The Trump Virus

We are living in crisis. The coronavirus is causing the crisis of the century, like no other for the past hundred years: over 200,000 deaths worldwide, 59,000 in the US, nearly all within the past one month. That’s many more American deaths than in the Korean War, and soon will be more than in the Vietnam War. That’s more deaths than in any influenza season, except for 2017-2018 (approx. 61,000), and we’ll soon pass that number. The monthly death toll of automobile accidents is just over 3000, as is the number of people who die from guns.

Since April 7, we have averaged about 2000 deaths per day, making the virus the leading cause of death in the US. Covid-19 is causing almost one-third of daily deaths in the US at this moment.

All of those numbers are underestimates. Official totals of deaths due to the pandemic include deaths in hospitals, not usually people who died at home and not people who died of other causes, because they could not get to a hospital. Comparing “normal” deaths per month with actual deaths in March and April across the world shows tens of thousands of additional virus deaths. In Paris, more than twice as many people are dying each day as is usual, and New York City has four times the usual number of deaths.

There have been lots of comparisons between the total deaths from coronavirus and other causes, mostly in service to arguments that are designed to diminish anxiety about the virus. “Dr.” Phil McGraw said to Laura Ingraham on FOX News, “We have 45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 a year from swimming pools, but we don't shut the country down for that. But yet we're doing it for this? And the fall out is going to last for years because people's lives are being destroyed.” He criticized the current lockdown measures, claiming they may cause “more deaths across time than the actual virus will itself.” Actually there are less than 4000 deaths from drowning each year, and none of the causes he mentions are contagious. Phil McGraw holds a doctorate in clinical psychology, but he is not licensed to practice. His expertise is getting famous for giving general relationship advice, like Dear Abby.

Instead of paying any attention to people like Phil McGraw, celebrities with political axes to grind, listen to COVID disease experts, like the real Dr. Peter Tippett, an emergency room MD with a PhD in biochemistry. “I have also spent much of my professional life in the high-tech world helping people understand how risk, infection, and the growth of infection behaves.” He offers clear common-sense rules for protecting ourselves – why, when and where to wear masks. “Your nose reduces the risk of viral particles getting to your throat. A mask reduces the risk of the viral particles getting to your nose, and social distancing reduces the risk of them getting to your mask. Together, these countermeasures work very well.”

Crises are the most important test of a leader, because in these moments leadership can directly affect our lives. They bring out in much stronger relief the central beliefs and values, the skills, and the intelligence of the leader. Our President has been a colossal failure on each of these counts.

The hypocrisy of his public enablers was demonstrated most clearly by the reaction to his serious public suggestion that ultraviolet light or disinfectants might protect against coronavirus if somehow they could get inside the body. If you watch him say these things, you can see that he was not joking in any way. That was just stupid, from the man who repeatedly calls himself a genius. So stupid, that he had to deny he said it. Immediately people across the country characterized those comments as ridiculous and dangerous. The next morning White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said that the media, the enemy, had taken Trump’s words “out of context”. Trump gave a different excuse to reporters: “I was asking a sarcastic — and a very sarcastic question — to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside.” He denied that he was asking his medical experts to look into it: “No, no, no, no.” Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, dismissed the importance of Trump’s remarks, saying only two days later that it bothered her that the media kept bringing them up.

Ordinary people who believe anything Trump says, but wanted to take the precaution of checking what sounded like crazy advice, called state hotlines and poison control centers to ask whether this was safe. Yesterday, Trump said he takes no responsibility if people injured themselves by following his medical advice.

These facts have been reported across the country, but it’s worth thinking about what they reveal. Not that Trump says stupid things and then denies it – that we already knew many times over. But the interplay between Trump and his base was on display. Who would call up a poison control center to ask whether drinking Lysol is a good idea besides some benighted members of Trump’s “base”? Taking Trump seriously is dangerous for his most ardent fans. Yet he takes no responsibility for them not recognizing that he was being “sarcastic”. He has never cared if his actions imperil the people who wear MAGA hats. And they don’t seem to mind.

Mistrusting Trump is part of acting safely. Leonard Pitts just wrote that he will ignore the advice of Dr. Phil and Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, and Trump: “I will not die of stupid.” The trouble is that the stupidity of others might kill us.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

April 28, 2020

The Crystal Ball is Broken

What will next year be like? I used to think that everything depended on the November election. Aside from politics, my life would be much the same. My pension and Social Security would keep rolling in. My children would keep working as their little children slowly grew up. My town would remain unchanged, offering the same amusements and shopping and restaurants. My friends would still be there for me and me for them, whether we hugged or sent emails. The world would continue to deteriorate towards a climate crisis, but slowly, one species, one more storm or drought, one flood at a time.

I was not naive, but I was wrong. Everything will be different.

Well, not everything. Unless this catastrophe is even bigger than I can imagine, my retirement funds will remain the same. But there will be much less to spend them on. The restaurants we like, local family establishments, will be decimated. The one coffee shop in town may be gone, along with the one bookstore, the donut shop that isn’t Dunkin, and other family businesses that could not survive months without revenue. The national and international chains that offer the same processed foods, the same bland products, the same standardized greetings and sales, will take up even more of our economic space.

Our social contract might be broken. I mean the unspoken contract to just keep going and keep funneling money upwards between the very rich who make most of the financial decisions and the masses who barely get by. Who knows what that might mean? An uprising of the no-longer-getting-by, but in which direction? Towards stronger unions, higher minimum wages, better health care, a fairer tax system? Or more nationalism, more division, more demagoguery, more escape into guns and narrow religiosity and hate?

I don’t think that our current isolation will prove so attractive that everyone will continue to stay inside, reduce all communication to the virtual, fall deeper into the rabbit hole of the computer/smart phone/tablet. But the younger generations, already used to ignoring the world to stare at pixels, may become even more isolated from reality.

Will we be inspired by the selflessness of the first responders, newly online teachers, and other caregivers to value them more, with something more than 7 PM applause? Will we realize that buying new things to replace the nearly new things bought yesterday doesn’t improve anything but the bottom line of the people who are telling us every day that we need new things to make our lives better? Will we trust scientists and doctors and professors more and conmen and professional liars less?

Will we prepare ourselves more thoughtfully for the next crisis or the unfathomable climate disaster? Or just breathe a sign of relief that we made it through this one, and go back to listening to the loud-mouthed know-it-alls, whose confidence never dims, but whose stories change every day?

Will we demand a health care system that really tries to keep everyone healthy? Or go back to rationing health care by income, by race, and by geography, kept in place by a political system that rations power and votes the same way?

Will politicians still be able to harvest votes by repeating ad nauseum that America is the greatest country on earth, pointing to their flag pins, while we mourn all those people who died because America wasn’t even close to the best at dealing with a global crisis?

What will be the new normal?

America changed after the Great Depression into a better America, where government tried to alleviate widespread economic suffering with programs that still didn’t do enough, but that many people today say we should reject. America changed after the crises of inequality of the 1960s, with programs against inequality that those same people today say we should reject. The voices that are being raised and will be raised about inequality, unfairness, and oligarchy will be countered by those same voices who use the word “great” to mean “shut up”, who meet facts about suffering with hatred, who wave guns at people in distress. Who will win?

If some of this language seems strong, look at the news story on the FOX News website about the possibility that Stacy Abrams will be Joe Biden’s pick for vice president. The story itself is unremarkable, much like the reporting on other media websites. What is notable are the comments. Open racism, attention to her body, more racism. These are the people who rely on FOX and love Trump. Perhaps not representative of all of those people, but still a lot of people who feel confirmed in their ugly prejudices by FOX and Trump and the Republican Party.

A NY Times reporter interviewed 20 experts about the long-term effects of the pandemic, but his article is still short on clarity about what the future will look like. Only one thing is clear – recovery to “normal life” will take a long time, well beyond the end of 2020.

An effective vaccine would be the magic bullet to end the danger of further infection. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the long-time director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been functioning as Trump’s main medical advisor and explainer, has repeatedly said that a vaccine will take at least a year to 18 months. His job as Trump’s mouthpiece is to be optimistic: the Times article is gloomier: “All the experts familiar with vaccine production agreed that that timeline was optimistic.”  Dr. Harvey V. Fineberg, former president of the National Academy of Medicine, said, “We face a doleful future.”

Because of the mounting pressure to open up our shut-down society, it is likely that the virus will again spread in spots, leading again to shutdowns. We are likely to experience two years of openings and closings, unwarranted optimism and new peaks of death, accompanied by politically motivated arguments about what to do.

There are many hopeful predictions of permanent social, economic and political changes in the wake of this shock. More willingness to believe science, which could mean more willingness to tackle climate change. More attention to the economic inequalities which have led to very different death rates between black and white, rich and poor, which could mean more political will to attack those inequalities. The sudden overloading of our health care system might make universal health insurance more popular. Less pleasant are the possibilities that the psychological burdens of isolation on vulnerable families may lead to more domestic abuse, depression, and suicide.

An old Chinese saying goes something like this: “It’s better to be a dog in a peaceful time, than be a man in a chaotic period.” Neither dogs nor men can determine whether the times they live in are peaceful or chaotic. But we, men and women, can influence how we come out of this chaos.

I was wrong. It’s not about November. November will be merely a clue about the future of our country and our lives. As for what that future will be like, at the moment I haven’t a clue.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

April 21, 2020

Unhealthy Politics in Wisconsin

Last week’s election in Wisconsin has caused a national uproar. There were no absolutely crucial elections on the ballot. The Democratic primary between Biden and Sanders was an afterthought. There were only a few statewide races. Democratic Governor Tony Evers tried to postpone the election or mail absentee ballots to every voter. Because the Republican-dominated state legislature, state Supreme Court and US Supreme Court all insisted that elections be held on the scheduled date, hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin voters were forced to violate the statewide stay-at-home order to cast a ballot. In Milwaukee, hundreds of poll workers called in sick or refused to work, so only 5 of 180 voting sites were open. Masked voters waited in lines for hours. In a month, we’ll know the human toll of this democratic exercise. Far beyond the importance of the results, the competing visions of democracy provoke a question rarely asked in America: should we risk our lives to vote?

Wisconsin is a closely contested state. Trump won it by less than 23,000 votes in 2016, less than 1%. Democrats won statewide races in 2018 for Governor and Attorney General by 1%. Every vote matters.

The story of how the Wisconsin election was conducted is remarkably complicated and profoundly partisan. Wisconsin is one of the most gerrymandered states in the country. After the 2010 census, Republicans drew new legislative lines that guaranteed them political control. In 2018, Democratic candidates for the state legislature won 53% of the votes, but only one-third of the seats.

The discussions about this election actually began in 2018, right after Tony Evers ousted Scott Walker as Governor and the Democrats won other statewide victories. Looking far into the future, Wisconsin Republicans discussed separating the re-election of conservative state Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly from the Democratic primary election, because they feared large Democratic turnout would imperil his chances. Those discussions went nowhere, possibly because holding an additional statewide election would have cost millions of dollars.

Of the 11 states which had scheduled elections in April, all but Wisconsin postponed them or shifted to mailed absentee voting. The Republican legislature in Wisconsin was nevertheless planning to hold the election as scheduled. A week before the election day, Democrats challenged that plan in federal court, and suggested that the deadline for mail-in ballots be extended another week, because of the huge surge in absentee ballots. The federal judge agreed. Republicans appealed to the Supreme Court in Washington, whose conservative majority overturned that ruling hours before the election, leading to statewide confusion about exactly when mail-in ballots needed to be postmarked.

Thousands of potential voters never received absentee ballot because of backlogs in processing requests, thousands were unable to insure that their mailed ballots arrived in time, and thousands simply stayed away from in-person voting because of their fears of infection.

The results were announced yesterday, delayed by a court order that extended the deadline for returning absentee ballots. Democratic challenger Jill Karofsky won a resounding victory over Kelly 55% to 45%. In local elections across the state, progressive candidates and school funding referenda won victories.

The partisan composition of the Wisconsin Supreme Court will have significant consequences for future state elections. Republicans have sought to purge the registrations of 200,000 voters, mostly in Democratic regions of the state, because of possible confusion about their addresses. A circuit court in January ordered the purge to happen, but an appeals court blocked that order. The state Supreme Court deadlocked 3-3 on getting involved, but the issue will come up again.

Furthermore, the gerrymandered Republican legislature will have control over the drawing of new election maps after this year’s census. Democratic Governor Evers could veto gerrymandered maps. Then the conflict could be decided by the state Supreme Court.

The election of a state supreme court judge is only one small data point in the effort to predict what might happen in November across the nation. But it is the most recent evidence we have, and it might show something about the influence of the coronavirus pandemic on voting.

Of course, November is about Trump. Trump endorsed Kelly in January and again since then. On the day of the election, he claimed that his most recent tweeted endorsement the day before had caused the Democrats to panic and try to move the election. Just another silly lie from Trump.

This election falls into line with a host of statewide elections across the country since 2018, which show a rising tide of Democratic votes and failures of Trump endorsements. There are other local explanations for this particular result, as there are for every other recent election. But the data points are accumulating.

That’s a lot of words about one state election. Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Maybe. It has been hard to find any good news lately. Trump gets worse every day. The presidential election is 7 months away. So please excuse me for grasping at this straw.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

April 14, 2020