The president was asked last week for his thoughts on recently released documents showing how the FBI prosecuted Michael Flynn, his former advisor. In 2017, Flynn pled guilty to lying to the Mueller investigation into Russia’s 2016 cyber-attack. Flynn now wants to change his plea. His sentencing is currently and indefinitely postponed.

Donald Trump’s answer signaled a willingness to pardon Flynn, but it suggested more than that. In just a few words, his answer captured his ideology as well as the way in which he has led a country now facing the likelihood, per an internal administration report, of 3,000 daily deaths from Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

“You don’t get to be where he is by being bad, I can tell you that,” Trump said.

Allow me to translate.

Success in life isn’t a matter of talent, education, labor and pluck. It’s a matter of character. More specifically, genetics. If you’re successful, as Trump believes Flynn is, your genes put you beyond the strictures of accepted morality. Right and wrong are for ordinary people, who are ordinary because they were born with ordinary genes. No amount of preparation and effort is going to improve their lot. It’s comical to even try.

You, however, were born with good genes. You are, therefore, good. The evidence of your goodness is your success. This is true even if your conduct is bad, because bad conduct is good when a good person does it. Because bad conduct is good when good person does it, attempts to hold a good person accountable for bad conduct violate his rights and liberties — a grave injustice that’s deserving of a presidential pardon.

This worldview is why Trump didn’t think he was doing anything wrong when he betrayed the United States in seeking foreign sabotage of the next election. The president is a good person in his mind. (His history of praising his DNA, and others’, is long and well-documented.) Treason, which is what the impeachment trial was about, would have been bad for a bad person born with bad genes. For a good person born with good genes, however, treason is good. So efforts to hold Trump constitutionally accountable were, by turns, “a hoax,” “a witch hunt” or “presidential harassment.”

This worldview is in keeping with despots in world history who wrongly believed they were infallible by dint of being who they are. Truth and morality were not afforded deference, because affording them deference meant submitting to their authority, which would violate the tyrant’s rights and liberties. Trump’s worldview is in keeping with eugenics, social Darwinism, fascism, white supremacy, Christian nationalism — any political thought privileging the in-group for reasons made out of whole cloth, any rightwing movement rationalizing the out-group’s pain, suffering and even murder.

The pandemic has now killed nearly 70,000 people in this country. An internal Trump administration report, revealed by the New York Times Monday, anticipates as many as 3,000 deaths per day by early June. Some 30 million people are officially jobless. Half the states are easing restrictions, but even as they do so, a huge majority of Americans believe governors are “reopening” too quickly. That suggests a depth of doubt, or outright distrust, that no amount of Republican propaganda is going to improve.

The US economy is not going to “snap back,” as the White House has claimed. Some Republican governors are going to try forcing employees back to work in an effort to save their own skins, but that gambit can’t succeed nationally. Too many people have died. Too many people are going to die. Trust in the president now flows in a trickle.

All things being equal, the economy may not return for a long time. Medical experts warn against hoping for a miracle. We probably won’t see a viable vaccine for two years. You may as well write off 2020 and 2021. Society was not designed for “social distancing” and economic collapse is likely to arrive before it’s redesigned for it. (The LA Times reported this morning the coronavirus has already mutated for the worse.)

Everyone but GOP confederates knows the president did not do enough early enough when national executive action would have mattered most. Trump did not do enough early enough, because he did not want the pandemic to be a problem, and because Trump did not want the pandemic to be a problem, it wasn’t — until it was, undeniably.

Trump’s unshakable faith in his genetic superiority means never making a mistake, never apologizing and never being accountable for anything to anyone. The death toll will continue to mount. Unemployment will continue to rise. Meanwhile, Trump will continue to believe he’s good, and because he’s good, he did nothing wrong, and because he did nothing wrong, the majority is being so unfair when it blames him.

It’s enough to make a president pardon himself.

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: 05 May 2020

Word Count: 810

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The 75th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender in May 1945 ought to prompt thoughtful reflection. For Americans, V-E Day, as it was then commonly called, marked the beginning of “our times.” The Covid-19 pandemic may signal that our times are now coming to an end.

Tom Engelhardt, editor and proprietor of TomDispatch, was born less than a year prior to V-E Day. I was born less than two years after its counterpart V-J Day, marking the surrender of Imperial Japan in August 1945.

Tom is a New Yorker, born and bred. I was born and raised in the Midwest.

Tom is Jewish, although non-observant. I am a mostly observant Catholic.

Tom is a progressive who as a young man protested against the Vietnam War. I am, so I persist in claiming, a conservative. As a young man, I served in Vietnam.

Yet let me suggest that these various differences matter less than the fact that we both came of age in the shadow of World War II — or more specifically in a time when the specter of Nazi Germany haunted the American intellectual landscape. Over the years, that haunting would become the underlying rationale for the U.S. exercise of global power, with consequences that undermined the nation’s capacity to deal with the menace that it now faces.

Tom and I both belong to what came to be known as the Baby Boom generation (though including him means ever so slightly backing up the official generational start date). As a group, Boomers are generally associated with having had a pampered upbringing before embarking upon a rebellious youth (Tom more than I), and then as adults helping ourselves to more than our fair share of all that life, liberty, and happiness had on offer. Now, preparing to exit the stage, we Boomers are passing on to those who follow us a badly damaged planet and a nation increasingly divided, adrift, and quite literally sick. A Greatest Generation we are not.

How did all this happen? Let me suggest that, to unpack American history during the decades when we Baby Boomers sashayed across the world stage, you have to begin with World War II, or more specifically, with how that war ended and became enshrined in American memory.

Of course, we Boomers never experienced the war directly. Our parents did. Tom’s father and both of my parents served in World War II. Yet neither were we Boomers ever truly able to put that war behind us. For better or worse, members of our generation remain the children of V-E Day, when — so we tell ourselves — evil was finally vanquished and good prevailed.

Never forget For Tom, for me, and for our contemporaries, World War II as history and as metaphor centers specifically on the Nazis and their handiwork: swastikas, mammoth staged rallies, the Gestapo and the SS, the cowardice of surrender at Munich, the lightning offensive campaigns known as blitzkrieg, London burning, the Warsaw Ghetto, slave labor, and, of course, a vast network of death camps leading to the Holocaust, all documented in film, photographs, archives, and eyewitness accounts.

And then there was der Führer himself, Adolf Hitler, the subject of a fascination that, over the decades, proved bottomless and more than slightly disturbing. (If your local library ever reopens, compare the number of books about Hitler to those about Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini or wartime Japanese emperor Hirohito.) Seventy-five years after his death, Hitler remains among us, the supreme villain routinely pressed into service by politicians and media pundits alike intent on raising the alarm about some imminent danger. If ever there were a man for all seasons, it is Adolf Hitler.

Hitler’s centrality helps explain why Americans typically date the opening of World War II to September 1939 when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. Only in December 1941 did the United States (belatedly) join the conflict, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s attack on Pearl Harbor and other American installations in the Pacific forcing Washington’s hand. In fact, however, a full decade earlier Japan had already set out to create what it would eventually call its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In September 1931, its forces invaded then Chinese-controlled Manchuria, an undertaking that soon enough morphed into a very large and brutal armed conflict with China proper in which the United States participated on a proxy basis. (Remember the Flying Tigers?) In other words, World War II actually began in Asia rather than Europe, with the first shots fired years before the Nazi attack on Poland.

Yet launching the narrative in September 1939 has the effect of keeping the primary focus on Germany. From a moral perspective, there are ample reasons for doing this: Even in a century of horrendous crimes — the Armenian genocide, Stalin’s extermination of Ukraine’s kulaks, and Mao Zedong’s murderous campaign against his own people — the sheer unadulterated evil of the Nazi regime stands apart.

From a political perspective, however, intense preoccupation with one example of iniquity, however horrific, induces a skewed perspective. So it proved to be with the United States during the decades that followed V-E Day. Subsumed within the advertised purposes of postwar U.S. policy, whether called “defense,” “deterrence,” “containment,” “liberation,” or “the protection of human rights,” has been this transcendent theme: “Never Again.” That is, never again will the United States ignore or appease or fail to confront a regime that compares to — or even vaguely resembles — Nazi Germany. Never again will it slumber until rudely awakened by a Pearl Harbor-like surprise. Never again will it allow its capacity for projecting power against distant threats to dissipate. Never again will it fail to lead.

Of all Donald Trump’s myriad deficiencies, large and small, this may be the one that his establishment critics find most difficult to stomach: his resurrection of “America First” as a primary principle of statecraft suggests a de facto nullification of “Never Again.”

To Trump’s critics, it hardly matters that “America First” in no way describes actual administration policy. After all, more than three years into the Trump presidency, our endless wars persist (and in some cases have even intensified); the nation’s various alliances and its empire of overseas bases remain intact; U.S. troops are still present in something like 140 countries; Pentagon and national security state spending continues to increase astronomically. Even so, the president does appear oblivious to the historical antecedent — that is, the imperative of standing ready to deal with the next Hitler — that finds concrete expression in these several manifestations of U.S. national security policy. No one has ever accused Donald Trump of possessing a profound grasp of history. Yet here his apparent cluelessness is especially telling.

Not least among the unofficial duties of any president is to serve as the authoritative curator of public memory. Through speeches, proclamations, and the laying of wreaths, presidents tell us what we should remember and how. Through their silence, they give us permission to forget the parts of our past that we prefer to forget. Himself born barely a year after V-E Day, Donald Trump seems to have forgotten World War II.

New signs for a new time? Yet let’s consider this admittedly uncongenial possibility: perhaps Trump is onto something. What if V-E Day is no more relevant to the present than the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812? What if, as a basis for policy, “Never Again” is today just as outmoded as “America First”? What if clinging to the canonical lessons of the war against Hitler impedes efforts to repair our nation and our planet?

An abiding problem with “Never Again” is that U.S. policymakers have never applied it to the United States. Since V-E Day, individuals and regimes deemed in Washington to be the spawn of Hitler and the Nazis have provided justification for successive administrations to accumulate arms, impose punishments, underwrite coups and assassination plots, and, of course, wage war endlessly. Beginning with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and China’s Mao Zedong, the list of malefactors that U.S. officials and militant journalists have likened to Hitler is a long one. They’ve ranged from North Korea’s Kim Il Sung in the 1950s to Cuba’s Fidel Castro in the 1960s to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the 1990s. And just to bring things up to date, let’s not overlook the ayatollahs governing present-day Iran.

Two decades after V-E Day, a succession of presidents deployed lessons ostensibly derived from the war against Hitler to justify the Vietnam War. John F. Kennedy described South Vietnam as “the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the Keystone of the arch, the finger in the dike.” Failing to defend that country would allow “the red tide of Communism,” as he put it, to sweep across the region much as appeasers had allowed the Nazi tide to sweep across Europe. “Everything I knew about history,” Lyndon Johnson reflected, “told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I’d be doing exactly what [Neville] Chamberlain did in World War II,” a reference, of course, to the Munich Agreement with Hitler, which that British prime minister so infamously labeled “peace in our time.” Even as late as 1972, Richard Nixon was assuring the public that “an American defeat” in Vietnam “would encourage this kind of aggression all over the world.”

Vietnam provides but one example among many of how viewing problems through the lens of World War II in Europe has obscured real situations and actual stakes on this planet. In short, the promiscuous use of the Hitler analogy has produced deeply flawed policy decisions, while also deceiving the American people. This has inhibited our ability to see the world as it actually is.

Overall, the approach to statecraft that grew out of V-E Day defined the ultimate purpose of U.S. policy in terms of resisting evil. That, in turn, provided all the justification needed for building up American military capabilities beyond compare and engaging in military action on a planetary scale.

In Washington, policymakers have shown little inclination to consider the possibility that the United States itself might be guilty of doing evil. In effect, the virtuous intentions implicit in “Never Again” inoculated the United States against the virus to which ordinary nations were susceptible. V-E Day seemingly affirmed that America was anything but ordinary.

Here, then, we arrive at one explanation for the predicament in which the United States now finds itself. In a recent article in the New York Times, journalist Katrin Bennhold wondered how it could be that, when it came to dealing with Covid-19, “the country that defeated fascism in Europe 75 years ago” now finds itself “doing a worse job protecting its citizens than many autocracies and democracies” globally.

Yet it might just be that events that occurred 75 years ago in Europe no longer have much bearing on the present. The country that defeated Hitler’s version of fascism (albeit with considerable help from others) has since allowed its preoccupation with fascists, quasi-fascists, and other ne’er-do-wells to serve as an excuse for letting other things slip, particularly here in the homeland.

The United States is fully capable of protecting its citizens. Yet what the present pandemic drives home is this: doing so, while also creating an environment in which all citizens can flourish, is going to require a radical revision of what we still, however inaccurately, call “national security” priorities. This does not mean turning a blind eye to mass murder. Yet the militarization of U.S. policy that occurred in the wake of V-E Day has for too long distracted attention from more pressing matters, not least among them creating a way of life that is equitable and sustainable. This perversion of priorities must now cease.

So, yes, let’s mark this V-E Day anniversary with all due solemnity. Yet 75 years after the collapse of the Third Reich, the challenge facing the United States is not “Never Again.” It’s “What Now?”

For the moment at least, Tom and I are still around. Yet “our times” — the period that began when World War II ended — have run their course. The “new times” upon which the nation has now embarked will pose their own distinctive challenges, as the Covid-19 pandemic makes unmistakably clear. Addressing those challenges will require leaders able to free themselves from a past that has become increasingly irrelevant.

Andrew Bacevich writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new book is The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.

Copyright ©2020 Andrew Bacevich — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 May 2020

Word Count: 2,062

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I suppose we should give the president a round of applause. Donald Trump has done something no Democrat (and no liberal) could have done — demonstrate to a voting majority the anti-American animus of the “conservative” project of the last 40 years.

“Anti-American” might sound strange. This is, after all, the same president who vowed in 2016 to “Make America Great Again.” But if the incumbent has taught the majority nothing else, it is the “America” of his famed campaign slogan is not the United States.

That “America” is a nation within a nation. It is an imagined community in which “real Americans” understand they are chosen by God to rule a country given by God. This birthright does not recognize the legitimacy of liberty and justice for all, because it cannot recognize them. The chosen do not have equals. The more you insist on equality, the more confederates insist your salvation comes only from submitting to their rule.

When this president calls himself a nationalist, he’s not talking about the United States. When he talks about borders, he’s not talking about US borders. He’s talking about himself as the leader of a “nation” defining itself less for what it is than for what it isn’t — less by its own values than by the values of its perceived domestic enemies.

In 1981, newly elected President Ronald Reagan said famously, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Most Americans gave him the benefit of the doubt. Most chose to believe he meant high taxes on the wealthy and high federal regulation of business and private enterprise. A government that does less of these things is a government that promotes greater liberty and broader prosperity.

The nation within a nation heard a different message. The “real Americans” heard a president saying the federal government would not push (especially southern) states into obeying Constitutional requirements to administer equal justice to their non-white residents. You could say Reagan’s inaugural speech became a mantra for four decades of anti-government politics. That’s not wrong, but that doesn’t arrive at its logical conclusion. It was the beginning of the Republican Party’s soft civil war.

To be sure, the modern GOP did not start that way. Reagan wasn’t an anti-American, as Trump and his confederates are. In the same speech, Reagan said: “Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work — work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.” (Thanks to David Lazarus for digging up that quote.)

To be sure, the remaining small-government conservatives in existence still believe that the federal government plays a legitimate role in regulating and coordinating responses to national crises, such as a pandemic that has killed, as of this writing, more than 68,500 people and put 30 million others on the jobless rolls. But a small-government conservative is not the same thing as an anti-American confederate.

During the financial panic and its aftermath, the Republicans discovered they could get the upper-hand on the newly elected Democratic president by ignoring Reagan’s conservatism. They stopped making government work at all. That caused massive suffering, even for GOP voters, but a chance to sabotage Barack Obama was worth it.

During the pandemic, the confederates took things a step further. They not only ignored Donald Trump’s gross negligence and dereliction of duty, but they also skimmed as much public money as possible for corporate friends and allies by passing huge coronavirus relief bills. At the same time, they saw a new opportunity to sabotage their domestic enemies even more by holding the rest of the country for ransom.

GOP leaders now say they want to shield businesses against corona-virus related lawsuits in exchange for bailing out cities and blue states fighting the worst of the pandemic. Democrats say that would incentivize GOP governors to “reopen” before it’s safe to, thus potentially sacrificing lives for the president’s political benefit. (“Reopening” as soon as possible will improve the economy, which is thought to be better for Trump.)

This isn’t what you do when you believe we’re one nation, indivisible. This isn’t what you do when you believe, as Reagan did, that “government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.” This is what you do, however, when one’s loyalty is to a nation within a nation — when treason is an option.

The question shouldn’t be whether government is big or small.

The question is whether government is for some or all Americans.

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: 04 May 2020

Word Count: 780

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SAN ANTONIO — Under a waning sun this week, a neighbor and I were quaffing takeout craft beers from an otherwise shuttered brew pub on the banks of the San Antonio River, contemplating the looming end of our city’s five weeks of plague-enforced hibernation.

Jim Wyatt, 73, is an asthmatic retired economics teacher, union organizer, and reserve Coast Guard captain. Though a bit younger, I’m asthmatic as well, with a history of even mild colds becoming serious chest infections.

Neither of us figures himself certain to survive a tangle with the coronavirus. Neither of us relishes having to try.

As I eyed a dozen laughing 20-somethings huddled with beers and without masks at an outdoor table a hundred yards away, Jim said he was “moderately scared, but not terrified,” of the consequences of the lockdown ending.

“I have to get out,” he said, sitting a few yards from me on shaded limestone blocks perched on the riverbank. Joggers, cyclists, dog walkers, and stroller pushers streamed past, most of them also sans-masks.

“I can’t stay trapped at home all day.”

Although testing for the virus still falls woefully short in Texas and though rates of infection continue to rise, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the state to begin a staggered reopening beginning today, May 1. Texas becomes the largest of a handful of states moving to reopen as political and economic considerations prevail over scientists’ warnings.

“Now it’s time to set a new course . . . that responsibly opens up business in Texas,” Abbott said recently in announcing his reopening plans, which have drawn praise from President Trump and business leaders.

Jim and I, and some 30 million other Texans, are being thrown into the breach.

Under Abbott’s plan, retail stores, malls, restaurants, and movie theaters open their doors first, but only up to a quarter of their normal customer capacity. If by mid-May data shows no increase in the virus’ spread, capacity can climb to half of normal. And even more contagion-risky venues like bars, gyms, barber shops, and beauty salons will then be allowed to open.

Abbott’s orders override the much more meticulous rules of many cities and towns, which include the mandatory wearing of face masks by anyone entering a store or otherwise coming in close contact with anyone else.

“It’s hard to get rid of this virus because it is so contagious,” Abbott said. “So, we’re not just going to open up and hope for the best.”

The arguments for re-opening are clear enough.

Texas, with a population 1.5 times that of the New York City metro area, has had just shy of 800 known virus-related deaths so far. The tri-state New York City area has seen more than 33,000 people succumb.

At the same time, the pandemic shutdown — combined with the collapse of petroleum prices exacerbated by demand being sapped by the lockdown — has sucked at least 1.5 million jobs from the state since mid-March. Houston alone looks to lose some 300,000 energy jobs as the oil industry collapses.

Nationwide, at least 30 million people have lost their jobs in less than two months.

But the relatively low death toll in Texas owes much to the state’s aggressive lockdown in March. Many fear that easing restrictions now will prove disastrous.

Movie theater chains, restaurants and shop owners say they fear unleashing a renewed outbreak among customers and employees alike. Many express doubt that working at a quarter of capacity, even for a short while, will prove profitable enough to justify the risk.

The mayors and county executives in the state’s largest urban centers — all but Fort Worth, governed by Democrats — have condemned the governors’ strategy as moving too fast.

“We are not through with this virus and the virus is not through with us,” warns San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who along with leaders of other big Texas urban centers has led the lockdown efforts.

Many, if not most, Texans agree.

A recent poll by the University of Texas at Austin and The Texas Tribune, a non-profit publication focused on politics and social issues, found that more than nine in 10 respondents see the virus as a crisis or very serious threat. More than half the survey’s respondents said they were very worried about infection in their communities.

Still, some two-thirds of those polled said they also are very or extremely worried about the state’s economy.

Views of the virus and responses to it were sharply defined by political leanings, with most Democratic voters favoring continuing the lockdown until conditions are optimal and most Republicans wanting the opening accelerated.

“There are more important things than living,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a conservative former talk radio host and failed business owner from Houston, told a Fox News interviewer. “And that’s saving this country for my children and my grandchildren and saving this country for all of us.”

Most Texans live in fast-growing towns and cities in the central and eastern stretches of the state — a wetter, greener triangle roughly bounded by San Antonio, Austin, Dallas-Ft Worth and Houston. Dallas County, at some 2,600 people per square mile is the state’s most crowded, has less than a twentieth the population density of Manhattan.

A fifth of Texas’ 252 counties claim fewer than five inhabitants per square mile. Presidio County, anchored by the town of Marfa that has become a mecca for artists, celebrities, and not a few New York City natives, has just two people per square mile.

Frustration with the lockdown has been enhanced by the state’s short, but glorious spring. Recent days have been sunny, windy, and — topping at 85 degrees Fahrenheit — reasonably brisk for late April and early May. A few weeks hence, that glory will be burned away by a brain-addling scorch that will last through October.

In my neighborhood — little more than a mile south of downtown’s Alamo memorial — the frenzied restaurant and bar tourist mecca of our city’s famed Riverwalk gives way to a leafy greenway. Herons, egrets, ducks, and hawks flock here, sharing the riverbank with anglers who pull bass from the shallow, usually clear, stream.

From where Jim and I were enjoying our beers, a paved bike and jogging trail runs 10 miles further south, connecting sprawling parks, small reservoirs, and four other 16th-century missions like the Alamo.

Always popular, this so-called “mission reach” of the Riverwalk has proved a godsend for many during the quarantine. So too have the other aquifer-fed rivers that run clear and cold through the limestone Hill Country to the west of San Antonio and Austin.

I joined scores of other people last week lining the banks of a deep, shaded stretch of the Medina River in the town of Bandera. Though most of us kept to ourselves as we fished, swam, or just enjoyed the day, teenagers clustered around a rope swing or climbed 30 feet into the cypress trees to plunge into the river.

State officials reopened state parks in late April, so people could enjoy the rivers and lakes many of them offer.

“As we navigate through these challenging times, it is essential that outdoor experiences and opportunities are available for Texas families,” Carter Smith, the head of the state’s Parks and Wildlife Department said.

That many Texans’ take on the virus cuts along political lines is hardly surprising.

After 40 years of voting Republican in presidential elections, Texas has been sliding back toward a decidedly purple — if not yet blue — hue.

Though Trump won the state four years ago by a comfortable 9-point margin, his victory badly trailed Mitt Romney’s 16-point advantage over Barack Obama in 2012. The UT-Texas Tribune poll puts the president just five points ahead of Joe Biden in November’s match up, with a 2.8 percent margin of error. Another survey, by a Democratic polling firm, puts Biden ahead by a point.

Trump opponents understandably see opportunity in this crisis. His most fervent backers do as well.

“Texas is leading the way against the tyrants,” Alex Jones, the conspiracy monger and right-wing internet mogul, shouted to several hundred people gathered on April 18 at the state capitol in Austin to demand an end to anti-virus lockdown.

A few protesters unfurled a banner rejecting any anti-corona vaccine as a Satanic plot. “Texas will not take the mark of the Beast,” it vowed, calling on God or a righteous public to “deliver up treasonous men,” including Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

“Let us work!” the protesters chanted. “God bless Trump.”

And God help Texas.

As a staff correspondent for the Houston Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers, Dudley Althaus has spent his career reporting on politics and other issues in Texas, the U.S.-Mexico border, and across Latin America.

Copyright ©2020 The Washington Spectator — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 May 2020

Word Count: 1,418

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At this moment of unprecedented crisis, you might think that those not overcome by the economic and mortal consequences of the coronavirus would be asking, “What can we do to help?” A few companies have indeed pivoted to making masks and ventilators for an overwhelmed medical establishment. Unfortunately, when it comes to the top officials of the Pentagon and the CEOs running a large part of the arms industry, examples abound of them asking what they can do to help themselves.

It’s important to grasp just how staggeringly well the defense industry has done in these last nearly 19 years since 9/11. Its companies (filled with ex-military and defense officials) have received trillions of dollars in government contracts, which they’ve largely used to feather their own nests. Data compiled by the New York Times showed that the chief executive officers of the top five military-industrial contractors received nearly $90 million in compensation in 2017. An investigation that same year by the Providence Journal discovered that, from 2005 to the first half of 2017, the top five defense contractors spent more than $114 billion repurchasing their own company stocks and so boosting their value at the expense of new investment.

To put this in perspective in the midst of a pandemic, the co-directors of the Costs of War Project at Brown University recently pointed out that allocations for the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health for 2020 amounted to less than 1% of what the U.S. government has spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone since 9/11. While just about every imaginable government agency and industry has been impacted by the still-spreading coronavirus, the role of the defense industry and the military in responding to it has, in truth, been limited indeed. The highly publicized use of military hospital ships in New York City and Los Angeles, for example, not only had relatively little impact on the crises in those cities but came to serve as a symbol of just how dysfunctional the military response has truly been.

Bailing out the military-industrial complex in the Covid-19 moment Demands to use the Defense Production Act to direct firms to produce equipment needed to combat Covid-19 have sputtered, provoking strong resistance from industries worried first and foremost about their own profits. Even conservative Washington Post columnist Max Boot, a longtime supporter of increased Pentagon spending, has recently recanted, noting how just such budget priorities have weakened the ability of the United States to keep Americans safe from the virus. “It never made any sense, as Trump’s 2021 budget had initially proposed, to increase spending on nuclear weapons by $7 billion while cutting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funding by $1.2 billion,” he wrote. “Or to create an unnecessary Space Force out of the U.S. Air Force while eliminating the vitally important directorate of global health by folding it into another office within the National Security Council.”

In fact, continuing to prioritize the U.S. military will only further weaken the country’s public health system. As a start, simply to call up doctors and nurses in the military reserves, as even Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has pointed out, would hurt the broader civilian response to the pandemic. After all, in their civilian lives many of them now work at domestic hospitals and medical centers deluged by Covid-19 patients.

The present situation, however, hasn’t stopped military-industrial complex requests for bailouts. The National Defense Industrial Association, a trade group for the arms industry, typically asked the Pentagon to speed up contracts and awards for $160 billion in unobligated Department of Defense funds to its companies, which will involve pushing money out the door without even the most modest level of due diligence.

Already under fire in the pre-pandemic moment for grotesque safety problems with its commercial jets, Boeing, the Pentagon’s second biggest contractor, received $26.3 billion last year. Now, that company has asked for $60 billion in government support. And you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that Congress has already provided Boeing with some of that desired money in its recent bailout legislation. According to the Washington Post, $17 billion was carved out in that deal for companies “critical to maintaining national security” (with Boeing in particular in mind). When, however, it became clear that those funds wouldn’t arrive as a complete blank check, the company started to have second thoughts. Now, some members of Congress are practically begging it to take the money.

And Boeing was far from alone. Even as the spreading coronavirus was spurring congressional conversations about what would become a $2 trillion relief package, 130 members of the House were already pleading for funds to purchase an additional 98 Lockheed Martin F-35 jet fighters, the most expensive weapons system in history, at the cost of another half-billion dollars, or the price of more than 90,000 ventilators.

Similarly, it should have been absurdly obvious that this wasn’t the moment to boost already astronomical spending on nuclear weapons. Yet this year’s defense budget request for such weaponry was 20% higher than last year’s and 50% above funding levels when President Trump took office. The agency that builds nuclear weapons already had $8 billion left unspent from past years and the head of the National Nuclear Security Agency, responsible for the development of nuclear warheads, admitted to Representative Susan Davis (D-CA) that the agency was unlikely even to be able to spend all of the new increase.

Boosters of such weapons, however, remain undeterred by the Covid-19 pandemic. If anything, the crisis only seems to have provided a further excuse to accelerate the awarding of an estimated $85 billion to Northrop Grumman to build a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), considered the “broken leg” of America’s nuclear triad. As William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, has pointed out, such ICBMs “are redundant because invulnerable submarine-launched ballistic missiles are sufficient for deterring other countries from attacking the United States. They are dangerous because they operate on hair-trigger alert, with launch decisions needing to be made in some cases within minutes. This increases the risk of an accidental nuclear war.”

And as children’s book author Dr. Seuss might have added, “But that is not all! Oh, no, that is not all.” In fact, defense giant Raytheon is also getting its piece of the pie in the Covid-19 moment for a $20-$30 billion Long Range Standoff Weapon, a similarly redundant nuclear-armed missile. It tells you everything you need to know about funding priorities now that the company is, in fact, getting that money two years ahead of schedule.

In the midst of the spreading pandemic, the U.S. military’s Indo-Pacific Command similarly saw an opportunity to use fear-mongering about China, a country officially in its area of responsibility, to gain additional funding. And so it is seeking $20 billion that previously hadn’t gained approval even from the secretary of defense in the administration’s fiscal year 2021 budget proposal. That money would go to dubious missile defense systems and a similarly dubious “Pacific Deterrence Initiative.”

How not to deal with Covid-19 Along with those military-industrial bailouts came the fleecing of American taxpayers. While many Americans were anxiously awaiting their $1,200 payments from that congressional aid and relief package, the Department of Defense was expediting contract payments to the arms industry. Shay Assad, a former senior Pentagon official, accurately called it a “taxpayer rip-off” that industries with so many resources, not to speak of the ability to borrow money at incredibly low interest rates, were being so richly and quickly rewarded in tough times. Giving defense giants such funding at this moment was like giving a housing contractor 90% of upfront costs for renovations when it was unclear whether you could even afford your next mortgage payment.

Right now, the defense industry is having similar success in persuading the Pentagon that basic accountability should be tossed out the window. Even in normal times, it’s a reasonably rare event for the federal government to withhold money from a giant weapons maker unless its performance is truly egregious. Boeing, however, continues to fit that bill perfectly with its endless program to build the KC-46 Pegasus tanker, basically a “flying gas station” meant to refuel other planes in mid-air.

As national security analyst Mark Thompson, my colleague at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), has pointed out, even after years of development, that tanker has little hope of performing its mission in the near future. The seven cameras that its pilot relies on to guide the KC-46’s fuel to other planes have so much glare and so many shadows that the possibility of disastrously scraping the stealth coating off F-22s and F-35s (both manufactured by Lockheed Martin) while refueling remains a constant danger. The Air Force has also become increasingly concerned that the tanker itself leaks fuel. In the pre-pandemic moment, such problems and associated ones led that service to decide to withhold $882 million from Boeing. Now, however, in response to the Covid-19 crisis, those funds are, believe it or not, being released.

Keep all of this behavior (and more) in mind when you hear people suggest that, in this public health emergency, the military should be put in charge. After all, you’re talking about the very institution that has regularly mismanaged massive weapons programs like the $1.4 trillion F-35 jet fighter program, already the most expensive weapons system ever (with ongoing problems galore). Even when it comes to health care, the military has proved remarkably inept. For instance, attempts of the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense to integrate their health records were, infamously enough, abandoned after four years and $1 billion spent.

Having someone in uniform at the podium is, unfortunately, no guarantee of success. Indeed, a number of veterans have been quick to rebuke the idea of forefronting the military at this time. “Don’t put the military in charge of anything that doesn’t involve blowing stuff up, preventing stuff from being blown up, or showing up at a place as a message to others that we’ll be there to blow stuff up with you if need be,” one wrote.

“Here’s a video from Camp Pendleton of unmasked Marines queued up for haircuts during the pandemic,” tweeted another. “So how about ‘no’?” That video of troops without masks or practicing social distancing even shocked Secretary of Defense Esper, who called for a military haircut halt, only to be contradicted by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, desperate to maintain regulation cuts in the pandemic moment. That inspired a mocking rebuke of “haircut heroes” on Twitter.

Unfortunately, as Covid-19 spread on the aircraft carrier the USS Theodore Roosevelt, that ship became emblematic of how ill-prepared the current Pentagon leadership proved to be in combatting the virus. Despite at least 100 cases being reported on board — 955 crewmembers would, in the end, test positive for the disease and Chief Petty Officer Charles Robert Thacker Jr. would die of it — senior Navy leaders were slow to respond. Instead, they kept those sailors at close quarters and in an untenable situation of increasing risk. When an emailed letter expressing the concerns of the ship’s commander, Captain Brett Crozier, was leaked to the press he was quickly removed from command. But while his bosses may not have appreciated his efforts for his crew, his sailors did. He left the ship to a hero’s farewell.

All of this is not to say that some parts of the U.S. military haven’t tried to step up as Covid-19 spreads. The Pentagon has, for instance, awarded contracts to build “alternate care” facilities to help relieve pressure on hospitals. The Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences is allowing its doctors and nurses to join the military early. Several months into this crisis, the Pentagon has finally used the Defense Production Act to launch a process to produce $133 million worth of crucial N95 respirator masks and $415 million worth of N95 critical-care decontamination units. But these are modest acts in the midst of a pandemic and at a moment when bailouts, fraud, and delays suggest that the military-industrial complex hasn’t proved capable of delivering effectively, even for its own troops.

Meanwhile, the Beltway bandits that make up that complex have spotted a remarkable opportunity to secure many of their hopes and dreams. Their success in putting their desires and their profits ahead of the true national security of Americans was already clear enough in the staggering pre-pandemic $1.2 trillion national security budget. (Meanwhile, of course, key federal medical structures were underfunded or disbanded in the Trump administration years, undermining the actual security of the country.) That kind of disproportionate spending helps explain why the richest nation on the planet has proven so incapable of providing even the necessary personal protective equipment for frontline healthcare workers, no less the testing needed to make this country safer.

The defense industry has asked for, and received, a lot in this time of soaring cases of disease and death. While there is undoubtedly a role for the giant weapons makers and for the Pentagon to play in this crisis, they have shown themselves to be anything but effective lead institutions in the response to this moment. It’s time for the military-industrial complex to truly pay back an American public that has been beyond generous to it.

Isn’t it finally time as well to reduce the “defense” budget and put more of our resources into the real national security crisis at hand?

Mandy Smithberger writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She is the director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).

Copyright ©2020 Mandy Smithberger — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 May 2020

Word Count: 2,269

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It can’t be said often enough. The biggest political story of the year isn’t the 2020 election. It isn’t the pandemic. It isn’t its death toll (64,000 and counting). It isn’t the record-breaking number of unemployed (30 million). It isn’t Donald Trump making everything, and I mean everything, much worse than it needed to be. It sure as hell isn’t those “ersatz phallus swingers” intimidating Michigan legislators with long guns.

No, the biggest story is so big as to be invisible. It’s so obvious as to be silent. The biggest political story of the year is the tens of millions of Americans sheltering in place for the sake of their own well-being and safety, and for the sake of all Americans. (The second-biggest story is Americans who are not paid to risk their lives risking their lives by working in grocery stories, pharmacies, gas stations, and nursing homes.)

Staying home might not seem like a political act. After all, what’s political about being scared of catching the coronavirus, which is a death sentence to the elderly and causes even 40-something men and women to stroke out? But please. Make no mistake. It is.

It’s as political as “jackbooted thugs” storming state capitols (to borrow the NRA’s favorite form of slander). It’s as political as the president sidestepping any and all accountability for the United States having the highest tally of dead compared to all industrialized nations combined. It’s as political as the Republican Party giving away billions of dollars in goodies to friends. It’s as political as Trump rushing the country back to some semblance of normal, risking a second wave more deadly than the first.

But more than that, it’s a better politics, and it’s a better politics, because it’s moral.

You are staying home not only for your benefit, but for everyone’s benefit. Yes, it’s driving you crazy. Yes, it’s driving your kids crazy, which drives you more crazy. But millions seem to believe such sacrifice is necessary and right, which is not only small-d democratic, it’s small-r republican. Staying home means staying healthy (or at least not getting sick), which means we are actualizing, willingly or not, the Good Life.

This is important for a number of reasons. One is that the biggest political story of the year doesn’t get the degree of attention it deserves. (It’s understandable why white men wielding semiautomatic rifles cause alarm, but these people should not be confused for a majority perspective. They represent a vanishingly small minority of chuds.) Importantly, the president won the last election vowing to make America great again. While Trump is failing, most Americans are following a far more prudent course.

Even more important, however, is what the pandemic is revealing about the American character, traits and qualities demanded of a nation committed to democracy. I yield to no one is my animosity toward fascism and a major party laboring to establish 21st-century apartheid. But I concede to the need to step back and marvel at the courage, patience and stamina of the millions of us doing what’s right. The challenge is only beginning. But no challenge can be overcome without the right kind of liberal spirit.

I confess to being skeptical. Trump’s election seemed to suggest an electorate that had forgotten the old democratic faith, a republic grown tired and no longer feeling the thrill of saying the words, at the end of the allegiance, with liberty and justice for all. Trump’s victory signaled the rise of a “nation” within a nation, one already at war with the other but that did not desire disunion as much as domination without complaint.

Since then, however, the people seem to have awakened, or at least cracked open a sleepy eye, not only to what an authoritarian has done but also to what the people themselves allowed to be done. I hope now that voters realize a president willing to extort governors into being “nice” to him in the thick of a pandemic is of a piece with a president willing to extort a foreign leader into sabotaging an election. I hope now that voters realize the same president vowing to make America great again is the most anti-American president of their lifetimes. I hope now that a majority of the people realize beating fascism requires unity and the overwhelming demonstration of power.

Presidents, leaders, institutions, and laws don’t make a nation. (Borders sure as hell don’t). What makes a nation is its people, and what makes a people is its character. Yes, some of us want to destroy us. But most of us don’t. Indeed, most of us want to do what’s right for everyone. The biggest political story of the year is tens of millions of Americans staying home for their sakes and for the benefit of the common good.

That’s a good reason to hope.

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: 01 May 2020

Word Count: 809

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Tuesday saw a milestone. More people have died from Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, than all the military men who died fighting in the Vietnam War. I would call it a double milestone, however. While American involvement in southeast Asia lasted about 19 years, the current pandemic has lasted just a month and a half.

The death toll, as of this writing, is 61,700. Without a vaccine, there’s no end in sight. If we’re lucky, the virus will disappear on its own. Those are terrible odds, though. It’s best not to trust anyone telling you things will go back to normal. Because they won’t.

Yes, the numbers are peaking in places like New York City, but that’s the result of stay-at-home orders and other “social distancing” measures put in place to prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed. Once those restrictions are lifted, as a result of their working in the first place, there’s almost certainly going to be a second wave that could be worse. (There’s almost certainly going to be a first wave in rural areas of the country.) All this could drive us all back to where we are now. At home. This is a fact.

There’s no getting around it. Yes, the US economy is suffering badly. The official number of unemployed has now topped 30 million. (That’s most likely an undercount.) However, you are doing your part for yourself and your fellow citizens. Staying home, after all, is what is slowing the disease’s spread.

It’s up to the federal government to “provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Another fact: It is not.

The White House would like you to believe society will normalize in a jiffy. The Gross Domestic Product shrank by nearly 5 percent last quarter. This quarter is expected to be much worse. But Larry Kudlow, the president’s economics advisor, said the GDP “should snap back.” This is the same guy who said, of the outbreak in February, that, “We have contained this. I won’t say airtight, but pretty close to airtight.”

The New Haven Register reported Saturday the results of a new medical study out of Yale. Researchers found most patients suffering from Covid-19 did not have a fever. Akiko Iwasaki, an immunobiologist at the Yale School of Medicine, said public health officials “may have to redefine” how they approach the disease. “If most people don’t develop a fever, then screening for fever is not a good public health practice.” You can say that again.

Colleges and universities are assuming the worst will be over by the time classes begin in the fall. That’s an enormous assumption. First, because dorms are where you catch things you don’t catch anywhere else. If you can catch chlamydia in college, you can catch the new coronavirus. Second, because nothing about college life is built for “social distancing.” Classrooms, dorms, labs, libraries, theaters, stadiums — nothing. And if students can be infected without being feverish, what’s the point of screening?

Before you think young people aren’t vulnerable, recall a report by the Washington Post showing young people, who aren’t supposed to suffer strokes, stroking out. “Doctors are sounding the alarm about patients in their 30s and 40s left debilitated or dead after major strokes. Some didn’t even know they were infected with the disease caused by the coronavirus.” Have I mentioned that professors, who teach young people, are often elderly? Are they going to trust administrators to have their best interests in mind? Maybe.

Fact is, institutions large and small — whether colleges and universities, local churches and entertainment venues, or Major League Baseball — they all of them feel tremendous financial pressure to jumpstart normal life, and they are going to look on the bright side despite the bright side being frequently cast in a shadow of doubt.

They have status-quo bias. They are going to presume the best even when there are 61,700 and counting reasons to presume the worst in the absence of a vaccine. They will weigh the cost of standing idle versus the cost of your well-being; and your well-doing, though important, might not be as important to them as the hard bottom line.

Most have good intentions. Most will be careful. Some will be reckless, though. Indeed, some will just come out and say the cash-value of your life is less than the cash-value of your labor, and as a consequence, we are going to use state power to force you back to work even if doing so exposes you and everyone else to a deadly disease. In Iowa, for instance, the governor’s office warned employees that refusing to go back to work out of concern for one’s well-being will be considered a “voluntary quit,” which would disqualify workers from access to unemployment insurance.

Life will return to normal — eventually. But in the absence of a vaccine (or good luck), be careful about who you put your trust in. Do they have your best interests in mind?

Maybe.

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: 30 April 2020

Word Count: 843

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“Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief.” So I wrote back in June 2012, with a presidential election approaching.

I was referring then to the war on terror’s CIA and military drone assassination programs, which first revved up in parts of the Greater Middle East in the years of George W. Bush’s presidency and only spread thereafter. In the process, such “targeted killings” became, as I wrote at the time, “thoroughly institutionalized, normalized, and bureaucratized around the figure of the president.” In Barack Obama’s years in the Oval Office, they were ramped up further as he joined White House “Terror Tuesday” meetings to choose individual targets for those attacks. They often enough turned out to involve “collateral damage”; that is, the deaths of innocent civilians, including children. In other words, “commander-in-chief” had, by then, gained a deadly new meaning, as the president personally took on the role of a global assassin.

I had little doubt eight years ago that this wouldn’t end soon — and on that I wasn’t wrong. Admittedly, our present commander-in-chief probably doesn’t have the time (given how much of his day he’s spent watching Fox News, tweeting his millions of followers, and, until recently, holding two hour press-briefings-cum-election-rallies on the coronavirus pandemic) or the attention span for “Terror Tuesday” meetings. Still, in his own memorable fashion, he’s managed to make himself America’s assassin-in-chief par excellence.

After all, not only have those drone programs continued to target people in distant lands (including innocent civilians), but they have yet again been ramped up in the Trump years. Meanwhile, still in our pre-Covid-19 American world, President Trump embraced the role of assassin-in-chief in a newly public, deeply enthusiastic way. Previously, such drones had killed non-state actors, but he openly ordered the drone assassination of Major General Qassim Suleimani, the top military figure and number-two man in Iran, as he left Baghdad International Airport for a meeting with the prime minister of Iraq.

Of course, for American presidents such a role was not unknown even before the development of Hellfire-missile-armed drones. Think of John F. Kennedy and the CIA’s (failed) attempts on the life of Cuban leader Fidel Castro or the successful killings of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem, and Dominican Republic head Rafael Trujillo. Or, for a change of pace, consider the Vietnam War-era CIA assassination campaign known as the Phoenix Program in which tens of thousands of supposed “Vietcong” supporters (often enough, civilians swept up in the murderous chaos of the moment) were murdered in that country, a program that was no secret to President Lyndon Johnson.

And it’s true as well that, in this century, our commanders-in-chief have overseen endless conflicts in distant lands from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria to Yemen, Somalia, Niger, and beyond, none of them congressionally declared wars. As a result, they had the ultimate responsibility for the deaths of, at a minimum, tens of thousands of civilians, as well as for the uprooting of millions of their compatriots from settled lives and their flight, as desperate refugees, across significant parts of the planet. It’s a grim record of death and destruction. Until recently, however, it remained a matter of distant deaths, not much noted here.

A new kind of drone war on the pandemic front However, the assassin-in-chief may now be coming home, big time, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Little did I imagine that, by 2020, an American president without a lick of empathy for other human beings, even Americans who loved him to death (so to speak), would be targeting not just civilians here in “the homeland” (as it came to become known after the 9/11 attacks), but his most fervent followers. In the age of Donald Trump, the assassin-in-chief now seems to be in the process of transforming himself into a domestic killer-in-chief.

That reality — at least for me — came into focus only recently. True, until then, even beyond those drone strikes, American presidents have had the ultimate responsibility for the deaths of startling numbers of civilians in faraway lands where the U.S. military has been making war (remarkably fruitlessly) for almost 19 years. The devastating use of American air power generally has only increased during the Trump years in, for instance, both Afghanistan and Somalia, where U.S. airstrikes have hit new levels of destructiveness, as Nick Turse reported recently at the Intercept — more of them in the first four pandemic months of 2020 than in all of the Obama years combined.

Still, historically speaking, killing Afghans or Iraqis or Syrians or Yemenis or Somalis has always been one thing, but Americans? That’s another story entirely, no?

As it happens, the answer is indeed no, not in 2020, and once again, in a sense, air power is at the heart of the matter. In this case, though, we’re talking about the spread of Covid-19, in part through respiratory droplets (think of them as microscopic Hellfire missiles). In that new air-powered context, with the equivalent of a drone virus in the hands of one Donald J. Trump, the president is bringing the role of assassin-in-chief home. He is, in fact, in the process of becoming a killer-in-chief for his very own base — anyone, that is, who listens to what he says and believes fervently in him. Set aside for a moment the deaths he’s undoubtedly responsible for because of, as Juan Cole put it recently at his Informed Comment website, “those two months he pissed away calling [Covid-19] a hoax and setting up the country for Vietnam War-level death tolls.” Put aside as well his repeated and dangerous medical advice to find and take anti-malarial drugs. Put aside as well his suggestion that perhaps people fearing they have the coronavirus should try to inject or internally take disinfectants (which, a recent study showed, do kill that virus on surfaces and in the air), an act medical experts assure us could result in death.

Think of each of those potential death sentences for his most fervent believers as a striking combination of grotesque ignorance and narcissism. But what about an actual decision, as commander-in-chief and president, to kill off members of his base?

Until a couple of weeks ago, that would have been harder to imagine — until, that is, President Trump noticed the first demonstrations against state shutdowns focused on preventing the deadly Covid-19 virus from spreading. Those protests against “stay-at-home” orders, organized or encouraged by what the New York Times describes as “an informal coalition of influential conservative leaders and groups, some with close connections to the White House,” have continued to bring out demonstrators in Trump-election-like rallies by the dozens, hundreds, or even (in a few cases) thousands.

Often, the demonstrators are not wearing the very masks that the president has recommended for other people (but not himself); nor are they keeping the social distance he has also officially backed (but continues to find it impossible to keep). They sport bizarre signs (“Don’t cancel my golf season,” “My body/my choice, Trump 2020” [with an image of a face mask crossed out], “Give me liberty or give me Covid-19,” “We demand haircuts”), carry American flags and occasional Confederate ones, and are sometimes armed to the teeth (not exactly surprising, given that the protests have been supported by conservative pro-gun or armed militia groups).

The Donald was clearly pleased with the earliest of those demonstrations, being so eager himself to “reopen” America and “the greatest economy in the history of our country” (then headed for the pandemic subbasement). It mattered little that, despite the grim pressures of the moment, polling showed significant numbers of Americans, including Republicans, preferred to keep the U.S. largely shut down for now. In response, he tweeted: “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” and then “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” All were states run by Democratic governors. And his focus on supporting such demonstrations quickly got the media’s attention, as they began to spread elsewhere.

At one of his nightly coronavirus briefings, the president then said this of the demonstrators: “These are people expressing their views. I see where they are and I see the way they’re working. They seem to be very responsible people to me, but they’ve been treated a little bit rough.”

With his future election campaign undoubtedly in his sightlines and his base in the forefront of his brain, he then began to encourage more of the same from both protesters and governors — and the Republican governor of Georgia broke the ice, so to speak, by attempting to reopen everything down to nail salons and movie theaters (something even the president would later criticize), while the Republican governor of Florida reopened that state’s beaches.

Targeting his base Now, here’s the obvious thing in this pandemic moment: if you’re the president of the United States (no less the governor of Georgia, Florida, or other Republican administrations or legislatures in a hurry to reopen the country), you’re encouraging people to sicken and die. To support citizens turning out to protest without either protection or any sense of social distancing is to support people potentially giving each other Covid-19, a disease which clearly spreads best in close quarters like nursing homes, prisons, crowded housing of any sort, or assumedly protests of this very kind. As one epidemiologist put it in response to a gathering of perhaps 2,500 protesters in Seattle, Washington, “I predict a new epidemic surge (incubation time — 5-7 days before onset [of] symptoms, if any, and transmission to associates around that time, even among asymptomatics)… so increase in 2-4 weeks from now.”

At this point, in a country leading the world by a long shot in known cases of, and deaths from, Covid-19, none of this should exactly be rocket science. It’s beyond obvious that if you encourage such demonstrations, you’re increasing the odds that the protesters will both catch and pass on a disease that’s already killed 60,000 Americans, more than U.S. fatalities from 20 years of war in Vietnam.

And that, of course, makes the president of the United States a killer, too. Or thought of another way, the assassin-in-chief in distant lands has just transformed himself into an assassin-in-chief right here at home, a man who might as well have fired Hellfire missiles into such crowds or put a gun to the head of some of those protesters and their wives or husbands or lovers or parents or children (to whom the disease will undoubtedly be spread once they go home) and pulled the trigger.

The act of encouraging members of his base to court death is clearly that of a man without an ounce of empathy, even for those who love and admire him most — and so of a stone-cold killer. You couldn’t ask for more proof that the only sense of empathy he has lies overwhelmingly in his deep and abiding pity for himself (which matches his staggering sense of self-aggrandizement) and perhaps for his children, other billionaires, and fossil-fuel executives. Them, he would save; the rest of us, his base included, are expendable. He’d sacrifice any of us without a second thought if he imagined that it would benefit him or his reelection in any way.

But there’s no point in leaving it at that. After all, as he pushes for a too-swiftly reopened country, he’s declaring open season on Americans of all sorts. And every one of us who will die too soon should be considered another Covidfire missile death and chalked up to a president who, by the time this is over, will truly have given a new meaning to the phrase assassin-in-chief.

You could say, I suppose, that he’s just been putting his stamp of approval on the recent statement of Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, another politician in a rush to reopen his state not to business, but to the business of pandemics. Patrick classically summed up the president’s position (and those of the protesters as well) in this fashion: “there are more important things than living.” Indeed, how true, though not, of course, for Donald Trump, or the Trump Organization, or that hotel of his in Washington, or his other presently sinking properties, or for his reelection in November 2020.

As for the rest of us, in Covid-19 America, we are all now potential Suleimanis.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com (where this article originated) and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Copyright ©2020 Tom Engelhardt — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 April 2020

Word Count: 2,075

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I just checked. Turns out I’ve never focused on Mike Pence. That might be due to his being a non-entity. Like most people, I don’t care enough about the vice president to bother forming an opinion about him. Circumstances, however, have forced me to.

Pence visited Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic Tuesday. He wasn’t wearing a mask.

Wearing a mask is, um, the smart thing to do in the thick of a pandemic that has, as of Tuesday, killed more Americans over a month and a half than all who died fighting in Vietnam over 19 years. It’s the smart thing to do in a health clinic whose patients are recovering from COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. It’s the smart thing to do for the official second in line to the most powerful office in the land.

Pence is no dummy. What gives?

Some have speculated he doesn’t believe he needs one. As a twice-born conservative Christian, he likely believes faith in Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior literally immunizes him against the coronavirus. Given that Pence never lets you forget his devotion to the unerring Word of God, this would seem a good theory.

Such speculation is given greater credence by the theory of “muscular Christianity” that has developed over two decades. After the Cold War ended, evangelicals were open to “soft patriarchy,” according to Kristin Kobes Du Mez. But after Sept. 11, 2001, “a more militant Christian masculinity returned with a vengeance.” Du Mez: “From hundreds of books that collectively sold millions of copies, evangelicals were told that men were called to be warriors and that masculine aggression was God’s gift to humanity.”

By the time of the 2016 election, Du Mez wrote, white evangelical Christians had been reveling in the idea of an ass-kicking Christ for years. The Rev. Robert Jeffress said he wanted for president “the meanest, toughest, son-of-a-you-know-what I can find in that role.” In Donald Trump, they found what they were looking for. So Mike Pence didn’t wear a mask Tuesday for three reasons. One, he’s a Christian. Two, he’s a man. Three, he’s a Christian man. And real Christian men don’t need no stinking masks.

I mean, these are interesting theories. But I think they give too much credit to the vice president and white evangelical Christians leaders unwavering support of a lying, thieving, philandering sadist who also happens to be the president. More importantly, they implicitly accept the legitimacy of American evangelism’s definition of manhood.

If Pence were really a manly Christian unafraid of catching the coronavirus among people who were recovering from it, why didn’t he just say that? Sure, he would have courted controversy, but so what? The president’s supporters would have loved it.

Instead, Pence lied. He said he was following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. Actually, the CDC’s guidelines, according to NPR, recommend “wearing cloth face masks in public to help prevent transmitting the virus to others.”

Pence lied in another way. He said he is tested every day to make sure he isn’t infected. “And since I don’t have the coronavirus,” the vice president said, “I thought it’d be a good opportunity for me to be here, to be able to speak to these researchers, these incredible health care personnel, and look them in the eye and say ‘thank you.’” Again, Pence is no dummy. He understands the difference between being uninfected and being immune to future infection. He is one, but not the other. Why did he lie?

I suspect it’s because the president refuses to wear a mask. If the president does something, the vice president does it too, because this vice president is pretty much the opposite of manly, never mind manly Christian. Deciding on his own how to think, how to talk, or how to even walk is too risky for a man who’s conformist to his core.

Mike Pence conforms so much to the president that he’s even starting to look like him. I can’t be alone in noticing the manner in which he toured the Mayo Clinic Tuesday — leaning forward slightly, arms dangling, appearing to tiptoe, as if he shared Trump’s heft and girth. He’s less Iron Vice President than Mighty Morphin Power Pence.

Manly Christians like to brag about being self-reliant. All they need is Jesus, after all. But self-reliance takes courage. It takes standing up to power when necessary, as Christ did. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. “He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”

Pence isn’t alone. The Christians who triumph in the belief that “the meanest, toughest, son-of-a-you-know-what” is the president are the same ones wailing about unfair persecution in American modernity. They complain with breathtaking consistency, which might be admirable if consistency, as Emerson said, weren’t “the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

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: 29 April 2020

Word Count: 855

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ISTANBUL — The coronavirus pandemic has offered Turkey the opportunity to try to improve ties with the United States so as to better cope with potential economic problems and defuse contentious issues in the relationship.

Ankara sent a military transport plane to Washington on April 28 carrying medical supplies for the fight against the coronavirus. It is the second such delivery to the US since the pandemic began earlier this year.

In a letter accompanying the supplies, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told his counterpart Donald Trump that Turkey wanted to develop its relations with the US “in all areas,” pointing to a joint decision to boost bilateral trade to $100 billion a year.

Erdogan’s letter also made clear that Turkey expects its support for the US against the coronavirus to dampen criticism levelled against Ankara in Washington.

“I hope that in the upcoming period, with the spirit of solidarity we have displayed during the pandemic, Congress and the US media will better understand the strategic importance of our relations,” the letter said.

He said he hoped that they acted “in a way that our common fight against our common problems necessitates.”

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo thanked Turkey via Twitter. “Americans are grateful for your friendship, partnership and support,” Pompeo wrote.

For Turkey, which has sent coronavirus aid supplies to many other countries, the show of support to the US has special significance as Ankara faces the prospect of new economic turbulence ahead.

It is also looking for US help at a time when ties between the two NATO allies are strained over differences in Syria and over Turkey’s decision to buy the Russian S-400 missile defence system.

Turkish officials said earlier this month that their country had held talks with the United States about securing a swap line from the US Federal Reserve and discussed other funding options to mitigate fallout from the coronavirus outbreak. In a swap, the Federal Reserve accepts other currencies in exchange for dollars. It has added temporary lines to central banks including those of Brazil, South Korea and Mexico but has made no decision in the case of Turkey.

Financial help from the US would be crucial for Ankara as Erdogan, who prides himself in having ended Turkey’s long history of relying on the International Monetary Fund, has ruled out calling on the IMF for help.

The Fund expects Turkey’s economy to shrink by 5% this year and unemployment to increase to 17% as the pandemic chokes economic activity and paralyses the country’s tourism industry, a key source of foreign currency. It would be Turkey’s second recession in fewer than two years.

Analysts have also raised concerns that a draw-down in foreign reserves could hamper Turkey’s response to the pandemic, increasing the need for external funding. The Central Bank in Ankara has been spending billions of dollars to shore up the Lira, a development that has depleted reserves. The bank’s reserves stood at $92.1 billion as of the end of March, a 14.5% drop since February, according to the state-run Anadolu news agency.

The draw-down has spooked investors, who worry that Turkey may not have enough of a cushion to shoulder a disruption in external financing.

“The main worry is that there is a pick-up in external debt repayments ahead while the tourism sector is not in a position to attract flows due to the lockdown,” Kaan Nazli, a senior economist and portfolio manager helping oversee $26 billion of assets at Neuberger Berman in The Hague, told Bloomberg. Despite the Central Bank’s efforts, the lira has lost almost 15% of its value against the US dollar since the start of the year.

Aykan Erdemir, senior director of the Turkey Programme at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think-tank, said the Erdogan government was aware of the economic dangers ahead.

“Erdogan fears the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic more than the public health consequences, given his ability to control the flow of news and manipulate the case and fatality numbers,” Erdemir said via email. “At this point, the Turkish president is just beginning to feel the real pressure.”

“The Turkish government’s publicity stunts through televised coronavirus aid around the globe can offer no remedy to the country’s looming balance of payments crisis and the ensuing fallout from a currency meltdown,” Erdemir added.

The pandemic also offered Turkey a chance to cool down another point of friction with the US.

Earlier this month, Ankara said it had postponed plans to activate the S-400 batteries, bought from Russia for $2.5 billion, because of the coronavirus crisis. The reason given for the delay was unconvincing because the pandemic has not disturbed any other areas of Turkey’s military operations.

Under the original plan, Turkey was to switch on the Russian systems this month, making them operational. The US said activation of the S-400 could trigger economic sanctions. Washington argues that the S-400 can be used to spy on NATO military equipment and has said Turkey will not be able to buy a new fighter jet, the F-35.

By postponing the activation of the S-400, Turkey is giving the US more time to come up with an alternative plan that could see Ankara buying the US-made Patriot system. No new date to unpack the S-400, delivered to Turkey last year, has been announced.

Thomas Seibert is an Arab Weekly contributor in Istanbul.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 April 2020

Word Count: 886

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