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 are some examples of my posts from the plague year. From time to time, I’m planning to continue to post some previous chronicles from that election year (mistakes and all intact), as a reminder of what we were going through with Donald Trump in the White House.
Below are three selections from early July 2020.
July 8
I try to expose myself to a wide range of credible information. But that means I’m missing much of what many Americans see and read every day.
Tucker Carlson now runs the most popular cable TV show. What is he telling his audience? Well, lately one of the things he's saying is that masks and social distancing "have no basis of any kind in science. It's like a kind of bizarre health theater." It’s particularly disturbing that the spy novelist Alex Berenson, one of my former NYT business reporting colleagues who I worked with on several stories, is supporting Carlson's lies with his own arguments against taking precautions against the virus.
At the same time, Carlson has engaged in a series of attacks on Tammy Duckworth, the Thai-American Illinois Senator who lost both her legs fighting in Iraq, accusing her and Rep. Ilhan Omar of being “vandals” who hate America.
Her reply? “Does @TuckerCarlson want to walk a mile in my legs,” Duckworth wrote on Twitter, “and then tell me whether or not I love America?”
Carlson is only the latest in a long line of right-wing “intellectuals” who have given a gloss to racist arguments. For example, Ryan Grim, in The Intercept, reminds us that William Buckley, who started The National Review in the 1950s and was one of the intellectual founders of the modern conservative movement, advocated white supremacy for much of the 1950s and early 1960s.
“The tragedy of Buckley is that he did personally evolve on questions of Jim Crow,” Grim writes after going through Buckley’s early support for segregation. “The civil rights movement and the white violence that met it did help Buckley genuinely evolve. He came around to support federal enforcement of civil rights laws, the rights of Black people to vote, and even affirmative action to right years of injustice. He attacked the John Birch Society and warred with anti-Semites. When [James] Kilpatrick eventually gave up defending segregation, Buckley cheered him.
“But like so many too-clever operatives before him and since, the forces he empowered became too powerful for him and his magazine. Buckley may have thought he was exploiting the Citizens Council for his own movement’s gain, but it worked the other way around.”
These days, Facebook is in a similar, but far more powerful position, defending free speech but enabling racism. And it looks like it will continue.
“Civil rights leaders organizing a major advertising boycott of Facebook said they remained unconvinced that the social network is taking enough action against hate speech and disinformation after meeting with Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives on Tuesday,” the Washington Post reported.
“Civil rights leaders used the session to press Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, to institute changes at Facebook, including installing a top level executive who will ensure the global platform does not fuel racism and radicalization. . .
“‘It was abundantly clear in our meeting today that Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team is not yet ready to address the vitriolic hate on their platform,’ [Jonathan] Greenblatt, [the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League,] said.”
All this activity on the right makes the refined argument among those on the broad left side of the political spectrum over free speech and “cancel culture” -- useful as it may be -- seem pretty trivial as long as Donald Trump is president.
Yesterday, Trump held a White House meeting supposedly to encourage schools to reopen, but it was mostly yet another excuse for him to enjoy being showered with praise in a must-see video session that reminded Jim Fallows, among others, of the “Dear Leader” effusions so common in authoritarian systems.
Meanwhile, the graft and grift of the “drain the swamp” Trump administration continues. The release of information on recipients of federal bailout funds, covered particularly well by ProPublica, showed that:
“Businesses tied to President Donald Trump’s family and associates stand to receive as much as $21 million in government loans designed to shore up payroll expenses for companies struggling amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to federal data released Monday.
“A hydroponic lettuce farm backed by Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., applied for at least $150,000 in Small Business Administration funding. Albert Hazzouri, a dentist frequently spotted at Mar-a-Lago, asked for a similar amount. A hospital run by Maria Ryan, a close associate of Trump lawyer and former mayor Rudy Giuliani, requested more than $5 million. Several companies connected to the president’s son-in-law and White House adviser, Jared Kushner, could get upward of $6 million.”
There’s much more in ProPublica’s extensive reporting on the issue.
Trump has only been able to enrich himself, his family and his donors, while doing so much harm to the country, because he has been enabled by Republican lawmakers in Congress. But if only a handful of GOP senators had backed their private dismay over Trump with public votes, he never would have been able to act so recklessly.
And no one among that group deserves to be defeated for re-election more than Susan Collins of Maine, who repeatedly wrings her hands over Trump’s behavior and then supports even the most obviously unqualified and un-judicious of his judicial nominees.
“So ubiquitous is Ms. Collins’s disappointment,” Jennifer Finney Boylan wrote in a NYT op-ed, “that there’s now a partisan mash-up video on YouTube of her expressing, over and over again, how upset and sad she is. On ‘Saturday Night Live,’ Cecily Strong as the senator said that Trump makes her ‘want to shake my head vigorously and wag my finger once, perhaps twice!’ . . .
“Mainers expected Senator Collins to stand up to Mr. Trump, to show courage and conscience. Instead she enabled him, leaving this country divided and adrift.
“How do we feel? Disappointed.”
Stay safe,
July 7
The Trump administration apparently wants Americans to learn to live with the coronavirus. Well, yes, given the White House’s initial bungling of the response to the pandemic, we don’t really have any other choice right now. But what does it mean to “live with” hundreds of unnecessary deaths every day?
Health care workers can tell us what it means to them.
“Beth saw her first dead body of the day just as she was leaving the emergency department,” Dr. Dhruv Khullar, writes in The New Yorker in a piece headlined “What Fighting the Coronavirus Feels Like.”
“Earlier, she’d admitted a patient with the coronavirus; now she was on her way to an upstairs doctor’s lounge to finish writing her notes. Standing by the elevators, lost in thought, she nearly missed the orange body bag as it was rolled out of the car that had just opened in front of her. She decided to take the next one.
“Seconds later, another elevator opened behind her. She turned—out came two more stretchers, two more bodies. While she watched, every elevator in the bay opened its doors, expelling stretcher after stretcher of bodies. ‘I felt surrounded,’ she said. ‘I’d never seen anything like it. I thought I might throw up.’
“An endocrinologist by training, Beth—whose name has been changed for this story—usually sees patients in an office; when she first volunteered to help on the wards, she was nervous. As the pandemic deepened, she’d grown comfortable in her new role, or so she’d thought. She turned to a junior colleague with whom she’d been waiting. ‘I knew I had to be brave,’ she said. ‘I kept it together for her.’ Thinking back now, she recalls not just the orange bags but the young woman’s petrified face.”
Doctors can also tell us what it means to the families of the dying.
“My patients and their families are facing the sudden decline that can occur in people with COVID-19, and many are not prepared,” writes Joel Rowe, an emergency room doctor, in a piece for The Atlantic.
“Before the pandemic, my colleagues and I conducted end-of-life conversations or delivered bad news over the phone only in very rare circumstances. I would take a patient’s family to a quiet room, sit face-to-face with them, and offer a hand to hold. Now the comfort I can offer the family, in some cases living mere blocks away, is limited, since relatives are rarely allowed in the hospital during coronavirus surges. Such restrictions exist for everyone’s safety, but they can make end-of-life decisions that much more difficult. When family members see the physical condition of their loved one, that’s often when the gravity of an acute situation truly sinks in. Without witnessing this reality, disbelief is common. ‘You can’t be talking about my dad,’ one family member said to me over the phone. ‘There’s no way you have the right person. Please tell me this is a mistake.’ No one should be making decisions about end-of-life care under such stressful circumstances.”
It’s true that less than 1 percent of those who contract Covid-19 die from it. But that doesn’t mean, as Trump claimed, that 99 percent of the cases “are totally harmless.”
“Conventional wisdom suggests that when a sickness is mild, it’s not too much to worry about,” writes Adrienne Matei in The Guardian.
“But if you’re taking comfort in World Health Organization reports that over 80% of global Covid-19 cases are mild or asymptomatic, think again. As virologists race to understand the biomechanics of Sars-CoV-2, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: even “mild” cases can be more complicated, dangerous and harder to shake than many first thought.”
Until there’s an effective vaccine, the pandemic isn’t going away. But there are things we can do to ease the burden on some of those who are helping make it possible for most of us to survive.
Here's one idea from a trio of opinion writers, also at The Guardian.
“Today, many Americans laud the valiance of first responders. (We define first responders to include everyone from physician assistants, like Henry, to the postal workers delivering our mail.) But after the applause, we should take care of the load we can actually help with – their student debt.
“The answer is simple: student loan forgiveness.”
You could wallow for hours reading about Donald Trump. I certainly have. But for those who have better things to do, here’s the best Trump piece I've read lately. It also happens to be among the most heartening, too.
“Trump does not want to govern and could not do it if he tried,” Jamelle Bouie writes in an NYT op-ed.
“Instead, as he sees it, the path to re-election lies with the instincts that brought him to power in the first place. With enough racist demagogy, Trump seems to think, he’ll close the gap with Biden and eke out another win in the Electoral College. But it is one thing to run a backlash campaign, as Trump did four years ago, in a growing economy in which most people aren’t acutely worried about their lives and futures. In that environment, where material needs are mostly met, voters can afford to either look past racial animus or embrace it as a kind of luxury political good. When conditions are on the decline, however, they want actual solutions, and the politics of resentment are, by themselves, a much harder sell. . .
“If this is true — if it takes a decent economy to make voters conducive to the campaign Trump wants to run — then he is, at this moment, speeding down an electoral dead-end. As long as Covid-19 is out of control, as long as there is mass suffering, sickness and economic distress, then nothing short of actually doing his job will help him get ahead. There simply is no substitute for good governance.
“Trump can spend the next four months raging against protesters, defending Confederate monuments and attacking Black celebrities. He can play the hits for his supporters and whip his most devoted followers into a frenzy of MAGA enthusiasm. He can turn up the racism dial as much as he wants and as far as it will go. But if he’s looking for approval, he won’t get it.”
Want something else to feel good about? Try watching this video performance of a song from Hairspray.
Finally, I’m not a fan of the Times columnist Bret Stephens. But the weekly online conversation Gail Collins and he have is often a delight. And this week, they reminded us of one more thing that the pandemic has taken away.
“Bret: Tangentially related: Do you miss going into the office?
Gail: Wow, I really do. Columnists have always been able to work anywhere, but I really treasured my days in the office. Just doesn’t feel as much like writing for a newspaper when the only other inhabitant of my work space is a dog.
How about you?
Bret: You’ll be happy to know that I’m getting a dog. He’ll be a useful sounding board for my more rabidly conservative columns.
Gail: Just don’t let him sit on your laptop. I speak from experience.
Bret: Solid tip. Thanks.
I miss everything the office was, and what it represented. The enclosed garden in the lobby. The great characters at the security desk. The gorgeous city view from the cafeteria. The nervous energy as deadlines approach. Watching Nick Kristof at work across the desk from me and Frank Bruni behind him and you behind Frank. The office gossip. The patatas bravas at that Spanish place across the street. The sense of belonging to a great institution of so many brilliant parts on which so much that matters depends. The feeling of being at the precise center of a city that embodies so much of what I love the most about the country — the striving and variety and excellence and crowding and everyone-trying-to-get-along-in-spite-of-it-all.
Yeah, I miss it. When does regular programming return again?”
Not anytime soon.
Please stay safe,
July 4
The past is always present. On this July 4 weekend, nothing I read illuminated the importance of understanding American history more than Isabel Wilkerson’s stunning essay in The New York Times Magazine, "America's Enduring Racial Caste System," which is adapted from her forthcoming new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent.
“With an old house, the work is never done, and you don’t expect it to be,” writes Wilkerson, who previously wrote The Warmth of Other Suns, a history of the migration of African-Americans from the South to elsewhere in the United States in the 20th century.
“America is an old house” she reminds us. “We can never declare the work over. Wind, flood, drought and human upheavals batter a structure that is already fighting whatever flaws were left unattended in the original foundation. When you live in an old house, you may not want to go into the basement after a storm to see what the rains have wrought. Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.
“We in this country are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even. Many people may rightly say: ‘I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked Indigenous people, never owned slaves.’ And yes. Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures in the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.
“And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands.”
President Trump knows very little about American history but he has apparently decided to fight the 2020 election, in large part, by reminding us of its ugliest features. At Mount Rushmore, Robert Costa and Philip Rucker write in the Washington Post:
“Trump put his strategy to resuscitate his troubled reelection campaign by galvanizing white supporters on display Friday night under the chiseled granite gaze of four past presidents memorialized in the Black Hills of South Dakota. He celebrated Independence Day with a dystopian speech in which he excoriated racial justice protesters as ‘evil’ representatives of a ‘new far-left fascism’ whose ultimate goal is ‘the end of America.’
“‘Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,’ Trump said to boos from a packed crowd of supporters. ‘Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.’”
Our most sacred memorials? He means mostly the monuments, erected largely in the early 20th century, intended to preserve racial injustice by celebrating Confederate traitors. Now he wants to build a monument to his own distorted view of American history.
"Mr. Trump directed the creation of a task force, chaired by the secretary of the interior, to 'expeditiously' open a 'National Garden of American Heroes' at a site to be determined. Michael Crowley writes in the New York Times. “His order specifies 31 Americans whom the garden must memorialize, a group of mostly white men that includes former presidents, pioneers and explorers, abolitionists and civil rights heroes.
"Mr. Trump’s list of those to be memorialized also singled out two recently deceased conservative icons: former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the evangelist Billy Graham, as well as former President Ronald Reagan. The lineup includes no equivalent contemporary liberals or Democrats. It does include the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman and Jackie Robinson, the first African-American player in modern major league baseball.”
Trump didn’t include Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave whose speech 168 years ago on this day in 1852, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” will be remembered long after Trump’s never-to-be-built garden is forgotten. My friend David Ehrens sent it to me with a short introduction that reminds us:
“Today is not a day for tanks and flyovers and a would-be Caesar’s notion of American greatness. A nation in crisis cannot honestly celebrate its hollow promises of democracy when they actually pertain to so few.”
But maybe we can still try to redeem the promises of American democracy for many more. Douglass certainly wanted us to.
Like many of you, Lisa and I watched “Hamilton” on Friday. It, too, distorts American history and has become increasingly problematic now that the more optimistic Obama era in which it was wryly written has morphed into our dark and dangerous present day. But Lin-Manuel Miranda’s moving show reminds us, as Tony Scott’s NYT appreciation notes, of what is still possible.
“Hamilton” is motivated, above all,” Scott writes, “by a faith in the self-correcting potential of the American experiment, by the old and noble idea that a usable past — and therefore a more perfect future — can be fashioned from a record that bristles with violence, injustice and contradiction. The optimism of this vision, filtered through a sensibility as generous as Miranda’s, is inspiring.”
Stay well,
Tom