It’s still unclear to me what Lindsey Graham was complaining about last night. He and three other GOP senators made a stink over a provision in the $2 trillion stimulus bill regarding jobless insurance. It’s unclear because their complaint was incoherent.

They claimed that workers would lose incentive to work if they received too much in unemployment benefits. They’d quit — and go on the dole. But unemployment benefits don’t apply to people who resign. They apply to people furloughed or laid off. Since “incentive” is about choice, and since choice is moot, their mewling was meaningless.

Unless they were trying to save face. Conservatism under Donald Trump is not the conservatism of my youth (think Ronald Reagan), but these people have reputations to protect even if their reputations are political fictions. They understand well what it looks like for “conservatives” who for years sabotaged the economy to wound a black president to, then, all of a sudden support the biggest economic relief package in US history.

The Senate passed the bill last night, but at least Lindsey Graham, Rick Scott, Tom Scott and Ben Sasse had a chance to make-believe they are dutiful limited-government conservatives forced into compromising their principles by circumstance beyond their control. Never mind that they voted yes. Never mind that they could have voted no without jeopardizing the bill’s passage. Never mind, because the play’s the thing.

Still, if we understand their complaint as one of incentives, it’s worth dwelling on. Incentives are central to the economic ideology that has animated the Republicans since forever. That ideology holds that markets are efficient and know better than government how to allocate labor and resources for the benefit of the greater good. “Government interference,” even in its blandest form, is akin to Communism or sacrilege, depending on how much heavenly import you imbue markets with.

It’s always been debatable whether the Republicans really believe what they say they really believe about the markets. (Leftists call it “neoliberalism” and blame both parties equally for its global economic dominance.) What’s not debatable is that the Republicans find ways around their “principles” when a Republican sits in the White House, while rediscovering the zeal of the freshly converted when it’s a Democrat.

Deficits were no big deal during Reagan’s time. Deficits were the end of the world during Bill Clinton’s time. Deficits were nothing to worry about when George W. Bush was president. Deficits were so dangerous the Republicans could not in good conscience help Barack Obama lead the country out of the Great Recession. Now, deficits are trivial again. They’ll be apocalyptic with the next Democratic president.

Whether in good faith or bad, however, markets were still more credible than an activist government. Most people most of the time still thought equal opportunity for businesses was the same as equal opportunity for their fellow Americans. Belief in market ideology was so strong it shaped how people engaged the debate over welfare.

Some said the rich were greedy and held workaday Americans in contempt. That’s why they hated social insurance programs like food stamps, Medicaid and jobless benefits. That couldn’t be right, said the market faithful, who have made up a majority of Americans for half a century. The welfare debate wasn’t about the bigotry of the aristocracy against the plebes. It was about efficiency. It was about incentives. To think otherwise was to think the unthinkable: class war in a classless society.

Like I said, Graham and his cohort were plainly incoherent last night. I still don’t know what they were talking about. But there is one interpretation that makes sense to me as Americans enter into a period of mass death and astronomic unemployment.

That interpretation is this: The rich can be trusted with public money, but not so everyone else. It’s OK to give Boeing tens of billions of dollars in relief aid. It’s OK to give corporations access to unlimited and cheap money from the Federal Reserve. But it’s not OK to give normal people an extra $600 a week, people who are at the same time being coaxed by billionaires into going back to work even at the risk of death.

When most people most of the time had ample faith in markets, and when the ideology of markets was credible, it was difficult to see the rank bigotry the very rich often express toward the not very rich. (Not being very rich means you obviously don’t deserving being very rich, which means you are richly deserving of your suffering.)

But I think that faith is waning. Unemployment rose to more than 3.3 million in a week. Deaths from the coronavirus pandemic hit 1,000 today. Markets are not going to save us. Indeed, the billionaires who control markets could make things so much worse. (They could literally kill people.) In a way, it’s fitting that Graham and others were incoherent. Their incoherence reflects a once-powerful ideology in deep decay.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 March 2020

Word Count: 823

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There was big news this morning. Party leaders in the Senate said they have agreed on a $2 trillion stimulus package aimed at stabilizing an economy wobbling through the effects of the new coronavirus outbreak. Bipartisanship is indeed something to cheer. Still, in today’s Washington, Nancy Pelosi will have the final word. According to reporting in Roll Call, the House Speaker signaled she might — again — hit the brakes.

It’s not clear how much impact the legislation will have, if it has any. Yes, two trillion dollars is a very, very big number, as is another four trillion dollars of unlimited “quantitative easing” announced this week by the Federal Reserve. But I don’t think anyone truly knows what those numbers, however big they are, can do to counteract the damage being done by an outbreak that’s idling as much as half the workforce.

At the same time, the president seems convinced this is all the stimulus the economy will need. Donald Trump said last week he directed the Treasury secretary, who has been the administration’s lead negotiator, to “go big” so the president wouldn’t later on have to keep tapping the Congress for even more money. Furthermore, he seems convinced the pandemic isn’t so bad that people can’t start going back to work. Despite concerns of medical authorities, policy experts and even other GOP leaders, such as Lindsey Graham, Trump said he wants America “reopened” by Easter.

I’ll have more to say about that in a moment. For now, let’s assume Pelosi gives her blessing. What then? In our system of government, in which powers are separated, the legislative branch writes law and the executive branch enforces it. With respect to spending, the former allocates funding and the latter distributes it, according to the will of the US Congress, which is a representation of the will of the American people.

Well, there’s your problem.

While individual members of the Congress can pat themselves on the back for doing what needed to be done in the face of a national public health emergency, they all of them still have to trust Trump to behave like all Americans matter equally. They all of them still have to trust this president to act not in his own interest, or the interest of his friends, but in the nation’s interest. Frankly, I wouldn’t trust him to walk my dog.

There’s already suspicion that the administration is being partial in distributing medical supplies to states. Florida, for instance, got everything it requested while New York got nothing. Moreover, three states Trump has recognized as coronavirus disaster areas have not gotten the unemployment assistance that goes with such a designation. According to Politico, New York, California and Washington state are still waiting.

You see a pattern. Red states get follow-through. Blue states don’t. What we’re seeing is a repeat of the president’s conduct in the aftermath of Hurricanes Maria and Harvey. One devastated Texas. Donald Trump to the rescue! One devastated Puerto Rico. Meh.

We’re seeing the rise of a much larger problem, though. This president can do virtually anything with public money that’s allocated by the Congress, because the Congress failed to hold him accountable after he did what he wanted with public money.

The Congress allocated tens of millions in military aid for Ukraine. Trump, however, didn’t distribute it. He used it to extort that country’s president into sabotaging Joe Biden. Withholding the money was illegal. Trump violated federal statute. But the Senate acquitted him of wrongdoing, and in doing so, it set a precedent. The executive branch might or might not distribute future public money as intended by the Congress. It’s free to distribute it in the executive’s interest, not in the nation’s.

What’s more, there’s nothing the Congress can do. The House Democrats impeached the president for obstructing the constitutional authority of the Congress. (That was the second of two articles of impeachment tried in the Senate.) Trump’s acquittal, however, means he can obstruct to his heart’s content. The Senate Republicans won’t stop him. If he favors red states in distributing $2 trillion, well, so much the better.

As for “reopening the country,” that’s rhetoric aimed at governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo who are doing the right thing in shutting down their states amid a global pandemic. We know this because “reopening the country” does not include lifting international travel bans and other things that are under a president’s authority. “Reopening the country” falls on governors whom Trump is prepared to punish for making him look bad when they shut down their states amid a global pandemic.

It’s not hard to imagine residents of Trump-friendly red states getting their $2,000 checks, their unemployment benefits, their cheap business loans and other goodies congressional Democrats fought hard for in negotiating $2 trillion in stimulus.

It’s not hard to imagine residents of blue states waiting, and waiting. It’s the kind of thing I’ve come expect from a president who got away with betraying his country.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 March 2020

Word Count: 830

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One of my preoccupations here at the Editorial Board is getting people to see the problems we face are much bigger than one terrible president. Donald Trump is a symptom of political and institutional rot as much as he is a catalyst. Yet too many people, especially white liberals, seem to think things will get better once he’s gone.

They won’t, because they can’t.

Things can’t get better when so many Americans believe the president more than they do the empirical evidence of their own senses. Things can’t get better when so many Americans are ready to go to war with democracy itself to win. Things can’t get better when so many Americans are ready to sacrifice their own lives to make an ideological point. Things can’t get better when so many white liberals think these people will snap out of it once it’s clear to them that Trump is a lying, thieving, philandering sadist.

They can’t, because they won’t.

To snap out of it means they’d be wrong, and they can’t be wrong. To snap out of it means the Democrats would be right, and the enemy can never — ever — be right.

Not long ago, it was thought the president might lose support in the most unlikely of places — big farming states like Nebraska and Kansas. Trump’s trade war with China was in its infancy, and the business press kept waiting for the moment when the pain of losing access the world’s biggest food market would spark a revolt against Trump.

It never came.

The revolt never came because people no longer vote for their economic self-interest, something the business and political press have taken for granted since at least the early 1990s. But there’s another reason the revolt never came. A lot of Americans support this president not so much because of judges or tax cuts or other traditionally conservative objectives but because he is explicit about who should be punished.

Conservatism under Trump is less about slowing the pace of change — assuming that’s what it means in practice — and more about hurting the right people for the fun of it. But sadism has a flip side, as I argued on June 11, 2018. “Republicans will continue to harm, even mutilate, themselves, with gladness in their hearts for God’s gift of granting the glory of a Republican president.” I called it Republican masochism.

Now apply this school of suicide-bomber politics to the rapidly expanding global pandemic in which the United States is on track to be the world’s top hot spot.

The president didn’t do enough to retard its spread; indeed, his decisions, such as the travel ban from Europe, almost certainly accelerated it. Trump won’t lead or take appropriate action, because leadership and appropriate action would mean more testing for the new coronavirus, and more testing for the coronavirus would be mean higher official numbers of sick and dead, which is bad. It makes Trump look bad.

At the same time, there are people inside the administration who are pushing the president, as he kicks and screams, in the direction of leadership and appropriate action — for instance, declaring a national emergency that frees up federal funding for cities and states to use on the outbreak’s front lines. But even as he takes some action, Trump is aware the national economy has come to a stand-still, thus threatening a political metric he believes will make or break his chances of getting reelected.

Moreover, as the Washington Post reported late Monday, the president is feeling personally and financially the pain of an economic shutdown. Six of his seven top revenue-grossing properties here and around the world — luxury hotels, golfing resorts and the like — are hemorrhaging cash. He surely had this in mind over the weekend when he floated the idea of easing restrictions. The cure can’t be worse than the disease, Trump said.

That wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the rest of the Republican Party getting behind the idea, especially Republican governors. Some of them appear to be ready to lift shelter-in-place orders or not bother ordering them at all. They understand the pandemic is hurting the economy and that a hurt economy is hurting the president. The best way to protect Trump is blame China for the pandemic or make-believe it isn’t terrible. Or worse: pretending that dying for “principles” is an act of heroism.

Reasonable people can’t believe this. I don’t blame them. But reasonable people suffer from two things. One, a mistaken belief that most Americans are reasonable. Two, a mistaken belief that Republicans leaders, not Republican voters, are the real problem.

I’ve always found that perspective lacking. It denies voter agency. Yes, it could be that regular Republican voters don’t understand that the GOP puts a higher premium on money and power than it does on real human lives. But it could be that regular Republican voters understand that. It could be that they understand that perfectly. Indeed, it could be that they understand that so well they’d risk their lives for it.

The problems we face are much bigger than one terrible president.

Even after Trump is gone, we can’t let up.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 March 2020

Word Count: 861

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Here we are in the middle of a national health emergency.

The number of sick is climbing. The death toll is growing. The economy has come to a stop. Normal people are worrying about their kids’ immediate present, instead of their long-term futures. When will school restart? Will there be enough food? These have normal people looking hard at the trees. There’s little time to think about the forest.

It’s understandable, during dire moments like this, for people to long for leaders who set aside politics in order to concentrate on the problem at hand. Partisanship during ordinary times is one thing. Partisanship during a full-on crisis is something else. To continue playing politics during a plague is to jeopardize lives already in jeopardy.

Bruce Bond and Erik Olsen gave voice to this view recently. They are co-founders of Common Ground Committee, a citizen-led initiative focused on productive public discourse. Last week, they wrote in USA Today: “We all can do this. Let’s make a pledge, across the political spectrum, to drop political agendas and work together.”

But this itself is a political statement. Indeed, it’s quintessentially liberal. Honoring our social obligations to individuals, who with us make up a political community, in the service of the common good that binds us together — that’s liberalism writ large.

To be sure, people who’d never think of themselves as liberal share these values. They aren’t closeted liberals, obviously. They merely function in a liberal historical context. The US, despite the crime of slavery, was founded on the above values along with representative government, civil liberties, individual rights and so on. These made America a republic, not a monarchy, which was the conventional form of government.

Bond and Olsen urge leaders to speak truthfully about the new coronavirus outbreak, to abandon personal bias and agendas, to seek solutions collaboratively, and to accept the facts. Ax-grinding won’t save us. Science and good governance, however, will.

But, again, these are liberal principles. Seeking a greater understanding of the natural world, privileging reason and prioritizing freedom of thought, embracing a greater awareness of the self and of self-interest, devising pragmatic means of solving real-world social ills — American liberals have fought for these since the founding.

My point is not to accuse Bond and Olsen of hypocrisy. Far from it. My point here is to highlight what’s really going on as the president fails to provide leadership during a plague, as congressional Republicans exploit it to enrich friends and allies, and as congressional Democrats struggle to protect normal people. We don’t need less politics-as-usual during a crisis. What we need is a better understanding of politics.

What we need is better politics.

My sense is the Republicans understand quite well what Bond and Olsen are asking of them implicitly. They are asking the Republicans to recognize the Democrats’ political legitimacy. They are asking the Republicans to share an equal playing field and to work in concert between the “soft guardrails” of democracy. They are asking the Republicans to restrain ambitions in the name of human health and brotherhood.

And they are asking the Republicans to lose.

The Republicans don’t win when they behave democratically — or “by the rules.” They win by using the institutions of democracy against democracy, as when GOP justices decided a presidential election, when House Republicans sabotaged the economy to wound a black Democrat, and when a GOP Senate acquitted a president of treason.

Of course, Bond and Olsen are not asking the Republicans to lose. They are asking them explicitly to act responsibly and honor their oaths of office. But that’s the key problem — for the Republicans. To act responsibility and honor their oaths is to lose.

Bond and Olsen are asking the Democrats to act normally, but they don’t sound like it, because they are assigning blame equally, which distorts what’s really going on.

The Democrats rightly killed a bill working its way through the Senate that would provide economic relief during the pandemic. But their obstruction wasn’t mere politics-as-usual. Mitch McConnell sought half a trillion dollars to be used in any way the administration saw fit, which is to say, for the benefit of GOP friends and allies.

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, were not opposed to underwriting big firms in theory. They just didn’t want to give them a blank check. They wanted assurances built in the language of the bill that CEOs wouldn’t turn around and lay off workers while giving themselves bonuses. They oppose public money being used for private enrichment.

By all means, we should ask — we should demand — that leaders stop fighting and work together to face a national health emergency. But as we do, let’s understand that such demands are meaningful only to those who are already committed to democracy.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 March 2020

Word Count: 793

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You may have noticed by now the number of celebrities, professional athletes and public officials who have come forward to say they are infected by the new coronavirus (COVID-19). The Brooklyn Nets announced Wednesday that the entire team had been examined by a private lab. Four players tested positive, including star Kevin Durant.

You may have noticed by now the number of normal people being tested — you, me and everyone we know — is tiny, relatively speaking, because normal people do not go to private labs, and cities and states do not have enough tests available for public use.

The president has said he’s prepared to address shortages, but hasn’t yet acted. Donald Trump instead told reporters Thursday that, “Governors are supposed to be doing a lot of this work. … The federal government is not supposed to be out there buying vast amounts of items and then shipping. You know, we’re not a shipping clerk.”

Trump’s remarks came a day after the press corps started noticing the difference between the haves getting tested and the have-nots not getting tested. He was asked during a Wednesday briefing about the apparent inequality, and what the president might do. “Perhaps that’s been the story of life,” he said. “That does happen on occasion. And I’ve noticed where some people have been tested fairly quickly” (my italics).

What the president is alluding to here is an ideology that has animated his adult life as a businessman and president. That ideology is sometimes called social Darwinism, but we can think about it in other ways. “To the victor go the spoils.” “Might makes right.” “The survival of the fittest.” “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” These and others familiar expressions represent an ancient belief that a society’s rich are rich, because they are special, and being special means they are deserving of being rich.

So the story of life, as the president would have it, is a self-interested story of the wealthy and powerful getting their share of what they deserve while the poor and weak get share of what they deserve, which are not to be confused for being the same thing. While elites get the best health care money can buy, normal people don’t. While elites get coronavirus testing — even if they don’t show symptoms — normal people don’t. Sure, you might suffer. You might even die. But perhaps that’s been the story of life.

Indeed, suffering was the largely unexamined story of life until the Enlightenment. That’s when liberal thinkers, including the American founders, refused to accept inequality as an immutable reflection of the natural order of things. (Yes, most of them were slavers; they chose to live with their hypocrisy.) Abraham Lincoln gave voice to the modern view of the social contract in which government is supposed to be of, by and for the people. Government, he thought, was the great equalizer, or should be. It isn’t when it’s run by a sadist who shrugs at the evils inherent in social Darwinism.

Corruption has no place in Trump’s story of life, because whatever elites do to maintain power and prestige is justifiable. They are, after all, deserving.

California might see half of its 40 million individuals infected by the coronavirus. National unemployment figures might jump more than 1,000 percent in the next week. But that has nothing to do with a president who hid information from the public in order to protect himself from enemies eager to use the disease outbreak against him. To Trump, he is the state, and the state is he. If the president does it, it can’t be corrupt.

To those, like our current president, who embody the ideal of might makes right, morality is either a frill or a con. It’s either something to pay lip service to, or it’s something to attack outright as an unholy perversion of the natural order of things.

Richard Burr, a Republican senator from North Carolina, took an oath to defend and protect the Constitution. He took another oath during the president’s impeachment trial to “do impartial justice.” But in the end, perhaps it’s no wonder that Burr chose to acquit Trump of the charge of putting his own interests above the nation’s interest.

After all, Burr — as well as two other GOP senators (that we know of) — knew way back in January about the economic damage about to be wrought by the coronavirus and yet he chose to say nothing. Instead, he warned other elites about what was coming and sold off millions of dollars in stock investments before the markets crashed. Not only did he fail to honor two oaths of office, he made a tidy profit from that moral failure.

Is that corrupt? Yes! But not to social Darwinists. Corruption is a moral determination whose authority they refuse to recognize because morality is either an empty gesture or a malicious fraud invented by the weak to prevent the rich and the powerful from having their way. Richard Burr has the absolute right, as Trump might say, to profit from sickness, misery and death, because Richard Burr is a member of the US Senate.

He deserves it.

It’s not corrupt if a Republican does it.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 March 2020

Word Count: 867

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The president used an expression during a press briefing yesterday that sums up everything you need to know, I think, about his mindset amid a global pandemic.

“The war against the Chinese virus,” Donald Trump said.

He was referring to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), which originated in China, but since December has spread around the world, bringing the international economy to a halt, panicking equity markets, and altering daily routines here and elsewhere. The president said he was invoking the Defense Production Act, a Cold War-era law, to address directly the shortage of medical equipment, such as coronavirus testing.

“Chinese virus” is a racist phrase, but Trump’s gambit doesn’t stop at rhetoric. He’s identifying a scapegoat to blame for his refusal to take the disease outbreak seriously, as well as gagging government officials for speaking publicly. Moreover, “war against the Chinese virus” sets Trump up to claim a title he has longed for: war president.

As with all things Trump, however, there’s no there there. After his invoking of the Defense Production Action, the press corps discovered the administration had no plan for ramping up production of medical equipment that first responders need badly. Meanwhile, the White House is spending all of its time lobbying Senate Republicans to pass a $1.2 trillion stimulus package to paper over Trump’s criminal negligence.

It’s by now a familiar pattern. The president stands in front of television cameras to announce he’s doing X. He thinks doing X projects an image of strength. Later on, it’s revealed doing X wasn’t the point. Saying he was doing X was the point. This pattern is the president’s fundamental weakness. It’s far from benign, however. Saying he’s doing X without instrumental follow-through has real-world outcomes that can be deadly.

His travel ban from Europe was supposed to show he was taking decisive action in response to Europeans “seeding” disease hotspots in the states. The result, however, was turning airports into gigantic vectors ideal for distributing the coronavirus. US travelers last weekend were stuck in long lines in close quarters for hours waiting to be screened by TSA officers underprepared and overwhelmed by the influx of flyers. All these people went home to hug loved ones, spreading COVID-19 far and wide.

Casting himself as a war president tells us Trump’s focus is on his television image more than it is on the nation’s health. His television image, of course, is wrapped up in the idea of a strongman getting tough on foreigners whose breath and blood are ruining the country. When the press corps asks him to evaluate his response to the viral outbreak, the president points, like clockwork, to his decision to suspend travel from China, as if that proves his intent to prosecute “the war against the Chinese virus.”

Casting himself as a war president explains something else: His intention to confuse public understanding of the facts behind the outbreak, especially that he knew of its dangers but prevented administration officials from speaking the truth for fear of it being used against him. This is the same president impeached and tried for putting his interests above the nation’s. The difference now is that millions of lives are at stake.

He isn’t alone. NPR’s Tim Mak revealed a secret recording made three weeks ago in which GOP Senator Richard Burr warned a group of rich constituents that the coronavirus was about to change the face of the earth. Burr is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He’s getting the same information the president is getting. Burr understood what was coming, but chose not to arouse the president’s fury.

As a war president, Trump will blame China while fighting “foreign viruses” in other ways having nothing to do with public health. Thanks to a GOP Senate, he’s free to use money any way he wants. He broke federal law when he held up military aid to Ukraine, but his acquittal in the Senate means no one will hold him accountable for violating the statute again. So there’s virtually nothing standing in the way of his claiming some of the $1.2 trillion in economic stimulus to finish a border wall.

The president’s supporters are likely to see his pivot to the border wall as just one more way he turned the tables on enemies pining for his end. Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Missouri, Mississippi, Idaho and Wyoming (all friendly to the president) have taken few steps, or none at all, to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Their governors seem to insist that life go on as normal (i.e., public schools remain open) as if that were some kind of resistance to the “Deep State” trying to bring down Trump.

They’ll cheer a war president — even if it kills them.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 March 2020

Word Count: 789

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The Connecticut Labor Department saw unemployment benefit claims jump 900 percent over four days, from a norm of 3,000 or so filings in a typical week ending Friday to nearly 30,000 on Tuesday. I asked yesterday what the economic indicators were to justify the president’s $1 trillion stimulus package. Well, there they are.

But knowing how serious the COVID-19 pandemic is doesn’t detract from my reluctance to trust the president to do the right for its own sake. He is a totalitarian in the sense that everything — truth or democracy, loyalty or disease — revolves around his enfeebled ego so that even obeying the law might put you on the other side of Donald Trump. He seems to care far more about juicing the economy, thus calming Wall Street and covering his ass, than providing the leadership a nation needs in a crisis.

As of cue this morning, Trump confirmed my suspicions. He said, and I quote:

95% Approval Rating in the Republican Party, 53% overall. Not bad considering I get nothing but Fake & Corrupt News, day and night. “Russia, Russia, Russia”, then “the Ukraine Scam (where’s the Whistleblower?)”, the “Impeachment Hoax”, and more, more, more…. Also, according to the Daily Caller, leading Sleepy Joe Biden in Florida, 48% to 42%.”

Don’t get me wrong. It does not feel good to distrust an American president at a time like this. It does not feel good suspecting that he’s more focused on “the numbers” — whether it’s the number of sick or the S&P 500 — than he is on real human beings who are really going to suffer thanks to a real pandemic his White House really did nothing to stop early on because he really did fear its impact on “the numbers.” It does not feel good, and yet here we are. Worse, the president today is basically saying I’m right.

Perhaps I’m looking at this wrong. Perhaps I need to stop trying to see a leader who does not exist at the moment. Maybe I need to see what’s not there. No crisis on God’s earth, even one as great as this one, is going to turn this president into a leader. He cannot rise to the occasion. There is no occasion he feels bound to recognize if it does not serve him. Whenever this crisis ends — and that may be 18 months from now, according to a new report — it will be in spite of, not because of, Donald John Trump.

The president’s Twitter id isn’t the only thing telling me I’m right to distrust him. The White House is putting all its political capital into a giant stimulus bill when it has not yet done nearly enough to stop, or slow down, the spread of the novel coronavirus.

For one thing, Trump’s foolish ban on travel from Europe forced Americans to return en masse, turning airports around the country into huge petri dishes perfect for spreading the virus. For another, cities and states do not have a sufficient tests, ventilators, hospital beds, medical staff and more. The closest he got to meeting that ballooning demand was a vague promise made during a presser about the stimulus plan.

About that plan. The Post tells us it (so far) calls for sending some Americans $1,000 depending on need and income (some will get $2,000 checks). That’s fine on its face, as is allocating $300 billion in cheap loans to businesses with fewer than 500 employees. A closer look, however, suggests Trump and the GOP are creating conditions in which special-interests — and even the president himself — will benefit from the legislation.

Some $50 billion would be set aside for the airline industry. (Boeing put its hand out for $60 billion.) That’s on top of tens of billions for “unspecified stabilization measures” to prop up other sectors, “which could include hotels,” according to the Washington Post. I don’t need to remind you Donald Trump is in the travel and hospitality business.

Now, I’m no economist. But I do know what bullshit smells like.

Here we have a global disease outbreak about to trigger an international recession, and here’s an American president proposing a law to paper over the damage he’s already done while seeming to profiteer from mass sickness and death. If I’m reading this right, the Democrats are not only trying to steer him in a patriotic direction. (They want “restrictions on firms that receive emergency assistance to assure that employees aren’t laid off while executives pocket large bonuses,” per the Post.) The Democrats are also trying to stop Trump from enacting a law allowing him to skim the public till.

This president is what he is. A leader? No. Thief? Yeah, that sounds right.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 March 2020

Word Count: 784

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The president wants the US Congress to enact a massive economic stimulus package worth upwards of $850 billion. Don’t get me wrong. The United States government should step in during economic crises. But that brings me to ask: Is now that time?

For one thing, Donald Trump said during a primetime address last week that the coronavirus outbreak was a public health crisis, “not a financial crisis.” He said: “This is just a temporary moment of time that we will overcome together as a nation.”

For another, government intervention would seem necessary after banks stop lending, firms start shuttering (or filing for bankruptcy), and workers begin losing jobs. The time for action would be after economic indicators tell us to. Yes, Wall Street is in a dark mood, but Wall Street isn’t the real economy. That global equity markets are in a frenzy is insufficient reason to deepen an already historic $22 trillion national debt.

Trump’s stimulus package is similar to the one enacted in the last weeks of George W. Bush’s presidency. By then, the housing and credit crisis was just starting. Even then, however, it was clear the Congress had to act and fast or, as Bush said then, “this sucker could go down.” It didn’t go down, no thanks to the House Republicans. Not one of them voted in support of the bill. The House Democrats were forced to rescue Bush.

This is important to note, because the same House Republicans would later blame Barack Obama for the bank bailout the House Democrats voted for at the request of a Republican president. They did this by blurring the difference between the Troubled Asset Relief Program (its official name) and the $787 billion economic stimulus package that the new president signed into law soon after taking office in 2009.

Instead of uniting to face an emergency together as a nation, the House Republicans, led by John Boehner (who became House speaker after 2010), told Obama he was on his own — whatever happened was his fault. They could have helped put out the fire. Instead, they defamed Obama and the firefighters. This was entirely in keeping with the Republicans’ No. 1 “policy goal” then: ensuring that he was a one-term president.

To that end, the congressional Republicans would not even debate Obama’s proposed American Jobs Act of 2011, which might have ended sooner the suffering wrought by the Great Recession. The Republicans were not going to help Obama win reelection. Sure, Republican voters would suffer, but that was a small price to pay. And anyway, they said they wanted to help, but couldn’t, alas. “We’re broke,” Boehner shrugged.

We weren’t broke. Economists said so. They also said a recession is the best time for governments to cut taxes across the board, but especially for workaday Americans, and borrow money to juice the economy. (This is called Keynesian economics.) After the economy recovers, and after a period of sustained growth, time to raise taxes, especially on the most affluent, to pay down debts incurred during a contraction.

The Republicans have done everything backward — for political reasons.

They allowed massive suffering in an attempt to bring down Obama. By the time Trump was elected, the economy was going gangbusters despite Republican efforts to sabotage it. By 2017, there was no need for tax cuts. Indeed, it was time for tax increases. No can do, said Trump and his party. They pushed for and got the cuts, thus enriching by orders of magnitude the obscenely rich, stealing local tax dollars from blue states in the process, and sending the national debt to the highest it’s ever been.

Now Trump wants his own stimulus — again for political reasons.

For one thing, there are no economic indicators telling us to act right now. For another, his proposal includes some $50 billion to bail out airlines suffering from lack of global demand during a pandemic. Moreover, a huge chunk of it is in the form of payroll tax cuts. That might be fine otherwise but if job loss is the bar for government intervention, payroll tax cuts won’t prevent it, and they’ll be meaningless after it.

Trump’s gambit seems to be pushing lots of cash into the economy, propping up demand and making Wall Street happy again. Don’t expect the Republicans to balk, though. If they weren’t concerned about debt when they enriched the obscenely rich, they aren’t going to be concerned this time. Debt, after all, is a Democratic problem.

It’s hard to see Trump doing anything in good faith. This new proposal is no exception. If he really wanted to prevent a recession — if he really wanted to aid and comfort workaday Americans rather than special interests close to the Republican Party and his business interests — he would take a look at what Chuck Schumer is doing.

The Senate minority leader is drafting his own $750 billion stimulus package to boost unemployment insurance, provide money for schools and public transportation, expand Medicaid funding, expand more investments in health care, provide loan assistance, and halt evictions and foreclosures, according to reporting by the Washington Post.

To be sure, that’s not enough. The Democrats in both chambers should be demanding what Joe Biden is demanding: The passage of permanent paid sick leave. But at least Schumer’s proposal pushes money downward, where it does the most economic good.

And unlike the Republicans of 2010s, these Democrats really would unite to face an emergency together as a nation — even if a president they impeached got the credit. This isn’t because they don’t play politics. This is because their politics is better.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 March 2020

Word Count: 934

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You’d think congressional Republicans would see the wisdom of stepping in to prevent a historically and monumentally weak leader of the Republican Party from making a horse’s ass of himself while turning a national health crisis into a full-on catastrophe.

But that would require Mitch McConnell in the Senate and Kevin McCarthy in the House to believe they have a responsibility to people other than other Republicans. Or, to put it another way, that would require them to show decency and courage. They’d have to tell the emperor that he’s naked. And, to be frank, who’s got the time for that?

Put yet another way, the Republicans began severing their dedication to democracy on the day the republic elected its first African-American president. The Democrats, at that point, were no longer the loyal opposition. They were the enemy. Their being the enemy justified any GOP action, even stealing a black executive’s Supreme Court nominee, or worse, covering up for Donald Trump’s conspiracy to betray his country.

Some are asking why the Republicans are standing aside while the president botches the government’s response to the outbreak of a new coronavirus. But this is entirely in keeping with the GOP’s conduct over the last dozen years. They turned their back on the Constitution. They enfeebled it, then sabotaged it. When they acquitted Trump, they said treason was fine. If you’re OK with treason, you’re OK with a pandemic.

Public officials in the Northeast, Midwest and west coast are taking extraordinary measures to slow the spread of COVID-19. They are shutting down various public venues, including schools, restaurants and bars. But some Republican leaders around the country deny the empirical reality of the outbreak, as if recognizing it risks the president’s fury. Worse, they are encouraging people to act as if nothing is wrong.

Governors in Oklahoma, Florida and other red states have taken little or no action to stop the outbreak. Devin Nunes, the president’s No. 1 toady, said on Fox: “If you’re healthy, you and your family, it’s a great time to go out and go to a local restaurant, likely you can get in easy. Let’s not hurt the working people in this country.”

This is profoundly irresponsible for a public official. Young healthy people can carry COVID-19 without showing symptoms. They can, therefore, distribute it far and wide. Such disinformation is of no concern to Nunes, though. His goal is singular and clear. It’s what happens when people in power view the world through a totalitarian lens in which nothing — neither treason nor pandemics — exists outside the realm of politics.

“Totalitarian” is the correct term. The president seems convinced the outbreak is the product of a conspiracy to humiliate him. That’s why he’s focused on numbers of sick people rather than on means of preventing more people from getting sick. That’s why he encourages people not to get tested. (If they do, the numbers go up!) That’s why he’s laser-focused on preventing foreign nationals from entering the country. (In his mind, it’s a “Chinese virus” that infected Europe. Less travel means fewer bad numbers!)

Totalitarians use the same blunt instrument for every crisis no matter how nuanced the crisis is. Inevitably, it gets much worse. Over the weekend, international travelers flooded airports beyond capacity, resulting in long screening lines and hours of waiting in close quarters. The travel ban was supposed to slow down the coronavirus, but the Trump administration failed to think ahead. Instead of retarding its spread, it accelerated it by turning airports into gigantic petri dishes hospitable to the disease.

Another number the president fetishizes is the Dow and other stock indices. He’s been pressuring the head of the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates in the belief that equity markets will celebrate more cheap money. But less than a day after the central bank announced rate cuts close to zero, stocks tumbled minutes after the opening bell. All trading ceased after tens of billions in wealth (8 percent) went up in a puff of smoke.

A monumentally weak president, as I have said, is a dangerous president. Don’t expect Trump to think, “Well, rate cuts didn’t work; let’s try something else.” Instead, expect him to blame Jay Powell for not doing enough to protect him (by way of juicing markets). His aides have said he can’t fire the Fed chairman, but that’s never been tested. The president could fire Powell as he has fired other administration officials for disloyalty, and that would roil the markets even more than they already are.

Trump is a totalitarian in that he is the center of everything, which makes everything — truth or democracy, loyalty or disease, or anything — for or against him in one way or another. His political worldview is total and totalizing. Even if the Republicans were to step in to prevent a weak president from making things worse, what could they do?

They are as weak as he is.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 March 2020

Word Count: 823

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The president of the United States went on television last night to reassure a worried nation that the government’s response to the outbreak of new disease is well in hand. “This is not a financial crisis,” Donald Trump said from the Oval Office. “This is just a temporary moment of time that we will overcome together as a nation and as a world.”

Yeah, no.

As I was waiting for my Dunkin this morning, ABC News broke into its regular programming with a special report. Wall Street fell 7 percent (that’s billions going poof) within minutes of the opening bell. That triggered the circuit breakers, which halted trading for 15 minutes. That’s a precaution, the correspondent said, to prevent “a free fall.” The long bull market has ended. A recession appears to be in the offing.

I don’t know what to say except more of what I’ve been saying.

You can’t trust a fascist to do the work of a democratic republic. You can’t trust a leader who betrayed his country, then got his party to cover up his betrayal. You can’t trust an executive who’s willing to throw people away when they displease him by telling the truth, obeying the law and practicing patriotism. You can’t trust someone who has, if memory serves, lied or spoken falsely over 14,000 times since taking office. You can’t trust a president who takes no responsibility for his oath to defend and protect the US Constitution. You can’t trust a president who serves Republicans only.

Morally speaking, if you were OK with treason, you should be OK with a pandemic.

You can trust a fascist to bumble into disaster before making things much worse by focusing on all the wrong things. Last night, Trump claimed his administration saved lives by taking “early action on China.” He blamed Europe for not doing more sooner to contain “the foreign virus.” He said Europeans “seeded” hotspots in the US. He announced a ban on travel from Europe for 30 days. (Earlier in the day, he said the coronavirus outbreak meant we needed a border wall more than ever.) It was a xenophobic know-nothing campaign speech dressed to look like serious leadership.

But Trump couldn’t even do nativism right.

Turns out “suspending all travel” from Europe does not include the United Kingdom or Ireland, which got officials on the continent thinking Trump’s true aim was punishing the trading bloc, not protecting public health. Turns out the ban does not apply to goods and trade. Turns out the ban applies only to foreigners who’ve been to Europe in the past 14 days. Trump said insurance firms “have agreed to waive all co-payments for coronavirus treatments.” Turns out that’s for testing, not treatments. (He said today that “the testing has been going very smooth.” That’s what you call a lie.)

The president is trying hard to project calm publicly, but privately he’s panicking. The more he panics, the more his aides worry he’ll do something destructive. According to the Washington Post, Trump is threatening to fire Jay Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

 

While Trump has long publicly clashed with Powell, Monday’s outburst was an “eruption” unlike many others due to the political and economic stress that has gripped the White House as the coronavirus spreads. … It caused some White House aides to worry that the president’s fury with Powell could lead to upheaval and economic woes if he continues to lash out at the Federal Reserve (italics all mine).

Given the president is untrustworthy, people are seeking out public officials who are. One person appears to be Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the president’s point man for disease response. He reminded a House panel during testimony Wednesday that COVID-19 is “10 times more deadly than the seasonal flu,” and “things will get worse than they are right now.”

 

We would recommend that there not be large crowds. If that means not having any people in the audience when the NBA plays, so be it. But as a public health official, anything that has large crowds is something that would [cause] a risk to spread.

Within hours, the NBA suspended its season. That came after the NCAA said college basketball fans would not be allowed to attend March Madness games. The South by Southwest Festival was cancelled. So was Coachella. Princess and Viking cruise lines are suspending operations. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and other universities and colleges are telling students not to return from spring break. States are banning access to nursing homes. (New Haven Public Schools just cancelled an entire week of school!)

Yet the president’s campaign continues to plan MAGA rallies.

To be a fascist is to be a nihilist. Maybe Trump figures what the hell, why not? It’s now confirmed that he was in contact with a Brazilian infected with COVID-19. Reuters’ Gabriel Stargardter posted a photo of Fabio Wajngarten, who had “tested positive … according to Brazilian media.” The picture was “taken at Mar-a-Lago, five days ago.”

Many of us knew we couldn’t trust Trump. Wall Street, however, could tolerate fascism as long as profits were good. When profits aren’t good, Wall Street gets suspicious. Doubt creeps in. Once doubt creeps in, it doesn’t go away. It grows. It accelerates. And the more Trump says the markets will be fine, the more the markets will doubt him.

Alas, it takes Wall Street for America to see what we been knew.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 March 2020

Word Count: 914

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