President Donald Trump holds up a Bible in front of St John’s Episcopal Church after walking across Lafayette Park from the White House in Washington, DC on June 1, 2020. (I couldn’t resist this image (which marked an early moment in his effort to marshal the forces of Christian nationalism during the protests over the death of George Floyd), even though it happened well before the dates of these newsletters.)
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 two selections from late July 2020.
July 20, 2020
Dear Friends,
It looks like a good news-hope-for-the-future day vs. a terrible-horrible-very-bad-news day. Let’s start with the bad news.
President Trump is desperate, so he is planning to expand the use of paramilitary troops in our cities. Michelle Goldberg asks a very good question: “Can we call it fascism yet?”
“There’s something particularly terrifying in the use of Border Patrol agents against American dissidents,” Goldberg writes in an NYT op-ed. “After the attack on protesters near the White House last month, the military pushed back on Trump’s attempts to turn it against the citizenry. Police officers in many cities are willing to brutalize demonstrators, but they’re under local control. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, however, is under federal authority, has leadership that’s fanatically devoted to Trump and is saturated with far-right politics. . .
“Through the Trump years, there’s been a debate about whether the president’s authoritarianism is tempered by his incompetence. Those who think concern about fascism is overblown can cite several instances when the administration has been beaten back after overreaching. But all too often the White House has persevered, deforming American life until what once seemed like worst-case scenarios become the status quo.”
Trump’s goal, with the help of Fox News, is to generate fear among suburban and rural whites of protests tied to the Black Lives Matter movement. That’s what the administration has been doing in Portland, as this excellent timeline of events by Oregon Public Broadcasting makes clear. And by vowing to expand the use of force to cities like Chicago and Oakland, Trump’s racist appeal is clear.
“What he’s doing instead is leveraging a manufactured excuse to use military and quasi-military forces for his political benefit,” Philip Bump writes in the Washington Post, just as the White House ordered a group of peaceful protesters to be cleared from a plaza in Washington so Trump could visit a church for a photo opp.”
As a political strategy to win the election, it appears to be failing. But as a buildup to a chaotic vote whose results are open to dispute, it may be his only chance to retain power.
If that’s the strategy, it’s doubtful that Trump devised it. Based on his proud boasting that he aced a cognitive test for dementia whose last five questions, he told Chris Wallace, were very hard, it’s looking more and more like Trump is losing it.
The Las Vegas Sun published the test so you can take it yourself.
A much bigger test is coming soon, Dana Milbank writes in the Washington Post.
“No, our national cognitive assessment is not promising. But now come the ‘very hard’ last questions:
Will Republicans, in these final months before the election, find the elusive courage to disavow Trump’s madness?
Will the people reject him and his enablers in 106 days?
And, if Trump loses, will all Americans insist he do what he refused to commit to on Sunday: honor the will of the people?
If not, we will have earned ourselves a big, fat F.”
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the GOP to disavow Trump. Too many Republicans have joined what Jonathan Chait calls a "death cult" in a very long but very readable explication of everything that Paul Krugman has been writing about in his short columns for years.
“The distrust and open dismissal of expertise and authority may seem uniquely contemporary — a phenomenon of the Trump era, or the rise of online misinformation. But the president and his party are the products of a decades-long war against the functioning of good government, a collapse of trust in experts and empiricism, and the spread of a kind of magical thinking that flourishes in a hothouse atmosphere that can seal out reality. While it’s not exactly shocking to see a Republican administration be destroyed by incompetent management — it happened to the last one, after all — the willfulness of it is still mind-boggling and has led to the unnecessary sickness and death of hundreds of thousands of people and the torpedoing of the reelection prospects of the president himself. Like Stalin’s purge of 30,000 Red Army members right before World War II, the central government has perversely chosen to disable the very asset that was intended to carry it through the crisis. Only this failure of leadership and management took place in a supposedly advanced democracy whose leadership succumbed to a debilitating and ultimately deadly ideological pathology.”
That’s enough bad news -- at least for the rest of this note. There’s promising progress on the vaccine front, suggesting that widespread immunization against COVID-19 could begin as early as this winter. To be sure, there are plenty of caveats, as David Kirkpatrick lays out in a thorough NYT news story.
But there are also plenty of grounds for optimism, particularly regarding the work at Oxford, where a Phase III trial is already underway and the scientists, working with AstraZenaca, are preparing to produce 3 billion doses. Bloomberg Business Week has an excellent piece (linked above) on the project, which is led by Sarah Gilbert.
“At the end of April, crunching a process that normally takes about five years into less than four months, Gilbert and her colleagues at Oxford’s Jenner Institute started a human trial on 1,100 people. When Gilbert testified before a parliamentary committee in early July, one member compared her effort to going into a shed and coming out with a jet engine. Gilbert’s team has leapfrogged other vaccine contenders to the point where it will likely finish vaccinating subjects in its big 10,000-person efficacy trial before other candidates even start testing on that scale, Kate Bingham, chair of the U.K. government’s Vaccine Taskforce, told the parliamentary committee in early July. ‘She’s well ahead of the world,’ Bingham said. ‘It’s the most advanced vaccine anywhere.’”
Again, plenty could go wrong. One recent report suggested that any immunity against the virus could fade in months. But it’s complicated, explains Derek Thompson in The Atlantic.
“If our defenses against COVID-19 evaporate in weeks, people could contract the disease for a second time, as some widely-shared stories have suggested,” Thompson writes. “In such a world, herd immunity would be out of the question. Even more depressing, it could mean that vaccines that work on the basis of antibody response would be useless after a few months. The study conjured for me a future in which the pandemic never went away.
“I called several scientists to talk me through the study and ease my apocalyptic anxiety. Their response: Please calm down—but don’t expect us to make you feel entirely relaxed. (I also reached out to several co-authors of the King’s College London paper, but did not hear back.
“‘I was definitely very worried when I saw the headlines,’ said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. ‘But then I looked at the data. And actually, looking at the data, I feel okay about it.’”
I’m going to hold on to my hope -- both for the defeat of Donald Trump and a victory over the coronavirus. And for some further inspiration, I can always turn to Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams, two of my favorite singers, who were interviewed by Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker.
“During our time together,” Petrusich writes, “they both played a few new songs—a tiny concert conducted via Zoom. You can see our conversation, and these performances, in the video above. They finished with a collaborative cover of ‘Deportee,’ which features lyrics by Woody Guthrie. It’s a brutal, heartbreaking song about what happens when we stop regarding one another as human. ‘Making art in the United States of America is a political statement in and of itself,’ Earle said. ‘This is the most hostile environment to art that’s ever existed in the world.’ [TR Ed. note: Not true. Not even close.] Yet Earle and Williams have kept going. That’s a lesson for all of us.”
Stay safe,
Tom
Dr Stella Immanuel is also a Christian pastor and founder of a church in Houston
July 28
Dear Friends,
Since I began writing these notes in mid-March, I’ve proudly managed to avoid using the trite phrase, “You couldn’t make this up,” but . . . you couldn’t make this up.
Yesterday, President Trump (and his son, Eric) favorably retweeted a video from a group of “doctors” in white coats led by a woman who claimed to have successfully treated Covid-19 patients with the debunked drug hydroxychloroquine and who also said that masks were useless in helping avoid contracting the disease.
When told by a reporter at the White House news conference that the same woman has claimed some gynecological ailments are caused by people having sex in a dream-world with demons, Trump repeated his support but then abruptly walked out of the briefing room.
You’ve probably seen much of this already (though the White Coat video was taken down by Facebook for doing harm to public health -- after being viewed at least 12 million times), but I’m going to stay with it for a while because the whole incident so perfectly captures both the dizziness and the danger of having a president who repeatedly repeats nonsense.
Here’s how my former colleague Clyde Haberman put it in a tweet that also shows the exchange on video.
“I thought her voice was an important voice but I know nothing about her.” That’s Trump distilled to his essence — plowing ahead in ignorance, and proud of it.
The Daily Beast was the first, as far as I can tell, to point out that the front woman, Dr. Stella Immanual, claims to believe in the dangers of demon sex. In a follow-up article headlined, “Trump Doubles Down on Demon Sperm Doc,” reporters Will Sommer and Adam Rawnsley, in a “just-the-facts-Ma’am” tone kept with the story and brought in other characters in the drama.
Dr. Simone Gold, the leader of America’s Frontline Doctors, tweeted later Tuesday to announce the group had met with Vice President Mike Pence.
“We have just met with Vice President Mike Pence to request the administration’s assistance in empowering doctors to prescribe hydroxychloroquine without political obstruction. We also discussed the recent censorship of doctors on social media platforms,” Gold wrote. . .
Jenny Beth Martin, the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, which helped organize the doctors summit, retweeted Immanuel’s complaints that she and other participants were being “attacked, ridiculed and discredited” in the wake of the event.
“Doctors are being silenced by Big Tech,” Martin tweeted. “The leftist media don't want hydroxychloroquine to work because it will mean President @realDonaldTrump was right!” . . .
Earlier in the day at another White Coat Summit event, Immanuel slammed “professional hacks” in medicine who have criticized the use of hydroxychloroquine. But she saved special vitriol for doctors who refuse to prescribe the drug because they’re supposedly afraid of professional consequences, calling them “good Germans” — a reference to Germans after World War II who claimed they had never supported the Nazis.
“You’re no different than a murderer,” Immanuel said. “You’re no different than Hitler.”
These people were invited into the White House.
Not surprisingly, a number of pundits jumped into the fray. I thought David Von Drehle, writing in The Washington Post, was particularly good.
I guess there is no point in expressing my strong view that the president of the United States should not, in the midst of a deadly pandemic, pass along medical advice that undermines public health officials without good reason to believe that it comes from a qualified authority. The president doesn’t care.
And I suppose it’s pointless to say to my Christian brothers and sisters in Trump’s dwindling camp that a man who raises the profile of a heretical preacher is not a friend of the faith. Many so-called evangelicals who stick with Trump gave up on evangelism — that is, winning people over through selfless acts of love and charity — long ago.
I’m not sure there is much use in patiently explaining that fighting the novel coronavirus while doing as little damage as possible to the economy is a very significant challenge, requiring the best efforts and maximal good faith of every American — starting at the top. No bridge is long enough to span the abyss between “best efforts” and “spreading dangerous bull hockey from a woman who believes in disease-spreading orgiastic dream demons.”
So, let me speak to those Republicans cowering in closets and hiding under stairs in Washington and the state capitals, muttering prayers that Trump might somehow calm the flames that threaten to consume them.
Run away. Close your eyes and duck your heads and sprint as fast as you can away from Trump. Claim amnesia. Say you’ve been hiking the Appalachian Trail. Blame your spirit spouse — whatever. A fury is building in Middle America that has nothing to do with Russia or impeachment or “Access Hollywood.” It’s rising among people who managed to look past all of that to find something they liked about the president. And now he’s repaying them with a stubby middle finger in their faces.
Trump can’t help being Trump, but what about the supposed adults in the room? Well, the latest Senate Republican relief plan, as the Washington Post reported, “won’t extend pandemic food stamps but doubles ‘three-martini lunch’ deduction.” Enough said.
Meanwhile, Trump’s most effective enabler, Attorney General William Barr, testified to a House committee yesterday. It wasn’t pretty.
For an overview of the proceedings, Heather Cox Richardson's extensive analysis is hard to beat. Here's how it begins:
Attorney General William Barr testified today before the House Judiciary Committee. His combative answers confirmed that he is Trump’s man. He is committed to the narrative that dangerous anarchists are endangering law and order, and that Trump was unfairly targeted by FBI agents in what Barr calls “Russiagate.”
A few moments of the hearing are worth watching as well, including this impassioned -- and I use the term in admiration -- rant by Rep. Pramila Jayapal from Seattle, one of the cities that has been invaded by federal stormtroopers.
It’s hard to find much inspiration from Washington these days, so we have to look elsewhere. Perhaps to Vermont, which has had the fewest cases of Covid-19 of any state, as Bill McKibben writes in The New Yorker.
It isn’t just—or even mainly—the governor who has carried the day. Vermonters entered the pandemic with remarkably high levels of social trust. Only thirty-eight per cent of Americans say they mostly or completely trust their neighbors, but a 2018 Vermont survey found that seventy-eight per cent of residents think that “people in my neighborhood trust each other to be good neighbors”; sixty-nine per cent of Vermonters said that they knew most of their neighbors, compared with twenty-six per cent of Americans in general. Part of that comes from the state’s geography: it’s essentially a collection of villages, perennially vying with Maine for title of the most rural state. And those villages have a better than three-century tradition of governing themselves at annual town meetings, the closest thing to Athenian democracy still to be found. It’s hard to get away with being a jerk at those meetings: if a Trump-like figure rose to start delivering rants, he would be tolerated politely for a few minutes and then asked to sit down, so that the meeting could get to work deciding if the roof of the town office building had another year in it or not. With the local school closed, the village of five hundred people where I live has two remaining gathering places: the country store, which also serves as the post office, and where a sign asking people to wear masks went up in early March and has been obeyed almost religiously since, and the town shed, where on alternate Saturdays people drop off their recycling. Showing up unmasked would be seen as unneighborly; no one does, and there hasn’t been a case of covid-19 yet.
No cases of Covid-19? What a relief that must be.
Stay safe,
Tom