Monday, October 26, 2020
Republicans closely resemble autocratic parties in Hungary and Turkey – study | US news | The Guardian
Barrett Set to Be Confirmed to Supreme Court - The New York Times
Opinion | Trump’s Army of Angry White Men - The New York Times
Infection of Pence Aides Raises New Questions About Trump’s Virus Response - The New York Times
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WASHINGTON — “Covid, Covid. Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid,” President Trump groused at a rally in North Carolina on Saturday, expressing dismay that the deadly coronavirus pandemic had come to dominate the final days of his struggling re-election campaign. He made up a scenario: “A plane goes down, 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it. ‘Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’”
But just seven hours later, the White House made its own Covid headlines when officials acknowledged that another coronavirus outbreak had struck the White House, infecting Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff and four other top aides — and raising new questions about the Trump administration’s cavalier approach to the worst health crisis in a century.
“We’re not going to control the pandemic,” Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday morning, essentially offering a verbal shrug in response to any effort to prevent an outbreak in the top echelon of the nation’s leaders. “We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigations, because it is a contagious virus — just like the flu.”
Mr. Trump made no reference to the new cases during campaign rallies in New Hampshire and Maine on Sunday. But for voters, the new wave of infections at the White House just over a week before Election Day was a visceral reminder of the president’s dismissive and erratic handling of the virus, even in one of the most secure spaces in the country. And it comes just as the United States suffers its third surge in infections across the nation, with a record number of daily new cases on Friday and a death toll that has risen to almost 225,000.
Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, said Sunday that the statement by Mr. Meadows was “an acknowledgment of what President Trump’s strategy has clearly been from the beginning of this crisis: to wave the white flag of defeat and hope that by ignoring it, the virus would simply go away. It hasn’t, and it won’t.”
“It’s sadly no surprise then that this virus continues to rage unchecked across the country and even in the White House itself,” said the former vice president, who has sought to make the administration’s handling of the coronavirus the centerpiece of his campaign.
From the beginning, Mr. Trump has downplayed the threat of the virus, initially insisting that it would just “go away” and failing to ramp up testing that might have helped slow its spread. Mr. Trump clashed with his own scientists, pressuring officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change their restrictive recommendations about how and when to reopen businesses and schools.
The president organized his pandemic response around his political ideology, warring with “blue state” governors while praising the hands-off approach of Republican leaders. And he publicly sided with people frustrated with restrictions and shutdowns, demanding on Twitter that the governor of Michigan, among others, “liberate” her state.
Mr. Trump turned mask wearing and other preventive measures into political loyalty tests, dismissing the critical importance of social distancing and pinning his hopes on Operation Warp Speed, a plan to accelerate development and distribution of a vaccine that has shown promise, but that scientists have insisted was never going to be quick or easy.
The president and his aides have taken the same approach inside the White House. They have declined to follow quarantine guidelines, ignored warnings from doctors, largely refused to wear masks and, in the case of the president, mocked reporters who did as recently as Friday in the Oval Office.
“The White House has had very loose rules about protecting the workers and leadership,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. “They’ve had one large outbreak, and it was very clear that they didn’t learn from that outbreak and so these are going to continue.”
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The president and vice president have largely stayed in messaging lock step as the pandemic unfolded. Mr. Trump has minimized it from the beginning, and used his own infection and hospitalization as a way of doubling down, telling Americans after his treatment with experimental drugs, “Don’t be afraid of Covid,” and urging them not to “let it dominate your life.” He said during his second debate with Mr. Biden last week that the country was “learning to live” with it.
As the leader of the White House virus task force, Mr. Pence has parroted the president’s rosy outlook, even mimicking Mr. Trump’s aversion to masks by refusing to wear one during a visit to a hospital in April.
Over the past several months, Mr. Pence stood by as the White House sidelined Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the task force coordinator, and instead embraced Dr. Scott W. Atlas, a radiologist and senior fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution, who has advocated a largely hands-off approach by the federal government to stopping the pandemic.
Mr. Pence tested negative for the virus on Sunday, and said he would not quarantine after his exposure to infected aides, who include Marc Short, his chief of staff, and Marty Obst, a senior adviser. His spokesman would not say whether Mr. Pence was receiving some of the drugs Mr. Trump was given, including an experimental cocktail of antibodies by the pharmaceutical company Regeneron, as a preventive measure.
In a statement, the White House deemed the vice president “essential” and said he would stick to his campaign schedule. That included an address on Sunday evening to supporters in Kinston, N.C., where Mr. Pence made no reference to the cases that had infiltrated his staff and instead defended the administration’s coronavirus response as the “greatest national mobilization since World War II.”
But several White House aides and officials on his campaign said privately that Mr. Pence should stay off the campaign trail, and instead host virtual events and phone calls to demonstrate that the vice president and his aides were taking the outbreak in their ranks seriously.
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Others said that the latest outbreak would be in the news either way, and that deploying Mr. Pence to a state like North Carolina, where campaign aides think the race will come down to fewer than 100,000 votes, was crucial in the final days.
But the decision to continue Mr. Pence’s schedule risked making the outbreak in his ranks a bigger story than if he pulled back from the campaign trail.
Robert C. O’Brien, the president’s national security adviser, defended Mr. Pence’s decision to maintain his campaign schedule, even as he acknowledged that the virus was “ripping through this country.” He cited the C.D.C.’s guidelines that allow essential personnel to continue working.
“Essential workers going out and campaigning and voting are about as essential as things we can do as Americans,” Mr. O’Brien said.
Those guidelines, issued in April and updated in September, were developed to ensure that “people who are helping us keep the lights on and the water running can do their jobs,” said one federal health official who participated in drafting them. And while Mr. Pence has thus far tested negative, health experts denounced his decision to continue traveling to campaign stops around the country.
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“The idea that you can just be declared an essential worker without being quarantined undermines the whole concept of quarantine,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, the director of the C.D.C. under President Barack Obama.
On the campaign trail, blaming the news media for covering the virus incessantly has become a stock part of Mr. Trump’s rally performance — a sign he is appealing to voters by leaning into the country’s general virus fatigue. The president has repeatedly said the country is “rounding the corner” in the fight against the virus — even as all evidence is to the contrary.
The president’s assessment stood in stark contrast to more aggressive guidance from Dr. Fauci, who said in an interview Sunday that the country should consider mandating the use of masks — something Mr. Trump has repeatedly refused to consider — because “the universal wearing of masks” is essential to curbing the spread of the deadly virus.
“It would be optimal if this could be accomplished without resorting to a mask mandate,” Dr. Fauci said, repeating comments he first made late last week. “However, if the situation continues to deteriorate regarding numbers of cases, hospitalizations and likely deaths while many people still refuse to wear masks, we should seriously consider mask mandates.”
The outbreak in the vice president’s office is the third to strike the White House, following a small outbreak in May that included Mr. Pence’s spokeswoman and a larger explosion of infection in late September after a Rose Garden ceremony for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.
The latest one began late last week, when Mr. Obst fell ill. Once that happened, people who had been in contact with him went into quarantine and contact tracing measures were employed, according to a senior administration official. But during that period, two other top aides to Mr. Pence tested positive for the virus. Officials in the vice president’s office did not make it public at the time.
Then on Saturday, both Mr. Short and Zach Bauer, Mr. Pence’s personal aide, tested positive, two senior administration officials said. Two officials familiar with the events said Mr. Short wanted White House doctors to issue a statement about his diagnosis, adding that Mr. Pence had tested negative.
But Mr. Meadows did not want the information becoming public on Saturday, the officials said. He pressed the White House medical office not to release a statement, and urged the vice president’s staff not to publicly reveal the diagnoses, the officials said. Several people said they believed Mr. Meadows was trying to keep the situation from becoming public so close to Election Day. Mr. Meadows has indicated to people that he was doing what the president wanted.
A senior administration official said that Mr. Meadows was not trying to prevent the outbreak from becoming public, but instead that he thought the White House medical office should not issue the statement and wanted the vice president’s office to engage in contact tracing before putting out a statement. After the Rose Garden ceremony last month, the White House made little effort to track the spread of the virus.
Across the White House complex, there was a mixture of anxiety about what the outbreak means for the election, and intense frustration with Mr. Short, who has been among the leaders in the administration in arguing the risks of the virus have been overblown.
Mr. Short has also played down the value of mask wearing, administration officials said. Mr. Short was expected to stay home for at least 10 days.
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Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, said he gave the vice president’s office credit for acknowledging that Mr. Short was sick, and took no issue with Mr. Pence being out on the trail.
“I don’t think they should overdramatize this,” Mr. Cole said. “It is near the end of a campaign. I’m sure all these things are weighed carefully by a presidential campaign. I guess you could call it either way, but if I were in a similar situation I’d be doing a similar thing to what Vice President Pence is doing.”
Asked by reporters on Sunday whether Mr. Pence should come off the campaign trail, Mr. Trump said that “you’ll have to ask him” and bragged about the size of the vice president’s rally crowds, saying they had been socially distanced.
The only person in the president’s orbit whose own experience with the virus appeared to have altered his thinking is Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, who was hospitalized after testing positive and now urges Americans to wear masks and practice social distancing.
“These minor inconveniences can save your life, your neighbors and the economy,” he wrote last week in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. “Seldom has so little been asked for so much benefit. Yet the message will be broadly heeded only if it is consistently and honestly delivered by the media, religious leaders, sports figures and public servants.
“Those in positions of authority,” he said — without directly mentioning Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence — “have a duty to get the message out.”
Emily Cochrane contributed reporting."
Sunday, October 25, 2020
Mary Trump: Psychiatrists know what’s wrong with my uncle. Let them tell voters. - The Washington Post
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Mary Trump: Psychiatrists know what’s wrong with my uncle. Let them tell voters.
In 1964, Fact magazine published an unscientific survey asking psychiatrists whether they thought the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, was psychologically fit to serve as president of the United States. The problem wasn’t that professionals felt the need to share their views of what they considered Goldwater’s dangerous ideas; it was the irresponsible and often bizarre analyses that were in some cases based entirely on rank speculation. “Goldwater is basically a paranoid schizophrenic” who “resembles Mao Tse-tung,” one offered. Another said that he “has the same pathological make-up as Hitler, Castro, Stalin and other known schizophrenic leaders.” A third said that “a megalomaniacal, grandiose omnipotence appears to pervade Mr. Goldwater’s personality.”
Embarrassed, the American Psychiatric Association (APA), in reaction to this debacle, established the “Goldwater Rule,” which barred its members from diagnosing public figures. It concluded that “it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.” That’s fair, as far as it goes. But in March 2017, shortly after my uncle, Donald Trump, was inaugurated, the APA didn’t just reaffirm the rule — it expanded it past the point of coherence. Not only were members prohibited from diagnosing public figures, now they could no longer offer a professional opinion of any sort, no matter how well supported or evidence-based, even if they believed that a public figure posed a threat to the country’s citizens or national security.
This is absurd on its face and has potentially serious consequences for the safety of the American people. While psychiatric diagnosis is a technical process, it is entirely within bounds to draw conclusions based on observable behavior. It is one thing to declare definitively that a person has anti-social personality disorder (a specific diagnostic term); it is another to point to behaviors — such as deliberately putting other people in harm’s way for no discernible reason (for example, abandoning our Kurdish allies) beyond one’s own self-interest — and express the general conclusion that it is dangerous to have somebody in the Oval Office who is incapable of empathy. The APA has also stated that “psychiatrists are medical doctors; evaluating mental illness is no less thorough than diagnosing diabetes or heart disease.” That’s true — but what might a cardiologist say if a public figure kept having heart attacks? Would he need to be subjected to a “thorough” diagnostic regimen for a doctor to speculate that there might be an underlying heart condition? If the person who kept having heart attacks was a pilot who refused to seek medical attention, wouldn’t it be malpractice not to speak out? It is not an exaggeration to say that Donald has exhibited pathological behavior that is equally alarming — as evidenced most recently by his callous disregard for his own health and the well-being of those around him when he left Walter Reed hospital while still shedding coronavirus, or when he holds rallies and encourages thousands of people to attend without wearing masks or social distancing in order to prop up his ego.
The American public is inadequately educated about mental health. It would take a serious, sustained explication, backed by the power and reach of a professional association, to help us understand why the emotional and psychological stability of our leaders matters and can have an impact on all of us. Every day legal experts weigh in on Donald’s unconstitutional or norm-breaking behaviors. Since his covid-19 diagnosis, medical experts have speculated about the course of his illness and the potentially dangerous side effects he may be experiencing as a result of the experimental treatments he’s received. Only the mental health experts have been effectively sidelined.
That doesn’t mean opinions haven’t proliferated about Donald’s mental health. It sometimes seems that everyone but psychiatrists has aired their views: Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, once described Donald’s behavior as “a combination of waking hallucinations, verbal tics, lies surpassing even his usual fabulist standard, aphasias and lunatic blurtings.”
This is a problem. Not necessarily because characterizations like this lack validity, but because such assessments can inadvertently undermine the seriousness of the case when experts fail to provide an appropriate context in which to understand the psychopathologies. If we look at the past 3½ years, Donald has lied publicly in excess of 20,000 times; he has impulsively, and against all reason, gone against the advice of experts who could have helped contain the pandemic and protect the economy; he has put private citizens at risk by attacking them on Twitter because they have criticized him; he has proved himself to be incapable of accepting responsibility, changing course or exhibiting empathy. As Courtney Fingar wrote recently in the New Statesman: “The public can observe all these things too, but does so largely without translation or explanation by actual experts. In the end, what was written as a rule to curb speculation has, in fact, allowed it to run rampant.”
Tunis G. Campbell fought for Black voting rights in Georgia Senate after Civil War - The Washington Post
He fought for Black voting rights after the Civil War. He was almost killed for it.
"From the floor of the Georgia Senate, Tunis G. Campbell could see the glint of firearms. As he spoke, his fellow senators moved their hands to the butts of their guns, gesturing ever more threateningly the longer Campbell held the floor. Undeterred, he went on. The state senator continued to speak for seven consecutive days, arguing for a simple right: to stand exactly where he was.
Campbell was Black. It was 1868, and after only a few months in office, his opponents had voted that his skin color alone disqualified him from holding political office. After the eighth day, Campbell headed to Washington to petition the federal government to reinstate him and several other Black political officeholders who had been denied their elected seats. He would stay in Washington for several months to lobby for bills promoting Reconstruction in Georgia. “We went on — although threatened by many rebel sympathizers that if I went to Washington again I should not live in Georgia,” he would later write in his autobiography.
He did return to live in Georgia, this time as a sworn state senator. His fight for the equal rights of Black citizens has been mostly forgotten, but Campbell was one of the earliest people in Reconstruction-era Georgia fighting voter suppression. Using a militia of several hundred people to protect himself and other Black residents from White violence, Campbell served as a labor organizer, justice of the peace, voter registrar and state senator.
Some 150 years later, amid racial justice protests and voter suppression efforts, Campbell remains emblematic of the struggle to ensure Black Americans not only the right to vote, but also to exercise the full scope of citizenship: as activists, as small-business owners and as politicians.
Campbell spent his life championing the rights of Black people, meeting with fierce resistance at every step. During the course of his political career, he would be threatened, suffer an attempted assassination, see his house burned down and even be imprisoned and put on a chain gang. Despite grave danger to his health and family, Campbell dedicated his life to ensuring that freedmen would be free in every sense of the word: safe from physical violence and exploitative labor practices, while being able to practice their constitutional rights. It was his work ensuring the enfranchisement of all voters that left its mark on McIntosh County, Ga., well into the 20th century.
Born in 1812, Campbell was the son of a free blacksmith in New Jersey. He worked as a head waiter in a New York City hotel before gaining recognition as an abolitionist and a preacher. He came to the South by order of a general under President Abraham Lincoln, who appointed Campbell as the guardian of several islands off the coast of Georgia.
By the mid-1860s, he was selected to be a registrar. He and a biracial group of registrars traveled to several counties registering voters, as part of a larger effort across the state. The several dozen statewide Black registrars were often greeted with brutal violence: Campbell and another Black registrar were poisoned. The other registrar died, according to Campbell.
Yet the drive to register voters in Reconstruction Georgia — both Black and White — was exceptionally successful. By the fall of 1867, approximately 80 percent of men, or nearly 200,000 potential voters, had been registered, according to historian Edmund L. Drago. That included not only recently emancipated Black residents, but also some 95,000 low-income White men. The Black registrars also served a symbolic function: providing “the first contact many Southerners, White and Black, ever had with a black office-holder,” Drago wrote.
Lynching and other vicious crimes were a near-daily occurrence across the South during Reconstruction. In 1868 in Georgia alone, there would be 355 “outrages,” or violent attacks against free men, women and children, according to sociologist Richard Hogan.
Campbell forged ahead. He was on the ground at polling places, urging Black voters to stand up for their newly won rights, under any circumstances.
“You see all of the things we see now. We see voter suppression. We see Whites blocking voting venues and courthouses,” said Russell Duncan, a historian and author of a biography on Campbell.
By then, President Andrew Johnson had restored voting rights to former Confederates, but many abstained from the vote for the mere fact that there were Black candidates on the ballot. Black voters did not abstain, however, and many of them cast their first vote ever for Campbell. He cruised to victory.
When Campbell traveled to Washington after White opponents tried to deny him his seat, he spoke to Charles Sumner about the need for a 15th Amendment. Duncan suggests that Campbell’s specific wording for the amendment may have ended up in the Constitution itself. As a state senator, Campbell continued to lobby for fair voting practices, integrated juries, equal opportunities for education, and the abolition of imprisonment for debt.
Campbell’s remarkable political career came to an abrupt halt in what one historian called a “judicial lynching.” As a justice of the peace, Campbell arbitrated both Black and White residents. He was known for levying fines on White landowners who mistreated their Black laborers. Some of the people had enslaved hundreds just a few years earlier — and appearing before a Black justice of the peace enraged them.
Campbell would be indicted on multiple charges in the mid-1870s, largely trumped up by those who saw the opportunity to finally oust him from the Georgia political arena. He petitioned many of his allies and sought a pardon from the governor and even from President Ulysses S. Grant. But those efforts failed. Campbell, then in his sixties, served his time — hard labor on a chain gang — and he left Georgia for good shortly afterward.
Just as early Reconstruction had ushered in a brief golden age of Black officeholders, they were violently ushered out. Historians estimate that some 2,000 Black people served in political roles during Reconstruction — as sheriffs, city councilors and members of Congress — a number not to be achieved again until the 1960s.
“There is almost always backlash, throughout U.S. history, to Black people gaining rights or making advancements,” said Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, an assistant professor of African American history who researches the Civil War and Reconstruction era. “And it’s not always just the backlash of the virulent racists; it’s also where they’re thrown to the wolves by people who are supposed to be their allies.”
Campbell may never have returned to Georgia, but his work left an indelible mark on McIntosh County. The region would remain — for the next four decades — a stronghold of Black political power."
Saturday, October 24, 2020
Friday, October 23, 2020
Thursday, October 22, 2020
Opinion | Let’s not mince words. The Trump administration kidnapped children.
THE TRUMP administration’s immorality, cruelty and bureaucratic malpractice in tearing migrant toddlers, tweens and teens away from their parents in 2017 and 2018 were the work of many co-conspirators, most of them faithfully carrying out the wishes of the president himself. A draft report by the Justice Department’s inspector general has made that clear. Perhaps even more shocking is that policy’s present-day legacy: More than 500 children who, having been wrenched from their families by U.S. government officials with no plan or mechanism ever to reunite them, remain separated.
That is the case despite years of efforts to track down parents who were, in many cases, deported after their children were seized and placed with family sponsors in the United States. For all intents and purposes, these children were kidnapped by the U.S. government.
In fact, it has not even been the U.S. government that has tried to reunite these sundered families. That has been the work of a court-appointed body organized by the American Civil Liberties Union, a nongovernmental organization. The ACLU, in effect, was put in charge of trying to fix what the Trump administration shattered — the lives of hundreds of children and families. Even now, the parents of 545 separated children cannot be located, despite the efforts of lawyers and advocates, according to a new court filing.
To its authors in the Trump administration, the child separation policy was justified in the name of inflicting such emotional trauma on migrant families that further illegal crossing of the southern border would be deterred.
That was the clear takeaway from the report of the Justice Department’s inspector general, a draft of which was reviewed by the New York Times. The report, whose final contours are unlikely to change significantly, paints a stomach-wrenching portrait of indifference and indecency on the part of U.S. officials. In the end, the policy was abandoned only when Americans, in overwhelming numbers, expressed their outrage at images and accounts of children torn from their families.
In what the Times cites as a 32-page response to the report by Gene Hamilton, a top Justice Department lawyer, the impetus for the family separation policy comes into focus. It was Mr. Trump himself who, in an April 2018 meeting with then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, demanded a blitz of prosecutions to deter further border crossings.
Some federal prosecutors along the border balked at bringing charges against migrant parents whose children would automatically be removed from their care. But at Justice, top officials washed their hands of ethical responsibility regarding the children’s welfare. “I just don’t see that as a [Justice Department] equity,” Rod J. Rosenstein, then-deputy attorney general, told the inspector general.
In a sense, Mr. Rosenstein was right: The job of protecting blameless children from emotional trauma is not a government “equity”; it is a human obligation. It is basic human decency, which was lacking in all the senior officials who helped implement this unspeakably callous policy."