VOTE 2020 - Trump Voting Intimidation?

"Trump’s suggestion of deploying law enforcement officials to monitor polls raises specter of voting intimidation" by Rosalind S. Helderman, Josh Dawsey, Matt Zapotosky - The Washington Post 8/21/2020

More than 30 years ago, a Republican Party program that dispatched off-duty police officers to patrol polling places in heavily Black and Latino neighborhoods in New Jersey triggered accusations of voter intimidation, resulting in a federal agreement that restricted for decades how the national GOP could observe voting.

Now, two years after those limits were lifted, President Trump has revived the idea of using law enforcement officers to patrol polling places, invoking tactics historically used to scare voters of color.

In an interview Thursday with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump described law enforcement officers as part of a phalanx of authorities he hopes will monitor voting in November.

“We’re going to have everything,” the President said.  “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to hopefully have U.S. attorneys and we’re going to have everybody, and attorney generals.  But it’s very hard.”

Trump’s remarks are part of a pattern of comments in which he has suggested he is willing to take actions to impede how people cast their ballots this fall.  He has repeatedly sought to undermine confidence in the November vote, making false claims about the integrity of mail-in balloting and raising the specter of widespread electoral fraud.  Earlier this month, he floated the idea of withholding election money from states and refusing funding for the U.S. Postal Service so as to curtail the use of voting by mail.

The President has limited authority to order law enforcement to patrol polling places.  Sheriff’s deputies and police officers are commanded at the local level, and a federal law bars U.S. government officials from sending “armed men” to the vicinity of polling places.

But civil rights advocates said they feared Trump’s words could inspire local officials to act on his behalf.  And they said even the threat of encountering police officers at the polls could be frightening to some voters, particularly in communities of color where residents are distrustful of the police.

“This is just such an old, dirty voter suppression tactic,” said Kristen Clarke, who leads the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.  “There is no doubt that this is about instilling fear and depressing participation in communities of color.”

Clarke said her group was researching how the President’s comments could be used in lawsuits intended to protect the vote.

Attorney Marc Elias, who is leading the Democratic Party’s voting litigation efforts, said he will rush to court if he sees any evidence of the actions Trump described.

“The reason why the Republican Party was under a consent decree for 40 years was for precisely this kind of behavior in 1981,” he said.  “It would be unfortunate if, having come out from under that consent decree, they now try to repeat those tactics.”

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on Trump’s remarks.

Mike Reed, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said that law enforcement officers are not part of the RNC’s new poll-watching program.  “Our program consists of volunteers and attorneys,” he said.

Other Republican officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal strategy said they were unaware of plans to deploy law enforcement officers to polling places, adding that the President’s comments were inaccurate and unhelpful to the party’s efforts to expand its poll-watching program through appropriate and legal measures.

Matthew Morgan, general counsel for Trump’s reelection campaign, said in a statement that “Republicans will be ready to make sure the polls are being run correctly, securely, and transparently as we work to deliver the free and fair election Americans deserve.”

The Voting Rights Act outlaws the intimidation or coercion of voters, a provision adopted to combat long-standing tactics that were used in the Jim Crow South to prevent Black people from participating in elections.  The tactics included deploying sheriff’s deputies and police officers to the polls.

Accusations of voter intimidation continued long past the end of Jim Crow.  Black voters in Florida complained about police traffic stops on Election Day as recently as 2000, according to a report on the 2000 Presidential election by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.  In 2010, advocates accused North Carolina police of voter suppression after they set up traffic checkpoints between primarily Black apartment complexes and polling locations.

The RNC came under scrutiny for allegedly violating the Voting Rights Act in New Jersey’s 1981 gubernatorial race, when the party was accused of creating a “National Ballot Security Task Force” made up of off-duty deputy sheriffs and local police officers who wore armbands and patrolled the polls in largely Black and Latino neighborhoods.  Some allegedly displayed their firearms.  Official-looking signs were posted at some precincts warning that voter fraud is a crime and that the task force was watching.

After the Democratic Party sued, the RNC entered into a federal consent decree in 1982 in which it admitted no wrongdoing but promised it would not take efforts to suppress the minority vote and would allow courts to review and approve future ballot security efforts.

In practice, that meant that for decades, the RNC largely ceded poll-watching activities to a candidate’s campaign operations.

In 2016, the Democratic Party alleged that the RNC had violated the consent decree by supporting the Trump campaign’s ballot security efforts.

But a federal judge ruled in 2018 that the Democrats had not proved that the agreement had been violated, allowing the consent decree to expire.

As a result, the RNC this year will be able to conduct poll-watching activities without restrictions for the first time in decades.

In response, party officials have said they hope to recruit at least 30,000 poll watchers in 15 battleground states, part of a program that will also deploy lawyers around the country to fight Democrats in court over election laws and ballots.

Justin Riemer, the RNC’s chief counsel, said volunteers will be trained on local rules and on looking for potential voting problems or fraud.  At times, he said, the ballot watchers may confront issues directly with poll workers or may call their problems in to a team of election lawyers back at state headquarters.  He said volunteers also will be trained to observe local officials as they count mail-in votes.

Some GOP poll watchers will be stationed in communities that have traditionally seen long lines or other voting day problems, which Riemer acknowledged would be likely to include some Democratic-leaning urban polling sites with many voters of color.

“Where do you see those lines wrapped around the block on Election Day?” he said.  “Those are the kinds of places we are going to be.  There is usually something wrong.”

Riemer said other poll watchers would focus on GOP-leaning areas, where they can monitor who has not yet voted as the day progresses to help the party better target its get-out-the-vote efforts.

RNC officials say they have developed training programs for poll watchers, though they declined to provide details or copies of the materials.

The consent decree significantly hampered the party’s political activities for years, Riemer said, and, as a result, the RNC plans to be extremely careful not to run afoul of laws against intimidation.

“People here are so vigilant that we are not put under another consent decree,” he said.  “Our volunteers will be beaten over the head that they need to be compliant with all applicable laws, and they need to be respectful and courteous when they are engaging in their operations.”

He added: “They are not there to stop people from voting.  We want people to vote.  If they don’t believe us, they don’t believe us.  That’s the God’s honest truth.”

Such assertions are viewed with skepticism by voting rights activists, particularly since the RNC has amplified Trump’s unfounded claims that voting by mail could lead to rampant fraud.

Many activists think long lines are driven in part by GOP-backed efforts to limit early voting or reduce the number of polling sites.

They also note that Republicans have said that they are open to recruiting former military service members and law enforcement officers as poll watchers — a proposal not far removed from the President’s suggestion to send sheriffs to the polls.

“We would be foolish not to be vigilant,” said Vanita Gupta, the former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, noting the country’s history of voter intimidation and the President’s misleading rhetoric.

Gupta, who is President of the nonprofit Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said she expected that Trump would threaten to deploy law enforcement officials to the polls.

“The danger is whether the threat alone or the posturing dissuades voters,” she said.  “That’s where voters really need to be empowered and educated — the best way to fight back is to do the opposite and register and vote.”

Still, she noted that the country has “long-standing laws” prohibiting law enforcement intimidation of voters.  Several states have their own statutes severely restricting police activity near polls.

But in the current fraught political atmosphere, the President’s call for a robust poll-watching effort could lead to unpredictable results.

Earlier this year, a conservative organization called True the Vote was recruiting former members of the military to go to polling places, according to Ed Hiner, a retired Navy SEAL who said he started the group’s “Continue to Serve” program.

Hiner said in an interview that he used the email lists from veterans associations to invite 2 million former military personnel to participate.  He said he thought the program would be a bipartisan effort that would pair Democratic and Republican veterans to encourage voting, and stopped working with the group this summer after realizing how partisan the issues related to voting have become.

A representative of True the Vote, which alleges on its website that “radicalized leftist organizations are hard at work exploiting the weaknesses of our elector process,” did not respond to questions about the program’s status.

According to guidelines distributed by the Justice Department, the states — rather than the federal government — are to ensure the voting process is conducted fairly.  The guidelines instruct federal prosecutors to minimize their public presence around elections, even if they suspect crimes, such as voter fraud, are occurring.

In a 2017 election crimes guide, the department stated that prosecutors and the FBI need approval before they can take any action that requires “intrusion by federal investigators into the area immediately surrounding an open polling place.”

Because federal law also does not allow federal officials to station “armed men” in the vicinity of polling places, the Justice Department has determined that this means a U.S. attorney cannot order FBI agents or U.S. marshals to the polls.

The Justice Department does, however, deploy unarmed, specially trained observers and poll monitors — though the number of those people has declined because of a 2013 Supreme Court decision limiting the federal government’s role inside polling places on Election Day.

“Law enforcement’s first obligation around elections is to do no harm,” Elias said.  “So there is an appropriate role of law enforcement to ensure other people’s conduct isn’t preventing people from voting.  It is not to engage in conduct themselves that could prevent people from voting.”

Correction:  An earlier version of this story misstated how many years it has been since the Republican Party was accused of voter intimidation in New Jersey.  It was more than 30 years ago, not nearly 30 years ago.  This story has been updated.

AMERICAN POLITICS - Trump vs Fauci Update

"Fauci is sidelined by the White House as he steps up blunt talk on pandemic" by Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey, Laurie McGinley; The Washington Post 7/11/2020

For months, Anthony S. Fauci has played a lead role in America’s coronavirus pandemic, as a diminutive, Brooklyn-accented narrator who has assessed the risk and issued increasingly blunt warnings as the nation’s response has gone badly awry.

But as the Trump Administration has strayed from the advice of many of its scientists and public health experts, the White House has moved to sideline Fauci, scuttled some of his planned TV appearances and largely kept him out of the Oval Office for more than a month even as coronavirus infections surge in large swaths of the country.

In recent days, the 79-year-old scientist and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has found himself directly in the president’s crosshairs.  During a Fox News interview Thursday with Sean Hannity, Trump said Fauci “is a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes.”  And when Greta Van Susteren asked him last week about Fauci’s assessment that the country was not in a good place, Trump said flatly: “I disagree with him.”

Fauci no longer briefs Trump and is “never in the Oval [Office] anymore,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.  Fauci last spoke to the president during the first week of June, according to a person with knowledge of Trump’s calendar.

For some administration officials, such developments have been an early sign their job was on the line.  But Trump cannot directly fire Fauci, a career civil servant with more than 50 years in government service who enjoys strong bipartisan support in Congress.  In any case, the President has no plans to get rid of him, said the official.

As for Fauci himself, although he is frustrated by the turmoil and the state of the outbreak, friends say he has no plans to abandon his post, which includes a critical role in the development of a coronavirus vaccine and treatments.

Fauci has found other ways to get his message out, from online Facebook chats to podcasts and print media interviews.  And in recent days, with coronavirus cases slamming hospitals in the South and West, he has been frankly critical of the U.S. response — and implicitly, of the President.

“As a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great.  I mean, we’re just not,” Fauci said in a podcast interview with FiveThirtyEight last week.

Fauci did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this story.

A White House official released a statement saying that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things” and included a lengthy list of the scientist’s comments from early in the outbreak.  Those included his early doubt that people with no symptoms could play a significant role in spreading the virus — a notion based on earlier outbreaks that the novel coronavirus would turn on its head.  They also point to public reassurances Fauci made in late February, around the time of the first U.S. case of community transmission, that “at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis.”

Fauci’s supporters acknowledge those early mistakes, attributing them to the challenges posed by a new, largely unknown pathogen.  They agree he downplayed the possibility of the virus spreading from person to person in January and early February even as it quietly seeded itself in communities on the East and West coasts.  And, like several other public health officials, he initially said the public shouldn’t wear masks, but now strongly recommends it, especially when individuals can’t maintain distances of at least six feet from other people.

Fauci has said he was worried early in the outbreak about a shortage of masks and wanted to reserve them for health care workers.  And he has said from the start that scientists’ knowledge of a brand new virus would evolve and recommendations could change based on new information.

The tension between the White House and Fauci was on full display last Sunday, when CBS host Margaret Brennan told millions of viewers that “Face the Nation” had tried for three months to interview him.

White House communications officials, who must approve television appearances related to the coronavirus, responded by allowing Fauci spots this week on PBS NewsHour, a CNN Town Hall with Sanjay Gupta, and NBC’s “Meet the Press” during the prime Sunday morning slot, according to one person familiar with the situation.

Then Fauci joined a Facebook Live event on Tuesday with Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), disputing Trump’s assertions that a lower death rate showed the country’s progress against the pandemic.  Fauci called it “a false narrative” and warned, “Don’t get yourself into false complacency.”

Fauci did not end up making any of the scheduled appearances.  The White House canceled them after his Tuesday remarks, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to relate behind-the-scenes conversations.

The episode underscores the deteriorating relationship between a scientist and a President who once bonded over their shared New York City roots and love of sports, but whose rapport has long since disintegrated over their differences on face mask policy, state reopening strategies and the use of antimalarial drugs to treat COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

A senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal deliberations, said the White House has asked Fauci to do certain media appearances but is not approving all of his requests.

“Our bigger issue with Fauci is stop critiquing the task force .?.?. and try to fix it,” the official said.

But that may be an impossible order given his strong differences with the White House over how the federal government should respond to the accelerating infection rate that’s pushing up the death toll after months of decline.

Fauci has argued that parts of the country experiencing surges should shut down, “but there is no buy-in for that,” said an official with direct knowledge of the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Four months ahead of Election Day, Trump wants to “reopen and move on,” said another senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal deliberations.  Those who disagree with that approach are out of favor, the official said.

Fauci has also expressed concern about the administration’s plan to reopen schools, but White House officials see keeping children home as having even more deleterious effects.  Fauci has also called on state and local officials to mandate that people wear masks in public.

Even though his suggestions have been largely ignored, Fauci has not complained that he does not get in to see the President, according to one of the officials.

Trump is also galled by Fauci’s approval ratings.  A recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed that 67 percent of voters trusted Fauci for information on the coronavirus, compared with 26 percent who trusted Trump.

The internal turmoil and troubled national response have taken a toll on Fauci, those close to him say.  He is exasperated that states and individuals are not following the recommendations of experts, such as social distancing and wearing face coverings, said David Barr, a longtime HIV/AIDS activist who has known Fauci for 30 years.

Three or four weeks ago, Barr said, he and Fauci spoke about the troubling signs they were seeing as cases began to tick upward.

“You could just feel from Tony .?.?. how unsettled it made him,” Barr said.  “He didn’t know what to do to change that, to stop it, but if the leadership isn’t there, and it’s clearly not there, then it’s really difficult to set the tone for the country.”

“What he cares most about is not his influence, but what’s happening — that things are going so badly and it’s going to cause so much disease and death,” Barr added.

People who are close to Fauci say the public undermining of scientists and public health experts has frustrated and saddened him because it adds to the chaos the country is already experiencing from the pandemic.

Despite the repeated pushback from Trump and the White House, however, Fauci has told those close to him that has no plans to do anything differently.

“For somebody like Tony, who tries to deal with people honestly and in a very open and generous way — that’s how he’s tried to approach his personal interactions with the president — it’s immensely frustrating and depressing.  And there’s not much he can do about it,” said Peter Staley, a longtime HIV/AIDS activist who has known Fauci for more than 30 years.

“He’s going to continue being himself, which is always talking honestly about a public health crisis and a new infectious disease,” Staley added.  “If things are looking more in conflict, it’s because this administration is going further and further adrift from a pro-science approach.”

White House communications officials say they have told government scientists and doctors that their job is to educate the public by talking about best practices to contain the virus and what the administration is doing to help the states.

Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Michael Caputo, a longtime Trump ally, approves Fauci’s television appearances, with input from the White House, said one of the senior administration officials.  Several White House aides view Fauci’s interviews as unhelpful and say they’re frustrated he has expressed interest in appearing on programs such as MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show,” which are hostile to the administration.  That one was rejected.

“The speculation game doesn’t serve the public in any particular way,” the same official said.  “When it gets to handicapping and what’s going to happen next, get a cable news gig.  We’ve conveyed that down to all the doctors.”

White House officials generally favor White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx, one of the senior administration officials said.  Both Birx and Fauci have expressed frustration that their concerns have not gotten to the president, although Birx is working with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Jared Kushner, a White House senior adviser and Trump’s son-in-law, to ensure better communication, the official said.

The administration also plans to have Brett Giroir, an assistant HHS secretary, and FEMA Administrator Peter T. Gaynor do more appearances related to coronavirus.

Among those crusading against Fauci internally is Peter Navarro, the President’s trade adviser, who has clashed with Fauci over his opposition to adopting the use of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, to treat COVID-19 before its effectiveness had been proved.

When Trump and Navarro repeatedly touted hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for coronavirus, Fauci pushed back both internally and at task force briefings, arguing there was only anecdotal evidence about the drug’s efficacy.  The Food and Drug Administration eventually revoked its temporary authorization after evidence showed it was not effective against COVID-19 and could be dangerous for some patients.

“Dr. Fauci has a good bedside manner with the public but he has been wrong about everything I have ever interacted with him on,” Navarro said.  “Now Fauci is saying that a falling mortality rate doesn’t matter when it is the single most important statistic to help guide the pace of our economic reopening.  So when you ask me if I listen to Dr. Fauci’s advice, my answer is only with caution.”

Friends and allies say Fauci doesn’t quit because he loves his job and also feels a great sense of responsibility about helping to develop coronavirus vaccines and treatments — the biggest challenge of his career and the only way the country can truly begin to move past the pandemic.  He has long said he does not want to retire before there is an AIDS vaccine.

“He recognizes if he doesn’t intercede, things could fall apart very quickly — even more so than they have already,” said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.  “He does it because he cares about the country and realizes he is uniquely positioned to help in this.”

Although his message is regularly at odds with the President, Fauci is naturally conflict-averse and has sought to establish a personal relationship with the six Presidents he has served over his career.

“He’ll try to be accommodating except for principles that are truly not something he can compromise on,” said one former senior administration official who has worked closely with Fauci for years.  “He will try to really accommodate and fulfill your reality, but he’s bound by the laws of science.”

In the previous five presidential administrations, Fauci has almost always played a key role in public health emergencies and infectious-disease responses by advising the president and serving as a chief spokesman for both Republican and Democratic administrations.

In many ways, he was shaped by the HIV/AIDS crisis that emerged during his first years as NIAID director when the Reagan administration remained largely silent about a disease afflicting mostly gay men.

Amid fear of the virus and the stigma associated with having the infection, Fauci learned the importance of communicating with the public about new diseases that were little understood.  He found out it was critical to speak honestly about the risks, and help people differentiate between valid concerns and unfounded fears, according to several people who have worked with him.

As the face of the HIV/AIDS response, Fauci also developed a thick skin, experiencing the ire of activists who felt an uncaring federal government was not doing enough to make treatments available for dying patients.  But over the years, he forged friendships with some of those who had begun as adversaries, activists said.

The lessons learned from the HIV/AIDS outbreak have had an impact on how he has handled almost every public health crisis since.  During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the Obama administration made Fauci its chief spokesperson to explain to people the actual risk of the virus.

Fauci briefed Obama about three times a week and had unlimited access to him if something came up, said Ron Klain, the Obama administration’s Ebola czar and now an adviser to the Biden campaign.

But in the coronavirus pandemic, Klain said Fauci is facing a new challenge: He’s the only member of the administration willing or able to speak plainly about the threat of the virus, in Klain’s view.

Fauci “respects the public,” Klain said.  “He has this view that the public can handle the truth, whether it’s good news or bad news and the most important thing is to give people the best information he has at the time.  Tony is left being the one person having to carry the weight of speaking honestly about all this stuff.”

COMMENT:  I absolutely believe in Dr. Fauci (who IS willing to admit when he's wrong) over Trump who is only concerned about himself and his re-election, and hates any news he thinks as bad.

VOTE 2020 - What This Election Isn't

"The Trailer: This election isn't 1968 or 1992 or 2016" by David Weigel, Washington Post 5/31/2020

In this edition: Why the fire's different this time, what the Libertarian Party has to say about the riots and the virus, and a new poll that shows why the President is an underdog.

Don't worry, it can get worse.  This is The Trailer.

If anyone was celebrating “MAGA night”  on Saturday, they did so far from the White House.  The President coined “MAGA night”  in a Saturday morning tweet, hinting that there might be some response to what he called the “professionally managed so-called 'protesters'”  who'd rallied in Lafayette Square on Friday.

There was no response, no red-capped counter-demonstration.  In Washington, as in many cities, people protesting the killing of George Floyd by police gathered, faced off with riot-gear-wearing police and then scattered.  A week that began with the President asking for a criminal probe of an unfriendly TV host ended with him promising to “designate Antifa as a terrorist organization,” though there's no legal way to do so.

That has led to speculation of how the unrest will play for President Trump, with just as many people arguing that it will seal his reelection as arguing that it'll undo him.  Who's right?  It is far too early to say, and none of the easy comparisons hold up in 2020.

It's not 1968.  Most of the quick analysis of the unrest, from politicians and from journalists, has pointed to the election of Richard Nixon to suggest events could help reelect the President.  “He won on a law-and-order platform that appealed implicitly to white anxiety,”  Edward Luce, referring to Nixon, wrote in the Financial Times.  “Richard Nixon won the presidency by promising the country he would restore ‘law and order’ on the streets,” historian Julian Zelizer wrote for CNN.

The comparison fails in two important ways.  First and most obviously, Nixon was not President in 1968.  He was returning from political limbo to challenge, at first, an incumbent Lyndon Johnson and then by fall, Johnson's vice President.  Every summer had seen riots break out in major cities, and every year, the crime rate surged.  When Nixon told the Republican National Convention that “we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame,” he had no political power or responsibility over those cities.

“America is in trouble today not because her people have failed but because her leaders have failed,” Nixon continued.  “What America needs are leaders to match the greatness of her people.”

President Trump has lashed out at mayors and governors, but arguing that all the country's “leaders”  are failing is something an incumbent can't coherently do.  That gets to the second problem: The law-and-order pitch stopped working for Nixon once he was sworn in.  As Walter Shapiro recalled Sunday, polling ahead of the 1970 midterm elections found most voters disapproving of Nixon's crime record.  In the Democrats' official pre-midterm message, Sen. Ed Muskie of Maine leaned in, accusing the President of flailing because he hadn't solved the crime problem.

“For four years, a conservative Republican has been governor of California,”  Muskie said, referring to Ronald Reagan, the era's other major (non-Southern) law-and-order figure.  “Yet there is no more law and order in California today than when he took office.  President Nixon, like President Johnson before him, has taken a firm stand.  A Democratic Congress has passed sweeping legislation.  Yet America is no more orderly or lawful — nor its streets more safe — than was the case two years ago, or four, or six.”

It's not 1992.  Violent crime rates rose throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with Republicans regaining the advantage when voters were asked to consider “law and order.”  Bill Clinton's Presidential campaign tried to turn that around, with the candidate promising not to “make race an excuse for failing to pass judgment about self-destructive behavior” and endorsing “the simple restoration of order.”

The Los Angeles riots, which followed the “not guilty”  verdict for four police officers who had beaten Rodney King, crystallized Clinton's message.  George H.W. Bush was running for President, but the crime rate kept growing.  At one point, when the White House suggested that Democratic welfare policies were at the root of unrest, Clinton mocked them.

“It's just amazing,” Clinton said.  “Republicans have had the White House for 20 of the last 24 years, and they have to go all the way back to the '60s to find somebody to blame.”

Clinton developed a playbook that other center-left politicians would use for years, combining a promise of more policing and tougher sentencing with a promise of smarter social investment.

“We cannot take our country back until we take our neighborhoods back,” Clinton said at a July 1992 rally, flanked by police officers.  “I want to be tough on crime and good for civil rights.  You can't have civil justice without order and safety.”

Once in office, Clinton acted on that, signing popular crime bills and presiding over declining crime rates — and no major social unrest.  At the start, he did so with the support of many black political leaders.  The salience of crime as a Presidential election issue faded, while incarceration rates skyrocketed.  No modern Democrat has responded to this week's unrest with rhetoric like Clinton's.

It's not 2016.  By the time Donald Trump ran for President, violent crime had been on the decline for decades, and influential Republicans had pivoted from tough-on-crime policies to criminal justice and police reform while Democrats began reversing policies like stop-and-frisk and cash bail.  The shift from the attitudes of the 1990s was epitomized by Hillary Clinton, who apologized for a 20-year-old speech in which she called some young black criminals “super-predators.”  What was smart politics for a 1990s campaign was toxic in 2016.  But at the same time, unrest after the killings of black men by police officers and fearmongering about Barack Obama's crime policies fed into a paranoia that danger was increasing and the government was covering it up.

Trump, unencumbered by a political record, pitched himself as both a one-man solution to the crime problem and an alternative to Clinton's record.  “I have a message for all of you: The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon, and I mean very soon, come to an end,”  Trump said at the 2016 RNC.  “Beginning on January 20th, 2017, safety will be restored.”  While his campaign bought ads that portrayed Hillary Clinton as a threat to black voters, Trump himself promised to side with law enforcement over anyone disturbing the peace, and, once in office, he rolled back the Obama administration's reforms.

“The Obama administration and the handcuffing and oppression of police was despicable,” Bob Kroll, the president of Minneapolis's police union, said at a 2019 rally.  “The first thing President Trump did when he took office was turn that around, got rid of the [Eric] Holder-Loretta Lynch regime and decided to start letting the cops do their job, put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of us.”

In 2020, the Trump campaign balanced tough-on-crime rhetoric with the same argument it had made against Clinton: that Trump's Democratic opponent locked up black Americans unfairly.  That was before Minneapolis.

By this weekend, the Trump campaign was accusing Joe Biden's campaign of “financially support[ing] the mayhem that is hurting innocent people,” because some of its staffers had donated to a bail fund for protesters, while the President was urging police to be “tougher.”  At the very same time, Washington's mayor was mocking an “afraid” and “alone” President, pointing out that he claimed local police were not trying to protect the White House, when they very much were.  Richard Nixon won by portraying himself as a unifier against an out-of-control left; Bill Clinton won reelection by carefully navigating the politics of crime and unrest.  There is nothing very careful, yet, about what we've seen from this President.

TRUMP BUSINESS - Disrespect in Indonesia

Ciletuh Hilir cemetery

"Trump’s business partner in Indonesia exhumed graves in West Java to build resort" by Joshua Partlow and Krithika Varagur, Photos and videos by Muhammad Fadli, Washington Post 5/14/2020

CILETUH HILIR, Indonesia — In the valley between two volcanoes, the soldiers fanned out around the cemetery as men with shovels moved in to dig up the dead.

Village leader Djaja Mulyana had cataloged many grievances about the construction site that hemmed in his community.  He’d filled binders documenting what he considered the deception, broken promises and lost livelihoods from the builders threatening to displace residents.

But nothing like this: In January 2019, gravediggers came to unearth corpses where his Muslim ancestors had rested since the 19th century, said Mulyana and two others who witnessed the excavations.  The remains were being moved to make room for a mega-resort that will include a Trump-branded hotel and golf course.

At least one person had agreed to the exhumations, but other families had not given consent.  One woman, Iyum, said the remains of her two daughters had been disinterred without her permission.

“Who did they think my children were — dogs?” she said in an interview with The Washington Post.

The Trump Organization’s foray into Indonesia was one of the last foreign deals Donald Trump signed before he was elected president in 2016.  It was part of a lucrative and relatively low-risk foreign expansion — licensing his name to hotels and towers around the world — that he halted when he entered the White House.  His company, now run by his two eldest sons, said it would not pursue new projects overseas, but would continue those already underway.

The ongoing struggle over land in the jungles of West Java shows that even as the global footprint of President Trump’s company has shrunk, he has continued to profit from deals with foreign developers, including some enmeshed in fraught local disputes.

The Indonesian developer — MNC Group, run by media tycoon Hary Tanoesoedibjo — is now behind schedule on two Trump resorts, including a beachfront resort in Bali.  MNC had faced a declining real estate market even before the economic shock of the coronavirus pandemic, according to current and former company officials.  The Bali site is overgrown and traversed by wild dogs.  Construction on the resort in West Java remains in early stages, a year after company officials had projected it would be operating.

The cemetery dispute in the Ciletuh Hilir community is one more controversy.

MNC Land — the subsidiary building the project, including the Trump resorts — says some residents of Ciletuh Hilir had accepted the company’s proposal to relocate their relatives’ remains “to a new cemetery location that we provide, which is more appropriate.”  The company also accused those who refused of exaggerating their concerns as a negotiating tactic to extract higher prices to sell their homes and unearth their ancestors.

“MNC is even willing to bear the entire grave removal costs,” the company said.

The village and its cemetery is located on land slated to become the resort’s theme park.  Trump’s business has sought to distance itself from the faraway feud.

“We have been told that this is not on or part of any of the Trump portion of the development,” a Trump Organization official said in a statement, adding: “Our relationship with MNC consists purely of licensing and management agreements only, we are not the developers.”

The Trump Organization did not respond to questions about whether it had been aware of the exhumations at the time or whether it had vetted MNC’s practices.

A former MNC official said that Trump’s company received regular updates.

“They want to know what’s happening every month.  They want to know the standards.  They want to know who’s going to be the constructor, who’s going to be the banker, no different than a Hyatt or a Marriott,” said the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships in the industry.

The Trump Organization’s 600-acre portion of the property — encompassing the future site of an 18-hole golf course, a 120-room hotel and 461 luxury villas — begins less than half a mile from the cemetery, according to GPS coordinates taken there overlaid with MNC and Trump Organization project maps.  The marketing materials MNC has produced for years tout the Trump connection, as key components for the 1,700-acre first phase of MNC Lido City, the project that envelops Mulyana and the 200 families of Ciletuh Hilir.

“Trump international resort, golf club and residences is at the core of the phase one master plan,” MNC said in a promotional video in August 2019.

American politics feels distant here, but Mulyana and his neighbors clearly recognize the name on billboards they drive past on their motorbikes each day.

“You see it everywhere.  It’s written everywhere on the project site,” he said.  “There’s the Trump project, the Trump hotels.  It’s not the Hary [Tanoesoedibjo] project.”

It is also more ambitious than anything the Trump Organization has signed onto abroad.  Tanoesoedibjo has said he plans to spend $1 billion on the two Indonesia resorts.  The Trump Organization will get a small percentage of the sales of more than 800 planned “Trump residences,” many that start at more than $1 million, plus management fees to run the golf courses and hotels in Lido and Bali, the former MNC official said.

“Both the Lido and Bali Trump Hotels will be architectural masterpieces that will do for Indonesia what the Sydney Opera House is doing for Australia,” Johannes Spies, one of the MNC officials in charge of design, said in a text message.

In Lido, Tanoesoedibjo is attempting to build a vacation metropolis.  It includes a theme park incorporating cartoon characters featured on his television programs, a kind of Indonesian Disneyland.  The plan includes hospitals, a university, a place called “Movie Land,” an indoor-outdoor film production studio with re-creations of cityscapes and ancient Indonesian villages, plus a venue for music festivals that could hold thousands of people, to be run by Tanoesoedibjo’s daughter, Valencia, according to MNC presentations and people familiar with the project.

When Donald Trump Jr. visited Jakarta in August to meet Tanoesoedibjo and investors, he told reporters that the Indonesian resorts were “dream projects” and that the two companies were “really working feverishly” to complete them.

“I see a great opportunity,” he said.  “The dream is becoming a reality.”

In Ciletuh Hilir early last year, such exalted visions felt far away.

When the gravediggers broke for lunch on Jan.  23, 2019, Mulyana and his neighbors rushed to the cemetery.

The agitated crowd quickly noticed a mistake and summoned Heri, a 56-year-old out-of-work farmer who, like others in the area, goes by one name.

The remains of four of his relatives — two siblings, his great-grandfather and another relative — had been pulled from the ground without his consent, he and others in the community said, along with the bodies of Iyum’s two girls.

They had dug up the wrong people.

“I broke down crying,” Heri he said.

‘They gave us hope’

The Lido Lakes Resort and Conference Center is nestled in a stunning part of Indonesia: between lush and misty mountains about an hour south of the capital city of Jakarta.  The adjacent [Mount] Gunung Gede Pangrango National Park is one of the last pristine tropical forests on the island of Java, a sanctuary for endangered leopards and silvery gibbons.

It was at this resort that Djaja Mulyana and other locals gathered in July 2014 to hear representatives of the property’s new owner, MNC, describe their early plans for transforming the weekend getaway into a resort that would become the pride of Indonesia.  It was the middle of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, and the gathering included a meal to break the day’s fast.

Residents came away impressed.  Many in the village were tenant farmers who grew corn and cassava on others’ land for subsistence wages.  They lived in cinder-block homes connected by dirt footpaths.  The MNC officials promised jobs for the farmers and schools for their children, Mulyana recalled; the plan was to build “the biggest tourist destination in Asia.”

“They gave us hope,” Mulyana said.

Within a few months, however, doubts emerged.

When surveyors and prospectors started poking around in the neighboring villages —collectively known as Wates Jaya, part of the Bogor district — residents questioned them.  Mulyana did not think the village had given necessary permission for work to begin, and he had not seen any permits.  The workers were outsiders, not locals, as residents hoped.

Villagers claimed hereditary rights to their homes.  They had been allowed to farm the area even as it changed hands often between government and private companies in recent decades.  Residents cite family ties back to the period of Dutch colonialism that preceded Indonesia’s independence in 1945, when the land was used for rubber and tea plantations.  They date the cemetery to 1834.

“I belong to a tradition, to a culture that I cannot simply abandon,” said Firmansyah, a 34-year-old resident.  “It is our belief that the land belonged to our ancestors as a community.  I’m probably seventh generation … and the cemetery has been there since before the independence.  That’s what I wanted to protect, the reason I resisted.  It’s the historical value.”

Those sentiments have done little to impede MNC from building all around them.  As earth-clearing and preliminary site work has progressed, residents said construction workers have moved a mountain of dirt across a main road into the village, blocking that access.  Builders also walled off the community with concrete fencing, and filled in portions of a lake used for fishing and drinking water, residents said.  The cleared land now presses right up against the tight cluster of homes.

“As the construction work is starting on site and in line with work safety regulations, fences must be built along boundaries between the project MNC’s area and Ciletuh Hilir Kampung, in which the people still [have] access to and exits from the Kampung,” the company said in its statement, using the word for neighborhood.

After MNC bought the land in 2013, it had allowed the residents of Ciletuh Hilir and villages to farm on the land, continuing a decades-long practice.  That permission stopped in 2017.

MNC had an “agreement stating that ‘if MNC at any time needs the land, then villagers must vacate the land without compensation from MNC,’ ” the company statement said.  “MNC has requested the villagers to vacate the land based on the agreement, as we plan to start developing the area as entertainment hub (non-Trump project).”

The development is an opportunity for some.  MNC said it now employs more than 300 people in the broader Lido area.  They do construction and site security among other jobs.

In Ciletuh Hilir, residents say MNC asked its employees in the community to sell their homes at low prices and evacuate.  MNC did not respond to questions about prices.

Those who remain — and can no longer farm — have turned to buying crops elsewhere and selling them in local markets or looking for other work in town.

“They want to acquire our lands on their terms: by paying the lowest price, using intimidation and so much more,” Firmansyah said.  “And this includes the land that the local community had been farming on — we’re not allowed to use it anymore.  That’s one of the ways that the company was using to kill the economy in our kampung.”

Using heavy machinery, workers cleared about 70 acres of farmland without providing compensation, residents would later recount in a letter to Indonesian President Joko Widodo outlining their concerns.  The Post reviewed a copy of the letter, provided by a local lawyer.

“They cut down our banana trees,” Mulyana said.

Mulyana had been elected in 2010 as head of his rukun warga, or citizens’ association, a local administrative body in Indonesia encompassing a cluster of neighborhoods.  He was a farmer, like his parents before him, and unaccustomed to facing off against a massive corporation.

At home, Mulyana kept his doors open at all hours, smoking cigarettes and trading gossip with neighbors who filtered through.  As worries grew about the development next door, he contacted a pro-bono legal collective based in the nearby city of Bogor for help defending the village.  He began accumulating stacks of letters, blueprints, meeting minutes and photos that eventually filled three plastic binders.

One of those documents, passed to Mulyana by a politician friend, galvanized his opposition to the project.

It was a 2014 letter signed by officials in Wates Jaya — a local jurisdiction that includes Ciletuh Hilir — stating that residents had been informed by an MNC subsidiary about the coming development.  The document said that residents in the area “have no objection to and approve of the request for the site permit."  Dozens of signatures from the attendance form used during the Ramadan meeting with MNC representatives — including Mulyana’s — were appended to the letter.

“I was so angry when I found out,” he recalled.

Mulyana said his signature had been used to suggest his approval of the development.  He felt deceived.

“We never signed anything agreeing to that,” he said.

Letter claiming residents support project (link)

One of the local officials who signed the letter, Basrowi, said that he couldn’t recall the details of the permitting process but denied that anything deceptive had taken place.  There will always be some opponents to such projects, he told The Post in an interview.

“You’re talking about 10,000 people.  Not everybody has the same opinion,” said Basrowi, who until recently was the head of the Cigombong subdistrict that includes Ciletuh Hilir.

MNC said it complied with all applicable laws and regulations in the permitting process and never falsified any residents’ signatures.

“The development permits in relation to the MNC’s land are processed and obtained from the regional government in accordance with prevailing laws and regulations," the company said.

A new partnership

Donald Trump met Hary Tanoesoedibjo in early 2015 through associates in real estate, and by late summer they had a deal.

The two men were an uncanny match.  Both were entrepreneurs who liked luxury and glitz.  They both developed resorts, were hosts of beauty pageants and had political ambitions.

Tanoesoedibjo, 54, lives in the type of splendor Trump could appreciate.  On his 100,000-square-foot estate, he keeps a 23-person house staff and a 1,000-bottle wine cellar, Forbes reported last year.  When he bought a mansion in Beverly Hills, Calif., for $13.5 million last year, it was Trump’s, as The Post first reported last year.

“We’re partners,” Tanoesoedibjo told Bloomberg News in 2017.  “We can come to meet them anytime to discuss the business.”

Before Trump’s campaign, his company was in the midst of a rapid international expansion.  In 2014, Trump spent $79 million in cash to buy two golf courses in Scotland and Ireland.  By the next year, when the two Indonesia deals were signed, Trump Organization officials were touting coming hotels in Vancouver; Baku, Azerbaijan; Punta del Este, Uruguay; and Rio de Janeiro.

Trump’s foreign partners often lacked a reliable track record of real estate success.  Some have faced allegations of corruption.

The beachfront Trump tower in Uruguay remains an unfinished construction site, four years after it was supposed to open, bogged down by lawsuits and financing issues.  The Trump Organization dropped out of Azerbaijan just after Trump’s election amid allegations against the builder of money-laundering and bribery, The Post has reported.  Developers for the Uruguay and Azerbaijan projects did not respond to requests for comment.

The company pulled out of the Rio de Janeiro hotel around the same time amid a federal investigation of potential bribery involving his local partners.  Paulo Figueiredo Filho, Trump’s former hotel partner in Rio de Janeiro, said the Trump Organization did not pull out because of the investigation but because of operational disagreements that remain confidential.  He added that no one was convicted.

Only the hotel in Vancouver has opened.

Even with all the problems, the Trump Organization’s licensing deals abroad remain a lucrative source of income.  In 2018, Trump reported $2 million to $8.7 million in foreign licensing deals and management agreements — not including revenue from the three golf resorts he owns outright in Scotland and Ireland — according to his 2019 personal disclosure form.  The form lists revenue but not profits.  Trump also reported $212,200 in technical services agreements relating to Indonesia that year.

When Trump became president, his company decided to stop new foreign projects.  Donald Trump Jr. told reporters during his visit to Jakarta last year that the company voluntarily gave up “tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars’ worth of deals.”

But for existing projects, or those already in motion, Trump’s new job added fresh complications.  In some places, such as Panama and Toronto, building owners stripped Trump’s now controversial name from their hotels.  Land-use disputes at his golf courses in Scotland and Ireland are now supercharged with international politics.

When Trump took office, Tanoesoedibjo flew in for the inauguration.  He had already lost one campaign for vice president of Indonesia and had formed his own political party and said he wanted to run for president.

Since then, the association with Trump has probably complicated his resort projects.

Trump’s executive order banning visitors from entering the United States from several majority-Muslim countries was not good for public relations in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation.

Although Indonesia was not included in Trump’s ban, MNC officials worried that his stance could provoke a backlash in West Java, with its more conservative Muslim population, the former MNC official said.

A wrenching confrontation

It was two years ago when MNC representatives approached residents in Ciletuh Hilir and offered to pay them to relocate remains from the village cemetery tucked in a grove of trees.

According to the company, some residents accepted the proposal and asked for police protection during the exhumation process because other neighbors were upset.  MNC said that it had “successfully carried out” another cemetery relocation in the Gombong Onan neighborhood.

Residents of Ciletuh Hilir recall that one man agreed to the removal of his relatives’ remains.

“There was no prior communication, no deliberation, no consensus, they were coercive right from the start,” Firmansyah said.  “They came with arrogance, knowing full well they had money, they had power, they came having absolutely no regard for the fact that people here still needed our cemetery.”

On the day the soldiers and police arrived, an angry crowd gathered and argued with authorities, according to video taken at the scene.

The gravediggers disinterred six corpses and put them an ambulance, said three people who were present.  Once neighbors realized that Heri’s relatives had been unearthed by mistake, they rushed to the ambulance and pulled out the four body bags.

Firmansyah said he was in tears as he helped others rebury the remains that day.  According to local Islamic tradition, the ahli waris, or primary heir, should handle any duties related to the grave, not military-backed construction workers, he and other residents said.

“I cannot put into words the mixture of emotions we felt at the time,” he recalled.  “We were upset, angry, all wrapped into one.”

“It felt like it was the end of the world for me,” he said.

Two other bodies dug up that day belonged to sisters — Susanti Binti Caing and Ade Holisah Binti Caing — who had died in 1985 and 1988.  Their mother, Iyum, wasn’t there the day the soldiers came.

“I knew nothing about it until after they were dug up," she said.  “I was shocked.  I cried.”

She had already been grieving: Her husband had died about a week before the gravediggers came.

“I want my children here.  Where they should be,” she said.

Iyum and Heri complained to police.  Iyum’s report, written by her lawyers and filed with the Bogor police three weeks after the graves were dug up, notes that her daughters were “in no way related” to the man who approved his relatives’ relocation, according to a copy obtained by The Post.

“Both of the bodies have not been returned to their graves,” it read.

The controversy at the cemetery quickly led to angry protests.  On Feb. 13, villagers gathered outside the Bogor police station, a scene captured by local media outlets.  Nine days later, a group from the village protested in front of the House of Representatives and the presidential palace in Jakarta, according to photos of the event provided to The Post.

In letters to Hary Tanoesoedibjo and President Widodo in the following months, lawyers representing the village said residents experienced “deep traumatic and psychological pressure” from actions by MNC and Indonesian security forces, such as the loss of the villagers arable land to the military-backed actions at the cemetery.

“The residents’ refusal was not heeded,” read the letter to Tanoesoedibjo, dated April 3, 2019, “to the point that a physical altercation broke out, and the officers continued to carry out the destruction of the cemetery by force and with no regard for human rights.”

Lawyers representing the villagers have issued three subpoenas to MNC Land between December 2019 and February 2020 to discuss the disinterred bodies and the village’s loss of its agricultural land.  But the small legal collective has been hesitant to escalate the situation in the courts because of the company’s vastly superior resources, said Anggi Triana Ismail, one of the lawyers representing the village.

Letter from residents to MNC Chairman Hary Tanoesoedibjo (link)

“MNC has a lot of powerful people on their side,” he said.

No lawsuits have been filed against MNC as a result of complaints “raised by the villagers or relevant communities,” the company said in its statement.

“They do not have a strong basis for filing a lawsuit,” it added.

A place of solitude, for now

Ciletuh Hilir residents say that about 2,000 people are buried in the three-acre cemetery.  Many of the graves are unmarked, except for plants and saplings rising from mounds of earth.

Even those might eventually disappear.

Residents acknowledge that they may not prevail against the coming resort.  A demolition of their community — and relocation of the cemetery — is still a possibility.

For now, neighbors regularly stand guard at the cemetery, worried about an unannounced return of the gravediggers.

They also find moments of solidarity there.  During a recent funeral, neighbors convened to sprinkle flower petals on the freshly turned soil.

Every Thursday evening, Abdullah Sayuti, the village cleric, leads the community in group prayer, as they work through what he called the village’s “psychological burden.”

“People have been feeling uneasy for a while now,” he said.

And so they come together and pray for better times, hoping that life alongside Donald Trump’s future golf course might someday improve.

WORLD - China vs America?

"Does the future still belong to the U.S. and China?" by John Pomfret, Washington Post 4/7/2020

For decades, theorists in the United States and China imagined two futures.  In one, the future belonged to both countries.  This scenario envisioned a world in which Beijing and Washington together managed climate change, economic issues, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and even pandemics.  China would be a “responsible stakeholder,” while the U.S. government would make room for it at the top.  This was the world of engagement, the “Group of Two” and “Chimerica,” of win-win and strategic partnerships.

The second prognosis conjured a future in which one power overcame the other and then helped set the trajectory for the rest of humanity.  In this scenario, competition between Washington and Beijing beat out cooperation.  This was the world of Cold War thinking, decoupling, zero sum and, to use the Chinese phrase, “you die, and I live.”

To be fair, a few scholars questioned this binary perspective.  But, generally speaking, no one really wrestled with the ramifications of a world with neither country on top.

The woeful response of both nations to the coronavirus and the petulant game of gotcha being played in Washington and Beijing provides an opportunity to reconsider these theories and ask the question: Is it possible that neither the United States nor China is capable of world leadership?  And if so, which nation can step into the breach?

Despite an onslaught of mind-bending “fake news” from Beijing, China’s slow response to the coronavirus clearly created the conditions for the global pandemic.  China’s failure to share information with the World Health Organization and the WHO’s apparent pandering to China’s interests made the crisis worse.

China’s unwillingness to provide accurate statistics continues to be an issue.  For one, it has been clear that China has been lowballing its death count.  The Post and others reported that people dying in their homes and outside hospitals awaiting medical attention were not counted in the official tally.  It’s also quite possible that China underreported its total number of COVID-19 cases due to political pressure from the Chinese Communist Party to declare the epidemic under control.

These faulty statistics matter because what happened in Wuhan is now unfolding tragically in other places, such as northern Italy and New York City.  China’s refusal to be transparent about fatalities and infections has made it even more difficult for the rest of the world to prepare for the onslaught.

In reacting to the crisis, China’s government, led by Communist Party boss Xi Jinping, has punished whistleblowers, muzzled citizen journalists and arrested dissidents.  It has tried to play a blame game with the United States, deputizing its spokesmen to spread confusion about the source of the virus.  China also sought to leverage the aid it is giving other countries and to frame every misstep by the United States as something that will benefit Beijing.  In WeChat postings, prominent Chinese have reacted with glee to the news that the disease is spreading rapidly in the United States.  “It’s your turn!” exalted a leading anchor on Chinese state-run television.

China’s economy, which was already slowing, faces even greater headwinds with COVID-19.  Huge problems loom on the horizon involving massive government debt, demographics and a widening drought in northern China.  The virus could only bring these issues forward, forcing an even more abrupt reckoning for Beijing.

Of course, the United States has not acquitted itself with glory either.  The U.S. response has been led by a feckless President who did not recognize the seriousness of the problem.  His underlings have also been less than stellar.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s botched manufacturing of test kits set the country back weeks, if not months, in its response to and understanding of the outbreak.

And members of President Trump’s national security team have often seemed more intent on scoring points against China than in confronting what is now a global menace.  Just consider Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s performance during a meeting of his counterparts at the Group of Seven in late March, during which Pompeo wasted valuable minutes failing to persuade his colleagues in Europe to name the disease “the Wuhan virus” to ensure that China got its fair share of the blame.  The United States is even getting into a bidding war with its Western allies over the purchase of medical supplies.

The United States, too, has punished whistleblowers.  Witness the execrable treatment of Navy Capt. Brett Crozier, who was removed from the command of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier after his appeal to evacuate his crew of 4,000 following a COVID-19 shipboard outbreak was leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle.

To be sure, there are differences between the failures in China and the United States.  The United States remains a free country, and the debate over how to deal with the disease is being held publicly and without the censorship that colors China’s regime.  But neither country can argue that its approach to the virus is worthy of imitation.

Other countries have done a far better job.  In Asia, South Korea and Taiwan stand out as models.  And in the West, Germany, and Canada are faring better, in how they are protecting both their people’s health and their economies.

These differences matter.  How these nations emerge from this once-in-a-generation crisis is going to remake the world order.  Americans and Chinese who believed they were going to remain at the top of the world, either decoupled or engaged, will be in for a rude shock when they discover that the future no longer belongs to them.

AMERICAN POLITICS - Self-Serving Republicans

"Republicans aren’t serving the country, or even the President.  Just themselves." by Michael Gerson, The Washington Post 1/23/2020

It is another of President Trump’s dubious achievements to turn the ultimate constitutional check on Presidential abuses of power into an utter farce.  Watching Republican senators complain that there is “nothing new” in the case made by House impeachment managers, while they are actively opposing the introduction of new evidence and new testimony, is confirmation of barefaced bad faith.  In this matter, elected Republicans are mainly serving, not the President, and certainly not the republic, but themselves.  Having decided that no amount of evidence would be sufficient for conviction, they realize that the presentation of a full and compelling case would convict them of servility and institutional surrender.  So a quick and dirty Senate trial is the best way to limit the exposure of their malpractice.

This crime against democracy is compounded by the eagerness of Republicans to use impeachment as a fundraising opportunity and method to energize base voters.  The theory seems to be: If you are going to betray the constitutional order, you might as well profit from it.

In the impeachment trial, all the dismal signs point to acquittal at any cost.  And it is not the first time the President has skated.  Despite compelling evidence of wrongdoing and obstruction of justice in the Mueller report, Trump largely escaped accountability (even as many of his smarmy advisers did not escape jail).  The appearance of vindication in this case immediately preceded the President’s decision to squeeze an embattled foreign power for his political benefit.  Give Trump an inch, and he’ll take Ukraine.

How has the President largely avoided the consequences of his corruption?  By employing the methods of his mentor Roy Cohn.  Admit nothing.  Stonewall investigators.  Defy subpoenas.  Viciously attack opponents.  Flood the zone with exculpatory lies.  Feel no shame.  Show no mercy.  Claim anything short of prison to be complete exoneration.

In terms that would have gladdened the heart of Richard Nixon in his day, the coverup is working.  Senate Republicans seem determined to cover up for Trump’s coverup.  What is essentially state-run media — Fox News and conservative talk radio — have created a narrative of establishment persecution that covers up for the Senate’s coverup of the Trump coverup.  The President is protected by layer upon layer of obfuscation, misdirection and deception.  Gradually at first, but now in a sudden rush, the norms of truthfulness, public service and ethical behavior have given way.  And the message has been sent to Trump and future iterations of Trump: Corruption has no consequence.

This is a danger to the country because success breeds replication.  Politicians who never dreamed of being anarchic and transgressive now conduct their public business like the Marx Brothers on a caffeine high.  Consider Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) responding to a perfectly appropriate question by CNN’s Manu Raju by saying, “You’re a liberal hack.”  It is nothing new for a senator to show his or her temper.  But McSally then posted her petulance on Twitter and began raising money on the basis of it.  It is human to lose your cool; taking pride in it is to lose one’s marbles.  But this is normal political behavior in the age of Trump.

There is further danger in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s likely acquittal by the Senate.  The President never views a near-miss as an opportunity for reflection and reformation.  He sees it as permission to indulge his every urge.  And his most consistent urge has been to seek unfair advantage in the upcoming Presidential election.  The months between Senate acquittal and the November vote will be fertile ground for further cheating.

And the election itself presents the greatest danger.  Trump avoided accountability after the Mueller probe.  He is likely to avoid accountability for the Ukraine squeeze.  That leaves one last source of accountability — the election in November.  This will be a test, not of the Republican Party, but of the republic.

Every Presidential election is important.  This one will have an added dimension.  It will be more than a referendum on the President.  It will be a referendum on the moral and ethical standards we apply to our political life.  Will corruption, cruelty and coverups be excused and encouraged?  Or will the boundaries of integrity, honesty and public spirit be redrawn?

Congress — with the large exception of the House majority — has largely failed to defend the democratic virtues essential to self-government.  American voters had better do better.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES - Thou Shalt Not Criticize Trump

"National Archives exhibit blurs images critical of President Trump" by Joe Heim, The Washington Post 1/17/2020

The large color photograph that greets visitors to a National Archives exhibit celebrating the centennial of women’s suffrage shows a massive crowd filling Pennsylvania Avenue NW for the Women’s March on Jan. 21, 2017, the day after President Trump’s inauguration.

The 49-by-69-inch photograph is a powerful display.  Viewed from one perspective, it shows the 2017 march.  Viewed from another angle, it shifts to show a 1913 black-and-white image of a women’s suffrage march also on Pennsylvania Avenue.  The display links momentous demonstrations for women’s rights more than a century apart on the same stretch of pavement.

But a closer look reveals a different story.

The Archives acknowledged in a statement this week that it made multiple alterations to the photo of the 2017 Women’s March showcased at the museum, blurring signs held by marchers that were critical of Trump.  Words on signs that referenced women’s anatomy were also blurred.

In the original version of the 2017 photograph, taken by Getty Images photographer Mario Tama, the street is packed with marchers carrying a variety of signs, with the Capitol in the background.  In the Archives version, at least four of those signs are altered.

A placard that proclaims “God Hates Trump” has “Trump” blotted out so that it reads “God Hates.”  A sign that reads “Trump & GOP — Hands Off Women” has the word Trump blurred out.

Signs with messages that referenced women’s anatomy — which were prevalent at the march — are also digitally altered.  One that reads “If my vagina could shoot bullets, it’d be less REGULATED” has “vagina” blurred out.  And another that says “This Pussy Grabs Back” has the word “Pussy” erased.

The Archives said the decision to obscure the words was made as the exhibit was being developed by agency managers and museum staff members.  It said David S. Ferriero, the archivist of the United States who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009, participated in talks regarding the exhibit and supports the decision to edit the photo.

“As a non-partisan, non-political federal agency, we blurred references to the President’s name on some posters, so as not to engage in current political controversy,” Archives spokeswoman Miriam Kleiman said in an emailed statement.  “Our mission is to safeguard and provide access to the nation’s most important federal records, and our exhibits are one way in which we connect the American people to those records.  Modifying the image was an attempt on our part to keep the focus on the records.”

Archive officials did not respond to a request to provide examples of previous instances in which the Archives altered a document or photograph so as not to engage in political controversy.

Kleiman said the images from the 2017 and 1913 marches were presented together “to illustrate the ongoing struggles of women fighting for their interests.”

The decision to blur references to women’s genitals was made because the museum hosts many groups of students and young people and the words could be perceived as inappropriate, Kleiman said in the statement.

Kleiman said the National Archives “only alters images in exhibits when they are used as graphic design components.”

“We do not alter images or documents that are displayed as artifacts in exhibitions,” she said.  “In this case, the image is part of a promotional display, not an artifact.”

When told about the action taken by the Archives, prominent historians expressed dismay.

"There's no reason for the National Archives to ever digitally alter a historic photograph," Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley said.  "If they don't want to use a specific image, then don't use it.  But to confuse the public is reprehensible.  The head of the Archives has to very quickly fix this damage.  A lot of history is messy, and there's zero reason why the Archives can't be upfront about a photo from a women's march."

Wendy Kline, a history professor at Purdue University, said it was disturbing that the Archives chose to edit out the words "vagina" and "pussy" from an image of the Women's March, especially when it was part of an exhibit about the suffragist movement.  Hundreds of thousands of people took part in the 2017 march in the District, which was widely seen as a protest of Trump's victory.

"Doctoring a commemorative photograph buys right into the notion that it's okay to silence women's voice and actions," Kline said in an email.  "It is literally erasing something that was accurately captured on camera.  That's an attempt to erase a powerful message."

The altered photograph greets visitors to "Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote," an exhibit that opened in May celebrating the centennial of women's suffrage.  The 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1920, prohibits the federal government and states from denying the right to vote on the basis of sex.

"This landmark voting rights victory was made possible by decades of suffragists' persistent political engagement, and yet it is just one critical milestone in women's battle for the vote," reads a news release announcing the exhibit on the Archives website.

Archives spokesman John Valceanu said the proposed edits were sent to Getty for approval, and Getty "then licensed our use of the image."

A Getty spokeswoman, Anne Flanagan, confirmed that the image was licensed by the National Archives Foundation but said in an email Friday evening that Getty was still determining whether it approved alterations to the image.

Karin Wulf, a history professor at the College of William & Mary and executive director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, said that to ensure transparency, the Archives at the very least should have noted prominently that the photo had been altered.

"The Archives has always been self-conscious about its responsibility to educate about source material, and in this case they could have said, or should have said, 'We edited this image in the following way for the following reasons,'?" she said.  "If you don't have transparency and integrity in government documents, democracy doesn't function."