The Clarifying Fire of the Virus Crisis

The Washington Post has a report out on the background to Donald Trump’s disastrous coronavirus policy speech last Wednesday.  Paragraph for paragraph, it’s one of the most damning and enraging portraits of the White House I’ve read in . . . well, in at least a few weeks.    We learn that presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner attempted to take the lead on the coronavirus response, employing such novel methods as taking crowdsourced Facebook suggestions from an in-law.  As with the president, Kushner’s main goal seems not to have been to organize a response to protect the American people, but rather arrive at the right combination of words and hocus-pocus that might arrest the stock market’s precipitous fall as it reflects the reality of a fucked economy.  

The article describes a White House in which the president’s re-election is the pre-eminent concern, and where advisors’ fear of being accused of disloyalty stifles discussion.  It helps clarify that this president and his staff are simply overmatched by the current crisis, unable to see beyond the narrow range of the president’s personal interests.  The processes inside the White House are chaotic and unfocused, and not equal to the gravity of this moment; as the president conducts free for alls in the Oval Office, his advisors apparently spend a great deal of energy in absurd rivalries.  Meanwhile, others tell the Post that “they have to spend significant chunks of their day dealing with leaks, especially as officials try to escape blame for the testing issues that have plagued the administration’s response for weeks.”

As hard as it is to stomach, this article did at least clarify something which really should have been more obvious to me long before now: that the president has absolutely no conception of actually being the president.  There appears to be a complete and total separation in his mind — a separation reflected in the attitudes of those around him — between serving the American people as he was elected to do, and seeking re-election to the highest office in the land.  He is obsessed with the latter, and sees his path to success in manipulating reality in such a way that he fools enough people into voting for him.  Even in the midst of an epidemic in which his actions can mean the difference between life and death for millions of Americans, re-election is the paramount interest.  For the vast majority of anyone who might be in his place, the choice would be obvious, to the point that it would be no choice at all: you would do everything in your power to protect the American people, and let the election sort itself out.  Indeed, any rational president would have to acknowledge that personal failure in handling this outbreak would rightly be considered disqualifying — after all, what’s the point of being president if you’re just getting people killed?

At this point, to expect any sort of competent response from this president and this White House is not just nonsensical, it’s delusional.  We need to disabuse ourselves of our natural instinct to think that the same solidarity and empathy we feel for other Americans must be shared by the monster in the White House.  Trump has surrounded himself with people who reflect and amplify his own tremendous personal failings, making the White House as a whole a fusion reactor of self-interest, greed, white nationalism, and ineptness. The vast majority of Americans simply do no matter to him.  

Meanwhile, the president’s failings are perfectly complemented by the political beliefs of the Republican Party, which has spent the past four decades denigrating and degrading our government’s ability to act for the collective good, including to protect us from a pandemic like the one we are facing.  Together, the president’s personal incompetence and the GOP’s ideological irrelevance make this into a horrifying crisis for the rest of us.  We are going to see thousands if not millions of our fellow citizens die because these incompetents long ago stopped believing in a democratic government that serves everyone, and started seeing government as just a mechanism to help funnel money and power to an increasingly narrow band at the top of American society.

Homebodyism: Everyone is Doing It, So Why Don't You, Too?

The dilatory and incompetent federal approach to the coronavirus pandemic means that individual states and the public at large have been left playing catch-up in understanding and implementing the necessary responses to this outbreak.  Simply the basic question of whether it’s safe to go to the office, or whether working from home (if possible) will help arrest the spread of the disease, is confounding millions of people.  My partner and I have both experienced this confusion firsthand, as both our places of work have acknowledged the threat posed by the virus over the past few weeks, but been slow to act beyond offering suggestions for avoiding and preventing the illness (washing hands, staying home if sick), while refraining from implementing plans to keep everyone at home.  By Friday, individual managers at my business were deciding whether to send employees home, essentially leaving the fates of employees up to the epidemiological savvy of whoever they happen to work for.  Meanwhile, one group of employees was literally cordoned off from the rest of us on our open-plan floor, as they are considered essential personnel; this may have superficially protected those lucky few, but the arrangement meant that office foot traffic doubled in other areas, unfortunately sending a message that some employees are more expendable than others, and blowing our sense of solidarity to smithereens.

I do worry that too many people are taking too much guidance from employers whose grasp of the situation is no better than their employees, and who don’t necessarily have employee health as their absolute first priority.  At the risk of sounding overly cynical, we need to bear in mind that companies, despite their official line of caring about their employees, also have a contradictory interest in protecting the running of their business.  I fear that many Americans are relying on guidance from employers that aren’t treating employee health as their primary priority — if there were, I think it’s safe to say, all American businesses would have already closed and told their workers to remain at home. Count this over-reliance on compromised sources of information as yet another cost of the federal government’s failure to talk truthfully about this crisis.

At any rate, the most pressing question for all of us right now is what can be done to slow the spread of this epidemic.  I wanted to flag this article from the Center for American Progress, which lays out some frightening but essential data, beginning with its opening line: “The United States is at a tipping point: If transmission of COVID-19 is not slowed within the next week, the hospital system will be overwhelmed.”  Crucially, it acknowledges the compromised federal response, and points to the critical role state and local governments need to play.  

It also contains some good basic information, including numbers around worst-case transmission scenarios and the potential for getting those rates down.  The idea of “flattening the curve” is something people may have heard about, and refers to slowing the rate of infection, with the goal of ensuring that our medical system is not overwhelmed by critical cases.  I found this paragraph particularly helpful:

According to current estimates, 5 percent of those infected will require intensive care beds. There are approximately 98,000 intensive care beds in the United States. On the current track, these estimates indicate that 470,000 people will require intensive care beds—far more than are available. In reality, this massive shortage will be even worse because these beds will also be needed for other conditions, including seasonal influenza. If state and local governments begin aggressive measures today, however, the number of intensive care beds required could be reduced to 26,650.

With the goal of slowing the coronavirus spread front and center, the authors make several common-sense recommendations, including banning gatherings of more than 50 people, closing gyms, bars, and movie theaters, and “strongly encouraging employers to require employees to work remotely.”  The specific measures are a useful baseline for our societal needs at the moment, providing a reality check in the face of contradictory information floating around.

And even as they present their recommendations as what state and local governments need to do, we can also read them as an urgent call for individual action as well — even if that action is mostly the inaction of staying home as much as possible. The fact that the single largest contribution we can individually make is to remain home means we have an incredibly low bar to clear — the critical thing is that enough of us are aware of it.

For Trump's Base, Presidential Fantasy and Harsh Viral Reality Are On a Collision Course

In a great piece over at GQ, Laura Bassett traces the authoritarian tendencies evident in President Trump’s response to the coronavirus crisis, which I think are a huge part of this story.  There’s been a tendency to view the president’s various lies and blunders around the outbreak as primarily signs of incompetence —but as others have observed, authoritarianism and incompetence often go together.  An autocrat who relies on his personal decision-making rather than the advice of advisors or experts is bound to make mistakes, while the instinct to cover up problems from public view and accountability means that they can fester and worsen as time passes.

In the case of Trump and the coronavirus, incompetence alone provides an incomplete framework, as it downplays the president’s deliberate and even methodical attempts to manage and discuss the coronavirus in a way that prioritizes his political needs over those of the public.  He’s using the power of his office to spread self-serving propaganda about the success of the effort he’s leading to stop the spread of the virus.  We can safely assume that Donald Trump realizes he’s in over his head and truly has no sense about how to handle this epidemic; but by telling a story about his brilliant leadership and an alternate reality in which the coronavirus magically disappears, he’s laying the groundwork for the survival of his power no matter what happens.

What I think a lot of us are slow to grasp is that the impress of an increasingly devastating reality will not result in the president accommodating it in rational ways — for example, by admitting mistakes and making a course correction — but in Trump doubling down on its denial, if not in favor of a blissful vision of hale patriots easily shucking off the virus like townsfolk at a Kansas cornfest, then based on a tale wherein evil Democrats and nasty Mexicans conspired to breach our borders and infect the heartland with the Wuhan nasty.  The reason we have good reason to suspect this denialism will happen is because it is already, as the president points to the virus as further justification for a southern wall and slurs Democrats for supposedly supporting open borders.

The big question, of course, is whether this will work to distract enough people from the truth of the president’s failures.  The authoritarian aspect of his rule is important because this is what has bonded so many of his supporters to this irredeemable man — he is their leader-savior battling the forces of liberalism and non-whiteness and globalism, and it is not a huge stretch from the story he’s already been telling to now believe that a pandemic is yet another reason to stand by him against America’s enemies.

But is there a point when reality will overwhelm propaganda?

Intriguingly, there may well be.  For her article, Bassett talked with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, s scholar of authoritarianism and a history professor at New York University who’s been documenting the president’s autocratic tendencies since his election.  Ben-Ghiat points to the example of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, for whom a cult of personality could not save him from the harsh reality of Allied bombs falling on his country.  In the case of the coronavirus, as Bassett points out, we have the quite twisted situation of the president lying to his base about an illness in ways that make it likelier they will get sick and even die from it.  She writes:

The great irony here is that Trump’s own supporters may suffer the most from his narcissistic response to this public health emergency.  Many will believe him that the virus is “fake news” and take fewer precautions against it than the city-dwellers stocking up on canned goods (or oat milk) and washing their hands to “Free Bird.”  His base tends to be older, thus at higher risk of dying from the virus, and live in rural areas, where there are fewer testing resources and less adequate health care in general.

This whole awful situation reminds me of a great (pre-coronavirus) riff by Portland comic Nariko Ott about how our country is one bad bird flu away from having free college for all.  What twist of fate and reality have we undergone that a dark, truth-telling joke threatens to become our lived reality, in part at the president’s own hand?  It is the blackest of ironies that Donald Trump may be working toward his own defeat in November by actively ensuring that his supporters are winnowed by a virus indifferent to party affiliation or non-belief in its existence — but this scenario also raises urgent questions for Democrats and other opponents of Trump.  Between a president who makes it likelier that many thousands of Americans will die by his bad advice and bungled leadership, and a disease whose spread and lethality will be determined in part by many millions of individual Americans taking steps to protect themselves and others, there’s no choice but to fight for the lives of those we disagree with politically — especially when they’re being misinformed by their deranged leader.  Against the obscene betrayal of his own loyal followers, the undeniable realities of the virus in combination with a renewed compassion for our fellow Americans may help break the spell this evil man has cast.

The Coronavirus Pandemic Is Also an Unavoidable Political Crisis

It’s horror enough that in the face of a pandemic, President Trump spreads lies about the coronavirus that directly threaten the ability of millions of Americans to protect themselves from illness and death.  Clearly obsessed with his re-election and the economic effects of an outbreak, he has tried to substitute his self-serving fantasies for the hard truths Americans need to hear; in doing so, he has made himself an accomplice to the spread of the virus.  But as unforgivable as his public behavior has been, we are learning on a daily basis more and more details about the way his denialism and incompetence have, behind the scenes, sabotaged the efforts of our government to contain and mitigate it.  Just this past weekend, The Washington Post and Politico published important stories detailing how the administration’s fumbled and dilatory response to the coronavirus threat can be traced straight to the top.  

Yet, because the disaster has not yet occurred, because many hold out hope that the administration will still change course under the pressure of criticism, and because of the critical role the federal government must play in fighting this pandemic, the president has so far escaped the level of criticism his words and actions deserve.  It should not be controversial to say that a president who puts his re-election effort ahead of his constitutional obligation to defend American lives has committed an impeachable offense — and yet, you will listen in vain for any prominent Democrats to make this case.  The question of whether his incompetence has made it inevitable that many more Americans will sicken and die than if a competent presidential effort had been made is vital if we are to have accountability in our government.  Yet, perversely, Trump is somewhat protected from such an indictment by the very crisis his own actions have served to worsen.

While every American should be rooting for this administration to correct course and get the coronavirus response right, what we know thus far means that believing that this course-correction will actually happen is itself a delusion that eerily parallels the president’s own apparent faith in the power of magical thinking.  The mistakes the administration has made already make it far more likely that the coronavirus will be much deadlier and economically destructive than if a sane and reasonable person had been president.  It’s important to recognize the truth of this, and how it happened, because the facts really only lead in one direction: that the incompetence of this president and his administration will continue, founded as they are in the basic unfitness of Donald Trump.

But while the president bears direct responsibility for the actions of himself and his administration, it’s also important to recognize that the coronavirus fiasco is also a symptom of a larger political crisis involving the anti-government ideology of the Republican Party.  For decades, a core belief of the GOP has been that the government can do no good; ancillary to this, and also as a fundamental belief in its own right, the GOP has also opposed universal health care.  We now face a crisis that brings the moral bankruptcy of both positions into stark relief.  Believing neither in a larger public good served by a government elected by the people, nor in a mutual obligation to take care of such a basic need as health care, the Republican Party bears substantial responsibility for the crisis now unfolding.

This responsibility, you may not be surprised to hear, also encompasses the GOP’s support of this president through all his previous failures and lawlessness, culminating in the Senate’s acquittal of Trump in his impeachment trial.  It is no coincidence that the very thing that stood at the center of his impeachment — his placement of personal interest above the public good — is the same behavior now undermining the U.S. effort against the coronavirus, as Josh Marshall and others have pointed out.  A few months ago, the GOP had a chance to remove this man from office for offenses against the American people that are now being repeated in the coronavirus response, but declined to do so.  Having ensured that we are saddled with his inept leadership in the face of our current crisis, they share culpability for what is happening now and in the future.

So clearly to blame, Trump and his allies are bound to use this pandemic to press a narrative that the Democrats are actually at fault, both as a matter of self-preservation and because they have made clear their contempt for the two-party system and its reliance on factuality and electoral competition.  Indeed, this initiative has already begun, as President Trump blames “the Democrat policy of open borders” for the presence of the virus in the United States.  Threatened with a crisis that demands democratic accountability, Trump and the GOP will do what they can to deny Americans that accountability.

In the face of such attacks, and given the pressing need for a strong governmental response to the coronavirus, the Democrats can’t be stuck playing defense or downplaying the president’s contributions to this crisis.  As David Dayen writes at The American Prospect:

But though this crisis doesn’t fit the normal economic measures to prevent suffering, that doesn’t mean nothing can be done. Public-health and targeted economic plans must be implemented as soon as possible. If the Trump administration refuses, voters loom to show their wrath in November. Democrats must take immediate action that will not only aim to arrest the catastrophe, but signify that self-preservation aligns with progressive values and economic ideas [. . .]  Those who believe in the progressive conception of government need to drive the conversation.

There is no better argument for universal health care than a pandemic that threatens our entire populace.  Similarly, the benefits of sick leave benefits for all workers become glaringly obvious, both in moral terms and as a benefit to everyone in society, as workers who are able to stay home won’t sicken others, and are spared the unconscionable choice between making rent and working while ill.  

Likewise, Democrats should embark on a coordinated, large-scale effort to counter the lies and disinformation issued by Trump and his lackeys.  In the best-case scenario, this would push the Trump administration towards truthfulness; in the worst, it would at least provide Americans with a reliable source of information about what’s happening and how to protect themselves.  They need to make the case that we face a political crisis that is exacerbating a medical one.

Mournin' for Warren

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s withdrawal from the Democratic presidential campaign would have been a gut punch for many of us whenever it happened, but I am guessing that many or even most of her supporters were hoping against hope that her campaign would survive Super Tuesday.  The suddenness of her withdrawal against our high expectations is particularly disorienting, but so is the sense that she has been swept aside by political and even historical forces that, at least for the time being, threaten to diminish the significance of her campaign and her ideas.  I believe she would have made the best president out of all the Democratic candidates, and while we must respect the choices of our fellow citizens, I can’t avoid feeling that we’ve thrown away the opportunity to elect the right person for this moment in our history.

Instead, we’re left with two men who feel distinctly out of step with our time.  Joe Biden, who has wanted to be president since forever but failed in his attempts to do so, was lifted to redemption by Barack Obama, and passed on a chance to run in 2016, is now poised to finally achieve his dream — but at an age that sees his faculties somewhat diminished, befuddled by a political history that parallels the compromised spirit of the Democrats over the past 40 years, and with an appeal that seems rooted more in restoration than progress.  Likewise, Bernie Sanders, for all that he’s catalyzed millions of Americans to widen their expectations of our democracy and economy, feels committed to a vision imported from another age, even if in its rough outlines it fits the needs of our time.

Of all the damage Donald Trump has done to the United States, some of the worst is his reinforcing many Americans’ belief that a woman is not ready to be president, or is the wrong choice to stand against our arch-misogynist chief executive.  To me, this is a demonstration of the trauma he’s inflicted on the nation — the way he’s gotten inside our heads and psyched us out.  Too many Americans saw Hillary Clinton when they looked at Elizabeth Warren, and were afraid to repeat what they saw as the error of sending a woman to dispatch the monster.  But to me, the lesson of Trump’s election has always been the complete opposite: to heal, we needed to empower a woman as our next presidential candidate, to start to undo the unbearable stain he has inflicted on American life.  Saying that a woman cannot win against Trump, even if one blames this on the preferences of other, less enlightened voters, perversely validates the very misogyny that our current president embodies, and negates one of democracy’s greatest powers: our ability to break open new futures and possibilities by collectively agreeing to do so.

I realize that misogyny alone didn’t take down Warren’s campaign.  She didn’t connect to African-American and other minority voters as much as she needed to, and wasn’t able to broaden her appeal beyond a certain highly educated and liberal socio-economic group.  Ideologically, she was also competing against a Bernie juggernaut build up over a previous presidential campaign.  I wish the millions of Democrats who have voted so far had given Warren more of a chance, and had questioned their assumptions about who’s the best candidate to take on Trump.  More than any other candidate, Warren knows what needs to be done to fix our government and economy, and, just as importantly, how crucial it will be not to let the corruption of the Trump administration slip away without consequence.  She understands what’s needed at a level of sophistication and detail that is simply lacking in either of the two remaining Democratic contenders.  I suspect that many of us will judge the choices of the eventual Democratic nominee by a not-entirely-fair comparison with what Warren would have done.

No Longer Able to Win Elections, Oregon GOP Embraces Anti-Democratic Politics

Over at Vox, David Roberts has written an excellent piece on the latest walkout by Oregon state representatives and senators aimed at stopping a climate change bill backed by Democrats.  He correctly zeroes in on the larger story here — the minority party’s violation of democratic norms to thwart the will of the majority on behalf of a overwhelmingly white, right-wing base and fossil fuel-devoted corporate interests.  

Even though the Democrats have a supermajority in both the House and Senate (and control the governorship), the Oregon state constitution contains a strict quorum requirement that two-thirds of legislators have to be present in either chamber for it to conduct business (in most states, a mere majority is needed).  For decades, both parties respected this rule, and refrained from using it to block legislation. Yet, in the space of just the last 10 months, “Oregon Republicans have walked out more times [. . .] than all Democrats have” in all states in modern history, stopping not just climate legislation but measures on gun control and limiting religious exemptions from vaccinations.

Roberts takes apart the arguments the Oregon GOP has made regarding its opposition to the climate bill: that it was “crammed down our throats” (in the words of a logging company owners); that they are merely doing what their voters want them to do; that it’s better addressed through state initiative.  As he explains, the cap-and-trade bill under dispute has been literally years in the making, and this latest version represents extreme revisions from previous versions in order to obtain Republican buy-in.  He also reminds us that money from business interests belies claims that voter interests are first and foremost in the politicians’ eyes; state senators and representatives “get 65 percent of their donations from corporations, in particular corporations like Koch Industries with assets that stand to be affected by cap-and-trade.”  

As I noted, though, for Roberts the bigger story is the Oregon GOP’s reliance on an anti-democratic measure — abuse of the quorum — to thwart majority rule.  Critically, he makes clear that what’s happening in Oregon is a microcosm of the larger movement by the GOP nationwide to embrace anti-democratic rule to preserve the power of its declining base of white Americans.  There are particular Oregon elements, but the story is a national one:

In national US politics, as in Oregon, it’s increasingly clear that the population is urbanizing and diversifying and there simply aren’t enough rural and suburban white Christians to constitute a majority anymore. If that demographic — which has now become an intense, all-encompassing political identity — is to maintain its traditional hold on power, it can only do so through increasingly anti-democratic means.

[. . .] An overwhelmingly white, rural minority of voters is holding an entire state’s business hostage. Oregon Democrats played by the rules, got more votes, and developed legislation through appropriate channels. Now fewer than a dozen lawmakers, heavily funded by the very industries they are defending, are blocking it, at will, using an anachronistic quirk of the state constitution.

There is no conceivable justification for it, no possible democratic rationale. It only makes sense in the context of white supremacy: the notion that rural white Americans are more authentically American than other groups and deserve outsized representation in its politics and veto power over its legislation.

Roberts identifies what’s happening in Oregon as a microcosm of what’s occurring in the U.S. more generally, yet Oregon’s situation is particularly galling.  Over many years, Oregon Democrats have benefited from demographic changes in their state that have made it more liberal, but have also proactively responded to the wishes of this growing Democratic majority.  Against a flood tide of corporate money fueling the GOP, they have clawed their way into a supermajority in both houses of the Oregon legislature.  They have played by the democratic rules, and won, and won again, through years of hard organizing, occasional defeats, and unforced catastrophic errors (see: disgraced Democratic governor John Kitzhaber, who resigned in connection with his partner’s use of First Lady status for grifting purposes).  Having won by playing by the rules, the GOP has changed those rules, in a direction that leads to the end of majority rule, and thus democracy, in Oregon.

Apart from this larger story, what has Roberts (and The Hot Screen) increasingly vexed is the failure of both the great majority of the press and of the Democratic Party itself to accurately describe and call out this new American political reality.  Roberts notes the “both sides do it” reporting by various sources, such as an Associated Press story about the walkout.  Even more discouragingly, he recounts how Oregon Democratic elected officials have time and again retreated in the face of the GOP’s legislative hostage-taking.  His description of Senate President Peter Courtney repeatedly, literally begging the Republicans to return to the capitol is especially upsetting, signaling weakness in the face of a cowardly abdication of duty by the GOP.  Why will the GOP stop the walkouts if they keep working?  Answer: they won’t.

From a certain perspective, it’s laudable that Oregon Democrats still seek compromise on an environmental bill with a party that denies the existence of human-caused climate change: but it should be obvious at this point that Oregon Republicans will never pass a bill that offends their corporate overlords, not when they can keep demagoguing about how it will cripple rural economies and bankrupt Oregonians every time they fill up a tank of gas.  This is not the politics that most Democratic elected officials are familiar with, but they need to get up to speed with the new reality quickly.  The GOP is no longer a party that can be reasoned with, but only defeated and discredited. Otherwise, minority rule will become entrenched in our state as the new (undemocratic) normal.

This means that the only way forward is to make the GOP pay an electoral price for its contempt for democracy.  Fortunately, Oregon Democrats have good options for enforcing this cost on their opponents.  With the GOP’s latest display of contempt for Oregon voters, Democrats have fresh ammunition in campaigns to flip a few more seats from red to blue to end the GOP’s abuse of the quorum rule.  There are also initiatives being pursued that would reform the state constitution so that the two-thirds rule no longer applies.  If the GOP refuses to abide by democratic norms not written into law, then it is high time to write those norms into law.

But reforms that deny the GOP the ability to stymy majority rule are only part of a necessary strategy.  Democrats need to get much more aggressive in publicly identifying the transformation of the GOP into a white nationalist party that see its survival rooted in riling up its dwindling base against the diverse American majority.  Not forcing the GOP to account for its de facto white nationalism in states like Oregon is at this point foolish.  My guess that Democratic leaders both in Oregon and nationally fear that they will be accused of calling their opponents racist — but this can be overcome by a smart, calculated strategy that pairs this accurate description of reality with an acknowledgment of the cultural resentments, anxiety about demographic change, and reality-based economic fears that underlie this growing white tribalism.  To acknowledge accelerants to white nationalism does not mean excusing it, but rather is a way to begin to undo its irrational power, to expose it as grounded in weakness, not strength, and to no longer allow its unacknowledged appeal to frame the terms of our political debates.  

In Oregon, this also means redoubling efforts to aid rural counties that have been left behind by the post-recession growth that has fueled increasing wealth in urban areas like Portland.  A readiness to call out the Republican Party’s swing to white identity politics needs to be paired with outreach to GOP voters betrayed by their current representatives, who would have them believe that rural Oregonians will somehow thrive if climate change decimates the state’s vast natural resources, or that there is no future beyond industries like forestry and agriculture that have long dominated in large parts of Oregon, or that they will somehow benefit by pretending that those who live in cities and don’t look like them aren’t real Oregonians.

Quarantine Trump, Part II

Reporting from The Washington Post adds more details to the story of the White House’s botched response to the coronavirus threat to date.  I described a couple days ago how Donald Trump’s concern with re-election has been the prism through which he views this crisis, distorting his priorities and contributing to his propagation of disinformation about the challenge we collectively face.  The Post article provides more details on this obsession, but also crucially details the basic incompetence that has plagued his and his team’s response.

The decision to name Vice President Mike Pence as coordinator of the coronavirus response effort also looks worse the more we learn about it.  The Post notes that, unlike previous administrations, Trump declined to name a “czar” to handle this health emergency, and goes on to report, “The president decided against that option after worrying that bringing in a person from outside the administration might be seen as a failure — and wondering whether such a person would be loyal to him, according to those familiar with the debate.”  Though at this late stage of his presidency it’s no surprise that the president would worry more about perceptions of his own failure and requirements of loyalty from subordinates, in this emergency context such tendencies come across as simply deranged.  Moreover, even some of Pence advisers wondered “whether having Pence in charge was a good idea, given the the messy situation and a lack of experience in his office on the topic.”  

The article also reports that some Republican senators have been criticizing the administration response and lack of preparedness; yet some of these same senators were in office while the administration made the cutbacks to the U.S. pandemic response infrastructure that are now plaguing current efforts.  Where was the GOP when it had a chance to help prevent these foolish decisions?  While from a political perspective it’s tentatively encouraging to see them willing to criticize Trump, we can’t ignore their hypocrisy and cynicism in speaking out now rather than years ago. 

The piece also offers a good summation of the president’s various misstatements and lies about the spread and threat of the virus, though they are scattered throughout the article, which has the effect of downplaying the consistency of his efforts to dissemble about the threat facing the United States.  Most jaw-dropping to me is his statement Thursday that, “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”  This may be the clearest evidence yet that the president, faced with an implacable reality, would rather convince himself and others of fantasy scenarios in which all will be right with the world, rather than confront necessary challenges head-on.

Writing at the New Republic, Ryu Spaeth zeroes in on what may be behind this possible self-delusion on the part of the president. He says that beyond the basic fact of Trump’s instinct to spread disinformation, there has been “a strong whiff of wish fulfillment in all [his] strenuous assertions” about the threat of the coronavirus, and that “his response also reveals a deep unease, a recognition on Trump’s part, through the apocalyptic swirl of his own paranoia, that the coronavirus represents a very real threat to his presidency.”  Spaeth correctly notes the threat Trump sees in an economic downturn driven by the coronavirus; the reference to Trump’s tone of “wish fulfillment” gets at the fact that at a basic, undeniable level, Trump understands reality quite well.  Indeed, the more threatening that reality is, the more incentive he has both to delude himself and to convince the rest of us of his own delusions.   I think that he realizes his own unfitness for the presidency, and is panicked by his growing peril, which raises the possibility of further flailing missteps and doubling down on what has been operating model for three years — relying on disinformation and propaganda to hide his shortcomings.

In the face of the threat of the virus and the president’s well-established incompetence, criticism of the president is well-warranted and necessary, as our best chance to hold him accountable and force as much of a course correction as possible.  Of course, to the president and his defenders, there is no distinction possible between attempts to hold him accountable for doing the job he was elected to do, and fantastical theories of a vast media-liberal-deep state conspiracy to destroy his presidency by any means necessary.  The idea that any criticism of Trump is always and ever unmerited may have begun as an authoritarian political strategy, but at this stage, when it blinds him and his defenders to the political risks of downplaying a threat that cannot ultimately be covered up by lies and propaganda, it has evolved into something indistinguishable from paranoia.

Afghani-gone?

It is not getting nearly as much attention as it should in the midst of the coronavirus threat, stock market crashings, and the escalating Democratic presidential primary — but news this weekend that the United States has signed a deal with the Taliban to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan within 14 months is remarkable.  The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan has been a vast and ultimately indefensible catastrophe, second only to the invasion of Iraq in its folly and infliction of suffering and death on literally millions of people.  As tragic as the deaths of more than 3,500 U.S. and coalition troops have been, this tragedy has been multiplied many times more among Afghan soldiers, civilians, and insurgents.  Then there is the $2 trillion cost of the war, over decades during which the American people were told, by politicians of both parties, that this country could not afford health care for more people, could not provide more assistance with college tuition, could not solve our homeless crisis.

And yet we are now at a point where we could have been nearly two decades ago — signing a deal with the Taliban, whose good faith still cannot be trusted.  Apart from the withdrawal of troops, the deal lays out a framework for the Taliban and Afghan government to negotiate during the withdrawal period; as The Washington Post notes, the “agenda for the talks is massive, including a comprehensive cease-fire, the role of the Taliban in a future government, and rights for women and civil society.”  It is still possible the deal will fall apart; Secretary of Defense Mark Esper stated that the “United States will not hesitate to nullify the agreement” if the Taliban does not maintain its commitments.  Indeed, critics are already noting that the Taliban will never adhere to its commitments during this negotiation period, and will eventually take over the country again once the United States leaves.  And yet, absent a  World War II-style mobilization to occupy Afghanistan that we never undertook and will never undertake, this was always the inevitable endpoint: a crappy deal that to a great degree would yield Afghanistan’s destiny largely back to its warring factions.

It is too soon for definitive answers as to why the U.S. is withdrawing now, but it seems that President Trump’s willingness to do so is the primary driver.  And since Trump is president, there is no outcry of treason from the right that would have met a Democrat’s decision to do the same — vaguely akin to staunch anti-communist Richard Nixon having the credibility to launch direct relations with China.  We have yet to learn the tenor of the advice that Trump has been receiving from the military and his advisors, and to what extent this decision has broader institutional support.

The New York Times writes that, “The Trump administration has framed the deal as the long-awaited promise made to war-weary Americans, for whom the Afghan war has defined a generation of loss and trauma but has yielded no victory.”  But are Americans really war-weary?  The Times, and indeed President Trump, suggest they are ready for our Afghanistan involvement to end, but is this really the case?  To the contrary, this war has been conducted increasingly far from the consciousness or concern of most Americans. Yet this lack of caring has been going on arguably since the first few years of the conflict, as Iraq and its aftermath occupied the national dialogue.  And the notion that this war “has defined a generation of loss and trauma” badly misstates the impact it’s had on the United States.  An extremely narrow segment of the population has served in Afghanistan, to the point that many Americans don’t know anyone who has actually been deployed there, let alone killed or wounded.  Yes, there has been much loss and trauma, but it has been largely invisible to the great majority of Americans, and experienced by a small subset of our population and their families.

Most startling of all is that major news sources are reporting on this withdrawal plan and the history of the Afghanistan War this weekend without noting that it has for most of its duration constituted a fraud perpetrated on the American people.  A few months ago, The Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers reporting project laid out the serial incompetence, lack of credible strategy, and self-delusion that have constituted the American experience in Afghanistan.  Most damningly, the Afghanistan Papers also laid out the great degree to which the government, including administration officials of both parties and the military, consistently lied to the American people about how badly and how fruitlessly our efforts were going, and suppressed vital knowledge that the conflict was fundamentally un-winnable.  Afghanistan has been a terrible war; but it has also been a scandal and cover-up of historic proportions, for which the American and Afghan people have paid the price.  For the United States, this incompetence abetted by mendacity has denied the American people the ability to make informed decisions about the United States’ war in Afghanistan. In this sense, the war has been a tragedy of democracy as well as of human life.

Instead, the U.S. continued fighting, not simply out of bureaucratic inertia, or the stated goal to prevent another 9/11, but as an insurance policy to protect the current administration, whether George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump, from political damage should another large terrorist attack occur on U.S. soil.  In this sense, American soldiers have figured as sacrificial figures, the spilling of their blood required to show that we were “doing something,” even if that something no longer had any rational relationship to decreasing the threat of terrorism against the United States.  The Afghan people have similarly been sacrificed for U.S. politics, though invisibly.

Quarantine Trump

If there is any justice in this world, February 28 will remembered as the day the Trump presidency ended.  Staring down the prospect of a pandemic that has already killed thousands around the world and brought the Chinese economy to a standstill, Donald Trump declared at a rally Friday night that the coronavirus is a “hoax”; at a news conference today, he said that he had actually been referring to what the Democrats are saying about the virus, which is a distinction without a difference. Against a deadly reality that requires a concerted and rapid federal response, our president put forth a grotesque and self-serving lie about the danger this disease poses, transforming a real-world emergency into a conspiracy to deny him re-election.  In doing so, he endangers us all, no matter your party affiliation, gender, race, or citizenship status, and confirms his basic unfitness to hold office. His dereliction of duty will haunt him going forward, and into the 2020 election.

Fearing the effects of the coronavirus on his re-election first and foremost, the president is clearly obsessed with the economic downside rather than the human cost of the disease.  This is not subtext with him; it is what he unmistakably communicates with every tweet and every appearance.  Earlier this week he was denying that the virus would have much impact in the U.S., and told us that the stock market looked pretty good to him.  Now, just a few days later, he’s reached the absurd endpoint of his regime of propaganda, attempting to persuade the American people that the virus is nothing to worry about.  

Just a few hours ago, he continued along in this vein, speaking about the first American death from the coronavirus.  He told reporters that, “healthy individuals should be able to fully recover [. . .] So healthy people, if you’re healthy, you will probably go through a process, and you’ll be fine.”  The president can’t even bring himself to say people will get sick, only that they will “go through a process,” as if we are all automatons to him; nor does it seem to occur to him how worrying his words might be to someone who is not healthy, including those suffering from illness or seniors, who together number in the tens of millions in the U.S. alone.  But he cannot acknowledge that many millions are at risk because he fears for his re-election — and apart from, this, of course, he is fundamentally incompetent and completely unmanned by the current crisis.

His insane ideas are being echoed by other members of the administration, who amplify the cuckoo message in an attempt to make state propaganda overwhelm necessary facts.  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo refused to say if the virus was a hoax, while White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney simply opined that Americans should ignore news about it.  Meanwhile, outside the White House, right-wing commentators are spreading the fiction that it is a story concocted to bring down the president.

By elevating his election concerns to the highest priority and attempting to hold back the tide of reality, Donald Trump and his henchmen are all but ensuring that Americans will die from his recklessness.  There is certainly a federal effort underway that takes the reality of the virus as a given, but the president’s contradictory words disarm Americans who need to take this virus seriously.  Beyond this, his appointment of Vice President Mike Pence to head up the effort is evidence that he does not take this fight seriously, given the Vice President’s horrible record with mishandling an HIV outbreak in Indiana while he was governor.  And the federal effort is left scrambling and playing catch-up due to the defunding of the CDC and pandemic response teams that the Trump administration has pushed over the last few years.

In one awful swoop, this disease is rendering defunct the president’s America First attitude and the GOP’s decades-long war against national healthcare.  Though the president may try to blame Democrats for open borders that have somehow allowed the (hoax) virus to enter the country, the reality is that migration has nothing to do with this pandemic.  If anything (and leaving aside the Chinese government’s authoritarian incompetence), it’s the basic interconnectedness of our world that is helping it spread, including tourism and international businesses.  Rather than being an argument for closing ourselves off from the world, something like the coronavirus is more evidence that in the contemporary world, international cooperation is the order of the day if we are to beat back threats like pandemics and climate chaos.  

Our fundamental interconnectedness within our borders is also why the coronavirus may well blow up the GOP’s decades-long war against health care for all.  Over the past few days in particular, I’ve read many people who note that our lack of guaranteed health care becomes a mortal threat when a disease like the coronavirus threatens.  I’ve seen the U.S. described as almost a hothouse for a pandemic, as millions will put off going to the doctor, while millions more who lack sufficient sick leave will go to work when they should remain at home, and in this way ensure the virus’ spread.  

At this point, we are wholly reliant on the people surrounding Trump and the federal bureaucracy to steer us away from disaster. Unfortunately, at this late stage, Trump has culled all but half-wits, sycophants, and white supremacists from his inner circle, which means that we will need to place our faith in the competence of officials like those at the Centers for Disease Control to make the right decisions going forward. This situation will also place added responsibility on state officials to compensate for the lack of leadership at the top of the governmental hierarchy. And whatever pressure our members of Congress can place on this presidency, be it through oversight or publicizing its shortcomings, will be badly needed in the days ahead.

At the local level, we’re going to need to double down on our care for each other and help each other stay informed and safe. This will include a rigorous and sustained pushback against the lies emanating from this White House about the coronavirus and the unforgivable effort to lull Americans into complacency on behalf of Trump’s re-election campaign. This means not passing on the president’s lies, but it also means not passing on false information about the spread of the coronavirus that foments panic rather than building understanding. Don’t forward on or post stories reflexively; check sources, and use your common sense.

Will Trump Echo China's Inept Authoritarian Response to Coronavirus?

As the scope of the coronavirus threat has begun to impress itself on the American public this past week, and the impulse to look inward and protect ourselves, at the national, state, and personal levels, becomes stronger, we need to reserve some energy and effort to understanding how this pandemic in the making came to be.  In particular, the fact that it’s emerged from China, one of the most authoritarian and anti-democratic countries on earth, seems to cry out for deep examination.  The country has been recalcitrant in its sharing of information about the virus with other nations; from this perspective, the country’s authoritarian style has hampered the efforts of the global community to control the spread of the coronavirus, and so itself effectively contributes to the threat to other nations.

Likewise, it has seemed highly probable to me that the country’s totalitarian governance has a direct relationship to its internal mishandling of the outbreak — but this has been more of an intuition than a well-developed theory.  The basic lack of accountability to its people gives the Chinese government an incentive not to act competently, but this is certainly balanced by the government’s need not to lose the confidence of its population and provoke unrest or even threats to the Communist Party’s hold on power.  At the same time, I could see the obvious counter-argument that its broad control over the population meant it might conceivably be more effective than democratic nations in locking down the virus; after all, so easily being able to effectively declare quarantines for vast swathes of the population could be seen as an advantage when dealing with a contagious disease.  And wouldn’t its vast surveillance apparatus aid it in detecting and controlling an epidemic?

But as professor and technology writer Zeynep Tufekci discusses at The Atlantic, the idea that authoritarian leaders might have trouble understanding what’s going on in their own countries is actually a well-documented phenomenon.  From China’s own modern history, she describes how the famines that began in the 1950’s could be traced to Chairman Mao Zedong receiving wildly inflated information about food production from subordinates “afraid of reporting bad news and because they wanted to please their superiors.”  However, China’s leadership learned from such tendencies, and in more recent times has used “big-data analytics in a digital public sphere” to monitor public sentiments and monitor events.  The government has used this to respond to real issues (such as incidences of corruption) in a way that allows it to appear accountable to the Chinese people without the democratic mechanisms that normally make accountability possible.

But under Xi Jinping, surveillance has been heightened ever more through social media and monitoring apps, and the country now also has an extensive system of cameras that interface with facial-recognition software.  The logical effect is to make people more cautious about the information they share, which confounds the government’s ability to rely on its monitoring of them to manage social unrest.

When the virus began to appear, it also seems likely, based on Tufekci’s description of events, that local authorities had incentives to downplay the ominous news, and in so doing enabled its spread.  She points to Xi’s slow response to the outbreak as evidence, writing:

It’s hard to imagine that a leader of Xi’s experience would be so lax as to let the disease spread freely for almost two months, only to turn around and shut the whole country down practically overnight [. . .] If people are too afraid to talk, and if punishing people for “rumors” becomes the norm, a doctor punished for spreading news of a disease in one province becomes just another day, rather than an indication of impending crisis.

Tufekci notes that it’s difficult to know with certainty how events have played out in China, but the dynamics she outlines are persuasive.  The coming months should involve a continued close look at how Chinese authoritarianism has led to a direct threat to the health and livelihood of the rest of the global community.

Even without definitive conclusions, it’s not too soon to see China as a warning sign, as our own authoritarian president shows every sign of fumbling the U.S. response to the coronavirus, threatening to add a deadly new dimension to his reign of incompetence.  Many observers were rightly horrified by his press conference yesterday; coming on the heels of bountiful evidence that he is less worried about Americans dying than about the stock market drying up and costing him re-election, his appearance provided further evidence that he’s not up to the task of protecting the United States, either mentally or morally.  

And just as the Chinese effort seems undermined by the unwillingness of those lower in the state hierarchy to pass bad news on to their superiors, the president has spent the last three years replacing competence with loyalty in the U.S. government, prizing denial and disinformation over facts.  It seems well within the realm of possibility that he has now surrounded himself sufficiently with an apparatus of personnel and information-gathering that ensures he will only hear what he wants to as he deals with the first true crisis of his presidency.

It also seems quite possible that he will resort to authoritarian solutions to the challenge, both out of personal inclination and because the intelligence and prior planning needed to deal with this crisis are wholly beyond the man.  At a minimum, he will surely use this “viral invasion” to double down on his lies that America needs to cut itself off from the world, when the real lesson is that his idea of defending America’s borders, through physical walls, destroying alliances, and cruelty to immigrants (including crowding them into camps where they are more vulnerable to communicable diseases) bears no relationship to what protecting the United States actually looks like.  As many have noted, a global pandemic can only be addressed by global cooperation; in the face of this, the radical nationalism that the president advocates begins to appear even more cut off from reality, even outright delusional, and promoting American weakness, not strength.

Boo to Bloomberg

As he’s moved up the polls and made his first debate appearances, I’ve been catching up on my Michael Bloomberg reading.  I’ve been deeply skeptical from the get-go at the spectacle of a billionaire trying to buy the Democratic presidential nomination, and getting better acquainted with the details of his past and candidacy has only highlighted how obscene and dangerous his nomination would be.  The Washington Post has an in-depth report on the long history of sexual harassment of women at the business he founded, while his derogatory remarks about trans people and minorities have been widely reported.  Then there’s his stop and frisk policy as New York City mayor, the very archetype of a racist approach to policing.

If you’re wondering how Bloomberg came to anoint himself the savior of the Democratic Party and not get laughed off the virtual public square, I highly recommend this New York Times deep-dive on the power and influence he’s developed in politics through careful deployment of money in exchange for tacit loyalty from politicians and others throughout the country.  This has left him with a great deal of credibility in the eyes of many who have received his largesse or agree with the good works it has done.

The most trenchant arguments against his candidacy, though, center on his billionaire status and authoritarian instincts.  David Dayen’s take at The American Prospect hits both these points; the following is a powerful summation of what he says it would mean for Democrats to nominate Bloomberg to challenge Donald Trump:

I think it’s a tragic mistake. A plutocrat-on-plutocrat election will just further subvert our already fragile democracy. It will show that nothing matters in a democracy if you have enough money. It will take every comment that Democrats said about the GOP being seduced by Trump and boomerang it back in their faces. It is an act of pure desperation that will alienate giant swathes of the country and put a For Sale sign on democracy, perhaps permanently.

Similarly, Greg Sargent hones in on the contest between Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders to explore the specific damage the former’s vast financial resources can inflict on American democracy.  He notes how millions of people have given average donations of $18 to the Sanders campaign, allowing him to run entirely on people power, and asks:

What message will it send if Democrats allow this new model to be snuffed out under an avalanche of one billionaire’s spending from his plutocratic fortune?  What message will this send to the millions of people who have scraped to do their part against Trump by donating small sums not just to Sanders but also to the other Democrats?

Framing the fight against Bloomberg’s intrusion into the race as not just Bloomberg versus a particular candidate, but effectively against the collective voice of all the supporters of a candidate, helps clarify the stakes.  Bloomberg appeals to many Democrats as a deep-pocketed savior, problematically viewing him as “our Trump.”  Yet the idea that Americans need another plutocrat to defend them represents a debased rather than realistic vision of both the Democratic Party and American democracy.  In a very real sense, the oligarchy and concentration of wealth that so many Democrats identify as a mortal threat to this country are coming directly for the Democratic Party itself in the form of Michael Bloomberg, a man ready to resolve the party’s long-running struggle between working people and the wealthy in favor of the latter.

The challenge Bloomberg presents can be posed as a question of faith — the faith that Americans have in each other, their collective voice, and their capacity to forge their own future.  Do we believe we can defend ourselves, or have we given up hope?  Do we believe that the nation can be transformed into a land of equals, or do we believe it’s time to accept that the public square and economy have been taken over by the wealthiest among us? Do we trust each other to move the country into a future that will benefit all?

President's Lies About Russian 2020 Election Interference Require Full-on Debunking by Democrats

The cascade of offenses against our democracy and our collective security can feel overwhelming, but the stories last week about Russian efforts to double down on their efforts in 2016 and interfere in the 2020 election should be getting every American’s attention.  This is not simply because our leaders, both Democrats and Republicans, have a responsibility to put a stop to this attack, but because the president is already lying about the Russian offensive, just as he did in the wake of Russia’s 2016 sabotage.

It has gone on for so long that it can be hard to see the situation with fresh eyes, but this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stop trying.  When the U.S. intelligence community warns that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election to support him, and Donald Trump denies this, everyone who believes in our right to choose the leaders we want should understand that the president is simply lying.  He has no sources of information apart from our national intelligence agencies.  If he did, he would make them known, to strengthen his case, but he does not.  Beyond this, the president’s indifference to Russian interference, even for the moment granting him his belief that it’s not actually for his benefit, in itself is a failure to protect the U.S. from a foreign attack.

The New York Times reports that the president was angered by the fact that Democrats were briefed on the intelligence community’s assessment of the interference intended to benefit him, but you will search in vain for reports of his similar anger at the Russians for attempting to undermine U.S. elections in the first place.  The president apparently is upset that the Democrats have been told this information because he worries they will use it against him for partisan advantage.  This again betrays the president’s complete lack of understanding of what it means to actually be an American president, not just a Republican one.  An American president would find Russian support of his presidency obscene and in need of rebuffing; this president, though, prefers to simply persuade the American people that no such support exists, and to do nothing about receiving its benefits. In furtherance of this strategy, he has already dismissed the acting director of intelligence he holds responsible for publicizing Russia’s support of his campaign, and has replaced him with a lackey who has apparently been charged with defending the president’s political interests over U.S. national security: a disturbing turn toward converting the U.S. intelligence apparatus into a partisan weapon.

Not only has the president lied about what he knows regarding Russia’s ongoing campaign to re-elect him, he claims that Russia actually wants Bernie Sanders to be president.  Yet it has also been reported that the Russians are interfering in the Democratic primary and appear to support the Sanders’ candidacy: information which Donald Trump has clearly been briefed on.  This Democratic Party effort may indeed be part of Russia’s attempt to undermine our faith in our electoral system more generally, but it is clearly not at odds with Russia’s effort to re-elect Trump, as they would not be alone in viewing Sanders as a weak candidate against him.  But rather than act to foil and deter Russia’s interference in our elections, including the Democratic primary, Trump is already using the sabotage campaign to his personal advantage: he tells us it is indeed ongoing, takes no responsibility to stop it, and uses it as a partisan weapon to slander Sanders.  I don’t see how you can look at these facts and not conclude that the president is effectively colluding with the Russian scheme against our election on his behalf, by choosing to distort the ends of the Russian interference in the Democratic primary rather than call it out as a hostile act against the United States that he has a responsibility to stop.  In a similar vein, his denial of the Russian efforts on his behalf — again, based on absolutely no evidence — mean that he is effectively colluding with their effort on behalf of him.  

The true horror and absurdity of this moment come into full focus when we recall the events of the past four years, with which this latest information provides a dark continuity.  The president is doing the same thing he did in the 2016 election and its aftermath, when he reaped the benefits of Russian electoral interference while denying that such interference existed (and this is setting aside the extensive evidence of explicit collusion between his campaign and the Russian government).  And since that election, we’ve witnessed a president curiously obsequious to Vladimir Putin, mysteriously subordinating vital aspects of American foreign policy to Russian interests.

As in the past, the president lies about Russia’s role with support from the broader GOP.  Tellingly, the evidence Republican officials cite of Trump’s allegedly tough stance against Moscow is laughable, only serving to disprove their point.  Defending Trump, Representative Chris Stewart spoke of how the president has strengthened NATO and supplied anti-tank weapons to Ukraine.  For anyone to believe that Trump has been strengthening NATO, and not trying to tear it down since the day he took office, is too absurd to contemplate.  And as for his commitment to defending Ukraine?  I seem to recall an impeachment about how he tried to extort that country, withholding vital military aid even while Ukrainian soldiers were dying in their conflict with Russia and Russia-backed separatists.  

So as Republican elected officials sign on to Trump’s lies about Russia’s role, the fact that the president is now purging the intelligence community to ensure that further information about Russia’s activities on his behalf is not made public or known to Democrats is not simply chilling, but a fact that in itself needs to be called to account beyond the fact of Russia’s attack on our elections.  In doing so, the president is seeking to formalize his own lies about Russia’s role, again abetting that attack rather than defending America against it.

At this point, the House Democrats’ game plan for running the 2020 election by highlighting health care, jobs, and corruption seems to have run into the wood chipper of the hard facts of the president’s betrayal of this country.  When America is attacked, the president’s job as commander in chief is to defend it, not to give the attackers a pass because he thinks they’re on his side.  For the Democrats to ignore the overriding primacy of protecting our elections is to exist in a sort of fantasyland.  A foreign campaign to rig the 2020 election, supported by the president, is not something that they can simply ignore, as if ignoring it will somehow make it go away or allow them to set the agenda of the 2020 election.  They act as if they can’t do anything about it, yet Trump clearly fears exposure — that’s why he keeps lying about what Russia is doing, even as he seeks to benefit from it.

This isn’t to say that the Democrats can’t or shouldn’t also advocate for their positive agenda.  Indeed, it’s crazy to me how they don’t see how the president’s profound abdication of duty on this central issue — defending our elections — completely dovetails with the issues they say they want to run on.  If the president can’t be trusted to defend our elections, how can he be trusted to defend people’s health care or jobs?  And isn’t enabling and embracing a foreign attack based on his selfish personal interest the ultimate example of corruption?

Indeed, we are at our current perilous point in part because the Democrats have held back in two major respects.  First, they have refrained from the necessary demonization and denunciations of Russia that Putin’s offenses demand.  Election sabotage is not something we just have to get used to; it’s something we have to put an end to.  Crush Russian with economic sanctions; arm their enemies; arrest any Russians involved with the election tampering who make the mistake of leaving Russian territory.  And last but not least, enact a long-term strategy that undermines Putin’s authoritarian state and gives the Russian people a shot at life in a democracy.

Given that the Russians are meddling in the Democratic primaries on Bernie Sanders’ behalf, the Democrats also have no political choice but to emphasize that they view Russia as engaged in an attack on the U.S. that must be repelled and defeated.  Otherwise, we will surely see Donald Trump flip the script, and accuse Bernie of being the one who is colluding with the Russians, while asserting that he’s the true defender of America (in fact, in the few hours since I started writing this article, I now see that Trump’s National Security Adviser, Robert O’Brien, is also using the reports of Russia’s interference on Bernie Sanders’ behalf as demonstrating Sanders’ sympathy for Russia, leading me to believe we’ll be seeing much more of this tactic. In light of this, Sanders would be well advised to take the advice of former FBI agent Asha Rangappa, who writes today that “If Bernie is the nominee, he needs to DEMAND, vocally and repeatedly, that the IC thoroughly investigate all Russian efforts to boost his campaign, provide him with regular updates, and for Trump to immediately take steps to ensure election security.” Rangappa argues that this is the right thing to do, forms a sharp contrast with the president’s behavior, and is a prophylactic against the slurs that will come from the Trump campaign).  Similarly, I don’t see how any Democratic presidential candidate can be considered credible without a concrete plan to end Russian election interference once and for all.  This simply can’t be permitted to go on.  It may not be war in the classic sense of a violent conflict, but the use of sophisticated misinformation efforts to hack our democracy is nonetheless an attack on our political system and our society.

Second, despite having impeached Trump for abuse of power, Democrats have shied away from the assertion that is staring us in the face: that this president has actively betrayed the United States by making himself party to an attack by a hostile foreign power.  I understand the impulse to avoid Trump-like incendiary language and a general desire to avoid exacerbating the incivility that he has fueled; yet our inability to call something by its right name can be crippling, and that increasingly feels like the case regarding Trump’s unwillingness to defend the United States against foreign attack.

Re-Establishing Rule of Law Will Require Maximum Transparency From Democrats

As we look forward to months of a hard-fought Democratic primary campaign accompanied by escalating authoritarianism from the president and his compromised party — including, crucially, attempts by Trump and his lackeys to undermine both the Democratic primary and subvert the 2020 election — it might feel premature to talk too much about what stance Democrats should take towards the legacy of corruption, crime, and treason they would inherit should they win back the White House.  But this question is far more than an abstract intellectual exercise, since how Democrats answer it will shape the nature of the campaign and their prospects for victory.  Beyond this, it will give form to an equally crucial struggle: how to govern in a way that rebuilds our collective faith in democracy while also working to disrupt, degrade, and destroy the Trumpist movement that has brought us so close to the brink of an American-style authoritarianism.

Trump’s post-acquittal behavior has demonstrated the centrality of undermining the impartial administration of justice to his authoritarian aims.  Since the Senate vote, the president’s highest priority has been to seek to punish those whom he considers his enemies; he has fired witnesses who responded to subpoenas (Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, sad-sack EU Ambassador Sondland), called for investigations of opponents, and supercharged efforts to protects his allies from ongoing legal actions (Roger Stone, Michael Flynn).  Punishing enemies and protecting friends by abusing the law is deeply corrupt, as it turns the law into a tool of partisan power rather than an instrument of justice.  For a strongman-type like Trump, though, using the law in this manner is simply common sense — if you can do this to your advantage and no one can stop you, it’s irresistible to try to exact vengeance and consolidate power.

Turning the Department of Justice into an enforcer of presidential vendettas and mercies will inevitably corrode any broad public sense that the legal system can be trusted.  If government officials can drum up false charges against some of the most powerful people in America, then how would we ever know whether lesser cases didn’t involve similar corruption or bias?  Why wouldn’t U.S. attorneys around the nation learn the lesson that to get ahead, the path lies in targeting local Democratic politicians on false charges, and deciding not to pursue allegations against Republican allies of the president?

So Trump’s attempts to make the Department of Justice into a partisan weapon are the tip of the spear in destroying the rule of law in our country.  But it’s not just in terms of directly subverting the administration of justice, via self-serving decisions to investigate or prosecute; it also destroys the rule of law by undermining public faith that it can ever trust its government to administer justice fairly and impartially more generally.  In a corrosive and depressing fashion, the logical conclusion most people would reach after a sustained period of such abuses is one sadly identical to that of the president: that the law is merely a tool that the powerful use to abuse their enemies and the less powerful.

Meanwhile, alongside this politicized attempt to hollow out the idea of who is guilty and who is innocent, there are countless pieces of evidence that the president and his cabinet have engaged in all manner of corrupt, illegal behavior, from the president’s endless grifting of taxpayers to the more mundane money-making of lesser lights like Rick Perry and Elaine Chao.  This behavior of course intersects with the president’s efforts to corrupt justice in a crucial way, in that he and his cronies are able to break the law in plain sight without fear of a politicized Justice Department taking any legal action.

All the major Democratic presidential candidates appear committed to following the rule of law should they be elected; we would expect them not to use the Justice Department as a political weapon and to respect the idea that the law applies to all equally, and to preside over administrations that aim to act in a non-criminal manner.  Yet a commitment to follow the rule of law is not the same as the need to restore the rule of law following the corruptions of the Trump administration.  A strong case can be made that it will in fact not be possible to follow the rule of law without a proper accounting and undoing of the damage the Trump administration has inflicted on it.  For example, if the Trump administration has corruptly instigated or subverted investigations, a Democratic administration could not simply pick up the threads and continue as before, since this would mean becoming complicit in and sustaining the very corruption they had pledged to end.  Likewise, allowing Trump and his minions to evade consequences for their rampant criminality would perpetuate the current administration’s contempt for the law.  Allowing crimes to go unpunished means that they would be repeated; for Republicans, and even Democrats, would have learned the lesson that any presidential crimes are permitted, since they will always be forgiven in the name of moving on.

Given all this, you will not be surprised when I say that it’s essential that a Democratic president act decisively both to clean up the Department of Justice and ensure that Trump administration crimes face proper scrutiny and punishment.  You may be surprised, though, when I also say that in practice this will likely be much, much harder than it sounds in theory.

As a real-world reference, let’s start with the criticism Senator Elizabeth Warren has received in the last week for reiterating, in the context of Bill Barr’s interference in Justice Department investigations and sentencing decisions, that as president she would “propose an independent DOJ task force to investigate crimes by Trump administration officials.”  Warren made this point in the course of identifying the president’s abuse of Justice Department investigations as an authoritarian threat that needs to be rolled back not just in the next administration, but in the here and now, via congressional action.  The general critique of her position is that this sort of task force would resume the same illicit practices as the Trump administration, using the Department of Justice to wage war on partisan enemies.

Lawfare’s Susan Hennessy tweeted a brief but nuanced critique of Warren’s proposal, writing that “Presidential candidates should NOT be pledging to investigate Trump, or any political opponent or any other specific person, if elected. We need to restore norms of DOJ independence. This erodes them further.”  Hennessy also, importantly, notes that it is acceptable for Warren to call on Congress to investigate Trump, suggesting that Democrats in Congress would be fine to do so in a Warren presidency as well; her concern is with abuse of the administration of justice by the executive branch.  While agreeing with Warren’s anti-corruption focus in general, she sees Warren’s pledge of a specific investigation as a red flag, and suggests (in the funhouse way of Twitter, in response to a question from NPR’s “Wait Wait. . .  Don’t Tell Me” Host Peter Sagal) an alternate approach for Warren to take:

I think the right answer is "I will appoint a qualified Attorney General who upholds the rule of law and the impartial administration of justice. I will trust his or her judgment regarding appropriate investigative and prosecutorial decisions.  As president I would set enforcement priorities, including addressing political corruption and white collar crime.  That said, it is inappropriate for any candidate to comment on individual investigations and shameful President Trump doesn't share this core commitment."

I agree 100% with Hennessy’s wish to avoid a politicized justice process, and have come around to thinking that her critique of Warren’s task force idea is warranted; yet the practical and political reality is that a Democratic president would play a decisive role in what approach to take to the Trump’s administration’s criminality, no matter the distance the new president tries to establish.  If a president set political corruption as a priority, and the AG proceeded to undo Trump’s corrupt practices, would there be any doubt that this is what the president also wanted?  Similarly, if a new president set political corruption as a priority, and the Justice Department proceeded to indict members of the Trump administration for their crimes, there would unavoidably be a sense that the president had set this course by his or her prioritization of political corruption.

Of course, I’m being a bit loose with my language when I say “there will inevitably be a sense” of this politicization.  Who, after all, will be doing this sensing?  On the one hand, millions of Americans who despise Trump would cheer such cleaning of house, inevitably seeing it as a sort of payback against Trump, no matter how justified the investigations or charges.  Simultaneously, Republicans would waste no time claiming that any investigations or charges against Trump officials were politically motivated — after all, why not make lemonades out of lemons and argue that Democrats are now no better than Trump?

Re-establishing a government that enforces the law impartially in the name of justice for all Americans may be the single greatest challenge for a new administration.  This encompasses everything from protecting our elections from foreign interference to making sure the president doesn’t use DOJ investigations to kneecap political rivals.  But just as the option of simply turning the page on Trump administration lawlessness means to condone and perpetuate it, what might seem like the righteous option of righting Trump’s perversion of the law and punishing his criminality carries inevitable risks of appearing as corrupt as he was, even if this fictional bias is cheered by partisan Democrats and hypocritically hyped by the GOP.

In other words, even as the Democrats need to do the right thing for the country and undo Trump administration corruption, this very corruption has created a presumption of biased or politically motivated behavior that a Democratic president will not be able to entirely evade.  There is no getting around the fact that widespread criminality on the part of Trump, supported by the congressional GOP, means that the Democrats face a fairly treacherous path forward.  Indeed, I’ve come to believe that there is no good path forward, only less bad ones.  Many Republicans and others will inevitably view a Democratic commitment to the rule of law as a naked partisan play, their capacity to believe the words of the other party undermined by how thoroughly Donald Trump has poisoned our collective assumptions about the motives of a president, and the vast capacity for abuse of power he has displayed.  The irony is depressing: when following the rule of law leads to indictments of criminal members of the Trump administration, the Republicans will attempt to cast this very adherence to justice as corruption, even when they know better.  Cleaning up corruption will itself be accused of being corrupt.

In light of this compromised terrain, it seems that in addition to foregrounding an unswerving commitment to the rule of law, the Democratic presidential candidate should publicly articulate the contradictions and dangers involved in cleaning up the mess Trump leaves behind, as a way of defusing some of the inevitable gaslighting by the GOP, and of signaling to Democrats that the order of the day is justice, not payback.  He or she should clearly state why it’s important to undo the corruption and punish the criminality of the Trump administration, but also clearly acknowledge the dangers of this situation, and pledge a commitment to non-partisan justice.  Even if this doesn’t stop Republican officials from bad faith accusations of bias, such transparency will help the public reach their own conclusions.

At the same time, both the new president and Democrats in Congress would do well to pair investigations and charges against members of the Trump administration with new laws that would help prevent such corruption in the future, such as around increased transparency on the part of the White House and cabinet members.  Legislation that requires greater openness by the new administration would demonstrate that the Democrats are serious about preventing a recurrence of the abuses of the Trump administration, even if it constrains their own power.  In other words, rhetoric and action must work toward a corruption-free future, which will help defuse accusations that everything is just a matter of partisan payback. Faced with the wreckage of the most corrupt administration in U.S. history, Democrats need to do everything they can to undo the damage without being contaminated by it.

Sympathy for the Devils

To paraphrase convicted Illinois ex-governor Rod Blagojevich: Today’s pardon travesty is fucking golden — for anyone who wants to beat Trump in 2020.  It would be difficult for the president’s most dedicated enemies to come up with a more damning sleazeball two-fer than Blagojevich and Michael Milken, the junk bond king who stuck a shiv in the American financial system back in the 1980’s.  These guys are cartoon-level bad guys whose offenses are easily understood by the public and constituted direct assaults on key aspects of American society.  In attempting to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder when it became vacant following Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008, Blagojevich defiled his office and put himself at odds with the interest of all Americans, of all parties, when he essentially worked to cheat Illinois’ citizens of fair representation and befoul the Senate with a criminal who paid his way to be there.  And Milken, who was convicted in 1990 on counts including securities and mail fraud, is an infamous avatar of financial abuses and 80’s greed, a man who holds the rare honor of symbolizing in the public mind the corruption of an entire decade.

Today’s other pardons are likewise shitty affairs, and again share the common thread of having been recommended to the president by a motley crew of Fox television personalities, celebrities, and acquaintances.  There’s Bernie Kerik, the former chief of the New York Police Department, who was convicted of tax fraud; Edward DeBartolo, Jr., convicted in connection with a corruption case against a Louisiana governor; and David Safavian, convicted in connection with the Jack Abramoff scandal.  For kicks, Trump also pardoned Angela Stanton, described by the Washington Post as “an author who served a six-month home sentence for her role in a stolen vehicle ring.” Hey, what’s a little grand theft auto among friends?

And so our president, by taking pity on an absurd and undeserving roster of criminals, infamous and anonymous alike, has managed to shine a spotlight on his own unrepentant criminality.  Beyond the sheer fact of his sympathy for the devils among us and disregard for the Justice Department’s long official list of people who might credibly deserve pardons and commutations, Trump clearly has a fondness for pardoning crimes of which he and his current administration are surely guilty.  Does he see a kindred soul in the foul-mouthed Rod Blagojevich, a man so stupid and crass that he thought he could get away with actually selling a Senate seat? Why, I believe he does!  Do Bernie Kerik’s travails for the crime of tax fraud strike a sympathetic chord in the president’s otherwise-unmusical heart?  Again, yes!  And the Washington Post doesn’t pull any punches in suggesting the president may be establishing the basis for further pardons closer to home, noting that, “The pardons and commutations focus on the type of corruption and lying charges his associates were convicted of as part of the Russia investigation, once again raising the question of whether he will pardon former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and longtime adviser and friend Roger Stone.” There is no thought of other people, always only himself and how to evade responsibility.

The president’s mumble-mouthed defense of these pardons, and the parallel nonsense spouted by those who advocated for them, demonstrate that all are simply getting away with what they can without feeling any need to justify themselves beyond abusing the prerogatives of power and access.  When Trump told reporters in reference to Blagojevich, “That was a tremendously powerful, ridiculous sentence, in my opinion,” you can’t miss the sheer empty nonsense of the pronouncement (though the armchair psychoanalyst can’t help hesitating over that word “powerful,” and reading into it the president’s own primordial fear of a similar punishment that awaits him should justice actually win the day).  Likewise, it’s hard not to laugh out loud at a Trump supplicant’s explanation for why he lobbied to pardon Blagojevich: “It was just so glaring that it was a political case.” Yes, indeed. Blagojevich’s attempt to defraud the American people of a Senate seat was indeed undeniably political. 

If Donald Trump’s latest round of pardons for undeserving criminals doesn’t cheer Democrats and others who want the president defeated in 2020, I really don’t know what will.  With a few grandiose strokes of a pen, he has self-identified as the best friend the criminal element could ever want.  His pardons are exactly those that a criminal himself would make — mercy for the unrepentant and well-connected, and pitiless disregard for the wrongly convicted and the truly deserving.  The president may be acting more lawlessly by the day, but when his overreaching is so reckless, so easily grasped by ordinary Americans, it becomes another weapon in the arsenal that will defeat him and the GOP come November.

The Democrats' Post-Impeachment Strategy Is a Fiasco in the Making

The best single analysis of the post-impeachment state of political play I’ve seen so far is Brian Beutler’s over at Crooked.com.  There are three big points I want to flag.  First, Beutler describes how the president’s post-acquittal actions have centered on enhancing Donald Trump’s ability to screw with the 2020 elections, via giving Attorney General William Barr sign-off on investigations of presidential candidates, creating a channel for Rudy Giuiliani to funnel dirt and propaganda to the AG, and Barr taking the reins of all legal matters relating to the president.  The second is that Trump’s campaign strategy for 2020, in addition to using a corrupted Justice Department to slander Democratic presidential candidates, is to demoralize his opposition as much as to energize his base; this includes a “multibillion dollar propaganda machine” documented in The Atlantic.  And third, he sketches out how Democratic politicians can energize voters by the basic act of fighting back and defying Donald Trump as he pursues his reign of lawlessness.

Beutler captures major dimensions of America’s deepening political crisis, but I’ve been mulling over a further aspect that makes it so much worse: the apparent inability of much of the Democratic Party to recognize the crisis for what it is.  While impeachment was still ongoing, I was struck by how so many Democratic politicians basically fetishized impeachment as the sole means to fight back against the president.  This was despite the fact that pretty much every single one of them knew that impeachment would not end up removing the president, and would likelier than not unleash further depredations.

Well, unleashed he is: and the fact that congressional Democrats clearly had no plan in place to counter his rapid moves towards greater authoritarian control over the government — whether it was his rapid firing of officials who had responded to subpoenas issued by Congress or his Attorney General’s moves to turn the DOJ into a tool of partisan retribution — may be the greatest strategic blunder yet from a party that has made many of them during the course of this frightening administration.

I am not saying that the Democrats could have stopped these moves; they likely could have not.  But there is a world of difference between the world of holy hell they should have raised, and simply covering their eyes at Trump’s moves. Instead, in the week and a half since the acquittal vote, by backing down from further confrontation, they’ve allowed the president to frame impeachment as a Democratic failure and a presidential victory.

Today, my last vestiges of hope that I was missing something, and that House Democrats were actually preparing to unleash a wave of subpoenas and new investigations against this White House, were dashed away by news that the new plan is indeed to retreat from confrontation with this president.  Amazingly, they have decided not to subpoena former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who is widely believed to possess information that baldly contradicts the president’s cover story about his Ukraine extortion plot.  Instead, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House leadership have decided that the way to beat Trump and the GOP in 2020 is to focus on jobs, corruption in Washington, and health care:

[J]ust as they did before the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats appear to have decided that focusing on Mr. Trump’s near-daily stream of norm-shattering words and deeds only elevates him, while alienating the swing voters they need to maintain their hold on the House and have a chance at winning the Senate.

Given that the House has already taken the most powerful step a Congress can take to hold a chief executive accountable — impeachment — Democrats reason that there is little more they can do. Some say Mr. Trump brings enough attention to his conduct all on his own.

I happily concede that there is more than one possible way to wage the 2020 campaign, and that the 2018 template shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.  But in 2018, it was clear as day that the Blue Wave was driven by huge amounts of revulsion against this unfit president as much as by the appeal of Democratic health and jobs plans. The idea that the president’s unfitness for office should not be a central part of an argument for why citizens should vote to remove him simply makes no sense - particularly when the new strategy means avoiding the very tactics, like aggressive, escalated investigations, that can bring that unfitness into the clearest view possible.

Particularly unnerving is the inclusion of cleaning up corruption in Washington as one of the three pillars of the Democrats’ “For the People” agenda.  What more pressing corruption does the nation face than the destruction of the rule of law by the president?  When the poster child for corruption is in the White House, it makes no sense not to make him central to the Democrats’ case.

But another enormous fallacy is hiding in plain view.  House and Senate Democrats would have us believe that their highest priority is to be re-elected in order to stop Trump, but this isn’t actually true.  The way to stop Trump is to elect a Democratic president in 2020.  In the face of Trump’s openly-conducted effort to subvert the 2020 election, the constitutional responsibility and political priority of House Democrats in particular are identical: to investigate, publicize, and work to stop the president’s lawlessness.  Claiming that election in 2020 is their highest priority is an abdication of their oaths of office, and speaks to an unresolved divergence over how Democrats might best win the presidency versus win control of Congress.

In Beutler’s analysis, he draws a straight line from the demoralization many Democrats are feeling to the need for Democratic politicians to fight Trump as a way of keeping spirits up.  After all, if Democratic politicians can’t be bothered to fight Trump, what sort of message does this send to the Democratic base, or undecided voters?  If elected Democrats act like directing the Attorney General against the president’s enemies isn’t worth making a big fuss about, this telegraphs not only to their own party faithful but to potential converts to the anti-Trump cause that what the president is doing is normal.  The president is not in fact self-indicting or bringing sufficient attention all on his own: the Democrats also need to bring all the attention and investigatory powers they can to exposing the details and extent of his authoritarian behavior.

The Democrats’ screwball decision to volte-face and pretend impeachment never happened also retroactively casts impeachment in an unflattering and futile light.  If the claim was that Trump needed to be removed from office because he was a mortal threat to the republic, then what to make of the fact that they are no longer pressing that claim?  Were they wrong?  Is he no longer such a threat?  Of course not — so why act in a way that undercuts their previous willingness to decisively confront this president?

This willingness to allow the president to essentially control the narrative of what impeachment means also throws into doubt the idea that the Democrats’ real plan was to put Republican senators on the record for their support of the president’s unconstitutional behavior.  Why are they acting like impeachment didn’t achieve what they wanted when they knew in the first place it wouldn’t remove him, and that it did in fact taint 52 GOP senators with an indefensible vote?  If it was bad for GOP senators to vote to acquit him, then why would it be bad to force them to continue to defend behavior that is arguably worse than what he was impeached for?  Why take off the spotlight when the GOP is arguably on the ropes in terms of the damage being done to the party via its unstinting support for this unfit president?

The president plotted, and continues to plot, to rig the 2020 election.  This is a mortal offense against our democracy, and throws into doubt the ability of Americans to vote him out of office in the coming election.  In light of this, the highest priority of Democrats should be to document and highlight his war on American democracy, and to show the American people that no issue is more important.  Health care, corruption, jobs: these are all meaningless if we can’t trust in a free and fair election in November.