TEMPO and HUP

A Blog for Civil Debate on Political Philosophy

A Blog for Civil Debate on Political Philosophy

Collusion Collision

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                              Attack on the Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021.

     The invasion of the Capitol on January 6 fused the interests of the violent mob with those of the demagogue who incited them. In my post of January 9 (“No Surprise”), analyzing the factors behind the events of the 6th, I referred to collusion between President Trump and the invaders. Now I wish to say more about that. This collusion was not only the result of Trump’s incendiary words at the rally on the Ellipse. It also involves the convergence of more general pressures from above and from below. Let’s take them one at a time.

     Right wing extremist groups produce pressure from below. Many newspapers and magazines and websites cover currents within the American right wing systematically. The Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Leadership Center have long tracked the activities of militias, Christian nationalists, white supremacists, QAnon believers, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, and others. We’ve seen the fanatical, murderous actions in Jonestown, Oklahoma City, Waco, Pittsburgh, El Paso, and elsewhere of these and similar groups. Since the rise of social media, alert reporters can quote their exact language. The symbols on their flags and badges and tee shirts carry coded messages. Perhaps the most obvious is the Confederate flag. The rioters harbor nostalgia for the slave-holding, secessionist South and for their demagogic President who refuses to condemn that cause.

   Their websites indiscriminately lump together Democrats, liberals, progressives, leftists, socialists, and communists. They also revile journalists, politicians, academics, experts, anyone they smear as elitist, and ordinary government employees of what, in their paranoia, they call the “Deep State.” The federal bureaucracy actually serves the public, but they consider its employees enemies. Then, wrongly appropriating language from the Second Amendment, they call themselves militias and proclaim themselves patriots. Fashioning themselves as “defenders of freedom,” they express their hostility to American mainstream institutions with militaristic language. Leaving aside overt references to civil war or “the Storm,” the idea of “taking back our country,” used almost universally on the right, is a military metaphor that evokes an armed troop recovering a lost vantage point by force. 

     President Trump exerts pressure from above. It has been clear since long before the Republican nomination debates of 2016 that Donald Trump is a vicious bully. Demands of fidelity characterize his relationship with subordinates. One might have thought that, as head of the FBI, James Comey would be autonomous. But no, he could be fired. Similarly dispensable was Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had been the first senator to endorse Trump as candidate. To Trump, everyone is expendable. 

   After he fired a very long list of senior officials in top agencies, the President’s appointees (often only acting secretaries) purged the ranks of their respective organizations. The Republican desire to shrink government served as a cover for this operation. In the Executive Branch, new cabinet department secretaries or agency heads retained only personnel presumed loyal to the President. Trump’s appointees have not only purged obvious organizations like the EPA that he targeted during his campaign, but also the Global Media Agency (home of the venerable Radio Free Europe), the Department of Justice, the Defense Department, and the Department of Homeland Security set up to improve coordination of intelligence gathering after 9/11. When Covid-19 hit, he also purged the FDA, the CDC, and the NIH to prevent advocacy of cures he did not favor or the publication of reports contrary to his own pet theories.

   Trump has turned the upper echelons of our government into a hostile workplace environment where insecurity undermines its function. Fealty to the President, like a vassal’s to a lord, permeates the administration. There is a party line, and those who depart from it get forced out. One result was that just “a day before rioters stormed Congress, an FBI office in Virginia issued an explicit warning that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington to commit violence and ‘war’.” How could such intelligence be ignored?   

     Given the deference Trump demanded throughout the government, it is easy to see how security personnel would react to unwelcome news. Developments threatening law and order must be reported from local agents upwards. But the screening system in the Executive Branch made it imperative that no harsh facts reach the top.

     How can even a responsible government official alarmed by the increasingly hostile rhetoric and numerous outbreaks of armed, threatening demonstrations of Trump’s base present the situation to a boss and his immediate associates who agree with the militants? It’s even less likely that ambitious, insecure, opportunistic personnel now in mid-level administrative posts would risk offending their superiors or blowing the whistle. Their boss has been stoking those emotions since before his election. 

    And what emotions? These people assume and sometimes assert that demonstrating whites, even those fearful of being “displaced” by minorities, are somehow more orderly than supporters of Black Lives Matter. They think whites who plan protests against the legal succession of presidents do not require surveillance. They are better behaved, it is assumed, by virtue of their racial superiority. This bias is manifest in the remarkable laxity of the intelligence community which failed to develop official threat assessments to warn of the true dangers in the demonstrations summoned by Trump for January 6 to protest the “theft” of his supposed electoral victory. Why did they fail? In her brilliant reporting on the subject, Dina Temple-Raston quotes R. P. Eddy, “a former U. S. counterterrorism official and diplomat who now runs Ergo, a private intelligence firm.” Eddy explains why the threat was invisible to the intelligence community. “[I]t was very hard for these decision-makers and these analysts to realize that people who look just like them could want to commit this kind of unconstitutional violence and could literally try to and want to kill them.” How could pro-Trump protesters, people who support the police and attack BLM demonstrations in defense of “law and order,” themselves turn violent? How could they have even worse goals? This blindness comes from systemic racism.  

    Here is an argument for diversity. A more diverse corps of intelligence gatherers and analysts would not have made the same naïve assumptions about white power marchers.

    If you don’t think they’re marching for white power, consider the photo above. Its slogan, “Come and take it,” alludes ostensibly and quite legally to the Second Amendment. But it is a Confederate flag, indicating their sympathies, and an AR-15-type assault weapon, indicating their intention.

  To sum up. Trump himself puts the top and the bottom in conspiratorial conjunction. That’s the essence of populism: resentment and insurrection disguised as patriotism. Watchdog groups knew where these populist, militant, apocalyptic beliefs were heading. They reported them to the FBI, which took no action. With Trump’s censorship of bad news in place, intelligence reports get buried, there is little preparation, and only an inadequate defense against the rioters. Trump and his people get their way. The Capitol is breached. Collusion collision. 

Update 1. How extreme were the rightwing chatroom statements prior to the actual insurrection? This one was quoted by The Washington Post January 12, a day before I posted this essay. “As of 5 January 2021, FBI Norfolk received information indicating calls for violence . . . . An online thread discussed specific calls for violence” including “Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”

Update 2. March 4, 2021. Here is a very concise account of security lapses (or deliberate malfeasance) by Trump appointed officials at the Pentagon in the days leading up to the insurrection of January 6. It is by Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter of March 4. 

Today’s biggest story about the previous administration . . . came from the Senate hearings about the January 6, 2021, attack, held before the committee of Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and the committee on Rules and Administration. While there is still confusion about what happened when, it became clear that there were some serious lapses in the protection of the Capitol, and it appears those lapses originated with Trump appointees in the Pentagon.

Because the District of Columbia is not a state, its National Guard is under the control of the Defense Department, and it is overseen by Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy. The Commander of the D.C. National Guard, Major General William Walker, told the Senate that, in response to a request from D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and the director of D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, Dr. Christopher Rodriguez, Walker requested approval for the mission from McCarthy on January 1.

McCarthy’s approval did not come until January 5, when the event was already upon them. And, in what Walker saw as an unusual move, McCarthy withheld approval for Walker to deploy the Quick Reaction Force, guardsmen equipped with helmets, shields, batons, and so on, to respond to civil disturbance, without the approval of the Secretary of Defense.

Then, at 1:49 pm on January 6, then Chief of the U.S. Capitol Police, Steven Sund, called Walker to say that the Capitol had been breached. “Chief Sund, his voice cracking with emotion, indicated that there was a dire emergency on Capitol Hill and requested the immediate assistance of as many guardsmen as I could muster,” Walker told the Senate. Walker immediately called the Pentagon for approval to move in his troops, but officials there did not give the go-ahead for 3 hours and 19 minutes. Once allowed in, the National Guard troops deployed in 20 minutes. But by then, of course, plenty of damage had been done.

The delay in deployment stood in dramatic contrast to the approval accorded to the National Guard to deploy in June 2020. Today’s testimony suggests that the Pentagon placed unprecedented restrictions on the mobilization of the National Guard on January 6, preventing it from responding to the crisis at the Capitol in a timely fashion.

The Barr-Trump Monarchy

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Unchecked power is the defining goal of Donald Trump’s presidency. When he accepted the Republican party’s nomination on July 21, 2016, he declared, “I alone” can fix “the system.” The words evoke intolerant, absolutist, political concepts, particularly monarchy. “Monarchy” means rule by one. During the twentieth century, we called this dictatorship or authoritarianism. But Trump and his allies have cloaked their view of the President’s immunity, his superiority over the law, in a religious garb that springs from deeper and more sinister roots. What support could the political evocation of such themes find in the United States of America? Two speeches by William Barr, the current Attorney General, shed light on that question.

First, there’s Barr’s exaggerated notion of presidential power. In his speech to the Federalist Society (Nov. 15, 2019), the Attorney General deplores the weakening of the presidential office. The Founders, he argues, rejected England’s notion of “an overweening Parliament” or a king limited by a royal council. Instead, the Founders established “a strong Executive, independent of, and coequal with, the other two branches of government.” Independent, yes, but not isolated from, and not superior (remember: “co-equal”) to the other branches. Having set out the problem so well, he proceeds to ignore its fundamental premise: equilibrium in conflict. Barr argues instead that, by Executive power, the Framers meant more than just “carrying into effect the laws passed by the Legislature.” Indeed, the president should have “essential sovereign functions” such as foreign relations, meeting emergency situations like a plague or a natural disaster, and, dramatically, the prosecution of war. In his haste to elevate the Executive, he omits Congress’s unique ability to declare war.

Next, he itemizes what he sees as encroachment on the Executive first by the Legislature and then by the Courts. In his opinion, the Executive should have the ability to use executive orders to bypass congress and initiate something like Donald Trump’s travel ban against primarily Muslim countries. But there are exceptions. For example, in Barr’s view, Barack Obama had no right to implement DACA, thereby “refusing to enforce broad swathes of immigration law.” The independence of the president vis-à-vis congress seems to depend on who occupies the office.

The courts also encroach on the Executive when they interfere with the debate that should take place between the President (who has veto power) and the legislature. But why would the Executive, if it is “independent” as Barr defines it, even need to debate with congress ? Besides disrupting the dialogue between the president and the congress, Barr says, the judicial branch also interferes with the President’s “prudential judgment.” The courts are mired in bothersome evidentiary standards such as the preponderance of evidence or guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Some decisions draw on deep qualities of personal character: prudence, humility, empathy, foresight. It is therefore wrong for the courts to employ their desiccated formulae to undermine the personal judgment of the president who, alone, can make these judgment calls. Note that when Mr. Barr was making these remarks the president was Donald J. Trump. One would have to believe absolutely in rule by one to assign this much discretion to the presidential office when one of them could be a person like Trump. Barr abuses the concept of office to excuse the failures of the man who holds it.

At the same time that the Attorney General exaggerates the Executive he disparages the state. His reasons are not political but religious. In his speech to the Federalist Society, Barr contrasts “so-called progressives” to “conservatives.” Those on the left treat “politics as their religion” and “seek an earthly paradise.” In Barr’s view, progressives are deceived by a false, secular religion. “In pursuit of an abstract ideal of perfection,” their “deific end” justifies “whatever means they use.” Typically, Barr stigmatizes all liberals with the excesses of history’s worst examples: those who resort to “any means.” His description may fit Leninists or Stalinists, but not left-of-center Americans. In contrast to leftist, Machiavellian ruthlessness, conservatives, he intones, seek the “proper balance of freedom and order necessary for the healthy development of natural civil society and individual human flourishing.” For Barr, therefore, everything depends on your ultimate goal. Do you “seek an earthly paradise” or pursue a heaven properly located in the other world? So stark a dichotomy is wrong. The Attorney General deliberately ignores the large numbers who seek to improve conditions on earth (some call it “repairing the world”) such as the climate or the distribution of wealth or opportunity, nutrition or healthcare— ethical goals that religious leaders of many faiths have advanced for centuries.

The Attorney General elaborates on his contrast between secular and religious aims more explicitly in his speech to the Law School at the University of Notre Dame (October 11, 2019). Presenting what is actually a top-down argument, but pretending to build from the ground up, Mr. Barr asserts that the founders removed control over citizen behavior from the government and left it to the character of individual citizens. “If you rely on the coercive power of government to impose restraints [on individual rapacity], this will inevitably lead to a government that is too controlling, and you will end up with no liberty, just tyranny.” Still, “unless you have some effective restraint, you end up with something equally dangerous, licentiousness . . . another form of tyranny.”

To escape the tyranny of licentiousness, Barr invokes moral law which he claims is based on natural law, the visible manifestation, in his view, of divine law. This would serve as the foundation for the absoluteness of his conception. Any abandonment of the moral law, as disseminated by religion, harms society. Human freedom, then, would be subject to authoritative interpretation of divine law, not by the people or by their representatives, but by experts in religion. Consequently, he attacks what he calls “modern secularists” for their “moral relativism,” which, by definition, is not absolute. Individuals who deviate from the moral law should, in his opinion, have to suffer the consequences. Unfortunately, secularists do not allow individuals to pay the price of their wrong behavior because, he says, the state cushions them. By weakening moral restraint, the state actually enables bad behavior. Therefore, in Barr’s view, the state acts against the moral law which flows downward like grace from God, not, as the Founders saw the system they established, upwards from the sovereign people. If we did not have popular sovereignty why would the Framers have guaranteed the people the freedom to seek redress of grievances against the government and reserved to the states and the people all powers not specifically assigned to the federal government as specified in the First, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments? Barr is wrong about our constitution. His hierarchy of moral, natural, and divine law is not political philosophy, it is theology. Worse, it is also political.

When China’s Xi Jinping got himself voted president for life, Trump joked (March 3, 2018), “I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.” Later, on July 22, 2019, in China, and pretending to be the only president ever to tackle delicate trade issues, Trump joked “I am the Chosen One.” Following the “I alone” statement, this pattern is not random. These are not jests—especially to the Evangelical component of his base that is prone to believe in them. The President can later deny that he meant them, but receptive ears hear them with gratitude and faith. Always credit the President’s rapturous exclamations over his later efforts to walk them back. They are far closer to his actual meaning than the revisions scripted for him by a circle of advisers in charge of damage control. Nor is Trump alone in his belief that he is chosen. Caleb Parke of Fox News wrote two articles (May 13 and June 25, 2020) that identify religious leaders such as Franklin Graham, who either share the President’s delusion or helped foster it in the first place. Widespread among Evangelicals is the idea that God appointed Trump to save the country. Parke lists prominent members of the government who agree, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Energy Secretary Ben Carson, and former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

How does this relate to William Barr? The hierarchy of moral to natural to divine law did not spring from his own head. It dates from the Middle Ages and includes an element not even he dares acknowledge. Without saying so, Barr is reading royal theocracy, better known as the divine right of kings, into our constitution. Here is the theory. Just as the universe has one Creator and one providential Ruler, just as reason rules the soul, and the heart the body, so should one divinely guided power rule the world: the emperor (in the early days) or the king. Less scholastically, there was this maxim: “The law of the land is in the breast of the king.” This unitary principle does belong to our constitution when applied to the carefully defined Executive, but not when carried any farther, as Barr does. When blended with Trump’s so-called jests about being unique and ruling for life and exploiting the religious overtones of being the chosen one, the threat of a supposedly divinely guided monarchy gets way too loud for this American’s ears. If you want to know what spirit animates our country, let’s go back to Thomas Paine: “In America, the law is king.”

Has this monarchist infection gone beyond the inner circles of Trump’s cabinet or the very committed Evangelical base? Consider what happened in July, 2020, when the Republicans abdicated their responsibility to define a program for the coming administration, should their candidate win the election. The pandemic prevented the Platform Committee from meeting in person, but not from deliberating. Instead, like faithful serfs to a lord or like good subjects of a sovereign, they said that if had they met, the RNC “would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party’s strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration.” Really? “Undoubtedly unanimously?” This is intellectual bullying. It allows no room for dissent or even doubt. The party assimilates its goals to the notions of its head, like the limbs of a body. This is monarchy, especially when the president is assumed to be an instrument of God or, as Barr puts it, a defense against godless, secular, moral relativism.

Since we, the people, have the power, we should employ it against this monarchical threat to our republic and vote these deluded people out of office.

Not Too Nice

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[Information learned after posting has been added at end.]

During the run-up to the First Gulf War, when the U. S. led an international coalition to force Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in 1990, James Baker advised George H. W. Bush that he could ignore the disfavor his rescue of Kuwait might arouse among America’s Jews, because “they don’t vote for us anyway.” Although the Secretary of State’s cynical attitude addressed only Jewish Americans at that time, now, under Donald Trump, the Republican category of despised others has expanded to marginalize all minorities, especially when they tend to be Democrats.

It is interesting that Trump never or rarely refers to people of color as such, which is hardly remarkable for someone who made his reputation ridiculing political correctness. “People of color” (a term of art, it would seem, used only by academics, journalists, and other elites Trump scorns) belong to the groups Trump wants to send back to what he calls “the shithole countries.” They are brown and black, Muslim, and female. And opponents — those he terms “low IQ,” “horrible,” “weak,” “nasty.” They are “animals.”

President Trump and his supporters seek to diminish these people they despise. Exploiting the well worn dog whistles of populism, he charms his base using his and their racism to assure them that, being white, they are superior to these “others,” the people Trump calls “losers.” By this strategy, he seeks to boost the ego and consolidate the in-group bonding of stereotypical white Americans – especially those left unemployed by globalization (exporting jobs), affirmative action (they think), and every other current in the present culture they don’t like: women’s reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, religions other than their own (all religions but one being evil), and recipients of public funding, like everyone who receives food stamps or Medicaid or any other “handouts” to “parasites.” This is the classic strategy of the ruling class: divide and conquer. They flatter underpaid, under-educated whites, who also lack adequate medical insurance, with the illusion that they are superior to equally persecuted people of color to prevent an alliance that would be irresistible. It must be a thrill to hear them complain, as Arlie Hochschild reports (Strangers in Their Own Land, 221), “There are fewer and fewer white Christians like us.”

Because that strategy has worked so well, now the ruling class has only to prevent people of color and their liberal allies from voting. Trump made this goal explicit on March 30, when he said on Fox news that high levels of voting (not just mail in, but all voting) would mean “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” This strategy builds on long-standing gimmicks dating back to the Jim Crow South that have now spread wherever Republicans control the statehouse: have fewer polling places in strategically chosen areas (inner-city zip codes), limit the hours polls are open, restrict early voting, enforce voter ID laws with abusive strictness. If citizens wish to vote from home, cripple the postal service to prevent voting by mail — or try to.

These measures are shocking enough because they so clearly attack democracy, but the appearance of the coronavirus gave this unscrupulous, vindictive, authoritarian bully of a president a new opportunity. He chose to downplay the virus and allowed it to hit those already exploited, vulnerable populations. As early as April 12, 2020, Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced that in Michigan, “Some 14 percent of Michiganders are African-American, yet more than 40 percent of COVID-19 related deaths in Michigan are African Americans.” It was not only Democratic governors who made this analysis. A story in the Wall Street Journal of April 8, 2020, had already observed the problem as big-city mayors began to take action. In another Journal article of April 22, 2020, Dr. Lauren Weber of Meharry Medical College analyzes the causes of this situation: those people disproportionately dying from the virus live in multi-generational households, hold essential jobs that put them in close contact with many others. They are more prone than whites to have underlying conditions that derive from the environments in which their poverty forces them to live (in crowded, urban areas, near polluted, industrial zones, or, even in the country, near the open air lagoons of factory farms). The same holds for whites who live in similar circumstances, but Blacks live there in disproportionate numbers. If essential workers were paid a living wage, this situation would change. Given the erratic, state-by-state implementation of Medicaid, the availability of health insurance falls unevenly on people of color. The Kaiser Family Foundation has published a graph detailing the “Percent of Nonelderly Adults who are Uninsured, by Race/Ethnicity, 2014.” Of the nonelderly adults with no medical insurance, 11% are white, 16% are Black, and 27% are Hispanic. So, even if these patients recover from a bout of Covid-19, they will not be able to handle the resultant medical bills. The inequity that these figures make predictable continued for at least four months. As of August 8, 2020, adjusting for age difference in race groups, 3.6 times more Blacks and 3.2 times more Hispanics have died, nationwide, than whites. Moreover, the absolute numbers (as opposed to ratios) are astonishing. Between April 15 and August 15, 2020, Covid-19 infected 4,726,003 and killed 141,386 Americans. The chronology here is vital. By mid-April at the latest, the disproportionate impact of the pandemic was clear. If outsize harm, especially for the most vulnerable, was to be averted, immediate action was needed.

WHAT ACTION? TESTS!

The dangers deriving from the novelty of this unknown virus were apparent early on. Some early tests used in China were inaccurate up to 47% of the time, but even in this country, even now, the tests are inadequate in number, in reply time, and in accuracy. Supplies such as swabs for collecting samples have been in short supply. Chemical ingredients have been impure. Given the resulting disorder, only patients with symptoms could get tested. Tragically, though, infected people do not manifest symptoms until about the fourth day, so they could still transmit their disease before their illness manifested itself. In crowded conditions, these circumstances were a recipe for great suffering and, indeed, death. In July the CDC circulated a paper by Le Chang, et al., based in Beijing with this advice: “As more asymptomatic cases occur, screening donors for viral RNA with high-sensitivity assays, as we are doing in Hubei Province, will be critical to ensure blood safety.” That means testing even people with no symptoms. In China, they began that policy by January 25, according to these authors. Drawing on information from Johns Hopkins University, as early as March 9, the Wall Street Journal explained the problem of asymptomatic incubation periods and the need for quarantines. These facts make extensive testing imperative. The need was clear by mid-March at the latest. In this country it was not done.

WHY NOT?

The disadvantages people of color endure make them likely to vote Democratic. 83% of Blacks, 63% of Hispanic voters are or lean Democratic, whereas, among whites, 53% are or lean Republican and 42% Democratic. That is one reason President Trump has ordered the U. S. Census takers to end their data collection a month early. If there are “fewer” of them, they will have less representation. It would also follow that, as Reuters put it on August 13, Trump used (or tried to use) the new coronavirus relief bill to block “Democrats’ effort to include funds for the U.S. Postal Service and election infrastructure” and so “to block more Americans from voting by mail during the pandemic.” The two policies reinforce one another:

REDUCE THEIR VOTE, REDUCE THEIR NUMBER.

Given the evident inequity that afflicts our most vulnerable populations, Trump’s despised losers and Democrats, it is hardly surprising that he offered no comprehensive initiative to combat the infection’s spread. Neither Donald Trump nor Howard Baker is the first Republican strategist to aim at a given minority group. In 1981, when describing Richard Nixon’s famed “Southern Strategy,” Lee Atwater, an advisor to Ronald Reagan and chair of the RNC under George H. W. Bush, approved abandoning explicit use of the N-word in shaping policy and instead recommended more neutral-seeming measures such as cutting taxes: “economic things, and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

Trump also had his own priorities. In order to allow business to continue as usual and avert the economic costs of sheltering in place, and because he thought its predictions were too negative and its scientific judgments contradicted his own intuitions, Trump purged scientists he considered disloyal to him and effectively crippled the CDC. In this weakened state, the CDC now proposes measures not as mandates but only as “recommendations” because they are contrary to Trump’s dream of a smoothly functioning economy not distracted by the health needs of the population. Besides, the racial minorities or ethnic groups disproportionately affected by the virus generally vote for his opponents. So Trump continued to ignore the virus or deliberately underestimate its impact. “It’s just like the flu.” “It will just disappear.” He offered no centralized, federal plan to distribute needed equipment (testing supplies, respirators, PPE). He allowed the pandemic to spread knowing it would disproportionately impact people of color, his target. This calculated policy of inaction during the first 6 months of the virus’s presence in the U. S. was achieving the desired result:

REDUCE THEIR VOTE, REDUCE THEIR NUMBER.

Here are the measures the Trump administration took or deliberately did not take with devastating disregard to the injury that would follow. He withdrew from international organizations, thus reducing the extent of global scientific cooperation. He left the American seat on the World Health Organization’s executive board vacant until May, 2020, when that “lapse” became too embarrassing. He removed “disloyal” staff from CDC. He dismantled “The Global Health Security and Biodefense Unit” in charge of national pandemic preparedness set up under Obama by Susan Rice as part of the National Security Council. And, as the keystone of his efforts to expose the very poor and unemployed to whatever illness might strike them, Trump dismantled Obamacare, as far as he was able. He has encouraged or pressured Republican governors (Abbot, DeSantis, Doucey, Edwards, Kemp, for example) not to order their states to wear masks, practice social distancing, and close businesses like bars and restaurants that involve close personal contact. He has actively opposed the expansion of diagnostic tests because he thinks tests embarrass him by revealing cases. Consistent with his xenophobia, Trump’s bans on immigration have deprived us of health caregivers. “The Trump administration’s policies have exacerbated the problem by reducing the influx of immigrants, who make up a quarter of long-term caregivers.” This goes with a neglect of public health administration because, as Ed Yong puts it, Americans view “health as a matter of personal responsibility rather than a collective good.” Indeed the Republican scorn for the word “public” feeds into this prejudice, as does the belief that the government should be as small as possible. These attitudes call for budget cuts and the reduction of staff responsible for public health. The reasons for these disparities follow from other policies favored by Trump and the Republicans. Don’t just scorn them, let them die. “They don’t vote for us anyway.”

         How can people like those in Trump’s base, who object fiercely, on grounds of conscience, to being forced into complicity (through government payments for medical care that funds birth control and abortion) force us into complicity, against our conscience, with a policy that causes disease, suffering, unknown long-term consequences, and death for their living fellow citizens? Trump and his faithful accuse us of “cancel culture” for removing statues while he himself tries to cancel segments of our population. Our military proudly displays its promise to “leave no one behind” and heroically rescues those in trouble. We might expect this ethical system to spread and benefit all Americans, but rather than “leave no one behind,” we get efforts to “push them behind,” with the weight of the administration, like the knee of Derek Chauvin on the neck of George Floyd, to hold down persons of color, women, liberals, Democrats, and all those despised “others.” Some ascribe this indifference to Trump’s callousness, his lack of empathy. These results, they say, are indirect, collateral damage resulting from his obsession with the economy to the neglect, as the Constitution puts it, of “the general welfare.” That analysis is inadequate. We all navigate between the pursuit of health and wealth, but Trump places the wealth of a few over the health of the many. This is not just negligence. Remember how Trump advised police not to be “too nice” to suspects as they arrest them; not to bother shielding their heads as they put them into squad cars? In our country, arrestees, suspects, are innocent until proven guilty. No harm should come to them until sentenced by a jury of their peers. Given the racial makeup of police arrests in this country, winking at rough treatment encourages it. There is a word for this de facto, systematic mistreatment of large populations. I hate to pronounce or even write it, because it is happening in my own country. Before the coronavirus, it was “merely” persecution. Now, with widespread death in the picture, it is more than criminal neglect. It is genocide. OK, maybe only murder.

NEW INFORMATION.

Update 1. August 23, 2020. As many as 215,000 more people than usual died in the U.S. during the first seven months of 2020, suggesting that the number of lives lost to the coronavirus is significantly higher than the official toll. And half the dead were people of color—Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and, to a marked degree unrecognized until now, Asian Americans. . . . People of color make up just under 40 percent of the U.S. population but accounted for approximately 52 percent of all the “excess deaths” above normal through July, according to an analysis by The Marshall Project and The Associated Press.

Update 2. August 29, 2020. In testimony first before the Senate and then the House, on August 21 and 24th respectively, Donald Trump’s new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, promised that changes he wishes to effectuate in running the USPS would not be implemented until after the election. Today, however, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Lauren Hernandez reports that 6 mailboxes have been removed from their accustomed places in downtown Oakland. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports even more systematically distributed issues in its metropolitan area.

Update 3. Sept. 5, 2020. Paul Weyrich, key political advisor to Republicans, founder of the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and, with Jerry Falwell, the Moral Majority, clearly understood the need for voter suppression. He had this to say: “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down. ”  Not “voters,” but “voting populace.”

Update 4. Sept. 9, 2020. Donald Trump’s taped interviews with Bob Woodward, revealed an hour ago, establish that, by February 4, the President was fully cognizant of the danger the virus posed. Already then he understood the implication of its being airborne. This shift in chronology is crucial. The longer he knew and the clearer his knowledge, the more deliberate his inaction and the more certainly he is guilty of murder by omission.

Update 5. Oct. 3, 2020.  Two days ago, Thursday, Oct 1, at about 1:00 AM East Coast time, the White House announced that President Trump had tested positive for Covid-19. But today, Saturday, Oct. 3,  Dr. Sean Conley announced at Walter Reed Hospital that the President had first tested positive “72 hours ago.” That would put the date of the positive test on September 30, about 36 hours before Mr. Trump’s condition was publicized. No statement by the White House on this situation is accurate. The Trump people have concealed when he last tested negative, whether he gets tested daily, as they have repeatedly said, or how serious a case he has. Because a person can be contagious before symptoms appear, it is possible that the President was infected at the time of his debate with Joe Biden in Cleveland on September 29th. Then, because he and his entourage refused to wear masks, he and they could have spread the disease to the Biden party, who did wear masks. Most important: on Thursday, Oct. 1, even knowing that he had already tested positive for Covid-19, Trump went to  a fund-raiser for wealthy donors at his golf course in Bedminster, NJ and mingled with influential, wealthy people from around the country. This is not negligence; this is reckless endangerment. Whatever the crime (homicide, manslaughter), it is wrong for an infected person to knowingly expose others, especially others who had gathered to offer him their support. Matt Friedmann of Politico quotes Peg Schaffer, a local Democratic leader, who calls Trump’s behavior “unfathomably selfish.”  Note that some accounts, such as in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post go with a slightly different chronology. In this schema, it was only Hope Hicks who had already tested positive before Bedminster, and the President would have tested positive only on Thursday evening, possibly after Bedminster, with the announcement coming at about 1:00 AM on Friday morning.

Update 6. October 5, 2020. Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of the NYTimes report today that President Trump’s first got a positive reading on a “rapid” test in the evening of Thursday, Oct. 3, after Bedminster. Later that night, a more sophisticated PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test was done that was also positive. Soon thereafter, the President tweeted out the result. It seems, then, he did not test positive prior to his fund raiser at Bedminster, but he did go there knowing that his close associate Hope Hicks was already showing symptoms and had isolated herself on the plane ride back from Cleveland. Kayleigh McEnany (not known for her honesty) asserted that the President did not learn of Hicks’s positive test until Thursday, just as he was about to board the helicopter to go to New Jersey. As for the President, “the first positive test he received (i.e. the rapid one) was after he returned from Bedminster.” A chronology published today by Christina Morales and Allyson Waller of the NYTimes also states that although Hope Hicks had been obviously ill on Wednesday, her positive test results were known only on Thursday “as Mr. Trump left the White House by helicopter around 1 p. m.” to go to Bedminster. This implies that it would have been too late to call off the trip. However, Hicks had clearly been ailing for much of the previous day while traveling in close connection with the President, who was therefore  exposed in close quarters over an extended period to a symptomatic person.

Shortchanged !

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Those who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 have not got what they wanted. Between their hopes and his performance, there is a great disconnect. The coalition that backed 2016 candidate Trump falls into five sometimes overlapping categories. Let’s consider them one-by-one.

            Business conservatives measure the country’s strength by its economy and its openness to entrepreneurial creativity. They seek to provide goods and services, to employ others, to gain profit, accumulate wealth and pass it on to their children. Many favored Trump as a fellow business owner and assumed he would think as they do. Yet Trump is a negative example. He ridicules expertise, rejects information contrary to his intuitions, and lies. Who would hire such a man?

            Trump poses as a friend to business, but he is not. He opposes open competition, promotes his own family’s interests, those of his donors, and some industries over others. He manipulates markets with arbitrarily imposed tariffs (a hidden tax) and mistakenly identifies the country’s well-being with the stock market thereby favoring short-term over long-term thinking. His myopia incurs tremendous costs. The country will benefit most from industries geared to succeed in markets that are open, not manipulated to reward a select few. Investors avoid uncertainty, but he governs arbitrarily.

            Trump’s tax policies are counter-productive. Yes, his 2017 reform simplified tax filing (almost doubling the standard deduction), temporarily lowered tax rates for each bracket, and increased the child tax credit until 2025, but permanently reduced the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, increased the allowance for tax-free inheritance from $11 to $22 million, and continued a 20% “pass through” or “carried interest” deduction that favors larger businesses. These regressive policies deny opportunity, squelch creativity, and reduce competition. What’s more, since the tax cut and before the coronavirus arrived, the GDP and corporate tax receipts surged momentarily and have since declined. Fiscal conservatives should be concerned. 

            Libertarians see taxes as a “taking” by the government, whose size must be minimized. Individual rights are their core value. Obligations cannot be imposed, rights not removed. Guns may be owned, consciences protected, expert recommendations for health (such as in the current Covid-19 pandemic) ignored, because each citizen is autonomous—free from the nanny state. Yet this individualism weakens the ties between neighbors, between employers and employees, vendors and their clients, citizens and their representatives. Moreover, freedom is not absolute. Free speech is limited as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes illustrated with the example of crying “Fire!” in a crowded theater. The law prohibits deceptive advertising and requires accurate labeling. Appeal to conscience cannot promote discrimination because discrimination violates the rights of others.

            There’s a point where individual rights collide. Wearing face masks in the present pandemic is an excellent example. If you exercise your freedom not to wear a mask, you may infect me; but I have a right to my health. There are times when everyone should hunker down in cooperation with everyone else. By ostentatiously refusing to wear a face mask, the President promotes not libertarian, individual rights, but infection. His action undermines libertarian thought by reducing it to the absurd.

            Respect for the individual rights might be Trump’s strongest suit were it not for his idiosyncratic abuse of the principle. In a president whose function our constitution delimited very carefully, his rejection of norms is destructive. His demands of personal loyalty, vindictive treatment of critics, repeated lying, and self-contradiction weaken the ideal. He said so himself at Mount Rushmore last night as he falsely projected his own crimes onto his opponents: “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission . . . [are] the very definition of totalitarianism.” Libertarian principles require critical thinking, not obedience. Trump’s use of the bullying tactics he pretends to deplore, exposes in him the very tyranny against which libertarians consider themselves the most stalwart defenders.

            Patriotism connects citizens as individuals to the country as a community. Yet Trump debases those bonds. We should take pride in our achievements without putting others down. Disparaging countries with lower standards of living as “shitholes,” characterizing Latin American immigrants as “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists,” using the crimes of a few to smear all Muslims as terrorists, while —at home— praising violent bigots as “very good people” undercuts our reputation. Certainly, we must, as a people, define our own identity. “You can’t have a country without borders,” a conservative told me. Right. But if we are the country that the most outspoken, self-declared patriots claim it to be, we will bond among ourselves according to exemplary principles.

            Those principles are already enshrined in the constitution, specifically in the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, that abolish slavery, provide due process, equal protection, and voting rights. The constitution is a complex web of provisions —not just the Second Amendment, as the President seems to think. It is also an agenda. We still need to correct some of its initial compromises on women’s rights, the horrible legacy of slavery, and our oppression of native Americans. With these wrongs corrected, our patriotism will be more easily exportable and our pride will shine brighter.

            Our advancement of science, innovations in medicine, technology, the arts and education, are areas where, especially in the post-war period, we have stood out among nations and even in world history. Sadly, the President disparages these achievements. He encourages a mindless anti-elitism that lowers our goals and saps our national ambition. Even if libertarians and business conservatives wish to reduce the federal government, its personnel should still be an all-star cast, an Olympic team. Yet Trump and his cabinet members (often temporary and therefore not vetted by the Senate) have silenced or expelled from agencies that formerly provided leadership for this country and for the world experts and scientists who question erroneous beliefs cherished in the White House or pushed by top interest groups. OSHA is one example. They have made its coronavirus guidelines for workers in close quarters mere recommendations that can be ignored with impunity. They have weakened the once prestigious Center for Disease Control to the point that, as of today, leading medical schools can no longer rely on its reports. Consequently, our efforts against the coronavirus dramatically lag behind those of other countries. Under Trump, our national reputation suffers.

            National defense is perhaps the principal job of the Commander in Chief. Patriotic fervor marches in step with military success and national security. Coming of age in the ‘fifties, with relatives and teachers and cherished older friends who were Word War II veterans, I once knew this feeling. In the meantime, many presidents have erred, but perhaps none so egregiously as Donald Trump. He has undermined resistance to Russia, made a secret and therefore unenforceable deal with Kim Jong-un, and delivered our friends the Kurds to Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan. Like these despots who share his own authoritarian personality, he discounts the advice of his defense and intelligence institutions. America is no longer first among nations.

            Religious conservatives are vital to Donald Trump’s support. They respect moral purity in the sense of correct sexual behavior and therefore resisted divorce and premarital sex. Now they oppose same-sex marriage and abortion. To implement these prohibitions, they invoke the First Amendment and stress the freedom clause over the establishment clause. But how can they deny the symmetry the Founders instituted between those two tendencies? “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or infringing the free exercise thereof.” The two —designedly— oppose each other like the constitution’s other checks and balances. Their insistence ignores the threat the Founders feared most: imposition of a single, official religion on their new nation. If that’s what they wanted, they had a king. Yet Donald Trump courts the support of dogmatic backers whose sole interpretation of what is right should be, they say, the law of the land. Libertarians and others who appeal to conscience should reject such an infringement of our liberties.

            Although religious conservatives don’t stress it much, religious teachings also encompass correct behavior towards one another. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Of the Good Samaritan, Jesus commanded: “Go and do likewise.” The New Testament enjoins generous behavior towards “the least” among us. Judaism and Islam similarly elevate care for others as a moral obligation. The rabbinic sages as well declared that “the righteous of all nations have a portion in the world to come,” thereby sensitizing the community to outsiders of good will. These injunctions impose on all of us an obligation to care for others. But, in courting opponents of abortion rights, Donald Trump backs those with the most limited view of religion, sexual purity. That’s actually very funny.

            Here religious and business perspectives go in the same direction. Just as religion prescribes care for the stranger, so business rewards the objective evaluation of every individual’s talents. But Trump’s anti-immigration policy discourages precisely the kind of people business conservatives should welcome: daring, enterprising people willing to endure hardship and tackle the unknown. Acceptance of these immigrants would elevate both entrepreneurial and religious values. But, erecting barriers of ethnicity, race, religion, and class, Trump says “no.”

            Constitutionalists. Many of the 2016 Trump backers hoped to limit government to increase their own freedom of action: to conduct business, to bear arms, to exclude undesirables, to prohibit immorality. They were tired of “legislation from the Bench.” The appointment of conservative judges and Supreme Court justices would support these goals, they thought. Although he invoked “the law of society and nature” at Mount Rushmore yesterday, he has consistently violated the rule of law. Ignoring the 10th Amendment, he declared “When someone is president of the United States the authority is total,” hoping to combat the coronavirus pandemic by dictating to the states’ governors. In opposition to long established procedures of inquiry, his obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation was so consistent that Robert Mueller could only conclude that he could not be exonerated. The president’s authoritarian personality directly opposes the Supreme Court’s motto: “equal justice under law.” The president is a citizen, not a king. In choosing Trump, constitutionalists got shortchanged.

            Conclusion. Trump has therefore betrayed all these voters. Millions have donated, invested even, in this no-holds-barred, tell-it-like-it-is, non-conformist, often-bankrupt billionaire. They expected reinforcement of their worldview and possibly an improved economic outlook. But no hoped-for personal, financial, or ideological benefit should outweigh the duty to protect our constitution and our country. Patriotism, constitutionalism, faith, and allegiance to country should mean more than loyalty to one party’s leader. Fortunately, our constitution allows us to dismiss this self-serving, vindictive, autocratic, incompetent president. Given his authoritarianism, if we do not replace him now, we may never have another chance. Therefore, on this Fourth of July before the 2020 election, I urge Trump’s 2016 voters to repudiate him and begin as soon as possible to work for his defeat in November.