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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

Betsy DeVos is an abysmal failure and our nation’s schoolchildren are paying the price. By Helaine Olen

Betsy DeVos is an abysmal failure and our nation’s schoolchildren are paying the price
By Helaine Olen
washingtonpost.com
3 min
View Original
June 21, 2020 at 1:45 PM EDT

Months after schools across the country closed to stop the spread of the coronavirus, it’s still not clear how, or even if, children can safely return to classrooms in the coming weeks and months. Despite the best efforts of teachers suddenly plunged into teaching remotely, the loss of learning has been staggering, especially for low-income students. This would be the moment, you’d think, when the nation’s top education policy official would step up and attempt to offer leadership and best practices going forward. Instead, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is missing in action, at least when it comes to the issues that matter most.

Almost two months ago, the American Federation of Teachers released a plan detailing how schools could reopen safely. Their recommendations include mandatory hand-washing on entering the school and capping class sizes to encourage physical distancing. Last month, the conservative American Enterprise Institute released one as well; among other things, it urges schools to evaluate students for learning gaps as a result of the closures.

The Education Department, by contrast, is all but silent, issuing little in the way of guidance, and doing little to review what did and didn’t work. Anecdotal evidence suggests many parents and teachers found virtual learning dissatisfactory, while surveys found a large number of students didn’t attend their online classes regularly. A poll of North Carolina parents found a majority believed their children learned less online than in-person. The Education Department’s response? According to The Post’s Laura Meckler, just this month, “the department invited education officials to a panel discussion on the practical applications of virtual learning."

The result is that states, cities and individual districts are on their own trying to dig out of a deep hole. One study estimates that students will return for the new academic year — if they return at all, that is — with less than half the gains in math knowledge they normally would be expected to possess.

It’s not that DeVos isn’t hard at work — it’s just that she’s not devoting her efforts to what we would assume a federal education head should be prioritizing. For DeVos, the pandemic is no obstacle to pushing her long crusade for charter schools and “school choice,” not to mention cracking down on people struggling to repay student loans. She’s attempted to reroute a portion of the $13.5 billion in the Cares Act dedicated for K-12 funding needs — money that’s supposed to be distributed based on poverty and need formulas — to independent and religious schools. She continues to promote school choice and the use of vouchers. She’s fighting efforts by colleges to include undocumented students among the recipients of money designated for helping students in need. And her Education Department has continued to collect student loan payments from borrowers in default even though the Cares Act had suspended such collections and the department had promised to comply.

“It is absolutely mind-blowing that the basic functions of the department are not getting done because she is so ideologically against public schooling,” says AFT president Randi Weingarten. “The level at which the Department of Education has abdicated responsibility for the safety, well-being and instructional success of the 90 percent of children in America who go to public schools is stunning.”

Shocking, yes, but hardly surprising. Over the past 3½ years, DeVos has done yeoman work supporting the nihilistic approach of the Trump administration, backing budgets that would take away money from everything from after-school activities to the Special Olympics. Time and again her pet causes have taken precedence over what’s best for teachers and students. Now, facing an unprecedented crisis for education, DeVos has again abandoned the field. She deserves an F for her time in office.

The U.S. is falling behind its peers. Americans — if not their leaders — are starting to notice. By Catherine Rampell

The U.S. is falling behind its peers. Americans — if not their leaders — are starting to notice.
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
washingtonpost.com
4 min
View Original
June 22, 2020 at 7:24 PM EDT

Americans’ belief in American exceptionalism is declining — and that could be a good thing.

National narcissism has rendered us complacent, even impotent, in the face of multiple crises.

On our biggest societal problems, the United States seems to have given up. Not because we can’t do better — but because many political leaders, particularly Republicans, apparently don’t think we need to. Their faith that America is already Living Its Best Life means there’s no need to learn from peer countries, or even gauge our relative performance. Consider:

Most of the rest of the developed world has managed to get covid-19′s spread under control. New cases across the European Union have plummeted; in New Zealand, the virus has been virtually wiped out. These and other places that have successfully mitigated the spread have enabled more citizens to safely return to their pre-covid-19 lifestyles, including even attending athletic events with packed crowds.

Meanwhile, here in the United States, the bodies pile up. New confirmed cases are again surging, especially across Sun Belt states. And political leaders seem to have no plan, nor even a plan to make a plan, for beating back the pandemic.

Instead, they simply declare the virus vanquished, even as it claims more lives.

“There is no second wave coming,” White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow announced Monday, almost exactly four months and 118,000 deaths after he infamously declared the virus “contained” and “pretty close to airtight.” Vice President Pence made a similar declaration in a self-back-patting op-ed last week: “Whatever the media says, our whole-of-America approach has been a success.”

How did a country once known for our get-up-and-go come to shrug off mass death, particularly when other countries’ records suggest many U.S. covid-19 deaths were preventable?

Faith in American exceptionalism has curdled into resigned acceptance. We got so accustomed to resting on our laurels that we fell asleep.

The United States entered this pandemic, after all, with President Trump boasting about a study that ranked the United States the world’s best-prepared country to handle an epidemic. That ranking was published in October; Trump does not seem to have updated his Panglossian assessment of our response.

This is of a piece with our supine responses to other national challenges that are unusually (sometimes uniquely) American. Much as they gave up on coronavirus containment, U.S. political leaders previously gave up on solving our epidemic of gun violence. And on our high numbers of police-perpetrated killings. Also our high rates of child poverty, uninsurance and carbon emissions.

On these and other metrics, the United States fares worse than most if not all other industrialized countries. Yet U.S. officials — from one party in particular — treat these crises as imaginary or unsolvable. (As the recurrent, viral Onion headline on mass-shootings notes: “ 'No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”) Because America is the world’s richest superpower, a city on a hill, our policy choices apparently must already be the best possible ones.

On the occasions political leaders do acknowledge that we’re not measuring up to peers, they excuse the failing as a trade-off necessary to pursue some other, supposedly superior American ideal. America can’t protect schoolchildren as other countries do, because we must prioritize unfettered access to firearms. America can’t save its grandparents from covid-19, because the Dow takes precedence. America can’t guarantee everyone health care, because [something something] liberty.

But there may be a ray of hope: Recent crises — involving health, the economy and police brutality — seem to have caused more Americans to question their country’s track record.

So suggests the COVID-19 Social Change Survey, a daily, nationally representative survey about the pandemic run by Northwestern University social scientists since mid-March. Some survey questions asked whether the United States is better, worse or about the same as other nations across about a dozen topics (economy, health care, criminal justice system, military, education, etc.).

On nearly every metric, the share of Americans rating the United States as “better” than other countries has declined since the pandemic began.

Other questions, from this survey and longer-term polling by Gallup, show declines in broader measures of national pride and confidence in U.S. institutions.

Normally, of course, reduced patriotism or institutional trust would not be positive developments. These declines can be constructive only if they spur the public — and elected officials — to create conditions that would inspire more patriotism and trust.

Such an outcome is not impossible, says Beth Redbird, a Northwestern sociology professor and principal investigator for the survey. “In times of great crisis, we can realize our institutions are not working for us,” Redbird says. “Maybe we decide it’s time to change institutions we’ve taken for granted.”

Maybe a more realistic assessment of our flaws — a crack in the national narcissism — will motivate change, at least if politicians ever catch up with their constituents.

Police reform alone won't stop another George Floyd from being murdered by Wesley Lowery / Newsweek Cover Story

newsweek.com
Police reform alone won't stop another George Floyd from being murdered
By Wesley Lowery on June 22, 2020, at 10:06 AM EDT

30-38 minutes

Where do we go from here? 

HOUSTON -- Congressman Al Green fidgeted in the front row of George "Perry" Floyd's third and final memorial service, held here in the city where the slain man had spent much of his life, as he rehearsed in his head the speech he'd spent the night before preparing.

Green had been in the living room of his Houston home when he first saw the excruciating cell-phone video on the news: a white Minneapolis police officer nonchalantly kneeling on the neck of the 46-year-old Floyd for nearly 9 minutes. The handcuffed man desperately crying that he can not breathe. The bystanders urging the officer to stop. His cold refusal to acknowledge their pleas.

Floyd's body had been flown back to Texas to be buried. But first, there would be a funeral at Fountain of Praise church, one of the largest churches in Green's district, at which the congressman had been asked to say a few words.

But now, as the service began, Green was struck by the words of the church's pastor Remus E. Wright, who urged congregants to maintain social distancing, avoid getting too close, and keep masks over their mouths and noses. The coronavirus pandemic was lurking. And no life, the pastor stressed, was expendable.

Green couldn't shake that concept—that we can't afford to lose one more life. That now is the moment for drastic, desperate action. By the time he was summoned to the stage, the congressman had torn up his speech.

The death of George Floyd has prompted a generational national reckoning with race and justice unlike any seen in the United States since the LAPD beating of Rodney King, which was also captured on bystander video, in the early 1990s. Yet Floyd is just the latest to join a roster of black people killed by police in recent years: Laquan McDonald, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Korryn Gaines, Botham Jean, Breonna Taylor.

For years, black activists and organizers have demanded a complete upheaval of the criminal justice system, yet their demands have been met with skepticism from the public and promises, often unfulfilled, of piecemeal reform from the police. But this time, after Floyd's death, could be different. Polling shows that a majority of white Americans now agree that there is something systematically unjust about American policing.

"I've actually been really emotional," Amber Goodwin, a longtime activist in Houston, who has worked on issues of gun and police violence, told me, adding that the conversation about changing American policing has seemingly evolved overnight. "I've always believed that another world was possible."

Rather than contemplating body cameras and bias training, the public is now debating what it could look like to shift some responsibilities away from police forces altogether. The nation is asking: Where do we go from here? And it seems, Americans are at least momentarily willing to consider a radical answer in response.

"To see a person with a knee on the neck, that's more than is tolerable for any conscience," Green would tell me a few days after the funeral service, noting that the Floyd video had shaken the nation in a way unlike any other video before it. He's worked on these issues for years, and can recite the names of half a dozen black people killed by the police during the years he led Houston's NAACP chapter. The hard-earned reforms over the years have been important. But in this moment, the public appetite for change seems to finally match the urgency of the crisis. "This Black Lives Matter movement is moving the social consciousness of this nation," Green added.

And so he ditched his prepared speech, in which he had planned to call for "unity" and declare that Floyd's life could not be lost in vain.

"We are here because we have no expendables in our community," Green declared from the stage. "George Floyd was not expendable. This is why we're here. His crime was that he was born black."
Wesley Lowery Feature
"To see a person with a knee on the neck, that's more than is tolerable for any conscience." Rep. Al Green speaks at the funeral service for George Floyd in the chapel at the Fountain of Praise church June 9, 2020 in Houston, Texas. David J. Phillip/Pool/Getty

Moments later, the 72-year-old congressman used his place in the pulpit to unveil a historic proposal—the creation of a federal department, run by a Congressionally-confirmed cabinet position, to tackle American racial reconciliation.

"We have a duty, responsibility and obligation not to allow this to be like the other times," Green urged. "We have got to have reconciliation...We survived slavery but we didn't reconcile, we survived segregation but we didn't reconcile, we are suffering invidious discrimination because we didn't reconcile... It's time for us to reconcile."

'We're in the middle of a crucible moment"

Green's call for a historic reckoning with America's racial legacy was still ringing in my ears days later, as I sat in front of my laptop screen and dialed into the video conference link I had been provided. Determined to seize the moment, the Congressional Black Caucus had convened a forum on police violence and accountability, and asked a slate of black activists from across the country to testify. They had also invited me.

For the last six years, I've spent most of my time writing and reporting on police violence and the movement of young black organizers determined to end it. It wasn't a beat I aspired to, or a story I had intended to tell, but rather an assignment seemingly provided by divine happenstance. In August 2014, I was a Congressional reporter for the Washington Post who happened to have a bag packed when rioting broke out in response to the police shooting of Michael Brown Jr. in suburban St. Louis. Two days after my arrival in Ferguson, another reporter and I were arrested by local police as we attempted to file our stories from the dining room of a fast-food restaurant just up the street from the protests. Critics, some within my own profession, insisted that the arrest had made me "part of the story," and that I should be removed from the assignment. That made me even more determined to dig in my heels. In the half of a decade since, I've made police-accountability journalism and the stories of those impacted by the failures of American policing into my life's work.

In 2015, my colleagues at the Washington Post and I launched Fatal Force, a national database tracking fatal police shootings that grew directly out of our reporting on the ground. The black residents and protesters who I'd interviewed in Ferguson insisted that the police were routinely killing black men and women in the streets. Meanwhile, the police and their unions insisted that just was not the case—they rarely killed anyone, they claimed, and on the rare occasion that they did, the person had it coming. The problem was either a flaw in the system, or a series of isolated incidents. Two competing narratives, driving a national debate over race and policing.

Yet, stunningly, no reliable national data existed to settle the question. It was unclear how many people the police were killing, who those people were, and under what circumstances they were dying. So The Post began tracking every fatal police shooting we could—relying on details provided by local news coverage and then supplemented by additional reporting of our own. In the five years that followed, we recorded nearly 5,000 fatal police killings by police—about 3 per day—and discovered that black Americans are killed by the police at at least twice the rate of white Americans.

One of our followup investigations would document how even fired police officers are often able to get their jobs back. Another documented the extent to which black communities are overpoliced yet underserved—the most violent areas of major American cities are also places where murders are rarely solved.

The American public now broadly agrees that there is a problem with race and policing. But a new debate has emerged: how deep and wide is that problem? The activists in the streets have been clear—they believe American policing, which in much of the nation descends directly from slave patrols, is systemically racist and fundamentally broken.

Where do we go from here? As I testified to the CBC, the role of a journalist is not to provide the answers, but rather to document, in excruciating detail, the extent of the problem. And so, when asked where we should go from here, I deferred to the activists, organizers, and the black Americans who have taken to the streets.

"We have truly tried it all," testified Jeremiah Ellison, a Minneapolis city councilman and former street activist who spoke before me, ticking off all of the reforms his city has attempted that have failed to fix policing. He's said he's given up on police reform, and is now one of the leading voices advocating the abolition of policing as it is currently constructed. "We give police an incredible amount of trust. And they deserve an equally incredible amount of accountability when they break that trust. Instead, accountability eludes them entirely."

"In my experience and my community's experience, the role of police has been a really violent force," testified Patrisse Cullors, one of three co-founders of #BlackLivesMatter and chair of Reform LA Jails. "What I've witnessed in the last 30 years is a deep investment into policing and incarceration, and a deep divestment from all of the things that help and support communities that are in need."
Wesley Lowery Feature
"George Floyd was not expendable. This is why we're here. His crime was that he was born black." Visitors pay their respects to George Floyd in front of a mural in Houston, Texas on Monday, June 8, 2020. MARK FELIX/AFP via Getty

For starters, at least, the activists argue that the police need to no longer be tasked with dealing with things like mental health, school discipline, drug and alcohol issues and nonviolent conflict resolution. The buckets of money being poured into police departments—at times the single biggest expenditure in a city budget—should be directed into other community services and resources.

"We're in the middle of a crucible moment in this country," Phil Agnew, another young black activist, would tell me a few days later. Agnew likes to say he was radicalized while a student at Florida A&M University, following the death of Martin Lee Anderson, a 14-year-old black boy who collapsed while doing a required workout at a boot-camp style youth detention center in Florida. When he first entered college, Agnew thought the disparities facing black Americans must be their own fault. But the more he read, and the more he learned, he realized the entire system of American life had been stacked against them. Later, Agnew helped found the Dream Defenders, one of the most influential activist groups to emerge following the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin. Most recently, he and Tef Poe, a Ferguson activist, launched Black Men Build, which hopes to organize and mobilize black men to be politically and socially engaged in advance of this November's elections.
Wesley Lowery Feature - Cover
Photo Illustration by Gluekit for Newsweek; Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty

The next steps, Agnew said, need to be the creation of a world in which black Americans have the same likelihood of health care, clean water, job opportunities and quality education as their white neighbors. "Black people need to have the power to determine what our lives look like in this country," he said.

Yet even as the activists insist that now is the time for sweeping changes and a deep reckoning with how the horrors of our nation's history inform the inequities of our country's present, the conversation in Washington remains much more narrow. Powerful Republicans and Democrats alike are offering legislation that, if signed into law, would undoubtedly increase police oversight and transparency, yet fall well short of the type of radical rethinking of American policing that the activists advocate. As the people in the streets call for abolition, the country's leaders say they're now ready to offer up reform.

"The nation is fed up with seeing the same situation play out over and over and over again," said South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the sole black Republican senator, who has been charged with leading GOP police-reform efforts. The video of Floyd crying out for his mother as he died "broke the back of the American psyche," Scott told me. "Enough is enough already."

A crucial component of his legislation is a body-camera requirement, a proposal he began to advocate after the 2015 police shooting of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, in Sen. Scott's hometown of North Charleston, S.C.

In that case, the officer initially claimed to have been in a desperate struggle for his life when he pulled the trigger. But then a bystander released a cell-phone video that showed Scott running away as the officer opened fire, shooting Scott in the back as he fled. While body cameras don't prevent such shootings, Scott conceded, they at least allow the public to see what truly happened in a given incident, and provide a better chance that officers will be held accountable.

"If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then a video is worth 1,000 pictures," said Scott, who spoke to me on the fifth anniversary of another tragedy in his home state: the racist massacre that left 9 worshippers dead in Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, shot and killed by a white supremacist.

The extent to which the GOP has empowered Scott marks a significant shift for a caucus that just years ago framed any call for policing reform as an attack on all police officers. And yet the senator must walk a rhetorical tightrope. His colleagues still loathe the suggestion that the criminal justice system is "systematically" biased against black Americans. And so Scott himself has avoided—even criticized—the term, even as he provides personal anecdotes that offer proof of such systematic bias.

"Can I identify racial outcomes in the law enforcement community that makes me feel like more of a target? The answer to that is yes. Does that speak to systemic racism? I don't know. I don't come to that conclusion personally."

For decades, he's been routinely pulled over and ticketed for what he says can only be considered "driving while black." Back when he was on his country council in South Carolina, Scott was pulled over by police seven times in a single year. Since first coming to Congress, he's been stopped by the police at least four times while on the grounds of the United States Capitol. On one occasion, Scott was pulled over while driving to visit his grandfather in a poorer part of town, years into his time as an elected official, and soon found his car surrounded by at least four police officers.

"As a person who has been racially profiled, it pricks at your soul, it makes you feel small. It makes you feel powerless and frustrated," Scott said. But isn't that, definitionally, systemic racism, I asked Scott?

"You guys in the media can fight over the philosophical definition of something, but I don't have the luxury of doing is having that fight...What you call it...is important... it just isn't that important to me right now."

Setting aside the rhetorical debate, Scott and his Democratic colleagues do agree on something else: whatever legislation they end up passing will still fall short of eradicating the issue. "I'm looking for something that stops hate from manifesting, I don't see anything in their legislation or mine," Scott said.

None of the proposals put forth by either piece of legislation would have necessarily kept George Floyd alive, and neither guarantees that another George Floyd won't meet the same fate. The passage of either proposal, or a compromise that combines them both, would at once be the most sweeping piece of police reform passed by Congress in a generation, and also largely inconsequential as it relates to curbing the number of police killings.

"It's all tinkering around the edges," said Jonathan Smith, one of the Justice Department's top civil rights officials during the Obama administration, who oversaw the investigation of the Ferguson Police Department after the death of Michael Brown. "People want to do something, so people are grabbing for low-hanging fruit," Smith said. "But it's not going to solve the problem in any meaningful way. It'll let people feel like they did something."

"I think what we're witnessing is, quite frankly, the birth of a new nation. Childbirth is very difficult, but we're going to make it," CBC chairwoman Barbara Lee said when it was her turn to question the panelists during the hearing.

"Many of my white contemporaries especially are finally waking up to begin talking about racism, specifically systemic racism," said Lee, who has introduced legislation that would create a truth, racial healing and transformation commission in the United States. "But they're not clear about the historical context as it relates to slavery and how it's manifested today in policies and programs and funding priorities and in the brutal murder of black men and women by the police.

A few days later, I called Congressman Green to ask how such a reconciliation process would work. As we spoke, he sat in his office, flanked by hand-drawn portraits he had commissioned of Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. Across the room hangs another hero, Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman ever elected to Congress, who boasted in her campaign slogan that she was "unbought and unbossed."

Chisholm, Green told me, was a "liberated Democrat," willing to tell the truth even when it made others in her party upset with her. And it's in that spirit that Green has joined Lee and others in calling for the United States to undergo a reconciliation process similar to those undertaken by post-Holocaust Germany and post-apartheid South Africa. Under Green's proposal, the president of the United States would create a Department of Reconciliation, overseen by a Senate-confirmed cabinet secretary.

This person would be tasked with overseeing national and localized efforts to empirically document, educate the public, and then proposed remedies for the extent to which our nation's original sin—centuries of slavery, followed by decades of legalized discrimination and oppression—still weigh down black Americans. The budget for such an office would fall under the Department of Defense, Green said, since future lawmakers would be loath to ever approve cuts to defense spending.

It's striking, experts say, that the United States has never undergone such a process. While it's true there have been commissions—the Kerner Commission after the riots of the 1960s, and the Christopher Commission after the riots of the 1990s—the federal government has never devoted significant resources to providing a sweeping corrective to the enduring damage wrought by American slavery.

"If you look at countries comparable to the U.S. in their long histories of racial inequality, all of them except the United States have gone through some sort of public reckoning of that past," said Kathleen Belew, a historian who has studied reconciliation processes and author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. "There are ways that racism and white supremacy are deeply hidden inside many aspects of our society. A truth commission gives us an opportunity to get it all out on the table."

It's a process that's played out before, at the local level. Activists in Greensboro, N.C. launched a truth and reconciliation process following the 1979 massacre in which white supremacists shot and killed five anti-racist protesters. In Maine, Native officials underwent a truth and reconciliation process to explain and address why tribal youth were both overrepresented and mistreated in the state's child welfare system. And in Detroit, local activists pressed the state for a truth and reconciliation commission to definitively document the public policy decisions that resulted in the region's stark racial segregation.

"The best thing that can come from a truth commission is that we narrow the range of permissible lies that we tell ourselves as a community about our own history," said Jill Williams, who ran the Greensboro commission and has advised on others across the country. I think that could be helpful to America."

One of the key components of any such commission is to establish a mutually accepted historical narrative. While we all live in the same nation, white Americans and black Americans believe fundamentally different things about what happened in our shared pasts, much less about how it still affects us all today. And how far off are we from having that type of shared history? Are we close?

"Oh, come on. No!" exclaimed Smithsonian Institute secretary Lonnie Bunch when I posed him that question about three weeks after George Floyd's death.

"You learn a lot about a country by what it remembers, but even more by what it forgets," Bunch added, once he'd stopped laughing at me. "I was struck, years ago, by a letter I received where somebody said that America's greatest strength is its ability to forget."

Few in recent history have done as much work as Bunch to force America to remember. After years running the Chicago History Museum, Bunch served as the founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture—affectionately nicknamed "the Blacksonian"—before being named the first black man to ever oversee all 19 Smithsonian museums. To walk the halls of the Blacksonian, from its underground exhibits on slavery to its ground-floor exploration of civil rights to its towering tributes to black sports and culture, is to be confronted by the extent to which the nation we now occupy has been crafted by its past. Neither the inequalities that plague us today, nor the fight to upend them, can be separated from what has come before.

"There's a lot of reason to recognize how today is tied to the arch of history, how the struggle is ongoing," Bunch said, nodding to the protests surging in American streets, comparing the energy of this moment to the Civil Rights push that followed the Brown v. Board of Ed. decision and the murder of Emmett Till. "And the struggle takes resilience. It's not always one big moment where there will be fundamental change. But what history tells you is that there are moments where you see the country take a giant leap forward."
Wesley Lowery Feature
Demonstrators, a young boy among them, picket in front of a school board office in protest of segregation, St Louis, Missouri, early 1960s PhotoQuest/Getty

Once a shared historical narrative can be established, a reconciliation process can begin. "Restorative justice is a set of values," explained Fania Davis, executive director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth. "It's a theory of justice that brings together everyone affected by wrongdoing...We make mistakes. And we hurt people by those mistakes. But we can make amends for those mistakes, we can say sorry and we can take action."

Davis is an elder in the movement, into which she was violently thrust after two of her childhood friends were among those killed in the 1963 Birmingham Church Bombings. "A big part of why you're talking to me today is that I left that experience with this deep yearning to be an agent of social transformation," Davis told me.

She began working with the Civil Rights Movement, and then the Black Power Movement, and then the anti-apartheid movment, and then the student movement. Her former husband, a Black Panther, was shot by a police officer who had entered their home as part of what was then-routine surveillance of black activists. When her sister, Angela, was arrested and held on murder charges (she'd later be acquited), Davis traveled the world raising public support for her release. It was that fight that inspired Davis to become a civil rights lawyer, and later to undertake the study of restorative justice.

While the American justice system asks what rule was broken, who broke the rule, and how severely should we punish them, a restorative justice framework asks who was harmed, what their needs are, what the responsibilities of the person who did the harm are, and how we repair that harm and meet those needs.

Like many activists, Davis had been heartened by the newfound national conversation around defunding police departments and replacing them with social services, and she praised the steps taken by the Minneapolis City Council to disband their police department—and hopes that whatever emerges there next is a community-led restorative justice process.

She also hopes other municipalities follow Minneapolis' lead, and endorses the idea of a nationwide effort to undergo reconciliation. "This is the first step in creating an amazing process that will allow us to imagine a public safety system where black lives matter."
Wesley Lowery Feature
Demonstrators march down Pennsylvania Avenue to protest against police brutality and the death of George Floyd, on June 3, 2020 in Washington, DC. Tasos Katopodis/Getty

"It's way bigger than the police"

Pastor Patrick "PT" Ngwolo met me at halfcourt just after 5 p.m., the Houston heat hanging in the air as a handful of children dribbled basketballs twice the size of their heads. The courts that sit in the center of the Cuney Homes, the city's largest public housing project, have four backboards but just two rims. "George Floyd," someone had scrawled in orange spray paint beneath each of them.

Cuney is a 600-unit project known colloquially as "The Bricks"—for the bland tan-and-red slabs that make up the outer walls of its two-story apartments. It's located in Houston's Third Ward, the center of the city's black politics and culture: it's raised generations of black artists and writers and politicians and a musician you may have heard of named Beyoncé. Yet even the Third Ward provides a tale of two cities. There are blocks of massive old homes, once belonging to the Jewish residents who lived here before the black people moved in. And then there's "The Bottoms," the low-lying stretch of projects, auto-body shops and corner liquor stores tucked next to Texas Southern University, the historically black college founded to serve the black students excluded from the University of Texas.

George "Big Floyd" was well-known in The Bottoms, where he spent most of his life living in a white one-story home on the edges of Cuney projects. Few here can recall precisely when they first met Big Floyd. He had just always been there, a fixture like the rusting metal clothes lines that hang between the apartments. When Ngwolo showed up a few years ago to start a church, Floyd's mother was on the housing complex's residents' council, and helped him get permission to hold church outreach events on the basketball court. Soon, Floyd himself had offered to help, telling the pastor to use his name if anyone ever gave him trouble.

"He provided a lot of guys mentorship and advice," Ngwolo said of Floyd, likening him to a neighborhood mayor. Floyd was an elder statesman. In a part of town where many men don't survive their teens, he had lived long enough to meet his grandchildren. "If you're meeting someone of note in Third Ward, they know Big Floyd."

Ngwolo and I walked a block or two to meet up with J.R. Torres, a 27-year-old, who had known Big Floyd for years. Torres' sister has a child with Floyd's longtime best friend, and so Torres got to know him well over the years. He'd initially scrolled past the video in his Instagram feed, but then his sister texted him. The police killed Big Floyd, she told him. It was only then that he realized the man he'd seen dying on social media was the guy from his neighborhood, the one who'd always offered an encouraging word and begged him to stay out of trouble.

"It was unbelievable," Torres told me. Even in a part of town that's used to burying its young, the cruelty with which Big Floyd's life was extinguished has left people in a state of infuriated paralysis. "We were actually looking at the life being taken up out of this man."

The three of us drove to the other side of the projects in Torres' white Buick Lacrosse—the funeral program from Big Floyd's memorial displayed on the dashboard—until we arrived at the memorial. It was a massive blue display, in which the slain man is depicted with a halo and angels wings. "In loving memory of Big Floyd," the tribute reads "Texas Made. 3rd Ward Raised."

There were about two dozen people gathered in front of the memorial, including Leonard "Junebug" McGowen, a popular Third Ward rapper who was perched atop the hood of his car, a mostly-smoked blunt burning in his hand, when Ngwolo and I approached.

"I think it's way bigger than the police." McGowen told me. He'd known Big Floyd most of his life, growing up as a childhood playmate of one of Floyd's nephews. He still hasn't watched the full video. "Look at our president right now. Look how he talks crazy...It's way bigger than the police. The police is like their street team. The police is like their soldiers. They're badged up so they can do whatever they want to us."

The men and women here don't always use the same words and frameworks as the activists who've taken to the streets across the country. But, when you listen, it's clear they want the same things. They want to live in communities safe from violence, especially from violence perpetrated by those who are supposed to protect them. They see a system stacked against them from birth. They're trapped in run-down housing, segregated into failing schools, without access to higher education or well-paying jobs. They live lives of difficulty and frustration, while being patrolled by police who don't understand them.

"We don't need white police in black areas. They don't get it. It goes all of the way back to slavery. The minute a white person sees us you already know what's the first thing on their head. You know how they judge us: Monster. Predator," said Joshua Butler, 28, who was out at the memorial that night. He wanted to be clear that he doesn't think all police officers or all white people are personally racist. Still, he said, too often, people who haven't grown up here, who haven't lived these lives—especially police—just don't understand. "Y'all don't know how it feels to open up the ice box and see nothing for a week straight. You could never stomach that."

After about half an hour of conversations, we climbed back into Torres' car to drive back to the basketball courts, and I asked him for his story. He'd grown up here, in The Bricks, and went to Jack Yates high school just up the street. His counselors and teachers helped him enroll in a nearby community college, but he didn't last long—on his first day of classes, he got discouraged when he couldn't locate the correct classroom. Days later, he got picked up by police and charged with marijuana possession. He spent a week in jail, and soon had abandoned his aspirations for higher education. In the years since he's worked a series of odd jobs—lots of landscaping to supplement his gambling winnings. He wonders if he'll ever leave The Bricks. He's not betting on it.

"They have to want to fix it," Torres told me of a system that he and black Americans across the country know is stacked against them, "If they don't want to fix it, it ain't gonna get fixed."

And you don't think they want to fix it? I asked.

"Not at all," Torres replied.
Wesley Lowery Feature
Wesley Lowery a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore and a New Era of America’s Racial Justice Movement. Victor Jeffreys II

Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore and a New Era of America's Racial Justice Movement. He is a correspondent for 60 Minutes' "60 in 6," on the mobile app Quibi.

Will Trump Save the Baseball Season? by Jonathan Bernstein

Will Trump Save the Baseball Season?
By Jonathan Bernstein
bloomberg.com
3 min
View Original

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I strongly suspect that over the next few days someone in the White House — perhaps President Donald Trump himself — is going to have the bright idea of solving the current impasse between Major League Baseball and the player’s union. Some quick advice: Don’t do it, Mr. President!

Sure, Trump could use a win. And being able to take responsibility for saving even a very abbreviated baseball season would be a nice nonpartisan achievement, exactly the kind of act that could please both his strongest supporters and lots of people who don’t necessarily like him.

The problem is that the upside and the downside of presidential intervention aren’t balanced. A win would be nice, but even baseball fans won’t remember it for long. What’s more, many people (again, even baseball fans) might not be thrilled that the president is spending his time on sports when there are plenty of more serious problems facing the nation. That wouldn’t necessarily be fair — sports is big business — but navigating through such image problems would be tricky for an administration that is not exactly known for message discipline.

A bigger downside is that there’s every possibility that the two sides cannot be reconciled, and that Trump would wind up bearing the blame for the first-ever cancelled baseball season. No, that wouldn’t be fair; if the sides want to make a deal they’ll succeed, White House or no, and if they don’t they won’t. But that’s how this stuff works. It’s also unfair that the good news of a settlement would have less of an effect on people’s attitudes toward Trump than the bad news of a cancelled season, but it’s very likely that those are the conditions.

The one exception is if it’s a sure thing. If MLB is ready to cut a deal and some of the owners want to give Trump the credit, then he could convene a big White House meeting to conclude negotiations that had already been worked out. (At least a few team owners are Republican donors, so it’s not entirely far-fetched.) But even then Trump should be careful: For one thing, MLB labor negotiators haven’t exactly been known for a firm grasp of their bargaining position over the years.

The real lesson here is that major events, and not publicity stunts, are what drive elections. That’s good news in some ways for presidents; contrary to what some pundits say, a president walking awkwardly for a few steps almost certainly won’t have any affect on anything (and Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth is correct that it’s not a legitimate area for criticizing any politician). Even the fiasco of Trump’s march to a church after attacking peaceful protesters, ugly as it was, may not have any long-term political effect — and to the extent it does it will be because of the inappropriate use of force, not because he looked silly holding a Bible.

What would really help Trump are big events that seem unlikely as of now: controlling the pandemic, rescuing the economy, responding to protests in some way that seems like a victory for the entire nation. Yes, those things are extremely difficult to accomplish. But no one said the presidency is an easy job.


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:
Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Timothy Lavin at tlavin1@bloomberg.net
Published on June 16, 2020, 7:31 AM EDT

Why Do Trump Supporters Act Like His Election Is Certain? By Ed Kilgore

Why Do Trump Supporters Act Like His Election Is Certain?
By Ed Kilgore
nymag.com
6 min
View Original

By any objective standard, the president’s prospects for reelection are looking down. Joe Biden is continuing to lead him in trial heats nationally (by 8.1 percent in the latest RealClearPolitics averages) and in most battleground states. The president’s job approval numbers are lower than they’ve been since last December. People are still very afraid of COVID-19, and despite one good monthly jobs report, the economy is still in the ditch, with unemployment higher than at any time since the 1930s.

Yes, yes, of course, there’s tons of time to go, the economy could somehow turn around and that second “wave” of the coronavirus could fail to appear, and Joe Biden could do or say something self-destructive. But the possibility of a Trump revival is not the same thing as its probability, much less certainty. Yet as Politico notes, there’s little doubt in MAGA-land that Trump will win in November, and maybe win big:

    Interviews with more than 50 state, district and county Republican Party chairs depict a version of the electoral landscape that is no worse for Trump than six months ago — and possibly even slightly better. According to this view, the coronavirus is on its way out and the economy is coming back. Polls are unreliable, Joe Biden is too frail to last, and the media still doesn’t get it….

    “The more bad things happen in the country, it just solidifies support for Trump,” said Phillip Stephens, GOP chairman in Robeson County, N.C., one of several rural counties in that swing state that shifted from supporting Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. “We’re calling him ‘Teflon Trump.’ Nothing’s going to stick, because if anything, it’s getting more exciting than it was in 2016.”

    This year, Stephens said, “We’re thinking landslide.”

Politico found that if you ask Republicans why Trump’s going to win, they generally offer explanations ranging from the hyper-optimistic (everything will be back to normal any day now and a happy back-at-work electorate will reward Trump for saving them), to the aggressively ignorant (all polls showing Biden ahead are fake, because they were dead wrong last time —well which they actually weren’t), to pure disinformation (Democrats are throwing away the election by calling for the abolition of police departments and confiscation of private property, beginning with guns).

But what’s more interesting is what Trump supporters really think, and why they appear so determined to project self-confidence, unlike their endlessly neurotic Democratic counterparts. After all, there is no established principle in politics that thinking you’ll win makes it more likely that you will win, beyond a minimal belief that it’s possible. And in fact, it’s very clear that in 2016, the assumption that Hillary Clinton had the election in the bag hurt her, perhaps fatally, since potential supporters felt free to stay at home, vote for a minor party, or even cast a “protest vote” for Trump.

So why are Trump-supporting Republicans so relentlessly upbeat, and dismissive of objective evidence that points in the direction of defeat? Here are five theories:

Trump supporters are by definition big fans of a man who never admits mistakes or weaknesses, expresses narcissistic, self-congratulatory hubris every other hour, and hates “losers” as much as Jesus Christ loved them. Perhaps they are simply following the leader, who appears to systematically block out any source of information that doesn’t tell him what he wants to hear.

As is well known, Trump’s reelection strategy, and his behavior in office, have been heavily oriented towards “base mobilization,” to the extent of sometimes excluding any serious effort to identify or persuade swing voters, much less Democrats. To the extent that mobilization is facilitated by enthusiasm, getting the MAGA faithful to believe they are marching in a perpetual victory parade is presumably valuable. It’s possibly relevant that polls show a majority of Republicans are motivated by a desire to support Trump, while a majority of Democrats are more focused on beating Trump than on electing Biden. Trump voters want to know they are part of a historic reelection campaign that will take America another step closer to the paradise of the 1950s, not into some socialist nonwhite dystopia.

One bond Trump has with his supporters is in deeply enjoying the discomfort of their common enemies. They are aware that the vast majority of left-of-center Americans don’t simply dislike the president, but dislike him intensely. Many view the prospect of this strange “accidental president” serving another four years with genuine horror. So it’s great sport for Trump supporters to confront them with this possibility, raised to the level of certainty. It’s mass schadenfreude, with a dollop of Trump’s own signature cruelty.

If you are convinced that polls are all “fake” and most of the media — including Fox News on occasion — just systematically lie, all to benefit Trump’s enemies, then it’s a short leap to assume that the “truth” they are hiding is MAGA-rific or even glorious. Similarly, once one is convinced that “real Americans” are in the president’s corner, then anything (like a bad poll or mockery of a self-destructive Trump video clip) emanating from sources that either “don’t get it” or are actively hostile to this country and its interests simply cannot be credited as “real.” Believing that Trump might lose, therefore, can become an anti-patriotic act, or a sign of being duped by contemptuous wrong-doers.

The most troubling possibility is that Trump supporters understand the president is laying the groundwork for contesting a defeat, and want to help him do so. Here’s how I recently described Trump’s efforts to undermine, in advance, the legitimacy of the November election in case he happens to lose it:

    Trump is now regularly claiming that voting by mail is inherently illegitimate, except for grudging exceptions for people who can’t make it to the polls. So, presumably, states that allow for no-excuse voting by mail in November are holding “substantially fraudulent” elections. That’s 34 states who do so by law (including battleground states Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), 11 more that so far are waiving excuse requirements this pandemic year (including New Hampshire), and another that may be forced to do so by a lawsuit (Texas).

    So in a very real sense, unless Trump backs off his claims that voting by mail means a “rigged election,” he’s letting us know that he and his supporters will be justified in challenging any adverse results in states that allow this terrible practice to take place.

Keep in mind that Trump went to a lot of trouble to claim he was robbed of a popular-vote majority in 2016 (thanks to “millions of illegal votes” for Hillary Clinton for which he offered not a shred of evidence), even though it didn’t ultimately matter. One possible rationale was to convince his followers Democrats always cheat, meaning their victories should prospectively be discounted or challenged. If on Election Night 2020, Donald Trump claims victory on the basis of early returns, is there any doubt his fans and media allies will join him in crying out “fraud!” to the high heavens should late mail ballots drift in and reverse the results? I don’t think so. And either consciously or unconsciously, some of them may be anticipating that fraught scenario already. To a significant number of the faithful, Trump is not just a president, but an embodiment of America, and even God’s Annointed. He can’t fail. He can only be failed.

A president who promised to put ‘America First’ instead turned us into this. By Dana Milbank.

A president who promised to put ‘America First’ instead turned us into this
By Dana Milbank
washingtonpost.com
4 min

June 15, 2020 at 7:19 PM EDT

How nice it would be to be in Tokyo today.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government moved to its last stage of reopening on Thursday, allowing bars, amusement parks and karaoke joints to operate. The city of 14 million, in a metropolitan area of 38 million, has averaged just 18 new cases of covid-19 per day, most of which the government efficiently traces to known cases.
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How nice it would be to be in Auckland today.

New Zealand has suspended social distancing and has lifted limits on public gatherings, after it declared the virus eradicated for now; Australia is close behind.

How nice it would be to be in Paris or Berlin.

On Monday, France and Germany, enjoying low levels of the virus, opened up to travelers from within the European Union. German tourist attractions reopened, and Paris reopened restaurants. French President Emmanuel Macron said it’s time to “rediscover our taste for freedom.” But U.S. visitors won’t be allowed.

And how nice it would be to be in Athens.

Greece on Monday was set to welcome visitors from such nations as China, Japan, Israel, Australia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and North Macedonia because those countries have the virus in check. The virus-laden United States didn’t make the cut.

The world is reopening, safely in many places, because responsible governments made the right decisions about the pandemic. Life there is slowly returning to normal.

And then, there is the United States. We just regained our worldwide lead in reported new cases, passing Brazil, with nearly 24,000 per day. USA! USA! We have had a world-leading 2.1 million infected and 116,000 dead. Much of the world doesn’t want America’s infected hordes traveling there.

Who can blame them? Other governments took the pandemic seriously and responded competently. Ours didn’t, and doesn’t. The willy-nilly reopening here, with safety requirements ignored and inadequate contact tracing, has allowed the virus to spread in much of the country, particularly in states that were most reckless in their reopenings.

And President Trump undermines what few restraints there are, scheduling mass rallies, beginning with an indoor event this week in Tulsa against the pleading of the local health director. Trump won’t “give the press the pleasure” of wearing a mask (one of the most important factors in safe reopening), which ensures many of his supporters won’t, either.

The effects of the careless reopening are now becoming clear. Health-care investment-research firm Nephron, in a report Sunday, finds that the quartile of states that opened earliest has seen a 26 percent increase in cases, while the second-fastest quartile has seen a 7 percent increase. The third and fourth quartiles went down, 31 percent and 9 percent, respectively. “It is patently obvious that states that removed stay-at-home restrictions earlier are seeing worse trends in case growth this month,” Nephron concluded.

Among the 14 earliest states, many of which ignored public health recommendations, nine have seen increases: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas, Missouri, Montana, Idaho and Alaska. In the second group, Arizona, California and North Carolina are particularly alarming.

In an interview with Britain’s Telegraph newspaper, top U.S. infectious-disease official Anthony Fauci said it’s an open question whether states will “have the capability to do the appropriate and effective isolation, and contact tracing, to prevent this increase from becoming a full-blown outbreak.” But The Post reports that contact tracing efforts are “way behind” in many hard-hit areas. And yet the reopening keeps expanding — sporting events, conventions, concerts — regardless of the growing threat.

It didn’t have to be this way. Japan, where subways are busy and nightclubs are hopping, benefits from a culture that embraces mask-wearing. Virus-free New Zealand, with back-to-normal sporting events and concerts, benefits from being an island nation. But what about Tunisia, Morocco, Chad, Dominica, Barbados, Uruguay, Cambodia, Thailand, Montenegro, Croatia, Fiji, Iceland and Australia? They’re also on the list of the 15 countries that a German data analysis company, Iunera, identified as being “on a successful path to recovery.” South Korea, the Czech Republic and others have also done well. Is America not as “great” as them?

“It’s just political will,” Andy Slavitt, a top health-care official in the Obama administration, told me Monday. “Are you willing to suffer short-term pain for a lot of long-term gain? Obviously, the president wasn’t.” The behavior of Trump, and of like-minded governors operating with his encouragement, is self-defeating, for it delays the restoration of commerce and the return to normal that countries around the world are now savoring.

The United States, long the envy of the world, now fumbles while others move ahead. A president who promised to put “America First” instead put us at the back of the line.