The 25th Amendment needs to be rewrittenOn Sunday, our mentally ill sociopath excuse for a president told reporters that "Some have gone too far. Some governors have gone too far. Some of the things that happened are maybe not so appropriate. And I think in the end it’s not going to matter because we're starting to open up our states, and I think they're going to open up very well. As far as protesters, you know, I see protesters for all sorts of things. And I’m with everybody. I'm with everybody." Except governors Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) and Ralph Northam (D-VA) who he singled out for his insane vitriol. "If you take Michigan, there were things in Michigan that I don’t think they were necessary or appropriate. Everyone knows that. I think the governor of Michigan-- we’re getting along very well-- but I think the governor of Michigan probably knows that." The functioning of a diseased mind is amazing... and like train wreck or car pileup on the highway, it's hard to turn away.The Boston Globe's right-wing columnist, Jeff Jacoby, thinks he may have found another president as bad as Trump: Woodrow Wilson. He wrote a column whose title everyone would have thought was about Señor Trumpanzee: The pandemic raged. The president said nothing. He wrote that in his research about the Spanish flue pandemic of 1917-18 he "hadn’t seen anything at all about the conduct of the U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson-- a striking lacuna, not only because of Wilson’s preeminence in national and world affairs at the time, but also in comparison with Donald’s Trump volubility on the current pandemic. Trump’s pronouncements are an inescapable part of the daily coverage of the Covid-19 crisis. Wilson’s, I should have thought, must have been as well. Not so."
From Eric Felten’s fascinating historical essay at RealClear Investigations, I learned that Wilson-- widely regarded as an outstanding president by many (though decidedly not all) historians-- had nothing to say about the influenza pandemic that raged during his second term. He apparently did nothing to try and mitigate it. This despite the fact that Wilson was an ardent exponent of expanded federal power, who believed that the president should be the preeminent figure in American politics.According to historian Sandra Opdycke’s 2014 book, The Flu Epidemic of 1918, Wilson was “extraordinarily close-mouthed about the epidemic from the first-- so much so that historians have been unable to find a single occasion on which he mentioned it in public.” His unvarying focus was on the world war, and a key priority was to speed American troop ships to the battlefields of Europe, even if that condemned U.S. soldiers to getting infected with influenza-- and, in many cases, to dying from it.“There’s no arguing that President Wilson was somehow unaware of the unfolding catastrophe,” writes Felten. “He knew very well the price that was being paid in sickness and death.” His advisers spoke to him about the toll the epidemic would take on soldiers forced to cross the Atlantic in crowded transports, but Wilson didn’t budge-- and he was backed in that decision by at least one military commander with whom he consulted.In early October 1918, Wilson met with Gen. Peyton March at the White House. The president said, “General March, I have had representations sent to me by men whose ability and patriotism are unquestioned that I should stop the shipment of men to France until the epidemic of influenza is under control.”The general responded, “Every such soldier who has died [of influenza] just as surely played his part as his comrade who died in France.”That may not have been the soundest military practice. For every soldier who showed up in France debilitated by the flu, others had to care for him. Sending more troops when many of those troops were sick only reduced the power and readiness of American forces in Europe. The epidemic “rendered hundreds of thousands of military personnel non-effective,” Carol R. Byerly wrote in the journal Public Health Reports . “During the American Expeditionary Forces' campaign at Meuse-Argonne, the epidemic diverted urgently needed resources from combat support to transporting and caring for the sick and the dead.”An estimated 16,000 American troops died of influenza during their deployment in Europe. An additional 30,000 died of the pandemic in stateside training camps.Wilson’s seeming indifference to the virus’s devastation among the troops was matched by a comparable reticence when it came to civilian deaths. “The great advocate for federal power,” Felten recounts, “neither involved himself nor said a word about the rampant deaths in major American cities such as Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Philadelphia.”Far more than today, state governments a century ago were expected to handle disasters and disease. And yet Wilson’s silence on the influenza pandemic remains strange given his belief that public rhetoric is at the heart of presidential power and influence. The president “is the only national voice in affairs,” Wilson wrote. “If he rightly interpret the national thought and boldly insist upon it, he is irresistible.” Where was Wilson’s “oratorical presidency” when the nation needed the sort of “unified action” it promised?Previous wartime presidents had shown a greater awareness of the threat posed by infection to troops. Felten cites the example of George Washington, who, as soon as he took command of the Continental Army in 1775, imposed social-distancing restrictions to contain a smallpox outbreak. One of Washington’s first orders was to ban soldiers from congregating at Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Mass., which was near the site of a quarantined hospital. “No person is to be allowed to go . . . a-fishing or on any other occasion,” he directed, “as there may be a danger of introducing the smallpox into the army.”But Wilson had other priorities than trying to slow the spread of a deadly disease. His foremost aims were, first, to win the war, and then to bring about the League of Nations, which he hoped would shape the postwar world. He never grasped just how much that world would be shaped by “the disease his decisions did so much to ship abroad,” Felten observes. “In the face of such epic suffering, President Woodrow Wilson-- erudite rhetorician, progressive statesman, and eminent world leader-- had no comment.”The more I learn about Wilson, the more firmly I root myself in the camp of those who consider him one of America’s least admirable presidents. From resegregating the federal government to arresting thousands of left-wing immigrants and labor activists, from prosecuting antiwar editors to reviving the monarchical State of the Union speech, from opposing female suffrage to supporting sterilization of the disabled, from championing a federal income tax to nationalizing private industries , the sanctimonious 28th president left a terrible legacy. I hadn’t previous known about his callous apathy during the most lethal pandemic of the 20th century, but it comes as no surprise.
Of course Jacoby is outraged that Wilson backed a federal income tax; it's who Jeff Jacoby is.Thankfully, NY Times reporter, Maggie Haberman isn't Jeff Jacoby. She noted yesterday that most Americans aren't amused by Trump's decision to stoke up civil discord based on the pandemic. She wrote that "First he was the self-described 'wartime president.' Then he trumpeted the 'total' authority of the federal government. But in the past few days, President Trump has nurtured protests against state-issued stay-at-home orders aimed at curtailing the spread of the coronavirus. Hurtling from one position to another is consistent with Mr. Trump’s approach to the presidency over the past three years. Even when external pressures and stresses appear to change the dynamics that the country is facing, Mr. Trump remains unbowed, altering his approach for a day or two, only to return to nursing grievances... Now, with Mr. Trump’s poll numbers falling after a rally-around-the-leader bump, he is road-testing a new turn on a familiar theme-- veering into messages aimed at appealing to Americans whose lives have been disrupted by the stay-at-home orders... just 36 percent of voters said they generally trusted what Mr. Trump says about the coronavirus."
But the president, who ran as an insurgent in 2016, is most comfortable raging against the machine of government, even when he is the one running the country. And while the coronavirus is in every state in the union, it is heavily affecting minority and low-income communities.So when Mr. Trump on Friday tweeted “LIBERATE,” his all-capitalized exhortations against strict orders in specific states-- including Michigan-- were in keeping with how he ran in 2016: saying things that seem contradictory, like pledging to work with governors and then urging people to “liberate” their states, and leaving it to his audiences to hear what they want to hear in his words....“These are people expressing their views,” Mr. Trump said. “They seem to be very responsible people to me.” But he said he thought the protesters had been treated “rough.”...So far, the protests have been relatively small and scattershot, organized by conservative-leaning groups with some organic attendance. It remains to be seen if they will be durable.But Mr. Trump’s show of affinity for such actions is in keeping with his fomenting of voter anger at the establishment in 2016, a key to his success then-- and his fallback position during uncertain moments ever since.In the case of the state-issued orders, Mr. Trump’s advisers say his criticism of certain places is appropriate.Stephen Moore, a former adviser to Mr. Trump and an economist with FreedomWorks, an organization that promotes limited government, said he thought protesters ought to be wearing masks and protecting themselves. But, he added, “the people who are doing the protest, for the most part, these are the ‘deplorables,’ they’re largely Trump supporters, but not only Trump supporters.”On Sunday, Mr. Trump again praised the protesters. “I have never seen so many American flags,” he said.But Mr. Trump’s advisers are divided about the wisdom of encouraging the protests. At some of them, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat, has been compared to Adolf Hitler. At least one protester had a sign featuring a swastika.One adviser said privately that if someone were to be injured at the protests-- or if anyone contracted the coronavirus at large events where people were not wearing masks-- there would be potential political risk for the president.But two other people close to the president, who asked for anonymity in order to speak candidly, said they thought the protests could be politically helpful to Mr. Trump, while acknowledging there might be public health risks.One of those people said that in much of the country, where the numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths are not as high as in places like New York, New Jersey, California and Washington State, anger is growing over the economic losses that have come with the stringent social-distancing restrictions.Crackpot Gov. Kristi Noem wouldn't be any more guilty of causing the 1,635 cases of COVID-19 in South Dakota if she injected the virus into each of the patients herself...[A]s Mr. Trump did throughout 2016, as when he said “torture works” and then walked back that statement a short time later, or when he advocated bombing the Middle East while denouncing lengthy foreign engagements, he has long taken various sides of the same issue.Mobilizing anger and mistrust toward the government was a crucial factor for Mr. Trump in the last presidential election. And for many months he has been looking for ways to contrast himself with former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and a Washington lifer.The problem? Mr. Trump is now president, and disowning responsibility for his administration’s slow and problem-plagued response to the coronavirus could prove difficult. And protests can be an unpredictable factor, particularly at a moment of economic unrest.Vice President Mike Pence, asked on NBC’s Meet the Press about the president’s tweets urging people to “liberate” states, demurred.“The American people know that no one in America wants to reopen this country more than President Donald Trump,” Mr. Pence said, “and on Thursday the president directed us to lay out guidelines for when and how states could responsibly do that.”“And in the president’s tweets and public statements, I can assure you, he’s going to continue to encourage governors to find ways to safely and responsibly let America go back to work,” he said.With the political campaign halted, Mr. Trump’s advisers have seen an advantage in the frozen-in-time state of the race. Mr. Biden has struggled to fund-raise or even to get daily attention in the news cycle.But Mr. Trump himself has seemed at sea, according to people close to him, uncertain of how to proceed. His approval numbers in his campaign polling have settled back to a level consistent with before the coronavirus, according to multiple people familiar with the data.His campaign polling has shown that focusing on criticizing China, in contrast with Mr. Biden, moves voters toward Mr. Trump, according to a Republican who has seen it.“Trump finally fired the first shot” with his more aggressive stance toward the Chinese government and its leader, Xi Jinping, said Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist. “Xi is put on notice that the death, economic carnage and agony is his and his alone,” Mr. Bannon said. “Only question now: What is America’s president prepared to do about it?”Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, has advocated messages that contrast Mr. Trump with Mr. Biden on a number of fronts, including China.But inside and outside the White House, other advisers to Mr. Trump see an advantage in focusing attention on the presidency.Kellyanne Conway, the White House counselor, has argued in West Wing discussions that there is a time to focus on China, but that for now, the president should embrace commander-in-chief moments amid the crisis.Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and a friend of Mr. Trump’s, said on ABC’s This Week that he did not think ads criticizing Mr. Biden on China were the right approach for now.Ultimately, Mr. Trump’s advisers said, most of his team is aware that it can try to drive down Mr. Biden’s poll numbers, but that no matter what tactics it deploys now, the president’s future will most likely depend on whether the economy is improving in the fall and whether the virus’s spread has been mitigated. Those things will remain unknown for months.“This is going to be a referendum,” Mr. Christie said, “on whether people think, when we get to October, whether or not he handled this crisis in a way that helped the American people, protected lives and moved us forward.”
