Saturday, March 28, 2020

Trump has never been worse but his approval is surging. Why?




Trump has never been worse — but his approval is surging. Why?
Damon Linker

My estimation of President Trump has never been lower than it is right now. And his approval rating has never been higher.

That disjunct has become familiar to lots of liberal-leaning journalists, intellectuals, and academics over the past three years. Though this hasn't kept plenty of them from trying to deny or explain it away. Unwaveringly convinced that the president and his party are inept, corrupt, ignorant, and brutally callous, they have written and published article after article under headlines like, "This is the end of the Trump presidency."

We saw this when Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. It happened again in the months surrounding the midterm elections, when Republicans took a big hit in Congress and lost control of the House. The headlines reappeared repeatedly before and during Trump's impeachment trial and subsequent acquittal. And we've seen it in the midst of a global pandemic, the seriousness of which the president at first dismissed, then grudgingly conceded, and now seems eager to deny once again, this time in the name of "restarting the economy."

Over and over again, those who report on and analyze politics at close range have documented the president's lies, exposed his schemes to enrich himself, taken note of his errors and their consequences, and highlighted his incompetence and cruelty — and at every step of the way they have assumed this would make a political difference. But it hasn't.
Maybe it's time to recognize that it won't.

Accepting this is hard. Journalists, academics, and intellectuals tend to be idealists. They went into this line of work not because they wanted to be rich but because they wanted to make the world a better place in some way. This doesn't mean their ideas on improving things would always have positive outcomes if they were enacted, or that their favored policy proposals deserve to take priority in our public life. Not at all. But it does mean they tend to assume that most people will recoil from outright lies, deception, malice, injustice, sleaze, and thuggish imbecility when it is exposed and demonstrated to them.

But maybe that isn't true.

Maybe most of what has been written about the president and his party in the mainstream media is true — and yet it won't mean that this produces "the end of the Trump presidency" at all. Maybe enough Americans in enough states just don't care. Or maybe enough of them do care but in an affirmative way. They like politics conducted like pro-wrestling. They smile at the vulgarity. They approve of a president who acts and thinks like a mob boss and prefer a politics of clientalistic corruption to an administrative state of well-trained experts and bureaucrats who aspire to scrupulous competence and ideological neutrality (while sometimes falling short of achieving it). Maybe instead of responding to evidence that Trump is a clownish demagogue, they respond by saying, "Good, and thanks for noticing."

Maybe they like these things because they're Republicans and Republicans benefit from the Republican president ruthlessly pursuing policies that Republicans want. (Every faction of the GOP has enjoyed victories and gains during the Trump administration.) Maybe they also like these things because they follow politics for the entertainment and the Trump presidency is fun. He spews rhetorical sulfuric acid at their political and cultural enemies, and he does it with relish and humor. And the victims of his vitriol typically respond by flying off into an indignant, self-important, and self-defeating rage. What could be politically sweeter than that?

Now let me be clear: This is bad. Very bad. It means that a large and politically potent segment of the American public is both actively contemptuous of expertise, specialized knowledge, and the effort to combat political corruption when it benefits them, and beyond the reach of being persuaded otherwise.

It will of course be even worse if they happen to get their president re-elected.

In that case, America's relative decline in the world will not only continue apace (as it almost surely would under any president at this point) but be managed terribly. We'll still be able to bully weaker countries to get our way for a while. But anything resembling the "American century" will be over and done. We'll be a declining hegemon in a world increasingly dominated by rising regional powers while being led by a carnival barker who takes his cues entirely from rabblerousing media personalities who know and care nothing about the wider world. Having turned ourselves into global laughingstocks, other countries will increasingly go their own way, bypassing the United States on trade and alliances and other international pursuits as we slowly founder.

At home our country will be marked by crumbling infrastructure and a tottering system of health-care provision to an aging and unhealthy population. Our government will be sagging under a crushing debt burden, our former efforts to soften the blows of capitalism's creative destruction being dismantled along with the regulatory regime that sought to protect citizens against externalities of corporate greed. Our courts will be dominated by right-wing Social Darwinists, with civil liberties in retreat and our public life polluted by a miasma of lies and disinformation designed to protect the powerful from oversight. Meanwhile "red" America will cheer it on, believing our national greatness has been restored and wildly entertained by nasty presidential tweets trolling the libs, while Trump and his party actively screw the disloyal "blue" states, enriching themselves along the way.

In such a pitch-black prophesy, what's the opposition to do?

Of course it still needs to try and win national elections. But if such efforts fail, one option would be for it to continue doing what it has for these past three years — allowing itself to be continually provoked into lashing out, living in a fantasy that voters can be persuaded to eject the ringmaster from his place at the center of the circus, and giving in to conspiracies to explain how we got here.
But there's another way to respond — and that is to disconnect from the spectacle. Use America's federalist system to circle the wagons, creating an archipelago of cities and suburbs that seek to govern themselves the way the country as a whole attempted to do through the middle decades of the 20th century: with a commitment to helping those less fortunate and protecting the vulnerable from harm, to bringing policy expertise to bear on solving common problems, and to building a system of public institutions that aspire to fairness for all.

This is really no solution and certainly nothing to romanticize. It would be a concession to our civic brokenness, a giving in to how divided we are as a polity, and how disinclined to find common ground. In that respect it could well intensify our divisions further. It would also demonstrate beyond any doubt that the time for grand, ambitious national projects — like fighting climate change in a systematic way or overhauling the health-care system to make it more equitable — is behind us. The most that liberals could hope for in such a scenario would be regional accomplishments that may well feel like little more than well-managed defeats.

But really, what's the alternative when contemplating the future of the center-left in a country that re-elects Donald Trump to the presidency? Continuing to jump up and down, pointing at the president while screaming, "Look at how bad he is!," while nearly half the country rolls its eyes and turns its backs in indifference?

Wake-up American liberals: We have no one to save but ourselves.

Thursday, March 26, 2020

Is this what America has come to?



Donald Trump isn’t much of a doctor or scientist. He isn’t much of a diplomat or general. His leadership skills match his business skills. There’s a reason his companies went bankrupt so many times.

But he might just be a pioneer with this idea of letting people die for the sake of the country. Only a once-in-a-century leader has the guts to say out loud what the worst among us are really thinking: everyone other than me is expendable.

Anyone older is past it, for sure. The younger ones we can easily afford to lose: they don’t actually pay for anything. The smarter ones? Totally annoying. The dumber ones: what’s even the point?
The sick are a real drain on us, financially and emotionally. The poor won’t really do much in the long run, no matter how hard we try. The wealthy just keep shoving it in your face. Foreigners aren’t like us at all. And our neighbors are frankly a bit too close for comfort.

So when you add it all up, it’s only sensible that we ask everyone else to sacrifice themselves for us. For the sake of the nation and all that’s good, please just go, so that the rest of us – not counting the undesirables – can get back to our old lives.

“Look, you’re going to lose a number of people to the flu,” this pandemic of a president told Fox News on Tuesday. “But you’re going to lose more people by putting a country into a massive recession or depression. You’re going to lose people. You’re going to have suicides by the thousands. You’re going to have all sorts of things happen. You’re going to have instability.”

Mr President, it might come as a shock to you but we are currently suffering from a viral case of instability, and you are one of its hotspots. As you surely recall, if you lift all restrictions, the estimated death count is 2.2 million Americans.

“You can’t just come in and say, ‘Let’s close up the United States of America,’” continued the president who prides himself on closing the borders of, um, the United States of America.
Being a fundamentally religious man, albeit one with a love of paying off porn stars, Trump has a full resurrection in mind for the country in all of two weeks. “I would love to have it open by Easter,” he told the normally diligent hoax-busters at Fox News. “I will, I will tell you that right now. I would love to have that. It’s such an important day for other reasons, but I’ll make it an important day for this too.”

Pray tell: what are those other reasons that Easter is important? Perhaps if we could discuss those reasons, you might rethink this one. It seems – how to put this diplomatically? – a little perverse to kill large swaths of the population to celebrate Jesus Christ rising from the dead. The White House comms team might think it’s confusing to mix one message of rebirth with another about mass death.
Of course, this kind of party-pooping epidemiology is so typical of the elites. They just don’t get it. Or worse: they’re trying to save lives just so they can hurt Donald Trump’s re-election.

“The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success,” tweeted our LameStream President on Wednesday. “The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before!”
If it’s not the media’s fault, it’s the doctors and scientists, or the governors or the Chinese. Someone, anyone, not called Trump
The real people won’t be surprised to hear that our fearful leader’s latest gambit is to blame everyone else as he desperately tries to squirm his way to November’s election. How else can he divert attention from his disastrously botched handling of the pandemic and the ensuing economic collapse? If it’s not the media’s fault, it’s the doctors and scientists, or the governors or the Chinese. Someone, anyone, not called Trump.

There is some history to this one, naturally. When Hurricane Maria ripped through Puerto Rico in our antihero’s first year in office, he thought it was fine and dandy to let the sick and elderly die. In the early days, the official death toll was so low it was actually worth celebrating their deaths on his one and only trip to the American colony after the storm.

“If you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here with, really, a storm that was just totally overpowering,” he said, “nobody has ever seen anything like this. What is your death count, as of this moment? Seventeen? Sixteen certified. Sixteen people versus in the thousands. You can be very proud of all of your people, all of our people working together.”

Of course, they weren’t working together because they had no commander-in-chief. At the time Trump was talking, the death toll was growing exponentially because our so-called president failed to surge supplies to the island. So the sick and the elderly died in their thousands because there was no reliable power, clean water or food, in hospitals and senior centers.

Anyone who complained, like the mayor of San Juan, was corrupt or crazy or incompetent: a combination of qualities that Trump should actually trademark. And when the real death toll finally emerged – at more than 4,600 Americans – it was naturally all a plot by Democrats to make him look bad.

Those old and sick Americans in Puerto Rico were no different from the old and sick Americans whose lives are so cheap for Trump and the Texas lieutenant governor and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal.

If only we could target the virus to those who get in the way of our economy and, more importantly, Donald Trump’s re-election. It would be so much easier than sourcing more ventilators, or respirator masks, or reviving an economy that is heading for depression.

That would require leadership, or at least crisis management skills: rallying a government and nation to a common cause to save each other and ourselves. All the rest is the wishful thinking of a group of people whose malign influence is now a matter of fact.

The coronavirus has no sense of morality: it just spreads its selfish genes, along with its misery and chaos, as fast as it can. At long last, this president has finally met his soulmate.

My American president






Dear Mr. President,

I am an emergency medicine resident physician in one of the biggest hospital systems in New York City, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. In the past several weeks, I have taken care of countless patients with COVID-19 ― some who didn’t seem so sick and some blue in the face and gasping for air 70 times a minute. I have put my face inches from theirs and inserted breathing tubes into their trachea, putting myself and everyone else in the room at exponentially higher risk of contracting this disease. 

As I’ve sat in a room full of coughing patients for 60 hours a week, I have worried about my own safety now and in the coming months as this pandemic gets worse and our completely inadequate supply of personal protective equipment rapidly disappears. There is a major shortage of face masks, along with other supplies, across the country and without them, it can be next to impossible to keep health care workers safe and working to support the increasing number of patients who are arriving at our hospital and clinic doors.

I have sent some not-so-sick patients home and I have seen some patients die right in front of my eyes. I have spoken on the phone to the sobbing mother of a young man admitted to the intensive care unit, and told her, “No, you are not allowed to enter the hospital to see your critically ill son because we are not letting family members into the hospital during this pandemic.” To say that I have experienced countless heartbreaking moments over the past several weeks would be an understatement.

In the next couple of days or weeks, we will run out of hospital beds and ventilators. The number of critically ill COVID-19 patients who come to my hospital seems to double every day. If things continue this way, I will soon be forced to make decisions about who deserves a shot at life and who I will allow to die, and that is an unthinkable thing to have to consider, much less do. 

Tell me ― when there is only one ventilator available, should it go to the young nurse or the elderly woman with multiple comorbidities who has an advanced directive that says “do not incubate/do not resuscitate”? How about the single mother of three? Or the deeply respected emergency medicine attending doctor I worked with last week? How about the middle-aged man with some medical comorbidities and corny jokes who reminds me of my father ― or is my father? Or maybe the person in prison for rape? How about the person of color in jail for marijuana possession? How about a beloved and wealthy celebrity? How about the homeless person with alcohol use disorder who spits on my fellow medical professionals and me when we try to help? How about the homeless person who lives on my street corner and smiles at me every day and says “God bless you”? It’s not so easy choose, is it? 

If things continue this way, I will soon be forced to make decisions about who deserves a shot at life and who I will allow to die and that is an unthinkable thing to have to consider, much less do.
This past week, between 12-hour shifts working in the emergency department and the newly created COVID respiratory unit, I have done everything I can think of to stop that nightmare scenario from arriving. I have posted on social media begging my friends and family to stay home. I have signed countless petitions and contacted my local government pleading for more personal protective equipment and ventilators. If I learn of other things I can do, I will do those, too.

My governor, Andrew Cuomo, has tirelessly worked to obtain more personal protective equipment and ventilators. He has begged you to nationalize the effort to acquire medical supplies and you have denied him. He’s begged for citizens to stay home and, while some are listening, many are not and if they don’t, it will be disastrous. But there’s only so much the governor ― or any of us ― can do alone. At this point, there may be only so much we can do together. But we must try. 

On Tuesday you told Fox News you would “ love to have the country opened up and raring to go by Easter.” You said you chose Easter because, “you will have packed churches all over our country, I think it would be a beautiful time and it is just about the timeline that I think is right.” The thought of this makes me nauseous. If we do that, exponentially more people will get this disease, our hospital system will not have the capacity to handle it, and health care professionals like me will have to let countless people die while continuing to put our own lives ― and possibly the lives of the people we love ― at risk.  

When we run out of ventilators ― and we will if we lift the social distancing restrictions that are in place and this pandemic continues to spread as it already has ― I will not be ready to make these decisions about who deserves to live and who deserves to die. When those moments come, I do not know how I will be able to sleep at night. Will you? Now is not the time to let our guards down.
You have the power to be remembered as someone who did the right thing. I beg you to help me and other health care workers save countless lives ― possibly including our own ― so that we as a nation don’t have to suffer the unthinkable devastation looming on the horizon. I beg you to take this pandemic more seriously and I am begging you to do it now.

Sincerely, 
Rachel Sobolev, MD

Rachel Sobolev is a second year emergency medicine resident in New York City. She feels passionately about being right at the intersection of health care and current events, and providing high quality health care to all types of people regardless of their background.