How a superpower self-destructs
By
DANIEL W. DREZNER
washingtonpost.com
4 min
View Original
President Trump will prolong a ban on U.S. employment permits until the end of the year and broaden it to include H-1B visas used widely in the tech industry, the White House said on June 22.
President Trump will prolong a ban on U.S. employment permits until the end of the year and broaden it to include H-1B visas used widely in the tech industry, the White House said on June 22.
Living in an age of upheaval makes is difficult to distinguish the urgent from the important. Indeed, upheavals frequently occur when the urgent is the important. Even amid an ongoing pandemic, severe economic contraction and significant social upheaval, however, it is worth paying occasional attention to decisions that could do irreparable long-term harm to the country.
The Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus has been pretty woeful, but it is worth appreciating the few bright spots, which primarily have to do with the economy. The Federal Reserve’s leadership has been extraordinary, offering substantial swap lines to other central banks and injecting $2 trillion into the U.S. economy, double the amount of what was done in the months after Lehman Brothers collapsed. On the fiscal side, Congress passed the $2 trillion Cares Act, which included one-time payouts for most adults and their children, plus expanded unemployment benefits and payroll protection for small businesses. As the Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey notes, these moves prevented the economy from straight-up crashing in March.
Despite these huge infusions of money into the economy, interest rates declined during this same period. This highlights a key source of American power: the primacy of the dollar and the ability of the federal government to effortlessly issue new debt. Sebastian Mallaby recently wrote in Foreign Affairs: “Since the start of the pandemic, the United States has unleashed the world’s biggest monetary stimulus and the world’s biggest budgetary stimulus. Miraculously, it has been able to do this at virtually no cost.” If a key measure of state power is the capacity to spend in an unconstrained manner, then the United States remains a unique superpower.
The dollar is only one of several structural advantages most Americans take for granted because it has been supreme for as long as anyone can remember. The United States possesses significant advantages in technology and culture. Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the Ivy League are enormous attracters of global talent. It is not just about attracting the best of the best, however. As I noted in Foreign Affairs last year, “An immigrant culture has constantly replenished this country’s demographic strength, helping the United States avoid the aging problems that plague parts of Europe and the Pacific Rim.”
U.S. advantages in technology, film and higher education are powerful, but policy can undercut them, like someone pulling blocks out of a Jenga tower. And that appears to be what the Trump administration was doing on immigration last week. According to Wired’s Aarian Marshall:
President Trump on Monday signed an executive order temporarily suspending many nonimmigrant visas, including temporary H-1B visas popular among tech companies. Industry executives say the move will push highly skilled tech workers and prospective innovators to other countries.
The executive order also suspends for the rest of the year some J visas, including those for camp counselors and au pairs; H-2B visas for seasonal nonagricultural workers; and L-1 visas, which companies use to transfer existing employees to offices in the US. The order will not affect workers who are already in the country.
The administration says that, while the US continues to suffer from the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, nonimmigrant visa programs “pose an unusual threat to the employment of American workers.” The administration said the move will give US workers access to an additional 525,000 jobs, including the 170,000 vacated by an April ban on green-card holders coming to the US.
As Marshall observes, the Trump administration’s claims of unusual threat are bogus, particularly for H-1B visas. According to a recent National Foundation for American Policy paper, “H-1B visa holders do not adversely affect U.S. workers, according to new research. On the contrary, the evidence points to the presence of H-1B visa holders being associated with lower unemployment rates and faster earnings growth among college graduates, including recent college graduates.”
Edward Alden makes a similar point in Foreign Policy, pointing to the global sources for U.S. talent in artificial intelligence that the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts cited earlier this month. According to Alden, “Rather than strengthening the U.S. economy and enhancing security, these restrictions would be a serious blow to the United States’ lead in cutting-edge technologies. … The ability to recruit and retain many of the top scientific minds from China and many other countries provides an enormous head start.”
Why is the Trump administration implementing own-goals for the U.S. economy? FiveThirtyEight’s Perry Bacon Jr. is probably correct when he noted months ago that any Trump move to restrict immigration is about the president’s preference for fewer immigrants than anything else.
The irony, of course, is that President Trump does not need to implement any restrictionist policies to reduce immigration into the United States. His inept handling of the novel coronavirus has done that all on its own. As U.S. cases skyrocket again, American universities are anticipating significant drop-offs in international students. Little wonder that the European Union plans to block most travelers from the United States. Trump’s desire to restrict immigration into the United States has succeeded because he has turned the United States into, as he might put it, a s---hole country.
One can hope that Trump’s executive order leads to a temporary and impermanent lull in attracting global talent. One must fear the opposite, however, especially after reading the Financial Times’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson. Because there is one big winner from the current administration’s cretinous policies: our neighbor to the North. He quotes Cisco Systems chief executive Chuck Robbins as saying, “This may be a Canadian Jobs Creation Act. You can go to Toronto and hire people there and work quite effectively.”
It will be a bitter irony that the president who insisted his administration was grounded on the idea of “America First” wound up, through prejudice and sheer ineptitude, implementing policies that made Canada great again. In the process, however, he has undercut a key pillar of American greatness.
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Tuesday, June 30, 2020
Zuckerberg once wanted to sanction Trump. Then Facebook wrote rules that accommodated him. Washington Post long read by Elizabeth Dwoskin
Zuckerberg once wanted to sanction Trump. Then Facebook wrote rules that accommodated him.
17-22 minutes
June 29, 2020
To Facebook’s executives in Washington, the post didn’t appear to violate its policies, which allows leaders to post about government use of force if the message is intended to warn the public — but it came right up to the line. The deputies had already contacted the White House earlier in the day with an urgent plea to tweak the language of the post or simply delete it, the people said.
Eventually, Trump posted again, saying his comments were supposed to be a warning after all. Zuckerberg then went online to explain his rationale for keeping the post up, noting that Trump’s subsequent explanation helped him make his decision.
The frenzied push-pull was just the latest incident in a five-year struggle by Facebook to accommodate the boundary-busting ways of Trump. The president has not changed his rhetoric since he was a candidate, but the company has continually altered its policies and its products in ways certain to outlast his presidency.
Facebook has constrained its efforts against false and misleading news, adopted a policy explicitly allowing politicians to lie, and even altered its news feed algorithm to neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers, according to more than a dozen former and current employees and previously unreported documents obtained by The Washington Post. One of the documents shows it began as far back as 2015, when as a candidate Trump posted a video calling for a ban of Muslims entering the United States. Facebook’s executives declined to remove it, setting in motion an exception for political discourse.
The concessions to Trump have led to a transformation of the world’s information battlefield. They paved the way for a growing list of digitally savvy politicians to repeatedly push out misinformation and incendiary political language to billions of people. It has complicated the public understanding of major events such as the pandemic and the protest movement, as well as contributed to polarization.
And as Trump grew in power, the fear of his wrath pushed Facebook into more deferential behavior toward its growing number of right-leaning users, tilting the balance of news people see on the network, according to the current and former employees.
Facebook is now confronting a mounting advertiser boycott that has pushed down its stock price as companies demand stricter policies against hate speech. Starbucks became the latest on Sunday to say it would hit pause on social media advertising.
Facebook is also facing a slow-burning crisis of morale, with more than 5,000 employees denouncing the company’s decision to leave Trump’s post that said, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” up.
Bowing to those pressures on Friday, Zuckerberg announced a rash of new policies aimed at better policing content on the site. That includes affixing labels on posts that violate hate speech or other policies — even on those from political leaders.
But the company said the post wouldn’t have qualified.
As the United States heads into another presidential election while facing a pandemic and civil unrest, the latitude given to Trump may afford him a potential advantage. In recent months, he has used Facebook and other platforms to tout misleading information about coronavirus cures, election fraud and the motives of protesters, frequently targeting a left-wing movement as a cause of violence without citing evidence.
It also places Facebook in growing conflict with its counterparts in Silicon Valley. Twitter has labeled several presidential tweets as abusive and misleading, and social media platform Snapchat curtailed the reach of the president’s account.
“The value of being in favor with people in power outweighs almost every other concern for Facebook,” said David Thiel, a Facebook security engineer who resigned in March after his colleagues refused to remove a post he believed constituted “dehumanizing speech” by Brazil’s president.
Facebook contends the use of incendiary populist language predates social media. Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for global affairs and communications, said in a statement that populism wasn’t invented in Silicon Valley, pointing to centuries of political history before social media companies’ existence.
“From the Arab Spring to local candidates challenging political incumbents, social media has also helped to open up politics, not favor one side over the other,” Clegg added. “Studies have shown the drivers of populism are complex and cannot be reduced to the use of social media, in fact political polarization has fallen in many countries with high internet use.”
Facebook declined to make Zuckerberg available for an interview, although it pointed out that Zuckerberg opposed Trump when his Muslim immigration ban went into effect. The White House declined to comment.
Zuckerberg talks frequently about making choices that stand the test of time, preserving the values of Facebook and subsidiaries WhatsApp and Instagram for all of its nearly 3 billion monthly users for many years into the future — even when those decisions are unpopular or controversial.
At one point, however, he wanted a different approach to Trump.
Setting the stage
Before the 2016 election, the company largely saw its role in politics as courting political leaders to buy ads and broadcast their views, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking.
But that started to change in 2015, as Trump’s candidacy picked up speed. In December of that year, he posted a video in which he said he wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. The video went viral on Facebook and was an early indication of the tone of his candidacy.
Outrage over the video led to a companywide town hall, in which employees decried the video as hate speech, in violation of the company’s policies. And in meetings about the issue, senior leaders and policy experts overwhelmingly said they felt that the video was hate speech, according to three former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Zuckerberg expressed in meetings that he was personally disgusted by it and wanted it removed, the people said. Some of these details were previously reported.
At one of the meetings, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president for policy, drafted a document to address the video and shared it with leaders including Zuckerberg’s top deputy COO Sheryl Sandberg and Vice President of Global Policy Joel Kaplan, the company’s most prominent Republican.
The document, which is previously unreported and obtained by The Post, weighed four options. They included removing the post for hate speech violations, making a one-time exception for it, creating a broad exemption for political discourse and even weakening the company’s community guidelines for everyone, allowing comments such as “No blacks allowed” and “Get the gays out of San Francisco.”
Facebook spokesman Tucker Bounds said the latter option was never seriously considered.
The document also listed possible “PR Risks” for each. For example, lowering the standards overall would raise questions such as, “Would Facebook have provided a platform for Hitler?” Bickert wrote. A carveout for political speech across the board, on the other hand, risked opening the floodgates for even more hateful “copycat” comments.
Ultimately, Zuckerberg was talked out of his desire to remove the post in part by Kaplan, according to the people. Instead, the executives created an allowance that newsworthy political discourse would be taken into account when making decisions about whether posts violated community guidelines.
That allowance was not formally written into the policies, even though it informed ad hoc decision-making about political speech for the next several years, according to the people. When a formal newsworthiness policy was announced in October 2016, in a blog post by Kaplan, the company did not discuss Trump’s role in shaping it.
In an interview, Bickert said the company ultimately made a call to maintain Trump’s Muslim ban video because executives interpreted Trump’s comment to mean that the then-candidate was not speaking about all Muslims, but rather advocating for a policy position on immigration as part of a newsworthy political debate. She said she did not recall the document where the options were presented.
Facebook’s Bounds added that the “newsworthiness” policy was added in 2016 after content reviewers removed a photo of a naked girl fleeing a napalm attack during the Vietnam War. “Our goal was to recognize the essential public benefit of preserving content that in other contexts wouldn’t be allowed,” Bounds said. “In the case of elected officials, it also ensures that they will be held to account for their words,” so that people can judge for themselves.
In spring of 2016, Zuckerberg was also talked out of his desire to write a post specifically condemning Trump for his calls to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, after advisers in Washington warned it could look like choosing sides, according to Dex Torricke-Barton, one of Zuckerberg’s former speechwriters.
The political speech carveout ended up setting the stage for how the company would handle not only Trump, but populist leaders around the world who have posted content that test these boundaries, such as Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Narendra Modi in India.
“Though [Facebook] has cracked down on misinformation, the most problematic influencers are politicians,” said Claire Wardle, U.S. director of First Draft, an organization dedicated to fighting misinformation that has a partnership with Facebook. “You can do all the fact checking in the world, but these influencers have a disproportionate impact.”
Trump presented a unique challenge, she added. “Until then, no one would have considered a president who would have said those things.”
Protecting the right
After the election, it became clear Russia had used social media to sow disinformation. Facebook soon after became a frequent target of the president’s ire. He tweeted that the social media giant was “anti-Trump” and trying to undermine his victory.
At the same time, GOP leaders stepped up criticism that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, with leadership ranks full of liberals, sought to limit the reach of right-leaning voices.
“There’s no credible research supporting Trump’s claim that social platforms suppress conservative content, but he still succeeded in getting them to revise their rules for him,” said former Facebook spokesman Nu Wexler, who left the company in 2018.
As Facebook scrambled to tackle foreign interference and misinformation, its executives in the nation’s capital argued that caution and deference was necessary to survive the new political environment, according to three people familiar with the company’s thinking.
Facebook’s security engineers in December 2016 presented findings from a broad internal investigation, known as Project P, to senior leadership on how false and misleading news reports spread so virally during the election. When Facebook’s security team highlighted dozens of pages that had peddled false news reports, senior leaders in Washington, including Kaplan, opposed shutting them down immediately, arguing that doing so would disproportionately impact conservatives, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. Ultimately, the company shut down far fewer pages than were originally proposed while it began developing a policy to handle these issues.
A year later, Facebook considered how to overhaul its scrolling news feed, the homepage screen most users see when they open the site. As part of the change to help limit misinformation, it changed its news feed algorithm to focus more on posts by friends and family versus publishers.
In meetings about the change, Kaplan questioned whether the revamped algorithm would hurt right-leaning publishers more than others, according to three people familiar with the company’s thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. When the data showed it would — conservative leaning outlets were pushing more content that violated its policies, the company had found — he successfully pushed for changes to make the new algorithm to be what he considered more evenhanded in its impact, the people said.
Isolated and divided
With the 2020 election on the horizon, Facebook and Zuckerberg’s hands-off approach to free speech was leaving it increasingly isolated in Silicon Valley.
In May 2019, Zuckerberg, citing free speech, refused to take down a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that made her appear drunk.
That summer, company leaders held a meeting to revisit its newsworthiness exception, which until then had been determined on a case-by-case basis, with the most controversial calls made by Zuckerberg. Internally, some were unclear how far that leeway extended, according to two people.
Clegg, the company’s new head of global affairs and communications and a former British deputy prime minister, announced the outcome of that meeting at a speech in Washington in September 2019. Aside from speech that causes violence or real-world harm, Facebook would allow politicians to express themselves virtually unchecked on social media. Facebook’s network of independent fact-checkers, which had been established as a key part of the company’s response to disinformation, would not evaluate their claims and the community guidelines would largely not apply to politicians.
Facebook did not want to be an arbiter of truth in political debate, he said, echoing Zuckerberg’s long-standing position.
The speech angered some employees, triggering more than 250 of them to sign a petition disagreeing with the decision because they thought it gave politicians a pass.
One former executive, Yael Eisenstat, who worked to improve the political ads process, wrote in The Post that the controversy was “the biggest test of whether [Facebook] will ever truly put society and democracy ahead of profit and ideology.”
She said that she routinely experienced how the company’s efforts at integrity were often undermined by “the few voices who ultimately decided the company’s overall direction.”
Meanwhile, in October, as Facebook faced more potential regulation and political troubles, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan went to the White House for a private dinner with Trump, a part of the CEO’s effort to cultivate personal relationships in Washington.
Tweetstorm
As the pandemic and civil unrest dominated the first half of this year, Trump continued to turn to social media platforms to spread misinformation. He touted the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine as a possible cure for the coronavirus and claimed without evidence that the left-wing antifa movement was behind the violence at George Floyd protests.
Meanwhile, Facebook employees began challenging the company’s decisions.
Two months before Trump’s “looting, shooting” post, the Brazilian president posted about the country’s indigenous population, saying, “Indians are undoubtedly changing. They are increasingly becoming human beings just like us.”
Thiel, the security engineer, and other employees argued internally that it violated the company’s internal guidelines against “dehumanizing speech.” They were referring to Zuckerberg’s own words while testifying before Congress in October in which he said dehumanizing speech “is the first step toward inciting” violence. In internal correspondence, Thiel was told that it didn’t qualify as racism — and may have even been a positive reference to integration.
Thiel quit in disgust.
In May, following years of internal debate of its own, Twitter chose to go in the opposite direction. It labeled two misleading tweets by Trump about mail-in ballots with a fact-check label.
Trump responded two days later with an executive order that could hurt social media companies by removing a key exception that limits their liability for content posted on their sites.
The next day, Trump tweeted about the Minnesota protests. Twitter quickly labeled the tweet for violating rules about glorifying violence, and Snapchat stopped promoting Trump’s account the following week. YouTube told The Post that it holds politicians to the same standards as everyone else.
Facebook, on the other hand, chose to haggle with the White House, asking for a deletion or a change, said the people. Axios first reported the call, which Facebook’s Bounds confirmed to The Post.
As employees raged on internal message boards and externally on Twitter, Zuckerberg told workers that Facebook’s policies might change again in light of Trump’s post. The company had rules allowing for “state use of force,” he said, but they were vague and didn’t encompass the possibility that such pronouncements could signal harmful aggression. Bickert’s team planned a series of policy meetings for the weeks ahead.
In June, Facebook removed a swath of Trump campaign ads with Nazi symbolism, after an initial internal assessment that found the ads did not violate the company’s polices, according to documents viewed by The Post. In meetings, senior executives argued that not removing them would be perceived as pandering too much to the president, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
Last week, the advertiser boycott picked up steam. Hershey, Verizon, Unilever, Coca-Cola and others said they were temporarily pulling ads.
On Friday, Zuckerberg told employees in a live-streamed town hall that he was changing the company’s policy to label problematic newsworthy content that violated the company’s policies as Twitter does, a major concession amid the rising tide of criticism. He also said in the most explicit language ever that the company would remove posts by politicians that incite violence and suppress voting. Still, civil rights leaders said his assertions didn’t go far enough.
“There are no exceptions for politicians in any of the policies that I’m announcing today,” Zuckerberg said.
17-22 minutes
By Elizabeth Dwoskin
washingtonpost.com
14 min
To Facebook’s executives in Washington, the post didn’t appear to violate its policies, which allows leaders to post about government use of force if the message is intended to warn the public — but it came right up to the line. The deputies had already contacted the White House earlier in the day with an urgent plea to tweak the language of the post or simply delete it, the people said.
Eventually, Trump posted again, saying his comments were supposed to be a warning after all. Zuckerberg then went online to explain his rationale for keeping the post up, noting that Trump’s subsequent explanation helped him make his decision.
The frenzied push-pull was just the latest incident in a five-year struggle by Facebook to accommodate the boundary-busting ways of Trump. The president has not changed his rhetoric since he was a candidate, but the company has continually altered its policies and its products in ways certain to outlast his presidency.
Facebook has constrained its efforts against false and misleading news, adopted a policy explicitly allowing politicians to lie, and even altered its news feed algorithm to neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers, according to more than a dozen former and current employees and previously unreported documents obtained by The Washington Post. One of the documents shows it began as far back as 2015, when as a candidate Trump posted a video calling for a ban of Muslims entering the United States. Facebook’s executives declined to remove it, setting in motion an exception for political discourse.
The concessions to Trump have led to a transformation of the world’s information battlefield. They paved the way for a growing list of digitally savvy politicians to repeatedly push out misinformation and incendiary political language to billions of people. It has complicated the public understanding of major events such as the pandemic and the protest movement, as well as contributed to polarization.
And as Trump grew in power, the fear of his wrath pushed Facebook into more deferential behavior toward its growing number of right-leaning users, tilting the balance of news people see on the network, according to the current and former employees.
Facebook is now confronting a mounting advertiser boycott that has pushed down its stock price as companies demand stricter policies against hate speech. Starbucks became the latest on Sunday to say it would hit pause on social media advertising.
Facebook is also facing a slow-burning crisis of morale, with more than 5,000 employees denouncing the company’s decision to leave Trump’s post that said, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” up.
Bowing to those pressures on Friday, Zuckerberg announced a rash of new policies aimed at better policing content on the site. That includes affixing labels on posts that violate hate speech or other policies — even on those from political leaders.
But the company said the post wouldn’t have qualified.
As the United States heads into another presidential election while facing a pandemic and civil unrest, the latitude given to Trump may afford him a potential advantage. In recent months, he has used Facebook and other platforms to tout misleading information about coronavirus cures, election fraud and the motives of protesters, frequently targeting a left-wing movement as a cause of violence without citing evidence.
It also places Facebook in growing conflict with its counterparts in Silicon Valley. Twitter has labeled several presidential tweets as abusive and misleading, and social media platform Snapchat curtailed the reach of the president’s account.
“The value of being in favor with people in power outweighs almost every other concern for Facebook,” said David Thiel, a Facebook security engineer who resigned in March after his colleagues refused to remove a post he believed constituted “dehumanizing speech” by Brazil’s president.
Facebook contends the use of incendiary populist language predates social media. Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for global affairs and communications, said in a statement that populism wasn’t invented in Silicon Valley, pointing to centuries of political history before social media companies’ existence.
“From the Arab Spring to local candidates challenging political incumbents, social media has also helped to open up politics, not favor one side over the other,” Clegg added. “Studies have shown the drivers of populism are complex and cannot be reduced to the use of social media, in fact political polarization has fallen in many countries with high internet use.”
Facebook declined to make Zuckerberg available for an interview, although it pointed out that Zuckerberg opposed Trump when his Muslim immigration ban went into effect. The White House declined to comment.
Zuckerberg talks frequently about making choices that stand the test of time, preserving the values of Facebook and subsidiaries WhatsApp and Instagram for all of its nearly 3 billion monthly users for many years into the future — even when those decisions are unpopular or controversial.
At one point, however, he wanted a different approach to Trump.
Setting the stage
Before the 2016 election, the company largely saw its role in politics as courting political leaders to buy ads and broadcast their views, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking.
But that started to change in 2015, as Trump’s candidacy picked up speed. In December of that year, he posted a video in which he said he wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. The video went viral on Facebook and was an early indication of the tone of his candidacy.
Outrage over the video led to a companywide town hall, in which employees decried the video as hate speech, in violation of the company’s policies. And in meetings about the issue, senior leaders and policy experts overwhelmingly said they felt that the video was hate speech, according to three former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Zuckerberg expressed in meetings that he was personally disgusted by it and wanted it removed, the people said. Some of these details were previously reported.
At one of the meetings, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president for policy, drafted a document to address the video and shared it with leaders including Zuckerberg’s top deputy COO Sheryl Sandberg and Vice President of Global Policy Joel Kaplan, the company’s most prominent Republican.
The document, which is previously unreported and obtained by The Post, weighed four options. They included removing the post for hate speech violations, making a one-time exception for it, creating a broad exemption for political discourse and even weakening the company’s community guidelines for everyone, allowing comments such as “No blacks allowed” and “Get the gays out of San Francisco.”
Facebook spokesman Tucker Bounds said the latter option was never seriously considered.
The document also listed possible “PR Risks” for each. For example, lowering the standards overall would raise questions such as, “Would Facebook have provided a platform for Hitler?” Bickert wrote. A carveout for political speech across the board, on the other hand, risked opening the floodgates for even more hateful “copycat” comments.
Ultimately, Zuckerberg was talked out of his desire to remove the post in part by Kaplan, according to the people. Instead, the executives created an allowance that newsworthy political discourse would be taken into account when making decisions about whether posts violated community guidelines.
That allowance was not formally written into the policies, even though it informed ad hoc decision-making about political speech for the next several years, according to the people. When a formal newsworthiness policy was announced in October 2016, in a blog post by Kaplan, the company did not discuss Trump’s role in shaping it.
In an interview, Bickert said the company ultimately made a call to maintain Trump’s Muslim ban video because executives interpreted Trump’s comment to mean that the then-candidate was not speaking about all Muslims, but rather advocating for a policy position on immigration as part of a newsworthy political debate. She said she did not recall the document where the options were presented.
Facebook’s Bounds added that the “newsworthiness” policy was added in 2016 after content reviewers removed a photo of a naked girl fleeing a napalm attack during the Vietnam War. “Our goal was to recognize the essential public benefit of preserving content that in other contexts wouldn’t be allowed,” Bounds said. “In the case of elected officials, it also ensures that they will be held to account for their words,” so that people can judge for themselves.
In spring of 2016, Zuckerberg was also talked out of his desire to write a post specifically condemning Trump for his calls to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, after advisers in Washington warned it could look like choosing sides, according to Dex Torricke-Barton, one of Zuckerberg’s former speechwriters.
The political speech carveout ended up setting the stage for how the company would handle not only Trump, but populist leaders around the world who have posted content that test these boundaries, such as Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Narendra Modi in India.
“Though [Facebook] has cracked down on misinformation, the most problematic influencers are politicians,” said Claire Wardle, U.S. director of First Draft, an organization dedicated to fighting misinformation that has a partnership with Facebook. “You can do all the fact checking in the world, but these influencers have a disproportionate impact.”
Trump presented a unique challenge, she added. “Until then, no one would have considered a president who would have said those things.”
Protecting the right
After the election, it became clear Russia had used social media to sow disinformation. Facebook soon after became a frequent target of the president’s ire. He tweeted that the social media giant was “anti-Trump” and trying to undermine his victory.
At the same time, GOP leaders stepped up criticism that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, with leadership ranks full of liberals, sought to limit the reach of right-leaning voices.
“There’s no credible research supporting Trump’s claim that social platforms suppress conservative content, but he still succeeded in getting them to revise their rules for him,” said former Facebook spokesman Nu Wexler, who left the company in 2018.
As Facebook scrambled to tackle foreign interference and misinformation, its executives in the nation’s capital argued that caution and deference was necessary to survive the new political environment, according to three people familiar with the company’s thinking.
Facebook’s security engineers in December 2016 presented findings from a broad internal investigation, known as Project P, to senior leadership on how false and misleading news reports spread so virally during the election. When Facebook’s security team highlighted dozens of pages that had peddled false news reports, senior leaders in Washington, including Kaplan, opposed shutting them down immediately, arguing that doing so would disproportionately impact conservatives, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. Ultimately, the company shut down far fewer pages than were originally proposed while it began developing a policy to handle these issues.
A year later, Facebook considered how to overhaul its scrolling news feed, the homepage screen most users see when they open the site. As part of the change to help limit misinformation, it changed its news feed algorithm to focus more on posts by friends and family versus publishers.
In meetings about the change, Kaplan questioned whether the revamped algorithm would hurt right-leaning publishers more than others, according to three people familiar with the company’s thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. When the data showed it would — conservative leaning outlets were pushing more content that violated its policies, the company had found — he successfully pushed for changes to make the new algorithm to be what he considered more evenhanded in its impact, the people said.
Isolated and divided
With the 2020 election on the horizon, Facebook and Zuckerberg’s hands-off approach to free speech was leaving it increasingly isolated in Silicon Valley.
In May 2019, Zuckerberg, citing free speech, refused to take down a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that made her appear drunk.
That summer, company leaders held a meeting to revisit its newsworthiness exception, which until then had been determined on a case-by-case basis, with the most controversial calls made by Zuckerberg. Internally, some were unclear how far that leeway extended, according to two people.
Clegg, the company’s new head of global affairs and communications and a former British deputy prime minister, announced the outcome of that meeting at a speech in Washington in September 2019. Aside from speech that causes violence or real-world harm, Facebook would allow politicians to express themselves virtually unchecked on social media. Facebook’s network of independent fact-checkers, which had been established as a key part of the company’s response to disinformation, would not evaluate their claims and the community guidelines would largely not apply to politicians.
Facebook did not want to be an arbiter of truth in political debate, he said, echoing Zuckerberg’s long-standing position.
The speech angered some employees, triggering more than 250 of them to sign a petition disagreeing with the decision because they thought it gave politicians a pass.
One former executive, Yael Eisenstat, who worked to improve the political ads process, wrote in The Post that the controversy was “the biggest test of whether [Facebook] will ever truly put society and democracy ahead of profit and ideology.”
She said that she routinely experienced how the company’s efforts at integrity were often undermined by “the few voices who ultimately decided the company’s overall direction.”
Meanwhile, in October, as Facebook faced more potential regulation and political troubles, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan went to the White House for a private dinner with Trump, a part of the CEO’s effort to cultivate personal relationships in Washington.
Tweetstorm
As the pandemic and civil unrest dominated the first half of this year, Trump continued to turn to social media platforms to spread misinformation. He touted the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine as a possible cure for the coronavirus and claimed without evidence that the left-wing antifa movement was behind the violence at George Floyd protests.
Meanwhile, Facebook employees began challenging the company’s decisions.
Two months before Trump’s “looting, shooting” post, the Brazilian president posted about the country’s indigenous population, saying, “Indians are undoubtedly changing. They are increasingly becoming human beings just like us.”
Thiel, the security engineer, and other employees argued internally that it violated the company’s internal guidelines against “dehumanizing speech.” They were referring to Zuckerberg’s own words while testifying before Congress in October in which he said dehumanizing speech “is the first step toward inciting” violence. In internal correspondence, Thiel was told that it didn’t qualify as racism — and may have even been a positive reference to integration.
Thiel quit in disgust.
In May, following years of internal debate of its own, Twitter chose to go in the opposite direction. It labeled two misleading tweets by Trump about mail-in ballots with a fact-check label.
Trump responded two days later with an executive order that could hurt social media companies by removing a key exception that limits their liability for content posted on their sites.
The next day, Trump tweeted about the Minnesota protests. Twitter quickly labeled the tweet for violating rules about glorifying violence, and Snapchat stopped promoting Trump’s account the following week. YouTube told The Post that it holds politicians to the same standards as everyone else.
Facebook, on the other hand, chose to haggle with the White House, asking for a deletion or a change, said the people. Axios first reported the call, which Facebook’s Bounds confirmed to The Post.
As employees raged on internal message boards and externally on Twitter, Zuckerberg told workers that Facebook’s policies might change again in light of Trump’s post. The company had rules allowing for “state use of force,” he said, but they were vague and didn’t encompass the possibility that such pronouncements could signal harmful aggression. Bickert’s team planned a series of policy meetings for the weeks ahead.
In June, Facebook removed a swath of Trump campaign ads with Nazi symbolism, after an initial internal assessment that found the ads did not violate the company’s polices, according to documents viewed by The Post. In meetings, senior executives argued that not removing them would be perceived as pandering too much to the president, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
Last week, the advertiser boycott picked up steam. Hershey, Verizon, Unilever, Coca-Cola and others said they were temporarily pulling ads.
On Friday, Zuckerberg told employees in a live-streamed town hall that he was changing the company’s policy to label problematic newsworthy content that violated the company’s policies as Twitter does, a major concession amid the rising tide of criticism. He also said in the most explicit language ever that the company would remove posts by politicians that incite violence and suppress voting. Still, civil rights leaders said his assertions didn’t go far enough.
“There are no exceptions for politicians in any of the policies that I’m announcing today,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg once wanted to sanction Trump. Then Facebook wrote rules that accommodated him.
Zuckerberg once wanted to sanction Trump. Then Facebook wrote rules that accommodated him.
ByElizabeth Dwoskin
washingtonpost.com
14 min
June 29, 2020
Hours after President Trump’s incendiary post last month about sending the military to the Minnesota protests, Trump called Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
The post put the company in a difficult position, Zuckerberg told Trump, according to people familiar with the discussions. The same message was hidden by Twitter, the strongest action ever taken against a presidential post.
To Facebook’s executives in Washington, the post didn’t appear to violate its policies, which allows leaders to post about government use of force if the message is intended to warn the public — but it came right up to the line. The deputies had already contacted the White House earlier in the day with an urgent plea to tweak the language of the post or simply delete it, the people said.
Eventually, Trump posted again, saying his comments were supposed to be a warning after all. Zuckerberg then went online to explain his rationale for keeping the post up, noting that Trump’s subsequent explanation helped him make his decision.
The frenzied push-pull was just the latest incident in a five-year struggle by Facebook to accommodate the boundary-busting ways of Trump. The president has not changed his rhetoric since he was a candidate, but the company has continually altered its policies and its products in ways certain to outlast his presidency.
Facebook has constrained its efforts against false and misleading news, adopted a policy explicitly allowing politicians to lie, and even altered its news feed algorithm to neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers, according to more than a dozen former and current employees and previously unreported documents obtained by The Washington Post. One of the documents shows it began as far back as 2015, when as a candidate Trump posted a video calling for a ban of Muslims entering the United States. Facebook’s executives declined to remove it, setting in motion an exception for political discourse.
The concessions to Trump have led to a transformation of the world’s information battlefield. They paved the way for a growing list of digitally savvy politicians to repeatedly push out misinformation and incendiary political language to billions of people. It has complicated the public understanding of major events such as the pandemic and the protest movement, as well as contributed to polarization.
And as Trump grew in power, the fear of his wrath pushed Facebook into more deferential behavior toward its growing number of right-leaning users, tilting the balance of news people see on the network, according to the current and former employees.
Facebook is now confronting a mounting advertiser boycott that has pushed down its stock price as companies demand stricter policies against hate speech. Starbucks became the latest on Sunday to say it would hit pause on social media advertising.
Facebook is also facing a slow-burning crisis of morale, with more than 5,000 employees denouncing the company’s decision to leave Trump’s post that said, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” up.
Bowing to those pressures on Friday, Zuckerberg announced a rash of new policies aimed at better policing content on the site. That includes affixing labels on posts that violate hate speech or other policies — even on those from political leaders.
But the company said the post wouldn’t have qualified.
As the United States heads into another presidential election while facing a pandemic and civil unrest, the latitude given to Trump may afford him a potential advantage. In recent months, he has used Facebook and other platforms to tout misleading information about coronavirus cures, election fraud and the motives of protesters, frequently targeting a left-wing movement as a cause of violence without citing evidence.
It also places Facebook in growing conflict with its counterparts in Silicon Valley. Twitter has labeled several presidential tweets as abusive and misleading, and social media platform Snapchat curtailed the reach of the president’s account.
“The value of being in favor with people in power outweighs almost every other concern for Facebook,” said David Thiel, a Facebook security engineer who resigned in March after his colleagues refused to remove a post he believed constituted “dehumanizing speech” by Brazil’s president.
Facebook contends the use of incendiary populist language predates social media. Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for global affairs and communications, said in a statement that populism wasn’t invented in Silicon Valley, pointing to centuries of political history before social media companies’ existence.
“From the Arab Spring to local candidates challenging political incumbents, social media has also helped to open up politics, not favor one side over the other,” Clegg added. “Studies have shown the drivers of populism are complex and cannot be reduced to the use of social media, in fact political polarization has fallen in many countries with high internet use.”
Facebook declined to make Zuckerberg available for an interview, although it pointed out that Zuckerberg opposed Trump when his Muslim immigration ban went into effect. The White House declined to comment.
Zuckerberg talks frequently about making choices that stand the test of time, preserving the values of Facebook and subsidiaries WhatsApp and Instagram for all of its nearly 3 billion monthly users for many years into the future — even when those decisions are unpopular or controversial.
At one point, however, he wanted a different approach to Trump.
Setting the stage
Before the 2016 election, the company largely saw its role in politics as courting political leaders to buy ads and broadcast their views, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking.
But that started to change in 2015, as Trump’s candidacy picked up speed. In December of that year, he posted a video in which he said he wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. The video went viral on Facebook and was an early indication of the tone of his candidacy.
Outrage over the video led to a companywide town hall, in which employees decried the video as hate speech, in violation of the company’s policies. And in meetings about the issue, senior leaders and policy experts overwhelmingly said they felt that the video was hate speech, according to three former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Zuckerberg expressed in meetings that he was personally disgusted by it and wanted it removed, the people said. Some of these details were previously reported.
At one of the meetings, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president for policy, drafted a document to address the video and shared it with leaders including Zuckerberg’s top deputy COO Sheryl Sandberg and Vice President of Global Policy Joel Kaplan, the company’s most prominent Republican.
The document, which is previously unreported and obtained by The Post, weighed four options. They included removing the post for hate speech violations, making a one-time exception for it, creating a broad exemption for political discourse and even weakening the company’s community guidelines for everyone, allowing comments such as “No blacks allowed” and “Get the gays out of San Francisco.”
Facebook spokesman Tucker Bounds said the latter option was never seriously considered.
The document also listed possible “PR Risks” for each. For example, lowering the standards overall would raise questions such as, “Would Facebook have provided a platform for Hitler?” Bickert wrote. A carveout for political speech across the board, on the other hand, risked opening the floodgates for even more hateful “copycat” comments.
Ultimately, Zuckerberg was talked out of his desire to remove the post in part by Kaplan, according to the people. Instead, the executives created an allowance that newsworthy political discourse would be taken into account when making decisions about whether posts violated community guidelines.
That allowance was not formally written into the policies, even though it informed ad hoc decision-making about political speech for the next several years, according to the people. When a formal newsworthiness policy was announced in October 2016, in a blog post by Kaplan, the company did not discuss Trump’s role in shaping it.
In an interview, Bickert said the company ultimately made a call to maintain Trump’s Muslim ban video because executives interpreted Trump’s comment to mean that the then-candidate was not speaking about all Muslims, but rather advocating for a policy position on immigration as part of a newsworthy political debate. She said she did not recall the document where the options were presented.
Facebook’s Bounds added that the “newsworthiness” policy was added in 2016 after content reviewers removed a photo of a naked girl fleeing a napalm attack during the Vietnam War. “Our goal was to recognize the essential public benefit of preserving content that in other contexts wouldn’t be allowed,” Bounds said. “In the case of elected officials, it also ensures that they will be held to account for their words,” so that people can judge for themselves.
In spring of 2016, Zuckerberg was also talked out of his desire to write a post specifically condemning Trump for his calls to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, after advisers in Washington warned it could look like choosing sides, according to Dex Torricke-Barton, one of Zuckerberg’s former speechwriters.
The political speech carveout ended up setting the stage for how the company would handle not only Trump, but populist leaders around the world who have posted content that test these boundaries, such as Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Narendra Modi in India.
“Though [Facebook] has cracked down on misinformation, the most problematic influencers are politicians,” said Claire Wardle, U.S. director of First Draft, an organization dedicated to fighting misinformation that has a partnership with Facebook. “You can do all the fact checking in the world, but these influencers have a disproportionate impact.”
Trump presented a unique challenge, she added. “Until then, no one would have considered a president who would have said those things.”
Protecting the right
After the election, it became clear Russia had used social media to sow disinformation. Facebook soon after became a frequent target of the president’s ire. He tweeted that the social media giant was “anti-Trump” and trying to undermine his victory.
At the same time, GOP leaders stepped up criticism that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, with leadership ranks full of liberals, sought to limit the reach of right-leaning voices.
“There’s no credible research supporting Trump’s claim that social platforms suppress conservative content, but he still succeeded in getting them to revise their rules for him,” said former Facebook spokesman Nu Wexler, who left the company in 2018.
As Facebook scrambled to tackle foreign interference and misinformation, its executives in the nation’s capital argued that caution and deference was necessary to survive the new political environment, according to three people familiar with the company’s thinking.
Facebook’s security engineers in December 2016 presented findings from a broad internal investigation, known as Project P, to senior leadership on how false and misleading news reports spread so virally during the election. When Facebook’s security team highlighted dozens of pages that had peddled false news reports, senior leaders in Washington, including Kaplan, opposed shutting them down immediately, arguing that doing so would disproportionately impact conservatives, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. Ultimately, the company shut down far fewer pages than were originally proposed while it began developing a policy to handle these issues.
A year later, Facebook considered how to overhaul its scrolling news feed, the homepage screen most users see when they open the site. As part of the change to help limit misinformation, it changed its news feed algorithm to focus more on posts by friends and family versus publishers.
In meetings about the change, Kaplan questioned whether the revamped algorithm would hurt right-leaning publishers more than others, according to three people familiar with the company’s thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. When the data showed it would — conservative leaning outlets were pushing more content that violated its policies, the company had found — he successfully pushed for changes to make the new algorithm to be what he considered more evenhanded in its impact, the people said.
Isolated and divided
With the 2020 election on the horizon, Facebook and Zuckerberg’s hands-off approach to free speech was leaving it increasingly isolated in Silicon Valley.
In May 2019, Zuckerberg, citing free speech, refused to take down a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that made her appear drunk.
That summer, company leaders held a meeting to revisit its newsworthiness exception, which until then had been determined on a case-by-case basis, with the most controversial calls made by Zuckerberg. Internally, some were unclear how far that leeway extended, according to two people.
Clegg, the company’s new head of global affairs and communications and a former British deputy prime minister, announced the outcome of that meeting at a speech in Washington in September 2019. Aside from speech that causes violence or real-world harm, Facebook would allow politicians to express themselves virtually unchecked on social media. Facebook’s network of independent fact-checkers, which had been established as a key part of the company’s response to disinformation, would not evaluate their claims and the community guidelines would largely not apply to politicians.
Facebook did not want to be an arbiter of truth in political debate, he said, echoing Zuckerberg’s long-standing position.
The speech angered some employees, triggering more than 250 of them to sign a petition disagreeing with the decision because they thought it gave politicians a pass.
One former executive, Yael Eisenstat, who worked to improve the political ads process, wrote in The Post that the controversy was “the biggest test of whether [Facebook] will ever truly put society and democracy ahead of profit and ideology.”
She said that she routinely experienced how the company’s efforts at integrity were often undermined by “the few voices who ultimately decided the company’s overall direction.”
Meanwhile, in October, as Facebook faced more potential regulation and political troubles, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan went to the White House for a private dinner with Trump, a part of the CEO’s effort to cultivate personal relationships in Washington.
Tweetstorm
As the pandemic and civil unrest dominated the first half of this year, Trump continued to turn to social media platforms to spread misinformation. He touted the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine as a possible cure for the coronavirus and claimed without evidence that the left-wing antifa movement was behind the violence at George Floyd protests.
Meanwhile, Facebook employees began challenging the company’s decisions.
Two months before Trump’s “looting, shooting” post, the Brazilian president posted about the country’s indigenous population, saying, “Indians are undoubtedly changing. They are increasingly becoming human beings just like us.”
Thiel, the security engineer, and other employees argued internally that it violated the company’s internal guidelines against “dehumanizing speech.” They were referring to Zuckerberg’s own words while testifying before Congress in October in which he said dehumanizing speech “is the first step toward inciting” violence. In internal correspondence, Thiel was told that it didn’t qualify as racism — and may have even been a positive reference to integration.
Thiel quit in disgust.
In May, following years of internal debate of its own, Twitter chose to go in the opposite direction. It labeled two misleading tweets by Trump about mail-in ballots with a fact-check label.
Trump responded two days later with an executive order that could hurt social media companies by removing a key exception that limits their liability for content posted on their sites.
The next day, Trump tweeted about the Minnesota protests. Twitter quickly labeled the tweet for violating rules about glorifying violence, and Snapchat stopped promoting Trump’s account the following week. YouTube told The Post that it holds politicians to the same standards as everyone else.
Facebook, on the other hand, chose to haggle with the White House, asking for a deletion or a change, said the people. Axios first reported the call, which Facebook’s Bounds confirmed to The Post.
As employees raged on internal message boards and externally on Twitter, Zuckerberg told workers that Facebook’s policies might change again in light of Trump’s post. The company had rules allowing for “state use of force,” he said, but they were vague and didn’t encompass the possibility that such pronouncements could signal harmful aggression. Bickert’s team planned a series of policy meetings for the weeks ahead.
In June, Facebook removed a swath of Trump campaign ads with Nazi symbolism, after an initial internal assessment that found the ads did not violate the company’s polices, according to documents viewed by The Post. In meetings, senior executives argued that not removing them would be perceived as pandering too much to the president, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
Last week, the advertiser boycott picked up steam. Hershey, Verizon, Unilever, Coca-Cola and others said they were temporarily pulling ads.
On Friday, Zuckerberg told employees in a live-streamed town hall that he was changing the company’s policy to label problematic newsworthy content that violated the company’s policies as Twitter does, a major concession amid the rising tide of criticism. He also said in the most explicit language ever that the company would remove posts by politicians that incite violence and suppress voting. Still, civil rights leaders said his assertions didn’t go far enough.
“There are no exceptions for politicians in any of the policies that I’m announcing today,” Zuckerberg said.
Trump’s ignorance is total — and you can quote his press secretary on that
Trump’s ignorance is total — and you can quote his press secretary on that
By Dana Milbank
washingtonpost.com
4 min
View Original
June 30, 2020
If things weren’t already bad enough for President Trump — economic collapse, botched pandemic response, mass unrest — U.S. intelligence believes Trump’s “friend” Vladimir Putin paid Taliban fighters bounties to kill U.S. troops.
But the White House is ready with a defense: The president has no earthly idea what’s going on.
Totally in the dark.
Not a clue!
“The CIA director, NSA, national security adviser, and the chief of staff can all confirm that neither the president nor the vice president were briefed on the alleged Russian bounty intelligence,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany declared at Monday afternoon’s briefing.
So, asked NBC’s Kristen Welker, Trump was kept “out of the loop by his own intelligence community?”
“It would not be elevated to the president until it was verified,” the press secretary explained.
Shouldn’t the president have been told about such a serious matter?
“There are dissenting opinions,” McEnany ventured.
Reporters pointed out that intelligence, by definition, is generally unverified, and that the bounty intelligence was solid enough that U.S. officials shared it with the British.
McEnany indicated Trump’s advisers didn’t find it “necessary” to brief him.
But “given these reports,” asked Jeff Mason of Reuters, “does the president have a specific message for Moscow?”
“No,” McEnany said, “because he has not been briefed.”
In fact, McEnany suggested, Trump still hadn’t been briefed on the Russian bounties by Monday afternoon, even though administration officials were, at that hour, briefing lawmakers.
Previous presidents have claimed not to have been briefed about things they shouldn’t have known about, as when then-Vice President George H.W. Bush claimed he was “out of the loop” on the Iran-contra affair during the 1980s. But this is quite unusual: The White House insisting the president was out of the loop on something he should have known about. It’s as though Trump’s ignorance is a point of pride.
The out-to-lunch excuse has been getting more use as thing get worse for Trump. On Sunday, Trump shared a video in which a man chanting “white power” (Trump’s tweet thanked the “great people” in the video) and deleted it only after an outcry that included Republicans. McEnany claimed Trump “did not hear that particular phrase” when he watched the video.
By Trump’s own account, he was kept in the dark by China on the coronavirus. He was oblivious to the significance of Juneteenth or of Tulsa when he scheduled a campaign rally on that day in that city. And John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser says Trump was unaware of many things, including Britain’s status as a nuclear power.
Ignorance may be the only bliss for Trump as his presidency dissolves into failures. As other countries keep the coronavirus in check, states that followed Trump’s encouragement to reopen early — Florida, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, South Carolina — are seeing record levels of infections. His allies are calling for a campaign shakeup as polls show the unpopular president trailing Democrat Joe Biden by nearly 10 points.
His rally in Tulsa was a debacle. His dalliances with white supremacists (McEnany declined Monday to disavow the display of Confederate battle flags at Trump rallies) has galvanized the opposition. Bolton revealed that Trump sought reelection help from China. And now, Russians have apparently put bounties on the heads of U.S. troops.
McEnany opened her briefing with a statement decrying “anarchy in our streets,” “chaos,” “shootings,” “rioting,” “domestic terrorism” and “rampant destruction.” Standing against anarchy, she said, “is President Trump’s vision for the future.”
That’s quite a reelection pitch.
But, in one sense, McEnany has a point about anarchy: When it comes to the nation’s troubles, our head of state is MIA.
Trump’s own secretary of health and human services is saying the “window is closing” to get control of the situation — but Trump’s spokeswoman says that “we’re encouraged to see that fatalities are coming down” and that mask wearing should be a “personal choice.”
Okay, so Trump isn’t going to act to stop the virus’s resurgence. How about action to stop Russia from paying for the killing of U.S. troops?
“The president is briefed on verified intelligence,” McEnany said.
“If he hasn’t been briefed,” the Dallas Morning News’s Todd Gillman asked, “how is he certain that Russia didn’t put out these bounties?”
The press secretary replied by condemning the “absolutely irresponsible decision of the New York Times to falsely report that he was briefed on something that he in fact was not briefed on.”
By Dana Milbank
washingtonpost.com
4 min
View Original
June 30, 2020
If things weren’t already bad enough for President Trump — economic collapse, botched pandemic response, mass unrest — U.S. intelligence believes Trump’s “friend” Vladimir Putin paid Taliban fighters bounties to kill U.S. troops.
But the White House is ready with a defense: The president has no earthly idea what’s going on.
Totally in the dark.
Not a clue!
“The CIA director, NSA, national security adviser, and the chief of staff can all confirm that neither the president nor the vice president were briefed on the alleged Russian bounty intelligence,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany declared at Monday afternoon’s briefing.
So, asked NBC’s Kristen Welker, Trump was kept “out of the loop by his own intelligence community?”
“It would not be elevated to the president until it was verified,” the press secretary explained.
Shouldn’t the president have been told about such a serious matter?
“There are dissenting opinions,” McEnany ventured.
Reporters pointed out that intelligence, by definition, is generally unverified, and that the bounty intelligence was solid enough that U.S. officials shared it with the British.
McEnany indicated Trump’s advisers didn’t find it “necessary” to brief him.
But “given these reports,” asked Jeff Mason of Reuters, “does the president have a specific message for Moscow?”
“No,” McEnany said, “because he has not been briefed.”
In fact, McEnany suggested, Trump still hadn’t been briefed on the Russian bounties by Monday afternoon, even though administration officials were, at that hour, briefing lawmakers.
Previous presidents have claimed not to have been briefed about things they shouldn’t have known about, as when then-Vice President George H.W. Bush claimed he was “out of the loop” on the Iran-contra affair during the 1980s. But this is quite unusual: The White House insisting the president was out of the loop on something he should have known about. It’s as though Trump’s ignorance is a point of pride.
The out-to-lunch excuse has been getting more use as thing get worse for Trump. On Sunday, Trump shared a video in which a man chanting “white power” (Trump’s tweet thanked the “great people” in the video) and deleted it only after an outcry that included Republicans. McEnany claimed Trump “did not hear that particular phrase” when he watched the video.
By Trump’s own account, he was kept in the dark by China on the coronavirus. He was oblivious to the significance of Juneteenth or of Tulsa when he scheduled a campaign rally on that day in that city. And John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser says Trump was unaware of many things, including Britain’s status as a nuclear power.
Ignorance may be the only bliss for Trump as his presidency dissolves into failures. As other countries keep the coronavirus in check, states that followed Trump’s encouragement to reopen early — Florida, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, South Carolina — are seeing record levels of infections. His allies are calling for a campaign shakeup as polls show the unpopular president trailing Democrat Joe Biden by nearly 10 points.
His rally in Tulsa was a debacle. His dalliances with white supremacists (McEnany declined Monday to disavow the display of Confederate battle flags at Trump rallies) has galvanized the opposition. Bolton revealed that Trump sought reelection help from China. And now, Russians have apparently put bounties on the heads of U.S. troops.
McEnany opened her briefing with a statement decrying “anarchy in our streets,” “chaos,” “shootings,” “rioting,” “domestic terrorism” and “rampant destruction.” Standing against anarchy, she said, “is President Trump’s vision for the future.”
That’s quite a reelection pitch.
But, in one sense, McEnany has a point about anarchy: When it comes to the nation’s troubles, our head of state is MIA.
Trump’s own secretary of health and human services is saying the “window is closing” to get control of the situation — but Trump’s spokeswoman says that “we’re encouraged to see that fatalities are coming down” and that mask wearing should be a “personal choice.”
Okay, so Trump isn’t going to act to stop the virus’s resurgence. How about action to stop Russia from paying for the killing of U.S. troops?
“The president is briefed on verified intelligence,” McEnany said.
“If he hasn’t been briefed,” the Dallas Morning News’s Todd Gillman asked, “how is he certain that Russia didn’t put out these bounties?”
The press secretary replied by condemning the “absolutely irresponsible decision of the New York Times to falsely report that he was briefed on something that he in fact was not briefed on.”
Monday, June 29, 2020
How Can Trump Fix His Campaign? By Governing Better.
How Can Trump Fix His Campaign? By Governing Better.
By Jonathan Bernstein
bloomberg.com
4 min
June 28, 2020
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What’s wrong with President Donald Trump’s campaign? That seemed to have been the big theme of the weekend, as in this long Washington Post story, which includes the detail that Trump himself is obsessed with what denigrating nickname he should use for his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.
In reality, there’s probably nothing important wrong with Trump’s campaign. But there are several things wrong with his presidency. And, more important, there are a few things going seriously wrong for the nation: the coronavirus outbreak, the economic disaster that has followed and the injustice that has pushed protesters out into the streets. Those things will all likely affect the election far more than both campaigns put together, to say nothing of the president’s choice of insults.
Trump probably can’t do much about systemic racism in time for it to help him in November, but he certainly could be a whole lot more aggressive about controlling the virus. And while the government’s reaction to the economic collapse in March seems to have been reasonably successful, since then Trump has effectively sided with the “wait and see” Senate Republicans rather than doing whatever it takes to get things moving again. Overall, his approach to both the pandemic and the recession since mid-April has been to wish them away — an approach that now has case levels at record highs and reopening suspended or reversing in several areas.
This isn’t really about Trump. It’s about the larger issues. I’ve been saying for some time that it’s not clear how the “fundamentals” — that is, factors other than the candidates and campaigns — will work this year. Perhaps voters would be willing to overlook a recession if it’s caused by a pandemic; perhaps they wouldn’t. But what I have little doubt about is that those fundamentals will be extremely important, that campaigns are relatively unimportant and therefore that each individual campaign decision is almost completely irrelevant. What slogan to use? Where, when and how often to hold rallies? What insults to hurl? Some pundits may spend time assessing those things, but there’s just not very much evidence that they make any difference. Jobless statistics? Those matter.
The president’s main focus, then, really should be on better governing, not the trivia of campaigning. In an extremely close race, it’s certainly possible that lots of decisions with small effects could in aggregate be enough to swing the whole thing. So it makes sense for both campaigns to give it their best shot. But presidents have a job to do, and the good news is that doing the job well actually tends to help them win a second term. The bad news is that Trump seems to believe third-rate pundits and his own self-aggrandizing interpretation of the 2016 campaign — and thus is focused way more on spinning reality than on actually improving it.
1. Nate Persily and Charles Stewart III on what could go wrong with in-person voting in November. One thing needed: a major campaign to get people to volunteer to work the polls on Election Day. Hey, celebrities! This is a worthwhile cause to champion.
2. Kim Yi Dionne and Boniface Dulani on elections in Malawi.
3. Solomon Messing argues that Trump’s chances are better than they seem.
4. Josh Bivens on the danger to the economy in allowing the generous unemployment insurance in the CARES act to lapse.
5. Caroline Randall Williams on monuments and what we remember.
6. Harry Enten on Trump’s unpopularity.
7. I tend to agree with Megan McArdle on Trump and the virus. I’d say we certainly can judge him harshly on the communications side right from the start, but it’s hard to know the baseline for assessing other errors early on. That is, it’s easy to spot mistakes; it’s a lot more difficult to guess how many mistakes the average administration would’ve made in similar circumstances, and how damaging they would’ve been. But as time goes on, the average administration surely would improve a lot more than this one has.
8. And Jennifer Senior on Trump and Newt Gingrich. Very nice, but I have to point out that like several other southern Republicans of his generation, Gingrich isn’t from the South at all; he’s originally from Pennsylvania.
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Published on June 29, 2020, 7:37 AM EDT
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Trump’s Napalm Politics? They Began With Newt
Trump’s Napalm Politics? They Began With Newt
By JENNIFER SENIOR
nytimes.com
5 min
June 28, 2020
Gingrich wrote the playbook for it all. The nastiness, the contempt for norms, the transformation of political opponents into enemies.
Opinion columnist
Approximately one billion news cycles ago — which is to say, on June 9 — a businesswoman named Marjorie Taylor Greene finished first in the Republican primary in Georgia’s deeply conservative 14th Congressional District, northwest of Atlanta, which means that after a runoff she’s all but assured a seat in the House of Representatives next year.
Unfortunately, she is a cheerful bigot and conspiracy-theory fluffernutter. She subscribes to QAnon, the far-right fever dream that says Donald Trump is under siege from a cabal of deep-state saboteurs, some of whom run a pedophile ring; she says African-Americans are being held back primarily by “gangs.” (She’s left behind a contrail of unsavory videos through cyberspace, if you’d care to Google.)
The House Republican leadership is trying to distance itself from this woman, as if she belongs to some other party from a faraway galaxy. She doesn’t. Her politics are Trumpism distilled. And Trumpism itself isn’t a style and philosophy that began in 2016, with Trump’s election, or even in 2010, with the Tea Party. It began 40-odd years ago, in Greene’s own state, with the election of a different politician just two districts over.
I’m talking about Newt. You really could argue that today’s napalm politics began with Newt.
The normalization of personal destruction. The contempt for custom. The media-baiting, the annihilation of bipartisan comity, the delegitimizing of institutions.
“Gingrich had planted; Trump had reaped,” writes the Princeton historian Julian Zelizer in the prologue to his forthcoming book, “Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of a New Republican Party.”
I recently read Zelizer’s book with morbid fascination. My first real job in journalism was as a reporter for the The Hill newspaper the year it launched, in 1994, which happened to be the same year Republicans won control of the House, overturning four decades of Democratic rule. (I wrote nothing memorable that day, but I did come up with our banner headline: “It’s Reigning Republicans.”)
Gingrich became speaker the following January. It was a stunning development. Previous speakers, no matter how partisan they were, tended to work, lunch and even drink across the aisle. The only kind of cocktails Gingrich was partial to were Molotovs.
He conceived of governing as war. Democrats were not merely to be defeated ideologically. They were to be immolated.
Even as an inexperienced kid, I could see his ascension was bad news. Looking back, the parallels between then and now couldn’t be clearer.
Democrats were devastated that a man with so much malignity and anger in his heart could suddenly be at the helm; but in Republicans, Gingrich had a cult.
Gingrich despised the mainstream press, breaking with tradition and giving valuable real estate over in the Capitol to conservative, nativist-populist radio hosts who spoke loudly and carried a big schtick, just as Trump gives coveted space to the servile One America News Network.
Gingrich was my introduction to Orwellian newspeak. He had this tic of starting every other paragraph with “frankly” and then telling a lie; it was his poker tell. Falsehoods and hyperbole came as naturally to him as smirking. He freely trafficked in conspiracy theories. His PAC circulated a pamphlet for aspiring politicians who wished “to speak like Newt.” It advised them to repeat a long list of words to describe Democrats, including sick, pathetic, corrupt.
Like Trump, Gingrich was a thrice-married womanizer who’d somehow seduced the evangelicals. He too had a skyscraping ego, nursed grudges as if they were newborns, and lacked impulse control. In 1995, Bill Clinton made him sit in the back of Air Force One; he responded with a tantrum and shut down the government, prompting The New York Daily News to run a cartoon cover of him in a diaper under the headline “Cry Baby.”
Gingrich turned the politics of white racial grievance into an art form. They may have started with Nixon’s Southern Strategy, but Gingrich actually came from the South. He intuited the backlash to globalization, to affirmation action; the culture teemed with stories about white men under siege. (Including the Michael Douglas movie “Falling Down,” about a divorced, unemployed defense contractor’s descent into armed madness.) It wasn’t long before 1994 became known as “The Year of the Angry White Male.”
Most of Zelizer’s book is about Gingrich’s Javert-like quest to bring down the House speaker, Jim Wright, for his shady ethics. (Gingrich succeeded, only to later be reprimanded and fined for his own ethical breaches.) Zelizer never mentions individual parallels to Trump once he starts telling Gingrich’s story, which is clever, because there’s no need. They hop off the page like frogs.
But the one that stands out, the one that goosepimples me even as I type, is this: Gingrich was the first true reality TV politician. He understood that the C-Span cameras didn’t have to be a passively recording set of eyes. You could operatically perform for them. Early in his career, Gingrich staged a coordinated attack on House Democrats that drew so much fury from Speaker Tip O’Neill it earned him time on the evening news. “I’m famous,” he crowed.
“Conflict equals exposure equals power,” became one of his favorite sayings. Which may as well be the motto of reality television. And Trump.
Assuming she wins in November, Marjorie Taylor Greene will likely be relegated to the margins of her caucus. But if Gingrich — and Trump — have taught us anything, it’s that there’s no telling where the last exit is on the loonytown expressway to extremism; we know only that the guardrails get lower with each passing mile. “These are the depths to which we’ve descended,” Zelizer told me in a phone call. “No one ever thinks that an outlier will one day be the party’s future.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
By JENNIFER SENIOR
nytimes.com
5 min
June 28, 2020
Gingrich wrote the playbook for it all. The nastiness, the contempt for norms, the transformation of political opponents into enemies.
Opinion columnist
Approximately one billion news cycles ago — which is to say, on June 9 — a businesswoman named Marjorie Taylor Greene finished first in the Republican primary in Georgia’s deeply conservative 14th Congressional District, northwest of Atlanta, which means that after a runoff she’s all but assured a seat in the House of Representatives next year.
Unfortunately, she is a cheerful bigot and conspiracy-theory fluffernutter. She subscribes to QAnon, the far-right fever dream that says Donald Trump is under siege from a cabal of deep-state saboteurs, some of whom run a pedophile ring; she says African-Americans are being held back primarily by “gangs.” (She’s left behind a contrail of unsavory videos through cyberspace, if you’d care to Google.)
The House Republican leadership is trying to distance itself from this woman, as if she belongs to some other party from a faraway galaxy. She doesn’t. Her politics are Trumpism distilled. And Trumpism itself isn’t a style and philosophy that began in 2016, with Trump’s election, or even in 2010, with the Tea Party. It began 40-odd years ago, in Greene’s own state, with the election of a different politician just two districts over.
I’m talking about Newt. You really could argue that today’s napalm politics began with Newt.
The normalization of personal destruction. The contempt for custom. The media-baiting, the annihilation of bipartisan comity, the delegitimizing of institutions.
“Gingrich had planted; Trump had reaped,” writes the Princeton historian Julian Zelizer in the prologue to his forthcoming book, “Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of a New Republican Party.”
I recently read Zelizer’s book with morbid fascination. My first real job in journalism was as a reporter for the The Hill newspaper the year it launched, in 1994, which happened to be the same year Republicans won control of the House, overturning four decades of Democratic rule. (I wrote nothing memorable that day, but I did come up with our banner headline: “It’s Reigning Republicans.”)
Gingrich became speaker the following January. It was a stunning development. Previous speakers, no matter how partisan they were, tended to work, lunch and even drink across the aisle. The only kind of cocktails Gingrich was partial to were Molotovs.
He conceived of governing as war. Democrats were not merely to be defeated ideologically. They were to be immolated.
Even as an inexperienced kid, I could see his ascension was bad news. Looking back, the parallels between then and now couldn’t be clearer.
Democrats were devastated that a man with so much malignity and anger in his heart could suddenly be at the helm; but in Republicans, Gingrich had a cult.
Gingrich despised the mainstream press, breaking with tradition and giving valuable real estate over in the Capitol to conservative, nativist-populist radio hosts who spoke loudly and carried a big schtick, just as Trump gives coveted space to the servile One America News Network.
Gingrich was my introduction to Orwellian newspeak. He had this tic of starting every other paragraph with “frankly” and then telling a lie; it was his poker tell. Falsehoods and hyperbole came as naturally to him as smirking. He freely trafficked in conspiracy theories. His PAC circulated a pamphlet for aspiring politicians who wished “to speak like Newt.” It advised them to repeat a long list of words to describe Democrats, including sick, pathetic, corrupt.
Like Trump, Gingrich was a thrice-married womanizer who’d somehow seduced the evangelicals. He too had a skyscraping ego, nursed grudges as if they were newborns, and lacked impulse control. In 1995, Bill Clinton made him sit in the back of Air Force One; he responded with a tantrum and shut down the government, prompting The New York Daily News to run a cartoon cover of him in a diaper under the headline “Cry Baby.”
Gingrich turned the politics of white racial grievance into an art form. They may have started with Nixon’s Southern Strategy, but Gingrich actually came from the South. He intuited the backlash to globalization, to affirmation action; the culture teemed with stories about white men under siege. (Including the Michael Douglas movie “Falling Down,” about a divorced, unemployed defense contractor’s descent into armed madness.) It wasn’t long before 1994 became known as “The Year of the Angry White Male.”
Most of Zelizer’s book is about Gingrich’s Javert-like quest to bring down the House speaker, Jim Wright, for his shady ethics. (Gingrich succeeded, only to later be reprimanded and fined for his own ethical breaches.) Zelizer never mentions individual parallels to Trump once he starts telling Gingrich’s story, which is clever, because there’s no need. They hop off the page like frogs.
But the one that stands out, the one that goosepimples me even as I type, is this: Gingrich was the first true reality TV politician. He understood that the C-Span cameras didn’t have to be a passively recording set of eyes. You could operatically perform for them. Early in his career, Gingrich staged a coordinated attack on House Democrats that drew so much fury from Speaker Tip O’Neill it earned him time on the evening news. “I’m famous,” he crowed.
“Conflict equals exposure equals power,” became one of his favorite sayings. Which may as well be the motto of reality television. And Trump.
Assuming she wins in November, Marjorie Taylor Greene will likely be relegated to the margins of her caucus. But if Gingrich — and Trump — have taught us anything, it’s that there’s no telling where the last exit is on the loonytown expressway to extremism; we know only that the guardrails get lower with each passing mile. “These are the depths to which we’ve descended,” Zelizer told me in a phone call. “No one ever thinks that an outlier will one day be the party’s future.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Saturday, June 27, 2020
Beyond ‘White Fragility’by Jamelle Bouie
Beyond ‘White Fragility’
by Jamelle Bouie, nytimes.com
June 26, 2020 04:09 AM
If you want to let freedom ring, hammer on economic injustice.
Opinion Columnist
Photo by: ...Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times
Since it emerged seven years ago in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the Black Lives Matter movement has produced a sea change in attitudes, politics and policy.
In 2016, 43 percent of Americans supported Black Lives Matter and its claims about the criminal justice system; now, it’s up to 67 percent, with 60 percent support among white Americans, compared with 40 percent four years ago. Whereas Democratic politicians once stumbled over the issue, now even Republicans are falling over themselves to say that “black lives matter.” And where the policy conversation was formerly focused on body cameras and chokehold bans, now mainstream outlets are debating and taking seriously calls to demilitarize and defund police departments or to abolish them outright.
But the Black Lives Matter platform isn’t just about criminal justice. From the start, activists have articulated a broad, inclusive vision for the entire country. This, in fact, has been true of each of the nation’s major movements for racial equality. Among black Americans and their Radical Republican allies, Reconstruction — which was still ongoing as of 150 years ago — was as much a fight to fundamentally reorder Southern economic life as it was a struggle for political inclusion. The struggle against Jim Crow, likewise, was also a struggle for economic equality and the transformation of society.
“The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in “A Testament of Hope”:
It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws — racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.
Our society was built on the racial segmentation of personhood. Some people were full humans, guaranteed non-enslavement, secured from expropriation and given the protection of law, and some people — blacks, Natives and other nonwhites — were not. That unequal distribution of personhood was an economic reality as well. It shaped your access to employment and capital; determined whether you would be doomed to the margins of labor or given access to its elevated ranks; marked who might share in the bounty of capitalist production and who would most likely be cast out as disposable.
In our society, in other words, the fight for equal personhood can’t help but also be a struggle for economic justice. And what we see, past and present, is how that fight against the privileges and distinctions of race can also lay the foundations for a broader assault on the privileges and distinctions of class.
As soon as the Civil War came to a close, it was clear there could be no actual freedom for the formerly enslaved without a fundamental transformation of economic relations. “We must see that the freedman are established on the soil, and that they may become proprietors,” Charles Sumner, the Radical Republican senator from Massachusetts, wrote in March 1865. “The great plantations, which have been so many nurseries of the rebellion, must be broken up, and the freedmen must have the pieces.” Likewise, said the Radical Republican congressman Thaddeus Stevens in September 1865, “The whole fabric of Southern society must be changed, and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost.” The foundations of their institutions, he continued, “must be broken up and re-laid, or all of our blood and treasure have been spent in vain.”
Presidential Reconstruction under Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, would immediately undermine any means to this end, as he restored defeated Confederates to citizenship and gave them free rein to impose laws, like the Black Codes, which sought to reestablish the economic and social conditions of slavery. But Republicans in Congress were eventually able to wrest control of Reconstruction from the administration, and just as importantly, black Americans were actively taking steps to secure their political freedom against white reactionary opposition. Working through the Union Army, postwar Union Leagues and the Republican Party, freed and free blacks worked toward a common goal of political equality. And once they secured something like it, they set out to try as much as possible to affect that economic transformation.
“Public schools, hospitals, penitentiaries, and asylums for orphans and the insane were established for the first time or received increased funding,” the historian Eric Foner wrote in “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.” “South Carolina funded medical care for poor citizens, and Alabama provided free legal counsel for indigent defendants.”
For blacks and Radical Republicans, Reconstruction was an attempt to secure political rights for the sake transforming the entire society. And its end had as much to do with the reaction of property and capital owners as it did with racist violence. “The bargain of 1876,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in “Black Reconstruction in America,”
was essentially an understanding by which the Federal Government ceased to sustain the right to vote of half of the laboring population of the South, and left capital as represented by the old planter class, the new Northern capitalist, and the capitalist that began to rise out of the poor whites, with a control of labor greater than in any modern industrial state in civilized lands.
Out of that, he continued, “has arisen in the South an exploitation of labor unparalleled in modern times, with a government in which all pretense at party alignment or regard for universal suffrage is given up.”
Du Bois was writing in the 1930s. A quarter-century later, black Americans in the South would launch a movement to unravel Jim Crow repression and economic exploitation. And as that movement progressed and notched victories against segregation, it became clear that the next step was to build a coalition against the privileges of class, since the two were inextricably tied together. The Memphis sanitation workers who asked Martin Luther King Jr. to support their strike in 1968 were black, set against a white power structure in the city. Their oppression as black Americans and subjugation as workers were tied together. Unraveling one could not be accomplished without unraveling the other.
All of this relates back to the relationship between race and capitalism. To end segregation — of housing, of schools, of workplaces — is to undo one of the major ways in which labor is exploited, caste established and the ideologies of racial hierarchy sustained. And that, in turn, opens possibilities for new avenues of advancement. The old labor slogan “Negro and White, Unite and Fight!” contains more than a little truth about the necessary conditions for economic justice. That this unity is fairly rare in American history is a testament to how often these movements have “either advocated, capitulated before, or otherwise failed to oppose racism at one or more critical junctures in their history,” as Robert L. Allen and Pamela P. Allen note in their 1974 study of racism and social reform movements.
Which brings us back to the present. The activists behind the Black Lives Matter movement have always connected its aims to working-class, egalitarian politics. The platform of the Movement for Black Lives, as it is formally known, includes demands for universal health care, affordable housing, living wage employment and access to education and public transportation. Given the extent to which class shapes black exposure to police violence — it is poor and working class black Americans who are most likely to live in neighborhoods marked by constant police surveillance — calls to defund and dismantle existing police departments are a class demand like any other.
But while the movement can’t help but be about practical concerns, the predominating discourse of belief and intention overshadows those stakes: too much concern with “white fragility” and not enough with wealth inequality. The challenge is to bridge the gap; to show new supporters that there’s far more work to do than changing the way we police; to channel their sympathy into a deeper understanding of the problem at hand.
To put a final point of emphasis on the potential of the moment, I’ll leave you with this. In a 1963 pamphlet called “The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook,” the activist and laborer James Boggs argued for the revolutionary potential of the black struggle for civil rights. “The strength of the Negro cause and its power to shake up the social structure of the nation,” Boggs wrote, “comes from the fact that in the Negro struggle all the questions of human rights and human relationships are posed.” That is because it is a struggle for equality “in production, in consumption, in the community, in the courts, in the schools, in the universities, in transportation, in social activity, in government, and indeed in every sphere of American life.”
Flags and flowers at a memorial for George Floyd in Minneapolis.Credit...Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times
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New Numbers Showing Coronavirus Spread Intrude on a White House in Denial
New Numbers Showing Coronavirus Spread Intrude on a White House in Denial
by Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman, nytimes.com
June 26, 2020 06:34 PM
Both President Trump and Vice President Pence seem oblivious to the new chapter in the pandemic.
President Trump made no mention on Friday, during a business meeting at the White House, of the increase in Covid-19 cases around the country.
Photo by: ...Samuel Corum for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — In the past week, President Trump hosted an indoor campaign rally for thousands of cheering, unmasked supporters even as a deadly virus spread throughout the country. He began easing up on restrictions that had been in place at the White House since Washington instituted a stay-at-home order in response to the coronavirus in March, and he invited the president of Poland to a day of meetings. Then, on Thursday, he flew to Wisconsin to brag about an economic recovery that he said was just around the corner.
But by Friday, it was impossible to fully ignore the fact that the pandemic the White House has for weeks insisted was winding down has done just the opposite.
The rising numbers in Texas, Florida and Arizona made that clear, as well as the reality that those are all states where the president and his Republican allies had urged people to return to normal.
In a reflection of a growing sense of anxiety over the new numbers, Vice President Mike Pence and members of the coronavirus task force held a public briefing for the first time in two months. But ever loyal to Mr. Trump’s desire for good news, Mr. Pence tried to tiptoe around the statistics that Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the task force coordinator, pointed to, showing surging cases and hospitalizations in Florida, Texas, Arizona and other states.
“We have made a truly remarkable progress in moving our nation forward,” the vice president said. “We’ve all seen the encouraging news as we open up,” he added, dismissing any suggestion that the outbreaks across the South should prompt a return to the shutdowns that Mr. Trump so badly wants to be over. “The reality is we’re in a much better place.”
Refusing to wear a mask even as the health officials next to him did, Mr. Pence described the recent outbreaks across the country as little more than the product of increased testing among younger, more healthy Americans who should be less likely to get seriously ill from the coronavirus even as they spread it to others.
“Very encouraging news,” he said.
But Mr. Pence’s comments came against the backdrop of a very different message from Dr. Birx and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, who warned of a broken testing system and said the outbreaks could engulf the country.
“If we don’t extinguish the outbreak, sooner or later, even ones that are doing well are going to be vulnerable to the spread,” he warned. “So we need to take that into account because we are all in it together. And the only way we’re going to end it is by ending it together.”
On Friday, Vice President Mike Pence and members of the coronavirus task force held their first briefing in two months.Credit...Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times
The return of the televised task force news conference — at which reporters were limited to only a handful of questions — revived the deep disconnect between Washington and the states where local officials spent Friday sounding the alarm and, in some cases, halting the reopening that Mr. Trump has so often encouraged.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who has resisted rolling back the economic reopening, banned drinking in bars after saying that patrons were not abiding by social distancing rules. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican, went further, ordering all bars closed in the state. And Judge Lina Hidalgo of Harris County, the largest county in Texas, reimposed stay-at-home orders on Friday, calling the rise in cases there “a catastrophic and unsustainable situation.”
Taken together, it was grim news about a pandemic that is still a threat to the public’s health, the nation’s economy and the president’s political future.
At a time when his poll numbers now call into question whether he can win a second term in November, Mr. Trump faces the prospect that his efforts to boost the economy by shrugging off the virus have backfired. Rather than head into the summer with a country on the mend, the president will be forced to explain how his response to the coronavirus contributed to a resurgence of it that may force some Americans back into a painful shutdown.
And yet Mr. Trump made no appearance at the task force briefing to demonstrate concern. Instead, an hour after it was over, the president addressed a panel of industry officials, political allies and White House economic advisers for a self-congratulatory session about how successful the economic recovery has been.
In taking his victory lap, Mr. Trump made no mention of the increase in cases around the country, underscoring a message that he posted on Twitter late Thursday night: “Our Economy is roaring back and will NOT be shut down. ‘Embers’ or flare ups will be put out, as necessary!”
All spring, Mr. Trump expressed his impatience and annoyance with the social distancing measures that various states, and his own aides, were taking.
He showed some concern when his personal valet, who serves his food, was diagnosed with the coronavirus and Mr. Pence’s press secretary tested positive. But since then, Mr. Trump has maintained a posture of denial and dismissiveness.
Photo by: ...Callaghan O'Hare for The New York Times
He has been enabled by a handful of advisers, some of whom share his desire to focus on the economy and some of whom are afraid of the president’s reaction if they press him too hard about the public health crisis unfolding once again in large chunks of the country.
The White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has been among the chief proponents of keeping the administration’s public health experts largely out of sight, according to several senior administration officials.
But he is not alone. Even though they are aware that Mr. Trump’s mishandling of the virus presents a threat to his re-election, his campaign advisers agreed to his demand for the rally last Saturday at an arena in Tulsa, Okla., hoping the adulation he would receive there would snap the president out of a funk he has been in for months.
But at least eight staff members — including two Secret Service agents — tested positive for the virus before the rally, which was lightly attended and attracted none of the overflow crowd that Mr. Trump’s advisers had promised. Since then, dozens of campaign aides who were in Oklahoma for the event have been told to quarantine.
His advisers are now trying to figure out how to give Mr. Trump the traveling road show he wants while acknowledging the widespread fears about the coronavirus and allowing for proper health measures. At the same time, the White House has stopped employing the health checks it had been using for several weeks, like temperature checks for people entering the complex.
One of the states where the cases are rising drastically is Florida, where Mr. Trump insisted the Republican National Convention at the end of August be relocated to meet his desire for a large-scale event free of social distancing measures. As of now, Republicans hope to put on a show celebrating Mr. Trump, the first lady and Mr. Pence with three nights of crowds as large as 12,000 people in Jacksonville.
Some of the president’s political allies have signaled in recent days that they intend to take the threat of the virus more seriously.
Speaking to a group of health care workers in Morehead, Ky., Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, held up a simple face mask.
“Until we find a vaccine, these are really important,” the senator said. “This is not as complicated as a ventilator. This is a way to indicate that you want to protect others. We all need during this period until we find a vaccine to think of us as protecting not only ourselves but others.”
And Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, had a not-so-subtle message for Mr. Pence in a tweet she posted not long after the vice president refused to wear a mask during the task force briefing on Friday. Her tweet included a picture of her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.
“Dick Cheney says WEAR A MASK,” she wrote, adding the hashtag: #realmenwearmasks.
But if anything, Mr. Trump, Mr. Pence and the rest of the senior members of the administration have seemed determined in the past 24 hours to embrace a previrus political reality — even if the medical facts contradict it.
On Thursday night, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to overturn the Affordable Care Act, a move that, if successful, would bring a permanent end to the health insurance program popularly known as Obamacare and wipe out coverage for as many as 23 million Americans.
In an 82-page brief, the administration joined Republican officials in Texas and 17 other states in arguing that in 2017, Congress, then controlled by Republicans, had rendered the law unconstitutional when it zeroed out the tax penalty for not buying insurance — the so-called individual mandate.
The president’s argument is sure to reignite Washington’s bitter political debate over access to affordable health care even as the accelerating pandemic has left millions of unemployed Americans without employer-provided health coverage.
Sheryl Stolberg contributed reporting.
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Thursday, June 25, 2020
How the World Views the U.S. Virus Response, as told by Bloomberg columnists
How the World Views the U.S. Virus Response
Covid-19 continues to spread at an alarming rate in parts of the world’s biggest economy. Bloomberg Opinion writers from elsewhere chime in.
By Robert Burgess
We asked Bloomberg Opinion columnists and contributors who are based outside the U.S. for their take on how the rest of the world views efforts to contain the coronavirus in America, where even the decision to wear a mask is seen as a political statement.
Ferdinando Giugliano writes columns on
European economics for Bloomberg Opinion from Milan. He is also an
economics columnist for La Repubblica and was a member of the editorial
board of the Financial Times:
I certainly would not feel safe travelling to the U.S. Italy was one of the early centers of the pandemic, and while its government enforced a lockdown relatively late, it eventually took some draconian steps for two months, including shutting schools and factories. Italy also took a gradual approach to reopening, which occurred over a month. New registered cases are now growing at a daily rate of approximately 0.1%, and they are mostly concentrated in the northern region of Lombardy. Life is slowly returning to normal. In contrast, many U.S. states enforced short and loose lockdowns. The situation appears to only be getting better in those areas that clamped down harder, such as New York.
Also, I do not really trust the U.S. health-care system. America has some of the very best professionals and hospitals in the world, but lacks a centralized structure that gives you confidence that the country as a whole can counter the pandemic effectively. Italy has a regional health-care system, so there have been coordination problems, especially with regard to the collection of data. However, the National Health Institute has offered consistent guidance to the government, both on the lockdown and on possible treatments. I hope that a legacy of the Covid-19 epidemic in the U.S. is a debate over the need to create some form of national health system.
Seen from India, the chaotic and patchwork approach the U.S. has taken to battling the Covid-19 pandemic is both confusing and familiar. Here, we have replaced the world’s most stringent lockdown with a largely uncontrolled reopening. The shutdown did not really manage to bend the curve downwards, as happened in Europe. But, unlike developed countries in Europe, we believe we simply can’t afford to close down the economy for too long. What doesn’t make sense is why the U.S. is doing the same thing. Congress did its job, as many U.S. workers received the aid they need to get by for now. In India, we can’t reach the vast majority of migrant workers, among others, through our welfare system.
What looks familiar is the strange patchwork approach that comes from having powerful state administrations making most decisions. Yet, while some Indian states have been much more careful than others about contact tracing and quarantining, none is being openly careless or dismissive. This, combined with a strange machismo about mask-wearing that seems to be spreading through parts of the U.S., makes the country look like a much more dangerous place to be than Europe or parts of East Asia.
In the end, both of our nations are confronting steadily increasing case numbers and the prospect not of a “second wave,” as such, but an ever-intensifying health crisis. The difference is that we have a leadership that, regardless of political party, has taken the pandemic seriously. We always knew poorer countries would struggle to control their case numbers. What’s appalling and sobering is that the world’s richest economy is doing so badly.
Tim Culpan is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology from Taipei. He previously covered technology for Bloomberg News:
On Jan. 22, just as China was about to shut down the city of Wuhan, I was transiting through a quiet and eerie Hong Kong airport bound for New York. Having covered the SARS breakout 17 years earlier, I knew how bad an epidemic could be. Over the next few weeks, as the outbreak spread through Asia, I figured the U.S. would be safer than Taiwan where I’ve been living for two decades. I delayed my return to Taipei until early February for fear of what awaited back home. Five months later, I’m safely in a place that’s never had a lockdown because it never needed one. Take a look at the data on coronavirus cases in Taiwan and you quickly understand how people here view the crisis both at home and abroad. It's been more than 70 days since there was a local infection.
For decades, the U.S. was seen as a dream destination for study, work and tourism. Now, Taiwanese returnees share tales of their “great escape" from the U.S. back to a place where healthcare is universal, cheap and high quality. They talk with admiration about Taiwan's beloved health minister, Chen Shih-chung, a man little-known before the crisis. These days, America is no longer the place to be but the place to avoid. It beggars belief that U.S. leaders are more focused on point-scoring and playing to their base than making sound public-health decisions. It’s too easy to say that American democracy makes it harder to manage a crisis and dictate how people should act. But Taiwan is a democracy, too, and a rowdy one at that. However, the government’s competence in recognizing the threat and acting quickly gave opposition parties little opportunity to build political capital.
Early yet limited curbs enforced four months ago -- such as social distancing and mandated mask use on public transport -- mean that nightclubs, bars and beaches are crowded today with little risk to public safety. Many Taiwanese wonder whether recent moves to relax border restrictions are wise, and would be happy to keep the gates closed and the masks on if it means preventing Taiwan from becoming like America. As with millions of Taiwanese, I love New York, but there’s no way I’d go back to the U.S. anytime soon.
Daniel
Moss is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asian economies from
Singapore. Previously he was executive editor of Bloomberg News for
global economics, and has led teams in Asia, Europe and North America:
Friends in Singapore, where I have lived for 18 months, greet the spike in American infections with a combination of trepidation and amazement: trepidation that the U.S. is on the cusp of a disastrous second wave, with the attendant global economic consequences, and amazement that parts of the country are pressing ahead with reopening regardless. Hovering over all this is incredulity that the U.S., which most here still see as a great nation and important counterweight to China, is engaged in a culture war over something as straightforward as wearing a mask.
Singapore is gradually emerging from a two-month lockdown that has curtailed coronavirus infections. Masks, social distancing, mandatory sign-ins through a tracing app, and handing over identity cards on demand seem like prudent steps in disease containment. In a city-state where a majority of its 5.7 million live in high-rise public housing or condominiums, outbreaks of infectious disease are an existential issue. To be sure, there’s also little choice, as transgressions invite fines or prosecution.
Would I visit the U.S. today? In a heartbeat, provided I felt I could get back to my family in a timely manner. But with many borders still closed, that’s a big “if.” I was born in Australia and became a U.S. citizen a few years ago. My wife and children are American. There’s a sense the U.S. is wasting precious time. I sympathize with these concerns, but I learned from a decade in Washington that America is a tough place to govern even in the best of times.
Nisha Gopalan is a Bloomberg Opinion
columnist covering deals and banking in Asia from Hong Kong. She
previously worked for the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones as an editor
and a reporter:
I’d be in no hurry to travel to the U.S. From Hong Kong. The view of most people is that the U.S. is way too complacent. Sitting on the edge of mainland China, where the Covid pandemic began, Hong Kong has had just 1,161 infections and six fatalities. Small wonder that Hong Kongers look at the multiplying numbers in the U.S. with horror. The first infection in this city of 7.5 million was Jan. 23 and the first death came on Feb. 4. These days, the smattering of new cases are almost all residents who have returned from overseas.
People in Hong Kong find the U.S. ambivalence over masks hard to understand. One friend describes America as “the worst place to visit right now.” Another views the country as “out of control,” with states opening too early. Even with local infections virtually nonexistent at this point, close to 100% of the people in Hong Kong are still wearing masks, with joggers among the rare exceptions. Hand sanitizer is now commonly found on restaurant tables and in the lobbies of office skyscrapers and residential buildings. Office bathrooms have filled with people obsessively washing hands, residents started using keys and toothpicks to press elevator buttons, and the wearing of masks has become socially obligatory outdoors and on subway trains.
Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion in
Berlin. He was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a
writer for the Economist. He's the author of "Hannibal and Me":
Germans were aghast at the U.S. under President Donald Trump even before Covid-19 and the killing of George Floyd. Now this American triple crisis – Trump, pestilence, racism – regularly tops the evening news here, often displacing even issues much closer to home. In part, that’s because Trump reserves so much of his ire for this country, and for Chancellor Angela Merkel. Just this month, he confirmed that he plans to withdraw about one in four American troops based here.
Merkel looks increasingly like a dramatic foil to Trump: To Germans he appears narcissistic, vain and anti-intellectual, whereas she comes across as understated, wonkish and meticulous. He disdains his own experts and scientists; Merkel, a quantum physicist by training, respects hers. He seeks conflict with U.S. governors and political opponents; she constantly mediates between Germany’s regional leaders to maintain consensus. He divides, she unites. As a result, Germany currently appears to have Covid-19 under control, whereas the U.S. seems to have given up on even trying. Like many people around here, I’m not planning to travel stateside any time soon, but will ride out the pandemic in relative safety here.
Mac Margolis is a Rio de Janeiro-based
writer for Bloomberg Opinion who covers Latin America. He was previously
a reporter for Newsweek and is the author of “The Last New World: The
Conquest of the Amazon Frontier”:
Like many of their Latin American neighbors, Brazilians have looked to the U.S. with conflicted passions. That’s because the land of Disney, the iPhone SE and sanctuary cities is also the nation of border walls, ICE and a botched response to the coronavirus pandemic. President Trump has done little to improve the brand. Well before the onset of the twin global health and economic emergencies, Latin American trust in the U.S. and especially in its leader was already slipping.
Yet even as Brazilian disenchantment with the hegemon up north has conceivably deepened, the parallel shortcomings of their own President Jair Bolsonaro, an unabashed Trumpophile, have helped to keep any neighborly contempt and schadenfreude in check. When George Floyd’s death sparked antiracism protests across the U.S., Brazilians were close behind with their own marches and hashtags. Black and Brown Brazilians comprise 53% of the nation’s 211 million people but 75% of the poorest tenth of the population, two-thirds of the unemployed and up to four times more fatalities than Whites from Covid-19. They also find themselves the victims not just of systemic prejudice and hair trigger policing, but also one of the most pernicious national lullabies: the myth of Brazil as a racial democracy.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Robert Burgess at bburgess@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Beth Williams at bewilliams@bloomberg.net
Covid-19 continues to spread at an alarming rate in parts of the world’s biggest economy. Bloomberg Opinion writers from elsewhere chime in.
By Robert Burgess
Robert Burgess is the Executive Editor for Bloomberg
Opinion. He is the former global Executive Editor in charge of financial
markets for Bloomberg News. As managing editor, he led the company’s
news coverage of credit markets during the global financial crisis.
The
coronavirus pandemic is showing few signs of abating in the U.S.
Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, said that
contrary to expectations, the virus isn’t taking a summer break, with
cases mounting in warmer states including Florida, Texas and Arizona.
Although the government has been lauded for its quick actions to support
the economy, it has come under fire for what some say is a haphazard
strategy to contain the health crisis. As many as 31 states have R0
figures above 1, according to the Rt.live
website, meaning that each person with the virus infects at least one
other. New confirmed cases have surged in June, increasing 22.6% last
week to 185,821, data compiled by Bloomberg show. And now, the European
Union may decide to keep the door shut to Americans even as it eases
controls on its external borders.
We asked Bloomberg Opinion columnists and contributors who are based outside the U.S. for their take on how the rest of the world views efforts to contain the coronavirus in America, where even the decision to wear a mask is seen as a political statement.
NEXT COLUMNIST FOLLOWS.
I certainly would not feel safe travelling to the U.S. Italy was one of the early centers of the pandemic, and while its government enforced a lockdown relatively late, it eventually took some draconian steps for two months, including shutting schools and factories. Italy also took a gradual approach to reopening, which occurred over a month. New registered cases are now growing at a daily rate of approximately 0.1%, and they are mostly concentrated in the northern region of Lombardy. Life is slowly returning to normal. In contrast, many U.S. states enforced short and loose lockdowns. The situation appears to only be getting better in those areas that clamped down harder, such as New York.
Also, I do not really trust the U.S. health-care system. America has some of the very best professionals and hospitals in the world, but lacks a centralized structure that gives you confidence that the country as a whole can counter the pandemic effectively. Italy has a regional health-care system, so there have been coordination problems, especially with regard to the collection of data. However, the National Health Institute has offered consistent guidance to the government, both on the lockdown and on possible treatments. I hope that a legacy of the Covid-19 epidemic in the U.S. is a debate over the need to create some form of national health system.
NEXT COLUMNIST FOLLOWS.
Mihir
Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist based in New Delhi. He was a
columnist for the Indian Express and the Business Standard, and he is
the author of “Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy”:
Seen from India, the chaotic and patchwork approach the U.S. has taken to battling the Covid-19 pandemic is both confusing and familiar. Here, we have replaced the world’s most stringent lockdown with a largely uncontrolled reopening. The shutdown did not really manage to bend the curve downwards, as happened in Europe. But, unlike developed countries in Europe, we believe we simply can’t afford to close down the economy for too long. What doesn’t make sense is why the U.S. is doing the same thing. Congress did its job, as many U.S. workers received the aid they need to get by for now. In India, we can’t reach the vast majority of migrant workers, among others, through our welfare system.
What looks familiar is the strange patchwork approach that comes from having powerful state administrations making most decisions. Yet, while some Indian states have been much more careful than others about contact tracing and quarantining, none is being openly careless or dismissive. This, combined with a strange machismo about mask-wearing that seems to be spreading through parts of the U.S., makes the country look like a much more dangerous place to be than Europe or parts of East Asia.
In the end, both of our nations are confronting steadily increasing case numbers and the prospect not of a “second wave,” as such, but an ever-intensifying health crisis. The difference is that we have a leadership that, regardless of political party, has taken the pandemic seriously. We always knew poorer countries would struggle to control their case numbers. What’s appalling and sobering is that the world’s richest economy is doing so badly.
NEXT COLUMNIST FOLLOWS.
Tim Culpan is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology from Taipei. He previously covered technology for Bloomberg News:
On Jan. 22, just as China was about to shut down the city of Wuhan, I was transiting through a quiet and eerie Hong Kong airport bound for New York. Having covered the SARS breakout 17 years earlier, I knew how bad an epidemic could be. Over the next few weeks, as the outbreak spread through Asia, I figured the U.S. would be safer than Taiwan where I’ve been living for two decades. I delayed my return to Taipei until early February for fear of what awaited back home. Five months later, I’m safely in a place that’s never had a lockdown because it never needed one. Take a look at the data on coronavirus cases in Taiwan and you quickly understand how people here view the crisis both at home and abroad. It's been more than 70 days since there was a local infection.
For decades, the U.S. was seen as a dream destination for study, work and tourism. Now, Taiwanese returnees share tales of their “great escape" from the U.S. back to a place where healthcare is universal, cheap and high quality. They talk with admiration about Taiwan's beloved health minister, Chen Shih-chung, a man little-known before the crisis. These days, America is no longer the place to be but the place to avoid. It beggars belief that U.S. leaders are more focused on point-scoring and playing to their base than making sound public-health decisions. It’s too easy to say that American democracy makes it harder to manage a crisis and dictate how people should act. But Taiwan is a democracy, too, and a rowdy one at that. However, the government’s competence in recognizing the threat and acting quickly gave opposition parties little opportunity to build political capital.
Early yet limited curbs enforced four months ago -- such as social distancing and mandated mask use on public transport -- mean that nightclubs, bars and beaches are crowded today with little risk to public safety. Many Taiwanese wonder whether recent moves to relax border restrictions are wise, and would be happy to keep the gates closed and the masks on if it means preventing Taiwan from becoming like America. As with millions of Taiwanese, I love New York, but there’s no way I’d go back to the U.S. anytime soon.
NEXT COLUMNIST FOLLOWS.
Friends in Singapore, where I have lived for 18 months, greet the spike in American infections with a combination of trepidation and amazement: trepidation that the U.S. is on the cusp of a disastrous second wave, with the attendant global economic consequences, and amazement that parts of the country are pressing ahead with reopening regardless. Hovering over all this is incredulity that the U.S., which most here still see as a great nation and important counterweight to China, is engaged in a culture war over something as straightforward as wearing a mask.
Singapore is gradually emerging from a two-month lockdown that has curtailed coronavirus infections. Masks, social distancing, mandatory sign-ins through a tracing app, and handing over identity cards on demand seem like prudent steps in disease containment. In a city-state where a majority of its 5.7 million live in high-rise public housing or condominiums, outbreaks of infectious disease are an existential issue. To be sure, there’s also little choice, as transgressions invite fines or prosecution.
Would I visit the U.S. today? In a heartbeat, provided I felt I could get back to my family in a timely manner. But with many borders still closed, that’s a big “if.” I was born in Australia and became a U.S. citizen a few years ago. My wife and children are American. There’s a sense the U.S. is wasting precious time. I sympathize with these concerns, but I learned from a decade in Washington that America is a tough place to govern even in the best of times.
NEXT COLUMNIST FOLLOWS.
I’d be in no hurry to travel to the U.S. From Hong Kong. The view of most people is that the U.S. is way too complacent. Sitting on the edge of mainland China, where the Covid pandemic began, Hong Kong has had just 1,161 infections and six fatalities. Small wonder that Hong Kongers look at the multiplying numbers in the U.S. with horror. The first infection in this city of 7.5 million was Jan. 23 and the first death came on Feb. 4. These days, the smattering of new cases are almost all residents who have returned from overseas.
People in Hong Kong find the U.S. ambivalence over masks hard to understand. One friend describes America as “the worst place to visit right now.” Another views the country as “out of control,” with states opening too early. Even with local infections virtually nonexistent at this point, close to 100% of the people in Hong Kong are still wearing masks, with joggers among the rare exceptions. Hand sanitizer is now commonly found on restaurant tables and in the lobbies of office skyscrapers and residential buildings. Office bathrooms have filled with people obsessively washing hands, residents started using keys and toothpicks to press elevator buttons, and the wearing of masks has become socially obligatory outdoors and on subway trains.
NEXT COLUMNIST FOLLOWS.
Germans were aghast at the U.S. under President Donald Trump even before Covid-19 and the killing of George Floyd. Now this American triple crisis – Trump, pestilence, racism – regularly tops the evening news here, often displacing even issues much closer to home. In part, that’s because Trump reserves so much of his ire for this country, and for Chancellor Angela Merkel. Just this month, he confirmed that he plans to withdraw about one in four American troops based here.
Merkel looks increasingly like a dramatic foil to Trump: To Germans he appears narcissistic, vain and anti-intellectual, whereas she comes across as understated, wonkish and meticulous. He disdains his own experts and scientists; Merkel, a quantum physicist by training, respects hers. He seeks conflict with U.S. governors and political opponents; she constantly mediates between Germany’s regional leaders to maintain consensus. He divides, she unites. As a result, Germany currently appears to have Covid-19 under control, whereas the U.S. seems to have given up on even trying. Like many people around here, I’m not planning to travel stateside any time soon, but will ride out the pandemic in relative safety here.
NEXT COLUMNIST FOLLOWS.
Like many of their Latin American neighbors, Brazilians have looked to the U.S. with conflicted passions. That’s because the land of Disney, the iPhone SE and sanctuary cities is also the nation of border walls, ICE and a botched response to the coronavirus pandemic. President Trump has done little to improve the brand. Well before the onset of the twin global health and economic emergencies, Latin American trust in the U.S. and especially in its leader was already slipping.
Yet even as Brazilian disenchantment with the hegemon up north has conceivably deepened, the parallel shortcomings of their own President Jair Bolsonaro, an unabashed Trumpophile, have helped to keep any neighborly contempt and schadenfreude in check. When George Floyd’s death sparked antiracism protests across the U.S., Brazilians were close behind with their own marches and hashtags. Black and Brown Brazilians comprise 53% of the nation’s 211 million people but 75% of the poorest tenth of the population, two-thirds of the unemployed and up to four times more fatalities than Whites from Covid-19. They also find themselves the victims not just of systemic prejudice and hair trigger policing, but also one of the most pernicious national lullabies: the myth of Brazil as a racial democracy.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Robert Burgess at bburgess@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Beth Williams at bewilliams@bloomberg.net
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