Will The Señor Trumpanzee #CocaineConvention Manage To Generate A Reverse Bounce?

I'm still hoping lots and lots of people watch the Republican #CocaineConvention. That's because I think it will turn off independent voters and may even persuade some mainstream-- as in non-fascist-- Republicans to stay home on November 3rd. Unfortunately, according to Nielsen, just 15.9 million people watched, a 28% drop from 2016. The first night of the Democratic Convention last week, drew 18.7 million viewers, also a 28% drop from 2016.

The former chief of staff of Trump's Department of Homeland Security, Miles Taylor, joined Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast on a Daily Beast podcast to continue his fun new job of denouncing and exposing Trump. "You thought what happened on screen on night one of the convention was crazy? It’s nothing compared to Trump behind the scenes, where national security officials couldn’t get through a meeting 'without him doing 20 tangents, becoming irascible, turning red in the face, demanding a diet Coke, spewing spit,' Taylor explained. 'Literally out of goddamn nowhere, he'd be like, You know, who’s just my favorite guy? The MyPillow guy. Do any of you have those pillows? When it came to the issue of the border wall, Trump would be dreaming up 'sickenin' medieval plots 'to pierce the flesh' of migrants, rip all the families apart, 'maim,' and gas them. 'This was a man with no humanity whatsoever,' Taylor says. 'He says, we got to do this, this, this, and this, all of which are probably impossible, illegal unethical,' Taylor recalls, but he was writing them down as the president spoke. 'And he looks over me and he goes, you fucking taken notes?'"



That leaves some people wondering if the Republican Party will survive Trumpism and some wondering if the party needs to be burned down to the ground an started all over again-- something many progressives also wonder about the Democratic Party. "Conservative intellectuals," wrote Jonathan Chait, "have spent most of the past four decades claiming-- especially during periods of Republican ascent-- to be winning the 'war of ideas.' Hardly any of them bother to make such a boast now. Now that the Republican convention has given itself over to four straight nights starring Donald Trump-- also featuring other unaccomplished members of his family along with some teens who were victimized by social media for wearing Trump gear-- and abandoned its platform altogether for the platform equivalent of a MAGA hat, all the fun has been drained out of the exercise.

In place of the usual gloating, the right has been engaged in a furious intramural debate over whether to burn down the Republican Party in the wake of Trump’s expected (but hardly assured) defeat. Advocates for burning it down include Max Boot, George Will, Stuart Stevens, Charlie Sykes, Mona Charen, and Jonathan V. Last. Critics include David French, Rich Lowry, and Peggy Noonan. Somewhat in the middle lie Ross Douthat, David Brooks,  Jonah Goldberg, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Kevin D. Williamson. In yesterday’s New York Times, former George W. Bush adviser Peter Wehner treats the burning as a (metaphorical) given and urges, “Any attempt to rescue conservatism from the ashes, then, has to begin with the defeat of Donald Trump in November.”

All parties to the dispute agree that Trump is deeply unfit for the presidency. They disagree about how broadly to define the moral and practical implications of that fact.

The anti-burners take a narrow view. The problem, as they see it, is Trump, and therefore his departure solves it. And it is certainly true that the current president has unique liabilities that no other Republican leader who succeeds him will share. However awful the next Republican leader may be, he or she will probably not use the office for personal profit, will tell lies numbering in fewer than five figures, will listen to their advisers, will spend the bulk of their waking hours working rather than obsessively watching television, and will be trained as a public servant rather than as a professional swindler and money launderer.

If Republicans’ goal is to replace Trump with a normal, noncriminal politician, they can achieve it without any systemic change. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, or possibly even one of the Trump children would be capable of showing up every day, doing eight hours or so of actual work a day, and staffing the administration with people who do not secretly believe their boss is deranged.





However, the pro-burners believe the Trump experience has exposed some deeper rot... If you take the broader view of the party’s problem, you quickly realize the problem is not just Trump himself but a party that would not merely cooperate with but actually idolize a grotesquely bigoted authoritarian. Once Trump disappears, Fox News will begin pummeling the next Democratic president with absurd lies and then building a new cult of personality around the next Republican who emerges as a leader, and that leader will pursue a more competent version of an essentially similar program: upper-class tax cuts, allowing business to self-regulate, ignoring large swaths of scientific expertise, and entrenching minority rule.

And if any Republicans wish to alter their fate from that trajectory, the solution is both simpler and more radical than anything they have acknowledged: They must sever the party from the ideological movement that has controlled it for a generation and driven it into its present dysfunctional state.

To the modern ear, the very idea of a Republican Party that operates independently of the conservative movement sounds preposterous, even oxymoronic. The movement’s association with the GOP is now so deep that almost everybody uses the terms Republican and conservative synonymously. But it was only about 60 years ago that the two had very different meanings.

A right-of-center leader in Britain, France, Germany, or Japan would not deny the need to do anything about climate change, oppose universal health insurance, or insist cutting taxes on the rich will pay for itself. For a period of time, the Republican Party seemed to be following the same course as right-of-center parties in other industrialized democracies today. Dwight Eisenhower accepted the contours and legitimacy of the New Deal while fighting many of the particulars. The conservative movement’s purpose was to oppose and reverse Eisenhower’s political vision for the Republican Party.

As detailed by books like Rule and Ruin, by Geoffrey Kabaservice, or Before the Storm, by Rick Perlstein, the conservative movement was once a minority faction within the GOP. It regarded the party’s leadership with about as much hostility as the Democratic Socialists of America today view the likes of Barack Obama and Joe Biden-- lesser evils at best, outright traitors at worst.

The movement loathed Republican leaders for having accepted as a settled fact Franklin Roosevelt’s extension of the welfare and regulatory states-- Barry Goldwater excoriated Eisenhower’s “dime-store New Deal”-- and Harry Truman’s Cold War containment. It demanded an apocalyptic confrontation that would roll back big government at home and communism abroad.

Modern conservatives have created a mythical story of how they took over the party, sustained through endless repetition. The myth holds that they gained control of the party because they were thoughtful and responsible. William F. Buckley, their intellectual leader, “expelled the Birchers”-- the far-right, conspiratorial John Birch Society-- and thus, having purged the movement of its kooks, prepared it for governance.

The truth is very nearly the opposite. A former Buckley colleague, Alvin Felzenberg, has detailed that Buckley tread very carefully with the Birchers. Grasping that the movement was far too important to the right to alienate, he tried to placate its leader, Joseph Welch, ultimately breaking with him while still endorsing the John Birch Society itself.

This small and seemingly esoteric point of historical interpretation is the root of the intellectual right’s systemic inability to face up to its problems. Conservatives have treated Buckley’s gentle and very partial break with the leader of the Birchers as his central legacy while dismissing many of his other positions as unimportant details. But those “details” are, in fact, the conservative movement’s DNA.

Buckley and the conservative movement defended Joe McCarthy, whose depiction of a vast secret Communist conspiracy and demands for aggressive rollback of existing communism closely tracked their own beliefs. They supported racial apartheid, first in the American South and then, after it was defeated there, in South Africa. They were supportive of right-wing authoritarianism both abroad and at home. Conservatives were skeptical of Richard Nixon because of his moderate policy agenda, but they closed ranks with him over Watergate. Nixon’s pragmatism repelled the right, but his authoritarianism attracted conservatives to him.

Center-right parties abroad are able to defeat left-wing appeals by co-opting popular elements. American conservatism is too rigid to do that. It regards democracy itself as a form of oppression-- a system that enables the majority to oppress the wealthy minority by redistributing income via the ballot box. One of the predictable features of any American debate over tax levels is that conservative politicians or business leaders will compare the latest Democratic plan to something out of Hitler’s Germany.

Conservatives famously created a vast network of think tanks, media, and activist institutions, which they used to slowly take over the GOP. The takeover took decades to complete. Even by the time of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, conservatives only had a large foothold but had to share power with Establishmentarians. And so, while Reagan would sometimes follow the conservative line, at other times his moderate advisers would steer him toward course corrections. Reagan repeatedly violated conservative orthodoxy by supporting a series of tax hikes, cap-and-trade environmental regulations, a tax reform that raised effective rates on the rich, liberalized immigration, and détente with the Soviets.

Conservatives were able to swallow their anger over these betrayals because, at the time, Reagan offered them the closest opening to real power they had enjoyed since the Hoover administration. But as they consolidated their party takeover, they would eventually demand far more complete fealty. Even the pragmatism permitted under Reagan would become unacceptable.

The key break point in the history of the party came under George H.W. Bush. In 1990, Bush cut a deal with congressional Democrats to reduce the deficit. In return for (rather deep) spending cuts, Democrats prevailed on Bush to accept a small increase in the top income-tax rate. Conservative Republicans led by Newt Gingrich revolted against Bush and later credited their opposition with causing his defeat. After the Gingrich revolt-- which later styled itself as a “Republican revolution” against Bill Clinton-- conservatives drove out Bush’s remaining moderate advisers and consolidated full right-wing control over the party.

It would be an overstatement to paint Trump as representing nothing but the triumph of the conservative movement. In his personal defects, Trump is indeed sui generis. But the broad outlines of his agenda and his style do closely follow the trajectory of the American right: racism, authoritarianism, and disdain for expertise. The movement attracts disordered personalities like McCarthy, Sarah Palin, and Trump and paranoid cults like the John Birch Society and QAnon.

Above all, Trump follows the American right’s Manichaean approach to political conflict. Every new extension of government, however limited or necessary, is a secret plot to extend government control over every aspect of American life. Conservatives met both Clinton and Obama’s agenda with absolute hysteria, whipping themselves into a terror that rendered them unable to negotiate.

The right has thought this way all along. Reagan, in his ’60s-era incarnation as conservative insurgent spokesman, warned that unless Medicare was stopped, “You and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” Conservatives are usually unable to roll back existing government programs and instead treat every new proposed extension as the final stand for freedom against socialist tyranny.

...[T]he American conservative movement lacks the analytic tools to acknowledge what acceptable social programs look like. An inability to distinguish reasonable, well-designed government programs that address real market failures from Soviet-style oppression is a congenital defect in conservative thought.

The most libertarian-minded conservatives laugh bitterly at the idea that the modern party reflects their ideology. In a sense, they are right: The last two Republican presidents both attempted to roll back a major entitlement (Bush sought to privatize Social Security, Trump to repeal Obamacare) and were defeated and instead presided over an expanded government. But they have also clung as tightly as ever to the actual governing priorities of the movement’s power centers: low taxes for the rich, placing business lobbyists in charge of federal regulations, and appointing jurists who believe in rolling back the regulatory state. For all his supposed populism, Trump’s plan to revive the economy is just more tax cuts.

Trumpism is a natural by-product of the dissonance between the conservative movement’s ambitions and the limitations of democratic politics. Totalitarian plots lie around every corner: the New Deal, the civil-rights movement, peaceniks, the Clintons, Obamacare, and Black Lives Matter. Every policy matter, from Bill Clinton’s modest aim of reducing the deficit to Obama’s goal of a national version of Romneycare, becomes a culture war. Since the right is unable to engage with any of these issues in a practical manner, conservative politics is forced to operate entirely on a symbolic level.

Because the stakes of even the most mundane policy disagreement are existential, and because the right keeps losing, there is no release for the tension that keeps building. All the accumulated terror is simply off-loaded from the last Armageddon to the next. Trump is not even pretending to have a positive second-term program. His only goal is to stop the next Democratic administration because the next liberal program is always the one that will usher in the final triumph of socialism.

The most likely near-term outcome for a post-Trump GOP would look something like this: The party reconstitutes itself in opposition to everything the next Democratic president proposes, “rediscovers” its existential terror of deficit spending, throws itself into vote suppression and minority rule, and eventually returns to power for another round of upper-class tax cuts and a large-scale managerial debacle. I suspect many of the Republicans who privately or publicly loathe Trump would be satisfied with such an outcome.

This is so incredibly illegal; not even consiglieri William Barr could explain this away:





This morning, Bernie reminded his followers that, alas-- and despite the hysterical carryings on at the #CocaineConvention-- Biden is no socialist and he and Kamala will not be carrying out the his or AOC's or Ilhan Omar's agenda. "If only that were true," wrote Bernie wistfully. "But while they scream 'socialist' as an epithet in their videos and from the stage, what everyone needs to know is that Trump and the Republican Party just LOVE socialism-- a corporate socialism for the rich and the powerful. And let's be clear. Their brand of socialism has resulted in more income and wealth inequality than at any time since the 1920s, with three multi-billionaires now owning more wealth than the bottom half of our nation. Their socialism has allowed, during this pandemic, the very, very rich to become much richer while tens of millions of workers have lost their jobs, their health care and face eviction. While Trump denounces socialism let us never forget the $885 million in government subsidies and tax breaks the Trump family received for a real estate empire built on racial discrimination. But Trump is not alone."

The high priest of unfettered capitalism, Trump’s National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow, spoke in a video last night.

And who could ever forget when Larry was on television begging for the largest federal bailout in American history for his friends on Wall Street-- some $700 billion from the Treasury and trillions in support from the Federal Reserve-- after their greed, recklessness and illegal behavior created the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression.

But it is not just Trump and Larry Kudlow.

If you are a fossil fuel company, whose carbon emissions are destroying the planet, you get billions in government subsidies including special tax breaks, royalty relief, funding for research and development and numerous tax loopholes.

If you are a pharmaceutical company, you make huge profits on patent rights for medicines that were developed with taxpayer-funded research.

If you are a monopoly like Amazon, owned by the wealthiest person in America, you get hundreds of millions of dollars in economic incentives from taxpayers to build warehouses and you end up paying not one penny in federal income taxes.

If you are the Walton family, the wealthiest family in America, you get massive government subsidies because your low-wage workers are forced to rely on food stamps, Medicaid and public housing in order to survive-- all paid for by taxpayers.

This is what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. meant when he said that “This country has socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor.”

And that is the difference between Donald Trump and us.

Trump believes in corporate socialism for the rich and powerful.

We believe in a democratic socialism that works for the working families of this country. We believe that in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, economic rights are human rights.

So yes, progressives and even moderate Democrats will face attacks from people who attempt to use the word "socialism" as a slur.

There is nothing new of that.

Like President Harry Truman said, "Socialism is the epithet they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years... Socialism is what they called Social Security … Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people."

Our job in this moment is to stay focused.

First priority: defeat Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in modern American history-- and defeat him badly.

Then on Day 1 of the Biden administration, we will mobilize the working families of this country to demand a government that represents all of us and not just the few. We will fight to ensure that every American has a right to a decent job that pays a living wage, to health care, to a complete education, to affordable housing, to a clean environment, and to a secure retirement-- and no more tax breaks for billionaires and large corporations.

...The one percent in this country may have enormous wealth and power, and they will use it to try and stop our agenda. But they are just the one percent. And if the 99 percent in this country stand together, defeat Trump, and go on to fight for the values we share, we can transform this country.

Bannon's Wall-- The Final Installation by Nancy Ohanian

It's Going To Get Worse, But Despair Is Not The Answer

Portland? Who's next?

My first trip to Turkey was in 1969-- and it was love at first sight. I drove a VW camper van from London to Istanbul, stayed a few weeks and then drove the entire width of the country-- to Ankara and Kirikkale (then a small village, now a sprawling city) in the middle of the country, along the Black Sea to Samsun and Tabzon, down into the "wild east" city of Ezurum and then to Iran. I've been back a dozen times and Turkey has never failed to fascinate me-- the food, the music, the architecture, the people, the history... I love Turkish history and you see it everywhere you go in the country-- from the Greek and Roman and Christian days through the rise and decline of the Ottoman Empire, the rebirth under Ataturk and the dark anti-secular reaction taking place now under Recip Erdoğan, a Trump-like authoritarian.

Yesterday, Jonathan Chait brushed across a fascinating and sad chapter in Turkish history-- "the Sick Man of Europe," the disintegration of the Empire from the 1850s (Crimean War) to the 1910s (World War I). Chait's interest though, is not Turkey-- at least not beyond the resemblance to Trump's America. We have to hope that, as we peer into the future, we see Trump as an anomaly who can be wiped away with an election and a political reformation. The bleaker picture is that Trump is exactly what Russia had hoped for when Putin invested in his election-- a harbinger of the end of the American glory days.

It's unlikely Putin could have predicted any specific category of catastrophe Trump would stumble over, but he knew that putting a man of Trump's quality in charge would eventually lead to America falling hard and fast. Many little things were adding up since 2017 but Trump's approach to the pandemic and then his instinctual fascist/exploitative handling of the Black Lives Matter protests, has put the U.S. into the "sick man" category, where Americans-- us, not just Trump-- are shunned by every other democratic country in the world.

5 Watt Bulb by Nancy Ohanian

Chait noted that "last October, the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security compiled a ranking system to assess the preparedness of 195 countries for the next global pandemic. Twenty-one panel experts across the globe graded each country in 34 categories composed of 140 subindices. At the top of the rankings, peering down at 194 countries supposedly less equipped to withstand a pandemic, stood the United States of America. It has since become horrifyingly clear that the experts missed something. The supposed world leader is in fact a viral petri dish of uncontained infection. By June, after most of the world had beaten back the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S., with 4 percent of the world’s population, accounted for 25 percent of its cases. Florida alone was seeing more new infections a week than China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, and the European Union combined. During its long period of decline, the Ottoman Empire was called 'the sick man of Europe.' The United States is now the sick man of the world, pitied by the same countries that once envied its pandemic preparedness-- and, as recently as the 2014 Ebola outbreak, relied on its expertise to organize the global response."

The distrust and open dismissal of expertise and authority may seem uniquely contemporary-- a phenomenon of the Trump era, or the rise of online misinformation. But the president and his party are the products of a decades-long war against the functioning of good government, a collapse of trust in experts and empiricism, and the spread of a kind of magical thinking that flourishes in a hothouse atmosphere that can seal out reality. While it’s not exactly shocking to see a Republican administration be destroyed by incompetent management-- it happened to the last one, after all-- the willfulness of it is still mind-boggling and has led to the unnecessary sickness and death of hundreds of thousands of people and the torpedoing of the reelection prospects of the president himself. Like Stalin’s purge of 30,000 Red Army members right before World War II, the central government has perversely chosen to disable the very asset that was intended to carry it through the crisis. Only this failure of leadership and management took place in a supposedly advanced democracy whose leadership succumbed to a debilitating and ultimately deadly ideological pathology.

...When the coronavirus began spreading in American cities, the Republican Party turned to a trained store of experts whose judgment conservatives trusted implicitly. Unfortunately, their expertise and training lay not in epidemiology but in concocting pseudoscientific rationales to allow conservatives to disregard legitimate scientific conclusions.

The cadres who leapt forth to supply Trump and his allies with answers disproportionately came from the science-skeptic wing of the conservative-think-tank world. Steven Milloy, a climate-science skeptic who runs a think tank funded by tobacco and oil companies and who served on Trump’s environmental transition team, dismissed the virus as less deadly than the flu. Libertarian philosopher Richard Epstein, who had once insisted, “The evidence in favor of the close linkage between carbon dioxide and global warming has not been clearly established,” turned his analytical powers to projected pandemic death tolls. He estimated just 500 American deaths, an analysis that was circulated within the Trump White House before Epstein issued a correction.

It was like watching factories mobilize for war, only instead of automakers refitting their assembly lines to churn out tanks, these were professional manufacturers of scientific doubt scrambling to invent a new form of pedantry. Some skeptics took note of the connection, though they seem to have drawn the wrong conclusion. “While they are occurring on vastly different time scales, the COVID-19 panic and the climate-change panic are remarkably similar,” wrote one of the climate-skeptical Heartland Institute’s pseudo-experts.

The fact that the conservative movement’s finest minds endorsed these paranoid claims attests to the movement’s sincerity. Unlike critiquing climate-science models, which allows skeptics decades to obscure their analytic failures, by denying the coronavirus, “you’re at risk of being shown to be a crackpot in real time,” Jerry Taylor, a former climate-science skeptic in the libertarian-think-tank world, tells me. These people are genuine adherents of their own conspiracy theories. The simplest explanation for the actions Trump and many of his top officials have taken is that they believe that scientific authorities are, at best, grossly negligent and, at worst, scheming to extend government control of the economy by perpetrating hoaxes. His responses follow from that supposition. He has warily treated his scientific advisers as potential saboteurs.

When the first warning signs of the virus appeared, Trump-- rather than take advantage of the expertise at his disposal-- set out to marginalize and contort it. Before the outbreak, Trump’s administration had reduced the number of CDC officials monitoring virus outbreaks in China by two-thirds. After the pandemic, he cut funding for a lab studying the origins of the outbreak in China. Trump’s repeated public statements that he wants less testing-- because less testing means fewer cases!-- encapsulates his earnest belief that the accurate measuring of the pandemic is itself the problem. After all, the scientists were advising him to shut down the economy, the prized asset of his reelection campaign. Wasn’t that a little suspicious?

...It was as if Trump thought he could bend reality to his will by forcing his advisers to endorse it. “I disagree with @CDCgov on their very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools,” he tweeted in July. “I will be meeting with them!!!” It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to predict that such a “meeting” would be unlikely to involve Trump prevailing upon the CDC to alter its guidelines through sheer force of reason and data. The only outcome of such a public threat is the undermining of his own government’s credibility.

Republicans goaded Trump to ramp up his attacks. “Dr. Fauci remains steadfast in his bureaucracy. Dr. Fauci’s a conformist,” announced Rush Limbaugh. “Here’s the difference between a health-professional bureaucrat-expert and Donald Trump.” This line reflects the view of science closest to Trump’s own perspective. He does not dismiss science wholesale as a field of study; he is not the medieval Church persecuting Galileo. Rather, he understands science as a kind of revelation accessible to a lucky genetic elite (naturally including himself, as evidenced by the genius MIT-professor uncle he often cites).

“I really get it,” he boasted during one visit to the CDC. “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.” That conviction is what gave Trump the confidence to deliver his on-camera brainstorming session, in which he suggested his science experts research the injection of light or disinfectant into the human body. If you don’t understand science as a discipline, you expect some genius will dream up a breakthrough cure. Why couldn’t Trump be that genius?

...By midsummer, as the coronavirus receded throughout most of the world, Trump’s supporters were engaging in cultlike displays of devotion. Republicans were pointedly holding mask-optional gatherings. “When the good Lord calls you home,” one Republican Senate candidate explained, “a mask ain’t going to stop it.” As masks became symbols of subservience to public health (“COVID burkas,” as former Trump official Sebastian Gorka called them), these people even held rallies to protest them. A county Republican Party chairman in Kansas who owns a weekly newspaper published a cartoon depicting face masks as yellow stars and the people bearing them as Jews forced into cattle cars.

In Scottsdale, Arizona, a Republican city councilmember announced, “I can’t breathe!” before dramatically removing his face covering. A Republican sheriff in Ohio, despite a statewide facial-covering requirement, declared, “I’m not going to be the mask police. Period.” The first day that Oregon governor Kate Brown imposed a requirement that residents wear masks in public, four police officers walked into a coffee shop in Corvallis mask-free, and when asked to comply with the order, they yelled, “Fuck Kate Brown!” In recent weeks, more than 20 county health officials have left their jobs in the face of protests, harassment, and threats. Georgia governor Brian Kemp went so far as to ban local governments from mandating masks.

In late June, Trump staged an indoor rally in Tulsa. His staff removed stickers on seats intended to space out attendees. Announcing his presence, Cain wrote, “Masks will not be mandatory for the event, which will be attended by President Trump. PEOPLE ARE FED UP!” (A few days after the rally, Cain tested positive.)

That many Americans would view public-health instruction with skepticism was understandable. The authorities had hardly covered themselves in glory. In the initial stages of the pandemic, many officials worried more about panic than complacency and insisted the pandemic might not be worse than a normal flu.

Faced with an initial shortage of masks, and fears that hoarders would buy up the supply and deny it to the essential workers who needed it most, public-health officials solemnly instructed people not to bother.

Public-health officials scolded anti-lockdown protesters for risking new outbreaks with their maskless demonstrations, but when anti-racism demonstrators poured into the streets, they emphasized the paramount importance of the cause. Even though Black Lives Matter demonstrators seemed largely to be wearing masks and attempting to practice social distancing, the contradiction rankled conservatives. Public-health officials had one standard for marches against their policies and another for marches they agreed with.

But if these officials were struggling to communicate clearly, it was in large part because clarity was impossible. The conclusions scientists could propose about the novel coronavirus were often both subject to revision and less than absolute: The outdoors is safer than inside but not perfectly safe; masks reduce risk but don’t eliminate it. What’s more, the officials were operating under political pressure from a president who spent weeks insisting the virus would disappear or prove no worse than a normal flu and then attacked every countermeasure as a plot to undermine him.

Public-health officials found themselves in the terrifying position of simultaneously trying to get a handle on a pandemic and being the targets of a political smear. The hybrid role of Kate Winslet’s character in Contagion and Michael Dukakis’s character in the 1988 presidential campaign was as uncomfortable to pull off as it sounds.

Yet public-health officials in almost every economic-peer country managed to overcome scientific uncertainty and missteps. Both here and abroad, they are gazing with a mix of horror and confusion at the helpless, pitiful American scientific giant. One German expert told the Washington Post that Germany had used American studies to design an effective response, which the U.S. somehow couldn’t implement. American “scientists appeared to have reached an adequate assessment of the situation early on, but this didn’t translate into a political action plan,” observed another.

The limiting factor that has done the most to contort the domestic response to the coronavirus is the pathology of the American right. As of late May, only 40 percent of Republicans believed COVID-19 was deadlier than the flu, and half believed the death count was overstated. One research study found that viewers of Fox News, which echoed Trump’s early dismissal of the pandemic, were less likely than the audiences of other cable news channels to engage in social distancing or to purchase masks or sanitizing products.

There has always been some question about the depth of sincerity with which conservatives hold their professed convictions. Did they believe that the Clintons murdered witnesses to their crimes and that Barack Obama faked details of his birth? Or were these statements expressions of partisan enthusiasm not to be taken literally? The coronavirus revealed the deadly earnestness with which the Republican audience accepts the guidance of the conservative alternative-information structure. As early as this spring, tragic stories began to appear of people mourning the deaths of loved ones who had angrily rejected public-health advice as a big-government plot.

The playbook for handling a public-health crisis assumes some baseline level of rationality in the government. The administration is presumed to be working with, not against, its public-health experts; the news media to be informing the public, not actively disinforming it. The ranks of American government, academia, and the nonprofit sector are thick with experts in pandemic response, but very few of them ever trained to deal with a pandemic in Trump’s America.

But that isn't the end of the national downfall. Trump "will pass from the scene," even if Americans don't have the stomach for guillotines or even a cathartic trial and appropriate punishment for him and his cronies. Unfortunately, American right isn't going away-- and Biden is unlikely the strong, vigorous reformist leader this juncture in our history is calling for. Chait concludes that this strain of Americanism represented by the far right "will be tapping into a deep vein of paranoia. Polls have shown somewhere between a quarter and a third of the public already does not intend to take a vaccine when it becomes available. In a country with a cult of self-reliance so ingrained that every new mass shooting propels more panicked arms purchases, is an act of collective, mutual security like public vaccination even workable? The truly remarkable thing about the right-wing revolt against public health is that it has taken place under a president whom conservatives trust and adore. From the standpoint of running the government, these have been awful conditions for handling a pandemic. But from the standpoint of persuading citizens to cooperate, they have been almost optimal. When we look back a year from now at the frenzied, angry revolt against science, the spring and summer of 2020 may seem like halcyon days."

Lambchop by Nancy Ohanian

The halcyon days Emily Stewart described at Vox as America sleepwalking toward economic catastrophe while the Wall Street Journal was reporting that corporate America is losing hope/has lost hope for a quick rebound? Chip Cutter and Doug Cameron wrote that "Big U.S. companies are deciding March and April moves won’t cut it. The fierce resurgence of Covid-19 cases and related business shutdowns are dashing hopes of a quick recovery, prompting businesses from airlines to restaurant chains to again shift their strategies and staffing or ramp up previous plans to do so. They are turning furloughs into permanent layoffs, de-emphasizing their core businesses and downsizing production indefinitely." And Sarah Chaney and Kim Mackrael wrote in the same edition that "The U.S. labor-market recovery is losing momentum as a surge in coronavirus cases triggers heightened employer uncertainty and consumer caution. Job openings in July are down from last month across the U.S., and Google searches for 'file for unemployment' are creeping up. Growth in worker hours is waning at small businesses after several weeks of gains."

As for that economic cliff we're about to go over with our collective eyes closed, courtesy of a national leadership that has actually earned more than what the French revolutionaries did with their national leadership in the early 1790s, Emily Stewart wrote that millions of Americans’ lives and livelihoods are in danger all but ensuring a prolonged recession if not depression. "Things have not gone according to plan. Amid reopenings, coronavirus cases are spiking across the country, and many states and cities are reversing course. There are signs the recovery that was happening is dissipating. And now many of the measures that kept so many American households afloat in recent months are about to come to an abrupt end. It’s not clear what, if much of anything, Congress and the White House plan to do about it. 'It could be cataclysmic,' said Angela Hanks, deputy executive director of the progressive group Groundwork Collaborative. 'I don’t think there’s any way to overestimate what happens when you have a pandemic worsening, not improving, when we have an economic crisis that’s intensifying, and frankly, there’s no response.' At the end of the month, the extra $600 per week of unemployment insurance benefits put in place under the CARES Act is set to expire, which could affect some 33 million workers. In the coming weeks and months, eviction moratoriums and mortgage and student loan forbearance programs will wind down. Small businesses continue to struggle to stay afloat, and many of those that got loans have used them up already. State and local governments are still in dire need of financial assistance. These issues aren’t ones that only plague the parties that are directly affected; they also have knock-on effects across the economy. Not being able to pay rent isn’t just a problem for the tenant-- it’s also a problem for the landlord. It’s an urgent situation, but many people in government aren’t treating it that way. We’re sleepwalking toward catastrophe. 'The cliff is totally visible in front of us, and yet we’re not ready,' said Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist. 'It’s probably already too late to avoid enormous hardship.'"

Elect people like Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump and expect the worst-- because that's what you'll get. And you won't get a helluva lot better by electing people like Joe Biden and the cast of characters Chuck Schumer has lined up for Senate seats across the country. It's time for some peoples' action: a small proposal, or plan of action from Team DWT.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

As you can see, I've decided to use an excellent anti-Trump/Pence TV ad as tonight's "meme." It's brought to us by a group calling itself Republican Voters Against Trump but I think it's important to point out that, although a small percentage of Republicans may be against Trump and may even realize that he is a danger to us all, they are still Republicans. They nominated him and eagerly voted for him knowing full well what he is and they had no problem with any of it, not his misogyny, not his virulent racism, not his sleaze, and certainly not the blatantly obvious mental illness that he displayed at his nightly televised rallies for all of us to see. He is who he is, they knew what he is, and their votes put him where he is. None of what Trump is and what Republican voters endorsed with their votes is un-Republican. Trump is simply the ultimate manifestation of what it is to be a Republican. They may have wanted Jeb Bush or any of a number of other leading Republican goons but that doesn't mean Jeb Bush isn't also a racist asshole. Jeb's actions in extreme voter suppression of African-American voters in his time as governor of Florida offers plenty of evidence about that. John "That one" McCain and Mitt "Free Stuff" Romney all showed their racism with their code-speak and the policy outlines in their campaigns. Moscow Mitch? Marco Rubio? Jim Jordan? Susan Collins? Trey Gowdy? Lindsey Graham? Devin Nunes? They and all the other Republicans in the House and Senate showed us where they really stand. They are all Republicans and they all voted to keep Trump, the light of their lives, right where he is. Being a little less of a sociopath or psychopath shouldn't get them off the hook.

Progressives have more than enough enemies among democrats but try naming a single Republican off the top of your head who didn't vote for the Trump-Ryan tax scam, or, against health care repeatedly, more than 50, count 'em, 50 times in numerous cases when it comes to the latter! Try finding a Republican that doesn't want to end Social Security and Medicare (A lot of Dems are bad enough on that issue). Try finding a Republican who doesn't continuously vote for pollution, against a woman's right to choose and against African-Americans having the opportunity to vote, and so on. I've yet to see a chorus of Republicans taking their guy to task for the way he's handling the response to COVID-19. The conservatives who walk among us continue to choose the virus over the citizenry just like they chose an increase of carcinogens and lead in our water. I could go on but you know what Republicans are.

There is no end to the number of Republicans who will now operate for years under the cover of not being Trump as if that is good enough. The enemy of our enemy is not always our friend even if they are temporarily an expedient ally. Our WW2 alliance with Stalin is a good example of that.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Next to his dereliction of duty in the fight against COVID-19, Donald Trump's biggest achievement may end up being the fact that he has emboldened and encouraged the Republican Party to take the final step in more fully revealing its true nature. Yes, the Republicans of the last 50+ years have always shown their racist and Nazi predilections, and the Korporate Dems have moved to the right in a senseless effort to meet them halfway, but, under Trump, the Republicans no longer feel they have to hold back or hide. Call it Trump's "Permissive Society."

Other than the occasional smirking denials, Republican actions tell the tale. Their increasingly escalating efforts at naked voter suppression are only one vile manifestation of their growing boldness. Their latest efforts in that area don't even pretend to be anything but what they are. When 62,000,000 vote for you, why even pretend anymore? Likewise with their current increasingly vehement fights to preserve statues of Confederate traitors as monuments to their beloved heritage of slavery and torture even as a few legislatures and local governments finally do the right thing after over 100 years.

The tiki torches of Charlottesville were no one-off. Trump's description of those followers as very fine people was designed to encourage more of the same. To Trump, if another woman or two gets deliberately run over by a Nazi-driven car, so be it, and to Trump, if it is a woman...all the better. The fact that Republicans have also made Tucker Carlson's Nightly White Supremacy Hour the number one prime time TV "news" and opinion show, followed close behind by that of his mentor and fellow white supremacist, Sean Hannity serves as another measure of who and what republicans are. They might as well just call the Nielsen ratings people and just say "Count me in" and then invite them over for a cross burning in their front yards so everyone can see! "Hey, look at me! I'm burning a cross! This is who I am! I'm letting my freak flag fly!"

In recent years, I have watched the eyes of Republicans I've encountered literally glaze over at the mere mention of one word, Obama. It's easy to figure out why. They'll tell you it's because "he's a socialist" but since Barack Obama hasn't a socialist bone in his body and is a centrist at best, hmmm, it must be something else. Now, today, if you want to get the same effect from Republicans you have the misfortune to know, just say three words instead of one, Black, Lives. Matter.

The parades of the flags you see in tonight's meme are on the increase since Traitor Don was inaugurated, as are the numbers of swastikas in public places as opposed to behind closed doors. The parades don't always feature Confederate and/or Nazi flags but they sure do feature the sentiments. Case in point: The little "White Power! White Power" golf cart parade of Turmp supporters in Florida a couple of weeks ago; happily tweeted by Trump to his followers, of course. It makes them feel not alone. It encourages them.

What's next? I'm glad you asked. How about a nice Russian flag with Trump's name on it? It's even better that those "I'd Rather Be A Russian Than A Democrat" T-Shirts.

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.”