Category: Coronavirus

ANTI-VAXXERS, NOT BIDEN, OWN DELTA

Fully vaccinated and maskless, many of us were basking in what we thought was COVID’s summer endgame. Then along came delta, an ill-timed pandemic redux. Suddenly, there was déjà vu all over the place.

Along with skyrocketing infections, came thunderous news reports of President Biden falling asleep at the coronavirus switch.  After all, the guy was elected on the promise of cleaning up Trump’s horrendous COVID mess.  Biden was credited for taming the virus, so he must now be blamed for its sequel.  Or so it would seem from reports like these:

  • “Biden’s Struggles on Delta Overshadow Infrastructure Victory”. (World News Network)
  • “For President Joe Biden, who pledged a ‘return to normal’ on July 4, (delta) is a tacit admission that competence alone won’t vanquish the coronavirus.” (Politico)

My admiration and respect for these and other major news outlets comes with a cautionary warning: Always read the whole report.  Relying on only headlines or story tops can grossly distort the full picture. In this instance, looking solely at these blurbs, it would be easy for a casual news consumer to conjure an image of Biden personally cranking out this new viral strain from his own Wuhan-like lab, deep in the bowels of his Wilmington, Delaware basement. 

Read a little further, however, and a demonstrably different picture surfaces: This highly contagious delta variant emerged in India last December. It inundated that country and Great Britain before making its way to the United states a few months ago.  It quickly blew up our descending trajectory of new infections, going from an average of 13,500 a day in June to 92,000 as of August 3. Some models forecast more than 200,000 new cases a day by this fall.  The delta variant now accounts for 85 percent of new infections.  Most of them are in people who have not been vaccinated. 

So how does any of that put Joe Biden in a pickle?  Where exactly was his stumble?  Much of this honeymoon-is-over reporting was predicated on the President’s July 4 “declaration of independence” from COVID. At that point, 67 percent of adults had at least one vaccine shot, and pandemic cases were down in all 50 states for the first time.  The media wrap on Biden was simply that he said things were getting better, but then they got worse.

Sure, the president congratulated the country back in July for getting vaccinated and helping to turn the corner on this virus.  But here’s what else he said then: “Now, I can’t promise that will continue this way. We know there will be advances and setbacks, and we know that there are many flare-ups that could occur. But if the unvaccinated get vaccinated, they will protect themselves and other unvaccinated people around them. If they do not, states with low vaccination rates may see those rates go up – may see this progress reversed.”  

And that is precisely what happened.  The areas hit hardest by delta are those with the highest rates of unvaccinated residents.  This demographic through-line also aligns those concentrations of anti-vaxxers with counties Trump carried in 2020.  Sure, there are multiple reasons behind vaccine reluctance.  But the spiteful Trumpian politics of refusing the shots Biden is pushing is a big part of this picture.  That makes the news media’s flippant narrative all the more insidious.  Blaming Biden for a delta flare up caused by 93 million unvaccinated Americans has to be putting at least a small smile on the grievance-obsessed face of Donald Trump.  

The sad irony is that some journalists feel the need to demonstrate their fairness and balance by attaching a negative spin to a political leader who has received considerable positive coverage. This phenomena, which is neither fair nor balanced, is even more pronounced in this post-Trump era.  The former president did and said mostly off-the-wall bizarre stuff, resulting in negative stories that Trump called “fake news.”  Then comes Joe Biden, who as the anti-Trump, presents as a bastion of competence and composure, resulting in generally positive news coverage.  Yet, some reporters have this weird balance itch that needs to be scratched. So when Biden’s July 4 reference to the light at the end of the COVID tunnel turned out to be a train called delta, they just had to take him to task.

Meanwhile, Biden remained calm and competent. He and his team assessed the delta data and made major changes in their strategy to conquer this pandemic.  The communication from this White House has been clear and concise: The only way out of this mess is vaccination.  So he is requiring some 11 million federal employees and contractors to either get vaccinated or face adverse employment consequences. Same goes for the military.  

This move, as intended, triggered mandatory vaccination programs in a number of other state and municipal governments, along with a growing list of large companies, including Google, Facebook, Anthem, BlackRock, Cisco, Delta Airlines, Door Dash, Equinox, Ford, Goldman Sachs, Lyft and Microsoft. Theaters and other entertainment and cultural venues have instituted mandatory vaccination policies for customers and employees.

All this happened at the same time headlines had Biden “stumbling” his way into a “pickle” over a dramatic rise in new COVID cases. Yet,  CNN reports, that the number of newly vaccinated people in the eight states with the highest delta caseloads has increased on an average of 171 percent each day over the past three weeks. 

Results like that don’t come from a stumble.  They come from a leader who assesses the rapidly evolving terrain of this pandemic and then responds with appropriate strategic adjustments. Earlier this year, Biden was adamant about avoiding mandatory vaccinations. He not only wanted to dodge the political fallout from such a move, he believed that the overwhelming majority of Americans would vaccinate out of self-interest.  When the carrot approach left 30 percent of the country unvaccinated, and delta began its rampage, the president set politics aside and turned immediately to the stick of making inoculation mandatory wherever possible. 

When the final chapter of this pandemic is written, my bet is on Politico being wrong: Joe Biden’s competence will, indeed, have vanquished this virus.  

FREEDOM FROM MASKS: THE RIGHT TO INFECT YOUR NEIGHBOR

In the name of liberty, unmasked MAGA heads are freely emitting oral and nasal droplets of God-knows-what. Welcome to Donald Trump’s America. In this bizarre upside-down moment, a former germaphobe has used his presidential power to turn unprotected coughs and sneezes into acts of patriotism.  Mandatory masking, Trump argues, is an attack on liberty.

Speaking of liberty, do you think Patrick Henry would have worn a face mask?  He’s the guy who, in 1775 created the rhetorical predicate for the Revolutionary War with his “Give me liberty, or give me death” speech. It’s hard to imagine those infamous words being uttered behind an N-95 facial covering. So weak and low energy, as our Twitterer-in-Chief would say.

But little did Henry know that, 245 years later, his precious aspiration for liberty would be used in another lethal battle, this time to preserve the Republican right to forgo wearing face masks during the most deadly pandemic in a century. 

In a year overflowing with specious and spurious arguments, comes this granddaddy of insipidness:  In the interest of personal liberty, nobody should be required to wear a face mask in mitigation of a virus that has infected more than 8.6 million Americans and left more than 224,000 of them dead. 

Reasonable people can differ over the closing of schools and businesses.  But to the medical professionals and other scientists tracking this epidemic, there is no dispute over the efficacy of masks. They work. And they are becoming more essential every day. 

Despite Trump’s claim that we have “turned the corner” on this virus, we are actually moving into another crisis stage. There were 82,600 new cases on Friday, the highest since the pandemic began. More than 1,000 Americans die from this disease every day. Hospitals in 38 states are at capacity or near-capacity levels. Yet, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the virus could be brought under control in two months if everyone wore a mask. Between now and February, universal masking, according to another expert, could save at least 100,000 lives.

But there’s this liberty thing.  A quick sampling of GOP governors:  

Greg Abbott of Texas: “Requiring everyone to wear masks is an infringement on liberty.”  (Texas liberty fun fact: You can be fined for selling Limburger cheese on Sunday.)

Ron DeSantis of Florida: “(Masks are) a matter of personal liberty.” (Florida liberty fun fact: Women who fall asleep under a beauty salon hairdryer are subject to fines.)

Brian Kemp of Georgia, “(Masks) must be a personal choice, not a requirement that infringes on people’s liberty.” (Georgia liberty fun fact: It’s a crime to give away goldfish as a prize in BINGO games.)

Doug Burgam of North Dakota: “(Mandatory masks) are not a job for government because people have liberty.”  (North Dakota liberty fun fact: In Fargo, you can be arrested for wearing a hat while dancing.)

All of these red states have a plethora of laws regulating human behavior in order to protect the health and safety of its citizens.  Drivers there stop at red lights and obey speed limits, not out of personal responsibility, but because they don’t want to be fined. Stroll through their liberty-loving parks and you will see signs mandating “No Bicycling; No Rollerblading, No Skateboarding; No Loitering.” 

Yet, in the name of liberty, they will not post a mandatory mask sign that says “No Public Release of Potentially Infected Spittle.”  Encouraging the spread of a deadly virus for reasons of political expediency is bad enough. But falsely and shamelessly cloaking it in the garb of a noble-sounding political philosophy is about as low as you can get.  

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote a piece this week under the heading of “How Many Americans Will Ayn Rand Kill?”  With tongue planted at least partially in cheek, Krugman suggested that this anti-mask liberty nonsense was derivative of the late conservative philosopher who advocated that selfishness was a virtue.  

There has been speculation that Trump is an Ayn Rand fan.  After all, she did create this sentence:  “Man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others.” It is hard to imagine The Donald as a Randian scholar – or any type of scholar, for that matter.  My guess is that someone might have highlighted that sentence and read it to him. Probably during a Fox News commercial. 

As we have learned these past five years, nothing with Trump is ever remotely profound, deep or even thought-out. This, I believe, was the impetus for mask liberty:  He needed optics to match his lie about the pandemic petering out. He got the word out to those GOP governors who think they need his blessing.  And they used the liberty gambit because . . .well, because they didn’t have anything else to justify their position in the middle of a punishing pandemic. 

Sadly, this approach has falsely and dangerously ignited a violent righteousness in whacked out and frequently armed ruffians who delight in defying mandatory mask rules at grocery stores, restaurants and other public places. There have been countless examples of low-wage workers shot or otherwise assaulted by these thugs asserting their Trumpian-blessed liberty (here, here and here).

The fact of the matter is that the concept of government imposing restrictions on citizens for the public good has been a pillar of democratic governance for more than 200 years.  Nineteenth century English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, an advocate of individual freedom, once wrote, “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”  The U.S. Supreme Court, in a long line of mandatory vaccine cases, has upheld the same principle. 

Patrick Henry would have shuddered at the notion that liberty means allowing people to freely disperse their droplets during a deadly pandemic.  Yet, for those unmasked Trumpian warriors who insist on baring their full faces in every crowd, a simple conjunctive change in Henry’s memorable line would cover them.  It is this:

Give me liberty, or and give me death.  

KING DONALD AND COVID: WHERE IS SHAKESPEARE WHEN WE NEED HIM?

Out there in some afterlife, is a very frustrated William Shakespeare begging for a chance to write and produce a play based on America’s 2020 presidential election. Think of it: King Donald The Maskless, shaping an entire campaign around the denial of a plague, and then being stricken by it just as voting begins. 

Americans aren’t used to presidential elections with this kind of high drama and daring plot twists.  We’re much more accustomed to Al Gore and his demand to put “Social Security in a lock box,” or George H.W. Bush’s cry of “Read my lips: No new taxes,” or, Barack Obama’s “Change we can believe in.”  

It’s hard for us to wrap our weary heads around such a diabolical storyline: An accidental and bombastic king is so taken with himself that he repeatedly tells the citizenry to ignore talk of a disease infecting millions and killing hundreds of thousands. He says it will all go away soon.  And then the virus suddenly swoops in and attaches itself to him, capturing not only his body but also his fate. 

Oh, what the Bard could have done with this material!  He was the master of plot twists and iconic irony.  In Henry V, for example, Shakespeare had the King of France send a crate of tennis balls to the young Henry as he assumed England’s throne. The gift was intended to mock him for his carefree, pleasure-seeking ways. Unamused, Henry upped his game from tennis balls to cannonballs, with which the military used to invade France in an epic battle. To top it off, Henry married the French princess, his adversary’s daughter.  

In The Winter’s Tale, Antigonus, a Macedonian king, was traveling with his infant daughter. He tells the audience that a vision appeared to him in a dream and warned him that he would never see his home or his wife again. Antigonus laid his daughter down in the woods.  As he walked away, a bear attacked and killed him. Soon a shepherd and his son, a clown, found the abandoned baby. They vowed to raise the child themselves.  Really.

In Shakespeare’s storytelling, events follow a karmic pattern of actions begetting reactions, of causes and effects colliding on a sometimes slippery slope.  The playwright would have been fascinated with the Donald Trump character, a rude, profane elite wannabe, born to aristocratic, emotionally sterile parents. 

Think about it.  Here’s this 74-year-old orange-tinted man-child, the most unpresidential of presidents, the product of an election he was not supposed to win.  All he really wanted was to pump up his brand a bit so he could sell more condos, steaks, bottled water and neckties. He billed himself as a business genius who, alone, would solve all of our problems.  In truth, he was deep in debt and badly needed to hawk more stuff.  He saw a presidential campaign as a road to two riches that had always eluded him: financial stability and an adoring fan base. 

As we work our way through the final act of this tragedy, King Donald’s election opponent is technically Joe Biden.  But the King’s real foe is COVID-19.  Right now, the battle between the two of them is both actual and metaphorical.  

Although Trump knew since February how lethal this virus is, he kept telling his kingdom that it was nothing to worry about. Even as the pandemic shook every corner and cranny of this country, leaving behind a terrorized trail of loss and raw fear, the president, rather than managing the disaster, continually minimized the virus. Just a week ago, with 7 million Americans infected and more than 200,000 dead,  King Donald insisted that this disease “affects virtually nobody.”

And then, just a few days later, he got it.  The “harmless” virus invaded Trump’s body.  It also infected a growing list of GOP office holders and staff who had earlier gathered – maskless  – in a Rose Garden celebration of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.  Right now, there is nothing in this world that affects Donald Trump’s future more than this novel coronavirus.

Shakespeare’s fascination with this development would hold regardless of the outcome of Trump’s disease. The conflict is not one of life and death. Instead, it’s about a powerful ruler’s battle between truth and deceit, between science and the will of a fool. 

This president constructs his own reality to please himself and his loyal fans.  He insisted Hilary Clinton was a crook, and his fans chanted “lock her up.”  He claimed caravans of violent migrants were invading our border, and his fans grabbed their guns and headed south. He says the Democrats have rigged the election against him, and the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist, white supremacist group, is “standing by.”

That Donald Trump has desecrated all notions of truth is no longer in dispute.  According to the Washington Post, his current average is 23 falsehoods a day.  The culture of deceit in this White House is so deep that the first 48 hours after Trump was hospitalized were dominated by false and conflicting reports on his condition. Not only that, but there has been widespread speculation on the left that Trump is lying about having COVID in an attempt to move his poll numbers.  What else could we expect from a fact-free administration?

Science, however, does not lie.  For all of the 7.6 million Americans infected with this virus, including the 210,000 who died, there are tens of millions more – family members, friends and neighbors – who know first-hand how real and how devastating this disease in.  They also know how wrong Trump was when he tweeted from his hospital bed: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”  In this bizarre election drama, those are merely sad, close-to-final lines of a sick man and a failing candidate.

What would Shakespeare think of it all?  Well, he gave us a hint in the second act of Measure For Measure:

“. . . proud man, dressed in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he’s most assured, his glassy essence, like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep.”

TRUMP & COVID ARE THE KILLERS OF NORMALCY

Riddle me this: What’s the difference between Donald Trump and the novel coronavirus? Other than the fact that the virus doesn’t lie, discriminate or emit offensive tweets, not much. 

If you were expecting a pithy one-liner, my sincere apologies. Alas, there is nothing funny about the destructive duality of Trump and this pandemic.  Together, they are responsible for the most powerful and tenacious one-two punch ever leveled against our norms, values and way of life. 

Not that long ago, most of us were living relatively stable lives. Sure, we had our problems: racism, misogyny, income inequality, climate change, among many others. We dealt with those matters mostly through elections, by voting for folks who share our values.  Meanwhile, kids went to school and parents went to work. Weekends were for shopping, barbecuing and a movie. Summers were for vacation trips, crowded beaches, fairs and festivals.  Despite our periodic frustrations with the government, we believed that our founders endowed us with a democracy inherently respectful of our rights, liberty and humanity.

Then along came Trump and the killer virus he tried to cover up.  Suddenly, our relatively ordered lives, along with the norms and traditions that held us together, are nowhere to be found.  Instead, we are on edge and out of sorts.  Life seems upside down and inside out. Stuff we used to count on and take for granted has vanished.  It feels like we are bobbing in a psychic sea of anomie and entropy, struggling to keep our heads above water. 

Sociologists tell us that norms are essential to maintaining social order (here, here and here). They take the randomness out of everyday life by instilling in us a sense of predictability. Norms mean we don’t grab an item out of another customer’s grocery cart; we knock or ring a doorbell before entering someone’s  house; and although we may not agree with our president’s politics, we assume he (and eventually “she”?) will protect us and our country from harm.

To be sure, norms change periodically as they adapt to evolving culture and technology. Think gay marriage, #metoo, not buying Twitter followers. For the most part, norm modifications gradually grow into acceptance. The problem comes when huge chunks of our normative lives are suddenly upended, leaving us without a trace of social equilibrium. 

This is happening to us on two fronts. First, our president is obliterating every norm and symbol of our democracy, turning America from a beacon of hope into an unrecognizable cauldron of chaos and despair.  Secondly, our own lives have been diminished and fractured by the contents of that very cauldron.

The crisis has been building for years.  We probably should have seen it coming when we elected a man who boasted about sexually assaulting women, and labeled Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. Although we missed those signals, Trump handed us a gem of a clue when he had babies snatched from their mothers’ arms and put into cages on our southern border.  Even then, as abhorrent as that behavior was, it was hard to imagine the normative evisceration that lay ahead.

Yet, day in and day out, this 45th president shreds one touchstone of decency after another. He traffics in racist putdowns. He affirms white supremacists. He threatens to jail political opponents. He lies constantly. He solicits foreign leaders to tamper with our elections. He hurls words like “dumb, stupid, terrible and dishonest” at those who disagree with him. The list is endless.  Donald Trump has managed to discard every standard of presidential behavior that our country holds dear.

Like an addict falling deeper and deeper into the abyss of the bizarre and aberrant, this president’s decline is rapidly accelerating.  More norms fall every day.  We just learned from The Atlantic that the commander in chief refers to dead and wounded soldiers as “suckers” and “losers.”  Thanks to journalist Bob Woodward, we now know that Trump deliberately lied to the American people when he said the novel coronavirus was nothing to worry about. He knew its lethality and did nothing to stop it.

There is so much more. He is:

  • Supporting white supremacist and conspiracy theory groups.
  • Encouraging armed right wing militias to take on Black Lives Matter protests. 
  • Using the Justice Department to defend him in a rape suit.
  • Pressuring security analysts to doctor their reports to protect his political position.

The cumulative weight of all this norm-busting behavior not only adds to the anxiety of most Americans, it leaves us with the inescapable apprehension that our president will stop at nothing in serving his interests, regardless of the damage inflicted on the rest of us.

More directly, we feel the angst and pain from the normative destruction in our own lives.  The pandemic, of course, would have torpedoed many of our daily norms, even under the best of leadership.  But we had the worst.  As a result, we’ve spent the past six months fighting over masks, social distancing, covid testing, school closings and Clorox injections. Our ultimate escape – a vaccine – is now in peril because of the fear that our president will push through a snake oil remedy just in time for the election.

As the number of cases and deaths continue to mount, much of our lives remain on hold. The rituals that connected us and filled life with meaning and richness now live only in our memories. We avoid family gatherings. We don’t hug anymore. We wait to bury the dead, and then limit the number who can attend a funeral. We avoid stores, and burden minimum wage workers to get us our supplies. We don’t look forward to a lot because we have no idea when this nightmare will end.  

Although this dystopian saga has depleted our supply of norms, it has been rich in the production of ironies, the biggest of which is this:  Donald J. Trump entered our lives by promising to Make America Great Again. He damn near destroyed it. 

Now comes Joe Biden, our only shot at – in the words of Langston Hughes – “Making America, America again.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, AMERICA! THE WORLD WEEPS FOR THEE

Donald Trump rode into the White House on his high horse of protecting white America from the dreaded Other. He vowed to slay the dragons of otherness: Mexican rapists and drug dealers; black and brown lowlife losers from shithole countries; and, of course, his imaginary caravans of violent gang members invading our southern border.  

As the curtain rises on Act Three of this Shakespearean-like tragedy, King Donald is encountering an abrupt plot reversal.  After nearly four years of trying to remake America in his own white nationalist image, the King has come face-to-face with the real dreaded Other.  

And it is us. 

The world, it turns out, has taken a good, long look at America in this troubled summer of our discontent, and found it to be . . . well, a real shithole.  

Trump was counting on his hosting of a summit of G7 world leaders in June as a symbol of what he branded as “transitioning back to greatness.” The conference, in his mind, would mean that those nasty little blips of a pandemic and demands for racial justice were yesterday’s fake news, and that he had moved on to greater missions, like leading on the world’s stage.  German chancellor Angela Merkel, however, rained on Trump’s transitioning parade by calling the U.S. gathering a health risk in light of our country’s unbent coronavirus curve. Other G7 players agreed and the conference was called off.

It turns out that the G7 rebuff was a mere prelude, an appetizer if you will, in a nasty, karmic feast of crow laid upon Trump’s table for his dining pleasure.  As of Wednesday, American travelers are prohibited from entering the European Union.  This will go down in the annals of international diplomacy as an elegant act of the pot calling the kettle orange (orange, of course, being the new black). 

Trump thinks he invented travel bans. He spent the first months of his presidency barring Muslims from entering the country.  He’s still trying to build a wall to keep the Mexicans at bay. His only aggressive pandemic moves involved travel bans, first against China, then Europe. 

To this president, the coronavirus was just another vile foreigner to be kept forever offshore. The disease, of course, was deeply into globalization.  By the time Trump boarded up the country’s entry portals, the virus had already taken up residence in the homeland, quickly spreading to millions, and killing tens of thousands.  

Europe now has a handle on the pandemic, unlike America where COVID runs rampant while Trump runs for cover. Based on the metrics of the past two weeks, E.U. countries as a bloc have slowed their new infections to 16 per 100,000 people. For the same period, the U.S. stands at 122 new cases per 100,000 people, a ratio that that grows exponentially by the day.  Who can blame them from treating us as the highly unmasked, infection-prone fools that we are?

Yet, this startling new phenomenon of the world seeing America as the ugly other, is by no means limited to the coronavirus. We have been steadily losing value, prestige and power as a country since Donald Trump took office.  He has belittled NATO and military alliances in Asia. He pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accord and tore up the Iran nuclear deal. He took the U.S. out of the World Health Organization in the middle of the worst pandemic in 100 years.  He has insulted virtually every foreign leader who’s not a ruthless dictator.  

But it has gotten so much worse in the past few weeks.  Just as heads the world over were shaking at Trump’s utter failure to lead on virus mitigation, a Minneapolis police officer pressed his white knee into George Floyd’s black neck for nearly nine minutes, killing him and setting off a series of Black Lives Matter protests throughout the world.   Nothing has been the same since.

Trump threatened to call out the military and have protesters shot.  He had mostly peaceful protesters in front of the White House tear gassed and sprayed with rubber bullets so the president could walk to a nearby church for a photo op.  He retweeted a video of a man shouting “white power” slogans.  In another tweet, he sent images of black-on-white assaults and asked why white people weren’t protesting. 

And the international community, our longtime allies, responded with a stunning sense of shock, bordering on disbelief.  The Guardian reported that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, paused for 21 seconds after being asked to comment on his country’s southern neighbor.  The silence was broken with these words: “We all watch in horror and consternation at what is going on in the United States. It is time to pull people together.”

E.U. leaders called out the Trump administration’s “abuse of power” and racism.  The Spanish prime minister expressed solidarity with the demonstrators and concern for America’s growing authoritarianism.  Another European official told a reporter that recent U.S. developments have left most political figures on his continent “shocked, appalled, and scared. . . they are locked in a Trump-induced coma.”

The world has long been fascinated with America. George Floyd’s death triggered massive protests all over the globe in large part because of that fascination, that connection people of all countries have with the U.S.  Here’s what former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt told The Atlantic: “Normally, when something happens – a war, an earthquake – everybody waits to see what the Americans are doing . . . and they calibrate their own response based on that.”

That protocol is no longer operative.  No country in its right mind is copying us today. As New York Times opinion columnist Thomas Friedman wrote the other day, “We’re not leading. We’re not following. We’re lost.”

Sure, we still have the expertise, the world’s best universities and the most innovative companies. Our country has produced more Nobel prize winners, and has more organizations devoted to social justice than any other. But those riches, that helped mold what is best about America, lie dormant now because we have a president who rejects both science and justice.

Donald Trump is the personification of Green Day’s American Idiot, a cartoon character who sputters aphorisms about America First and a return to greatness.  He is a deeply broken man who has turned our country into the dreaded and diabolical Other.

TALE OF TWO DISASTERS: THE VIRUS AND TRUMP’S WAR AGAINST IT

As the superman of divisive politics, Donald Trump is faster than a seething bullet point. He emits more steam than a powerful locomotive, and is able to leap over truth, justice and science in a single bound. 

The good news?  COVID-19 may well be his kryptonite. The man who wormed his way into the White House on the premise that “I alone” can solve America’s problems, has choked badly and publicly at the pandemic’s every turn.  

Up until now, the singular distinction of this misbegotten 45th presidency has been Trump’s Houdini-like escape work in separating himself from the shackles of his many vile, dastardly deeds.  He grabbed pussies, caged children, praised neo-Nazis, paid hush money, sought election interference, told endless lies. With each repugnant move, we waited for him to fall, as did mere mortals before him for acts far more benign. Yet, he not only carried on, he became more brazen in his odiousness.

Then came the novel coronavirus, radically and permanently altering the terrain and architecture of our lives. Everything changed. The rhythms of our days. The sleep quality of our nights. Our thoughts, emotions, plans, uncertainties.   Sometime between early and late March, life was scrambled, turned on its head and, for far too many people, ended.   

The uniqueness of this fragile and perplexing moment is that we are all experiencing the adversity together in, as the cliché goes, real time. To be sure, our pain levels vary depending on circumstance. Yet we share the agonizing sense of loss, of grief, whether over a COVID death, job loss, separation from those we love, decimated retirement accounts or the inability to envision better days ahead. 

Against that backdrop, Donald Trump trotted out his old theatrical, make-it-up-as-you-go routine designed to cast himself in the best possible light. The virus, he said, was no big deal and would soon disappear. As infections increased exponentially, he changed character and became our “war-time president,” pledging to eradicate the enemy.  As the death rate surpassed 1,000 a day and the economy began to tank, he waved the white flag and said it was time for the country to get back to business.  

There have been dozens of role changes since then. One day he was the all-powerful Oz who would tell the governors what to do. The next day, it was all up to the governors, with Trump blasting them on Twitter if he didn’t like what they did. He even managed to encourage and embrace protesters fighting social distancing guidelines issued by his own administration.  Then came his death-defying Mr. Science act with Clorox Bleach, and pill-popping an anti-malarial drug the FDA says can result in death. 

The fact that The Donald was acting erratically and doing dumb stuff wasn’t new. His schtick hasn’t changed in years. What changed was us, his audience.  Most of us had acquired a pre-COVID immunity to his verbal regurgitations. Sure, he told us Mexico would pay for the wall and that his call to the Ukrainian president was perfect. We might roll our eyes and create a meme, but we didn’t lose sleep over it.  

We are now in a whole new ballgame, the worst crisis in a century. We’re holed up at home while this plague ravages the country. For the first time in more than three years, many of us looked at this president through the lens of neither the resistance nor MAGA. We simply wanted him to lead us out of this mess.  Instead, he failed miserably, day in and day out, on national television, where his ratings were high but his leadership nonexistent.  

As the president performed in his daily televised briefings, these were the stats weighing on his audience:   COVID deaths, nearly 100,000; infections, 1.6 million; jobs lost, 38.6 million; families with young children that don’t have enough to eat, 40 percent; increase in cases of serious mental illness since start of pandemic, 300 percent. 

But hark, comes now President Donald John Trump to address the American people on the crisis that has paralyzed our lives.  He looks directly into the Klieg lights and pauses a bit for effect before uttering his momentous declaration:  “We have met the moment, and we prevailed.” 

PREVAILED! Really? Never in the history of the English language has a word been so tortured, so drained of meaning.  Our country is overcome with massive deaths, infections, unemployment and hunger. And this guy takes a victory lap.  Sure, Trump and truth have had a difficult relationship. He said Barack Obama’s birth certificate was a fraud, that Meryl Streep is over-rated and that his IQ is one of the highest. We’ve grown accustomed to his lies.  But this is different. 

We are all feeling the pain of this pandemic. Trump’s claim that he has “prevailed” over it, is a profane rejection of our experience. So is his campaign’s rant about the virus being a political ploy to make him look bad.  This president, based on recent polling (here, here and here), has made himself look bad. About 75 percent of us remain vigilant about social distancing and hold tight to our anxiety over falling victim to this disease. Add to that the fact that Trump’s approval ratings have reached new lows and that Joe Biden is out-polling him. There is every reason to believe that most Americans know full well that the only thing this president has prevailed over is his total diminishment and failure as a leader. 

It would be foolish, of course, to count Trump out for reelection.  We know from 2016 that he is a master of grievance politics, adroit at igniting the passions of those intent on clinging to the unsung glory of white male privilege. 

Still, his cataclysm in dealing with this pandemic leaves us with hope. Some of his softer votes four years ago came from folks who were fed up with both political parties and took a chance on Trump because of his aura of a rich business leader; a guy who could get things done.  That illusion has now been laid bare.  While tens of thousands died, while millions lost their jobs, while families went hungry, Donald Trump worked desperately to protect only himself. The I-alone-can-fix-it guy completely blew it. 

In order to turn the corner on our dual disaster, we need two things in 2021:  a vaccine and a new president.

SEARCHING FOR HOPE IN A PANDEMIC

I was drunk through most of the 1970s. As I twelve-stepped my way into sobriety 40 years ago, I severed all ties with pessimism.  Granted, there wasn’t much about the ‘70s to get all giddy and gaga about, unless you really adored leisure suits. My negativity and cynicism mixed much better with a beer and a bump than it did with AA meetings and bad coffee. The lesson learned was that we can’t always control the events in our lives, but we can chose how to react to them.  So I’ve been a registered optimist since 1980 and, as a result, a lot happier.  

These past couple of months, however, have posed the single largest challenge to that world view since my conversion to hopefulness. With apologies to Thomas Paine, these are the times that try the optimist’s soul. 

How do you find even a thin ray of light in the darkness of our new existence? The soaring numbers of coronavirus infections and deaths are baked into the daily metrics of our lives, like the pollen count and chances of measurable precipitation. More than 26 million American jobs have been lost. Economists predict that 21 million of us will be pulled into poverty.  Food bank waiting lines stretch for miles throughout the country.  Not exactly the kind of stuff that lends itself to an optimistic spin.

The basic contours of any crisis are pollenated with an abundance of pessimism.  Yet, with effective, focused, purposeful leadership, we can optimistically and hopefully work our way out of the abyss. On a national level, however, those were not the cards we were dealt.  Instead, 2020 will forever be known as the confluence of two hideous events: the most deadly pandemic in a century, and the reign of our most unhinged and incompetent president ever.  

Donald Trump addresses the crisis in protracted daily news conferences.  I challenge you to find even the tiniest needle of genuine hope in his haystack of delusions, reversals, fabrications and other cognitive constipations he brings to the table.  The diabolical intersection between Trump and this pandemic was on full display Thursday when, on that single day, our country’s COVID-19 body count surpassed 50,000, and warnings rang out to ignore the president’s soliloquy on injecting bleach. 

It’s not just his crisis management incompetence that clouds any path to optimism. Trump failed miserably at what should have been his easiest task: pulling this fractured and wounded nation together, united – despite political differences – in the singular goal of working together to survive this virus.  History offers an abundance of precedence for that approach. For most of us, a threat to our survival outranks partisan and policy differences. Our humanity, in the broadest sense of the word, becomes our loadstar.  

Donald Trump, however, was born without a humanity gene. Not once has this president showed a modicum of empathy for those who lost their lives or their livelihoods in this pandemic.   The closest he comes to expressing grief is when he ruminates about the loss of an economy he thought would buy him reelection. 

It’s the same old story. Unable to pivot, Transactional Donald sticks with the schtick that brought him to the party: an unnatural enthrallment with himself, and intense grievances with everyone not wearing a MAGA hat.  Although the virus infects without regard to party affiliation, the national response is all tangled up in red and blue.   To mask or not to mask became a political litmus test as soon as Trump announced he wouldn’t wear one.

Given all that doom and gloom, you may be wondering whether I have abandoned my vow of optimism.  No, not even close.  The optimistic viewpoint is not a snapshot in time. It’s not looking at a train wreck and calling it “fantastic,” (as Trump might if he thought it would get him votes).  That’s being delusional, not optimistic. Optimism is being hopeful that the horror of now can eventually be converted into a better place.  No successful movement for change has ever been propelled by the hopelessness of pessimism. 

The most hopeful sign lies in the answer to this constantly asked question:  When will we get back to normal?  Never.  When normalcy left us, it did not buy a return ticket. It’s not coming back. And that is very good news.  What is happening to us right now is so deep and pervasive that it will change us in profound ways, and give us a unique opportunity to create a brand new normal. 

Those New Deal programs of the 1930s that lifted up millions of poor and working class Americans didn’t just serendipitously appear one day.  They evolved as the new normal from out of the ashes of the Great Depression, a disaster every bit as devastating and painful and game-changing as this pandemic.  Then, like now, the crisis dramatically identified the cracks, strictures and gaping holes in our body politic.  There was no going back to normal again.

Through the audacity of pain, this pandemic has drawn us a road map for change. Things like wealth redistribution, universal health insurance, paid sick and family leave for workers were mocked as “socialist tropes” by many on the right just months ago. Yet, the multiple trillion dollar relief bills passed by Congress recently made strides in all of those directions. Even some Republicans are pushing the Trump administration to confront the pandemic’s disparate impact on people of color and to address racial disparities in health care. As we eventually attempt a reset on normal, it’s hard not to see momentum on those issues continuing.  

There is something else to be guardedly hopeful about.  For the first time in his presidency, Trump is struggling – really struggling – to shake off his brazen ineptness and idiotic stumbles. This is decidedly not normal.  This is the man who boasted about sexually assaulting women. He put children in cages. He colluded with Russia. He obstructed justice. He tried to force foreign countries to help him win reelection. He was even impeached, and then acquitted.  Through it all, his approval ratings, although low, were relatively constant.  Recent polling shows that the president is rapidly losing the public’s confidence in handling the pandemic.  

Just think about that: The guy who says he could get by shooting someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue is politically done in by a virus he said would be gone by April.  That’s the meaning of – that’s the beauty of – optimism. 

THE AUDACITY OF AUTHENTICITY WITHOUT VIRTUE

What do you call a president who, in the middle of a deadly pandemic, repeatedly spews falsehoods, insults political opponents and praises himself?  A-U-T-H-E-N-T-I-C. You call him authentic.

After all, the 2016 presidential election was all about authenticity (here, here and here). The pundits and the pollsters kept telling us that, for all of his failings, Donald Trump was seen by voters as being authentic. The Donald won the election, the story line went, because he was real and Hillary Clinton was fake.  This bizarre binary standard for evaluating politicians extended into 2020. Reams have been written about potential Democratic presidential candidates and their authenticity or lack thereof. 

Why are we treating authenticity – irrespective of the content of a person’s character – as a virtue?  Clearly, Trump is no phony. He’s the real deal. But the deal is terrible. He is authentically bad, immoral and indifferent to the needs of others. Why is that kind of authenticity virtuous? How did we get here?

Well, don’t blame Aristotle. The architecture he provided for ethical systems that lasted centuries revolved around such virtues as courage, honor, temperance, truthfulness, justice and friendship. Authenticity did not make his list. In fact, Aristotle went in the opposite direction, advising us to emulate others who have these virtues until they become habitual with us. 

Then, in the 18th century, a Genevan philosopher named Jean-Jacques Rousseau, advocated an alternative view, one in which authenticity – being true to one’s self – sits atop his ethical hierarchy. Rousseau, according to academicians who studied him, saw pure, unvarnished authenticity as the most important source of happiness and psychological coherence. He believed that people are naturally good and that their authentic selves cannot harm others since “their self-love is moderated by concern for others.”   Rousseau developed this school of thought roughly 300 years before Donald Trump roamed the earth.

The late social critic and academic Christopher Lasch was, however, very aware of the self-absorbed Trumpian archetype. More than 40 years ago, he wrote a book called The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. In it, Lasch noted the similarities between Narcissistic Personality Disorder and authenticity. He wrote that narcissism and authenticity are both characterized by “. . . deficient empathetic skills, self-indulgence and self-absorbed behavior.” In other words:  An authentic narcissist is still a narcissist. And wholly without virtue.

The political fascination with authenticity did not begin with Trump. It exploded with him and, if we are lucky, it will end with him. But this bizarre phenomenon has been building for some time. Think back to the Bush v. Gore election in 2000.  The rap on Gore was that he was too stiff and had a propensity to overinflate his resume. Bush, despite – or maybe because of – an  antipathy toward good syntax, struck people as more real, the kind of guy you’d like to have a beer with.  

This desire for authenticity in leadership is certainly understandable. Politicians have long been seen as crafty, cagey characters who say one thing and do another, who appear overly buttoned down and tightly scripted.  Add to those perceptions the current environment of rampant distrust and disgust with our government and political systems, and you can begin to see the attraction of someone who simultaneously wants to trash the status quo and appears to be genuinely authentic.  

Like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.  Yes, they are lightyears apart in so many ways.  Yet their appeal has embraced the same two elements: being authentic and promising to blow the system up.  Sanders’ brand of authenticity is considerably different than Trump’s.  Bernie is not a narcissist.  But his fans constantly boast about how their candidate hasn’t changed in 40 years.  Indeed, there is a lot of truth to that.  Sanders has forever believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat, the evil of capitalism and value of class warfare.  

In many ways, Sanders’ authenticity is more pure and moral than Trump’s.  In the finest Rousseauian tradition, Bernie is stridently faithful to his principles. They reflect his true self and he is not of a mind to modify them in order to enlarge his base.  Therein lies a serious problem for a presidential candidate. His allegiance to an ideology makes him authentic, endears him to his followers and advances his movement. But given his narrow appeal to a minority of the electorate, and the absence of the slightest rhetorical nod to wanting to be “president for all Americans”, he lacks the votes to win.  To Bernie, being true to himself is more important than winning.

That is decidedly not the case for Donald Trump.  To him, it’s all about winning. He has no ideology or core beliefs. His positions on . . . well, on everything, change with the wind, depending on what he thinks will help him win.  He spent the first three weeks of the coronavirus crisis insisting it was a hoax that would soon go away. Then he became a “wartime president”, leading the battle against the dreaded enemy virus. As cases started doubling every few days, as temporary morgues were built near hospitals, he talked about a quick return to normal. On Sunday, responding to a bipartisan outcry, he backed away from abruptly ending the war, saying, “Nothing would be worse than declaring victory before the victory is won.”

 All of these dramatically disparate moves were about only one thing: Trump’s perception of what would best help him win reelection.  That’s authenticity. That’s being true to his narcissistic self. 

It has been said that this life-and-death crisis we are going through will forever change us. Let us hope that one of those changes is a massive rejection of the notion that we should pick our leaders on the basis of unbridled authenticity, regardless of how obnoxious and odious a candidate’s behavior may be.  

Aristotle had it right. Virtue doesn’t lie in being true to whatever kind of self we may have. Virtue is about qualities like courage, honor, honesty and justice that provide a better life for all of us.  Authenticity without virtue is no more than a fool looking into a mirror.

THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING BUT TRUMP REMAINS THE MASTER OF HIS OWN CHAOS

The Russians are supposedly working hard to tamper with our elections. Their goal, according to intelligence agencies, is to sow confusion and disarray.  How utterly redundant of them. Don’t they realize their guy Trump has already infused our democracy with perfect chaos?   Here in the fourth year of our Kafkaesque nightmare, there is zero demand for imported havoc. 

This bizarre dichotomy of home grown versus off-shored chaos reached a daunting and ironic crescendo recently when Trump fired his national intelligence director for, in effect, doing his job. The agency reported that Russia was up to its old election interference tricks in an effort to confuse Americans by blurring fact from fiction and eroding their confidence in democratic institutions.  The Donald, of course, has always guarded fact blurring and confidence erosion as part of his exclusive jurisdiction.  

For that reason, and because his ego enters apoplexy at the mere suggestion that he can’t get elected without Russia’s help, Trump stirred the chaos pot by firing the intelligence director over the detection of Russian election interference designed to create chaos.  Somewhere in that mess is a delicious irony. And a question: Why knock yourself out, Russia, when your candidate is doing such a superb job of turning the country into a cauldron of confusion and obfuscation all by himself?

Intelligence experts say Russia’s main weapons in its disinformation war against us are phony news items and social media messages aimed at attacking many of Trump’s opponents and turning American voters against each other.  Really?  That’s it?  The South Carolina Democratic debate – back when there were seven candidates – resembled an inelegantly choreographed fight scene from West Side Story. As far as social media attacks go, nothing spewing from a Russian bot can be more mean or vitriolic than the daily political discourse among real-life friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter.  And we have somehow survived all that. So far.

What may be far less survivable, however, is the tsunami of chaos that Donald J. Trump creates – and basks in – on a daily basis.  During just the past week, for example, our president managed to produce a level of mass confusion that had to be the envy of every Russian troll farm. During our national panic attack over the $400-a-bottle-Purell-coronavirus, Trump, rather than offering clear and accurate guidance, spouted the obfuscatory gibberish of a Veg-O-Matic salesman.

Trump said the disease will soon disappear, “like a miracle,” probably in April when the weather is warmer.  Government health experts said the epidemic is likely to be bad and long.

Trump told a campaign rally in North Carolina that the coronavirus is a plot by Democrats to make him look bad. “This is their new hoax,” he said.  Government health experts said this is a “very serious virus” and Americans must prepare to deal with it.

Trump said the virus is no more lethal than the flu and minimized it through branding, calling it the “corona flu”.  Government health experts said the coronavirus is far more dangerous than the flu.

Trump said tests for the virus are available for anyone who wants one.  Government health experts said there is a serious shortage of tests.

Trump said a coronavirus vaccine will be available any day now. Government health experts said it will take more than a year to develop a vaccine.

In other words, who needs Russian subterfuge to stir chaos and panic in our body politic?  Trump has this stuff down pat. Sure, Russia is proficient at creating fake websites and social media posts to deviously spread false information on their political opponents.  But Trump has also mastered this niche of deception.  Check out this phony Joe Biden site. At first glance, it looks real and official. Then come the pictures and videos of Biden touching, hugging and patting the shoulders of various women and young girls. It also features a collection of the former vice president’s more embarrassing gaffes and his less-than-popular Senate votes.  The site is the handiwork of one Patrick Mauldin, who produces video and digital content for Trump’s reelection campaign.

Trump himself sent out a “deep fake” video on Facebook and Twitter purporting to show House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripping up pages of the president’s State of the Union speech immediately following Trump’s commemoration of the accomplishments of various citizens.  Pelosi did, indeed, rip up the speech, but only at its conclusion, not at those poignant moments honoring audience members. The doctored video deliberately altered the context.

Intelligence reports say Russia is attempting to tamper with our actual voting process in hopes of delegitimizing the elections and keep some folks from voting.  Again, Trump and his party are way ahead of their foreign counterparts.  The GOP leadership in Georgia has purged tens of thousands of voters, mostly people of color for such minor discrepancies as having a misplaced hyphen in a name.  In another Republican-governed state, Texas has closed 750 polling places since 2012, predominately in black and Latinx neighborhoods that typically vote Democratic.  One man waited seven hours to vote in last week’s Texas Democratic primary election. Many others left long lines without voting.  Research by University of Houston political science professors showed that people are less likely to vote if they have to travel further to cast their ballots.

In a recording obtained by the Associated Press, Justin Clark, a senior Trump campaign advisor, spoke candidly about his camp’s efforts to suppress likely Democrats from voting.  Here’s what he said: “Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places. Let’s start protecting our voters. We know where they are. . .Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.”

It is, of course, insidious and vile that a foreign adversary would invade the contours of our sovereign democratic elections in order to sow confusion and suppress voting.  Yet, based on all available evidence, the incumbent president and his party are far more effective at accomplishing those goals than their foreign allies. Obviously, that’s why Vladimir Putin wants him reelected. Nobody does chaos better than Donald Trump.