I began my newsletter in March 2020, just as the Covid pandemic was beginning. I started out writing far more regularly than today, often putting something out three to five times a week. It kept me sane. Here’s an early example of one of my posts, from almost exactly four years ago. From time to time, I’m planning to continue to post some previous examples from that election year, as a reminder of what we were going through with Donald Trump in the White House.
Dear Friends and Family,
"If you break it, you own it."
That was Colin Powell's famous "Pottery Barn rule" advice to George Bush regarding his invasion of Iraq. Donald Trump, as he has told us repeatedly, accepts no responsibility for allowing the pandemic to spiral out of control in the United States, but we need to keep reminding ourselves that Powell was right.
The latest evidence that the White House is better at breaking things than fixing them was an inside look by a team of reporters at the NYT at a stunning combination of corruption and ineptitude emanating from the hodgepodge of management consultants, Republican insiders and an ex-"Apprentice Show" contestant that Jared Kushner assembled to supposedly help procure protective equipment and other health care supplies. Instead, they just got in the way of the professionals and wasted time and money on following tips from Fox News hosts. Even as health care workers struggled to save lives and most Americans sought to help reduce the case load by sheltering in place, the result of such Keystone Kops episodes was to turn April into another lost month, setting us up for a rise in COVID-19 deaths rather than a decline.
Yesterday, I cited an excellent piece by Ezra Klein about the dilemma facing Democrats in Congress as they seek to compromise with Republicans over how to respond to the pandemic and limit the economic damage. But forging any kind of sensible agreement is looking nearly impossible as the White House proposes useless perennial Republican ideas like restoring tax deductions for business meals and reducing capital gains taxes for the wealthy. Some would even be destructive, such as a plan to make the temporary full expensing for capital investment a permanent feature of the tax code, giving business an incentive to postpone spending rather than accelerate it.
I'm really trying to understand the logic of the White House's approach to the pandemic, but sometimes there doesn't seem to be any method to Trump's madness beyond feeding his ego and further enriching his family, his cronies and his donors. But maybe that's the point.
Does that mean we will end up resigning ourselves to live with so much dying? That's the conclusion opinion columnist Charlie Warzel is coming to and sometimes it's hard to disagree.
But I keep coming back to the Pottery Barn rule and the conviction that the American public will ultimately hold Trump accountable for his childish rampage through the store.
Normally, I try to end these notes with something amusing or at least distracting. Instead, I'm going to offer today something strangely uplifting, a deeply felt essay by Caitlin Flanagan on living with cancer amid the pandemic.
Stay safe, Tom