ACB-- Another Terrible Idea Of Trump's And His Circle

 

I dissent by Nancy Ohanian

Dan Balz wrote scorching column for the Washington Post yesterday even before Trump announced Amy Coney Barrett, Facing possible defeat, Trump threatens the integrity of the election. "Each week has brough evidence," he began, "of the damage [The Donald] has done during his nearly four years in office. According to his own words, he is not finished. This past week brought a renewed warning of a harm he could yet inflict on the integrity of elections. [Donald] did more than simply refuse to pledge that he would facilitate a peaceful transfer of power if he loses to former vice president Joe Biden, though that in itself was a step no previous president has taken. In doing so, he escalated his ongoing attack on mail-in ballots, seeding the ground to contest the election as rigged or fraudulent if he is not the winner and to propel the country into chaos."

Balz speculated that all this carp from The Donald may "merely reflected the mind-set of a president who knows he is running behind in his bid for a second term, one more rhetorical flailing to somehow throw the opposition off balance and to distract from the real reasons for Biden’s lead in the polls. But this close to the election, anything Trump does to question the validity of the count should be regarded as serious and treated as such. Republicans who normally stand by idle when the president says or does something outrageous pushed back against his words-- though, notably, nearly all were careful neither to rebuke nor condemn the president personally. They simply pointed to a long history of peaceful transfers from one presidency to the next and stood up for the Constitution, which is the minimum expected of elected officials who have sworn an oath to defend that document."

As you know, almost all of these Republicans-- who were fanatics that "the voters must weigh in" when Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court-- almost a year before before the election-- are now saying that Donald's nominee must get a vote. Democrats see it differently. Reaction against his nomination yesterday was swift and overwhelming. Mondaire Jones is Blue America's candidate of the week and a court expert, so I was talking with him about about the nomination. His take, like many progressives, is that Barrett "thinks the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. She thinks abortion is 'always immoral.' She is hostile to LGBTQ+ civil rights, & would vote to undo marriage equality. Her nomination would be a direct attack on millions of Americans. We won't stand for it. A generation ago, the GOP replaced Thurgood Marshall, the founder of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, with someone who has cast decisive votes to undermine racial justice. Now they want to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with someone who promises to undo her legacy of reproductive justice. Not on our watch." Jones will try to find support among his new colleagues to expand the Supreme Court by 4 members next year. [You can contribute to his campaign here.]

Current members were concerned about the same things Jones is concerned about. Pramila Jayapal, right after the announcement:

Any individual nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court must believe in equal justice under law and opportunity for all. That means being fully committed to protecting civil rights and voting rights, women’s rights and workers’ rights, reproductive rights and disability rights, LGBTQ+ rights and Indigenous rights. It also means standing on the side of people over profits and communities over corporations when it comes to health care, protections for those with pre-existing conditions, immigration, the environment, consumer protections, ending gun violence and getting money out of politics.

Not only does Amy Coney Barrett fail to meet that standard, but she has spent years consistently and dangerously arguing against it from the federal bench. It is no wonder that conservative, right-wing groups had her on their recommendation list as they continue their coordinated attacks on health care, abortion rights, voting rights and the right of workers to organize. I strongly oppose this lifetime appointment to the highest court in our land, and I urge President Trump to withdraw his nomination as quickly as he made it.

With less than 40 days until the election, and as voters across America are already casting their ballots, we need to let their voices be heard. They know that everything is on the line. We must allow them to choose the next president and then allow that president to choose the next nominee for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. This is the same standard that Republicans implemented at the end of President Obama’s term when Merrick Garland was nominated with more than seven months remaining before the election. This is how we must proceed with the future of the court, this country and our democracy hanging in the balance.

AOC weighed in quickly as well: "If confirmed before the election, Barrett will have the opportunity to cast the deciding vote to strike down the ACA on November 10th when the Court hears California v. Texas. Millions of Americans would be thrown off their health insurance in the middle of the pandemic, and health insurers could refuse to cover individuals who have or have had COVID-19... And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Barrett holds radical positions when it comes to the right to choose. She is on record saying that abortion is 'always immoral.' On the 7th Circuit, she has repeatedly handed down decisions that would have limited abortion. With her on the Court, the conservative goal of repealing Roe v. Wade is within reach."

Bernie urged his supporters across the country to tell their senators "to do everything possible to slow down the nomination process... He called her nomination "a disaster for our country and our movement. If confirmed, she poses a threat to health care, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights, voting rights, workers' rights, environmental protections, and so much more. Now Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans are going to try to rush through Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation hearings and have the Senate vote on her nomination before the end of this year." He continued:

It is not a radical idea to suggest that the winner of this year's presidential election should be the one to select Justice Ginsburg's replacement. In fact, that is what the clear majority of the American people want.

But now that Trump has announced his nominee, Mitch McConnell is planning to rush a vote during this election year-- a complete contradiction from his position just a few years ago.

You may recall that in 2016 Mitch McConnell refused to have the Senate vote on President Obama's Supreme Court nominee to replace Justice Scalia. McConnell's view at that time was that the nomination should be the job of the next president.

Here is what McConnell told Fox News in 2016:

"The Senate has a role to play here. The president nominates, we decide to confirm. We think the important principle in the middle of this presidential year is that the American people need to weigh in and decide who's going to make this decision."

And it's not just Mitch McConnell-- many other Republican senators are on the record saying the same thing.

Well, today I say to my colleagues in the Senate: We must let the next president name Justice Ginsburg's replacement. Respect the will of the American people and delay Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation to the Supreme Court.

Barbara Lee (D-CA) noted that "Senate Republicans have no shame in pushing a right-wing judge just weeks before the election despite the fact that a majority of Americans believe Mitch McConnell should wait to replace the judge until after the election. This lifetime appointment will reshape the court to a 6-3 conservative majority and have far-reaching impacts on our nation for generations to come. Amy Coney Barrett has a record of being hostile to reproductive rights, immigrants’ rights, gun control policies, and the Affordable Care Act. With the Supreme Court scheduled to hear a case on the Affordable Care Act coming up a week after the election, the stakes have never been higher. Right now our fundamental rights are on the line, and we need to do everything we can to honor Justice Ginsburg’s last wish and prevent Mitch McConnell from stealing this seat."

Back to Balz's pre-announcement column. He wrote that Señor Trumpanzee's "Republican allies in Congress... are they the people whose views he cares about most. Instead, his attempt to discredit mail-in ballots as a way to challenge a possible Biden victory is aimed at rallying his own army of supporters, prepping them to respond, if necessary, with protests or perhaps worse if he challenges vote tabulations-- and therefore the results-- in the days after the election. If any people believed that the president was just letting off steam when he declined to pledge a peaceful transfer of power, they can look to something White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said after FBI Director Christopher A. Wray had testified before a Senate committee that he knows of no evidence of 'any kind of national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise.' Wray’s comments were the latest in a string of statements from all kinds of election and security experts debunking Trump’s claims about mail-in ballots being rife with fraud. Meadows, however, chose to challenge the FBI director during an interview Friday on CBS’s This Morning. 'With all due respect to Director Wray,' he said, 'he has a hard time finding emails in his own FBI, let alone figuring out whether there’s any kind of voter fraud.' That was not a chief of staff trying to retract a president’s words or clean up after a mistake. What he said in attacking Wray was meant to reinforce the message the president continues to deliver."

Attorney General William P. Barr has added his voice to the campaign against mail-in ballots, saying they mean an end to the sanctity of the secret ballot-- and ignoring the steps states take to protect the secrecy of votes cast that way. This past week, Barr told the president about discarded mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, which the president claimed was evidence of fraud.

Voting-law experts have sharply criticized a Justice Department investigation into the matter.

People do want to know who wins the presidency as soon as possible, and generally that’s been on the night of the election or by early next day. But that was in years when nearly everyone voted in person on Election Day. In recent years, more Americans have chosen to vote ahead of the election at designated early-voting sites.

This year, because of the coronavirus pandemic, millions of Americans are reluctant to vote in person, whether on the day of the election or during specified early-voting windows. They prefer to mark their ballots without having to be in places with other people. As a result, there has been a surge in requests for mail-in ballots. Trump appears to fear that the more people who vote, and the easier it is for people who fear the virus to do so safely, the less chance he has to win the election.

The processing of those mail-in ballots will take longer than ballots cast on Election Day. Some states require that mail-in ballots arrive by Election Day, others that they simply be postmarked by Election Day. Ballots may legally arrive for days after Election Day, and processing and counting can and will be slow in some places, as the primary elections showed. There will also be challenges to some of these ballots, and some will be discarded because they were filled out improperly.

No matter the exact system, the processing and counting of these ballots is more laborious and therefore slower. California is a case in point, a state where the counting can go on for days and possibly weeks. In 2016, Hillary Clinton saw her vote totals rise steadily after the week of the election, eventually amassing a popular vote margin of nearly 5 million votes in the state. In 2018, California Democrats captured House seats with the votes that were tabulated days after the election, including two in which Republicans were leading the day after the election.

The scenario that could play out on the night of the election is simple. In the hours after the polls close, Trump could appear to be winning in some of the states that will decide the election, even though tens upon tens of thousands of ballots will not have been counted.

At that point, as he did with a tweet during the 2018 U.S. Senate race in Arizona, Trump could attempt to call a rhetorical halt and claim that whatever happens next is a sign of fraud or evidence of a rigged count. The tabulating will continue, but how will his loyalists react if he cries foul?

To suggest this is all just mischief-making by the president is to understate the potential maliciousness of what he is attempting to do. He seeks to disqualify voting in states where all voters are being sent mail-in ballots, which he claimed, without evidence, in a recent tweet means they are open to “ELECTION INTERFERENCE by foreign countries” that will lead to “massive chaos and confusion.”

Facing possible defeat in November, the president also recently tweeted that this year’s election “may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED” because of mail-in ballots. In another tweet he claimed, “RIGGED ELECTION in waiting.” At a rally in Wisconsin last month, he said, “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” On Friday night in Virginia, he said, “We’re not going to lose this except if they cheat.”

If Trump loses the election and then moves to discredit the results in the face of no evidence of widespread fraud, the country will be confronted with one more crisis of his presidency-- one that will have been unfolding in plain view.

Donald’s announcement of his Supreme Court nominee drew about 150 guests to the White House and, appropriately enough, according to Washington Post reporter Seung Min Kim "most of [them] declined to wear masks or social distance because of the coronavirus pandemic. Notable in the Rose Garden crowd were former campaign aide Corey Lewandowski, Faith & Freedom Coalition Founder Ralph Reed and Fox News host Laura Ingraham. Folding chairs were set close together for the event. Among the lawmakers in attendance were Republican senators who will be voting on the nominee-- Josh Hawley (MO), Thom Tillis (NC), Deb Fischer (NE), Ben Sasse (NE), Kelly Loeffler (GA), Mike Lee (UT) and Marsha Blackburn (TN)." If you could pick one of them to not die, who would it be?

I caught up with New Jersey congresswoman and progressive icon Bonnie Watson Coleman at church this morning. After the services, she told me that she had two problems with what was happening here, first "The hypocrisy of nominating a replacement of this ilk, or any person to the Supreme Court at this time, and second This particular nominee, Amy Barrett Coney. First, we are at the end of the election season when an important decision about the direction of this country is being considered. Trump has made a mockery of our values, made our citizens less safe and divided this country with his inciting and racist words and deeds. McConnell refused to consider Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court with 400 days left in his administration, yet he promises to force this upon us in less than 40 days left before an election and at a time when some states are already voting. Sheer hypocrisy and evil and it pisses me off. Regarding the second point, this candidate does not deserve to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg. She represents a direct threat to access to health care, a woman’s autonomy over her body, protection of civil rights, LGTBQ+ rights and voting rights. She’s wrong for the job."

Adam Christensen, the progressive Democrat aiming to replace Ted Yoho in north-central Florida by beating some shady character from Yoho's orbit, noted that "Amy Coney Barrett stands against everything we fight for: Medicare, civil rights, climate legislation, LGBTQ+ rights and women’s rights to choose. Mrs. Barrett would be on the bench for decades and would prevent any meaningful change from occurring. If she is nominated before this election we must expand the Supreme Court to allow for fair justices who will stand for the issues that matter to all Americans, not just the few." It'll be great seeing him and Mondaire Jones working on this together.


Nate McMurray is running for Congress in western New York, a rural/suburban district between Buffalo and Rochester that is the reddest district in New York and a district McMurray, running as a progressive with no help-- to put it mildly-- from the DCCC came within a third of a percentage point (1,087 votes) of winning in 2018. Presumably because he did so well, the vile, progressive-hating Blue Dog Cheri Bustos, who heads the DCCC, is again actively sabotaging McMurray's campaign. Meanwhile, the DCCC and it's corporate candidates can take a lesson from McMurray in how to talk with their voters about Trump's Supreme Court power-grab. McMurray to NY-27 voters today:

A mere week after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing, the Trump administration speeds forward with its plan to install another extremist ideologue on the Supreme Court by Election Day in November, flouting the Constitution yet again in the process.

All this so the Republican party can cruelly do away with protections for preexisting conditions and go after women's health and protections for minority communities. Over 204,000 Americans are dead, seven million more infected and at risk of long-term effects of COVID-19. Over 40 million Americans are out of work and 12 million lost their health insurance since March. It is unconscionable that President Trump would choose a nominee who will deliver the death blow to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and rip health care away from millions of people during a deadly pandemic.

After Justice Ginsburg’s passing, I said that Trump’s choice for nomination would unravel Justice Ginsburg’s legacy of protecting choice and equality. Sadly, I was correct. And the hyper-political nature of this moment puts on full display his utter contempt for the American judicial system and the confirmation process.

There is no doubt that Trump will, if allowed to stack the highest court in the United States, ask them to overturn the ACA, including its protections for people with pre-existing conditions. If Trump has his way, complications from COVID-19, on top of conditions like cancer, diabetes, and pregnancy, will become pre-existing conditions that allow families to be denied healthcare coverage.

My opponent, who has only known a life of wealth and privilege, including lifelong access to excellent healthcare, has already signaled his support of Trump’s nominee. Chris Jacobs has no idea what it is like to be unemployed or struggling, without health insurance, in a health crisis. I do. The voters do. God help us.

If, Like Putin, You Bet Trump Would Be The Worst President Ever, You Would Be Raking In The Bucks Today

There was never any doubt-- at least not among people with 3-digit IQs-- that Donald Trump would be a catastrophic president. He isn't intelligent or even vaguely competent and he is completely self-obsessed and narcissistic. The Democrats gambled that running even a horrible and widely-hated candidate like Hillary would be a safe bet in the kind of lesser-of-two evils contest they like best. The Democrats lost the bet. And they're doing it again this year. Maybe they'll win this time.

Trump's glaring and undeniable shortcomings were at the base of why Putin was so enthusiastic about supporting him. Worldwide, America's allies saw clearly what a mess Trump would be likely to make of everything he touched. They were right. Yesterday, Gallup released a poll showing that worldwide disapproval of American leadership since Trump entered the White House has been the highest ever, especially in Europe. In Europe a median 61% disapproving of U.S. leadership was a new high and in Asia, the level was 32%, slightly less than the 2017 record low of 30%. The Asian levels were bolstered by relatively high Trump approval ratings in 6 authoritarian countries-- Israel (64%), Mongolia (62%), Turkmenistan (62%), the Philippines (58%), Nepal (54%), and Myanmar (53%).

A day early, Washington Post reporter Dan Balz noted that "America’s standing in the world is at a low ebb. Once described as the indispensable nation, the United States is now seen as withdrawn and inward-looking, a reluctant and unreliable partner at a dangerous moment for the world. The coronavirus pandemic has only made things worse. President Trump shattered a 70-year consensus among U.S. presidents of both political parties that was grounded in the principle of robust American leadership in the world through alliances and multilateral institutions. For decades, this approach was seen at home and abroad as good for the world and good for the United States. In its place, Trump has substituted his America First doctrine and what his critics say is a zero-sum-game sensibility about international relationships. America First has been described variously as nationalistic, populistic, isolationist and unilateralist. The president has demeaned allies and emboldened adversaries such as China and Russia."

Trump has failed dismally in confronting the pandemic-- and that isn't just obvious in Florida, Texas, California and Arizona. It's also obvious in Italy, Germany, France and Japan. Allies have been re-thinking their relationships with the U.S.-- and praying Trump is defeated in November. Balz reminded his readers that in response to Trump's COVID-failure European nations have taken the unprecedented step of blocking Americans from entering their countries. Yesterday, it was announced that Trump's latest national security advisor, Robert O'Brien-- who has refused to wear a mask or practice social distancing-- tested positive for the coronavirus.

Balz continued that "From abroad, the United States is seen as having lost confidence in itself as it grapples not only with the pandemic but also with long-standing political divisions and a racial reckoning over the treatment of black Americans. The perceived loss of confidence among Americans in turn has led others to question the United States’ appetite or capacity for a collaborative leadership role at a time when the health and economic crises call out for committed global cooperation... [O]verall assessments of the effect of his approach to the world are harsh-- with fears that the pandemic will do further damage over time."

Before the pandemic, the president took a number of steps that signaled a retreat from collective involvement abroad, pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, the Iran nuclear deal and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. He raised doubts about the U.S. commitment to NATO. After a long-running quarrel with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he has called for the withdrawal of more than a quarter of the 34,500 U.S. troops stationed in Germany.

Since the pandemic struck, Trump has continued to pull back. When other nations’ leaders gathered by video to rally behind and provide funding for the development of a coronavirus vaccine, the United States skipped the meeting. When many world leaders participated in a World Health Organization assembly on the pandemic, the president was absent. Trump’s anger with China over the virus ultimately prompted him to withdraw the United States from the WHO.

“People are stunned about the effect of incapable leadership, or of polarizing leadership, of not being able to unify and get the forces aligned so you can address the problem [of the coronavirus],” said Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, a vice president of the German Marshall Fund and director of its Berlin office. “And that, of course, results in a nosedive in how you view [the United States]. What you’re seeing is a collapse of soft power of America.”

“I think the U.S. is seen from my perspective as being involved in its own internal reckoning-- like the rest of the world doesn’t really exist,” said Robin Niblett, director and chief executive of Chatham House, a think tank in London. “It’s America trying to battle with historical and contemporary demons that as much as anything are a result of its own internal contradictions and tensions and strengths and weaknesses. And it’s not all bad. I’m just saying it is like really seeing somebody’s psychological flaws exposed at a moment of stress.”

...“It hurts our brand. It hurts the status of our institutions. It’s going to weaken our economy and our economic power and soft power as a consequence,” said Stephen J. Hadley, who was a national security adviser to President George W. Bush. “It’s potentially a real setback.”

...[B]y the numbers, Trump had an immediate and negative impact on perception of American leadership. A Gallup survey of impressions of world leadership after the first year of Trump’s presidency saw the rating of U.S. leadership plummet by 20 points-- lower than Bush’s worst rating.

The following year, approval of U.S. leadership remained similarly low, and disapproval was higher than for the leadership in Germany, China and Russia. “In this climate, China’s leadership has gained a larger advantage in the ‘great power competition,’ and the other player, Russia, is now on a more even level with the U.S.,” the Gallup report said.

The Pew Research Center issued a report in January on international attitudes toward the United States and found 64 percent of people across 32 countries saying they had no confidence in Trump as the U.S. leader, though impressions of the U.S. as a whole remained positive. Trump’s ratings were slightly better than the previous year. Pew analysts said that was because of increased support from those on the right in other nations, including those who support right-wing populist parties in their countries.

The same phenomenon showed up in an annual Gallup survey of satisfaction among Americans with the U.S. position in the world. The 2020 survey found that category of satisfaction at 53 percent, up from 32 percent in early 2017. The difference was attributable in large part to a big shift among Republicans. Coming out of the Obama years in 2017, 47 percent of Republicans said they were satisfied with the U.S. position in the world. After three years under Trump, that had risen to 85 percent.

...On Sept. 2, 1987, Trump, at the time a New York real estate developer toying with a run for president, bought a full-page ad in three major newspapers to publish an open letter to the American people outlining his views on foreign and defense policy. It was a view of the world and America’s place in it that he would carry largely unchanged into the White House almost 30 years later.

He did not use the words “America First” but that was the essence of his message. For decades, he argued, “other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.” He said the world “is laughing at America’s politicians” for doing work beneficial to others at the expense of those at home. He said the United States was absorbing the costs of protecting other nations that could and should pay more.

At the time, Japan and Saudi Arabia were among his principal targets. In office, it has become China and the nations of NATO, which together make up the United States’ most important military alliance. But if the targets are different, the philosophy has changed little. America has been played for a sucker, and it’s time to call a halt.

The elements of his America First worldview include a focus on trade, with tariffs as a weapon; a more restrictive immigration policy; pressing others to pay more of the cost of mutual defense; and a reliance on bilateral rather than multilateral negotiations. His style is transactional and highly personal, and while he has been critical of the leaders of democratic countries such as Germany and France, and Britain earlier, he has been reluctant to criticize authoritarian leaders including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping (the latter at least until recently).

In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2019, Trump said: “If you want freedom, take pride in your country. If you want democracy, hold on to your sovereignty. And if you want peace, love your nation. Wise leaders always put the good of their own people and their own country first. The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots. The future belongs to sovereign and independent nations.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a speech to the Heritage Foundation’s President’s Club last October, said the administration was approaching the world realistically. “We’ve recognized that we can’t be all things to everywhere, all the time,” he said. “No nation has the capacity to deliver that. And that means not that you abandon the field but that you calibrate your resources to effectively address the relative risks... I am confident that the next administrations will come into office and they’ll see these issues the same way because they’re right.”

On their face, those words are not particularly discordant. But analysts who have served presidents of both parties come to a different conclusion. They say Trump’s presidency has marked the greatest discontinuity in American foreign policy since World War II.

“President Trump is acting as no administration acted since the 1920s,” said Nicholas Burns, a career Foreign Service officer and former U.S. ambassador to NATO now teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “Those presidents were engaged in the world. President Trump isn’t. He’s almost at war with the world.”

Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and U.S. ambassador to NATO during the administration of President Barack Obama, said of Trump, “He doesn’t believe in alliances, open markets, promotion of freedom and human rights — the three pillars of [American] foreign policy. On the essential concept of the United States as the global leader of the international order, Donald Trump has thrown that all out the window.”

“What Donald Trump is doing is badly damaging the belief by people outside the United States that we still understand that that system [of alliances] is in our best interests, as well as the interest of other countries,” said Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute, who served in the administration of George W. Bush. “We act like treaties and participation in international organizations is some kind of big favor we are doing everyone else.”

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) said Trump’s benign treatment of authoritarian leaders such as Putin, Xi and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has produced no obvious positive results or benefits for the United States. “He would argue this is part of his grand strategy to get them to be better neighbors,” Romney said. “The disproof of that is the lack of pudding.”

Romney pointed to Trump’s decision to withdraw from the WHO to argue that going it alone is the wrong strategy. “It’s a very symbolic decision to say the WHO is too influenced by China and we’re going to get out of it so it can be completely dominated by China, instead of saying we’re going to flex our muscle and make sure the WHO gets in line,” he said.

Across the political spectrum of national security analysts, including some who give the president credit in specific areas of foreign policy, there is agreement that the pandemic underscores the damage caused by the president.

Tom Donilon, who was a national security adviser to Obama, said: “By almost every measure, America’s standing and influence in the world has been damaged over the last three-and-a-half years... You see it during a crisis. This is the first global crisis probably since World War II where the United States has not been in the lead. It’s kind of a stunning thing to see a transnational challenge like this without U.S. leadership.”

...What the next four years hold obviously depends considerably on the outcome of the November election, but few who study or practice in the areas of foreign policy and national security see an easy path ahead, whatever the result.

“Over the long term, I still have confidence in our institutions, our entrepreneurial traditions, our universities, our values, our young people and all the rest,” said Hadley, the former national security adviser. “But our margin for error is small. The challenges are great and we’re not doing what we need to do to avoid the doomsday scenario.”

“I think this is the most dangerous moment the United States has faced in decades,” said the former Obama adviser Donilon. “We obviously are in the midst of multiple crises. Economic. Health. A serious societal upheaval. We have an election system that is vulnerable to outside interference... We have the lowest point in our relationships with Russia and China in decades. I think democracy is under the most pressure in the world since the ’30s.”

Burns, a foreign policy adviser to the Biden campaign, said he thinks the former vice president, as president, would “quickly return the United States to a position of leadership” and that other governments would respond positively to that. “But I worry that it will take longer with the publics of these countries,” he added. “The memory of Donald Trump will not fade easily.”

But for those for whom electing Biden solves everything, Daalder offered a cautionary note. “It’s not enough to just change tone,” he said. “People will say it’s great that Joe Biden loves us, but what are we going to do? It will take an extraordinary effort to reengage and rebuild a set of relationships and a set of tools that have been ignored for far too long.”

Few believe a new president can flip a switch and return the situation to that of a previous era. “There is no status quo ante,” said the German Marshall Fund’s Kleine-Brockhoff.

Nor will the choices be easy for allies of the United States, particularly in Europe, even if Biden becomes the next president. “Europeans can dismiss a lot of what the Trump administration tells Europe because it’s Trump telling us,” Niblett said, “because we don’t trust him personally, because as Europeans, we think he’s making it up as he goes along. But if Biden were to come, there’d be no hiding. Europeans would have to make choices”-- starting with their relationship with China.

Whoever is the next president will face what some analysts see as the most daunting national security inheritance of any president in living memory-- and the mere change of administrations might not be enough to reassure other nations, which now fear that a significant portion of the U.S. population embraces Trump’s approach to the world and will continue to do so, even if he is no longer president.

“Now that they’ve seen Trump, they fear a whipsawing back and forth between something they recognize in the historical tradition and something that’s a throwback to neo-isolationism,” said Michèle Flournoy, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy in the Obama administration. “Until they see a second election that validates an engaged United States that is willing to lead in concert with allies and partners, they won’t be assured.”

The prestige of the United States ebbs and flows with events, but the country remains the one to which others still look in times of crisis. Expectations of this country are always higher than for other powers that do not have its long track record of leadership. But the last time this country’s standing was in decline, it was because of fears that the United States would exercise its vast powers excessively and unilaterally. That is not the issue today. Instead, it is a worry that the United States is no longer prepared or willing to use the powers it still has for the good of the world.

The Trump/Pandemic Combo Has Been A Godsend For Conservatives

Fake Magic by Nancy Ohanian

Yesterday, writing for the Washington Post, Alex Tabarrok and Ahluwalia Ohlhaver-- public health professionals-- asserted that We could stop the pandemic by July 4 if the government took these steps. Trump-- and you thought he was bad before we fell into the pandemic?-- admits he would prefer see Americans die, by the thousands daily, rather than do the hard work it would take. "The dangers of reopening without disease control-- or a coronavirus vaccine or therapeutic breakthrough-- are illustrated," wrote Tabarrok and Ahluwalia, "by events at the Smithfield Foods meatpacking plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Smithfield offered workers a bonus if they showed up every day in April. Normally, bonus pay would increase attendance. But in a pandemic, encouraging the sick to haul themselves into work can be disastrous. The plan backfired. Hundreds of Smithfield employees were infected, forcing the plant to shut down for more than three weeks. If we stay the current course, we risk repeating the same mistake across the whole economy." Unfortunately, that's the Trump/Noem way of handling the pandemic.

The economy consists of people who have hopes and fears. As long as they are afraid of a lethal virus, they will avoid restaurants, travel and workplaces. (According to a Washington Post-Ipsos Poll last week, only 25 percent of all Americans want to “open businesses and get the economy going again, even if that means more people will get the coronavirus.”) The only way to restore the economy is to earn the confidence of both vulnerable industries and vulnerable people through testing, contact tracing and isolation.

There is already a bipartisan plan to achieve this; we helped write it. The plan relies on frequent testing followed by tracing the contacts of people who test positive (and their contacts) until no new positive cases are found. It also encourages voluntary isolation, at home or in hotel rooms, to prevent further disease spread. Isolated patients would receive a federal stipend, like jurors, to discourage them from returning to workplaces too soon.

But our plan also recognizes that rural towns in Montana should not necessarily have to shut down the way New York City has. To pull off this balancing act, the country should be divided into red, yellow and green zones. The goal is to be a green zone, where fewer than one resident per 36,000 is infected. Here, large gatherings are allowed, and masks aren’t required for those who don’t interact with the elderly or other vulnerable populations. Green zones require a minimum of one test per day for every 10,000 people and a five-person contact tracing team for every 100,000 people. (These are the levels currently maintained in South Korea, which has suppressed covid-19.) Two weeks ago, a modest 1,900 tests a day could have kept 19 million Americans safely in green zones. Today, there are no green zones in the United States.

Most Americans-- about 298 million-- live in yellow zones, where disease prevalence is between .002 percent and 1 percent. But even in yellow zones, the economy could safely reopen with aggressive testing and tracing, coupled with safety measures including mandatory masks. In South Korea, during the peak of its outbreak, it took 25 tests to detect one positive case, and the case fatality rate was 1 percent. Following this model, yellow zones would require 2,500 tests for every daily death. To contain spread, yellow zones also would ramp up contact tracing until a team is available for every new daily coronavirus case. After one tracer conducts an interview, the team would spend 12 hours identifying all those at risk. Speed matters, because the virus spreads quickly; three days is useless for tracing. (Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., are all yellow zones.)

A disease prevalence greater than 1 percent defines red zones. Today, 30 million Americans live in such hot spots-- which include Detroit, New Jersey, New Orleans and New York City. In addition to the yellow-zone interventions, these places require stay-at-home orders. But by strictly following guidelines for testing and tracing, red zones could turn yellow within four weeks, moving steadfastly from lockdown to liberty.

Getting to green nationwide is possible by the end of the summer, but it requires ramping up testing radically. The United States now administers more than 300,000 tests a day, but according to our guidelines, 5 million a day are needed (for two to three months). It’s an achievable goal. Researchers estimate that the current system has a latent capacity to produce 2 million tests a day, and a surge in federal funding would spur companies to increase capacity. The key is to do it now, before manageable yellow zones deteriorate to economically ruinous red zones.

States can administer these “test, trace and supported isolation” programs-- but Congress would need to fund them. The total cost, we estimate, is $74 billion, to be spent over 12 to 18 months. That sum would cover wages and training for contract tracers, the cost of building voluntary self-isolation facilities, stipends for those in isolation and subsidies to manufacture tests.

That amount is a lot, but not compared to the cost of a crippled economy. In Congress’s latest relief package, $75 billion went to struggling hospitals alone, $380 billion to help small businesses and $25 billion toward testing. But hospitals and businesses will continue to hemorrhage money and seek bailouts as long as they can’t open safely. Not spending on disease control means new waves of infection followed by chaotic spikes in disease and death, followed by more ruinous cycles of economic openings and closures. Economists talk about “multipliers”-- an injection of spending that causes even larger increases in gross domestic product. Spending on testing, tracing and paid isolation would produce an indisputable and massive multiplier effect.

States have strong economic incentives to become-- and remain--— green zones. Nations that have invested the most in disease control have suffered the least economic hardship: Taiwan grew 1.5 percent in the first quarter, whereas the United States’ gross domestic product contracted by 4.8 percent, at an annual adjusted rate. (Taiwan was fortunate to have its vice president, Chen Chien-Jen, a U.S.-trained epidemiologist; under his guidance, the island acted quickly with masks, temperature checks, testing and tracing.) The second quarter will be worse: The projected decline for U.S. GDP, at an annualized rate, is an alarming 40 percent.

Looking forward, we will see stark economic contrasts across states, depending on their investment in disease control. With $74 billion, Congress could close the gap between states and relieve pressure on state budgets hamstrung by collapsing revenues. In the spirit of federalism, states would then become laboratories for discovering the best ways to implement testing, tracing and isolation. States might choose to form interstate compacts that pool and move testing resources across state lines as the disease travels and surges; county health officials might tap firefighters or other municipal workers to build regional contact-tracing workforces (as is happening in Tyler, Tex.). When local and state governments become accountable for adopting strategies that work, we can expect more innovation.

How do we know that testing, tracing and supported isolation would work? It already has worked in New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan-- where there have been few to no new daily cases recently. Taiwan never had to shut down its economy, while New Zealand and South Korea are returning to normal. It would work here, too. Since March, Congress has passed relief bills totaling $3.6 trillion to support an economy devastated by a virus-- and $3 trillion more is on the table. We should attack the disease directly so we can stop spending to alleviate symptoms. Following this road map, we can defeat the coronavirus and be celebrating life, liberty and livelihood by the Fourth of July.

If, instead of a president guiding the country through the pandemic, all decisions were just made by flipping a coin, statistically half the decisions would be the right decision and half the decisions would be wrong. If we did that, America would be far better off than we are with Trump as president, since every single crucial decision he has made has been wrong-- and it's a good bet that every decision he makes going forward will be the wrong decision.





Undermining peoples'trust in government has been the preeminent conservative project at least since 1932. Like in shrinking it enough so it could be drown in a bathtub. What better way than... Donald Trump? There has never been a regime as incompetent and dysfunctional in the country's history. Not even close. Washington Post chief correspondent Dan Balz took a stab this weekend at explaining how the pandemic is exposing just how hollowed out the GOP has made our government. He starts with the most obvious point printed in his paper this week: "The government’s halting response to the coronavirus pandemic represents the culmination of chronic structural weaknesses, years of underinvestment and political rhetoric that has undermined the public trust-- conditions compounded by President Trump’s open hostility to a federal bureaucracy that has been called upon to manage the crisis. Federal government leaders, beginning with the president, appeared caught unaware by the swiftness with which the coronavirus was spreading through the country-- though this was not the first time that an administration seemed ill-prepared for an unexpected shock. But even after the machinery of government clanked into motion, missteps, endemic obstacles and lack of clear communication have plagued the efforts to meet the needs of the nation."

“A fundamental role of government is the safety and security of its people,” said Janet Napolitano, the former secretary of homeland security. “To me that means you have to maintain a certain base level so that, when an event like a pandemic manifests itself, you can quickly activate what you have and you have already in place a system and plan for what the federal government is going to do and what the states are going to do.”

That has not been the case this spring. The nation is reaping the effects of decades of denigration of government and also from a steady squeeze on the resources needed to shore up the domestic parts of the executive branch.

This hollowing out has been going on for years as a gridlocked Congress preferred continuing resolutions and budgetary caps to hardheaded decisions about vulnerable governmental infrastructure and leaders did little to address structural weaknesses.

The problems have grown worse in the past three years. Trump was elected having never served in government or the military. That was one reason he appealed to many of those who backed him. He came to Washington deeply suspicious of what he branded the “deep state.” Promising to drain the swamp, he has vilified career civil servants and the institutions of government now called upon to perform at the highest levels.

His transition was messy and since then his administration has been slow to populate the thousands of political slots atop federal agencies, and the president has seemed to prefer acting agency heads to those who can win confirmation from the Senate and the authority that imprimatur conveys. He has targeted career officials and sought retribution for those who differed with him, particularly those whose job it is to find and expose problems.

“One thing to keep in mind is that government takes on hard problems,” said David E. Lewis, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University. “They’re often problems that can’t be solved by the market and there aren’t private entities to solve them.”

He added: “We’re seeing a government that is suffering now from a long period of neglect that began well before this administration. And that neglect has accelerated during this administration.”

The question is whether the weaknesses and vulnerabilities exposed by the current crisis will generate a newfound interest among the nation’s elected officials-- and the public-- in repairing the infrastructure of government and a sense of urgency on the part of the public to encourage them to do so. Or will partisanship and public indifference lead to a continuation of the status quo?

...The pandemic has forced another critical look at government’s competence. For months, the Trump administration has been running behind to bring testing capacity to the levels needed. That was true as the virus was taking hold and when more tests might have helped contain the spread. It is the case now as businesses look to reopen but cannot assure safety for workers or their communities without the widespread availability of tests, which so far does not exist.

Stockpiles of needed equipment were never adequate for the scale of the pandemic either, and the government was slow to ramp up production. The government’s economic intervention, while massive in dollars and well-meaning in intent, also has run into problems.

In contrast to many European nations, where the strategy has been to keep payrolls afloat, the U.S. program has relied on direct payments to individuals, unemployment insurance for furloughed workers, loans to small businesses (in some cases forgivable) and aid to some major industries, such as airlines.

Speed took precedence over precision in the design of the program. Delays were common. Areas of the country hardest hit by the virus in March and early April were sometimes shortchanged as money flowed to areas less affected. Payments through the Small Business Administration ended up in the hands of big firms like Ruth’s Chris steakhouses or entities like the Los Angeles Lakers. Treasury Department officials had to move swiftly to get those payments returned.

Flaws in the nation’s unemployment insurance program, a patchwork system run through the states, highlighted inequities, as benefits vary from state to state, as do eligibility requirements and length of assistance.

Florida’s has drawn the most criticism. That state’s program was redesigned when now-Sen. Rick Scott (R) was governor to make it more difficult to qualify for assistance. Recently it has been plagued by computer problems. A recent headline on the Miami Herald website said, “Florida’s jobless benefits program finding new ways to confound, infuriate the unemployed.”

Congress authorized an additional $600-a-week payment through July for those unemployed, on top of what they would receive from their state program, which has resulted in some people receiving more money while being unemployed than when they were working.

Ricardo Reis, an economist at the London School of Economics, said that the U.S. program is one of the largest in the industrialized world but not necessarily the most efficient. “To get the same bang you’ve got to spend a lot more bucks because you’re sending a check to everyone, right?” he said “A lot of people don’t need a check.”

“Much of the response at the federal level has been predicated on the idea that we’re just going to take a holiday for a few months and then go back to where we were,” said a skeptical Steven J. Davis, a professor of international business and economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell warned last week of “significant downside risks” to the future of the economy.

The jury is still out as to whether what the government has done is either adequate or efficient. “My impression from the outside is that we have significantly mal-designed the economic assistance and adjustment system,” said Philip Zelikow, a professor at the University of Virginia who served in five administrations and was executive director of the 9/11 Commission.

“The counter to that is we just needed to get the trillions out the door,” he added. “Maybe after analysis, that argument could have merit [but] I suspect this still could have been done better under the time constraints.”

Meanwhile, lawmakers are now locked in age-old ideological battles at a time when fresh thinking will be needed to help workers who could face long periods of unemployment and businesses threatened by closure by a pandemic that appears certain to create a new normal whenever the economy does reopen.

“I think this event is revealing of what governance wonks have been warning about for a long time, namely that we haven’t been very focused on the basic governing systems we need to execute policy successfully,” said William Galston of the Brookings Institution. “The competency of government to serve as an instrument of policy delivery has been weakened substantially. One of our long-term tasks is to rebuild that capacity.”

Gene Dodaro, the comptroller general, leads the Government Accountability Office, the agency that is tasked with being a watchdog for government performance. He sees structural weaknesses that constantly impede performance. “The hardest part of my job is getting people to focus on things before they become a crisis,” he said.

The GAO regularly produces a list of areas of high risk in government performance. The most recent, issued in 2019, began with this assessment: “The ratings for more than half of the 35 areas on the 2019 High Risk List remain largely unchanged. Since GAO’s last update in 2017, seven areas improved, three regressed, and two showed mixed progress.”

“Fundamentally we have a legacy government that hasn’t kept up with the world around it,” said Max Stier, president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service. “We create government and capacity around the problems of the day and there’s not much refreshed. . . It does not lie with a single administration. It is endemic through modern times and not just the executive [branch] but in Congress.”

To take just one example, government has allowed its technology infrastructure to age in place. According to Dodaro, Washington spends about $90 billion a year on its IT systems-- about three quarters of the money going to supporting operations and maintenance of existing systems, starving investment in new technology.

A call for technology upgrades is not a new problem. In 1995, Dodaro said he recommended that every agency create a position of chief information officer. Congress followed suit the next year, he said, but resistance in the agencies hampered the progress. In 2014, Congress enacted a second piece of legislation to spur what had been started nearly two decades earlier.

The Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs have been working to make medical records easily transferrable when personnel leave the military and become eligible for VA benefits. Billions have been spent but the problem hasn’t been solved.

Among those with the most antiquated computer systems are two agencies tasked with delivering economic assistance to workers this spring, the Small Business Administration and the Internal Revenue Service.

“SBA was asked to do the impossible on top of antiquated technologies,” said Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University.

Some unemployment insurance systems run on mainframe computers that are 40 years old. In April, several states put out a call for people familiar with programming language for COBOL, introduced half a century ago, to help keep their systems running.

More than the computer systems are aging; so too is the workforce assigned to work on them. Stier estimates that there are five times as many federal employees over age 60 working on IT issues as there are employees under age 30. “The talent pool in government has to be refreshed,” he said.

Aging technology highlights the weaknesses of the government’s infrastructure, but that is only one of the obstacles that hinders more effective performance. Over the years, the federal government has created a complex system for the delivery of services.

Much of the work done by government is now carried out by nongovernmental employees-- private contractors, consulting firms, nonprofits and others not technically on the federal payroll. Tina Nabatchi, a professor of public administration at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, estimates that as much as 70 percent of the work of government is done by these outside entities. “We’ve taken out the middle levels of bureaucracies,” she said.

One reason is the desire of some leaders to run government like a business, though the two are not alike. Another is to mask the true scope of government. John DiIulio, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said that earlier in its existence, the Department of Homeland Security had more full-time-equivalent contractors than full-time-equivalent employees. “We want a lot from government,” he said. “We don’t want a lot of government.”

Donald F. Kettl, a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, said most Americans, including many lawmakers, view government services through a vending machine model: Money goes in at the top, a lever is pulled and services come out at the bottom. Inside, however, is a complicated and often cumbersome contraption.

Kettl described the U.S. health care system as “much more complex than anywhere else in the world,” a labyrinth of government, private insurers, public and private hospitals, physicians, nurses and other health care workers, all involved in the delivery and billing of services. “The strategy of competence means managing these really complex partnerships,” he said.

Another area where the United States is unique is in the number of political appointees atop agencies in the executive branch. The system is supposed to allow a president to gain control of the bureaucracy but vacancies and constant turnover in those jobs mean that, when in their posts, officials are often afflicted with short-termitis-- focusing on matters of the moment and ignoring underlying structural weaknesses that can become crippling problems in a crisis.

Leadership is a critical ingredient in the functioning of government. A president can set priorities and focus his administration on making systems work more efficiently. But there is one more reason the work of making government better rarely attracts the attention of senior government officials. It often requires becoming mired in mind-numbing detail. In other words, however important the work might be, it’s just plain boring.

...Marc Hetherington, a professor at the University of North Carolina, said the public conversation about government began to shift with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Before that, anti-government rhetoric focused more on what government ought and ought not to do, themes highlighted by Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater (R) during his 1964 presidential campaign.

“What changed with Reagan and the decades since is that the conversation moves away from what government ought to do to government is incompetent to do things,” he said. “That’s a big change, with a fundamentally different message.”

Throughout the conservative movement since, that message has been a staple, with the often explicit goal of shrinking the federal government, cutting resources to starve the beast. “Sometimes poor performance is trying to do government on the cheap,” Lewis said. “There is a penny-wise, pound-foolish idea of how we manage government agencies.”

Hetherington said he has noticed one thing from his research about trust in government. Whenever the focus is on the military or national security, trust increases. When the focus shifts away to other programs, particularly those safety net programs such as welfare or food stamps, which serve disadvantaged populations, trust decreases.

But if Republicans have made this kind of rhetoric a staple of their message, Democratic politicians have engaged in some of the same kind of thing. “Every candidate has campaigned on a bureaucracy-bashing theme,” Nabatchi said. “That message has gotten through to affect people’s confidence in government.”

The president’s disdain is on display constantly, far more so than for past presidents. Hetherington said that in this area, Trump is “off the charts. Whereas a lot of Republican attacks on the government left certain things implicit, the Trump people have made them explicit.”

There is much that works well in the federal government, particularly everyday activities that citizens take for granted. Career civil servants on the whole are dedicated and skilled. But when the challenges shift from ordinary to extraordinary, cracks within the system are exposed, demands on leadership rise and the government’s competence is rightly called into question. This has been such a time.

It is an open question whether the more intense focus on the federal government will result in more calls to deal with the underlying weakness or whether criticism of the administration’s response-- and the political divisions surrounding it-- will further degrade people’s trust in the institutions they have turned to at this moment.

“We don’t want to invest in the capacity of government to get the job done,” Kettl said. “But we are happy to complain immediately when there’s sand in the gear that causes the system to seize up.”