use in yard care and construction, more to protect against dust and particulate matter than infectious agents. But clear evidence did emerge that cloth facial coverings were surprisingly effective in reducing the risk of transmission. Some authorities estimate that covering the mouth and nose can lower the chance of infection by 10% for cloth compared with 30% for surgical masks. The most effective, N95 masks, lower the risk by 80-90% when properly fitted because they form a seal around the mouth and nose while surgical masks leave gaps around the nose and at the sides. Note they must be properly fitted and be held in place with straps around the head not over the ears. Two layers of cloth boost effectiveness; an additional filter as simple as a coffee filter may add to the protection. While a 30% reduction in risk may not sound like a lot, modeling around trends in COVID19 cases suggests that face coverings and social distancing can lower case numbers by 60% which would go a long way in tempering the pandemic aspects of viral spread to more of a slow burn. Coronavirus would eventually become another endemic disease similar to influenza. . . and life could resume. But it will probably not disappear as 45 is so fond of saying.
Still, there is much about COVID19 transmission that is not well understood. Zeynep Tufekci points to a number of gaps in knowledge such as why did the northern region of Italy have the majority of cases accounting for over 75% of the deaths concentrated in the first few months of their outbreak? This is being repeated in Italy’s second wave. Why did cities of similar density, age distribution, weather and travel patterns have vastly different numbers of COVID deaths? How did Japan, a country of densely populated megacities with a significant population of the elderly, escape logically predicted catastrophic outcomes?
Tufekci summarized epidemiologic data suggests that the virus tends to spread in big bursts, not a steady pace like influenza. The majority of people may not infect anyone else, while there are incidents of a single person infecting 80% of the other people in a room. A paper from Hong Kong, where there is rigorous testing and tracing, found that 80% of transmissions came from contact with only 19% of the cases while 69% of cases infected not a single other person. This type of cluster spreading means that in any one location, the level of infection is dependent on who was the patient 0 in that setting. For instance in New Zealand, only 19% of their many patient 0s caused more than one additional case. In contrast, in South Korea, one superspreader was responsible for over 5000 other cases at a megachurch event. Interestingly, SARS-CoV-2 seems to share this characteristic style of spread with its predecessor SARS-CoV which caused the 2003 viral outbreak in Asia. MERS also seems to share this overdispersed pattern of spread, but it doesn’t yet transmit well in humans.
Why are some people superspreaders and others not? Part of the explanation lies in the number of people who come in contact with that individual. The person who lives alone or stays primarily at home is in a very different position than a resident in an elderly facility, a prisoner in a jail, a student at school or a politician on the campaign trail. But there is emerging evidence about other factors that are intrinsic to different settings.
Although the WHO has been slow to accept aerosolized spread of coronavirus and the CDC has only recently signed on, recent evidence has demonstrated that viral particles do form larger aggregates with moisture in the air that then drift throughout a room and accumulate over time at distances far longer than 6 feet. Thus poorly ventilated rooms crowded with occupants who are talking loudly, singing or cheering over some extended period have been central to superspreader events. People eating in the path of an air conditioner vent in a South Korean restaurant were all infected by a person sitting at a table near but not in that air current. This information emphasizes the role of ventilation systems in fighting the spread of this disease.
Even with this list of conditions that must occur at the same time, the risk may vary by setting and activity. The key elements are a highly infectious person, crowding, poor ventilation and prolonged exposure. There may be other factors not yet clear, but a strategy to decrease super-spreading settings even if the presence of a highly infectious person remains unknown could represent a big step forward.
Is the president really the Superspreader in Chief? He may not be a highly infectious person, a designation that is impossible to unravel from the tangle of events and large number of individuals involved in the White House outbreaks. But he is consistently creating the conditions for overdispersion. Even though his MAGA rallies have primarily been outdoors, some are in partially enclosed structures. No matter the location, they are all crowded with the majority of the audience unmasked and shouting. The larger the crowd, the higher chance that one or more highly infectious persons will be present. For instance, following one MAGA rally in Bemidji Minnesota, state health officials found 9 cases among those who had attended the rally during the window when they would have become infected. At least one person was likely infectious when they attended. Two other cases attended a protest against the MAGA event, an ancillary route of spread surrounding mass gatherings. The fact that these gatherings were outdoors may have tempered the spread somewhat but the data is incomplete, since participants from other states were likely in the crowd and Minnesota officials would not have access to data from those other states, or even knowledge of which states were involved.
This is a major pitfall in this state based response concocted by the self designated Wartime President, although he seems to have dropped that moniker when he announced that the war has already been won. Still, a Trump administration laser focused on controlling the spread of coronavirus could have provided names of the attendees to the health department because the demographics and contact information of every ticketed MAGA rally attendee goes into a database which the campaign mines for delivering political propaganda, contributions, merchandising and soliciting volunteers. Still, at least 4 counties across 3 states have reported a surge in cases after a MAGA rally; attendees resume their normal routines shopping, eating, working.
But that guy is not campaigning to remain in the White House. If the AmericaFirst President has demonstrated anything over the last 4 years it’s that he’s a TrumpFamilyFirstPresident and to hell with everyone else who isn’t stroking his ego while greasing his palm. Mark Meadows, chief of staff, admitted that the administration is focused on treatments and vaccines but there is no way to control the virus. And there it was. Finally an admission that clarified the thinking behind the abdication of a federal emergency response at the outset. As Governor Cuomo of New York summarized it, 45 put up a white flag before firing a shot and surrendered. In his transactional mind, it’s either the economy or the disease and it’s not even a contest for 45, despite the successes of multiple countries around the world. But the AmericaFirstPresident can follow no other example, except perhaps Vladimir Putin whose response in Russia has been similar to his. Just today even Putin has imposed a national face mask mandate, and he has the machinery of state to enforce it.
So he produced one of his reality TV dramas which incorporated his favorite elements, profits for private corporations who smoozed him at various fundraising events. They were incorporated into every phase of federal action including PPE, testing supplies and outlets to do testing, vaccine development, potential treatments, logistics, etc. He added a competitive component by setting states vying for supplies against each other and FEMA, a contest that raised prices by multiples to profit his friends. Even the “persuasion” of companies to shift production to PPE and ventilators under threat of the Emergency Production Act proved extraordinarily profitable for those companies. One more touch, the MAGAPresident used his pulpit to bully political enemies, i.e. Democratic governors, to incite his Scrump of 2nd amendment supporters, white supremacists and associated Trumpophants to revolt against state attempts to control the virus. In all, it was quite a pageant, but it wasn’t meant to impact the pandemic, only the perceptions of his Trumpophants in a mad dash to remain in the Oval Office. And so it has not.
COVID19 cases in the US from the Washington Post 10.26.20
Tufekci suggests in Atlantic that overdispersion should inform contact tracing efforts, which admittedly have been lackadaisical and ineffective, in part because viral testing results are delayed. The other part is the politicization of the pandemic itself where Trump partisans have made a principled stand against government intrusion and are seized with a paranoid fear of being tracked by the government [deep state]. GOP governors waddling behind their orange tinged mother goose have not invested the needed resources into contact tracing either, in an effort to present a united front supporting the idea that the pandemic is not a threat. That is becoming an increasingly difficult dance for some as cases mount and ICU bed availability disappears. And almost no state has the necessary funding, given the stinginess of elected Republicans officials including the Senate holding up pandemic relief.
Still, there is a theoretical path forward by concentrating on eliminating superspreader events, either by eliminating the settings or isolating the spreaders. The idea is to identify transmission events rather than infected individuals. Tracing contacts backward from the case to find a superspreader and tracing forward from that individual will yield a much higher number of potential contacts than the traditional forward tracing from a case who may not infect anyone else. Think about it like this. Some people are connectors; they’re the glue in a social circle and also connect one social grouping to another. They’re the people who organize social gatherings. That individual is more likely to widely disperse infection because they are in contact with more people.
The use of rapid testing is critical to this approach. As Tufekci details, using a rapid test for a coronavirus infected person and 10 of their 20 forward contacts can help determine who doesn’t have the disease because rapid tests are good at negative results but may miss some positives. If all of them are negative, there’s a good chance that none of the 20 are infected which can be confirmed with PCR testing. But, if a couple are positive, then a superspreader event has been identified and all 20 people can be treated as if they’re infected and should be isolated until a PCR test can be done on each of them individually. All of that information can be determined in less than 30 minutes.
We are behind the eight ball already with trust in authority and government near zero, proven factors in the success in other countries. For better or worse the credibility of the CDC is in the toilet, both at home and abroad. There is a noted absence of an investment in the public good or even a belief there is such a thing. National cohesion has been replaced by partisan identification, particularly hostile on the right. And there is that American sense of rugged individualism that has hardened into freedom is the right to do whatever one wants and the hell with everyone else. The death of societal respect for science and focus specific expertise has elevated conspiracy theories over public health messaging. Let’s hope that conspiracies control fewer people than the media has been telling us or those people will be outliers in a hopefully broader swath of the population who agree to a commitment to national recovery.
And finally, in the wake of the chaos that is the Trumpnado, Americans seem unable to “know” what they can’t see in front of their faces. The death of local news is one contributor; the AJC has more national stories than local news and its formerly excellent reporting from across the state has been reduced to a few items from the surrounding Atlanta metropolitan area. Many local papers have disappeared completely so while the AJC updates coronavirus numbers daily, that information is only available in quick summary fashion from the local news broadcasts, which are also disappearing or a state or public health website. That’s probably a less frequent stop than national paper sites like the New York Times or Washington Post which have elaborate daily dashboards down to state and county level. Both are read extensively, but how much of that readership is in small towns, rural areas or across the south is anyone’s guess.
None of my Gen X children read newspaper websites; they check news or Twitter feed summaries of news organizations at best without filling in the details. And they only click on what grabs their attention. Watchers of Trump/FoxNews don’t hear any coronavirus statistics. In sum, most people don’t seem to comprehend the scope of the pandemic. The PiedPiperPresident tells them that it’s no big deal several times daily as it echoes through the news cycle and social media. Unconsciously, this simple repetition does impact the brain. If people don’t know anyone who lines up at a food bank or who isn’t talking about whether they can pay their mortgage or rent, then the pandemic is being overblown. People are pissed that their local bar is closed or their favorite restaurant has one third capacity or is only doing take out or closed altogether. They are tired of their kids being at home zooming into school.
But incredibly, they seem unable to connect those things to rising coronavirus infection rates while the Trumpbeat “the pandemic is over” keeps reverberating through their brains. It is an unfathomable disconnect. As long as the virus is raging, people will not return to the level of previous economic activity, but if they did, the viral storm would upgrade to a tsunami. In fact we’re already seeing the uptick in reopened states where a significant number of people are not following proper public health behaviors. Is it because those boobs are spending more time at home? Is it because the virus is invisible? Is it because infection is invisible in a majority of people who have it? Or is it because they just don’t care about all the dying if they can drink at the local bar?
Americans will have to make sacrifices but not necessarily in the form of a broad national shutdown which hasn’t yet happened in the US although it seems like it might have. Our lockdowns went state by state sometimes county by county or city by city as partisan politicians jockeyed for the glow of El Trumpe’s approval and by extension, better access to badly needed resources and local leaders fought back against poor public health choices.
The current recommendations for hand washing are givens. The first sacrifice is simply to accept scientific and public health expertise, which should not be considered a sacrifice but apparently is by some. But using that expertise, we can think about fashinoning more targeted strategic approaches to allow public interaction and isolates only those who are potentially infectious. This shift will make the pandemic response more palatable to disaffected individuals. But it does mean that the executive branch will have to name our situation as a federal emergency and mount a federal response. Clearly, that transition can not happen without a change in the Oval office save lightning striking it’s current occupant and rewiring his brain. If the right revolts at the change, referred to in their propaganda to loss of states’ rights and individual freedoms, there will be a tug of war but hopefully the federal government has emergency powers which not even the new SCOTUS can overturn.
Returning to the theoretical from the political reality, a strategic approach to face mask wearing could incorporate consideration of the length of interactions at distances within 6 feet. If a mask is not covering both nose and mouth, an encounter that lasts less than 15-30 minutes without raised voices, or singing poses a low risk so people need not worry in that setting. For the general public, it is probably easier just to wear the mask all the time than to time interactions. Still people walking or running in the street or a park need not worry about wearing a mask for passersby. It goes without saying that face masks represent no sacrifice at all, no matter how much liberty people believe they are surrendering.
One element that can be dropped is the obsessive focus on surface disinfection because surface transmission of COVID19 is minimal. Surfaces can still be cleaned, but don’t need to be disinfected in between uses. News clips of primarily foreign countries where workers are spraying the streets and sidewalks may be reassuring to the populace, just like disinfection rituals here are, but represent wasted effort and resources that could be otherwise directed more effectively. The NYC subway system is a much nicer way to travel because it is being thoroughly cleaned, so cleaning is a nice thing, but detergent is fine. Cleaning will also help lower the spread of influenza as we enter the winter months. Filtering of ventilation systems however is a far more important matter.
One thing that will have to be sacrificed is large gatherings with their potential to super-spread the virus. Large gatherings will have to remain prohibited and even smaller gatherings that can’t be socially distanced or mask wearing is impossible like meals may not be feasible. However, as the holiday season approaches, there is a way to approach friend gatherings that make them safer and eliminate mask wearing. That way is to have participants test before gathering. Positives would stay home; negatives will gather and maintain their own bubble, while routinely observing public health measures when leaving the bubble. As icing on the cake, attendees could retest on arriving home and notify the party if one of them had become positive. Probably testing should wait for 2-3 days to increase the probability that the virus will be detected. This is a feasible approach even with the irregular availability of testing and long result intervals, although that problem can be easily remedied by not reimbursing labs with turnaround times longer than 24 hours.
Home for the holidays: test before you gather, positives stay home. Maintain a bubble during gathering, taking usual precautions when someone goes out. Retest when you return home and notify others if you turn positive.
A more strategic approach to restricted activity is possible if viral testing is made abundant, low cost if not free, easily accessible and includes rapid less sensitive tests that can also be performed at home. But individuals must test consistently and abide by the results, including notifying authorities and quarantining at home for a 10-14 day period during further assessment when the positive test result can be confirmed by PCR testing. This step will probably require something like fines for noncompliance. But imagine if everyone knew their status before they left home! That doesn’t actually sound like a big sacrifice, just adherence to the rules, something that appears to have gone out of fashion these days.
The strength of rigorous testing is evident from the success of the NBA and WNBA. It also demonstrated the importance of compliance with the rules, and that bubbles can’t be sealed, but testing can identify and isolation could prevent spread. Players could engage in close physical contact for extended periods without transmitting the disease. At the same time, the NFL, and MLB are examples of the importance of minimizing the intrusion of unknown sources of coronavirus. Travelling and playing in different stadia has led to multiple positive tests in football and baseball, causing games to be cancelled or rescheduled. The political lesson is that with enough money and the will, infectious coronavirus spread can be stopped. These were very wealthy private organizations who could take their own initiatives to protect their workplaces; similar efforts could be made by others that could limit spread. For instance, Amazon can afford to rapid test employees before entering the workplace and send positive testees home to isolation, with accompanying medical expenses paid and paid leave off. All the largest distribution centers, like Walmart, could do the same. Some universities have adopted frequent student testing as well, but unfortunately, most public school systems can’t afford even minimal testing of teachers and students.
To have 100% compliance, the government will have to create a program that will support workers during their isolation which would also include medical costs for those without medical insurance and guarantee expedited access to medical evaluation, possibly through local health departments. Residences for those infected who live in shared households, the homeless and those institutionalized who are unable to quarantine must also be provided.
Aggressive contact tracing is a critical accompaniment to a universal rapid testing approach. But the focus will concentrate on limiting superspreader events, using the backward contact tracing methods discussed above. Again, if rapid at home testing were available and people honestly stayed in isolation when positive, people could return to concerts, stage and movie theaters, college football, basketball sports arena and even, smaller sport seasons like lacrosse, ultimate frisbee or soccer. Until then, these events will remain off the table and private gatherings should be kept under 20 attendees, unless people pretest just before going. My family has used periodic testing to gather now a couple of times, so the strategy works even with current PCR tests turnaround times, although our negative results are not always available before we gather. In that sense, we’ve been lucky. We have seen that churches and some synagogues will continue to break the rules and that is where identifying superspreading individuals can make a significant difference, especially in smaller districts with fewer medical resources that are likely to become overwhelmed.
As far as reopening or keeping schools open, the low infection rate among younger children should guide who is in classrooms and who remains online. Schools includes pre-K and early childhood education which is critical to child development particularly during the first 36 months. We are battling lost time as pre-K is 2 years at the longest and almost a whole year has been lost already. School grades above elementary can resume classes in buildings with consistent viral testing and compliance with quarantine rules. But the buildings can be made safer by improving ventilation systems and incorporating HEPA filtering, whether in classrooms or attached to the ventilation systems. They might consider using ultraviolet lighting that is used to sterilize medical chambers. All of these changes are expensive and given the lack of investment in public school systems for decades maybe impossible but if they stopped spending on disinfectants and returned some of their stockpiles, they might be able to make small changes. It goes without saying that preferential treatment should be given to schools in the zip codes where nonwhite students and poor students predominate, since those communities have been the worst hit by COVID19 infections, deaths, job losses and inadequate internet connectivity leading to educational neglect, all added on to pre-pandemic insufficient educational opportunity warped by implicit racial bias. Our children, the future of the country are something Americans must refuse to sacrifice.
El Trumpe continues to say that Americans are tired of COVID19 and want to move on. SARS-CoV-2 has no ears. The virus has one purpose–to seek out a human cell that will reproduce a bevy of progeny that will ensure the survival of the organism. Not even the PiedPiperPresident can dissuade the virus from its mission. On the contrary, he has enlisted a COVID19 ally to do exactly the opposite. The embrace of the inane strategy to await herd immunity by his latest addition to the task force, Scott Atlas, is guaranteed to insure profligate viral growth. Atlas currently has 45 in his pocket, having auditioned as a Trump/Fox News pundit, the Chief exec’s favored route into his administration. Atlas is carrying the right message, so comfortably nestled into Trump’s penchant to look inward rather than consider the realities facing his AmericaFirst. The RealityTVPresident is about shaping reality, not living it. With reelection in mind, the task is to deny COVID19’s existence and ignore the economic realities for millions without jobs or savings or food or rent money or a sense of their future. He worships the stock market as an indicator of economic well being, a notion as shallow as the man himself. Atlas has emerged as the dominant influence on the Coronavirus Task Force and the illusion of a response that disguises continuing federal inaction is the rule of the day.
Atlas Risen is definitely moving the country in the wrong direction. The President is creating multiple superspreader events every day as the campaign comes to a close. The Vice President emerging from a hotspot among his own staff has continued to add his own potential COVID19 particles to his superspreader events as well as endanger secret service agents, Air Force 1 personnel and staff rather than self isolate. There will be a lot more deaths before January, 2020 because many Americans have chosen not to do the simplest things. Right now, our death toll of at least 224,000 people is equivalent to exterminating the whole population of Des Moines Iowa. Why then do so many Iowans not care? Trumpophants say “I don’t know anybody who has it” as if that is the standard for what’s happening around them. And yet they are willing to believe in Qanon, none of which can be seen or verified. It says so much about the death of empathy in conservatives and the rise of a cult that engulfs people as thoroughly as a burqa covering noise cancelling headphones. Without empathy, we may not be able to change the course of COVID19. The death of empathy may strike a deeper blow to the nation than the deaths of so many of its citizens.
From the Equal Justice Initiative 2020 calendar
On October 27,1986 the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 created a 100-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine possession drastically increasing mass incarceration of African Americans.
The most important lesson from the New York Times investigation of the president’s taxes is this: the US tax code is extraordinarily unfair to the vast majority of citizens. There are at least 200 loopholes in the US tax code making it one of the most complicated in the world. This is not the first example of this fact; Amazon is one of 90 companies on the Fortune 500 list that pays no US taxes, even as they, like the RealityTVPresident, probably paid taxes in other countries with stricter policies. But Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates have probably paid taxes, although because they are private citizens this is unknowable unless they themselves release the information. Billionaire Warren Buffett has made the point several times that he pays less federal tax than his secretary. But here is a far less wealthy individual who has paid nothing in taxes in the majority of the years since the 1990s and what he did pay was refunded in a financial windfall of $72.9 million. In contrast in 2016 and 2017, the average middle class American laid out something like $2200 on an income of $60,000, triple 45’s payments on an income in the hundreds of millions.
Between 2000 and 2017, someone who earned about $150,000 paid roughly the same amount of federal income tax as The Donald. About half of all American families paid more in federal income tax than the current president. And none of those people have solid gold fixtures, own a jet and several residences.
Remember when the Republicans began hawking their tax bill as one that would simplify the tax code. While it seems like an eternity ago, the RealityTVPresident held up a postcard in his hand and said most Americans would be able to file their taxes on a postcard, without H&R Block’s help. But the bill that emerged from Congress did not simplify the tax code at all. Yes, the average American could use the higher standard deduction which could compensate for deductions like charitable contributions, but the cap on state income tax deductions hurt a lot of families living on the two coasts. The wealthy got more tax loopholes and a far lower tax rate; businesses got a real bonanza too, lower rates and targeted deductions which were particularly favorable to real estate businesses and “pass-throughs”. Middle class taxpayers were left holding the bag which will be even heavier in the year of reckoning with the pandemic come April 2021. Think deferred payroll taxes. Many middle class workers have continued to work from home, presumably with the same compensation. Others who were furloughed and hopefully, able to obtain unemployment insurance, will have lower income and perhaps a lower tax bite. Those who lost their job may even get a refund which for many will be too late to keep their residence and adequately care for their families.
The tax code allows people like the reality TV star turned president to merge their business income and losses into their personal income tax returns, so called “pass-through” entities. His supporters say he’s just savvy at accounting tricks, but NY DA Vance suspects he played fast and loose with his deductions by manipulating the valuations of his properties and claiming as business expenses the personal services that everyone has, for instance, hair styling ($70,000 for him and $100,00 for Ivanka) and wardrobe, but they can’t claim as well as those that most people don’t have, like the costs of his personal jet. He learned the trick of inflating the value of his holdings for bank loans and devaluing them for taxes from his father Fred, as detailed in an earlier NY Times investigation. It turns out, that’s tax fraud.
The IRS has not been particularly successful in tracking down rich tax cheaters but they seem to dog poorer ones. My 92 year old mother was audited 3 years after her returns were prepared by a friend of a friend who claimed to have been a former IRS employee. Unfortunately, she had begun to lose some of her faculties and didn’t remember some of her savings accounts. Her tax preparer came up with an innovative way to declare her social security and bam, she owed over $50,000. She was living on her social security, two small pensions and the interest from an investment of the money she received when she sold her home. Her assisted living unit cost $4000/ month. Fast forward to 7 years later, right after her death in December. The IRS was demanding that she pay $6000, even though she had no income and owed her nursing home $40,000 from the 5 month interval before she received Medicaid to cover that cost. By agreement, Ohio Medicaid seized all of her Social Security payments, now her only income, except $50/month. Why should a 98 year old woman on Social Security have to pay any taxes at all and the reputed multi-millionaire leader of the country pay no taxes at all?
Why should a 98 year old woman on Social Security have to pay any taxes at all and the reputed multi-millionaire leader of the country pay no taxes at all?
I digress. The county with the highest number of IRS audits in the US is a small poor majority Black rural county in Mississippi. Put simply, the agency most often audits people who used the earned income tax credit, the poorest earners. This is the result of conservative led budget slashing during the Obama administration which reduced the IRS budget by 20% and a subsequent 22% reduction in staff. Those changes included a 30% cut in the enforcement staff. Audits of poor people are efficient; they are simple and consume little time. Poor people are easily intimidated and less likely to have retained records, so they yield cash, generally discounted to maximize the possibility of collecting it. On the other hand, audits of millionaires require significant expertise, forensics and sophisticated cyber intelligence as well as attorneys to handle the long legal battles. The IRS isn’t staffed for that and the current administration has no interest in pursuing high rolling presidential supporters and cronies.
Lesson number 2 comes from the extraordinary amount of debt facing 45 in the next couple of years. The irony is that he’s not paid the debt because he’s the very thing he denounces at every turn, a loser. Here, in black and white by the Donald’s own accounts, the charlatan who claims to be a consummate businessman has squandered away not one but two fortunes. His entire business history is more about losses than profits. Now he is mired in a whopping $421 million soon to be due loans for which he is personally responsible. There is the disputed IRS refund plus interest which could amount to as much as $100 million and $385 million in business loans on 3 properties that will fall due by 2022.
Given that the only bank in the world that would lend to Trump Inc was Deutsche Bank, the same bank holding a chunk of his debt, he will have few alternatives to cash payment of his debt. Typically, companies roll over their debt by taking out another loan, similar to refinancing a mortgage. Because Deutsche Bank itself is currently being scrutinized for its transactions with Trump and other money laundering activity, it is hardly in a position to extend additional credit. The bank is probably worried that he will try to wiggle out of their loan, just as he did before this latest one. In an audacious twist that only the Donald would dream up, he countersued the bank to cancel the debt under some obscure interpretation of a contract clause.
With his brand enhanced by the presidency, his principal sources of income these days are foreign and domestic dollars finding their way to his properties to purchase some political favoritism and US taxpayer dollars spent on his properties and the care and feeding of his extended family entourage. He’s tried to pad his haul with international meetings, like the proposal to host the G8 at the Doral, but the coronavirus has put an end to big in-person summits. No foreigner is anxious to venture into our virus infested landscape with the highest number of cases in the world. And then there’s the probable under the table transfers between the campaign and Trump family pockets, a supposition based on his actual conduct beneath his concocted legend of success. No wonder he’s so desperate to stay in office.
The eventual resolution of Trump’s debt brings up several concerns, but primarily for the holders of his debt. If he remains in office, will Trump refuse to repay quietly to force modification of a part of the debt or extend the deadline? Will he offer some quid pro quo to creditors for some “special considerations” in federal policy or appointments? In or out of office, will he make a big political splash of countersuing, claiming political persecution in order to pressure a more favorable resolution?
Every national security specialist insists that this is an enormous national security threat. If he hadn’t won the electoral college, he would never have obtained a high level security clearance. A large debt is among the reasons why traitors have turned on the country to become foreign agents, through blackmail or having their debts paid. But in terms of the president, it could have far reaching impacts on both foreign and domestic policy down through the cabinet agencies. The intelligence community has already been corrupted by the heavy hand of political steerage, aided and abetted by Bill Barr, to enhance the chances that Trump can win reelection. Understand that when US intelligence loses its eyes on the world, any bad actors besides Russia, like China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Islamic terrorists, North Korea, white nationalists and armed militias are less likely to be monitored. Without information, it is impossible to defuse or deter threats let alone determine the origin and punish the perpetrators.
The tax documents also raise questions about conflict of interests resulting from Trump’s finances. One is the administration positions with Erdogan of Turkey, such as agreeing to force US Kurdish allies into a narrow strip of Syria next to the Turkish border which placed them at the mercy of Turkish forces determined to destroy Kurds as terrorists, rather than independence fighters. Could Trump’s love affair with the Saudis be related to the potential for their abundant cash to bail him out of debt, completely outside the banking system? This is similar to the influx of cash from Russian oligarchs through purchases at above market prices for Trump Towers space and Florida real estate. Eric Trump said freely that Russian purchases sustained the company in the period before Trump began diving into politics. He implies that it was the reason the company was able to purchase all those golf courses but the Times documented that income from “The Apprentice” and associated licensing fees and ventures generated the bulk of that financial windfall.
The threat to national security is an ongoing one even when or if Agent Orange leaves office. In truth for the rest of his life. The president has been privy to the full spectrum of top secret information as well as the operations of federal government agencies, Congress and even the Supreme Court. In addition, he’d have information on the people swirling around the DC Beltway nexus; dirty personal secrets are always marketable, particularly for Russian kompromat. He will retain connections to people who remain in government after his exit, people with whom he can use his legendary bully tactics to both plant and extract information in the future. Given his love affair with Vladimir Putin, there is nothing but patriotism and integrity to keep him from regularly giving information to the Russians but it is patently obvious that the RealityTVPresident doesn’t possess either. A Trump Tower Moscow deal might be enough to open the floodgates. He might be even more eager to cooperate in a fit of pique and vengeance over his rejection by the American electorate.
The danger of betrayal is even higher if the legal system moves in to hold him responsible after his departure from office for tax evasion and obstruction of justice as detailed in the Mueller investigation. Undoubtedly, there are a host of other actions that we don’t yet know about, but they should be thoroughly investigated. However, the danger of a security threat should not deter prosecution. Donald J Trump has been a cancer on the US government and he and all his facilitators must be held accountable to reestablish the rule of law.
From the Equal Justice Initiative 2020 calendar:
On October 4, 1864, 150 Black men from 17 states and Washington DC met to demand citizenship, land ownership, and equal rights and opportunities. Later they formed the National Equal Rights League.
45 came into the White House riding the birtherism wave, so it is only fitting that he try to remain there through another innuendo campaign, Obamagate. He was hard pressed to define it in a recent news briefing, largely because he hasn’t got the full details from his Trump/FoxTVNews advisors yet. But soon enough, the groundbreaking work by Bill Barr will plant the seeds for Qanon, Limbaugh, Alex, etc to tee up in their echo chambers. Apparently, the intelligence agencies have added tidbits to the manhunt as Rick Grenell disclosed agency personnel who unmasked Flynn to the DOJ…to be leaked to Trump/FoxTVNews in the blink of an eye. The cauldron is still bubbling, not yet ready to serve up the poison, but it’s brewing.
The details don’t matter to the RealityTVPresident. Certainly, 45 is trying to distract from the bad COVID-19 news, but more than that, he’s about out of viable campaign themes to nibble around the edges. Despite the PiedPiperPresident’s attempts to rewrite his script, the incompetence demonstrated in his anemic, nonurgent states’ based pandemic response, rising number of deaths and the worst unemployment since the Great Depression hasn’t produced a good plot.
For instance, the organization Blacks for Trump will have a hard time expanding outside their business base to people afflicted with COVID-19 and struggling to keep their livelihoods. In fact, some of their number may have businesses tittering on the edge. Of course, the campaign had little interest in African American votes anyway; it was aiming for a few crumbs to boost that 8% number from 2016. The Obamagate strategy is likely to seal that coffin.
With a booming economy off the table, Trump’s other go-tos have disappeared as well. He’s shut down immigration, leaving him without the caravan card. Apparently, only 2 immigrants have been admitted since the beginning of the year. He can still reverberate his message to disparage people of color and Muslims through the Wall as he tried to do recently at a White House briefing where he touted the lie that a lot of the structure has continued to be built. He’s got forthcoming peace in Afghanistan, also exaggerated and the relative quiet in North Korea, both weak issues with a base that cares little about international issues. There are still US military deaths in the Middle East and the military families know it, even if Trump/FoxTVNews isn’t covering it.
Beyond that, he’s got his war on China, which has shifted away from the issue of trade which has almost ceased, to scapegoating China and the WHO for his disastrous nonresponse to COVID-19. Even if the Chinese didn’t manufacture the virus, he blames them for letting it spread all over the world. Of course, we’ve seen that the virus controls its own course and it had probably already spread to Asia and Europe before the Chinese or Europeans understood that, given the 2 week period of asymptomatic shedding. Those countries were equally unaware of its presence in the very early days. But, as Rudy Giuliani once quipped, if people believe it’s true then it’s the truth. The facts don’t matter in a PiedPiperPresident universe. The argument is building now, but it’s still too far ahead of November to assess its impact.
His victimhood is his next best play. The Mueller investigation and impeachment are his best pitch to supporters for essentially a pity vote. Trump always wants to appear to be omnipotent, and yet he spends an inordinate amount of time whining about his victimization by the press and the Democrats. But he’s reserved a special place for Obama, whom Trump must believe left him under a voodoo spell. It was that curse that blinded the RealityTVPresident to the approaching pandemic, not his own intentional dismantling of the pandemic alert and preparedness response system in the NSC. Even almost four years after leaving office, the Obama curse left 45 paralyzed to maintain national stockpile resources, although the cancellation of maintenance contracts for equipment and supplies or the sales of PPE to foreign countries through middlemen contracted by FEMA are probably more germane.
Whenever the ArtfulDodgerPresident is unsettled by a probing question from the press, his mind skips to Obama. There was the blame for not having tests for a virus that was unknown in humans 4 years ago and for regulations that prevented the development of new tests. Three years should be adequate time to revise regulations, a top priority when the Trump administration assumed office. One initiative tasked each agency to create a list of regulations that required deletion or amendment. In the naivete of the early days, they did not understand that there is a process to amend regulations which requires review and public comment. And that would seem to take precedent over golf and TV viewing; perhaps 45 put Jared in charge.
That brings us full circle to Obamagate, a deep state conspiracy to destroy the Donald and his movement of dispossessed white people. Trump couldn’t run against him in 2012, so he’s resurrected him, hoping that brown face will galvanize his minority’s white rage scattered over just the right places to nail an electoral college win. Obama brings back the fury of the culture wars, a reminder of the tipping point when the white majority will become a minority, superseded by a new non-white majority. Obama is a gateway to the triumph of Brett Cavanaugh and the infusion of religious freedom and anti-abortion/contraception into current administration policies. It’s the MAWA victory train.
Obama is also a sledgehammer to pound Joe Biden. Who needs Giuliani’s dream woven tales of corruption in Ukraine when Biden has latched onto the only African American president’s coattails. The Ukraine fiasco was an attempt to use the VP’s role as an enforcer of an international edict for the country to reform its legacy of rampant corruption from Soviet regimes to impune Biden’s integrity with a charge of personal corruption. Trump cronies were projecting their own behaviors, as they often do, onto others, unable to image basic honesty and integrity. Biden’s name is among those listed in the Grenell “unmasking” hit list.
Still, it’s a little bizarre that Trumpophants continue to accept their fearless leader as a victim of the government of which HE IS IN CHARGE. Either he is the big dog that he says he is or he’s ineffectual. He’s had almost 4 years to take control, and yet according to the Artful DodgerPresident, he’s still losing. How long are they going to give him to prove his might? In any case, this subterfuge has allowed him to retain support for a series of anti-democratic maneuvers that will ultimately destroy American democracy as we know it. He has started down the paths of Duterte in the Philippines or Erdogan in Turkey, mobilizing the judicial system to retaliate against perceived political enemies. He has unleashed his bulldog, Bill Barr, on a manhunt to prosecute a former president and his executive officers, another historic first.
At the same time, the Trump defense in the SCOTUS case to obtain his financial records is that the president is immune from investigation, let alone prosecution and even civil suit. Apparently the president has enough time to watch Trump/FoxTVNews for the majority of his day, but is too busy dealing with COVID-19 to have to deal with disclosure of documents to Congress. His attorney has called this “temporary” immunity, careful not to create the possibility of a longer term immunity that would include Obama.
Despite the contradictions, a hallmark of the El Trumpe regime, his supporters are all in; they care little about the processes of a government they distrust without understanding that it underpins those freedoms they’re always demonstrating about. They believe in a strong leader that can bulldoze their collective will forward. They believe that their leader knows exactly what they want and need. Right now, it’s to strip the rights that are the prerogative of normal whites from those who are not white or their idea of normal. When they realize that their fabled leader will ultimately come for them as “white” becomes more narrowly defined to exclude Cubans and Jews, for example and then extends to other groups. Along the way, he will single out those who may question the mantra of the day, as he is doing today. Eventually, those who are not wealthy and white will find themselves an underclass, valuable only for their hands and their taxes. The people only began to worry when he came for them. By then it will be too late.
Agent Orange may be a skillful grifter, but he’s only got a limited bag of tricks and we’ve seen them all already.
On May 15, 1970, police shot and killed 2 unarmed Black student protestors at Jackson State College
Imagine that you might be infected but don’t know it.
This is how wearing a mask can help slow the spread of covid19. The evidence is very clear that the virus can be spread when people have no symptoms. Some people may never develop them, some will have a mild case, perhaps thinking they have the flu. Others will go on to recover from feeling sick and still others will ultimately die. Wearing a mask will keep the infected from projecting viral particles into the air, whether from coughing or even just talking. New evidence shows that the droplets can remain in the air for sometime after a person leaves, but not as long as measles droplets. They can also settle on surfaces within the room, just as the virus, deposited on a person’s hands or clothing can be left on surfaces the person touches. The interval over which the virus stays viable on different surfaces is not yet clear.
Some authorities estimate that covering the face can lower the chance of getting infected by 10% for cloth and 30% for surgical masks. The most effective, N95 masks, lower the risk by 80-90% if properly fitted. N95s form a seal around the mouth and nose while surgical masks have gaps around the nose and at the sides. Because medical personnel face repeated exposures to high viral loads, surgical and N95s should be reserved for them in this time of shortages. In normal times, there are other reasons to use N95 masks, like asbestos abatement and construction environments where fine dust particles are being filtered out, environments where airborne bacteria or toxins are a threat, etc. By the way, no facial covering is effective if it doesn’t cover the nose, so keep that mask up!
Some medical and public health experts have been strong advocates of the routine use of face covers. The Chinese believe it was an important aid in their control of covid19, but many Chinese have worn them for years as a defense against oppressive pollution. Similarly in other Asian countries, some portion of their populations have been using face masks routinely for a variety of reasons. In Hong Kong, they were used to evade detection by video surveillance during their recent protests. The Japanese also have used face masks for both protection and as decorative style statements among the young.
Face masks have two advantages; they keep people from touching their nose, mouth and face which is particularly helpful in diseases with respiratory spread. And they help with bank robberies, just kidding. Outside of that, they have no drawbacks. They are simple, usually easily acquired or made and even a scarf can be substituted. As the president would say, “What have you got to lose.” Obviously, he himself has something although he hasn’t yet said why he’s refusing to wear one. He cited what he felt was the inappropriateness of meeting foreign dignitaries, but they would have to be out of their mind to come to the White House where they have poopooed sensible behaviors and oh yeah, there is a travel ban. Of course, 45 has already met at Mar-a-lago with the Brazilian covid19 denyer Bolsonaro, so there’s no reason for him to return soon. A reason may yet come to him during a bout of verbal diarrhea in the daily Task Force briefings/MAWA rallies.
On the other hand, others like Dr Fauci, felt that recommending face masks would compromise an already inadequate supply of medical masks without evidence of a significant reduction in risk for those uninfected. He also felt that moving to masks would undermine the proven tactic of social distancing as people opted to get close with masks rather than stay apart.
The evolution of the CDC recommendations to use face coverings reflects the process of scientific discovery. Science explores questions through an accumulation of data from well designed experiments. As more data accumulates, previous conclusions may be overturned by new data. This is particularly true in the case of covid19, which was completely unknown until November 2019. Everything is new and as more cases accumulate more information can be gleaned. As more data emerges, previous conclusions can be reevaluated in light of new information.
For instance, Atul Gwande, Mass General surgeon best known for his surgical checklist that reduced medical errors and for thoughtful pieces in the New Yorker magazine, has examined the experience in Singapore and Taiwan where the covid19 epidemic has effectively been controlled. These countries learned a number of lessons from their experience with the SARS epidemic that ravaged Asia. Gwande cites several tactics besides extensive testing, aggressive contact tracing and effective isolation while awaiting test results. One is that healthcare workers wear surgical masks when they leave home and come into the hospital, to prevent bringing infection in with them. And all healthcare workers wear them for all patient interactions. They use social distancing in interactions between staff, physicians and patients except during examinations within clinics and hospitals, including waiting rooms. Patients without respiratory symptoms or potential exposures like travel or symptomatic partners are triaged to separate areas where they are examined and treated separately by staff dedicated only to that group.
Full protective outfits, N95 masks, gowns and goggles are reserved for known or suspected covid19 cases and procedures where there is a potential for the aerosolization of theoretically infected respiratory secretions. When someone has an unexpected positive viral test, they keep personnel working by limiting quarantines using strict criteria. Officials aggressively trace contacts and isolate only those who have had close contact with that infected person. While Hong Kong defines close contact as fifteen minutes at less than 6 feet without a surgical mask, Singapore uses 30 minutes. If the exposure lasted less than that time period at less than 6 feet but more than 2 minutes, the worker can remain if they wear a surgical mask and have temperature checks twice a day. Those with only brief, incidental interaction can self monitor for symptoms.
If we apply similar time thresholds to our public interactions, we can see first, that the risk of infection remains low if we practice social distancing and hand washing. Face coverings may further lower it if everyone adopts them as if they are infected without symptoms. But even if they don’t, we are still at low risk from brief encounters. Unfortunately, it seems difficult to institute procedures in healthcare institutions similar to those in Taiwan, as many are frightened by the constant stream of videos from overwhelmed ERs and ICUs in the media. But those are different units from clinical settings seeing patients that do not have any evidence of respiratory disease.
Ironically the movement to don face masks may be bringing people together. For weeks, thousands of volunteers have been sewing decorative face masks for healthcare workers who like the look and can’t get medical PPE. Some are wearing them over their medical PPE which they’ve been forced to reuse for days. Now everyone, similar to the Japanese, can show their own sense of style. On a recent trip to the grocery store, all of their workers wore a variety of styles, some opting for scarves, others for pulled up neck sheaths used in skiing or cycling. It was pretty colorful.
Unfortunately, the joke about bank robbing has proven prophetic. Social media has shown some instances of African American men who have been harassed and ejected by store security for wearing face masks because of their concern that the young men might be shoplifting or about to attempt a robbery. The covid19 epidemic is no exception to the rule that the invisible hand of implicit racial bias leaves no area of American life untouched.
Racial bias also has implications in the increased mortality of the virus in African Americans, over and above the now frequently cited socioeconomic differences. Those differences can’t be separated from the decades of government policies that leave people of color out of the wealth of benefits showered on Caucasians. Even now, while the language appears “color-blind” it is specifically worded to exclude particular categories that include large numbers of minorities. Officials have just gotten smarter about the way they oppress Black people. They eschew evaluating disparate outcomes, for the most part attributing the disparities to some characteristic, often a stereotype, to the Black population in the time honored tradition of blaming the victim. In fact the example of face masks is perfect. It probably did not occur to a white official that a blanket recommendation to wear face masks would result in additional harassment of Black citizens and yet, African Americans immediately understood and comics hinted at the danger that quickly became realized.
Still, it is imperative for people of color to don masks when social distancing is not possible. We are at high risk because we are more likely to be classified as essential workers, like bus drivers, postal & package delivery drivers, garbage men, hospital custodians and home health aides. We are more likely to be taking public transportation to work. And we have a higher burden of risk factors for severe disease and death, factors that are often not addressed with regular healthcare because of a lack of insurance and clinical access. And we experience the phenomenon of weathering, where the sheer chronic stress of navigating racial prejudice shortens life expectancy and worsens health outcomes.
In the fight against covid19, Black citizens must follow public health recommendations because they are working, even knowing that we may experience some push back. We must challenge medical supervisors with the charge of racism, which white people hate, if that is what it takes to get the appropriate testing and medical care. We can call the press to report improper treatment because at this point, they are primed to hear these stories. And as much as I hate to say it, we might have to call the police to set the store security straight about the state and CDC recommendations on face masks. It’s probably best to have a white person phone or code switch to a white voice, so they’re more likely to respond. It’s taking a big chance, but depending on where you live, you might get one of those “nice white officers” they talk about instead of the “bad apples” who shoot before asking. Notifying the press that you called might help as well. It is a sad reality of the Black experience that we have to aggressively advocate for ourselves, but we welcome any Caucasians into the fight because they are more likely to get heard.
On April 7, 1712, a revolt of the enslaved in New York City, which killed 9 whites was crushed. All participants were killed by execution except the 6 who reportedly committed suicide.
45 dubbed himself a wartime president because he likes the sound of it. Thinking that it will supersize him onto a footing with FDR & Lincoln, he believes that the moniker will cement his legacy, wistfully envisioning shiny gold monuments arising in Washington and across the country. He’s forgotten or never knew about LBJ, another wartime president, who slunk out of office into a Texas sunset.
The Art-of-the-DealPresident has known a lot of failure in his life, six bankruptcies alone. Perhaps those experiences made him facile at spinning defeat into victory regardless of the ridiculousness of his claims. He’s always hopeful that rewriting his history will alter the realities in the black and white ink in his court filings and financial accounts. Put bluntly, the essential character traits required to become a great wartime leader are missing from his inventory; what they are seems to have escaped him, aside from giving less than inspiring speeches which inevitably degenerate into self pity parties. He’s no match for Lincoln. Of course ignorance has never stopped him before; he is after all, a reality TV producer who can create whatever effects he can dream up.
This new gig is a step beyond reputation rehabilitation. The RealityTVPresident suffers from the delusion that he’s turned in a sterling performance in his war against covid19. In truth, his efforts recall LBJ in Vietnam more than Lincoln except in the land of Trump/FoxNews where he triumphs, buttressed by his sycophant advisers in the executive branch. He believes his own hype, boxed in by the sand in which his head is buried. Fanciful denials and pundit fired partisan drivel replace scientific evidence and statistical analysis so critical to an effective pandemic response.
The single most important heroic wartime president characteristic missing from Trump is a sense of personal responsibility. Never in his life has The Donald accepted responsibility for his actions. For him, the buck always stops elsewhere and he begins probing for candidates early on. Since the time it became apparent that covid19 had hit our shores, he’s laid the fault on China, the Obama administration, state governors, Cuomo, Whitmer and Insley particularly, the FDA and the news media. His latest targets are frontline healthcare workers whom he’s lately accused of hoarding PPE or something more sinister. He knows no shame. Our wartime president has stated specifically that he takes no responsibility for any of it.
While Covid19 was in the US at the same time it was detected in South Korea, the virus and its consequences were never on Trump’s radar at the same time that federal bureaucrats were staging annual pandemic drills in the belly of some federal building. Lately, both he and Moscow Mitch have intimated that impeachment distracted him (so it’s the Democrats fault by inference). Presidents need to have more bandwidth than that. Bill Clinton separated governance from his legal defense, delegated to lawyers and staff.
The Trump administration could have been prepared if the intelligence had bubbled up to the attention of the Oval Office. But he was too occupied with campaigning, Muslim terrorists, bungling North Korean and Iranian nuclear threats to realize that the national security experts within and outside the administration named a global pandemic as the biggest security threat to the globe. Officials testified to that before Congress. Instead he eliminated the personnel responsible for pandemic planning when he closed the dedicated office in the NSC while he later denied knowing anything about it. A disingenuous claim made the president who claims to control everything.
All this means the administration lost precious planning time; steps that are being considered now should have been foreseen during the early stages of covid19 in China. Instead, Trump tried to wish the epidemic away, selling the narrative that rolling up our borders would keep us safe while the virus already lurked inside. Worried about the press, 45 consistently filtered information that countered his narrative, like the reports of the number of cases and the extent of testing, to make “his numbers” look like he was in control of a situation that was fast overwhelming us. Literally the CDC stopped reporting.
Emergency responses in the past have supposedly been for all those affected although, as in all things American, they reeked of the racial bias that has generally disadvantaged minorities. Characteristically the BullyPresident, ripped the subtle veneer off discrimination to make it obvious, as in the contrast between stateside Hurricane Maria disaster relief and Puerto Rico, which is facing another season of hurricanes without getting aid from the last one.
45’s America is more and more exclusive, as he makes a white polka dot tapestry of the Americans he will protect, literally house by house and congressional district by district. As of the week of March 27, 77% of covid 19 cases were in counties that voted for Clinton in 2016 and 19% in Trump voting counties, as reported by Chuck Todd on Meet the Press. Trump is basking in the uptick in his poll numbers reflecting approval of his emergency response. Unfortunately the virus is an equal opportunity vector. The pandemic may arrive later in Trumpophant territory but when it does, it may be even more deadly. Leaders in those places, huddling under Agent Orange’s cape, have been lax about social distancing and suspension of normal activities. They have not done the logistical work to respond effectively. These areas are often resource poor at baseline and will be late to the acquisition party. They will need supplemental medical facilities and ventilators; some rural hospitals in Georgia have less than 10. And they will drag us all down.
In my home state with a governor narrowly elected as a cruder southern imitation of Trump, counties in the Georgia mountains are banning residents from the Atlanta area, fast becoming a hotspot. Here too is evidence of racial bias, as residents of the state’s other two hot spots are not banned. Cartersville and Dougherty counties are primarily white communities where the source of infection was evangelical Sunday church services. The ministers have whispered in the governor’s ear enough to prevent him from ordering churchs to stop services. He has discouraged it but not ordered them shut down. He must protect his supporters even at the cost of their lives. These church members are particularly susceptible because the idea of “God’s will” goes a long way toward erasing responsibility from real world decision making that results in tragedies.
Conservatives who want to strip away federal regulation and bureaucracy have entered into a marriage of convenience with Trump, a would-be autocrat.
Trump’s modus operandus, governance by instinct, is no match for this novel virus, particularly when his instinct is grounded in misconceptions recycled from the 80s, partisan political concerns, narcissistic visions of grandeur, an information stream from Fox News cratered with misinformation and falsehoods and above all maximizing personal aggrandizement. But instinctual governance is a matter of style which distracts, in this everchanging fast paced news era, from the core conservative principles beneath it. El Presidente has no principles beyond concentrating power in his hands, but the conservative Republicans who’ve surrendered their power to him do.
Conservatives see the federal government as the problem, not the solution. They want to dismantle the federal stranglehold on a state’s ability to control business and regulate its residents according to their own principles regardless of what the residents want. Theirs is a marriage of convenience between a would-be autocrat who wants to strip away constraints on his power and conservatives who want to strip away federal regulation and the bureaucracy charged with enforcing it. Congressional conservatives have happily supported the deconstruction of federal agencies.
This is the first conservative experiment in national emergency response crafted to circumvent the federal apparatus. Perhaps they believe it can work, much like the Kansas experiment under Brownback. There, massive tax cuts bankrupted the state but conservatives, continuing to believe massive tax cuts are effective despite evidence to the contrary, incorporated some of those elements in their federal tax cut for the rich. This pandemic response is the perfect stage to work their magic on a national scale. Conservatives have broken the federal government. The emergency response has been outsourced to the individual states and when they didn’t act, local governments under a White House facade hell bent on plundering the treasury in service to corporate elites.
As the Covid19 Task Force emerges for its daily briefing which it’s rumored the president does not regularly attend, 45’s like a kid in a candy store, announcing the latest innovative solutions extracted from brainstorming sessions bereft of an understanding of the dynamics of disease spread and operational procedures of a public health response. No advisor in the room, except Dr Fauci, has any idea how to harness the power of the federal government to solve problems; the others have had no experience with it and they’re not interested in learning. They purposely try to avoid it except when it’s convenient to extend their powers. They know the laws, not the processes. New public private partnerships is the word of every day even as the RealityTVPresident is more often wrong than right announcing the availability of the products.
The federal government has opted out of drug safety monitoring. The FDA has completely abandoned drug, lab and device approval in favor of a fast tracking process that allows pharmaceutical products into general use without adequate testing or surveillance. The FDA has supported 45’s assertions that drugs already on the market can be used for covid 19 treatment without any way to assess their efficacy. In the wake of that announcement, individual doctors have begun using the drugs on their own, without knowing appropriate dosing or duration of treatment. And in doing so, they’ve created a shortage of the medications for current users, among them, sufferers of rheumatoid arthritis. We have entered a therapeutic wild west where doctors are free to experiment on each patient.
The public private partnership solution also provides another of Trump’s favorite vehicles, dumping tax money into corporate pockets. It promotes future back slapping, corporate campaign/PAC donations and future employment for employees leaving government service. But the case for new manufacturing in a plant that must be retooled rather than use the stockpile and excess military supplies right now is unclear.
El Presidente involved the Defense Production Act and then declined to use it, because he has never met a power he didn’t want to have. It appeals to him in a more fundamental way; 45 can think of nothing better than to command captains of industry, directing them to heel to his follies. Apparently the administration was negotiating with GM over government payment for the cost to retool a plant to manufacture ventilators until 45 lost patience and ordered them to do so under the Defense Production Act. They’ll bargain over some compromise reimbursement and GM will have income while other businesses have been shut down. What luck.
It turns out that the Trump administration has used the Defense Production Act which grants government orders priority over any others and extends loans to expand a vendor’s capacity thousands of times. Last summer, the DOD used the power to get rare earth metals to manufacture lasers and armored vehicles. FEMA has used it for disaster relief supplies and Homeland placed over 1000 orders in 2018. The Defense Department has used the act 300,000 times a year. The BullyPresident has represented the Defense Production Act as a rare last resort, a subterfuge for actions that seem to be routine for his administration. He has simply chosen not to use it in his emergency response for reasons that appear vindictive against primarily Democratic governors, bearing the current brunt of the pandemic, who have been critical of his response. This wartime president thinks exclusively in partisan political gain. Apparently, he’s steered equipment from the stockpile to states that have not even requested it yet and altered FEMA distribution after calls from his favorite supporters.
Trump has added his signature politics of division to his pandemic response. He’s attacking governors for looking for the federal leadership they deserve as they are literally struggling on the front lines. He’s playing Roman emperor, setting governors, mayors and county executives in the Coliseum ring to battle each other as well as predators, this time a virus, not the traditional maneaters. The winners will be favored with PPE, ventilators and tests, additional weapons to stagger back bloodied into the ring for another round.
Agent Orange has made clear that governors must show the proper praise and contrition to receive federal aid, like every good tyrant. He’s told Pence to ignore phone calls from Cuomo, Insley and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer who have been critical, despite the fact that they are the hotspots most in need. It wouldn’t be complete without the BullyPresident’s added hate speech against them. One hates to think that his malice is underpinned by the potential loss of so many Democratic voters in hard hit urban areas, but given his general conduct, it can’t be dismissed offhand. This short sightedness is characteristic of a president who always thinks politically in the moment, not anticipating that the virus hops county lines in the travelers carrying it.
His divide and divide again strategy has set locale against locale. Several states are banning New Yorkers from entry; upstate New York is banning travellers from the city. Florida has ordered travelers from the New York area, encouraged by the covid19 task force coordinator, Dr Deborah Birx to self quarantine for 14 days while refusing to shut down beaches and restaurants statewide. 45 floated the idea of quarantining an ill defined New York area (the city or suburbs or upstate or all of the above) and possibly New Jersey. As usual, he had to walk that back to an issuance of a CDC travel advisory.
In his isolation, the RealityTVPresident has become increasingly unhinged by the restraints of social distancing as it keeps him from the golf course. His need for adulation is particularly acute in the absence of the idolatry of his MAWA rallies, leaving him adrift in a sea of dwindling numbers of reporters who are not friendly, as their job demands that they not be. He’s had to make due with daily press briefings, hijacked from the covid19 Task Force, which provide live national TV coverage for his campaign themes tailored to the current crisis. Inject a little xenophobia, adopt the foreigners bring diseases theme to castigate allies and foes alike; further torment asylum seekers marooned in Mexico by bringing all immigration to a stop. There’s no applause or cheering in Trump’s ears, but at least he gets direct feedback from his Trump/FoxNews gallery afterwards. And since TV watching is now a bigger part of his life, like all of us social distancers, he calls in frequently to Fox & Friends and other pundits. He can soak up their praise without interruption. In desperation, he went unnecessarily to Virginia to send off a Navy hospital ship just to get out of the White House and flip off pandemic precautions. At least there, he found cheers in an audience of Navy men and their families.
Now that Agent Orange has floated the idea that if everything is done right, fatalities could be kept to 100,000 -200,000, it hasn’t registered with him that that is a truly staggering number. China with a population of 1,408,526,449 reported 37,780 deaths (0.002%) while 100,000 of 328 million US residents is 0.03%, 15X higher. Even if China misreported, as the Trump Posse has recently suggested, by a factor almost 10 to 25,000, the US death rate will still be 1.5X higher than the Chinese 0.02%. Extreme isolation and extensive testing must have been critical to that differential.
These recent estimates are a far cry from the “15 cases will soon be 0” narrative that started 45’s pandemic nonresponse. Still, he’s setting expectations for his claims of a successful covid19 response come November, if he hasn’t cancelled elections under an ongoing state of emergency. His campaign is leveraging messages that say this wartime president kept the country from some larger number of fatalities and sets a fall guy among people who didn’t follow the task force’s often squishy guidelines and governors on his hit list.
That point is underscored by reports that their pandemic modeling has spurious sources. Birx has refused to release the identity of the modelers, stating that it an amalgam of several sources. Jeffrey Shaman, the leading epidemiologist cited by Birx has said his work doesn’t go as far into the future as the task force implies. In fact, he’s not sure what period their model is meant to cover.
Modeling is only as good as the assumptions on which its based. Many have speculated that it was only with this most dire model that Birx and Fauci were able to change 45’s frame of mind and jolt him into what would appear to be more active interventions. Appear is the key word here, because most of his actions are more bluster than rescue. This administration reeks of falseness at every turn; the effort to ferret out tangible truth is truly exhausting.
More importantly, modeling is only useful in constructing an overall strategy using estimates of projected needs. Both Trump and Kushner have poopoo-ed estimates from state governors using their own case statistics. And yet, 45 has only used it to coax his political allied governors into finally initiating social isolation. Even so, some like the Alabama Governor remained a holdout until April 3. He has continued to resist a national isolation order and to actively use the Defense Production Act even as the national stockpile is near empty and people will die today without a necessary ventilator. Again he intones governors to get out there on their own in the feeding frenzy. They simply can’t wait. Everything 45 lauds publicly is an illusion of reality TV editing.
What will the number of deaths from heart attacks, strokes, drug overdoses and other emergencies that go untreated as the hospital staff care for covid19 victims be?
One important mortality statistic, the other sick people that no one is talking about. Deaths from heart attacks, strokes, hypoglycemic and diabetic comas, drug overdoses and other emergencies that are occurring as hospital staff have been consumed with covid19 cases and can’t get to others in a timely manner. Luckily, the number of accidents and sports injuries are way down because people are staying indoors. But beyond that number, there are the number of people with long term consequences from non-timely or inadequate treatment of their illnesses.
Trump’s pandemic response is based on a self involved version of states’ rights where each governor jumps into the mad scramble for medical supplies with 150 other countries across the globe who all need the same items. It’s picture perfect to avoid a leader’s responsibility. The despotic touch is that supplies go to those who worship at the throne. Thus Ron Desantis, Florida’s governor, has had all his needs met as a reward for his staunch political support. He initiated that idea with the president to quarantine The Big Apple fearing New York and New Jersey snowbirds coming to their Florida roosts. Remaining in the denyer category, Desantis refused to initiate lockdown orders until April 1, leaving beach goers to seed cases at home and in other states when they returned. It’s ironic that the governor who is expanding the pandemic is first in line to get supplies that are desperately needed in states overwhelmed by the virus whose leaders Trump sees as political enemies.
The supply chain has been hampered by the fact that much of it is manufactured in China, shut down first by the virus. Italy, the second country to be devastated is also a center of manufacturing for some components. The lack of production is further exacerbated by the closing of borders, creating a logistics nightmare. The Air Force has recently airlifted covid19 testing supplies from Europe. As Governor Cuomo pointed out, FEMA’s entry into the response effort just added another hand to the bidding war. He’s also said that distributors are playing one entity against another, reneging on commitments to one state to fulfill orders for another higher bidding state.
Where then are those testing supplies from Europe destined to go, now that HHS and the CDC have outsourced testing to each locale, insisting that they are free to develop and procure their own tests? Of course, almost every place is still complaining that they can’t increase their testing. Most continue to restrict testing to inpatients and exposed healthcare workers and without information about asymptomatic and mild cases, there will be no way to determine infection rates. Isolation of exposed healthcare workers must be determined quickly to shorten unnecessary isolations and detection of asymptomatic cases is needed to isolate them appropriately. These are the methods being used successfully in Taiwan and South Korea.
Our fearless leader claims he’s heard nothing about problems with testing; he must not have caught any of the thousands of social media posts about individual experiences. While getting the test has been a bottleneck, getting the result has been even more frustrating, often taking more than a week. Maybe the task force is so focused on innovation they’ve not bothered to track how effective it is. But the exact purpose of a task force is to ferret out problems in execution of its plans. Apparently, they don’t think it’s their problem; the governors and mayors are making those decisions.
Agent Orange has made one grand gesture, sending naval ships to NYC and LA. As for the USNS Comfort sent to NYC to treat non-covid19 patients more safely, it’s majestic but not substantive. Only 20 New Yorkers have been transferred to it; similarly the USNS Mercy in LA has only 15. The ships have obstructed patient transfers through bureautic hurdles and military protocols. These include a list of 49 conditions which are excluded from treatment. Patients must be first transferred to a city hospital for screening, including a covid19 test before they can be transferred to the ship. This can require up to 5 ambulance rides, since viral test results take a week, while ambulances in the city are in constant use. Perhaps a better solution would be for the navy doctors on board to start helping out in New York hospitals.
What’s needed is a central procurer, ie the federal government which makes strategic decisions about distribution. FEMA has never played this role for the whole country. But the highest bidder approach is exactly the wrong one. Distribution of needed resources should obviously go first to the hardest hit, as infections peak in waves and resources can be shifted to those hit later as more supplies are manufactured. Every state doesn’t need to be preparing at the same moment and a central distributor will own the equipment and can move it judiciously. Is Cuomo going to want to move those 100,000 ventilators he purchased to Chicago? Probably not without a hefty transfer of funds, which neither one of them can afford. Cuomo could easily decide to sell them to the highest bidder, Norway or Sweden perhaps in the current atmosphere.
In this country where money talks louder than compassion or anything else, a central distribution authority is critical to ascertain that resources go to institutions that lack financial resources. Phoebe Putney Hospital in Albany Georgia has had 30 covid19 deaths in the midst of a Doherty County hotspot. This is a staggering figure for a city of 79,000 traceable to two funerals. The hospital was financially unstable before the pandemic and has now had to create additional ICUs with the help of the national guard.
Georgia’s governor was refusing to issue a statewide shut down, leaving the work to local governments although he finally declared a state of emergency last week allowing the mobilization of the national guard. In this scenario, who will procure the hospital’s needed supplies? The state may be lucky in this regard; Governor Kemp is also a staunch Trumpophant and his wish may become a command from Agent Orange. Claiming that he did not know that the asymptomatically infected spread the virus, he finally declared a shelter in place order on April 2, although self defeatingly exempting churches in this Bible Belt. He does have a pretty savvy Public Health Department director making his excuse simply pathetic. Kemp has become the butt of comedians everywhere. It is this type of patchwork response that endangers the whole nation, leaving specific populations vulnerable. It increases the case and death rates and diminishes the possibility that viral spread can be eliminated in the near future. Our states have different governments but they are bound together in a single land mass. We are clearly not all in this together, just as our chief executive intends.
No doubt medical practitioners are so exhausted from their patient loads, aggrieved by the high number of deaths around them, anxious and saddened by illness in their colleagues and overwhelmed by the struggle to find or create the PPE that they can’t see the forest for the trees. It’s near impossible for healthcare workers to be imaginative under these conditions. But Americans are volunteering to individually support them by making hand sanitizers, sewing masks and jerry rigging plastic shields. One enterprising young man is 3D printing face masks at home and this idea seems to have caught on in a number of institutions. UCSF has 13 3D printers pumping out face masks. This type of production could take these institutions out of the mask lottery, leaving more traditional PPE for other places. New York has a ton of universities who might try filling in their gaps as do many other states.
A recent news story featured an adapted 3D printed diving mask that is being used as an alternative to ventilators in Italy which could also lower the need for ventilators. The president is thrilled to announce corporate innovations and pay them for those, but who is in charge of developing alternative equipment innovations outside corporate giants. Why has no federal effort in innovation been launched to print 3D face masks or modified diving masks? Could it be that it might compete with GM ventilator and other corporate contracts?
This is yet another area where 45 has abdicated his wartime command in favor of allowing each battalion to equip itself with weapons and plan its own strategy. Lincoln saw the folly in letting the generals take the lead as the Union was defeated in every major battle for the first two years of the Civil War. But at least he was providing supplies and logistics and weighed in on the generals’ war plans.
Certainly, everybody is flying by the seat of their pants in the wake of this novel virus. In the UK Mercedes has modified CPAP devices, commonly used for sleep apnea, to lower the need for ventilators. However, there is evidence from the SARS epidemic that CPAP may aerosolize the virus into the room, increasing transmission. Apparently, China and Italy may have used CPAP in the wake of ventilator shortages but not enough time has elapsed for an analysis. Unfortunately, good evidence takes time.
Britain, recovering from a miscalculation that the virus would burn itself out, has made a complete u-turn after members of the Royal family, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and several Cabinet ministers tested positive. Boris thought he’d emulate his American friend, but probably had second thoughts when he saw the US top the charts in covid19 deaths. The country shut down with good popular compliance and the NHS has ramped up quickly, building multiple large field hospitals in soccer stadiums in preparation for their peak in cases. They plan to use their modified CPAP devices extensively, perhaps believing they’ve addressed the problem of aerosolization.
But they stand in sharp contrast to the delayed bungling here, the difference between a pretender and a leader. The Brits demonstrate how modelling can change government strategy. Despite a slow start, Boris Johnson took the bull by the horns even though their response is not yet well oiled and they’re having problems with ramping up testing. But at least they’re trying. In contrast, New York City is just now building large temporary hospitals in the Javits Center and Central Park with smaller units in hotels and any space they can stick sick people, the result of 45’s every-state-for-themselves approach. Only time will tell which approach will leave their country less sick and on the road to a viable economic recovery.
The danger to healthcare and ancillary hospital staff is real. Physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, EMTs and anesthesiologists are dying from the lack of appropriate protection from viral infection. Others have become ill and must be treated or self quarantine, taking them away from the jobs they are performing. This fiasco will have a far reaching impact on a healthcare system that has physician and nursing shortages at baseline. The current working conditions will result in early retirements and others who will leave hospital positions for offices or leave clinical positions all together. Some will have PTSD as a result of their experience and require mental health services. As a profession, physicians have high rates of substance abuse and suicide under normal conditions; this will certainly increase after this traumatic event. As the nation debates expanding access to medical care, significant losses of caretakers will make that access only theoretical.
As we sit in our homes in social isolation, or perhaps not if you live in much of the South and western states or you’re an essential or healthcare worker, many of us only see covid19 through our TV or social media. Most of us don’t know anyone infected or healthcare workers. But we do know people who are now laid off or unemployed; we can’t go to our favorite restaurants or movies or sports events or even watch many of our favorite TV shows. The bad certainly feels like it outweighs the good. And yet, none of us is safe from infection; even if there aren’t many confirmed cases around you, the virus could be lurking in an asymptomatically infected person, triggering an outbreak around you. That is the most likely scenario particularly in the absence of a massive testing regime. We have evidence that social distancing works in slowing viral spread which then spares healthcare facilities from being overwhelmed. And yet, there are at least a dozen states that have refused to issue stay at home orders.
45 has as yet refused to issue a nationwide stay at home order. The longer he waits, the longer we will all suffer and the more Americans will die. The problem with the path Trump has chosen is that a national response must be led nationally. It can’t be outsourced to individual states because sometimes everyone must act in tandem. Conservatives don’t believe that, nor does he. Trump believes that the minority of the populace that supports him can keep him in power, his ultimate goal. He’s not invested in states, he counts on bare to overwhelming majorities in congressional districts. His political calculation that his base, unable to see the consequences of the covid19 pandemic in their neighborhoods, will not react to the mounting death tolls on the two coasts. It’s shortsighted because the virus will get to them soon. Florida is already being ravaged and Michigan is catching up. The virus won’t stay in Detroit alone. Pennsylvania cases are creeping up as well. By that time, the RealityTVPresident is hoping to rewrite his story to appear to have taken decisive command, with the help of Trump/FoxNews allies. He just needs the right scripted media production to make his flock believe; one that doesn’t contain the reality of events as documented by his own words. This masquerading wartime commander is failing bigly.
On April 4, 1968, Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee.
When 45 visited the CDC to reassure the nation that he was firmly in command of the response to the covid19 epidemic, he wore a red Make America Great campaign cap. Even though we’ve become inured to a multitude of his breaches of protocol, this was still striking. Rather than a chief executive rallying his nation to fight an invisible foe, we were watching a partisan campaign rally, the rest of us be damned. The RealityTVPresident was being transparent; he thinks governing is campaigning. He started officially running for re-election on Inauguration Day and every decision he’s made in office has been with an eye toward staying. Now that we’re in the thick of election season, having survived the sham Impeachment trial has unleashed his inner Music Man full throttle. So he filled the airwaves with falsehoods directly contradicted by administration officials because that’s how he rolls. Why not, it’s been working for him, at least as far as he can tell.
He also demonstrated why he is incapable of taking charge of this emergency. Standing in a CDC lab, surrounded by infectious disease experts, he gave the then current number of covid19 cases he’d gotten from the “Great Fox News”, his words. He’s so embedded in that fantasy, that he can’t turn to the scientists surrounding him who have the actual data. One wonders where he thinks Trump/FoxNews got their information, or is he willing to concede that they often make stuff up to favor him. The RealityTVPresident is so distrustful of nonpartisan objective expertise that he has nowhere to turn. Undaunted, he believes that he inherited his scientific knowledge from an uncle who taught at MIT. Just that assertion screams his scientific ignorance, and yet he went on to say that he really “gets this stuff”, so he seems to feel perfectly equipped to manage covid19 without additional guidance.
One other disturbing development in the increasingly frequent interactions he’s having with the mainstream media is the solicitous praise for the Donald that drips from his subordinates’ remarks, reminiscent of the televised Cabinet meetings in the past. It rings of Kim Jong Un.
That goes a long way toward explaining why the US response has been so sluggish. It lacks forethought and vision. Trump likes to point to his ban on Chinese travelers early as a master stroke. That was right down his alley; it’s an emergency extension of his overall approach to immigration ala Stephen Miller. America is for Americans and no foreigner belongs here. The policy was supposed to buy some time to rev up our preparedness. The administration dithered away the time and has been lying about it ever since. After all, the first cases in China were reported in November.
Completely predictably, covid19 arrived from other sources because none of the ABCs of epidemic response were being followed. There’s no doubt that the public health officials were trying to get the ear of our reigning stable genius, but his entourage of partisan yesmen don’t have any real experience or expertise in managing infectious disease outbreaks. Their big picture is narrowly defined in the contours of Trump/FoxNews. Given their Keep America Isolated proclivities, they skipped the first step, coordination with other countries. The way to keep infectious diseases from our shores is to help address them where they are. Tick, tock. . .
Even more disastrous was the America First move to insist on a US test rather than use the German test supplied by the WHO. In a typical ‘it’s everybody else’s fault’ statement, National Security Advisor Robert O’brien blamed the Chinese for the delay in releasing the viral sequencing data. Yet another big fat lie. How were the Germans able to act so quickly? The Chinese released the data on the day after they finalized it. Chinese scientists are no fools; they know that the rest of the world could help them figure out a treatment or vaccine. Not so with Americans bent on going it alone. Tick, tock. . .
However, one advantage of testing done only through the CDC while it struggled to produce a lab test that other labs could use was that it allowed 45 to claim that we were safe while covid19 ravaged the world. What you don’t know comes back to bite you in the ass.
State run healthcare systems can be very efficient. They can act rapidly and easily assess the extent of the problem. They can develop sites to screen and house patients who must be quarantined and treated without regard for payment status. South Korea is testing 10,000 people a day in drive thru sites. The Chinese built a large hospital complex in 2 weeks. Here in the US, everything’s scattershot. We’re at the mercy of a hopefully well prepared government, like Barack Obama with Ebola and H1N1 flu or George Bush with SARS. Instead, we’re now at the mercy of whatever commercial enterprise sees profit in the undertaking and decides to jump in. With lab tests, there is an additional step of FDA approval before the product can be used commercially, in other words billed for.
Despite the task force announcement that insurance companies and Medicare/Medicaid will cover it, the trick is to make sure that the uninsured can get tested without breaking the bank, given that it will come with an expensive ER visit and a battery of other diagnostic tests and procedures. Right now the most common experience is that a patient gets the ER visit but can’t get a lab test; big bill, no result! VP Pence refused to answer a question from the press about the uninsured, another indication that the administration’s concern tends toward the monied. Dr Fauci bluntly testified before a Congressional committee that the US can’t institute drive thru testing or broad testing across the population. “Do I think we should be. Yes.” It was never part of their vision so it was simply not possible. It would require a complete philosophical reorientation of a system firmly entrenched in free enterprise.
According to the New York Times The Daily postcast, it was a research lab at University of Washington that stumbled upon the first known US case of community transmission. The lab developed its own test which did not have clearance from the FDA to report results outside of their study. However, they felt compelled to notify the health department with their first positive which they estimated indicated that the virus had been in the community for as long as two weeks. Thus it was not the protective apparatus of the government that detected this first case but those pesky scientists.
Agent Orange is focused on the numbers: the Dow Jones primarily and then the covid19 case count. His take on the docking of a cruise ship off San Francisco with several virus infected passengers was like a third quarter football score, “I like the numbers where they are; I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault. And it wasn’t the fault of the people on the ship either.” Note, he’s talking about his numbers, not grandmothers and fathers, sisters and brothers. Fault and blame are his high priority. Like many a slave master, he was counting something, just not people. The man has no soul.
Keep America Isolated hamstrung the covid19 response: failure to coordinate globally before the virus arrived; insistence on making a US test; limited screening without testing; shuttering the borders while sending Americans out to infect the world.
And apparently keeping the numbers down has been the government’s mission. As the CDC was forced to expand the criteria for who should be tested and the number of cases mounted, the CDC stopped reporting. They are no longer updating their website daily with the number of cases; they will not release the number of tests done. The agency says that it can no longer monitor testing or cases which are being done at the local level, a departure for the role that the agency has always played in disease outbreaks. If it could get data on Zika testing and cases from South America, it would seem it could manage here at home. Instead it reflects an HHS policy to camouflage the extent of the disease and the response as part of partisan politics. That policy reflects a fear among federal officials of enraging El Presidente.
Ironically, the president, VP and conservative politicians who gathered at CPAC have been exposed. 45 has continued to mingle with them, even riding on Air Force One with Matt Gaites. He and the new chief of staff have chosen to self quarantine, but not the commander in chief. He’s continued to shake hands at appearances and has refused to get tested. He has at least deferred rallies for now. In the intervening days, 45’s exposures have expanded; an aide to the Brazilian president who now has tested positive dined at Mar-o-lago with 45. The Australian Minister of Home Affairs Peter Dutton who later met with Ivanka, Bill Barr and Kelleyanne Conway also tested positive and they meet frequently with the president. The Mayor of Miami who also met with the Brazilian aide is positive as well. These incidents continue to raise the specter of the disease spreading widely in the West Wing and Mar-o-lago where there are a lot of old rich people at highest risk for serious infection.
Some estimates are that 70-80% of people will become infected, so the multiple interactions within the GOP caucus members suggests that many will be affected. Given their ages, one or two of them will probably get pretty sick. In the meantime, they’re spreading it to staff and ancillary personnel across the capital. Certainly, a role modelling president would volunteer to be tested and follow recommendations of public health officials. It’s a national security issue; if he became seriously ill, it affects the country’s leadership such as it is. If he doesn’t become ill, he could show that the disease course is short-lived and mild.
But our president could do neither. A positive test would destroy him. In his mind, it would demonstrate some personal failure; he would have to lie about it, not usually a problem but refusing a test means that a positive can’t leak to the press. Still, it seems improbable that the presidential physician is not monitoring him for symptoms and insisting on testing. Of course, the virus is being shed long before symptoms develop so to abstain from testing is to spread the epidemic. El Presidente is not one to respond to insistence, even from his closest advisors. There should be a law, but if we’ve learned anything from 45, it is that much presidential tradition is embedded in the idea that the office holder places his allegiance to the country at the forefront, fixing the oath to uphold the Constitution in his heart. No one could have anticipated that people would elect a president without a heart who would use the Constitution as a stepping stone to absolute rule. Through negligence, covid19 could bring down a man who believes he’s impervious.
Eventually, the doctors prevailed and 45 announced that he had been tested. The press corp was being checked for symptoms before the last press conference and 45 conceded that staff was also being monitored. It’s probably too late, but at least they’ll have access to the best medical care. We can all speculate the odds that the report of his negative test result is factual; the question has to be asked given his history.
In his Oval Office speech, Trump blundered through a series of mistruths and misstatements of his own policy initiatives that bear his uniquely xenophobic lens. The MAWAPresident has a limited bag of tricks which make his responses fairly predictable, something that he never wants to be. It was important to 45 to characterize covid19 as a foreign virus even though viruses have no nationality. He then linked the foreign invader to clusters of US cases seeded from Europe except that never happened. Voila! His announcement of a travel ban for all Europeans entering the country. He’s used this logic before, i.e the Latinx are taking your jobs, so they must be kept out and thrown out. All Muslims are terrorists, so they must be kept out and thrown out.
It turns out, the MAWAPresident got a little carried away in his address, overstating his ban a bit. This marked another presidential first; the first Oval office address where the president misrepresented his own policies, not extemporaneously but from prepared remarks from a teleprompter. Actually, the policy applies only to non-US citizens who have travelled to 26 countries, excluding the UK and Ireland. Why those two? Trump was making a political statement to support the two countries with strong borders as a result of Brexit. Apparently, he’s unaware that nothing has changed in the UK except the vote to leave. The contours of an agreement are being negotiated while the borders remain as open as ever. That rates a demerit on geography, current affairs and international relations. There was no communication with European allies beforehand; they literally heard it on the TV, another demerit.
A more cynical interpretation of the UK exemption is that Trump owns golf courses there so he’s protecting reservations. Given his allegiance to his properties, that couldn’t have been far from his mind. His exception flies in the face of Britain’s second highest number of reported cases in Europe outside Italy, so the ban is not about the disease burden or the threat of transmission here.
Active duty and DOD civilians can no longer travel to or within most of Europe and any Level 3 regions, but not including South Korea, a hotter spot than Europe. Perhaps coincidentally, Trump also has properties in Seoul and two other cities. The military will scale back their exercises as well. We’ve crossed the frontier to a heightened national security threat.
Dreaming that he was striking out at trade with the EU, he announced that European imports would also be banned, an assertion he had to immediately retract; that would have really sent the markets down the toilet.
Nowhere in the address was there mention of resolution of the testing debacle, in part because he began with congratulating himself on mounting the best covid19 response on the globe, an obvious figment of his imagination. To then shift to fixing a problem he refused to acknowledge was impossible.
The speech served to divert attention from both the inadequate federal response and the expanding number of infections. It was simply an excuse to insult allies in the context of a health crisis, not an attempt to control viral spread. A ban on non-citizens coming from the same location as citizens who are allowed to travel is just prejudice; it has no benefit in preventing spread of a virus that doesn’t check IDs. All the recurrent Trumpian themes are here: the targeting of non-citizens, the partisan play to the base, segregating his attempts at governance to his slice of the electorate, self-aggrandizing monetary gain and his head buried in a reality of his own making.
A ban on non-citizens coming from the same location as US citizens who are allowed to travel is just prejudice; it has no benefit in preventing spread of a virus that doesn’t check IDs.
While 45 would like to pretend that covid19 is coming from abroad, we have more than enough to share here. Pro Basketball players, politicians and actors are popping up positive all over the place. One wonders if their wealth had something to do with their testing priority. There is no restriction on American travel; apparently we are free to carry it around the world. He’s president of the US, not the world; he feels no fealty to anything outside our borders.
And it’s not only US citizens let loose on Europe. Some commentators have suggested that the UK and Ireland may experience an additional screening burden as residents from other EU zone countries try to find more freedom of movement. It’s not that they don’t have a significant number of cases, including Britain’s health minister. At the same time, Trump’s misinformation sent thousands of Americans to European airports desperate to book often pricey tickets home. Large crowds pressed closely together was dangerous for all including airport personnel. If it’s not 45’s shore, it’s not his problem.
The folly of the original policy has been reversed so the ban now includes the UK and Ireland. But the change came without detailed coordination with customs in airports so that returning passengers were crammed into long corridors leading to customs booths, delayed further by screening protocols. This is another example of a royal edict style of governance that doesn’t coordinate with other federal agencies or local officials. They just don’t grasp the details of complicated operations; the “deep state” bureaucracy is a necessary component of efficient operation. The cogs that make the wheels turn can’t be spurned without consequences. But the blame game continued with federal authorities blaming airport managers for cramming hordes of people into viral incubators. And yet, local officials have been forced to react to surprise shifts in policy without any prior notification. It seems a perfect set up; when someone doesn’t know what they’re doing, they can’t anticipate the outcomes, but they can always find someone else to blame.
In the meantime, can screening of returning US citizens impact viral spread without adequate testing. It should be clear by now that patients are infectious before they develop symptoms, perhaps for 10 days, an unusually long time as viruses go. The Chinese let no suspected person tested pass go; they went immediately to an area awaiting test results and quarantine if positive. Here, after screening, will the person be allowed to travel through crowded areas on the way home to self-isolate before the 4 hours to 2 days it will take to get a test result. That screening protocol is a sieve, not sealed containment.
The Oval office speech followed an announcement of economic interventions by Trump before he had discussed it with Congressional leaders. Fresh off surviving impeachment, he forgot that there is a legislative process independent of his whims. Moscow Mitch pushed back, representing that Congress wasn’t a rubber stamping Duma. Like a toddler mid temper tantrum, Trump met only with GOP leaders and is refusing to speak to Speaker of the House Pelosi, sending Treasury Secretary Mnuchin to negotiate instead. It’s difficult to imagine that Pelosi won’t be driving a hard bargain. Once again, he’s governing MAWAland, not the United States. Free testing, paid sick leave and support directed at covid19 victims are high on the Democratic agenda, trying to improve conditions that support testing, social distancing and self quarantines. The GOP’s focus arises from their trickle down economic orientation: give money and tax breaks to businesses.
A proposed payroll tax deferral for both employer and employee contributions does nothing for people not working, or those working in the gig economy and the self employed. Democrats wanted to sunset any payroll tax exemption while the GOP wanted them to be permanent, essentially eliminating the source of funding for Social Security and Medicare. Characteristically, forced childbirth advocates desire to include Hyde amendment language that excludes the use of federal funds for abortion was a temporary stumbling block, although how it figures into sick leave or covid19 testing is obscure. It was just propaganda dressing Trump could use with evangelicals. The GOP opposes expansion of Medicaid on principle, so the use of Medicaid to cover testing and diagnosis of viral infection was a stumbling block in negotiations as well.
Pelosi can pass a House bill comfortably, but contrary to McConnell’s minor assertion of independence, GOP Senators are waiting for the BullyPresident to issue his royal approval, hoping he might point the way toward that lofty goal. He is still so pissed about Impeachment that beyond not talking to the House Speaker, he has to be dragged tooth and nail into compromise. But he is being boxed in by public criticism outside his cheering squad of his covid19 response, so he must wedge his best deal for his corporate cronies into relief for the populace he purports to represent.
For his part, Trump is all about economic support of industry: the cruise, travel and airline industries, with a sop to small businesses in the form of loans. He’s hoping that his meet and greets with business leaders and government subsidies/tax breaks will buoy Wall Street. He’s nudged the Fed into dropping the interest rate and the treasury to dump short term money into the market. None of that can counterbalance the ineptitude of the federal response and Agent Orange’s management of the crisis and his evident fuzzy understanding of what should be done. Thank God Fauci is everywhere cleaning up the mess. And then there is the slowdown in the global economy as one country after another hunkers down.
In an economy driven by consumer purchasing of services, just the losses from a few large cancelled events are staggering: $8 million for March Madness, Final Four $100+million, South by Southwest $355 million and Frozen Four (hockey) $10 million. That’s just the cost to the cities without considering the airlines, restaurants and their employees, Uber and cab drivers and the retail spending of those workers. Add in the cancellation of the NFL, NHL NBA seasons and the vendors who work those events. The economic uncertainty lies in how long this state of affairs will last and how many financial supplements will be created.
The RealityTVPresident seemed hell bent on modelling anti-hygienic practices during his make-up press conference in the Rose Garden. He shook hands with the 15 people packed shoulder to shoulder behind him; he caressed the microphone where others subsequently spoke, keeping in mind that he often spits when he speaks; there was no hand sanitizer in sight. The president touched his face as did others in the group. At least, no one seemed to be coughing. “These are all the things that the public should avoid” would have been a great banner crawling across the screen. It speaks to the lackadaisical concern with which the president seems to be taking the whole affair.
His message was the puffery of theater. He declared a state of emergency so that he’ll have billions of dollars at his disposal to deal with the crisis in the usual way he greases corporate palms. He’s talking to private industry to expand testing and big pharma. Slyly, he indicated he hasn’t gotten what he wants out of Pelosi to pass an economic relief package and negotiations would continue. Of course, Pelosi has the votes for whatever she wants, so she doesn’t have to play ball except for her desire to have a bipartisan.
45 did mention that the problem with testing was NOT HIS FAULT. He’s not a buck stops here kind of guy. He has previously shifted the blame for his halting response somehow to Barack. Who else; it always scores well with the base and Trump/FoxNews pundits. In an administration consumed with dismantling federal regulations, certainly they would have scanned the FDA for potential obstacles as covid19 ravaged China. And yet, when confronted with a question about dismantling the Obama’s Office of Global Pandemic Response from the NSC, Trump denied that he knew anything about it. The chief executive who claims to control every action of his subordinates, he lamely referred questions to John Bolton. Perhaps it’s detailed in that book he can’t publish, at least until Trump is out of office.
Governors, state and local health departments have jumped into the breach. The state to state approach punishes those who live in conservative penny pinching states who favor handouts to businesses over the suffering of individuals. They have systematically underfunded public health resources for years.
We have to be thankful that governors, state and local health departments have jumped into the breach. They’ve shut down events and schools. They’ve contracted with labs to do their own drive thru covid19 testing; New York is selling its own hand sanitizer, albeit made with prison labor. By-in-large, public health has been underfunded for some time and states will need federal relief for their expenditures when the government dropped the ball. They will also need some economic support for lost revenues from business struggling with social distancing. The problem with a primarily state to state approach is that it punishes those who live in conservative penny pinching states who have little empathy for the suffering of individuals. They’re more sympathetic to hand-outs for businesses. The disparities in infection and death rates between states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare and those who didn’t would make an interesting study when the epidemic resolves.
In sum, the Dow Jones is down into bear market territory, professional and college sports have been cancelled, the cruise industry is on hiatus, Broadway lights went dark and all the associated food and service industry workers are winding down to closure. Colleges and schools are closing, concerts, theater and any large gatherings are being canceled or audiences themselves are asking for ticket refunds and not attending. All of the effective public health interventions have come from the state and local officials or private businesses.
The US service economy is grinding to a halt for who knows how long. Covid19 testing is still woefully inadequate, unavailable to most. Even as the administration continues to claim more kits are available, local and state officials complain that reagents are missing or the tests are not all functional. For now, the CDC, state labs and the government have made the number of tests unknowable. But we know that even Iran and Vietnam are testing more regularly than the US. These facts in addition to the slowdown in the global economy and the lag in resumption of Chinese production are good reasons for Wall Street to be tanking.
All but the most devoted Trumpophants can see that not only is the PiedPiperPresident lying, he clearly has no idea what’s happening or what to do. Good thing he has Pence to blame when it comes crashing down. But life will become more uncomfortable; as production and distribution slows, shortages will last longer. Hopefully the first run of hoarders will stay home to give others a chance. Why so much toilet paper? If 45 is lucky, the vagaries of covid19 will not totally disrupt life in the US for longer than the 5 months it has taken China through dragonian measures to control the disease. That will give El Presidente the fall to convince his MAWA Nation that he should remain on his throne even though he doesn’t have the nation’s interests at heart and has no commitment to protect it.
March 16, 1995 Mississippi legislature finally ratifies the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery 130 years after it rejected it in 1865.
oleblacklady 