Democracy, Donald Trump

Donald Trump and Presidential leadership in the era of the coronavirus pandemic

First, “Donald Trump: A Study in Leadership,” a brief video that contrasts Trump with other world leaders.

Ann Applebaum comments, “One knows, of course, that Donald Trump behaves differently from the leaders of other countries, especially the leaders of other Western democracies. One knows that he disdains facts; that he does not read briefing papers; that he has no organizational talents; that he does not know how to make use of militaries, bureaucracies, or diplomatic services; that he has no basic knowledge of history or science, let alone government.

But seeing him in this video, produced by my colleagues in Atlantic Studios, juxtaposed with other world leaders during this coronavirus pandemic comes, nevertheless, as a shock.”

Second, the views of a founding member of the Never Trump movement, Steve Schmidt:

“I think that what makes the country exceptional is that we’re made up of all the peoples of the world. We’re the only country in the history of the world that’s founded on the power of an idea. And that idea, though it was wrapped in injustice and hypocrisy, is that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. And over time that came to include African Americans, Hispanic Americans, women, gay men and women — and we still have work to do.

But that collection of people — Americans — we have fed more people, clothed more people, liberated more people, cured more people, and done more general good in the world than all the other countries of the world put together since the beginning of time.

And for the last 75 years, since the end of World War II, we’ve lived in an American era. It was a liberal, U.S.-led, liberal global world order that was architected in the mind of the twentieth century’s greatest president, FDR. It was built by Harry Truman. It was maintenanced from presidents between Eisenhower and Obama of both parties. And it has ended.

Donald Trump has been the worst president this country has ever had. And I don’t say that hyperbolically. He is.

But he is a consequential president. And he has brought this country in three short years to a place of weakness that is simply unimaginable if you were pondering where we are today from the day [when] Barack Obama left office. And there were a lot of us on that day who were deeply skeptical and very worried about what a Trump presidency would be.

But this is a moment of unparalleled national humiliation. Of weakness. When you listen to the President, these are the musings of an imbecile, an idiot. And I don’t use those words to name-call. I use them because they’re the precise words in the English language to describe his behavior, his comportment, his actions.

We’ve never seen a level of incompetence, a level of ineptitude so staggering on a daily basis by anybody in the history of the country who’s ever been charged with substantial responsibilities. It’s just astonishing that this man is the President of the United States.

The man, the con man from New York City — many bankruptcies, failed businesses, a reality show that branded him as something that he never was: a successful businessman.

Well, he’s the President of the United States now and the man who said that he would make the country great again. He’s brought death, suffering, and economic collapse on truly an epic scale.

And let’s be clear. This isn’t happening in every country around the world. This place, our place, our home, our country — the United States — we are the epicenter. We are the place where you’re most likely to die of this disease. We’re the ones with the most shattered economy.

And we are because of the fool that sits in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk.”

(Editor’s note: in a future post I intend to reference these remarks, which provide context and contrast for the discussion about whether or not Trump is a weak president.)

Donald Trump, Republicans, Tribalism

North Dakota Governor Burgum rejects senseless dividing line: “We’re all in this together”

“In our state there’s no requirements regarding wearing masks … and we’re all in this together. And there’s only one battle we’re fighting. And that’s the battle of the virus.

I would really love to see a North Dakota that we could just skip this thing that other parts of the nation are going through where they’re trading a divide – either it’s ideological or political or something – around mask versus no mask.

This is a – I would say – senseless dividing line. And I would ask people to try to dial up your empathy and your understanding.

If someone is wearing a mask, they’re not doing it to represent what political party they’re in or what candidates they support. They might be doing it because they’ve got a 5-year-old child who’s been going through cancer treatments. They might have vulnerable adults in their life who currently have COVID, and they’re fighting.

And so, again, I would just love to see our state, as part of being North Dakota Smart, also be North Dakota Kind, North Dakota Empathetic, North Dakota Understanding to do this thing. Because if somebody wants to wear a mask, there should be no mask shaming. You should look at them and say: That person’s wearing a mask because for them there’s additional risk in their life.

. . .

The first thing that somebody ought to assume is they’re doing it because they’ve got people in their life that they love and that they’re trying to take care of. And I just think, let’s just start there.” — Governor Doug Burgum

That a Republican governor would make these remarks is newsworthy because, “In 21st century American politics, truth is tribal.” And the Republican tribe — of Donald Trump and Fox News Channel — have contradicted and criticized the judgments of doctors, scientists, and public health authorities regarding the risks posed by a worldwide pandemic, whenever those judgments have conflicted with the Republican message of the day.

The message today is, Get back to work, go out and spend (and never mind the risks). But in the rarefied world of the Fox News on-air personalities and of White House personnel, best practices (as developed by medicine and science) aren’t rejected quite as cavalierly. Not behind the scenes and away from the cameras.

By late February at Fox News headquarters, the CEO had directed the installation of hand-sanitizing stations and the disinfecting of offices, and cancelled an event to pitch ad sales to Madison Avenue. Rupert Murdoch called off his 89th birthday party to keep himself and his friends safe.

At the White House, President Trump (and those around him) are tested regularly. There is even contact tracing and a requirement to wear masks. While touring the Ford plant last week, Trump explained why he wasn’t wearing a mask. “It’s not necessary. Everybody’s been tested and I’ve been tested. In fact, I was tested this morning. So it’s not necessary.”

The President tours a Ford plant.

The message could be: We’re all in this together. The priority could be: let’s put testing and tracing, and social isolation when infection is found, in place for everyone. The priority could be: let’s ensure that PPE is available for all health care workers, grocery workers, and the men and women in meat packing plants — for everyone being urged to get out and reopen the economy.

The public message of the Trump reelection campaign — Reopen the economy — has polarized the country, because ensuring safety has not been a priority. There is no plan to defeat the coronavirus or to protect the public (in either tribe). Instead, we get denial — from the Trump camp and Fox News — signaling to the base that there is no threat, or that the threat is overblown.

So, mask shaming has become a thing. In a world where WME — the white male effect — is a thing, where doctors and scientists and government experts are ridiculed, where conspiracies are pushed and hoaxes alleged, where anti-intellectualism is endemic, where public protesters (with and without guns) pointedly refuse to take steps to protect themselves and others (by wearing masks or socially distancing), in this world, the President seals himself off in the West Wing and protects himself when out of public view.

Anonymous photo behind the scenes at Ford.

As we approach the ghastly milestone of 100,000 deaths, the United States continues to lead the world in the number of infections and fatalities from COVID-19 — a testament to the failure of national leadership.

Governor Burgum, your heart and your head are in the right place.

Donald Trump

Making the case for the view of political scientists that Donald Trump is a weak president

Is Donald Trump a weak president? A number of political scientists and commentators have answered this question affirmatively. A strong case can be made for this view. I was in the affirmative camp in February 2019. By December 2019, I had begun to harbor doubts. In this post, I survey why Trump is regarded as a weak president. In a subsequent post, I will look at the strong grounds we have for challenging this view.

Presidential Power

Generations of political scientists have looked to Richard Neustadt’s analysis in Presidential Power, which suggests that our constitutional system, featuring separated powers, institutional constraints, and competition among political actors, limits what a president can accomplish through the sole exercise of formal powers (though these are substantial). Thus the president must elicit the cooperation of others to get things done. A president’s effectiveness is found in his power to persuade.

We might better think of ‘persuasion’ as negotiation, because Neustadt envisages “hard bargaining” and a give and take between the president and other political actors.

The essence of a President’s persuasive task, with congressmen and everybody else, is to induce them to believe that what he wants of them is what their own appraisal of their own responsibilities requires them to do in their interest, not his. Because men may differ in their views on public policy, because differences in outlook stem from differences in duty—duty to one’s office, one’s constituents, oneself—that task is bound to be more like collective bargaining than like a reasoned argument among philosopher kings.

Jonathan Bernstein, who argued before Trump’s inauguration that “We may be at the beginning of a historically weak presidency,” observes (in “The 1960 Book That Explains Why Trump Is a Failure“) that in Neustadt’s view:

“persuasion” doesn’t necessarily mean changing anyone’s mind. It may just mean convincing someone in a position of power to do nothing rather than something.

Bernstein also notes that

skilled presidents … rely on more than just threats. They work hard to build strong relationships, and know when to dangle carrots to loosely affiliated supporters, too.

A savvy and effective president makes good use of the tools at his command, which may include: a reservoir of knowledge and the know-how to command the levers of power; an understanding of the political interests and needs of, for instance, the senators and members of Congress with whom a president must deal; a reputation as someone who can articulate what he wants, whose word can be trusted, and is prepared to do what he says he will do; and a favorable standing with the American public.

Donald Trump lacks virtually every asset on the list. It is safe to say that Neustadt’s image of a strong president looked nothing like our current president. Several distinct critiques of Trump’s shortcomings illustrate why this is so. Let’s begin with Daniel Drezner’s “Immature Leadership: Donald Trump and the American Presidency.”

Trump as Toddler

Drezner notes Trump’s meager legislative accomplishments, feckless executive orders, and the absence of trade or arms control agreements, among other failures. Drezner attributes this record to specific psychological traits of the President. Drezner has observed that friend and foe alike (and even Trump himself) have depicted Trump in language applicable to “a rambunctious two-year old.”

Even a cursory examination of the Trump literature reveals a peculiarity unique to this president: almost all his biographers, even his acolytes, describe him in terms one would use for a toddler. He offers the greatest example of pervasive developmental delay in American political history.

Between April 25, 2017 – when Drezner posted a tweet noting that Trump’s staff talked about him like a toddler – and April 27, 2020 – three years later, Drezner had writen a book, The Toddler in Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us about the Modern Presidency, and posted 1,358 tweets citing references to Trump as toddler. “It is safe to say that Donald Trump has not grown into the presidency. At this point, the thread itself possesses more maturity than the commander in chief.”

Drezner identifies Trump’s quick temper, short attention span, and poor impulse control as primary traits that have greatly impaired Trump’s effectiveness as president. Making the case for Trump’s deficiencies, based on the review in “Immature Leadership,” is child’s play. Drezner concludes: “If Neustadt is correct in his view that the chief power of the presidency is the ability to persuade, then Donald Trump has been a weak, ineffectual president.”

Trump as Failed Deal Maker

We can make an equally strong case with a different approach. Consider a calling card of Donald Trump years before he ran for president. As the nominal author of Trump: The Art of the Deal (actually ghostwritten by a writer “who put lipstick on a pig“) and in his starring role as the chief executive on NBC’s “The Apprentice,” Trump convinced much of the country that he was a skillful deal maker. The evidence of the past 3+ years reveals the opposite. His shortcomings as a negotiator have become well known during his presidency. Seven months into his term, Calculated Risk, an economics blog, distinguished two kinds of negotiation – distributive (win-lose) and integrative (win-win) – to explain Trump’s failures as a negotiator.

Trump’s approach is win-lose. Distributive deals are zero-sum. Bluster, bluffing, empty threats, even lies might carry the day with the sale of real estate, especially if one has no intention of ever making another deal with the buyer. Take the money and don’t look back.

A successful president, on the other hand, must rely on integrative negotiating skills, which Trump lacks.

The approach to an integrative negotiation includes building trust, understanding the other party’s concerns, and knowing the details of the agreement – with the goal to reach a mutually beneficial agreement.

Trump can’t be trusted, since he is both irresolute (saying one thing one day, and another thing the next) and has a reputation as a cheat (well-earned before he ran for president). He’s certainly not working hard “to build strong relationships.” He fails to master substantive matters, including policy choices, proposed legislation, and international conflicts. This deficit – and his lack of empathy or even a modicum of curiosity – blind him to the concerns and even the incentives of whoever is on the other side of the negotiating table.

More than once Trump’s threats to Democrats made no sense because he was warning of consequences that his own party had more reason to fear than did Democrats. His misreading of Kim Jong Un has been grotesque.

Trump’s reliance on gut instinct and on fantasies regarding personal relationships (and even ‘love letters’), and his aversion to strategic planning, have yielded few agreements after 40 months in office. His inability to persuade negotiators on the other side demonstrates glaring weakness.

Trump as Narcissist

Trump’s self-love and hunger for the adoration of others, which crowd out virtually everything else in his personal space, is in evidence every day.

Trump, as Ashley Parker put it last month, clings to a “me-me-me ethos.” In the face of a rising death toll, millions of unemployment claims, and long lines at food banks, Trump made the coronavirus briefings all about himself – “his self image, his media coverage, his supplicants and his opponents, both real and imagined.”

George Conway – employing DSM criteria for narcissism – has taken time and care to document Trump’s compulsive focus on himself and his profound lack of empathy for others (“Unfit for Office”). It is critical to note that Conway (an attorney, not a psychiatrist) is focused on Trump’s publicly observable behavior and how that renders Trump incapable of fulfilling the fiduciary responsibilities of the office of president. He has no interest in rendering a medical/psychiatric diagnosis.

There is no contradiction, in fact, in both calling Trump “a world-class narcissist” and declining to label him as mentally ill. It doesn’t take a degree in medicine or psychology to see in plain sight Trump’s extraordinary vanity and callousness. Conway argues convincingly that, “Trump’s ingrained and extreme behavioral characteristics make it impossible for him to carry out the duties of the presidency in the way the Constitution requires.”

For our purposes, we can conclude that his distinctive psychological makeup robs Trump of managerial competence and the capacity to persuade.

Trump as COVID-19 Bystander

Finally, the COVID-19 debacle, and Trump’s flight from accountability, is documented daily by the news media. Last month David Hopkins cataloged Trump’s blunders in response to the pandemic (“The Weakest Modern Presidency Faces a Pandemic From the Couch”), including failing to engage meaningfully with the issue. “According to recent reporting, Trump is unengaged with the substance of his administration’s COVID mitigation efforts: his discursive appearances at task force meetings reveal a limited understanding of relevant subjects when he attends at all, and he spends much of the workday watching cable television.”

Hopkins summarizes:

All of these traits were visible before COVID came along. But now the demands on this presidency have grown stronger while the president looks less and less comfortable in the job, unable even to mimic the seriousness of purpose that other elected officials have marshaled in the moment. [Emphasis added.]

Trump as toddler, failed deal maker, narcissist, and passive bystander: all point to the same conclusion. Trump lacks basic managerial skills, an affinity for negotiation, and an informed understanding of government. His deeply rooted self-absorption renders him incapable of acting as an effective executive. He is deficient in both credibility and the power to persuade anyone not predisposed to defer to him.

On the other hand

As strong as the case is for the conclusion, ‘Trump is a weak president,’ it leaves something out: Trump’s singular, imposing dominance over the Republican Party, which is without precedent among other presidents stretching back to FDR (Neustadt’s starting point). While Trump displays many conspicuous weaknesses as president, his command over the GOP undermines the conclusion.

Mark Shields alluded to this dominance in December, noting (in my words, not his) that LBJ was a weakling compared to Trump regarding the fear that each man generated among the party faithful. The fearsome LBJ could only dream of dominating the Democratic Party as Trump dominates the GOP.

I will argue in a subsequent post that Trump’s domination of the GOP is not an empty illusion (contrary to advocates of the view that Trump is a weak president); that as ham-handed, uninformed, and constrained by compulsive self-absorption as Trump is, he has become more powerful over the past three years; and that these (and other) considerations undercut the conclusion.  

(Image: small man creates a commotion, flailing and whining about how unfairly others treat him, and grasps for a simplistic solution.)

Donald Trump, Off the Rails

No plan to defeat the coronavirus; Trump casts shade on testing; White House veers and cheers

“We don’t have a single point of leadership for this response, and we don’t have a master plan for this response.” — Rick Bright

“We have greatest testing in the world. We have the most cases than anybody in the world – but why? Because we do more testing. When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.” — Donald Trump

“We had left a playbook and it was easy to tell that’s what it was, because it said on the front in big red letters, Playbook, and then it had all those steps you needed to take. Sixty-nine pages of steps of what to do when a pandemic loomed.

…First everyone said no such document existed. Now today the White House press secretary came out and said: Well, there was this document, but it wasn’t really that good. And we had our own document … – which contradicts the fact that the Trump position till now has been: Well, no one saw this coming.

Now the position is: Well, we saw it coming. We rejected the Obama playbook. We had our own playbook. Our playbook was better.

… The only thing that’s consistent in the excuse making from the White House.” — Ron Klain

“There’s never been a vaccine project anywhere in history like this. And I just want to make something clear. It’s very important. Vaccine or no vaccine, we’re back.” — Donald Trump

More than 88,000 Americans have died of COVID-19. And the dying hasn’t stopped.

(Image: Kayleigh McEney, holding the Obama administration’s Playbook, while celebrating the disastrous response of the Trump administration to the pandemic.)

Donald Trump, Off the Rails

Donald Trump has no plan to defeat the novel coronavirus and doesn’t intend to make a plan

It is May 7, 2020, three months after the first American death from the novel coronavirus. More than 76,000 Americans have died since then.  Yet the Trump administration has no plan to keep us safe. Instead, it is focused on revving up economic activity, while acknowledging that infections and deaths from coronavirus will continue to increase as a result.

On Tuesday Andy Slavitt, former Acting Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (during the last two years of the Obama administration), offered observations about this rush to reopen the country, which put things into a clear, well-grounded perspective:

The truth is we`ve done a very good job over the last couple of months staying inside, slowing down the infection rate. That has saved people`s lives. But nothing`s happened to the virus in the meantime. There was no magic act where that virus became less infectious. And so as soon as we go outside again and start interacting more, if we`re not testing and tracing and wearing masks and taking really profound steps, then the infection rate`s just going to grow again dramatically. And where we sit today is much, much higher than every other country in the world.

Without testing, tracing, PPE, and social distancing, the situation will grow dramatically worse. And we lead the world with the highest rate of infection.

Slavitt argued against the simplistic view that we must put aside concerns with public health for the sake of the American economy, since:

… we`re not choosing between either a good economy or fewer deaths. The truth is that for us to have a better economy, we have to fix the public health crisis. Nobody`s going to start spending money at stores, buying cars, investing in small businesses, signing leases until they feel this crisis is behind us.

The Lieutenant Governor of Texas says, “there are more important things than living. And that’s saving this country for my children and my grandchildren and saving this country for all of us.” Like Donald Trump and Mike Pence, though, he is far from the assembly lines at meatpacking plants, checking out customers at the local supermarket, attending to sick patients in an ICU, or anywhere else where the risks are especially high.

Slavitt noted we are still learning about the virus:

But we know it`s a novel virus. We know none of us have immunity. At best there may be a couple percent of the population that have gained immunity. We know that it infects people and keeps – and while it infects them they`re asymptomatic, or a good bit of the time, if not the entire time. And so it goes from person to person until it finds a host where it can become lethal. And it takes just a small speck through the air for that to happen. And if it gets into a nursing home or a meatpacking factory or a prison or a public housing unit or any place where people congregate and multiple generations live, it can wipe out large communities.

And so we`re seeing death tolls now on a daily basis that are soon to approach the number of people that died on 9/11. Continually. We have to ask ourselves how we reverse course from where we are – and we can. But we can`t if we don`t admit the facts, if we don`t face the facts.

Guys with guns in Lansing.

Slavitt suggested – contra those urging us to accept a higher death count in return for a humming economy, or those guys with guns in Lansing, Michigan, or the crowds clamoring to reopen the beaches – most of us want to protect ourselves and our families from harm [my emphasis]:

… I think that people want to be safe first. I think they want – we all want our lives back. But people don`t want to endanger their selves or their families. They don`t want to endanger others. I actually think that a lot of this, “economy opening” – yes, there are scenes of people at beaches on TV, and yes there`s scenes of people rallying with guns, but the lion’s share of people, I think, want a plan to open up the country safely. And that is not too much to ask. Germany has done it. Japan has done it. New Zealand has done it. I mean, this is not impossible. We just want to open up safely. And safely means we have to do things. We have to have testing and tracing in place. We have to have masks in place. The Czech Republic has done it. Greece has done it. Italy is doing it. Why are we the country that decides we`re going to open up unsafely?

Why have we given up defeating the coronavirus and decided to sacrifice tens of thousands of Americans whose lives need not be shortened by this pandemic?

Because doing things – conducting widespread testing and tracing, providing PPE to our medical personnel, giving the public clear guidance at each phase – would require leadership at the federal level: a strategic plan and energetic executive action. And the Trump administration doesn’t have a plan, much less the will or the capacity to carry out a plan.

Virtually every public health authority has put testing at the center of a strategy to defeat the virus and protect American lives. Why not focus on doing this – to achieve the victory? Because, increased testing would increase the number of identified cases of infection, and that would make Trump’s numbers look bad. As he put it yesterday, “The media likes to say we have the most cases, but we do by far the most testing. If we did very little testing, we wouldn’t have the most cases. So in a way by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad.”

A month ago – on April 5 – David Wallace-Wells (“There Is No Plan for the End of the Coronavirus Crisis”) noted that testing and tracing was the ideal path to containing the pandemic, and that, in the absence of tracing, an aggressive testing program could lead to success. The country’s lockdown provided the opportunity to implement a plan:

buying the country time to ramp up a comprehensive testing regimen. We would shelter in place until such a program was ready to go, then reenter “normal” life through that portal of medical surveillance.

Sadly, he added: “the complete absence of federal leadership … is especially conspicuous.”

Today, as infections and deaths mount, the federal government continues to abdicate its responsibility to protect us.

Jay Rosen has concluded (“The plan is to have no plan”):

The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible— by telling the governors they’re in charge without doing what only the federal government can do, by fighting with the press when it shows up to be briefed, by fixing blame for the virus on China or some other foreign element, and by “flooding the zone with shit,” Steve Bannon’s phrase for overwhelming the system with disinformation, distraction, and denial, which boosts what economists call “search costs” for reliable intelligence. 

Stated another way, the plan is to default on public problem solving, and then prevent the public from understanding the consequences of that default.

On April 5, I wrote, “Accountability is anathema to Donald Trump. Between now and November 3, he will frantically flee from even a modicum of responsibility for the tens of thousands of deaths from coronavirus that will continue to take place on his watch.”

Donald Trump hasn’t succeeded — or even tried with any conviction — to defeat this virus. He continues, however, to muddy the waters (“flooding the zone with shit”) to escape blame for the carnage.

(Image: U.S. Department of State.)

2020 General Election, Democracy, Republicans

GOP will gladly accept an extended contested election — if they think it may help them win it

“No one wants the uncertainty of an extended contested election with complaints like those we heard about the recent Wisconsin primary or the Iowa caucuses in February.”

No one? Suppose Mitch McConnell were offered a choice: a free and fair election (that Democrats likely win) or a contentious argument with weeks or months of turmoil about a result that is finally decided (perhaps by the United States Supreme Court) in Republicans’ favor. Does anyone doubt the choice he makes?

How about Kevin McCarthy? Or Bill Barr? Brian Kemp, Robin Vos, Kris Kobach? What would be the preference of John Roberts, whose career in restricting voting rights stretches back to 1982?

The consensus among Republicans in Washington, and in state houses across the country, would be to make the choice that Mitch McConnell would make. The GOP is committed to winning any way it can. Free and fair be damned.

That stark fact – that Republicans don’t hesitate to cheat to win elections – is why the report (“Fair Elections During a Crisis: Urgent Recommendations in Law, Media, Politics, and Tech to Advance the Legitimacy of, and the Public’s Confidence in, the November 2020 U.S. Elections”) by an ad hoc committee put together by Richard Hasen is going to win favor with good government groups and with Democratic leaders, but not with the leadership of the Republican Party.

Jonathan Bernstein’s commentary (“How to Hold a Fair Election in November”) – in which the quoted sentence appears – provides context, describes the report’s overall strategy (ensuring “a diversity of avenues for voting”), and recommends both the report and Hasen’s recent book (Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy).

I’m on board with the thrust of Bernstein’s post. Richard Hasen has been sounding the alarm regarding the threats to free and fair elections for many years. Voting is under attack and Hasen is well-qualified to offer viable reforms to ensure the integrity of the process and to boost Americans’ faith in elections. The coronavirus pandemic, exacerbated by Donald Trump’s abdication of responsibility, is yet another threat.

However, although the sentiment expressed in the quotation above is virtually de rigueur for an op-ed advocating democratic reform, we can’t count on it. Republicans are convinced – and have been for decades – that restricting voting turnout is good for them. In 1980 Paul Weyrich, during the fall campaign for Ronald Reagan, mocked “the goo-goo syndrome – good government,” arguing that “our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up, as the voting populace goes down.” From the Brooks Brothers riot to Wisconsin’s recent election, we see that this is an enduring calculation.

And that’s not all: Republicans benefit when Americans are bitterly divided and when government is discredited. An extended contested election – win or lose – redounds to the advantage of Republicans.

[Photo of poster by Robbie Conal.]

2020 General Election, Donald Trump

Presidential Priority: Meat on the table. Collateral Damage: Low wage workers, mostly minorities and Democrats

Report (from the Washington Post via the House Education and Labor Committee):

President Trump signed an executive order Tuesday evening compelling meat processors to remain open to head off shortages in the nation’s food supply chains, despite mounting reports of plant worker deaths due to covid-19.” . . .

Trump alluded to the plan Tuesday morning during an Oval Office meeting with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). “We’re going to sign an executive order today, I believe,” Trump said. “It was a very unique circumstance because of liability.” He did not elaborate. . . .

Tyson Foods video.

Response from John Tyson, Chairman Tyson Foods: “The food supply chain is breaking.”

Tyson Foods photo.

Response from Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds: “The reality is that we cannot stop this virus. It will remain in our communities until a vaccine is available. Instead we must learn to live with coronavirus activity without letting it govern our lives.”

Furthermore:

“If you’re an employer and you offer to bring your employee back to work and they decide not to, that’s a voluntary quit. Reynolds said Friday. “Therefore, they would not be eligible for the unemployment money.”

Smithfield Foods video.

Response from Kim Cordova, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, “If these meat plants can’t be held liable, there is no reason for them to take measures to ensure workers are safe. . . . If workers stop showing up, what are they going to do? Enact a draft? This is insane. If these workers are essential, protect them. They are treating workers like fungible widgets instead of human beings.”

Even a casual review of the videos and photographs on the Smithfield Foods and Tyson Foods websites reveals that men and women are working in close quarters. During a pandemic, that’s a risky business. But not for Donald Trump (or Mike Pence or Governor Reynolds).

ABC News video.

The President, as Catherine Rampell observed last week (“Trump has almost nothing to lose. That’s why he wants to reopen the economy.”), has relied on a “But the economy” pitch for reelection. That’s gone now. But he’s willing to gamble with other people’s lives on the slim chance that he might get the economy back by November 3.

David Frum sums up this political calculation:

Propublica published a list of seven things that the experts recommended before America can open safely and up in have been done and none of those things will be done any time soon. There’s no contact tracing. And the United States cannot stay locked down indefinitely. That’s the one thing that the resident said is true. I don’t think the President and people like Governor Kemp are consciously planning this, but they’re removing all the alternatives to the only policy that is going to remain this time six weeks from now or eight weeks from now. Which is they’re moving toward the policy of what’s — “let’s take the punch.”

He’ll reopen and see what happens. Let’s accept that there may be hundreds of thousands, or some double hundreds of thousands, of Americans killed. They’re going to be mostly poor and minorities, mostly not going to be Trump voters. Let’s take that punch and push through and try to get to herd immunity as fast as possible.

I don’t think the President quite processes it quite that rationally, but maybe Governor Kemp does. I suspect Governor Desantis probably does. But that’s where with they’re going. When you don’t prepare any alternatives the only plan left available to you is the plan that you have and the plan that they’re working to is take the punch, let people take the casualties casualties. They’re mostly minorities and non-Trump voters.

Does anyone expect to see Vice President Mike Pence walk the assembly line at a meat packing plant — with or without a mask?

[Photo above headline: Smithfield Foods’ “Our COVID-19 Response” video.]

Update: “Nearly 900 employees, 40 percent of the workforce, at a Tyson Foods pork-processing plant in Indiana have tested positive for the coronavirus.”

The Way the World Goes 'Round

Round and round: The president, the governor, voting rights, and the Grim Reaper

1.  Speech acts

In 1974, John Searle made an observation in a classroom about this sentence: ‘This room would look good in blue.’ He noted that the import of the sentence could differ from speaker to speaker. So, for instance, the words constituted a simple declarative sentence when spoken by a casual observer to a friend, while the same sentence could function as an imperative – Paint it blue – if spoken by the homeowner to a contractor.

I was reminded of this lecture when reading Bonnie Honig’s comments about an exchange on Fox News (which I quoted yesterday):

Jesse Watters: The President’s spitballing and he’s asking questions. ‘Would it be possible to maybe target the virus through a cure using certain ingredients and using sunlight?‘ You didn’t believe the President was putting anyone in danger, did you?

Dr. Deborah Birx: No. He gets new information. He likes to talk that through out loud. And really have that dialogue. And so that’s what dialogue he was having. I think he just saw the information at the time, immediately before the press conference. And he was still digesting that information.

It was easy enough to take the good doctor’s suggestion – that Trump was just digesting the information when he commented on bleach and light – at face value. But, Honig illustrates why this is wrong.

Trump isn’t just riffing aloud. He is demanding public praise for his intelligence from a distinguished authority whose job depends on Trump’s goodwill. Honig (“Spitballing in a pandemic”) [emphasis added]:

Dr. Birx … tried to explain it all away on Fox News, and what she said rings true: “When he gets new information he likes to talk that through out loud and really have that dialogue and so that’s what dialogue he’s having.” The issue, she implies, is not the musing: that is his process. The issue is that it happened in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But Trump knew that. He mused publicly because he hoped to give us all a peek behind the scenes. He has ideas and his people take them seriously! See? And who knows? He himself might come up with the cure! 

. . .

What we saw on Thursday in the briefing room is what is going on behind the scenes: his advisors indulge Trump’s bright ideas and take them seriously. “I just had a thought. Look into it.” He did not say it like it was an order. On Thursday, his tone was inveigling, whispery. He was impersonating what he imagines it looks like to have an idea. Buttressed by power and smothered in noblesse oblige, however, his “thought” was really a command: act like it’s a good idea. — Yessir, we will.

2.  That’s bracing

In California, declaration of an emergency results in an extraordinarily broad expansion of a governor’s power, in this case, Gavin Newsom’s:

States are afforded broad authority under constitutional law, which grants them “police power” to improve the health, safety, morals and general welfare of the population. Under California’s Emergency Services Act, the governor’s powers are virtually unlimited — he can suspend any law or regulation during a state of emergency.

3. Voting rights

On April 12, I referenced election expert Richard Hasen’s fear that Republican-controlled state legislatures, in purple states (or red ones that could flip to Biden), could cancel the November 3 election and allocate the state’s electoral votes to Trump. The U.S. Supreme Court noted in Bush v. Gore that state legislatures possess this authority under the Constitution.

Last week, in a review of Joe Biden’s warning that Trump could try to cancel the election, Ed Kilgore noted that in fact the Florida legislature – in 2000 (when Bush v. Gore was before SCOTUS) – filed a brief asserting the authority to throw out the election results and direct all of the state’s electoral votes to Bush. The five Republican men who comprised the Court’s 5-4 majority in the case rendered this move unnecessary to give the election to George W. Bush.

In the aftermath of the Court’s unsigned 5-4 ruling overturning a lower court’s extension of time to count ballots in Wisconsin’s recent election in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Nina Totenberg commented that “in a voting case, Chief Justice Roberts assuredly would have played a pivotal role.” Roberts has been deeply involved in voting rights cases dating to 1982, when as a staffer to Ronald Reagan, he worked (unsuccessfully) to narrow the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Later, as Chief Justice, he succeeded in gutting provisions of the law. Regarding the Wisconsin case, she observed:

So, it was no surprise when the conservative majority refused to make even a modest accommodation to the pandemic. What was surprising was the tone of the opinion. Critics of the opinion, including some Roberts defenders, called the language “callous,” “cynical” and “unfortunate.”

4. The Grim Reaper aka the Majority Leader of the United States Senate

Mitch McConnell was on conservative talk radio last week. He made news by suggesting that he thought, rather than provide funding for states facing unprecedented financial burdens fighting the coronavirus, that he would prefer to see the states declare bankruptcy.

I would certainly be in favor of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route. It saves some cities. And there’s no good reason for it not to be available. My guess is their first choice would be for the federal government to borrow money from future generations to send it down to them now so they don’t have to do that. That’s not something I’m going to be in favor of.

And:

“I said yesterday we’re going to push the pause button here, because I think this whole business of additional assistance for state and local governments needs to be thoroughly evaluated. You raised yourself the important issue of what states have done, many of them have done to themselves with their pension programs. There’s not going to be any desire on the Republican side to bail out state pensions by borrowing money from future generations.” 

In a press release, McConnell highlighted his comments about state bankruptcy with the heading, “On Stopping Blue State Bailouts.”

Governor Andrew Cuomo responded:

Let me go back to my self-proclaimed Grim Reaper, Senator McConnell for another second. He represents the State of Kentucky, okay? When it comes to fairness, New York State puts much more money into the federal pot than it takes out, okay. At the end of the year, we put in $116 billion more than we take out, okay? His state, the State of Kentucky, takes out 148 billion more than they put in, okay.

… Senator McConnell, who is getting bailed out here? It’s your state that is living on the money that we generate. Your state is getting bailed out, not my state.

Cuomo also took McConnell to task for the rawest kind of partisanship.

Don’t help New York State because it is a Democratic state. How ugly a thought. I mean just think of – just think of what he’s saying. People died: 15,000 people died in New York. But they were predominantly Democrats, so why should we help them? I mean, for crying out loud, if there was ever a time for you to put aside, for you to put aside your pettiness and your partisanship and this political lens that you see the world through — Democrat or Republican, and we help Republicans but we don’t help Democrats — that’s not who we are. That’s just now who we are as a people. I mean, if there’s ever a time for humanity and decency, now is the time.

As I have observed repeatedly in this blog, Mitch McConnell’s M.O. is to exacerbate partisanship at every opportunity. Humanity? Decency? Not among McConnell’s priorities.

I learned from David Frum that Republican proposals to encourage state bankruptcies date back more than a decade. The idea, which Frum sketches, is this: rich blue states impose higher taxes, and spend more on social programs (including, incidentally, generous public employee pensions), than Republicans like. Yet many wealthy Republicans – the GOP donor class – live in blue states. Moreover, Mitch McConnell’s biggest donors are not from Kentucky: they too live, work, and pay taxes in blue states. If Congress (when Republicans are in charge), and the federal courts (which are being stacked with right wing ideologues), could impose a bankruptcy process on the blue states, then those rich Republicans living in California, New York, and other wealth-generating states where Democrats reliably get elected, could see their taxes go down.

And if that meant that public employee pensions could be gutted, then Republicans would be smiting the most well-organized Democratic constituency – public employee unions – in the country.

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s comments (characterizing McConnell’s suggestion as “one of the saddest, really dumb ideas of all time”), asserted that state bankruptcies would wreak havoc on markets worldwide, wrecking the economy. Actually not (as Frum explains): Republican proposals to permit state bankruptcies would ensure that big money interests get paid; it’s the labor unions that would lose. And Democrats.

Frum observes:

A federal bankruptcy process for state finances could thus enable wealthy individuals and interest groups in rich states to leverage their clout in the anti-majoritarian federal system to reverse political defeats in the more majoritarian political systems of big, rich states like California, New York, and Illinois.

In other words, in a country where more than half the population only elects 18 of 100 Senators; where the Electoral College reflects this disparity; and where boundaries for Congressional Districts (because of demographics related to cities and state of the art gerrymandering) make Democratic votes less potent than Republican votes, Democratic majorities may still rule within the states. But If Republicans in Washington could change federal law (and shape federal court rulings) as proposed, then a national minority could crush majorities within the big blue states. California, New York, Illinois, and others would cease to enjoy majority rule.

Yet another Republican plan for extinguishing responsive democratic government. Here’s hoping Mitch McConnell is deposed as Majority Leader after November 3.

Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans

“I’m not a doctor, but I’m, like, a person that has a good you-know-what” — President Donald Trump

The President of the United States brainstorms at a coronavirus briefing.

Jesse Watters: The President’s spitballing and he’s asking questions. ‘Would it be possible to maybe target the virus through a cure using certain ingredients and using sunlight?‘ You didn’t believe the President was putting anyone in danger, did you?

Dr. Deborah Birx: No. He gets new information. He likes to talk that through out loud. And really have that dialogue. And so that’s what dialogue he was having. I think he just saw the information at the time, immediately before the press conference. And he was still digesting that information.

Out loud on live television in a briefing to provide information and reassurance to the American public.

While some of the usual suspects jumped to Trump’s defense — among the most relentless, Scott Adams, who has decided that critics who disagree about the brilliance of Trump’s riffing on a cure, must lack intelligence …

— but mostly, even those in Trump’s camp, perceived the obvious: this wasn’t the time or place for musings that could have been spoken by a grade school student after learning that sunlight is a disinfectant. Parsing the words to win a Twitter argument misses the point. (Of course this is straight out of a well-worn playbook: missing the point is the point.)

Jonathan Chait suggested:

If Trump’s presidency has demonstrated any scientific principle, it is the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who have a low ability to perform a task tend to overestimate their own ability to do it — or, to oversimplify it, they are too incompetent to recognize their own incompetence. “Maybe you can, maybe you can’t,” Trump allowed. “I’m not a doctor. But I’m like a person that has a good you know what,” tapping his head to indicate his gigantic brain.

Philip Bump and Ashley Parker (“Thirteen hours of Trump: the president fills briefings with attacks and boasts, but little empathy”) describe Thursday’s coronavirus briefing:

President Trump strode to the lectern in the White House briefing room Thursday and, for just over an hour, attacked his rivals, dismissing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden as a “sleepy guy in a basement of a house” and lambasting the media as “fake news” and “lamestream.”

He showered praise on himself and his team, repeatedly touting the “great job” they were doing as he spoke of the “tremendous progress” being made toward a vaccine and how “phenomenally” the nation was faring in terms of mortality.

What he did not do was offer any sympathy for the 2,081 Americans who were reported dead from the coronavirus on that day alone — among nearly 53,000 Americans who have perished since the pandemic began.

They document, in detail, how these briefings have morphed into (what Parker has dubbed) the Coronavirus Show, featuring self-congratulations, attacks on the media and political rivals, fabrications by the President, and often medical advice from a man who is “not a doctor.”

“Like his campaign rallies, the president’s portion of the daily briefings are rife with misinformation. Over the past three weeks, 87 of his comments or answers — a full 47 minutes — included factually inaccurate comments.”

This is what passes for leadership in a country that with any other president in recent memory (or with John McCain, Mitt Romney, or Hillary Clinton) — would have by this time (even if one or another of them might have been caught flat-footed initially) a national strategy to defeat the coronavirus.

Moreover, the world is a witness. The pandemic:

is shaking fundamental assumptions about American exceptionalism — the special role the United States played for decades after World War II as the reach of its values and power made it a global leader and example to the world.

Today it is leading in a different way: More than 840,000 Americans have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and at least 46,784 have died from it, more than anywhere else in the world.

Yet Trump’s catastrophic failures, and his aversion to accountability, are not as significant politically as the Republican Party’s continuing obeisance to him. Never mind the mounting deaths — soon to exceed the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War over two decades. Never mind our country’s declining influence and security across the globe. The GOP is getting tax cuts, deregulation, and judicial appointments.

The Way the World Goes 'Round

That’s the way the world goes ’round: news, context, and comments on the past week

1.

2. Wisconsin Republicans refused to let a deadly pandemic (with the greatest impact in Democratic strongholds in Milwaukee) get in the way of guaranteeing a low-turnout election for a state supreme court seat. Speaker of the Assembly Robin Vos, outfitted in head to toe PPE, assures the public that everything is fine.

3. Charles Sykes – who for twenty five years was immersed in the “conservative movement, both as an observer and as a full participant” and knows all the Republican players, including Robin Vos – explains the election’s significance and the context in Wisconsin politics. (I recommend Sykes’ book, How the Right Lost Its Mind, which presents an insiders’ account of how conservative media “succeeded in convincing our audiences to ignore and discount any information whatsoever from the mainstream media. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the Right’s immunity to false information.”)

4. Richard Hasen (“How Republicans are using the pandemic to suppress the vote“) suggests that Republicans may be willing to go to far greater lengths than they did in Wisconsin to rig the November election. He foresees two possibilities. The first (a 180-degree pivot from Wisconsin Republicans), is to emphasize the grave risks to public health and simply close polling places in Democratic cities and swing states. (Shutting down polling places – creating voting deserts, in effect – in Democratic areas of a state is a tried and true method of voter suppression.) The second method is more novel: a direct assault on the right of citizens to cast votes.

More ominously, as Mark Joseph Stern has pointed out, state legislatures have the power under the Constitution to choose presidential electors. In its infamous 2000 decision in Bush vs. Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court remarked that although every state legislature had given voters the power to vote directly for the president and to allocate the state’s electoral college votes, state legislators could take back that power at any time.

What’s to stop Trump from appealing to Republican-controlled legislatures in the swing states of Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to take back this power from voters under the pretext that the risk of COVID-19 makes voting too difficult? Although all these states, except Arizona, have Democratic governors, some believe that the legislatures could take back this power even without the agreement of the governor. [My emphasis.]

5. The United States now leads the world in coronavirus deaths. The lack of national leadership that brought this about is disgraceful.

6. Today’s New York Times offers the most recent review of Donald Trump’s ongoing failures to protect the American public (“He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus”).

By the last week of February, it was clear to the administration’s public health team that schools and businesses in hot spots would have to close. But in the turbulence of the Trump White House, it took three more weeks to persuade the president that failure to act quickly to control the spread of the virus would have dire consequences.

7. Last month Trump declared, “We’re not a shipping clerk,” but the continuing refusal of the federal government to take command is costing lives. Instead, his administration has relied on five large medical supply companies to step into the breach. These companies are distributing personal protective equipment — but their regular customers are getting first dibs on all PPE, regardless of need. Governors with coronavirus hotspots have to stand in line while scrambling to find their own sources for gear.

Admiral John Polowczyk, who leads FEMA’s Procurement Task Force, explains: “I’m not here to disrupt a supply chain, say, look, they have trucks to go to the hospital door every day. We’re bringing product in. They’re filling orders for hospitals, nursing homes like normal.”

But things are hardly normal. As a result, according to governors with hospitals that lack PPE, “this has led to confusion and chaotic bidding wars. Until the bottleneck is sorted out, it will be market forces and corporations that often decide who gets scarce supplies and who doesn’t.”

(Image: courtesy of NASA.)