Americans are facing “A Spring Unlike Any Before.” So warned a front-page headline in the March 13th New York Times.

That headline, however hyperbolic, was all too apt. The coming of spring has always promised relief from the discomforts of winter. Yet, far too often, it also brings its own calamities and afflictions.

According to the poet T.S. Eliot, “April is the cruelest month.” Yet while April has certainly delivered its share of cataclysms, March and May haven’t lagged far behind. In fact, cruelty has seldom been a respecter of seasons. The infamous influenza epidemic of 1918, frequently cited as a possible analogue to our current crisis, began in the spring of that year, but lasted well into 1919.

That said, something about the coronavirus pandemic does seem to set this particular spring apart. At one level, that something is the collective panic now sweeping virtually the entire country. President Trump’s grotesque ineptitude and tone-deafness have only fed that panic. And in their eagerness to hold Trump himself responsible for the pandemic, as if he were the bat that first transmitted the disease to a human being, his critics magnify further a growing sense of events spinning out of control.

Yet to heap the blame for this crisis on Trump alone (though he certainly deserves plenty of blame) is to miss its deeper significance. Deferred for far too long, Judgment Day may at long last have arrived for the national security state.

Origins of a colossus That state within a state’s origins date from the early days of the Cold War. Its ostensible purpose has been to keep Americans safe and so, by extension, to guarantee our freedoms. From the 1950s through the 1980s, keeping us safe provided a seemingly adequate justification for maintaining a sprawling military establishment along with a panoply of “intelligence” agencies — the CIA, the DIA, the NRO, the NSA — all engaged in secret activities hidden from public view. From time to time, the scope, prerogatives, and actions of that conglomeration of agencies attracted brief critical attention — the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, the Vietnam War of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the Iran-Contra affair during the presidency of Ronald Reagan being prime examples. Yet at no time did such failures come anywhere close to jeopardizing its existence.

Indeed, even when the implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War removed the original justification for its creation, the entire apparatus persisted. With the Soviet Empire gone, Russia in a state of disarray, and communism having lost its appeal as an alternative to democratic capitalism, the managers of the national security state wasted no time in identifying new threats and new missions.

The new threats included autocrats like Panama’s Manuel Noriega and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, once deemed valuable American assets, but now, their usefulness gone, classified as dangers to be eliminated. Prominent among the new missions was a sudden urge to repair broken places like the Balkans, Haiti, and Somalia, with American power deployed under the aegis of “humanitarian intervention” and pursuant to a “responsibility to protect.” In this way, in the first decade of the post-Cold War era, the national security state kept itself busy. While the results achieved, to put it politely, were mixed at best, the costs incurred appeared tolerable. In sum, the entire apparatus remained impervious to serious scrutiny.

During that decade, however, both the organs of national security and the American public began taking increased notice of what was called “anti-American terrorism” — and not without reason. In 1993, Islamic fundamentalists detonated a bomb in a parking garage of New York’s World Trade Center. In 1996, terrorists obliterated an apartment building used to house U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia. Two years later, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up and, in 2000, suicide bombers nearly sank the USS Cole, a Navy destroyer making a port call in Aden at the tip of the Arabian peninsula. To each of these increasingly brazen attacks, all occurring during the administration of President Bill Clinton, the national security state responded ineffectually.

Then, of course, came September 11, 2001. Orchestrated by Osama bin Laden and carried out by 19 suicidal al-Qaeda operatives, this act of mass murder inflicted incalculable harm on the United States. In its wake, it became common to say that “9/11 changed everything.”

In fact, however, remarkably little changed. Despite its 17 intelligence agencies, the national security state failed utterly to anticipate and thwart that devastating attack on the nation’s political and financial capitals. Yet apart from minor adjustments — primarily expanding surveillance efforts at home and abroad — those outfits mostly kept doing what they had been doing, even as their leaders evaded accountability. After Pearl Harbor, at least, one admiral and one general were fired. After 9/11, no one lost his or her job. At the upper echelons of the national security state, the wagons were circled and a consensus quickly formed: no one had screwed up.

Once President George W. Bush identified an “Axis of Evil” (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea), three nations that had had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks, as the primary target for his administration’s “Global War on Terrorism,” it became clear that no wholesale reevaluation of national security policy was going to occur. The Pentagon and the Intelligence Community, along with their sprawling support network of profit-minded contractors, could breathe easy. All of them would get ever more money. That went without saying. Meanwhile, the underlying premise of U.S. policy since the immediate aftermath of World War II — that projecting hard power globally would keep Americans safe — remained sacrosanct.

Viewed from this perspective, the sequence of events that followed was probably overdetermined. In late 2001, U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan, overthrew the Taliban regime, and set out to install a political order more agreeable to Washington. In early 2003, with the mission in Afghanistan still anything but complete, U.S. forces set out to do the same in Iraq. Both of those undertakings have dragged on, in one fashion or another, without coming remotely close to success. Today, the military undertaking launched in 2001 continues, even if it no longer has a name or an agreed-upon purpose.

Nonetheless, at the upper echelons of the national security state, the consensus forged after 9/11 remains firmly in place: no one screws up. In Washington, the conviction that projecting hard power keeps Americans safe likewise remains sacrosanct.

In the nearly two decades since 9/11, willingness to challenge this paradigm has rarely extended beyond non-conforming publications like TomDispatch. Until Donald Trump came along, rare was the ambitious politician of either political party who dared say aloud what Trump himself has repeatedly said — that, as he calls them, the “ridiculous endless wars” launched in response to 9/11 represent the height of folly.

Astonishingly enough, within the political establishment that point has still not sunk in. So, in 2020, as in 2016, the likely Democratic nominee for president will be someone who vigorously supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Imagine, if you will, Democrats in 1880 nominating not a former union general (as they did) but a former confederate who, 20 years before, had advocated secession. Back then, some sins were unforgivable. Today, politicians of both parties practice self-absolution and get away with it.

The real threat Note, however, the parallel narrative that has unfolded alongside those post-9/11 wars. Taken seriously, that narrative exposes the utter irrelevance of the national security state as currently constituted. The coronavirus pandemic will doubtless prove to be a significant learning experience. Here is one lesson that Americans cannot afford to overlook.

Presidents now routinely request and Congress routinely appropriates more than a trillion dollars annually to satisfy the national security state’s supposed needs. Even so, Americans today do not feel safe and, to a degree without precedent, they are being denied the exercise of basic everyday freedoms. Judged by this standard, the apparatus created to keep them safe and free has failed. In the face of a pandemic, nature’s version of an act of true terror, that failure, the consequences of which Americans will suffer through for months to come, should be seen as definitive.

But wait, some will object: Don’t we find ourselves in uncharted waters? Is this really the moment to rush to judgment? In fact, judgment is long overdue.

While the menace posed by the coronavirus may differ in scope, it does not differ substantively from the myriad other perils that Americans have endured since the national security state wandered off on its quixotic quest to pacify Afghanistan and Iraq and purge the planet of terrorists. Since 9/11, a partial roster of those perils would include: Hurricane Katrina (2005), Hurricane Sandy (2012), Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria (2017), and massive wildfires that have devastated vast stretches of the West Coast on virtually an annual basis. The cumulative cost of such events exceeds a half-trillion dollars. Together, they have taken the lives of several thousand more people than were lost in the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Earlier generations might have written all of these off as acts of God. Today, we know better.  As with blaming Trump, blaming God won’t do. Human activities, ranging from the hubristic reengineering of rivers like the Mississippi to the effects of climate change stemming from the use of fossil fuels, have substantially exacerbated such “natural” catastrophes.

And unlike faraway autocrats or terrorist organizations, such phenomena, from extreme-weather events to pandemics, directly and immediately threaten the safety and wellbeing of the American people. Don’t tell the Central Intelligence Agency or the Joint Chiefs of Staff but the principal threats to our collective wellbeing are right here where we live.

Apart from modest belated efforts at mitigation, the existing national security state is about as pertinent to addressing such threats as President Trump’s cheery expectations that the coronavirus will simply evaporate once warmer weather appears. Terror has indeed arrived on our shores and it has nothing to do with al-Qaeda or ISIS or Iranian-backed militias. Americans are terrorized because it has now become apparent that our government, whether out of negligence or stupidity, has left them exposed to dangers that truly put life and liberty at risk. As it happens, all these years in which the national security state has been preoccupied with projecting hard power abroad have left us naked and vulnerable right here at home.

Protecting Americans where they live ought to be the national security priority of our time. The existing national security state is incapable of fulfilling that imperative, while its leaders, fixated on waging distant wars, have yet to even accept that they have a responsibility to do so.

Worst of all, even in this election year, no one on the national political scene appears to recognize the danger now fully at hand.

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: 26 March 2020

Word Count: 1,811

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

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

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

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

Well, there’s your problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 March 2020

Word Count: 830

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The grievances that exploded all over the Arab region between 2010 and 2020 are historic in so many ways that it is hard to know where to start understanding them. Scholars should avoid a single-focus analysis and instead grasp why the protests across nearly a dozen countries have addressed almost every dimension of material, political, and psychological life. Four key factors that converge, though, should take priority in any assessment of what this decade means for the Arab region: (1) the expanding range of rights, denials, and grievances that citizens raise; (2) the fact that Arabs have unsuccessfully tried to redress these grievances since the 1970s without receiving any serious responses from their states; (3) the demands today to go well beyond reforms in individual policies and instead totally overhaul the governance systems and throw out the ruling elites; and, (4) the simultaneous uprisings across much of the Arab region, revealing the common suffering of citizens and the incompetence of governments in about a dozen states at least. In short, the deterioration of the quality of citizenship and the dilapidated state of public services and governance have reached such a severe condition that they have caused mass eruptions by citizens in multiple lands to redress these stressful and often dehumanizing realities.

The strength and depth of this decade’s protests reflect the fact that their core issues have been raised by Arab activism, demonstrations, and other means for at least four decades, without eliciting any serious policy responses from the political elites or the foreign powers that support them. This is far from just a seasonal “Arab Spring,” as it is often referred to in the West. It is the second half of a century of Arab statehood in which ordinary citizens have struggled unsuccessfully for their rights.

The very wide range of criticisms and demands the protests raise across the region indicate how ordinary citizens have suffered in virtually every dimension of their lives. The issues raised include corruption, household income, poverty, inequality, opportunity, jobs, education, health care, water, electricity, accountability, police brutality, abuse of power, the rule of law, environmental justice, gender equality, and the lack of citizen voice, to mention only the most significant.

This range of issues that keeps growing with time and their painful impact on ordinary citizens due to decades of governmental mismanagement ultimately generates more serious new threats. The latest examples include Lebanon and Iraq. In Lebanon, a banking crisis prevents citizens from drawing their deposits beyond a few hundred dollars a week and cripples many small and medium businesses that need dollars to import essential goods. In Iraq, the worsening electricity shortages and the new threat of a possible cut in power imports from Iran due to US sanctions both highlight the inability of Iraqi governments to manage their people’s welfare or even the integrity of their state (given the Kurdish autonomous region, the short-lived Islamic State, and some calls among southern residents around Basra to run their own affairs).
The accumulation of so many problems since the 1980s contrasts with the pre-2000 period, in which protests were occasional and tended to focus on singular issues, such as gas, bread, or milk prices, cost-of-living increases due to new taxes and fees, elite abuse of power, lack of equal rights among citizens, normalization of the relationship with Israel, and others. This decade’s complaints and demands, however, cover simultaneously almost every sector of life, and protests go on for months or years at a time.

These growing multi-sectoral stresses over decades help explain another critical factor in the current uprisings: the fearlessness of citizens who challenge powerful state and sectarian leaders by name and demand their departure. Protestors stopped being scared off by rough treatment from security agencies or sectarian thugs. This lack of fear results from nearly half a century of neglect during which citizens have felt that their governments pay no serious attention to their needs and rights, and governments appear to lack the technical capabilities to respond effectively. Citizen anger becomes amplified from older people’s memories of past decades when their governments in their state-building developmental eras had provided their citizens with basic services equitably and efficiently, like collecting garbage, operating decent schools, and providing clean water and electricity, while younger Arabs under the age of 40 have only known deteriorating social services and security conditions and widespread political exclusion. The combination of uncaring, corrupt, and incompetent governance proved to be too much for citizens of all ages to take without fighting back.

To make matters worse, citizens who rise up to protest in anger and frustration are usually met with police and security responses that are increasingly militarized and brutal. This only exacerbates people’s feelings of being ignored and abused by their own power elite that treats them with disdain. Citizens eventually move beyond anger, and if like so many today they are unable to feed or educate their children or secure a decent job for themselves, they often feel dehumanized by the actions of their own state. They rise up to no longer accept being treated with contempt by the officials who should serve them.
These developments are evident across the Arab region, where the persistent protests have generated a historic new demand by large segments of Arab citizenries for a total change of their governing system, which would both remove the individuals who have been in power for decades and institute new governance mechanisms based on participation, pluralism, and accountability, under the rule of law. This contrasts sharply with the many previous, smaller, protests from the 1970s through the 1990s, when demonstrators usually just sought one or two policy changes or to replace a few officials with others. The problems that have accumulated reflect the fact that policy changes were minimal and that the “new” officials who assumed power came from the same pool of the failed ruling power elite. The protesters now call their actions “revolutions” because they aim to both eradicate the old power structures and to rehumanize and revitalize the role and rights of citizens.

These key elements of the ongoing Arab revolutions reflect many driving forces that have converged in the past decade, including rampant corruption by crony capitalists within security-dominated ruling elites who also proved incompetent in addressing the challenges, in economic development, political rights, and environmental protections at least, that became evident since the 1970s. This poor quality of governance resulted in insufficient real economic growth through productive activities, reliance on rentier political economy systems, erratic economic growth that was unable to keep up with population growth, and complicity in or impotence in the face of the non-stop damage of local and regional wars, including the Arab–Israeli conflict that has now entered its second century.

Another recent development and consequence of these drivers may well explain the widespread and apparent desperation of many protesters who say they have nothing to lose because they have nothing to live for. A large and growing number of Arabs live in poverty and vulnerability, which leads to economic and political marginalization and ultimately alienates them from their state, from their economy, and even from some of their traditional social configurations, like tribal, religious, and community organizations that had long defined people’s identities and supported them in times of need. The United Nations and credible data indicate that some two-thirds of all Arabs are poor or vulnerable. The vulnerable are low-income families that live right on the edge of poverty and plunge into that category with a sudden increase in prices or taxes or a shock to the family’s income. New analyses in light of regional turmoil that slows economic growth also indicate that families in poverty are destined to stay there for several generations. That percentage of poor and vulnerable in Arab countries is also increasing due to the impact of the armed conflicts and internal economic collapse in several states, including Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Libya, and Yemen.

As some states seem to abandon their citizens and stop serving them, those citizens turn away from their states and assert other identities and allegiances (tribal, religious, ethnic, ideological). In extreme cases, they create their own sovereign or virtual states (South Sudan, Kurdistan, Islamic State, Somaliland, Gaza), most of which encounter difficult days for various reasons.

Across the Arab region, with only a few exceptions, pauperized citizenries are challenging their militarized states in an epic battle that has been brewing for a century and that has now exploded into the open air. Taking to the streets to topple the entire systems that brought people to this condition is the last-resort option that nevertheless seems to motivate many—probably a majority of—citizens to take charge of their own lives and future wellbeing. It remains unclear, however, whether the current revolutions will be able to depose any power structures and replace them with more democratic systems.

The transitional sovereign council in Sudan is an important precedent that we must watch closely to see if it fully tempers the once absolute powers of the security agencies and creates a new governance system that is pluralistic, participatory, and accountable under the rule of law. Lebanon and Iraq suggest that sustained protests and road closures that suspend business as usual for a short period of time can elicit some tangible concessions, like the resignation of a prime minister or even drafting new electoral laws. The Algerian protests similarly achieved some limited gains, like the decision of the moribund president not to seek a fifth term.

Yet, the Egyptian experience of 2011–2013 remains fresh in many people’s minds, as well as among the ruling elites and their military allies. These elites, sometimes with external support, have pushed back against the protesters, often violently and brutally, resulting in hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries, especially in Sudan and Iraq. The counter-revolution of conservative autocrats in Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and others has been as evident in most Arab countries as the street demonstrators trying to evict them forever. Electronic surveillance systems, shooting to kill or injure protesters, erecting massive concrete walls to protect state institutions, widespread arrests, internet shutdowns, and other responses have only seen the protests persist and expand, as best evidenced in Lebanon and Iraq.

The protesters today endure, however, partly because they have obviously learned and applied lessons from the 2010–2011 uprisings. These include the importance of cross-community solidarities, persistent challenges to the elite, innovative protest tactics that emphasize the incompetence or criminal corruption of the ruling elite, coordination among different protest groups, and sticking with a set of a few basic demands until they are met. The most important ones across the region have been the governments‘ resignation, new election laws, appointing efficient ministers, creating credible anti-corruption mechanisms, and most importantly, installing a civilian government in place of military or oligarchic-sectarian rule.

As the protests and countermoves go on, we can also see some basic social values and power control systems evolving underneath the surface. The most dramatic include the significant role of women in the protests and other dimensions of public life, the widespread open participation of all citizens in public forums to shape the new governance systems they seek, cross-sectarian solidarity among protesters from groups that more commonly used to confront each other, the pervasive demands for social justice, and accountability under the rule of law.

All signs indicate that this epic battle for the identity of the Arab region will go on for some years to come.

Rami Khouri is an internationally syndicated political columnist and book author, a professor of journalism and journalist-in-residence at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. This article originally appeared in the Kennedy School’s Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy

Copyright ©2020 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 March 2020

Word Count: 1,918

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

They won’t, because they can’t.

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

They can’t, because they won’t.

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

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

It never came.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 March 2020

Word Count: 861

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The other morning, walking at the edge of a local park, I caught sight of a beautiful red cardinal, the first bird I ever saw some 63 years ago.

Actually, to make that sentence accurate, I should probably have put either “first” or “ever saw” in quotation marks. After all, I was already 12 years old and, even as a city boy, I had seen plenty of birds. If nothing else, New York, where I grew up, is a city of pigeons (birds which, by the way, know nothing about “social distancing”).

Nonetheless, in a different sense, at age 12 I saw (was struck by, stunned by, awed by) that bright red bird. I was visiting a friend in Connecticut and, miraculously enough, though it was 1956, his parents had a bird identification book of some kind in their house. When I leafed through it, I came across the very bird I had seen, read about it, and on going home wrote a tiny essay about the experience for my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Casey (one of those inspirational figures you never forget, just as I’ll never forget that bird). I still have what I wrote stuffed away amid ancient papers somewhere in the top of my bedroom closet.

Six decades later, in this grim coronavirus March of 2020, with my city essentially in lockdown and myself in something like self-isolation, I have to admit that I feel a little embarrassed writing about that bird. In fact, I feel as if I should apologize for doing so. After all, who can doubt that we’re now in a Covid-19 world from hell, in a country being run (into the ground) by the president from hell, on the planet that he and his cronies are remarkably intent on burning to hell.

It was no mistake, for instance, that, when Donald Trump finally turned his mind to the coming pandemic (rather than denying it) as the economy he had been bragging about for the previous three years began to crash, one of the first groups he genuinely worried about didn’t include you or me or even his base. It was America’s fossil-fuel industry. As global transportation ground down amid coronavirus panic and a wild oil price war between the Saudis and the Russians, those companies were being clobbered. And so he quickly reached out to them with both empathy and money — promising to buy tons of extra crude oil for the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve (“We’re going to fill it right to the top”) — unavailable to so many other endangered Americans. At that moment he made it perfectly clear that, in an unfolding crisis of the first order, all of us remain in a world run by arsonists led by the president of the United States.

So, a cardinal? Really? That’s what I want to focus on in a world which, as it grows hotter by the year, will only be ever more susceptible to pandemics, not to speak of staggering fires, flooding, extreme storms, and god knows what else. Honestly, given a country of closed schools, self-isolating adults, and the sick and the dying, on a planet that seems to be cracking open, in a country which, until recently, couldn’t test as many people for Covid-19 in a couple of months as South Korea could in — yes, this is not a misprint — a day, where’s my sense of proportion?

A secret life Still, if you can, bear with me for a moment, I think there’s a connection, even if anything but obvious, between our troubled world and that flaming bird I first saw so long ago. Let me start this way: believe it or not, birds were undoubtedly the greatest secret of my teenage years.

On spring weekends, my best friend and I would regularly head for Central Park, that magnificent patch of green at the center of Manhattan Island. That was the moment when the spectacular annual bird migration would be at its height and the park one of the few obvious places in a vast urban landscape for birds to alight. Sharing his uncle’s clunky old binoculars, my friend and I would wander alone there (having told no one, including our families, what we were doing).

We were on the lookout for exotic birds of every sort on their journeys north. Of course, for us then they were almost all exotic. There were brilliant scarlet tanagers with glossy black wings, chestnut-and-black orchard orioles (birds I wouldn’t see again for decades), as well as the more common, even more vivid Baltimore orioles. And of course there were all the warblers, those tiny, flitting, singing creatures of just about every color and design: American redstarts, blackburnians, black-and-whites, black-throated blues, blue-wingeds, chestnut-sideds, common yellowthroats, magnolias, prairies, palms, yellows.

And here was the secret key to our secret pastime: the old birders. Mind you, when I say “old,” I mean perhaps my age now or even significantly younger. They would, for instance, be sitting on benches by Belvedere Castle overlooking Belvedere Lake (in reality, a pond), watching those very birds. They were remarkably patient, not to say amused (or perhaps amazed) by the two teenaged boys so eager to watch with them and learn from them. They were generous with their binoculars, quick to identify birds we otherwise would never have known or perhaps even noticed, and happy to offer lessons from their bird books (and their own years of experience).

And, for me at least, those birds were indeed a wonder. They were genuine beauties of this planet and in some odd way my friend and I grasped that deeply. In fact, ever since we’ve grown up — though this year may prove to be the self-isolating exception — we’ve always tried to meet again in that park as May began for one more look at, one more moment immersed in, the deep and moving winged beauty of this planet of ours.

Of course, in the 1950s, all of this was our deepest secret for the most obvious of reasons (at least then). If you were a boy and admitted that you actually wanted to look at birds — I’m not sure the phrase “bird watch” was even in use at the time — god knows what your peers would have said about you. They would — we had no doubt of this — have simply drummed us out of the corps of boys. (That any of them might then have had their own set of secret fascinations would never, of course, have crossed our minds.) All you have to do to conjure up the mood of that moment is to imagine our president back then and the kind of mockery to which he would certainly have subjected boys who looked at birds!

Now, so many decades later, in another America in which the coronavirus has already reached pandemic proportions (potentially threatening staggering losses, especially among old folks like me), in which the stock market is already tanking, in which a great recession-cum-depression could be on the horizon, and our future FDR — that is, the president who helped us out of the last Great Depression in the 1930s — could an over-the-hill 77-year-old former vice president, it seems odd indeed to write about beautiful birds from another earthly moment. But maybe that’s the point.

Fini? Think about it this way: as last year ended, Science magazine reported that, in North America, there were three billion fewer birds than in 1970; in other words, almost one out of every three birds on this continent is now gone. As Carl Zimmer of the New York Times put it, “The skies are emptying out.” Among them, warblers have taken one of the heaviest hits — there are an estimated 617 million fewer of them — as well as birds more generally that migrate up the East Coast (and so have a shot at landing in Central Park). Many are the causes, including habitat loss, pesticides, and even feral cats, but climate change is undoubtedly a factor as well. The authors of the Audubon Society’s most recent national report, for instance, suggest that, “if Earth continues to warm according to current trends — rising 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 — more than two-thirds of North America’s bird species will be vulnerable to extinction due to range loss.”

Extinction. Take that word in. They’ll be gone. No more. Fini.

That, by the way, is a global, not just a North American, reality, and such apocalyptic possibilities are hardly restricted to birds. Insects, for instance, are experiencing their own Armageddon and while — monarch butterflies (down 90% in the U.S. in the last 20 years) aside — we humans don’t tend to think of them as beauties, they are, among other things, key pollinators and crucial to food chains everywhere.

Or think about it this way: on Monday, March 8th, in my hometown, New York City, it was 68 degrees and that was nothing. After all, on February 19th, in Central Park, the temperature had hit a record-breaking 78 degrees in the heart of winter, not just the highest for that day on record but for the month of February, historically speaking. At the time, we were passing through a “winter” in which essentially no snow had fallen. And that should have surprised no one. After all, January had started the year with a bang globally as the hottest January on record, which again should have surprised no one, since the last five years have been the warmest ever recorded on this planet (ditto the last 10 years and 19 of the last 20 years). Oh, and 2020 already has a 50% chance of being the warmest year yet.

And by the way, soon after that 68-degree day, in our parks I began to notice the first crocuses and daffodils pushing through the soil and blooming. It was little short of remarkable and, in truth, would all have been beautiful, not to say glorious — the weather, the flowers, the sense of ease and comfort, the springiness of everything — if you didn’t know just what such “beauty” actually meant on a planet potentially heating to pandemic proportions.

How sad when even what’s still truly beautiful on this globe of ours increasingly tells a story that couldn’t be grimmer. So, think of this as my in-memoriam essay about the planet I thought I grew up on and the birds I thought I knew. Consider it a kind of epitaph-in-advance for a world that, if the rest of us can’t get ourselves together, if we can’t rid ourselves of arsonists like Donald Trump and his crew or those fossil-fueled CEOs that he loves so much, may all-too-soon seem unrecognizable.

In the meantime, consider me — semi-locked in my apartment — to be, in my own fashion, in mourning. Not for myself, mind you, though I’m almost 76 and my years on this planet are bound to be limited, but for those I’ll be leaving behind, my children and grandchildren in particular. This just wasn’t the world I ever wanted them to inherit.

In truth, in this coronaviral moment of ours, our world is being transformed before our eyes into one of missing beauties. Given my teenage years, I want to leave my grandchildren the pleasure of entering Central Park in some distant May, long after I’m gone, and still seeing the brilliant colors of a scarlet tanager. That’s my hope, despite everything.

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: 24 March 2020

Word Count: 1,898

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we need is better politics.

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

And they are asking the Republicans to lose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 March 2020

Word Count: 793

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So, the coronavirus pandemic has shown its brutal face in Turkey as well. After a long period of silence by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose choice to remain out of the spotlight for about a week raised many eyebrows, the number of coronavirus cases declared by the Ministry of Health points to a surge.

As a result, those who mistrusted the system for its lack of transparency raised their voices even louder.

As of March 20, 359 people in Turkey were confirmed as being infected with coronavirus, with 168 diagnoses recorded in the preceding 24 hours. There have been four confirmed deaths, although that number was predicted to rise geometrically, given the alarm being raised by doctors.

The government agrees. Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said he expected the number of coronavirus diagnoses to peak within two weeks. After a remarkable hesitation in recent weeks, authorities placed about 10,000 people under quarantine.

However, much of the official attention seems disproportionately focused on economic measures rather than tackling the spread of the virus. Ankara’s plan to deal with the pandemic, given the hardships already being faced by Turkey’s embattled economy, has been exposed amid a quickly weakening local currency and soaring unemployment.

All of this points to an uphill battle. Even Erdogan’s recent announcement of a 100 billion lira ($15.4 billion) package to support Turkey’s economy offered more questions than answers, with experts wondering how the envisioned funding will be financed. Many predicted a rapidly rising inflation rate.

On the political level, Turkey’s hard-line administration is demonstrating its well-known reflexes. Erdogan’s much-anticipated speech March 19 was heavily coloured by religion and framed by the elements of a Friday sermon rather than based on concrete preventive steps, which did not go beyond “wash your hands and salute each other from a distance” rhetoric.

“The best way not to fight the epidemic is not to be caught by the virus,” he said, stating the obvious.

However, his broader strategy couldn’t be clearer: Focus on his devout base, even if this falls short of his constitutional duty to embrace the whole nation at a time of global crisis that defies borders.

On the social level, there were facts that surfaced and others that remain question marks.

First, there is the defiant mentality of fatalism that seems deep-rooted in the conservative psyche. Although the mighty Diyanet (Directorate of Religious Affairs), which has more than 100,000 imams on its payroll, decided to close the mosques for Friday prayers and community gatherings, many deeply pious men — apparently influenced by the myth of Erdogan as saviour — expressed indifference, some openly protesting the ban on entering mosques.

The element of religion revealed the main source of the spread of the virus. It was the people returning from umrah — pilgrimage in Mecca — who, despite authorities’ early knowledge of the outbreak, were allowed to travel to Saudi Arabia. About 15,000 pilgrims returned to Turkey during this period and, without being put under quarantine, mingled with their relatives and neighbours. When the next batch of returning pilgrims, around 7,000, were placed in confinement, it seemed too little, too late.

So deep was the ignorance among these returning pilgrims that many of them attempted to escape, some successfully. Such social facts show the weaknesses — or unwillingness — of Turkey’s political leadership.

The big unknown is what to do with the massive number of prison inmates. There are nearly 300,000 people locked up behind bars in Turkey. It is well known that after the 2016 attempted coup, Turkey’s prisons were filled beyond capacity. Human Rights Watch said approximately 50,000 of Turkey’s prison population are political prisoners, the main bulk of whom are Gulenists and Kurdish dissidents, as well as liberals, judges and journalists.

Voices are rising, referring to Iran’s move to release prisoners to curb the pandemic from penetrating prison compounds, with many calling for priority release to be given to Turkish prisoners held on political grounds.

The clock is ticking, but — perhaps no surprise for Turkey observers — Erdogan’s government seems hesitant, delaying the process. There are even signs that common criminals could be temporarily released instead.

COVID-19 may turn out to be a codename for testing Erdogan’s regime to the limit as the pandemic forces a tense and mistrustful society to distance itself even further from those who rule the country and their stunning hubris.

Yavuz Baydar is a senior Turkish columnist, and news analyst. A founding member of the Platform for Independent Journalism (P24) in Istanbul, he has been reporting on Turkey and monitoring media issues since 1980. A European Press Prize Laureate in 2014, he is also the winner of Germany’s ‘Journalistenpreis’ in 2018.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 March 2020

Word Count: 722

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The unfolding coronavirus crisis has elements of the surreal, one of which is the extremist group Islamic State’s “travel advice” to its members.

In its al-Naba newsletter, the Islamic State (ISIS) urged its followers to avoid Europe like the plague. Literally. The “healthy should not enter the land of the epidemic and the afflicted should not exit from it,” the group said, in trademark apocalyptic vein.

The advisory prompted some hilarity because ISIS normally reserves fire and brimstone as a warning for what the West has coming to it, at the hands of ISIS. Indeed, it does seem ludicrous that ISIS, which often incites followers to carry out suicide attacks on the West, should issue an advisory restricting travel to Europe and that ISIS, branded a “death cult” by former British Prime Minister David Cameron, appears to fear its followers could die if they set foot in Europe.

One British tabloid columnist suggested that, if ISIS leaders “had any imagination, they would have claimed responsibility for the virus.”

Richard Littlejohn, who is known for his controversial fulminations, wrote in the Daily Mail: “They could have instructed their jihadists to contract it (the novel coronavirus) as soon as possible and become super-spreaders throughout the West. Beats the hell out of blowing yourself up on a bus. And, if the predictions of mass casualties are to be believed, a lot more effective.”

In a bizarre sort of way, that makes sense, especially when it comes to ISIS, a jihadist group that has long pursued a corporatist management model, which professionalised terrorism with the precision use of suicide attacks. Whether it was car bombers, activists detonating suicide vests, random stabbings in world capitals or coordinated assaults in Paris, Brussels, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and elsewhere, the whole point of ISIS has been its celebration of death. It calls its cohort of suicide attackers “death admirers, the knights of martyrdom.”

It wasn’t too long ago that Olivier Roy, the French professor considered an expert on political Islam, noted that ISIS had changed the terrorist’s death from mere possibility or an unfortunate consequence of his actions to a central part of the plan. For ISIS jihadists, said Roy, “suicide attacks are perceived as the ultimate goal of their engagement.”

So, what’s with the travel advisory on Europe, the epicentre of the virus, as stated by the World Health Organisation?

There could be two possible reasons. First, ISIS is nothing if not methodical. That’s been clear since 2013, when it started its rise to prominence, going from a wannabe caliphate to holding territory that comprised about one-third of Syria and 40% of Iraq.

In late 2015, approximately 340 official documents, notices, receipts and internal memos of the Islamic State ruled by ISIS showed the extent to which the jihadist group was obsessed with creating a bureaucratic structure to buttress its state-building exercise.

The documents came to light via Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a young researcher in Cardiff in Wales, who compiled primary source material about the state that ISIS was attempting to build. It was Tamimi, incidentally, who translated ISIS’s travel advisory on Europe and blogged about it in English.

The documents gathered by Tamimi about the now-defunct caliphate stated that ISIS created rules and regulations for everything including fishing, dress codes, the sale of counterfeit brands and university admissions. Even though ISIS lost its state and 95% of its territory and revenue sources by December 2017, there is nothing to suggest it has lost its pragmatic gene.

This brings us to the second possible reason for ISIS’s travel advisory on coronavirus-affected Europe. Might it be a recognition that there is no particular reason to terrorise a region that is already so fearful about its very existence? ISIS might sense that richer pickings in harvesting fear and control are to be had beyond Europe.

Could it signal that ISIS is rebalancing? Loss of territory, revenue, operational capacity and manpower the past three years changed the group’s focus. While ISIS claims it is resurgent in Iraq — a new propaganda video boasts of a series of guerrilla attacks in northern Iraq — the growth area for the group in recent times has been the Sahel, from Senegal to Sudan.

Once it controlled most of Syria’s oil fields and crude was the militant group’s biggest single source of revenue. Now, the International Crisis Group said, ISIS is focused on gold mines in the Sahel, particularly in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. It seems to be the region that ISIS sees as a viable host for its own particular virus.

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: 23 March 2020

Word Count: 757

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He deserves it.

It’s not corrupt if a Republican does it.

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 March 2020

Word Count: 867

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 March 2020

Word Count: 789

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