Americans Are Largely Unaware That, As A Country, We're Doing Worse And Worse-- And There Is No Political Solution In Sight... At Least Not For The Next Few Years

In his NY Times column yesterday, that the U.S. is #28... and dropping. And he wasn't talking about soccer. He wrote that "The newest Social Progress Index... finds that out of 163 countries assessed worldwide, the United States, Brazil and Hungary are the only ones in which people are worse off than when the index began in 2011. And the declines in Brazil and Hungary were smaller than America’s." It's worth noting that Brazil and Hungary have also elected fascist-type leaders similar to Trump.

The index, inspired by research of Nobel-winning economists, collects 50 metrics of well-being-- nutrition, safety, freedom, the environment, health, education and more-- to measure quality of life. Norway comes out on top in the 2020 edition, followed by Denmark, Finland and New Zealand. South Sudan is at the bottom, with Chad, Central African Republic and Eritrea just behind.

The United States, despite its immense wealth, military power and cultural influence, ranks 28th-- having slipped from 19th in 2011. The index now puts the United States behind significantly poorer countries, including Estonia, Czech Republic, Cyprus and Greece.

...The United States ranks No. 1 in the world in quality of universities, but No. 91 in access to quality basic education. The U.S. leads the world in medical technology, yet we are No. 97 in access to quality health care.

Make sense of the moment.

The Social Progress Index finds that Americans have health statistics similar to those of people in Chile, Jordan and Albania, while kids in the United States get an education roughly on par with what children get in Uzbekistan and Mongolia. A majority of countries have lower homicide rates, and most other advanced countries have lower traffic fatality rates and better sanitation and internet access... and lags in sharing political power equally among all citizens. America ranks a shameful No. 100 in discrimination against minorities.

The data for the latest index predates Covid-19, which has had a disproportionate impact on the United States and seems likely to exacerbate the slide in America’s standing. One new study suggests that in the United States, symptoms of depression have risen threefold since the pandemic began-- and poor mental health is associated with other risk factors for well-being.

That's what neoliberal policies have wrought-- and what Trumpism has exacerbated. If if we get rid of Trump, we still have one of the worst examples of neoliberalism in American politics sitting in the Oval Office. Dartmouth economist David Blanchflower told Kristof that "Rising distress and despair are largely American phenomenon not observed in other advanced countries." Kristof suggests we "wake up, for we are no longer the country we think we are."

You think Trump is going to resign or even seriously consider resigning? It would be a smart move for him, since he could make a deal with Pence-- who would get to be "president" for a couple of months or weeks-- to pardon him and his churlish family. But he won't. He'll fight to the last second and then refuse to give up the White House until Biden pardons him. How's that possible? In David Remnick's words, "Trump is who he has always been, and the details that we learn with every passing day merely fill in the portrait with sharper focus and more lurid colors. The man who lied about the nature of the novel coronavirus to the American people (but confided in Bob Woodward) is the same man who, as a real-estate huckster, used to say that the best way to hype a new building was to 'just give them the old Trump bullshit.' Deception is his brand." It's worth reading Remnick's take on RAGE-- the nightmare presidency that doesn't want to let us wake up from. "As he proves almost daily, Trump is capable of saying or doing anything to win. And if he doesn’t win, the presumption that he will hand over power without some sort of duplicity is far from assured."

Trump’s Presidency has been appalling–– but not unpredictably so. That he would bring misery and division to this country should have been obvious from the start. Flagrantly corrupt and instinctually autocratic, he immediately set about threatening democratic values and the rule of law, while encouraging autocrats abroad and white nationalists at home. He has aroused hatred for the free press and slimed the patriotism of everyone from John McCain to John Lewis. It is a painful thing to say, but the evidence assaults us daily: Trump is a miserable human being. Ask his sister, a retired federal judge; in a taped conversation with the President’s niece, she refers to him as "cruel." It is the rare adviser or satrap who leaves the White House and does not hasten to write a memoir or speak to the press with the intention of sounding a common alarm, that Trump poses a threat to national security even more profound than the news-weary public can imagine. Woodward reports that the former director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, came to believe, more and more, that the Russians had something on Trump. "How else to explain the President’s behavior?" Woodward writes. "Coats could see no other explanation."

“So you just had to deal with it,” Woodward quotes Mattis as saying, about the situation inside Trump’s White House. “It was, how do you govern this country and try to keep this experiment alive for one more year?” Mattis says he resigned only when Trump went “beyond stupid to felony stupid” and made an abrupt decision to withdraw troops fighting ISIS.

Trump’s reaction to the book has been Trumpian. He gave Woodward eighteen interviews, often calling Woodward at home at night just to deepen the hole he began to dig at more formal sessions in the Oval Office. Woodward taped the conversations with the President’s knowledge. But, as a way to cover all bases, Trump tweeted last month, “The Bob Woodward book will be a FAKE, as always, just as many of the others have been.” And, of course, he has now tried to pick at the critical thread that the reporter should have published his remarks about the dangers of covid-19 earlier. “Bob Woodward had my quotes for many months,” Trump tweeted Thursday morning. “If he thought they were so bad or dangerous, why didn’t he immediately report them in an effort to save lives? Didn’t he have an obligation to do so? No, because he knew they were good and proper answers. Calm, no panic!”

The executive in charge of saving lives was, and is, Donald Trump, not Bob Woodward. And the President’s delays and denials insured that the American response, compared with that of other nations, would be tragic. William Haseltine, the chairman and president of access Health International and a world-renowned biologist, told CNN, “How many people could have been saved out of the hundred and ninety thousand who have died? My guess is a hundred and eighty thousand of those. We have killed a hundred and eighty thousand of our fellow-Americans because we have not been honest with the truth.”

...Early in his term, there were moments when Trump would seemingly abandon his customary venom and wildness and do something ordinary, such as read a bland speech from a prepared text. The spectacle would be so striking that we’d hear commentators say such things as, “This is the night that Donald Trump became President of the United States.” Meaning that there was half a chance that he would now behave somewhere within the bounds of sanity and decency. There was never any chance of that happening. Trump is who he has always been. The rest is details. And he is not going anywhere until he’s compelled to do so.

Did Trump Calculate The Cost Of 200,000 American Lives In Terms Of Paper Growth On Wall Street?

At least 100 times in the last couple of years, I started a post with something like "well, now he's really lost his mind." I find myself having to stop doing that and changing it to something else-- as I'm doing right now. I mean how many times can you say that? And I almost did it again yesterday when I saw this tweet. Doesn't anyone tell him-- John Pavlovitz aside-- that he sounds like a drug-addled madman?

As Glenn Kessler noted in the Washington Post, if Trump's trying to not spark panic, what's his reelection campaign based on? And it doesn't stop there. In the tweet above the drug-addled madman chastises Woodward for not exposing him earlier. Anyone in the country can make that argument... except one obese, orange-hued psychopath. The Post's Margaret Sullivan reported that "Woodward said his aim was to provide a fuller context than could occur in a news story: 'I knew I could tell the second draft of history, and I knew I could tell it before the election.' (Former Washington Post publisher Phil Graham famously called journalism 'the first rough draft of history.') What’s more, he said, there were at least two problems with what he heard from Trump in February that kept him from putting it in the newspaper at the time: First, he didn’t know what the source of Trump’s information was. It wasn’t until months later-- in May-- that Woodward learned it came from a high-level intelligence briefing in January that was also described in Wednesday’s reporting about the book. In February, what Trump told Woodward seemed hard to make sense of, the author told me-- back then, Woodward said, there was no panic over the virus; even toward the final days of that month, Anthony S. Fauci was publicly assuring Americans there was no need to change their daily habits. Second, Woodward said, 'the biggest problem I had, which is always a problem with Trump, is I didn’t know if it was true.'... But why not then write such a story later in the spring, once it was clear that the virus was extraordinarily destructive and that Trump’s early downplaying had almost certainly cost lives? Again, Woodward said he believes his highest purpose isn’t to write daily stories but to give his readers the big picture-- one that may have a greater effect, especially with a consequential election looming. Woodward’s effort, he said, was to deliver in book form 'the best obtainable version of the truth,' not to rush individual revelations into publication. And always with a particular deadline in mind, so that people could read, absorb, and make their judgments well before November 3. 'The demarcation is the election.'"

So the Regime is now trying to persuade whatever is left of Trump's moron base that it is Woodward who caused the deaths of 200,000 Americans, not Trump. Kessler began his article with Trump's quote from Wednesday: "I don’t want people to be frightened. I don’t want to create panic." Presumably he wasn't thinking of panic on the streets of London, Birmingham, Carlisle, Dublin, Dundee, Humberside or Leeds as much as panic on the floor of the New York stock exchange.

Who is going to fall for the new Trump trope that "he was trying to keep the nation calm by not revealing how much he knew about the dangerous nature of the novel coronavirus?" Kessler:

A cynic might suggest that Trump wanted to keep things calm because he was concerned that a plunging stock market would harm his chances for reelection. But let’s lay that aside for the moment and consider Trump’s explanation that he does not want to create panic.

That might be news to the President Trump running for reelection. His YouTube video channel is filled with apocalyptic images of violence, economic despair and disaster. So are the president’s speeches and news availabilities, including at the same venue where he said he did not want to create panic.

Here’s a sampling, drawn mainly from our database of Trump’s false and misleading claims:

“Radical justices will erase the Second Amendment, silence political speech and require taxpayers to fund extreme late-term abortion. They will give unelected bureaucrats the power to destroy millions of American jobs. They will remove the words ‘under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance. They will unilaterally declare the death penalty unconstitutional, even for the most depraved mass murderers. They will erase national borders, cripple police departments and grant new protections to anarchists, rioters, violent criminals and terrorists.”
— Sept. 9

“Joe Biden and the radical, socialist Democrats would immediately collapse the economy. If they got in, they would collapse it. You’ll have a crash the likes of which you’ve never seen before. Your stocks, your 401(k)s.”
— Sept. 7

“Biden wants to surrender our country to the virus, he wants to surrender our families to the violent left-wing mob, and he wants to surrender our jobs to China-- our jobs and our economic well-being.”
— Sept. 7

“Biden’s strategy is to surrender to the left-wing mob, which is exactly what he’s doing-- I don’t think he even knows what he’s doing-- and give them control over every lever of power in the United States government. But when you surrender to the mob, you don’t get freedom; you get fascism. That’s what happens in all cases. You take a look at Venezuela. Look what-- look what’s going on there and other places.”
— Aug. 31

“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our Founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”
— July 4

“In Joe Biden’s America, rioters, looters and criminal aliens have more rights than law-abiding citizens, and that’s true.”
— June 20

“The entire Democratic field supports deadly sanctuary cities, which release dangerous criminals to terrorize your communities right here in North Carolina, believe it or not.”
— March 2

“Every major Democrat running for president has pledged to eliminate gas-powered automobiles and destroy the U.S. auto industry forever.”
— Dec. 18

Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, pinned a tweet back in early March. I'm sure Tweeter-in-Chief, for whom Twitter is a one-way street, never read it:

This week Hanage decided to use a Twitter thread to make some comments about it and Trump's claims about why he lied about the pandemic. "In an emergency, it is reasonable and responsible to minimize panic. However this is not done by denying the existence of the emergency-- at best that delays the panic and at worst it magnifies the panic once the truth becomes clear. Instead earn trust. Honestly present the reality of the situation and reassure people that you are working to control it and minimize the fallout. Work with expert risk communicators. When it comes to preparing, listen to experts who know more than you. Use whatever time you have to collect the resources people will need-- remember their safety is your responsibility. Be responsive. Recognize that mistakes will be made and learn from them. Don't be distracted. Support those who are suffering and those who are working to minimize suffering. Know that it is a marathon, not a sprint. Failing to prepare for a real threat is not responsible. Playing down a real risk that you know is real is not preventing panic. It's negligence."

Will RAGE Mean Anything To Trump Supporters?

I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but do Trump supporters read books? The release of Woodward's book, right on top of The Atlantic's revelations about what Trump thinks of American military servicemembers, should be the coup de grâce. But we've all lost track of the instances that were the straw that broken the camel's back. They never are and never will be. Not the stuff from Michael Cohen, from Trump's niece, from Michael Wolff, from Brandy Lee, from Amanda Carpenter, Tim Alberta, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Phil Rucker and Carol Leonid, Jonathan Karl, Doug Wead, Neal Katyal, Alan Grayson, John Lithgow, Sarah Kendzior... So, as much as I am looking forward to reading Rage, I don't expect the revelations-- which were all over the news yesterday-- are going to change the minds-- the lizard brains-- of the hardcore 38-40% of voters who are addicted.

However... with all the TV channels-- even Fox-- running the tapes, maybe some of the congressional Republicans will... nah. Carl Bernstein termed Trump's lies about the virus "homicidal negligence." Where does that leave knee-jerk Trumpist governors Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Greg Abbott (R-TX), Brian Kemp (R-GA), Bill Lee (R-TN), Henry McMaster (R-SC), Kristi Noem (R-SD), Doug Ducey (R-AZ), Kim Reynolds (R-IA), Kevin Stitt (R-OK), Tate Reeves (R-MS), Kay Ivey (R-AL), Doug Burgum (R-ND), Mike Parson (R-MO), Gary Herbert (R-UT), Chris Sununu (R-NH)...

Chris Cillizza tackled the question many of us are asking: Why, why, why would the President grant Woodward so much access? And why would the famously denial-prone Trump allow Woodward to tape the conversations so that there can be no doubt about a) their authenticity or b) what he actually said? Obviously, it's all wound up in the sick Trump psyche.

For all the attacks he lobs at the media, there is NO president who has more closely followed how he is covered and treated by the press than Trump. And it's not even close. He is a voracious consumer of cable news as well as print newspapers. Cable TV has long been the lens through which he views the world and, since being elected president, the way that he analyzes-- in real time-- how he thinks he is doing.

That obsession with perception has naturally lead Trump into forever hunting out ways to cement his legacy in office. Whether that's the almost farcical attempt to buy Greenland or his fascination with the possibility of his face being added to Mount Rushmore, Trump has shown a unbending focus on creating and preserving his legacy. (Trump thinks like a real estate developer; he goes big!)

Aside from those attempts to secure a legacy in stone-- literally!-- Trump regularly uses campaign rallies, supposed policy speeches and his Twitter feed to promote the idea that he really deserves to be considered as one of the best presidents ever.

"I've always said I can be more presidential than any president in history except for Honest Abe Lincoln, when he's wearing the hat," Trump said in 2019. In a speech at the United Nations in 2018, Trump said that "in less than two years my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country." (The audience laughed.)

...Woodward is writing the history of each president as it happens. He is the most recognizable and famous political journalist in the country. When Bob Woodward says he wants to write about you-- even if you are a billionaire businessman or the president of the United States-- you are flattered. And you see opportunity, because if you can convince Woodward that the coverage of you is unfair and biased and that you are really doing a great job, well, then, maybe history starts remembering you the way you want it to.

...Trump has two Achilles heels in politics and life. The first is that he cares so desperately about how people think of him and remember him that he is willing to do almost anything to impact his legacy. The second is that he believes far too much in his own ability to persuade. Woodward (and the book he has produced) cuts at both of the heels.

Which means that Trump was essentially poking at his own weakest spots with every single word he uttered to Woodward. And yet, he couldn't stop himself.

Here are some reports of particularly damning revelations from the book, aside from the web of lies he wove about the coronavirus to deceive the public:

1- Dan Coats, a former very conservative Republican senator from Indiana who Trump hired and fired as director of national intelligence told Woodward that could not shake his "deep suspicions" that Putin "had something" on Señor Trumpanzee, seeing "no other explanation" for the president’s behavior. Coats and his staff examined the intelligence regarding Trump’s ties to Russia "as carefully as possible" and that he "still questions the relationship" between Trump and Putin despite the apparent absence of intelligence proof... "To him, a lie is not a lie. It's just what he thinks. He doesn't know the difference between the truth and a lie."

2- Trump spilled the beans to Woodward on a top secret new nuclear weapon, a very grave breach of national security. "I have built a nuclear-- a weapons system that nobody’s ever had in this country before. We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before. There’s nobody-- what we have is incredible."

3- Former Defense Secretary James Mattis, who referred to Trump as "dangerous" and "unfit" with "no moral compass," told Woodward that Trump took foreign policy actions that showed adversaries "how to destroy America. That's what we're showing them. How to isolate us from all of our allies. How to take us down. And it's working very well."

4- Fauci was willing to go on record calling Trump's leadership on the virus "rudderless," saying his "sole purpose is to get reelected," and noting that "his attention span is like a minus number."