It’s a common question. What have the president’s ordinary supporters gotten out of their deal with him? The answer is just as common — not much. Before the pandemic, the only material outcome of backing Donald Trump was a slight decrease in their federal income taxes. Other than that, gains have been performative, not substantive.

Some say that’s enough to sink an incumbent. If he can’t deliver for his base, then he can’t win reelection. If he presides over a fragile economy, as is currently the case, then he’s bound to lose. But what most people don’t understand is that Trump is delivering, and he will keep delivering even if the economy collapses. The deliverable doesn’t come in the shape of economics, policy or law. It’s entirely psychological.

Think of it this way. Remember those men at “anti-quarantine protests” strolling around state capitols carrying semi-automatic rifles? They said they were protesting stay-at-home orders. They said their goal was demonstrating their rights to bear arms, individual liberty and personal sovereignty. But that wasn’t their immediate goal.

Their goal was intimidating peaceful and unarmed protesters. Their goal was deriving pleasure from the fear of seeing a man brandishing a weapon the likes of which have massacred thousands in mass shootings around the country for the last decade and a half. Their goal was savoring the flavor of gaslighting someone into thinking their goals were high-minded and pure rather than what they were: low and barbarous.

“Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters,” wrote Umberto Eco in his 1995 classic, “Ur-Fascism.” “This is the origin of machismo. … Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons — doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.” (Many thanks to Charles Sykes for reminding me of Eco’s essay.)

I’ve tried coining a phrase capturing the essence of Trump, but I don’t think I’ll ever come close to the elegance and accuracy of “ersatz phallic exercise.” This is what the president delivers. This is what he will continue to deliver even if the US economy falls into a full-blown depression. Trumpism is a mirror — a fetish you might say — more than it is a political ideology. The key to understanding his presidency isn’t what it is but what it isn’t. It isn’t governing according to morality, the Constitution and the law for the benefit of all Americans. That takes lots of time. That takes lots of labor. That’s not nearly as fun as swinging your phallus around to the horror of the “snowflakes.”

“Ersatz phallic exercise” helps explain one of Trumpism’s key contradictions. On the one hand, supporters say that he’s manly man, and that his manly manliness is why liberals, Democrats and Never-Trumpers hate him. On the other, Trump is a fire hose of whining. He pules and keens at the slightest offense, real and imagined, but mostly imagined. He can’t take hard questioning. He’ll blame anyone for his mistakes. You’d think a manly man would have skin made of iron. Trump’s is made of onion paper.

But that doesn’t matter to his supporters, because consequences don’t matter, and consequences don’t matter, because there’s always a way of escaping accountability when intellectual dishonesty is the lens through which one engages the world. What matters is impulse, urge, appetite, an itch, and other neurological bliss points. You don’t swing your phallus around wondering what the outcomes might be. You swing it around, because your reptile brain demands that you swing it around. If you need a reason for horrifying some bystanders, you can later on fabricate one out of thin air.

Those who take responsibility for their actions will always seem weak to those who do not take responsibility for their actions. That’s just the way things are. But let’s not pretend “ersatz phallic exercises” are tougher, stronger and manlier than virtue. “Virtue” is derived from the Latin vir, which means “man.” Virtue, among ancient Romans leaders, who were nothing if not men’s men, privileged it above all other qualities, as it connoted valor, excellence, courage, and the strength of character. Real virtue is harder to put into practice. It takes lots of time. It takes lots of labor.

Even so, it too can be a source of profit and pleasure.

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: 28 April 2020

Word Count: 725

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Energy analysts have long assumed that, given time, growing international concern over climate change would result in a vast restructuring of the global energy enterprise. The result: a greener, less climate-degrading system. In this future, fossil fuels would be overtaken by renewables, while oil, gas, and coal would be relegated to an increasingly marginal role in the global energy equation. In its World Energy Outlook 2019, for example, the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted that, by 2040, renewables would finally supersede petroleum as the planet’s number one source of energy and coal would largely disappear from the fuel mix. As a result of Covid-19, however, we may no longer have to wait another 20 years for such a cosmic transition to occur — it’s happening right now.

So take a breath and, amid all the bad news pouring in about a deadly global pandemic, consider this: when it comes to energy, what was expected to take at least two decades in the IEA’s most optimistic scenario may now occur in just a few years. It turns out that the impact of Covid-19 is reshaping the world energy equation, along with so much else, in unexpected ways.

That energy would be strongly affected by the pandemic should come as no surprise. After all, fuel use is closely aligned with economic activity and Covid-19 has shut down much of the world economy. With factories, offices, and other businesses closed or barely functioning, there’s naturally less demand for energy of all types. But the impacts of the pandemic go far beyond that, as our principal coping mechanisms — social distancing and stay-at-home requirements — have particular implications for energy consumption.

Among the first and most dramatic of these has been a shockingly deep decline in flying, automobile commuting, and leisure travel — activities that account for a large share of daily petroleum use. Airline travel in the United States, for example, is down by 95% from a year ago. At the same time, the personal consumption of electricity for telework, distance learning, group conversations, and entertainment has soared. In hard-hit Italy, for instance, Microsoft reports that the use of its cloud services for team meetings — a voracious consumer of electricity — has increased by 775%.

These are all meant to be temporary responses to the pandemic. As government officials and their scientific advisers begin to talk about returning to some semblance of “normalcy,” however, it’s becoming increasingly clear that many such pandemic-related practices will persist in some fashion for a long time to come and, in some cases, may prove permanent. Social distancing is likely to remain the norm in public spaces for many months, if not years, curtailing attendance at theme parks and major sports events that also typically involve lots of driving. Many of us are also becoming more accustomed to working from home and may be in no rush to resume a harried 30-, 60-, or 90-minute commute to work each day. Some colleges and universities, already under financial pressure of various sorts, may abandon in-person classes for many subjects and rely far more on distance learning.

No matter how this pandemic finally plays out, the post-Covid-19 world is bound to have a very different look from the pre-pandemic one and energy use is likely to be among the areas most affected by the transformations underway. It would be distinctly premature to make sweeping predictions about the energy profile of a post-coronavirus planet, but one thing certainly seems possible: the grand transition, crucial for averting the worst outcomes of climate change and originally projected to occur decades from now, could end up happening significantly more swiftly, even if at the price of widespread bankruptcies and prolonged unemployment for millions.

Oil’s dominance in jeopardy As 2019 drew to a close, most energy analysts assumed that petroleum would continue to dominate the global landscape through the 2020s, as it had in recent decades, resulting in ever greater amounts of carbon emissions being sent into the atmosphere. For example, in its International Energy Outlook 2019, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy projected that global petroleum use in 2020 would amount to 102.2 million barrels per day. That would be up 1.1 million barrels from 2019 and represent the second year in a row in which global consumption would have exceeded the notable threshold of 100 million barrels per day. Grimly enough, the EIA further projected that world demand would continue to climb, reaching 104 million barrels per day by 2025 and 106 million barrels in 2030.

In arriving at such projections, energy analysts assumed that the factors responsible for driving petroleum use upward in recent years would persist well into the future: growing automobile ownership in China, India, and other developing nations; ever-increasing commutes as soaring real-estate prices forced people to live ever farther from city centers; and an exponential increase in airline travel, especially in Asia. Such factors, it was widely assumed, would more than compensate for any drop in demand caused by a greater preference for electric cars in Europe and a few other places. As suggested by oil giant BP in its Energy Outlook for 2019, “All of the demand growth comes from developing economies, driven by the burgeoning middle class in developing Asian economies.”

Even in January, as the coronavirus began to spread from China to other countries, energy analysts imagined little change in such predictions. Reporting “continued strong momentum” in oil use among the major developing economies, the IEA typically reaffirmed its belief that global consumption would grow by more than one million barrels daily in 2020.

Only now has that agency begun to change its tune. In its most recent Oil Market Report, it projected that global petroleum consumption in April would fall by an astonishing 29 million barrels per day compared to the same month the previous year. That drop, by the way, is the equivalent of total 2019 oil usage by the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Still, the IEA analysts assumed that all of this would just be a passing phenomenon. In that same report, it also predicted that global economic activity would rebound in the second half of this year and, by December, oil usage would already be within a few million barrels of pre-coronavirus consumption levels.

Other indicators, however, suggest that such rosy predictions will prove highly fanciful. The likelihood that oil consumption will approach 2018 or 2019 levels by year’s end or even in early 2021 now appears remarkably unrealistic. It is, in fact, doubtful that those earlier projections about sustained future growth in the demand for oil will ever materialize.

A shattered world economy As a start, a return to pre-Covid-19 consumption levels assumes a reasonably rapid restoration of the world economy as it was, with Asia taking the lead. At this moment, however, there’s no evidence that such an outcome is likely.

In its April World Economic Outlook report, the International Monetary Fund predicted that global economic output would fall by 3% in 2020 (which may prove a distinct underestimate) and that the pandemic’s harsh impacts, including widespread unemployment and business failures, will persist well into 2021 or beyond. All told, it suggested, the cumulative loss to global gross domestic product in 2020 and 2021, thanks to the pandemic, will amount to some $9 trillion, a sum greater than the economies of Japan and Germany combined (and that assumes the coronavirus will not come back yet more fiercely in late 2020 or 2021, as the “Spanish Flu” did in 1918).

This and other recent data suggest that any notion China, India, and other developing nations will soon resume their upward oil-consumption trajectory and save the global petroleum industry appears wildly far-fetched. Indeed, on April 17th, China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported that the country’s GDP shrank by 6.8% in the first three months of 2020, the first such decline in 40 years and a staggering blow to that country’s growth model. Even though government officials are slowly opening factories and other key businesses again, most observers believe that spurring significant growth will prove exceedingly difficult given that Chinese consumers, traumatized by the pandemic and accompanying lockdown measures, seem loath to make new purchases or engage in travel, tourism, and the like.

And keep in mind that a slowdown in China will have staggering consequences for the economies of numerous other developing nations that rely on that country’s tourism or its imports of their oil, copper, iron ore, and other raw materials. China, after all, is the leading destination for the exports of many Asian, African, and Latin American countries. With Chinese factories closed or operating at a reduced tempo, the demand for their products has already plummeted, causing widespread economic hardship for their populations.

Add all this up, along with a rising tide of unemployment in the United States and elsewhere, and it would appear that the possibility of global oil consumption returning to pre-pandemic levels any time soon — or even at all — is modest at best. Indeed, the major oil-exporting nations have evidently reached this conclusion on their own, as demonstrated by the extraordinary April 12th agreement that the Saudis, the Russians, and other major exporting countries reached to cut global production by nearly 10 million barrels per day. It was a desperate bid to bolster oil prices, which had fallen by more than 50% since the beginning of the year. And keep in mind that even this reduction — unprecedented in scale — is unlikely to prevent a further decline in those prices, as oil purchases continue to fall and fall again.

Doing things differently Energy analysts are likely to argue that, while the downturn will undoubtedly last longer than the IEA’s optimistic forecast, sooner or later petroleum use will return to its earlier patterns, once again cresting at the 100-million-barrels-per-day level. But this appears highly unlikely, given the way the pandemic is reshaping the global economy and everyday human behavior.

After all, IEA and oil-industry forecasts assume a fully interconnected world in which the sort of dynamic growth we’ve come to expect from Asia in the twenty-first century will sooner or later fuel economic vigor globally. Extended supply lines will once again carry raw materials and other inputs to China’s factories, while Chinese parts and finished products will be transported to markets on every continent. But whether or not that country’s economy starts to grow again, such a globalized economic model is unlikely to remain the prevailing one in the post-pandemic era. Many countries and companies are, in fact, beginning to restructure their supply lines to avoid a full-scale reliance on foreign suppliers by seeking alternatives closer to home — a trend likely to persist after pandemic-related restrictions are lifted (especially in a world in which Trumpian-style “nationalism” still seems to be on the rise).

“There will be a rethink of how much any country wants to be reliant on any other country,” suggests the aptly named Elizabeth Economy, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I don’t think fundamentally this is the end of globalization. But this does accelerate the type of thinking that has been going on in the Trump administration, that there are critical technologies, critical resources, reserve manufacturing capacity that we want here in the U.S. in case of crisis.”

Other countries are bound to begin planning along similar lines, leading to a significant decline in transcontinental commerce. Local and regional trade will, of course, have to increase to make up for this decline, but the net impact on petroleum demand is likely to be negative as long-distance trade and travel diminishes. For China and other rising Asian powers, this could also mean a slower growth rate, squeezing those “burgeoning middle classes” that were, in turn, expected to be the major local drivers (quite literally, in the case of the car cultures in those countries) of petroleum consumption.

A shift toward electricity — and a greater reliance on renewables Another trend the coronavirus is likely to accelerate: greater reliance on telework by corporations, governments, universities, and other institutions. Even before the pandemic broke out, many companies and organizations were beginning to rely more on teleconferencing and work-from-home operations to reduce travel costs, commuting headaches, and even, in some cases, greenhouse gas emissions. In our new world, the use of these techniques is likely to become far more common.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is, among other things, a massive experiment in telecommuting,” observed Katherine Guyot and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution in a recent report. “Up to half of American workers are currently working from home, more than double the fraction who worked from home (at least occasionally) in 2017-2018.”

Many such workers, they also noted, had been largely unfamiliar with telecommuting technology when this grand experiment began, but have quickly mastered the necessary skills. Given little choice in the matter, high school and college students are also becoming more adept at telework as their schools shift to remote learning. Meanwhile, companies and colleges are investing massively in the necessary hardware and software for such communications and teaching. As a result, Guyot and Sawhill suggest, “The outbreak is accelerating the trend toward telecommuting, possibly for the long term.”

Any large increase in teleworking is bound to have a dramatic dual impact on energy use: people will drive less, reducing their oil consumption, while relying more on teleconferencing and cloud computing, and so increasing their use of electricity. “The coronavirus reminds us that electricity is more indispensable than ever,” says Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA. “Millions of people are now confined to their homes, resorting to teleworking to do their jobs.”

Increased reliance on electricity, in turn, will have a significant impact on the very nature of primary fuel consumption, as coal begins to lose its dominant role in the generation of electrical power and is replaced at an ever-accelerating pace by renewables. In 2018, according to the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2019, a distressing 38% of world electricity generation was still provided by coal, another 26% by oil and natural gas, and only 26% by renewables; the remaining 10% came from nuclear and other sources of energy. This was expected to change dramatically over time as climate-conscious policies began to have a significant impact — but, even in the IEA’s most hopeful scenarios, it was only after 2030 that renewables would reach the 50% level in electricity generation. With Covid-19, however, that process is now likely to speed up, as power utilities adjust to the global economic slowdown and seek to minimize their costs.

With many businesses shut down, net electricity use in the United States has actually declined somewhat in these months — although not nearly as much as the drop in petroleum use, given the way home electricity consumption has compensated for a plunge in business demand. As utilities adapt to this challenging environment, they are finding that wind and solar power are often the least costly sources of primary energy, with natural gas just behind them and coal the most expensive of all. Insofar as they are investing in the future, then, they appear to be favoring large solar and wind projects, which can, in fact, be brought online relatively quickly, assuring needed revenue. New natural gas plants take longer to install and coal offers no advantages whatsoever.

In the depths of global disaster, it’s way too early to make detailed predictions about the energy landscape of future decades. Nonetheless, it does appear that the present still-raging pandemic is forcing dramatic shifts in the way we consume energy and that many of these changes are likely to persist in some fashion long after the virus has been tamed. Given the already extreme nature of the heating of this planet, such shifts are likely to prove catastrophic for the oil and coal industries but beneficial for the environment — and so for the rest of us. Deadly, disruptive, and economically devastating as Covid-19 has proved to be, in retrospect it may turn out to have had at least this one silver lining.

Michael T. Klare writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change (Metropolitan Books).

Copyright ©2020 Michael T. Klare — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 April 2020

Word Count: 2,669

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The April 20 deal to form a unity government in Israel between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his rival, Benny Gantz, may bring some stability to Israel’s highly fractured politics but is likely to put a nail in the coffin of a two-state solution as Israeli annexation of settlements in the West Bank will most likely proceed in July as part of this deal.

In a surprise move, Gantz, head of the Blue and White party, reneged on his promise not to join a government with Netanyahu at the helm and decided to do just that. Gantz’s decision not only led his partners in Blue and White to bolt from his party (Gantz’s faction has now been reduced to 19 out of 33 Blue and White members who won Knesset seats), but has also given a green light to Netanyahu and his right-wing allies to proceed with annexation after having insisted that he be given veto power over such policies.

The unity deal allows Netanyahu to remain prime minister until October 2021 at which point Gantz will take over that post. In the interim, Gantz would become defence minister, while his Blue and White ally, Gabi Ashkenazi, becomes foreign minister.

In addition, Gantz’s faction will also have the justice, media, cultural and economic portfolios, while Netanyahu’s faction will have the finance, health, public security, construction and housing, transportation and education portfolios.

Because Netanyahu’s right-wing allies are angry that so many prominent cabinet positions are being allotted to Gantz’s faction, the Israeli leader agreed to create even more cabinet portfolios — 34 in total — the largest in Israel’s history, to accommodate them. Although the unity deal including these cabinet portfolios will have to be enacted by the Knesset, there are likely enough votes for all of this to be approved soon.

It appears that one of the reasons why the right-wing parties went along with this agreement is because Gantz caved on the issue of annexation of settlements, which has long been a goal of these parties as well as Netanyahu’s Likud.  The unity agreement stated that, beginning on July 1, Netanyahu will be allowed to bring the issue of “extending sovereignty” (essentially meaning annexation) to the West Bank for discussion in the cabinet and a vote in the Knesset.

If there was any doubt over what he signed up for, Gantz issued a statement that said, “from July, the presiding prime minister will be allowed to bring President Trump’s statement with regard to the realisation of Israeli sovereignty to government and Parliament, following due process.”

Significantly, the unity deal allows only this issue — annexation — to be brought up during the first six months of the unity government outside of coronavirus-related legislation.

Gantz has been sharply criticised by his former allies as well as the Israeli peace camp for “being played” by Netanyahu. Although Gantz was able to secure prominent cabinet positions for his faction and himself, his deal with Netanyahu not only gives the Israeli leader another chance to remain prime minister and possibly try to seek an immunity with a corruption trial hanging over his head but also makes a two-state solution virtually impossible, as annexation of settlements could encompass about 30% of the West Bank.

Netanyahu and his right-wing allies want to seize this moment because the stars have all aligned for them.

US President Donald Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan, unveiled on January 28, endorses annexation, and the beginning of July, when the Israeli government plans to move ahead with cabinet and Knesset approval of it, coincides with the intensification of the US presidential election campaign.

Trump reiterated his charge a few days ago that the Democrats are the “anti-Israel” party, and more of such rhetoric is expected.

Moreover, given the uncertainty of Trump’s re-election in November, the summer is the opportune time, from Netanyahu’s perspective, to start the annexation process, while the Trump team is still in place.

Indicative of this support, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on April 22 said “we’re glad there’s now a fully formed government” in Israel, and underscored that annexation “is an Israeli decision,” but “we’ll work closely with them.”

As David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy has written, Pompeo’s statement “suggests that the Trump administration will be a partner rather than an obstacle in this regard and will not block Israeli application of sovereignty.”

While Trump will tout this stance in an effort to solidify political support from Christian evangelicals and conservative elements of the American Jewish community, liberal American Jews have taken a different position.

In early April, 140 American Jewish leaders sent an open letter to Gantz and Ashkenazi, coordinated by the pro-peace Israeli Policy Forum, calling on them to “remain steadfast” in opposing annexation in any unity government.

That Gantz did not do so has not lessened this opposition to annexation, which gives Biden, the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee, political cover to criticise both Trump and the Netanyahu-led government on this issue.

This is all the more reason, in Netanyahu’s mind, to proceed with annexation in July and present it as a fait accompli, knowing that Biden, even with his strong pro-Israeli record, is opposed to the Trump plan, especially the annexation clauses.

Gregory Aftandilian is a lecturer at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and is a former U.S. State Department Middle East analyst.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 April 2020

Word Count: 870

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The conventional wisdom holds that Joe Biden must have a message about what he stands for, and why, in order to persuade a majority of Americans to vote for him in November. This now seems more assertion than fact. The incumbent keeps talking himself into trouble. In comparison, the former vice president might coast by doing the minimum — e.g., combing his hair, brushing his teeth, and standing up straight.

Donald Trump is now into his fourth day in a grudge-match against the White House press corps over whether he suggested that injecting disinfectants, and exposing the inside of one’s body to “light and heat,” might cure COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, which has killed nearly fifty-five and a half thousand Americans. Trump’s face-off with the press has turned into a vicious cycle. The more he says, no, I really didn’t say that, the more reporters say, yes, you really did, and the more they say that, the more the president compares them to the “Invisible Enemy” (i.e., the virus).

If it’s true that Joe Biden must have a message to win a majority of voters, what might that message be in a context of a four-day-old conflict over whether the president really did say what he really said? “Don’t drink bleach” or “I believe in science” or “Trump isn’t worth poisoning yourself”? Or more generally: “I will defend and protect the health and well-being of all Americans” or “I will honor my oath of office”? This would sound like parody if the reality of our current moment weren’t so absurd.

Making is more absurd, of course, is the press corps’ habit of taking everything this president says deadly seriously. He doesn’t mean half the things he says, yet reporters dutifully record each word as if he did. A consequence is the separation of intent from effect so Trump can claim credit for the latter but no responsibility for the former. Fact is, half of what he says doesn’t make sense, because it wasn’t suppose to make sense. Indeed, half of what he says is hostile toward sense-making. Its true purpose is communicating to celebrants of the politics of the occult. All a Democratic opponent must do is point to it and ask voters: Is this what you want from your president?

I introduced on Friday the concept of the politics of the occult. It’s another way of characterizing what others have called “epistemic closure” among Republicans during the George W. Bush years. It’s another way of describing what others have called the “cult of Donald Trump.” But it’s better, I think, in that “occult” connotes something hidden, something that must be kept secret, because once it’s exposed — once it’s named — it ceases to exert power. The magic spell, you might say, is broken. Half of what the president says doesn’t make sense, because it isn’t supposed to make sense to people who privilege making sense of the world. Those who don’t want the world to make sense, or who want it to make sense only to them, practice the politics of the occult.

The politics of the occult lends itself, I think, to discourse on conspiracy theory, the psychology of political paranoids, the golden-calf idolatry of white evangelical Christians, militia movements and other rightwing organizing, white nationalism, and so on. All share in common not only a hiddenness from the mainstream of American society, but a desire to remain secret even as they work to take over the mainstream. None of these hope to persuade a majority of their rightness. All of them hope to replace the majority’s view with theirs, to replace facts with “alternative facts.” The means of replacement isn’t reason or democracy. It’s demagoguery and violence.

If a president says things that not only don’t make sense (how about we look into injecting disinfectants!) but also denies that he ever said anything that doesn’t make sense (like saying how about we look into injecting disinfectants!), it’s safe to say his intent, whatever the effect, was always already malign.

If he doesn’t mean what he says, he doesn’t care, and not caring is, at the very least, a violation of his oath. Such a president doesn’t persuade “the enemy of the people” (i.e., the press corps) that he is right and they are wrong. He goes to war. He lies and lies, and he lies, until they decide that checking his “facts” and holding him to account are useless, then giving up.

Compared to Trump’s politics of the occult, Joe Biden doesn’t need a message. All he needs is to make sense:

“I will not break the law.”

“I will not undermine the US Constitution.”

“I will not commit treason.”

“I will not encourage people to eat poison, then deny saying it, making isolated Americans feel crazier than they already feel amid a pandemic whose death and destruction are partly my fault.”

Sounds like a winner!

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: 27 April 2020

Word Count: 820

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Historically, in hyper-crises, local and global systems can change fundamentally. Before the coronavirus pandemic hit first China and then the rest of the globe, the question of whether the American imperial era might be faltering was already on the table, amid that country’s endless wars and with the world’s most capricious leader. When humanity emerges from this devastating crisis of disease, dislocation, and impoverishment, not to mention the fracturing of a global economic system created by Washington but increasingly powered by Beijing on a climate-stressed planet, the question will be: Has the Chinese dragon pushed the American eagle down to a secondary position?

To assess that question objectively in this unsettled moment, it’s necessary to examine on a day-to-day basis how the two contemporary superpowers handled the Covid-19 crisis, and ask the question: Who has proved better at combating the deadliest disease of modern times, President Donald Trump or President Xi Jinping? It’s chastening to note that whereas China under Xi has suppressed the latest coronavirus at the human cost of three lives per million population, the U.S. under Trump is still struggling to overpower it, having already sacrificed 145 of every million Americans.

In the afterglow of Trump’s December 16, 2019, touting of a partial trade deal with China (after a lengthy trade war), a Sino-American exchange took place. George Gao, director of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC), spoke with his American counterpart, Robert Redfield, on January 3rd, alerting him to the arrival of an as-yet-unidentified, pneumonia-inducing virus in the city of Wuhan (news of which the Chinese government would for crucial days withhold domestically). Redfield then briefed Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar on that conversation.

Ever since, the trajectories of the policies followed by Beijing and Washington have diverged by 180 degrees. Mind you, the potential prize for the winner of the contest for killer of the super-virus is the World Leadership Trophy.

Attacked by a virulent virus, China fights back China’s National Health Commission (NHC), which had dispatched a team of experts to Wuhan on December 31st, informed the World Health Organization (WHO) that cases of pneumonia of an unknown sort had been detected in that city, linked to human exposure at a 1,000-stall wholesale seafood market, selling fish and other animals, dead and alive. With that, the Chinese scientists faced two separate challenges: to isolate the pathogen causing the disease in order to set out its genome sequencing and to determine whether or not there was human-to-human transmission of the virus.

On January 3rd, the NHC centralized all testing related to the mysterious disease and, two days later, in conjunction with experts in infectious diseases caused by pathogens that jump from animals to humans, completed the sequencing of the genome of the virus. It became accessible worldwide that January 7th. And on January 10th and 11th, the WHO issued guidance notices to all its member states about collecting samples from any patients who might show symptoms of the disease, listing stringent precautions to avoid the risk of human-to-human transmission.

On January 14th, Maria Van Kerkhove, acting head of the WHO’s emerging diseases unit, offered a mixed message on the situation. She told reporters that there had, so far, been only the most limited kinds of human transmission between family members in China. Nonetheless, she added, the possibility of wider human-to-human transmission should not be regarded as “surprising” given the similarity of the new virus to the ones in the earlier SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) outbreaks. However, Reuters and China’s Xinhua News Agency also quoted her as saying that there had been only the most limited human-to-human transmission of the new coronavirus so far, mainly among small clusters of family members and that “it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission.”

On January 16th, scientists at the German Center for Infection Research in Berlin developed a new laboratory test to detect the novel coronavirus. This offered the possibility of diagnosing suspected cases quickly. The WHO publicized it as a guideline for diagnostic detection. The leaders of many countries adopted it, but not President Trump who, in America First-style, demanded a test produced by U.S. scientists. Only on February 29th, however, would the Food and Drug Administration allow laboratories and hospitals to conduct their own Covid-19 tests to speed up the process. That was four weeks after the WHO had started distributing its effective test globally.

On January 19th that China’s National Health Commission confirmed human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus. On that day, it publicly confirmed the first cases of person-to-person transmission. Headed by a cabinet minister, the NHC classified the novel coronavirus as a category B infectious disease under the country’s 1989 Law on Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases (revised in 2004 and 2013). This law allows the upgrading of an infectious disease to category A subject to the decision of the cabinet. Under that classification, medical institutions are authorized to treat patients in isolation in designated places and take necessary preventive measures to discover and deal with their close contacts.

On January 20th, after chairing a cabinet meeting, Premier Li Keqiang first spoke of the necessity of controlling a coronavirus epidemic, demanding that all Communist Party and government units address the situation. While endorsing Li’s call, President Xi Jinping stressed “the importance of informing the public to safeguard social stability.” As one high-level Communist Party committee typically stated in a posting on WeChat, “Whoever deliberately delays or conceals reporting for the sake of their own interests will be forever nailed to history’s pillar of shame.”

All this happened on the eve of the week-long Chinese New Year holiday, a time when hundreds of millions of people return to their homes for celebrations. On January 22nd, three days before the New Year, the authorities suspended all rail and air links out of Wuhan.

The next day, the central government imposed a complete lockdown on that bustling city of 11 million and other large urban centers in the province of Hubei. Residents were forbidden to leave their homes, while food and other supplies were to be delivered by neighborhood committees. This set a precedent for similar measures in other cities, as in the coming weeks many areas across China imposed such “closed management” situations on communities. Up to 760 million people were subjected to travel curbs of one sort or another, while the economy was reduced to 40%-50% of its normal capacity.

During a meeting with WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in Beijing on January 29th, President Xi assured him that he had personally overseen and directed the response to the viral outbreak and the prevention and control measures that went with it. On January 30th, with the novel coronavirus having spread to 17 countries including the United States, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a “global health emergency.” On February 11th, it labeled the disease caused by the latest coronavirus, which can culminate in death-inducing pneumonia, Covid-19.

Meanwhile, in Trumpland… On January 29th, President Trump officially inaugurated a task force led by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to monitor, contain, and mitigate the spread of the coronavirus while also keeping Americans informed on the matter.

Azar and the Centers for Disease Control Prevention’s Robert Redfield had already been involved in protecting Americans from the deadly virus. On January 7th, Redfield had established the CDC’s Covid-19 Incident Management System and, on the 21st, he activated its emergency response structure. On that very day, the first lab-confirmed coronavirus case was reported in Olympia, Washington. (Earlier ones would later be detected.) The president noted the news with a tweet: “It’s one person coming in from China and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

Inside the White House, Trump’s national trade adviser, Peter Navarro addressed a warning memo to the National Security Council stating that the present “lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.” He estimated that such a pandemic could kill half-a-million people and deliver a $5.7 trillion hit to the economy.

Two days later, in response to these developments, all Trump did was ban the arrival of non-US citizens who had recently traveled to China. From then on, he repeatedly touted this as evidence that he had acted early. Azar’s plan to set up surveillance in five cities at the cost of $100 million fell through when, on February 21st, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters that problems with the kits to test for Covid-19 were still unresolved.

In the absence of meaningful testing, the number of cases in the U.S. looked small. “The coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” Trump tweeted on the 24th. “CDC & World Health [Organization] have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” He ignored Navarro’s memo of the previous day and its warning that “there is an increasing probability of a full-blown Covid-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1-2 million souls.”

Instead, on February 25th, at a news conference in New Delhi during his trip to India, the president haughtily claimed that a vaccine for Covid-19 would soon be available. “Now they have it, they have studied it, they know very much, in fact, we’re very close to a vaccine,” he said confidently.

That same day, in a CDC briefing in Washington, Nancy Messonnier described the situation this way: “Ultimately, we expect we will see [the infected] community spread in this country… [and] disruption to everyday life may be severe. But these are things that people need to start thinking about now.” That led to a staggering 1,031 point fall in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which infuriated Trump. He promptly urged Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, to go on television and preach confidence. Accordingly, Kudlow told CNBC, “We have contained this. I won’t say airtight, but it’s pretty close to airtight.”

On his return to Washington on February 26th, Trump replaced Azar as the head of the coronavirus task force with Vice President Mike Pence, and charged him with disseminating positive messages in order to steady a jittery stock market. The next day, the grievance-laden president complained that the media were doing all they could “to make the Caronavirus [sic] look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible.”

Meanwhile, back in the Middle Kingdom On February 10th, Chinese President Xi visited a hospital in Beijing where he held a video call with health workers in Wuhan. Coverage of it and his temperature being taken by a doctor filled the front page of the official newspaper, the People’s Daily. By then, Communist Party chiefs in Wuhan and Hubei province had been “replaced” because of their poor initial response to the coronavirus.

In Wuhan, an extra 60,000 hospital beds for Covid-19 patients were created within a month by converting 16 exhibition halls and sports venues into field hospitals and constructing two brand new hospitals as well. On February 23rd, Xi teleconferenced with 170,000 local officials, describing the pandemic as the hardest public-health emergency to contain since the founding of the People’s Republic. He noted that the situation remained grim and complex, while Hubei Province and significant parts of the rest of the country (as well as the economy) had been shut down.

The highest priority was given to the production of personal protective equipment. According to an official March 6th press briefing, production of protective clothing had jumped from less than 20,000 pieces daily to 500,000 pieces daily. The output of specialist N95 masks shot up eightfold to 1.6 million and ordinary masks totaled 100 million.

During a trip to Wuhan four days later, Xi praised front-line medical workers, military officers, soldiers, community workers, police officers, officials, and volunteers fighting the pandemic, as well as patients and residents in the locked-down city. The epidemic had by then caused 3,000 deaths. On March 9th, however, daily new cases in Wuhan had already dropped to 19 from thousands a day a month earlier. All the makeshift hospitals were closed. Nonetheless, Xi warned that prevention-and-control work required constant vigilance.

When 114 countries reported coronavirus cases to the World Health Organization on March 11th, it declared the Covid-19 outbreak a global pandemic.

By mid-March, the Chinese government and the Jack Ma Foundation, part of the giant corporate conglomerate Alibaba Group, had sent doctors and medical supplies to Belgium, Cambodia, France, Iran, Iraq, Italy, the Philippines, Serbia, Spain, and the United States. The foundation announced that it would ship “20,000 testing kits, 100,000 masks and 1,000 protective suits and face shields” to every country in Africa and added that Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, would “take the lead in managing the logistics and distribution of these supplies to other African countries.”

Of the 89 countries that, by March 26th, had received emergency assistance from China to fight the pandemic, 28 were in Asia, 16 in Europe, 26 in Africa, nine in the Americas, and 10 in the South Pacific. Such medical supplies mainly included testing kits, masks, protective suits, thermometer guns, and ventilators. China also invited officials and experts from more than 100 countries to a video conference on Covid-19, while President Xi conducted 26 telephone conversations with 22 foreign leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz, Spanish King Felipe VI, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, and Donald Trump.

Trump wakes up On March 13th, President Trump declared a national emergency, pledging to dramatically speed up coronavirus testing (which he disastrously failed to do). By then, he had chalked up a remarkable series of false claims and outright lies about the fast-spreading disease. Typically, on a visit to CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 6th, he had boasted of his “natural ability” to understand the subject of epidemiology.

On March 13th, he falsely announced that a Google website was being developed to help people find places to get Covid-19 tests, something Google’s officials turned out to know nothing about. The next day, he lined up executives from Walmart, Target, CVS, Walgreens, LabCorp, Quest Diagnostics, and Roche Diagnostics, insisting that they would help expedite testing to stop the quick-spreading virus. In fact, little happened and the nation began to shut down. Public schools closed, sports leagues postponed or cut off their seasons, people began working from home in large numbers (as others by the millions simply lost their jobs), and supplies of hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes, and toilet paper disappeared from store shelves. A month on, very few of the president’s promises had materialized, while the disease had spread dramatically and deaths had begun to soar.

Asked about the shortage of testing kits and sites, which has left America lagging far behind South Korea and other countries in dealing with the still-spreading virus, Trump couldn’t have been clearer. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” he said. And yet, locked into his “Make America Great Again” bubble, until March 6th he blocked an offer from the Jack Ma Foundation to send 500,000 testing kits and one million masks to the U.S. to be distributed by the CDC.

By heeding the WHO’s battle cry of “test, test, test,” South Korea had managed to avoid the kinds of lockdowns implemented by China, many Western European countries, and some American cities. In a desperate phone call to President Moon Jae-in on March 24th, Trump begged him to rush test kits to the United States. In response, Jeong Eun-kyeong, director of the South Korean equivalent of the CDC, agreed, but only at a level that would not diminish his own country’s testing capacity.

Soon after the arrival of 1,000 Chinese ventilators at John F. Kennedy International Airport on April 4th, much to the relief of a grateful Governor Andrew Cuomo, a tweet from Trump read, “USA STRONG!” His boast, however, sounded hollow, given the grim news that, between February 12th and March 11th, the Dow Jones index had dropped around 8,000 points from its historic peak, as national unemployment tripled from a low of 3.5% (with more to come).

To counter this, on April 9th, the Federal Reserve released business lending and other programs worth $2.3 trillion to steady a fast-sinking economy. It had already injected $500 billion dollars into the financial system in March, with plans for a further $1.5 trillion to come.

By March 27th, as the U.S. had gained the global status of number one in coronavirus cases, the president also signed into law the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, passed almost unanimously by Congress, to rush federal assistance to workers and businesses. It included the payment of $1,200 to most taxpayers; enhanced unemployment benefits; a $500 billion lending program for large companies, cities, and states; and a $367 billion fund for small businesses.

Despite all this, the country’s gross domestic product is expected to fall by at least 10.8% in the second quarter of 2020. China’s GDP contraction of 6.8% in the first quarter of the year was a historic drop. However, at 5.9%, the jobless rate in urban areas in March 2020 was down by 0.3% from the previous month.

Passing on the world leadership trophy? The question that many experts on geopolitics are now pondering is this: Have their responses to Covid-19 shifted the balance of power between China and the U.S. in a way that will matter in a post-coronavirus world? Watching the chaos of Trump’s daily press conferences and his administration’s failure to stop the virus effectively proved an alarming reminder that rational people can plan for anything — except an irrational American president. After all, under his watch 746,459 Americans had contracted Covid-19, and 39,651 had died by mid-April. The comparable figures for China were 82,747 cases and 4,632 deaths.

Nathalie Tocci, an adviser to the European Union’s foreign affairs chief, recently offered a pertinent historical parallel to consider. She cited the 1956 Suez crisis — Britain’s unsuccessful, if conspiratorial, alliance with France and Israel to militarily topple the nationalist regime of Egypt’s President Gamal Abdul Nasser. It is now considered the sunset moment for Britain’s imperial power. In the present context, she speculated that the Covid-19 pandemic may prove to be a “Suez moment” for the United States.

Ignoring the warnings of scientists and public health experts, President Trump threatens to disastrously extend his coronavirus chronology from hell into an increasingly painful future by “reopening” the country too soon. By so doing, he will only accelerate the day when the World Leadership Trophy, held by America since 1946, is handed to the People’s Republic of China.

Dilip Hiro writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the author of After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World among many other books. His latest book is Cold War in the Islamic World: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Struggle for Supremacy (Oxford University Press).

Copyright ©2020 Dilip Hiro — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 April 2020

Word Count: 3,142

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What’s the point of Donald Trump’s new immigration ban? Just like his decision to ban Muslims from entering the US three years ago, Trump’s new, temporary immigration restriction lacks both sense and sensibility.

The US president cast his April 21 announcement as a jobs-protection measure, meant to “help unemployed Americans be first in line for jobs as America reopens.” It was a pointless statement meant to explain a pointless action.

The 2017 Muslim ban was ridiculous because no extremist from any of the seven countries on Trump’s list had carried out a fatal attack in the United States in 40 years; the 9/11 hijackers did not come from the banned countries – Somalia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan or Yemen – and refugees had not killed a single person in a terrorist attack in the US since the 1980 Refugee Act.

Trump’s new, temporary ban on immigration is ridiculous because the coronavirus outbreak has already led the State Department to put most consular services on hold around the world. Immigration to the US is neither occurring nor likely to occur any time soon with all visas and asylum claims, in effect, suspended. Refugee admissions have been suspended since March 19 after the United Nations and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), an inter-governmental organisation, temporarily halted refugee travel. The US is not processing refugee arrivals and won’t do so until May 15 at the earliest. So, Trump’s new immigration suspension is meant for an already suspended system.

Add to that the discordant note struck by the Trump White House, which recently unveiled guidelines to help states across America decide on loosening lockdowns and reopening their economies. The new immigration suspension sends a contrary message. Trump has exempted foreign seasonal guest workers — fruit and vegetable pickers — one of the largest sources of immigration at the moment. With 26 million Americans filing for unemployment benefits in the past few weeks, wouldn’t it make sense for some of them to be drafted in to do the other jobs that are available and need doing?

The US president’s intentions are unclear, the motivation much less so. It’s not only Democrats who discern “xenophobic scapegoating” of foreigners in Trump’s new restrictions on immigration. Long-serving senators belonging to Trump’s Republican Party are also casting doubt on the logic and rationale for pausing legal immigration to the United States. Hours after Trump made his announcement, Chuck Grassley, the senior Republican senator from Iowa, noted: “We’ve been a welcoming nation and we need people.”

That isn’t the message Trump has sent in the five years he has been on the political stage. Just as with the 2016 election, it’s obvious his re-election campaign strategy will deploy tried and tested malevolent tools that trigger and weaponise racial and religious resentment of minorities, migrants and Muslims.

The strategy is increasingly obvious. Ahead of the holy month of Ramadan, Trump retweeted a comment by a conservative author asking if mosques in the United States would be subject to the same social distancing restrictions during Ramadan as churches during Easter. The suggestion seemed to be that Muslim places of worship generally receive better treatment than Christian ones at the hands of local governments and the law enforcement authorities. But Trump was unrepentant about his promotion of a specious and inflammatory idea. Asked by a reporter about his retweet, Trump offered a rambling response that was clear on only one point. “Because they go after Christian churches but they don’t tend to go after mosques. And I don’t want them to go after mosques! But I do want to see what their event is…the Christian faith is treated much differently than it was, and I think it’s treated very unfairly.”

No evidence has been presented in support of the claim. It sits oddly with the reality. There have been attempts to block mosque-building in places as disparate as New York City and Murfreesboro, Tennessee; mosque surveillance and Trump originally rose to political fame on his startling 2015 promise to literally ban all Muslims from entering the United States.

Pitching mosques into the febrile atmosphere of a world shut down by a pandemic merely feeds grievance politics, possibly taking it to dangerous heights. The new immigration suspension, too, is yet another brick in Trump’s promised wall between an exclusivist idea of America and everyone else.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 April 2020

Word Count: 719

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Since the start of the pandemic, the president has acted frequently as if a cure for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, were just around the corner. He does this, I suppose, because someone somewhere is going to believe him as long as he says it with enough confidence. (And Donald Trump is nothing if not bigly confident.)

One of his advisers must have told him that hydroxychloroquine, an old malaria treatment, was being studied as a possible remedy. That was enough for the president to blow up a possibility into a guaranteed reality. Of course, someone somewhere believed him, took it and died. The FDA issued a warning today, saying that um, yes, ingesting it might actually kill you. Otherwise, it had no effect on the seriously ill.

That Trump was proven wrong is no impediment to continuing his shuck and jive. This president will not recognize the authority of facts, reason, scientific method or empirical truth. Yesterday, during a press briefing, he hinted at another surefire cure that, again, someone somewhere is almost certainly going to believe, inject and die.

I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs.

In front of TV cameras, Trump also asked the White House task force coordinator, Deborah Birx, to look into “a rumor that — you know, a very nice rumor — that you go outside in the sun or you have heat and it does have an effect on other viruses.” Addressing the good doctor, the president added: “Speak to the medical doctors to see if there’s any way that you can apply light and heat to cure, you know, if you could.”

It’s natural to call Trump an idiot. It’s understandable to call him deranged. A more sophisticated reaction might be that he’s a conspiracy theorist or a fascist demagogue or an anti-intellectual populist. I have touched on all of these. But today, I’d like to suggest another view: that Donald Trump’s politics are the politics of the occult.

I’m borrowing from Joan Didion’s Political Fictions. In the introduction, she explains her difficulty comprehending the 1988 election. “There remained about domestic politics something resistant, recondite, some occult irreconcilability that kept all news of it just below my attention level. The events of the campaign as reported seemed to have taken place in a language I did not recognize. The stakes of election as presented did not compute. … I could clearly bring no access, no knowledge, no understanding.”

Didion’s chief complaint in her classic analysis is that the campaign press corps invents a vernacular that only those already inside the machinations of Washington can understand, leaving those outside the circles of power to wonder what it all means, which is detrimental to the American principle of democratic self-determination.

I think “occult” can be adapted for our own times if we think of it as more than belief in “vampires or fairies and movements like ufology and parapsychology,” to quote occultism’s Wikipedia entry. If we think of the politics of the occult as those things just outside our normal human comprehension, things just behind the reach of our senses and our reason, but also things hostile toward established knowledge, then virtually everything associated with Trump is more coherent, because it’s clear it’s not supposed to be clear — unless, you’re already on the inside the politics of the occult.

Coronavirus protesters, sovereign citizen militias, Deep State conspiracists, QAnon (the belief that Democrats worship Satan and have orgies with children), and even white evangelical Christian preachers defying stay-at-home orders and turning congregants into idolaters — all of these and more can be better described as variations on a theme of the politics of the occult. None of it makes sense, because it was never intended to make sense, and our trying to force it to make sense actually empowers it.

I don’t intent to besmirch the good names of genuine believers in the occult or the earth-centered religion of magick. (I’m thinking specifically of the late Margot Adler, an esteemed NPR reporter who was also a Wiccan priestess and wrote a book that established what’s now known as neopaganism.) But the fact is, occultism has a bad reputation, and I’m not above exploiting it to put Trump’s politics in a rhetorical box.

So the next time a white evangelical preacher says his followers can defend against the new coronavirus by drenching themselves in the blood of Christ, know he’s not practicing the Christian faith so much as practicing the politics of the occult. Same thing goes for anyone deciding it’s a good idea to inject themselves with bleach.

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 April 2020

Word Count: 804

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I admit it. I write on the theme of betrayal so often I risk diluting the impact of the word with sheer repetition. I can’t help it, though. I see the national Republicans saying they govern in the interest of all Americans, then behaving as if only some citizens count as legitimate Americans. Trust is key to a democracy. We must trust our leaders to act for the sake of the common good, especially in times of crisis. When a partner suddenly demands freedom from responsibility, what word describes that other than betrayal?

Nearly 48,000 Americans have died in the last five weeks from COVID-19, the disease caused by a new strain of the coronavirus. The death toll would almost certainly be higher had not good-faith governors (including Republicans) taken aggressive measures to force people to isolate or distance themselves from each other in order to retard the disease’s spread. A major consequence, of course, has been an economy in near collapse. Today, the government reported another 4.4 million unemployment insurance claims, bringing the total number of official jobless to about 26 million.

Even Donald Trump’s most vocal critics don’t hold him entirely responsible for the damage done, but no reasonable person can say he did even close to enough when it most mattered, or has done enough since. The president’s administration “delayed or bungled basic but crucial steps to contain the spread of infections and prepare the country for a pandemic,” according to a review of government documents by the LA Times. The investigation is just one of a host of reports showing the president privileging his television image over the health and well-being of the populace.

The president might be forgiven (politicians are self-interested, after all) if his Republicans had spared a thought for the 56 million northeasterners facing the worst. But they didn’t. Instead, in each of three relief bills passed so far (a fourth is pending in the House), the Republicans demonstrated concern for the health and well-being of corporations struggling with a near-total absence of consumer demand. To be sure, normal people are getting one-time checks, but big businesses are getting massive, cheap and forgivable loans. Meanwhile, the Fed is printing trillions to take over the bond market and provide virtually unlimited lending to Wall Street banking firms.

Even that, however, wouldn’t be so bad if major cities and blue states got a cut of the action. Fighting mass disease and death has strained their resources to the breaking point. Even the richest municipalities foresee the possibility of insolvency in the near term. If the airline, hospitality, banking and oil industries can get bailouts, surely so can cities and states defending the country against the “invisible enemy” whose existence a Republican president refused to acknowledge for weeks and weeks.

Not so fast, says Mitch McConnell. The Senate majority leader said yesterday that his conference was in no mood for more relief. The national debt is becoming a serious issue, he said, we can’t mortgage our children’s future on a “blue-state bailout.”

“We’re not going to let them take advantage of this pandemic to solve a lot of problems that they created for themselves with bad decisions in the past,” he said. Instead, he’d rather work to change current federal law so states can declare bankruptcy.

It’s hard to express the depths of betrayal here, but I’m going to try. First, future insolvencies are not a consequence of past decisions by the states, but instead recent inaction by a president whose gross negligence and incompetence forced cities and states to take matters into their own hands.

Second, McConnell is suggesting the country does not owe these cities and states a debt of gratitude deserving of federal compensation even if the money ended up covering “bad decisions in the past.”

Third, in not recognizing the debt owed, and instead offering the possibility of bankruptcy, he’s slapping the face of anyone who has sacrificed, which is to say everyone.

With respect to blue states, the betrayal goes even deeper. Blue states are richer, and they send more tax dollars to Washington than they get in return. That’s not so bad given that blue states tend to believe in the common good, plus they used to keep some of the money thanks to a tax code allowing filers to deduct state and local taxes (SALT) from their federal tax returns. In 2017 Trump, McConnell and the Republicans capped SALT deductions, in effect raising taxes on rich states while cutting taxes for obscenely rich individuals. Blue states were already subsidizing red states. Now that went double.

Make it triple. McConnell is fine with extracting wealth from major cities and blue states, redistributing it to red states and GOP-friendly corporations, while at the same time expressing concern for the national debt just when 56 million Americans, who collectively send Democrats to Washington, are in full need of assistance. McConnell is happy, in other words, to let a pandemic weaken and impoverish his political rivals. That’s not what you expect from a leader governing in the interest of all Americans.

It is, however, what you’d expect from a traitor.

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 April 2020

Word Count: 857

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Reopening day 2020?

by Robert Lipsyte

As controversies about the “reopening” of America loom over our lives, nothing seems as intrinsically irrelevant — yet possibly as critically important — as how soon major spectator sports return.

If sports don’t trump religion as the opiate of the masses, they have, until recently, been at least the background music of most of our lives. So here’s my bet on one possible side effect of the Covid-19 pandemic to put in your scorebook: if the National Football League plays regular season games this fall, President Trump stands a good chance of winning reelection for returning America to business as usual — or, at least, to his twisted version of the same.

That’s why he announced at a recent daily coronavirus briefing-cum-rally his eagerness to bring professional sports back quickly. Though it was Major League Baseball that he mentioned — “We have to get our sports back. I’m tired of watching baseball games that are 14 years old” — the sport that truly matters to him is football, the only major mass entertainment (other than Trumpism) that endorses tribalism and toxic masculinity so flagrantly and keeps violence in vogue. Football supports Trump in its promotion of racial division, the crushing of dissent, and the spread of misinformation, inequality, and brutality.

Whether or not the president can survive the loss of the 2020 baseball season — already poisoned by last year’s Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal — is up for grabs. Certainly, the proposed plan to turn stadiums in the Phoenix, Arizona, area into the sports equivalent of a vast movie set for the games of all 30 major league teams (to be played without fans) seems far-fetched at best.

But football, now the true national pastime, is another matter.

In sports terms, as in so much else in coronaviral America, these are desperately deprived times, even for casual fans. There will be intense pressure — and not only from the president’s base — for that sport’s return. For many people, mostly men, it’s the sustaining soap opera that has always carried them into the next week and the one after that, a porn-ish escape hatch from work and family, a currency of communication with other men, an eternal connection to a non-demanding hive.

Games for lives? Without professional (or even college) sports right now or realistically in the near future, fans feel even more unmoored in lives that, for all of us, are distinctly adrift. As they become edgier, it’s a reasonable bet (or at least my hope) that they will also become more open to questioning Trump’s mismanagement — or, to put it more bluntly, sacrifice — of their lives. Recent polls already seem to reflect this, with the latest Gallup Poll showing the steepest approval decline of his presidency.

The president, I suspect, fears just this, though perhaps, in the end, the hole in everyday life where sports once was may only reinforce fans’ sense (like the president’s) that the games are too important not to bring back, safety be damned. Certainly, Trump and other Republican politicians have already been willing enough to forfeit lives to boost their reelection chances.

The values and sensibilities of football are, of course, Trumpist in nature. That’s why former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s demonstration against racism — performed in a kind of public isolation — elicited such a harsh reaction from the president in the now-distant pre-pandemic era. That’s why the sport’s billionaire owners, predominantly Trump donors, shunned Kaepernick (although some of their teams could have used his skills). They didn’t dare to, or care to, give him another platform, not in an era when “president” and “racism” were becoming synonymous.

Even more tellingly, in an understandable but still disappointing me-first display, few of Kaepernick’s fellow players, most of whom are also African-American, supported him publicly. After years of being celebrated as America’s “warriors” and “role models,” they came up desperately short when it counted. Compare them to healthcare workers and other front-line heroes of this pandemic and you’ll realize just how far short they fell of even the most modest form of everyday bravery.

Not that, when it comes to pro sports, football was such an outlier. As activism goes, baseball, a sport that once produced transcendent progressive heroes like Jackie Robinson, Jim Bouton, and Curt Flood, has been eerily quiet in recent years. It’s a sport that the president has paid relatively little attention to — except for suggesting recently that Pete Rose, banned from baseball for life for betting on the Cincinnati Reds while he was that team’s manager, should be allowed into its Hall of Fame.

How Trumpian was that? Such betting is, of course, strictly forbidden for active players and managers who are obviously privy to inside information. But, hey, does disregarding inconvenient rules to profit from a privileged position ring any bells these days in Washington?

Trump has, in fact, been uncharacteristically silent on the recent revelation that during the 2017 season, the World Series winners, the Houston Astros, concealed a video camera in center field to steal the pitching signs of opposing teams. That’s also illegal. Major League baseball punished the team by suspending its manager and general manager for a year, imposing a $5 million fine on its owners, and taking away its first- and second-round draft picks in 2020 and 2021.

For some fans and commentators, the Astros’ punishment was too severe or too mild. Opposing players, feeling victimized by the scheme, thought specific Astros should have been penalized, too. Yet such cheating is hardly new. In 1951, the “shot heard round the world,” a famed home-run that won the National League pennant for the New York Giants and sent them to the World Series, was linked to the stealing of signs from the Brooklyn Dodgers through a hand-held telescope. Only the technology has improved.

A changing national pastime Once baseball’s opening day passed without a pitch this April, proof that the plague was winning, the Phoenix Plan was floated. It would require all major league players and employees to be sequestered in that area and continually tested at a moment when tests might still not be universally available. But, hey, haven’t VIP Jocks always gone to the head of the line? (Actually, a massive study of 10,000 Major League Baseball employees, from players to popcorn vendors, being conducted by Stanford University and the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory to find out how many contracted and may have recovered from the virus has already gotten access to such testing kits at a time when even some front-line workers can’t get them!)

For those who think this country needs baseball now to raise its depressed spirits, you might consider a cautionary historical precedent, the Summer of Swat of 1998. As the country reeled from the revelation of President Bill Clinton’s sexual liaison with a White House intern and with his impeachment just around the corner, a feel-good legend was born. A white man and a brown man rose in friendly rivalry to break the 37-year-old record of 61 home runs by Roger Maris, who, in turn, had bested Babe Ruth’s famed 60 in 1927.

The good-natured competition between Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals (who won with 70 homers) and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs (66) was, at the time, celebrated as a balm that should soothe the country. And perhaps for many fans it did indeed serve as a comforting distraction in a difficult political moment.

But that summer’s golden glow soon faded as both players were reported to have taken steroids to muscle up. McGwire would admit it years later; Sosa would not. (A dark-skinned Dominican, he further complicated his legend by bleaching his skin to whiten himself, as if in anticipation of the Trumpian racial preferences to come.) Their contemporary, Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants, would eventually become the single-season home run leader with 73, but has never shaken rumors that he, too, used steroids.

Nor did baseball ever fully recover its sense of primacy as the national pastime or its sense of righteousness as one of America’s first major institutions to integrate. In fact, the sport is still overwhelmingly white and skewed toward an older audience, as well as slow and outdated in an era of tweeting speed.

Which is why, whether or not baseball opens this season in a vast sports self-isolation experiment, the key to President Trump’s future lies in his perverse relationship with the National Football League. That goes back more than 30 years to the moment he tried unsuccessfully (as with so many other business ventures) to elbow his way into the sport. Give him credit, though: ever attuned to the public mood, he did sense the rise of a new national pastime.

Bet on this One reason for the NFL’s growing popularity is the way it uses college football as its minor leagues and early showcase for pro players (though possibly not this fall). For a passionate pro football fan, it’s a pleasure to see the stars of tomorrow in the making. Of course, the famously corrupted higher education sports market is a happy NFL partner and crime may pay after all, as it often does in the Trump league. In a recent commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nathan Kalman-Lamb of Duke opines that high-revenue men’s football and basketball “will become more valuable than ever as an enticement to lure steep tuition from students.”

And here’s an innovation that the president would glory in, one that would make post-pandemic football an even greater success: the addition of real-time nationwide legal gambling on games. Just imagine the sort of Trump-donor dollars that would be stacked up to support such a future industry. After all, estimations are that illegal gambling on pro and college football is already a $93 billion business. Legal or not, it’s an integral part of the fan experience (though in the post-pandemic world there will be a lot less money in so many pockets to gamble with).

The dream of easily accessible, high-tech legal gambling has been lurking on the sidelines for years. All that’s necessary to make it come true is for Congress to reverse the 1992 Professional & Amateur Sports Protection Act, the federal law that bans it in most states. And the pandemic moment may prove perfect for just that, for “reopening” football in a new and even more Trumpian way, allowing fans to sit at home and bet what money they have left on games in progress: Will that field goal attempt split the uprights? Will Tom Brady in his new Tampa Bay Buccaneers uniform make that crucial third-down conversion?

However, to reopen pro football, as the president would wish, to make life seem “normal” again, stadiums might have to remain empty (or partially empty). Imagine, for instance, if San Francisco had actually beaten Kansas City (which it didn’t) in the Super Bowl on the first Sunday in February and the expected championship parade had followed a few days later, drawing a million people to that city’s streets. It might have proved an early version of Mardi Gras (a 2020 coronaviral disaster of a get-together).

Of course, social distancing will be inconceivable for football players and the results all too predictable in a world in which Covid-19 is likely to hang around for a long, long time. From the huddle to tackling, the game is, in every way, a potential disease transmitter. The only example of social distancing (besides Kaepernick kneeling alone) I can even remember might have been the 1958 West Point football team, which fielded a “lonesome end,” Bill Carpenter. On every play, he set himself up near the far sideline in an innovative formation. He never even joined the huddle and that team went undefeated.

If it proves impossible to stage football games, given social-distancing rules, the inevitable sport of the future is already waiting in the wings. Just under the radar of most of the middle-aged and elderly, especially those without access to children, is a fiercely contested, already commodified, fan-friendly industry with championships, heroes, endorsement contracts, and a ready market for expensive gear. I’m thinking, as you may have guessed, of competitive online video games, or esports.  (Think of it as the revenge of the nerds.) No matter what Donald Trump does, sooner rather than later they’re likely to replace the old up-close-and-contagious live games.

It’s not hard to imagine a future in which individual competitors, regional and national teams, leagues, or even some version of the Olympics, would be watched by millions on streaming platforms on home screens and, once social distancing becomes a historical footnote, on the screens of sports bars as well, if not theaters and arenas. While combat games like Fortnite and Call of Duty, along with sports knock-offs like Madden and NBA Live, currently dominate esports, the future will undoubtedly include brainier fare that will turn art, architecture, banking, diplomacy, music, and maybe even poetry into online competitions even Nike and Google could sponsor.

Esports already supports ESPN-style commentary. There might even be room someday for a new reality show about them hosted by a motor-mouthed, pumpkin-headed former one-term president.

Who needs football after all? It would, in fact, be the definition of madness to launch a football season in a coronaviral world. But that doesn’t mean Donald Trump won’t push for just that. The advisory board he appointed for the reopening of sports includes, as my colleague Dave Zirin points out, “a group of brigands defined by their lack of care in normal times for the safety and well-being of their employees.”

It’s Trump’s dream team because, to win in November, he needs an America in which the National Football League is back in business big time. For him it’s open arms for the NFL, which could mean open season on the rest of us.

Robert Lipsyte writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He was a sports and city columnist for the New York Times. He is the author, among other works, of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.

Copyright ©2020 Robert Lipsyte — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 April 2020

Word Count: 2,301

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BEIT MERY, Lebanon — The coronavirus pandemic, which forced a lockdown of nearly all enterprises — except food stores — in Lebanon, has aggravated the country’s severe financial crisis that has resulted in job losses, salary cuts and food price hikes.

Lebanon has declared a COVID-19-related medical state of emergency, which included closing Beirut-Rafik Hariri International Airport, most public institutions and private companies as it looks to rein in the virus outbreak that has claimed 21 lives and infected more than 640 people in the country.

In the absence of a functional state, the Lebanese were already helping each other as they have done many times in wars and crises.

Private initiatives have multiplied to help the most impoverished parts of society, including donating money and distributing food, clothes and medical supplies to those who can no longer afford it.

Scenes of seniors stranded in the streets in a family-oriented society such as Lebanon’s prompted social activist Yara Bou Aoun to concentrate her efforts on the homeless elderly. With other volunteers she arranged a home for them in an old stone house with a garden in the village of Beit Mery in Mount Lebanon that she dubbed “Beit Jdoudna” — “Our Grandfather’s Home.”

“The idea came to me from the elderly whom I have been assisting through my Lifeline association. Every time I asked one of them where you want to stay, he would reply, ‘I’d love to be at home.’ They did not want to stay in shelters or convents,” Bou Aoun said.

“These people had difficult circumstances and downturns in their life or were abandoned by their families. They have the right to a decent and respectable life in their old days. So I decided that we have to make a home for them where they can live as a family,” she said.

Established a year ago, Beit Jdoudna is home for 12 men who had lived on the street, under bridges, in public parks or derelict shelters without doors and windows.

“This is their home now where they are free to do whatever they please without restrictions or rules. It is nice to see them living together like a family, caring for each other and spending time together,” Bou Aoun said.

Backed by donors, volunteers and the village community, Bou Aoun was ensured a decent and comfortable dwelling that is equipped with internet access, television, telephone and furniture.

“People donated everything, beds, carpets, couches, kitchen equipment, et cetera. It was such a great show of solidarity,” Bou Aoun said.

The elders can also enjoy their time “at home” with leisure activities such as farming, drawing, card games, crossword puzzles and books.

Maroun, 81, went to Beit Jdoudna seven months ago after staying for years in a rundown shelter. He became homeless after his stepdaughter-in-law kicked him out.

“Here I feel that I am not in a shelter but in my own home, where I found a new family, and here I am free to go in and out as I please,” he said. “We are well taken care of and they even prepare for us food that we like. It is a blessing after being homeless.”

Khaled Lhaybe, 70, lived for a year in a public garden before he found Beit Jdoudna two months ago. He is a builder by profession, divorced and abandoned by his children.

While he could not find work for years, he collected plastic bottles and tins from rubbish for recycling.

“I used to make 10,000-15,000 Lebanese pounds ($6.60-$9.95) a day to help me survive. In the garden, there were snakes and rats that sometimes ate my provisions,” he said. “Here I have a bed, food and medication. I am still trying to find any work just to keep me busy.”

Bou Aoun, whose home for elderly men is fully funded from donations, is seeking to develop a project for women called “Beit Siti” (“My Grandma’s Home”).

She said she hopes similar homes would be established in all regions of Lebanon “because loneliness is the worst thing that can happen to old people and no elderly should remain homeless.”

The economic crisis in Lebanon that fuelled an anti-government protest movement since October has caused a surge of help by rallying public attention to people’s suffering.

Stores have offered discounts and set up boxes for donations of clothes or money. Television ads urged Lebanese to pack bags of donations instead of suitcases for travel. Another urged Lebanese in the diaspora to return with “medicines, clothes and goodies” to give because “Lebanon needs help.”

The efforts are in part driven by the famed entrepreneurial spirit that helped Lebanese get through numerous previous crises, including a 15-year civil war and several wars with Israel that wrecked the infrastructure and economy.

“We only have each other,” proclaims one campaign hashtag, a snub of the political class and the state.

Samar Kadi is the Arab Weekly society and travel section editor.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 April 2020

Word Count: 807

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