Bret Stephens has a long career as a conservative opinion writer, formerly at the Wall Street Journal and Jerusalem Post (as editor-in-chief) and currently at the NY Times. He's also a crackpot Zionist, a racist, a neo-con, a Climate Change denier, a Pulitzer winner and a prominent #NeverTrump Republicano. In yesterday's column, Donald Trump Is Our National Catastrophe, Stephens wrote about a class he taught about heart of political persuasion, using as examples of practitioners Abraham Lincoln, Pericles, Martin Luther King, George Orwell, Václav Havel, Winston Churchill and Señor Trumpanzee-- or at least the Twitter account of Señor T's. "We are, he wrote, "in the midst of an unprecedented national catastrophe. The catastrophe is not the pandemic, or an economic depression, or killer cops, or looted cities, or racial inequities. These are all too precedented. What’s unprecedented is that never before have we been led by a man who so completely inverts the spirit of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. With malice toward all; with charity for none: eight words that encapsulate everything this president is, does and stands for... [G]reat political writing aims to elevate. What, by contrast, does one learn by studying Trump’s utterances?"
The purpose of Trump’s presidency is to debase, first by debasing the currency of speech. It’s why he refuses to hire reasonably competent speechwriters to craft reasonably competent speeches. It’s why his communication team has been filled by people like Dan Scavino and Stephanie Grisham and Sarah Sanders.And it’s why Twitter is his preferred medium of communication. It is speech designed for provocations and put-downs; for making supporters feel smug; for making opponents seethe; for reducing national discourse to the level of grunts and counter-grunts.That’s a level that suits Trump because it’s the level at which he excels. Anyone who studies Trump’s tweets carefully must come away impressed by the way he has mastered the demagogic arts. He doesn’t lead his base, as most politicians do. He personifies it. He speaks to his followers as if he were them. He cultivates their resentments, demonizes their opponents, validates their hatreds. He glorifies himself so they may bask in the reflection.Whatever this has achieved for him, or them, it’s a calamity for us. At a moment when disease has left more than 100,000 American families bereft, we have a president incapable of expressing the nation’s heartbreak. At a moment of the most bitter racial grief since the 1960s, we have a president who has bankrupted the moral capital of the office he holds....Trump is responsible for the nation’s wounds. It’s that he is the reason some of those wounds have festered and why none of them can heal, at least for as long as he remains in office. Until we have a president who can say, as Lincoln did in his first inaugural, “We are not enemies, but friends”-- and be believed in the bargain-- our national agony will only grow worse.
And it isn't just Trump's words that are making literally everything worse. His dysfunctional, chaotic and incompetent, venal regime is a colossal failure. The nightmarish coronavirus pandemic is global and wasn't started by Trump. The fact that it is far worse in the U.S. than anywhere else on earth is the fault of Trump, his regime and his Republican Party lickspittles.I Can't Breathe by Nancy OhanianThis afternoon we crossed the two million confirmed cases mark in our country. It didn't have to be this way. Even as new case rates start to slow down in states that were hit hard early on-- New York, Washington, New Jersey, Michigan, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, other states-- particularly states with governors who emulate Trump, like Greg Abbott (Texas), Ron DeSantis (Florida), Brian Kemp (Georgia), Henry McMaster (South Carolina), Kim Reynolds (Iowa), Doug Ducey (Arizona), Pete Ricketts (Nebraska), Chris Sununu (New Hampshire), Mike Parson (Missouri)-- are watching their own cases numbers accelerate dangerously. States that we're part of the early first wave but where bad policy decisions are fueling severe outbreaks see rapidly growing cases per million today:
• Nebraska- 8,082 cases per million• Iowa- 6,867• South Dakota- 6,147• Virginia- 5,938• Mississippi- 5,803• Colorado- 4,862• Georgia- 4,888• New Mexico- 4,264• Alabama- 4,181• Tennessee- 3,863• New Hampshire- 3,691• North Dakota- 3,754• Utah- 3,764• Arizona- 3,694• California- 3,331• Nevada- 3,133• Arkansas- 3,123• Florida- 2,977• South Carolina- 2,775• Texas- 2,613• Missouri- 2,455
Friday, Guardian writer Michael Safi looked into what the contours of Wave II are likely to look like-- warning ominously that "the pandemic’s future will be decided by human action and several unanswered questions about the nature of the virus." Some countries see their curves flatten significantly-- Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Belgium, South Korea, Holland, Iceland, Switzerland, Israel, Japan, Austria, Denmark, Czechia, Australia, Finland, Cuba, New Zealand, Hong Kong-- while others, notably the U.S., India, the UK, Russia, Peru, Mexico, the Gulf states, Pakistan, south Africa and Egypt, are still going in the wrong direction. "The future shape of the pandemic," Safi wrote, will be decided both by human action, in the form of social distancing, testing and other traditional methods of disease control, but also several unanswered questions about the nature of the virus itself. Experts say there are several possibilities."
One is that the virus breaks out and is suppressed in peaks and troughs, until enough of the population is vaccinated or potentially develops immunity.Antibody tests in most places indicate that quarantine measures were very effective in slowing down the virus. Fewer than 10% of populations in France, Spain and Sweden have developed the antibodies that would be evidence of having caught the virus and, in theory, becoming immune, for at least a short time.But that also means the vast majority of populations remain susceptible.If societies reopen before the virus is sufficiently eradicated, it may be that this first wave does not completely go away, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University.“In the US, we are lifting lockdowns when there are still increasing numbers of cases in a bunch of states … We may just have peaks and valleys of transmission occurring over and over again as people’s behaviour changes,” she says.The scale of these peaks could be reduced by making changes such as wearing masks, using public transport in a staggered way and avoiding overcrowded social events-- which are increasingly being blamed for being “super-spreaders” of the first wave of the coronavirus.If outbreaks grow too large, some governments might choose to reimplement quarantines. “If we’re reopening and we start to see case numbers growing rapidly in a few weeks, we may see rolling lockdowns or shutdowns to try to control the virus in those areas,” Rasmussen says....Social distancing and robust testing-- or a lack of it-- will be critical in deciding the future of the pandemic. But its shape will also be influenced by factors outside our control.The first is whether we can become immune to the virus, and if so, how long that protection endures for.Sometimes immunity can last for decades. During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, public health authorities were initially confused as to why many older people seemed to be immune. Later, they discovered the virus was structurally similar to one that circulated during the 1918 pandemic. The immune systems of many older people had dealt with a similar virus 92 years ago.Resistance to some earlier discovered coronaviruses has been thought to fade within a year. If immunity to Sars-CoV-2 is not permanent, a report from Harvard epidemiologists says it is likely to enter into regular circulation, coming in annual or biennial waves or sporadic outbursts.The frequency of significant outbreaks may also be influenced by the weather. Most influenzas spread more easily in the winter because the virus is thought to prefer dry air over humidity, and because people in cold environments spend more time indoors and close to each other.Existing coronaviruses also follow seasonal patterns. If this coronavirus behaves in the same way-- and there is not yet strong evidence that it does-- we could see regular wintertime surges of Covid-19.But with so many people still apparently not immune to the virus, that summer relief may not arrive this year, says James Hay, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health.“The factor that most contributes towards transmission is how many people are still susceptible,” he says. “And with so many still susceptible, that’s going to swamp out any climate effect.”Significant mutations in the virus might also lead to a wave of new infections down the track. So far, scientists say that isn’t a huge concern.“Even though there are different genomes out there that have changes compared to each other … there’s no evidence any of those changes are in spots that are critical for the immune system to recognise,” Rasmussen says.But that doesn’t mean we won’t see a significant mutation later. “We’ve only known about this for six months, so it’s possible different strains could emerge in the future, because it does have a higher mutation rate,” she says. “But right now there’s no evidence that that’s happening.”For countries that are able to implement highly effective interventions such as testing and contact tracing, this first wave of coronavirus cases may be the last they experience, at least for some time.In New Zealand, which has managed to virtually eradicate the virus and installed robust systems to monitor new outbreaks, there may be no significant new outbreaks or future waves at all, says Nick Wilson, a professor of public health at the University of Otago.“New Zealand is about to eliminate this virus,” Wilson says. “Even if there are border control failures, I expect that the contact tracing system is now good enough to control an occasional outbreak. So this country should be able to avoid future waves until a vaccine arrives.”Countries with small populations and isolated geography such as New Zealand and Australia may be able to pull this off. South Korea is another country whose virus detection and suppression systems may be advanced enough to smother any future outbreaks. But it will be extremely difficult for most countries, especially those with large populations and porous borders.
