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 three examples of my early posts, from late June four years ago. 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. Luckily one of my fears did not pan out (Washington spent enough in response to the pandemic to avoid a serious recession.)
June 22, 2020
“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
When the great and powerful Wizard of Oz is revealed to be a cranky old man, the movie is nearly over. And it’s starting to look like closing time for Donald Trump, the self-centered cranky old man who spent over 15 minutes Saturday night trying to explain why he had trouble walking down a gentle ramp.
And worst of all, at least from Trump’s point of view, his once-loyal audience had better things to do than risk contracting Covid-19 by attending the performance in Tulsa. So did we, but for those who want a helpful summary of what happened, in words and images, the Washington Post’s “five takeaways” has the gory details.
Perhaps it even dawned on President Trump, as he returned to the White House early Sunday morning, that the gig is up.
And what was the point of holding a campaign rally in the middle of a pandemic? Who knows? Trump certainly didn't explain it. Instead, as he is wont to do over and over, he spoke out loud the awful truth that most intelligent people would want to keep hidden.
“A long spring of pain has just ended in America; on the first night of summer, Trump both proved incapable of addressing that pain and confessed that he has contributed to it,” Eric Lach wrote in The New Yorker. “From the moment covid-19 emerged, Trump has done his best to downplay the disease. ‘I like the numbers where they are,’ he said back in March—a sentiment that then became government policy. More recently, Trump has become fixated on a peculiar, circular argument about testing. ‘If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases,’ he said in May, an assertion as inane as it is inarguable. On Saturday, Trump took things a step further, telling us—bragging, really—that he’d discouraged government officials from trying to get a full picture of the outbreak. “I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please,’” he said. Within minutes, Trump’s aides were trying to clean up his mess, saying the President had been ‘joking.’”
It’s not a joke, of course. The delays in testing and the White House’s ineptitude in responding to the pandemic, according to a comprehensive report in Stat News, contributed to tens of thousands of needlessly premature deaths.
So many things are going wrong for Trump that it’s hard to keep track. David Leonhardt does a very good job of gathering the evidence in his Monday briefing for the New York Times.
“These acts of defiance” Leonhardt writes, “are both a sign of Trump’s current weakness and a further cause of it, as Matt Glassman, a Georgetown University political scientist, told me. People feel more comfortable opposing Trump because they think he is on the wrong side of public opinion on several major issues.
And the more people who defy Trump, the less difficult it becomes for others to do so. It was especially striking to see Senator Lindsey Graham, a frequent Trump defender, decline to support the Trump administration’s choice of a new federal prosecutor. ‘It’s not a random, rogue action,’ Glassman said. ‘It’s a calculated move based on the weakness of the president.’”
Leonhardt rightly warns, of course, that none of this means Trump is sure to lose in November. Not only is there the constant threat that Trump and his allies will try to steal the election, but there’s also the risk that Democrats will grow overly confident of victory.
Matt Viser, in the Washington Post, aptly captured the mood in Biden’s circle: “Confidence comes with a chaser of fear.”
But for Democrats, the very idea that they are doing well provokes an underlying skittishness,” Viser wrote. “They worry about voting during the coronavirus crisis, amid restrictions that could make it harder to cast ballots. Some fear a coming misinformation campaign and say the party risks underestimating Trump’s ability to turn the country against their nominee.
“They also worry their party still does not fully understand what led voters to Trump in the first place, and they are terrified that overconfidence, like some of them enjoyed four years ago, will lead to complacency.”
That’s more than enough for now on Donald Trump.
Over the weekend I devoured a smart thriller, The Last Flight by Julie Clark, which came highly recommended by Sarah Lyall, and read a handful of terrific articles, starting with Brent Staples' remembrance of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921.
“The lynch mobs that hanged, shot or burned African-Americans alive during the early 20th century,” Staples begins his compelling piece, “sometimes varied the means of slaughter by roping victims to cars and dragging them to death. The killers who re-enacted this barbaric ritual in Tulsa, Okla., on June 1, 1921, committed one of the defining atrocities of the Tulsa Race Massacre, the bloody conflagration during which white vigilantes murdered at will while looting and burning one of the most affluent black communities in the United States.
“The helpless old black man who was shredded alive behind a fast-moving car would have been well known in Tulsa’s white downtown, where he supported himself by selling pencils and singing for coins. He was blind, had suffered amputations of both legs and wore baseball catcher’s mitts to protect his hands from the pavement as he scooted along on a wheeled wooden platform.”
The Tulsa massacre was part of the history most of us didn’t learn in school. In The New Yorker, Princeton historian Eddie S. Glaube, Jr. writes about the history that James Baldwin wanted America to see. It, too, is a compelling piece.
I also loved Todd Purdam’s paean to summer camp in The Atlantic.
“How do you play Capture the Flag and stay six feet apart?” Purdam asks as he contemplates the decision his brother made to close for the summer the camp he has run for three decades. “What happens if a harried college-age counselor forgets to clean a bow and arrow with sanitizing wipes after each use? How can 12-year-old girls mentor and (literally) hold the hands of their 9-year-old sisters if all campers are supposed to spend the summer clumped in 20-person pods and not commingle with others outside their cabin group (as the American Camp Association’s draft guidelines recommend)?
“Absent clear-cut directives from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and in the face of a broad patchwork of approaches by state health departments from Maine to California, camp directors across the country are confronting the quandary my brother faced. The paradox: The need for camp has perhaps never been greater—and the practicability of it never more in doubt.”
Growing up, I wasn’t able to go to summer camp, which perhaps explains why I was so eager to make it possible for my own children to experience it. And the fact that we couldn’t afford to go on vacation very much certainly explains why I love to travel so much. Of course, I’m not the only one who misses the opportunity to travel.
“In an era in which spirituality has in many ways been supplanted by a quest for temporal experience, to venture abroad is to accumulate evidence that we are making the best of our short time on Earth,” Henry Wismayer writes in the WashPost. “Bask in the afterglow of the last adventure. Count down to the next.
“At least that’s how it used to be.”
I can’t imagine a world in which travel is no longer part of my life. But our Earth is changing in profound ways and perhaps even my devotion to adventure and exploring the natural world is making it worse. That was one of the insights I took away from the scary NYT Magazine piece on "How Humanity Unleashed a Flood of New Diseases."
Zoonotic pathogens do not typically seek us out nor do they stumble onto us by pure coincidence,” Ferris Jabr wrote. “When diseases move from animals to humans, and vice versa, it is usually because we have reconfigured our shared ecosystems in ways that make the transition much more likely. Deforestation, mining, intensive agriculture and urban sprawl destroy natural habitats, forcing wild creatures to venture into human communities. Excessive hunting, trade and consumption of wildlife significantly increase the probability of cross-species infection. Modern transportation can disperse dangerous microbes across the world in a matter of hours.”
Finally, I couldn’t finish this longer-than-normal note without mentioning an insightful magazine profile of Debra Katz.
“Katz, one of America’s top #MeToo lawyers, would gain national recognition as the woman who sat beside Christine Blasey Ford,” Ellen Wexler writes in Moment. “But while it is easy to mistake her as a leader who grew out of a movement, the opposite is true: She was a go-to lawyer for women in need of legal support long before #MeToo had a name. She has been at this fight a long time, and finally, the times have caught up.”
June 24, 2020
I’m normally a glass half-full person. In my life, I’ve been very lucky. But individual good fortune won’t be worth much if we continue to allow our collective fate to worsen.
It’s not news that our world is warming. But the report that the temperature reached 38 degrees Celsius, or 100 degrees Fahrenheit, in the Siberian city of Verkhoyansk, Russia, on Saturday is yet another ringing alarm bell that we’re going in the wrong direction. If confirmed by global weather authorities, that would be the highest temperature ever recorded within the Arctic Circle. Records for this location go back to 1885.
One reason I’ve been relatively lucky, of course, is that I’m white, born in America. That’s an extraordinary privilege, as a very compelling set of statistics put together in words and charts by the Washington Post makes clear.
“Numbers can help put American racism in perspective,” the Post article begins. “And here is what the numbers say: The United States is a vastly different country, depending on the color of your skin. For African Americans, hardship begins before birth.”
I was born in 1950, just as the United States was entering the longest period of sustained prosperity in its history. Those born in this century are growing up in a much richer society, but we’ve already suffered through one severe economic downturn and a weak recovery, starting in 2008, and we’re now reeling from the biggest shock to our nation since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
And unless our government responds effectively to the current crisis, the United States could be about to endure another decade of pain, concentrated on the most vulnerable. In the Atlantic, Annie Lowrey notes, as I have, that the recession is technically over, but warns, also rightly, that we could still face a second Great Depression in this decade.
“Households are headed for a cliff,” she writes. “But not everyone will be affected by it equally. Rich workers, the ones with do-anywhere office jobs, have remained relatively untouched by job and earnings losses thus far. Wealthy families have seen their stock portfolios rebound to close to where they were in the winter. But poor workers—disproportionately black and Latino workers, as well as younger workers—have borne the heaviest employment and earnings losses. They entered this recession with no wealth cushion, many saddled with heavy rents and heavy debts. Income and job losses for them translate into a loss of demand economy-wide, absent federal intervention.
If and when that federal intervention dries up, millions of families just keeping their head above water will sink, as lost jobs and canceled hours force them to stop paying their rent and go into arrears on their debt payments. Hunger, homelessness, forgotten plans to attend community college, babies growing up in stressed households: These are the stakes.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. As Jared Bernstein argues in his Washington Post column, the economic and political insights of John Maynard Keynes offer the most promising path out of our crisis.
Keynes died in 1946, and a few decades after his death, a counterrevolution in economics restored most of the false beliefs he labored to disprove and displace,” Bernstein writes. “In the economic orthodoxy, a wide range of anti-Keynesian ideas again took hold: Government was treated as the enemy of the “free market”; any trade deal was assumed to be a good deal; and minimum wages, safety net benefits and taxes on the wealthy all supposedly distorted incentives. Economics, it was argued, must be concerned only about growth, never about its distribution. But because Keynes was so fundamentally correct about how economies actually work, these false assumptions have once again been exposed for what they truly are: rules of a rigged system.”
On my Twitter feed, Neera Tanden, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton and the current president of the Center for American Progress, is a polarizing figure. She fought all the time with supporters of Bernie Sanders and now vigorously defends Joe Biden. But in an essay for Democracy Journal, she also points to an achievable future that most people on the left should be able to unite around.
“Perhaps, in November, we will see that President Trump has become the Herbert Hoover of our day,” she concludes. “Not only may this crisis bring in a new President, but we could also see a new wave of progressive reforms in the face of a failed theory of libertarianism, the ideology of a dying era. The virus has highlighted glaring flaws in our current system. And what comes in its place is a reimagined social contract that not only leads us into recovery, but paves the way for a new future, one that reconfigures the relationship between government, corporation, and citizen, and presents a more fair and just way forward.”
It’s easy to lose sight of just how unpopular Donald Trump actually is. But he’s never managed to appeal to a majority. Moreover America is becoming more diverse, not less. And he’s alienating just about every group but his base: white men without college degrees. His entire campaign is predicated on white racism.
“Trump’s use of the “Chinese virus” or “kung flu” is, of course, not in good faith and very much about tapping into the same racism and xenophobia he’s long amplified in myriad comments he’s made about people of color,” Li Zhou writes in Vox. “As the Washington Post’s Jose Del Real reported, Trump made several other racist statements during his Tulsa remarks: In his speech, he described racial justice protesters as ‘thugs’ and used a scenario involving a ‘tough hombre’ to illustrate the threat of defunding police.
Will Trump’s divisive approach work? It did in 2016, but Trump is running against a different candidate this time. And whatever you think of Joe Biden’s political skills and consensus-oriented policies, he’s not the polarizing figure that Hillary Clinton is.
“Joe Biden is old,” Mark Z. Barabak writes in the Los Angeles Times. “He has a paper trail reaching back half a century. He is, by his own admission, a ‘gaffe machine’ who regularly trips over his own tongue. He is not, however, as widely and viscerally disliked as the last Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and that’s complicating President Trump’s reelection effort. The incumbent is deeply unpopular and, if history is a guide, stands little chance of drastically changing those sentiments by election day. His best — and possibly only — chance of winning a second term is making Biden seem the more unpalatable of the two; turning the election, in the political shorthand, into a choice between candidates rather than a referendum on Trump’s personality and performance.”
There’s still more than four months to go, but for now Biden clearly has the edge. The New York Times, with Siena College, just released its first poll of the campaign.
“Joseph R. Biden Jr. has taken a commanding lead over President Trump in the 2020 race,” the Times pollsters found, “building a wide advantage among women and nonwhite voters and making deep inroads with some traditionally Republican-leaning groups that have shifted away from Mr. Trump following his ineffective response to the coronavirus pandemic.”
One of the things I’ve missed during the pandemic is the opportunity to play (very low stakes) poker. But even if you don’t share my interest in a game where skill and luck both play crucial roles (just like in real life), I think you will find Maria Konnikova’s entertaining and illuminating profile of Erik Seidel worth your time.
“What is the object of playing poker?” Konnikova wonders at one point.
Seidel answers by describing the response of another talented poker player, Mike Caro, to the same question.
“Somebody says, ‘Winning money.’ He says, ‘No.’ Somebody else says, ‘Winning a lot of pots.’ ‘No.’ He says, ‘The object of poker is making good decisions.’ I think that’s a really good way to look at poker.”
Here’s to making good decisions.
June 29, 2020
George Floyd. Eric Garner. And too many others.
All victims, as the New York Times reports in a stunning example of investigative reporting, of needless deaths at the hands of the police and other law enforcement officials.
“But while the cases of Mr. Garner and Mr. Floyd shocked the nation,” the Times found, “dozens of other incidents with a remarkable common denominator have gone widely unacknowledged. Over the past decade, at least 70 people have died in law enforcement custody after saying the same words — “I can’t breathe.” The dead ranged in age from 19 to 65. The majority of them had been stopped or held over nonviolent infractions, 911 calls about suspicious behavior, or concerns about their mental health. More than half were black.”
Many more needless deaths are occurring, from Covid-19, because of negligent Republican politicians who have turned not wearing a mask into some sort of symbol of virility and individual liberty.
Perhaps nothing more succinctly captures the effect of President Trump’s derision of masks than this Twitter screen shot of a man wearing a MAGA hat on a crowded airliner with his disposable mask over his eyes rather than his nose and mouth.
The messaging from the White House has been reinforced by Fox News and the broader conservative megaphone, as Margaret Sullivan explains in her latest media column in the Washington Post.
“Three serious research efforts have put numerical weight — yes, data-driven evidence — behind what many suspected all along: Americans who relied on Fox News, or similar right-wing sources, were duped as the coronavirus began its deadly spread. Dangerously duped.”
Now, Vice President Pence -- the ostensible head of Trump’s coronavirus task force -- is finally (sort of) encouraging people to wear masks, but it’s too little and way too late.
And the consequences of failing to prioritize public health are once again evident in the changing geography of the disease.
“The shifting of the epicenter of the pandemic,” writes Amy Davidson Sorkin in The New Yorker, “from Northeastern, Midwestern, and urban areas that are largely governed by Democrats to states in the South and the West, many of them red or purple, along with blue California, is a reminder of a point that Dr. Ashish Jha, a Harvard public-health expert, has been making since March: the coronavirus doesn’t care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat. Nationally, the number of deaths has fallen, thanks in part to new insights about treatments. But the rising numbers of cases, coupled with the listlessness of the Administration, suggest that the respite may be brief, and that we are squandering whatever advantage was gained by the ebb in the states first affected.”
Texas is one of the states now at the epicenter. It’s a depressing tale but if any story about the coronavirus can be said to be entertaining, Mimi Swartz’s NYT op-ed on how Texas “swaggered” into its disaster is it.
“And so, here we are,” Swartz writes, “with a jittery populace and the Texas Medical Center’s coronavirus website competing with TikTok. I.C.U.s in Houston are at 97 percent capacity, with ‘unsustainable surge capacity’ predicted for hospital beds in late July. If ‘this trajectory persists,’ Dr. Hotez tweeted, ‘Houston would become the worst-affected city in the U.S.’ He added that it would ‘maybe rival what we’re seeing now in Brazil.’”
Will anything positive come out of the pandemic? In The Atlantic, Charles C. Mann looked back at history for some answers. It’s way too early to draw any firm conclusions, but he found at least one ray of hope in a fairly recent example.
“Later it occurred to me that a possible legacy of Hong Kong’s success with SARS is that its citizens seem to put more faith in collective action than they used to,” Mann concluded. “I’ve met plenty of people there who believe that the members of their community can work together for the greater good—as they did in suppressing SARS and will, with luck, keep doing with COVID-19. It’s probably naive of me to hope that successfully containing the coronavirus would impart some of the same faith in the United States, but I do anyway.”
There’s no hope of that, though, if President Trump remains in office next year. Most of you undoubtedly heard about Trump’s retweeting on Sunday of a video in which a racist supporter shouted “white power.” The White House subsequently pulled down the tweet, saying Trump had not heard the shout. But it was impossible to miss, as the Washington Post explained in its piece on the incident.
“President Trump promoted a video Sunday that includes a Trump supporter shouting “white power” at counterprotesters, calling his supporters at the Florida retirement community where the demonstration occurred ‘great people.’
“The video captures a pro-Trump golf cart parade from June 14, the president’s birthday. It was shot at the Villages, a retirement community in central Florida.”
Want to know more about the Villages? This piece in Politico Magazine, from June 2018 and written by Michael Grunwald, is smart and revealing.
“The Villages is America’s largest retirement community, a carefully planned, meticulously groomed dreamscape of gated subdivisions, wall-to-wall golf courses, adult-only pools and old-fashioned town squares” Grunwald explains. “It’s advertised as ‘Florida’s friendliest hometown,’ and it’s supposed to evoke a bygone era of traditional values when Americans knew their neighbors, respected their elders and followed the rules. It has the highest concentration of military veterans of any metropolitan area without a military base. It has strict regulations enforcing the uniformity of homes (no second stories, no bright colors, no modern flourishes) as well as the people living in them (no families with children, except to visit). And it is Trump country, a reliably Republican, vocally patriotic, almost entirely white enclave that gave the president nearly 70 percent of the vote.”
The Villages is a fantasy of what America once was, but it is not our future. Fortunately, we are re-examining our past to better understand where our country should be going. Which is why I’m looking forward to watching Hamilton on television this weekend. Lisa and I were lucky enough to see the show with Emily on Broadway, but now it's coming to home screens on Disney Plus.
The timing couldn’t be better, as the concluding quote in the NYT story makes clear:
“Now more than ever we need to see representation onscreen, and to use ‘Hamilton’ as a way, once again, to hold up a mirror to ourselves and ask who we are as a society, and what we want to be,” said Phillipa Soo, who stars as Hamilton’s wife, Eliza. “As much as we are grappling with the things that are very flawed in our country, I hope it gets people excited about what it means to be an American.”