“People are actively, persistently racist”: Poet Joshua Bennett on performative anti-racism

Being a successful young professional today usually includes a cluster of events, mixers, panels and meeting on meetings that seem to never end . . . well, it was up until COVID happened. The pandemic swallowed all of our crazy schedules, making even the busiest workaholics learn to function from home. For me, the last few months were eye opening and a time to reflect on the things that really matter like love, family and community – and tune out the things that don’t.

Dartmouth College professor and award-winning poet Joshua Bennett, author of “The Sobbing School” and “Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man” captures the beauty of what really matters in life — the memories, youth sports, family traditions and little moments that many of us take for granted — in his new book of poems, “Owed,” which couldn’t have been more timely. I recently got a chance to talk with Bennett about his new book on an episode of “Salon Talks.”

Bennett and I unpack everything from what it’s like teaching college students during a pandemic to his writing playlist, to the tough questions around how Black writers feel about new enthusiasm for their work from white people. You can watch my “Salon Talks” episode with the Joshua Bennett here, or read a Q&A of our conversation below to hear more.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

How have you been handling COVID?

It’s been surreal, man. I got married.

Congratulations.

Thank you, thank you. I moved out of the city of Boston, I mourned my grandmother, and also had these new books that I actually dedicated to her come into the world. It’s just been this incredible spectrum, thinking about both life and death at this very large, world historical scale. But also, just in the intimate constraints in my own life, thinking about both my grandmother, but also this small new life with my son coming into the world. So, it’s been surreal.

When was your son born?

Well, he’s due in October. The whole process of my wife’s pregnancy, the ultrasounds, everything has taken place really over the past six, seven months.

Is this your first child?

Yes.

I just had my first child in January. And it’s crazy because we got married last year, but we were planning to have a wedding this year, and we just decided to bump it up. We were just thinking about all the people who are going through these COVID weddings, and just like the madness. Did you guys do that?

We did. Right outside here, man, at our new place. The COVID wedding is fascinating.

Has the isolation of COVID been good for your writing? Has being home been good for your writing?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think it’s transformed my writing process. I’ve heard other writers say this. My reading rhythm is completely different. Nowadays it’s strange, because in some ways I was looking forward . . . because I’ve been off from teaching for the past couple of terms. I already was going to have this time off, but being in the midst of the pandemic and the midst of the move, it’s completely changed in some ways, my writing practice, as well.

If I had hours just to myself, you know, I’ll be moving through the poems. And I think it’s just pushed me in a different form. I finished a manuscript, for example, that’s a hybrid of poetry and fiction. I’m finishing up a manuscript that’s narrative non-fiction about the history of spoken word. And those books, I think, have really been inflected by the moment. They both include explicitly, narratives around COVID and thinking about the way this pandemic specifically, I think, has affected Black people in a way that I think has fallen out of the national conversation.

I’ve never been more disciplined throughout my whole career as a writer until this pandemic. I mean, everything is like clockwork to me, from designated writing time, to spending time with my wife and baby, to going for walks. I want it to end, but this production and how organized I’ve become is like, it’s crazy. It’s something that I didn’t imagine.

I do think there are lessons from it. There are always lessons from tragedy. This is again, one of the great gifts of the Black literary tradition and other traditions, right? Is that part of what I’ve learned is what matters to me the most, to be frank.

Talking about intimate time with loved ones, during the pandemic I’ve learned to put that first. I’ve been a very career-driven person since I was quite young, and I think this was the first time it was like, you know, I need to put some of this stuff away, spend time with my wife, get on a FaceTime with my father, with my mother, check in with my goddaughter. You know, these are moments of social life that the pandemic has helped me realize, maybe I was actually pushing them to the background. Even as I was foregrounding them in my work. Thinking about the book, on the cover, is me and my dad, but this pandemic made me think, “Well, how often am I really checking in with him?” So yeah, it’s changed my discipline, but I think in another way, as well.

As a teacher, do you think universities are handling COVID right? Or do you think they’re moving too fast? I’m teaching all online classes this semester, but I love being in a classroom. I need to be in front of my students. It’s part of the social experience for me — their reactions, their readings, the conversations. I’m not excited about starting school this week and being online. But at the same time, safety first. What do you think?

I think it’s a moment in which we have to question what is a university? And what are our highest aspirations for it? Most people in my family didn’t go to college. My mother growing up, was the only person I knew with a college degree. She studied accounting at a school nearby where she lived in the Bronx. At Dartmouth I’m teaching one class online. Some of it’s going to be asynchronous, so it’s not even clear to me how much actual individual teaching time I’m getting with my students.

It’s making me think about those other textured moments, like office hours. I do my office hours as walks around campus. So, you set a time with me, we go on a walk around campus. We talk about what we’re doing, what you’re up to, what questions you have about the course. And that falling out of the teaching experience has been so interesting to me, man.

You asked the question about how I think universities are handling it. The fact that it varies so widely has been really striking. There hasn’t been a kind of uniform – and that mirrors other aspects of how we’re dealing with COVID in this country. There’s no sort of clear federal response, and then universities like Cal State they’re like, “We’re not opening up for the fall.” And then you had other places that said, “Oh, of course, yeah, we’ll open.” And then, other places have a mix, right? With Dartmouth, I think for me, it was clear from the beginning. I have a baby coming into the world. My wife is pregnant. I’m not coming to campus. Even as a junior faculty member, it really made me think, what do you value? And how are you going to express that in a moment of great duress? But yeah, I miss my people.

Let’s get into this amazing book, “Owed.” Talk to me about the cover.

Yeah, shout out to Mom Dukes. My mom took this photo, man, 28 years ago. It’s me and my dad at a party in the house. I’m eating cornbread, collard greens, chicken off his plate. I wanted to honor him. I wanted to honor our family. And when I think about my father, his life is like a textbook. Grew up in Jim Crow, Alabama. Fought in Vietnam. Came back to New York City. Lived with a bunch of his brothers in an apartment building, and met my mother in a house party.

I think a lot about how the way I learned to articulate history and literature is largely from seeing his experience. What I learned about what it meant to be Black came from him. I wanted to honor him on this cover. I think about “Owed” in a double sense, owed as in, these poems are celebration. But also, in aesthetics of reparation, right? As we’re in the midst of this national conversation, how do we think about the other forums that will need to accompany this sort of monetary debt as owed to Black people? How can art contribute to that?

For a lot of people watching this, this is going to be their introduction to you. Can you give us a glimpse into some of the energy behind the creation of this book? What were some of the things that you were feeling as you wrote it?

That’s a great question. What was I feeling? Honestly, I was thinking about . . . And I love some of your insights on this, brother. I was thinking about my first book, “The Sobbing School,” and the moment in 2015 where I was writing that book, largely thinking about Mike Brown and the spirit of grief and mourning and reflection. And I think with this book, trying to also make sure that I was honoring the celebration and the joy and the persistence and the tenacity of Black life.

At the core of this book, I wanted to think what are Black people doing when we’re not just resisting the forces that constrain us, right? I have poems in here about the 99-cent store. I have poems in here about growing up in a middle school where everybody wanted to be a hooper, so we were wearing ankle weights, right? Thinking about those tiny moments of the texture of Black social life that of course, we’re constrained by the police state. But you’re not always thinking about that, right? I think sometimes, the way we’re especially training young writers now to articulate Black life in public, it kind of doubles down on a critique that doesn’t always foreground the full texture of our lives. So, that’s the energy of this book.

I was thinking about church, I was thinking about hip-hop, I was thinking about growing up in Yonkers, you know, in the same neighborhood as Jadakiss and DMX and Mary J. Blige, shout-out, and Ella Fitzgerald. I was thinking about what that kind of literary tradition meant to me, as someone whose mom was from the South Bronx, my father was from Birmingham. I was from Yonkers and what did that mean? This book is also like everything I write, it’s about Yonkers, New York. And it’s about people trying to make a name for themselves. And it’s about, as Gwendolyn Brooks says, you know, their country’s a nation on no map. You know, this is for those people who have never really felt like they have a home here in America, as it’s often advertised.

Every time I read something about ankle weights, I get upset because I think about how I tore my knees up.

Oh, man.

Kids, don’t do it.

It’s not prescribed.

I’m pretty sure Vince Carter never, ever played with ankle weights on concrete. God gave Vince and LeBron and Mike, that’s from God. That’s not from wearing ankle weights on concrete. It doesn’t work like that.

That’s facts. It goes back to discipline. I mean, I loved what you said about discipline in the beginning. Because that’s part of what I’m trying to think about in the book. Like, what are these other forms of discipline that we hone? That 99-cent store poem is also about just growing up. You couldn’t always get the name brand cereal in the supermarket. That’s a form of discipline – like, boy, don’t even reach for those Frosted Flakes. Or like when you’re eight, and you don’t have McDonald’s money. I wanted to celebrate all of that. That’s really the heart of it.

As Black writers, I feel like our stories and our experiences like what you went through in Yonkers versus what I went through in Baltimore, versus what some brothers and sisters are going through in Atlanta, or Compton, or wherever, we all have these interesting stories.

In our current political climate with the constant killing of unarmed Black people, the oppression and the wild racist in the White House, all of these crazy things that are going on have a whole lot of people wanting to connect with us more and understand our stories, and understand our narratives. And sometimes, I’m torn because I think good writing is good writing. Since I became a reader, I’ve been trying to learn about different experiences. But now, a lot of people who are trying to learn about these different Black experiences are only doing it as a reaction to what’s happening in the world. They don’t want to be the person who’s like the racist. Are you okay with that type of attention?

You’re asking the real questions. I mean, it’s strange to me because the relationship is still extractive in some sense, right? I say this as someone that lived for a while in a pretty liberal part of Boston where there are Black Lives Matter signs everywhere, but you’re looking at me wild when I walk down the street.

Crazy, right?

I’m just like, you people are actively, persistently racist, and you have all these books. You have Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, you have the Black Lives Matter sign, and you would never send your kid to a school with Black people, ever. You would actively avoid social spaces with Black people at all costs, right? And so to me, part of what’s so complicated is, there’s a way to adorn oneself in all the trappings of loving Black people, while actually knowing no Black people, having no meaningful engagement with the things Black people have written.

I love how you started with writing. Because you actually talk to some of these folks, and this again, across the spectrum of race and ethnicity, that actually have no engagement with Audre Lorde’s oeuvre, right, as a writer. They’ll rattle her name off, maybe, and maybe they’ll talk about bell hooks. They probably won’t talk about June Jordan. But if they do, say, “Well, have you actually read the substances of what these people are saying? Because they had a critique of a lot of things you love. And they have a critique of the thing you’re doing right now.” So yeah, I don’t love it, man. The idea that Blackness and Black culture is just a site of extraction, is something I think we need to refute at every turn.

Now, do I think this can be a moment where Black institutions, Black writers, Black thinkers, Black studies, practitioners, can get what they’re owed? Of course. I think that’s where we need to put the pressure. It’s like okay, you care about Blackness, Black culture so much, you need to fund Black students’ projects. You need to fund Black cultural centers, Black community centers, Black communities. We need reparations. We need to actively have investments in our people.

Yes, something real. I’m good if you don’t have a sign in your lawn. And I’m also good if you don’t paint Black Lives Matter across the beltway. I mean, it’s cute, but it’s the same thing to as me tweeting, “I care about the kids,” and then just walking past a bunch of starving kids. If you really care, then what are you actively doing to support these ideas that you have versus just the chatter?

Another thing that I thought about while reading “Owed” was just the lyrical bounce to it. I was wondering, “Who is on his playlist?” When you work on different books, do you have different playlists? What sort of songs did you have going through your head while you were putting this together?

I always have Kendrick on and Tramaine Hawkins. Always for me it’s going to be a mix of gospel, hip hop, and R&B. Mint Condition. I always got swing on, in part because that’s my aesthetic, right? I love that you said bounce, because “You Send Me Swingin'” is maybe my favorite R&B song ever. I want the work to swing, so I’m always listening to Mint Condition, Boyz II Men, Whitney, of course. I was listening to this Whitney Houston clip from the “Arsenio Hall Show” where she’s just singing a hymn just off the top of the dome. And I was like, “That’s what I want.” And Sylvia Wynter, my favorite living writer said this; she wanted her work to sound like what it sounds like when Aretha Franklin sings. So, always got Aretha on in the background. Mick Jenkins is a young cat who I think he’s incredibly talented. Love his work. Who else am I listening to? Biggie, of course. Jada, and X.

You definitely got to throw a homie in there.

Yeah, yeah. But I think about X too because I grew up in sort of like a Black Christian family where the theology was very, very heavy. And so for me, DMX helped me marry the sacred and the profane in a way that was so liberating, man. And he also loved animals. So, my first book that came out this year was about the relationship between Black writers and animals. And the way I saw DMX talk about dogs was so fascinating, in part because I think in the United States, we have a very sort of public bourgeois culture around dogs where people talk about dogs as their family members, et cetera.

I’d love to hear about how this looks in Baltimore. In south Yonkers, a dog is not your child. But a dog has value. Like, you don’t disrespect your dog, but a dog is not part of your family. A dog is its own individual. It’s opaque. Dogs attack people. It’s like, you have a kind of unwieldy relationship with this thing, because you recognize its power. And I think DMX talks about that on “Grand Champ.” He says, you know, “I trust dogs more than I trust humans.” And there’s something there that I think is so Black and complicated. His name means Dark Man X. So, I always have Earl in the back of my mind.

Down in Baltimore, people do love their dogs more than anything. I mean, it’s crazy, because like, the first dude who really, really, really introduced me to just pit bull everything, pit bull culture was a dude from Yonkers who moved down to Baltimore. His name was Aaron. He was an older dude, and his dog was kind of like his child. And then, one of my friends, they got a job walking his dog. We were maybe like, 10 years younger than this guy. He got a job walking his dog, and we ended up calling him Dog Boy because he walked the dogs all the time. I feel like it’s strong in New York, but it almost seems like it goes to a different level down South. That’s why I think that one of the reasons why “Salvage The Bones” was so powerful because it hits you. It’s a special relationship. I’m not chasing no dogs around.

It’s hectic. Trust me, I got myself Apollo back here. I mean, it’s hectic, man. And people ask me where his name is from, and I’m like, there’s the Greek version, but it’s also the Apollo Theater and Apollo Creed, right? You see the dog as part of a Black family.

Performance is such a big piece about dropping a new book, of being a poet, of being a writer. You want to get out and you want to share your work. Do you have any plans on doing online readings just to promote the book or to connect with people who have been reading it?

Yeah, for sure. I’ve got a reading coming up with Rachel Eliza Griffiths at the Midtown Scholar Book Store.

Is that in Harrisburg?

Yeah.

That’s one of my favorite book stores. It’s so beautiful.

I read there live for one of my first poetry book drops. And it was packed.

They’ve got a great community. I love that store.

It’s beautiful. One of the best readings I’ve ever had in my life. So, I got a reading there with Rachel Eliza Griffiths. I have an event next month with Imani Perry, who is also my dissertation advisor at Princeton. We’ll be talking about both “Owed,” and also my book of criticisms. I miss the in-person stuff of course because I built my career like that. You know, doing spoken word videos on YouTube. Like, there’s stuff from me when I was 17 years old that’s out there.

Poetry slam was my introduction to it. I mean, it’s funny, I don’t really talk about this a lot in interviews or in public conversations, but I’m a self-taught poet. I didn’t go to an MFA program. I learned through poetry slams and doing spoken word shows. That was my introduction to “literary poetry.” Then, I did the Calgary Creative Writing Workshop. I did Cave Canem It really was all of these historically Black institutions that trained me to think about what it meant to write on the page. I’m classically trained as a literary critic, like I’m PhD in English from Princeton. But when it comes to the poems, I have a completely different project in a certain way, just where it comes from. I’m interested to see what happens to the future of performance, to see a great turn because this distance between us that’s mediated by a screen, it completely changes what a performance is and what it can be.

It does. You do a Zoom in front of like, 200 people, and everybody’s muted, so you can’t hear reactions.

Yeah, especially when energy drives you. Like, if you’re the kind of reader where a snap or a clap or an amen takes you to another level, that’s actually really complicated, what happens when that’s gone?

As a writer, how has it been making the switch to narrative non-fiction from poetry?

Tough. Not going to lie. I try not to lean too much into genre distinction, but I think writing a book of narrative non-fiction is very different from writing a book of poetry. And is different from writing a work of literary criticism, but I think it’s been useful. I didn’t know what genre was when I was five. But I knew a preacher was telling a story, and my grandma was telling a story. And I liked when my mom told stories. And I wanted to find a way to do that with this thing called poetry. And I think narrative non-fiction is bringing me back to that initial impulse in a new and interesting way.

Can you give any advice to new poets on the come up? A lot of people who watch our videos and watch some of the interviews that I do are aspiring writers. They’re up and coming, they’re in their prime. Sometimes, they feel like they want to quit. Sometimes they feel like their work isn’t resonating the way it should. You’ve had tremendous success. Can you give them some knowledge and some things they can walk away with?

Read everything. Read as much as possible. I think sometimes, when you’re not writing, you need to be living. Sometimes when the poems aren’t flowing you actually just need to go outside. And I know the places you can go outside are quite limited right now. But you might just need to go get a breath of fresh air, sit under a tree. Don’t locate your human value on the page.

As someone that came out of a writers’ community where we were all very young, we were making videos, we were touring the world. We were going to Botswana and South Africa and India and U.K. What I wish someone would have told me at that moment, even as I had real, incredible visibility, was that I needed to make sure I was grounding myself in human relationships that had nothing to do with my success as a writer. And I think that’s the most important advice I can give a young writer. Your value should not be located in this craft.

I’ve tried to locate my practice now in the love of people. There are ideas I want to get out. There are people and communities I want to see celebrated in a world that denigrates them. But I do not locate my value as a person on what my books do, or how good my poems or prose are. It’s just not interesting to me anymore, and I think that’s important especially when you’re teaching young people.

Silicon Valley’s service workers speak out about their treatment amid the pandemic

In March, as the coronavirus began its initial spread across the United States, Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies closed their doors and asked their office workers to work from home. What began as a week-long safety measure morphed into a semi-permanent telecommuting directive. Now, tech companies like Facebook have told their employees not to return to the office until July 2021. Yet while software engineers and sales professionals have the luxury to work from home, the service workers who maintained big tech campuses do not.

Lilliana Morales has worked as a prep cook at Facebook’s Menlo Park campus cafeteria for six years through a subcontractor called Flagship. In March, when the Bay Area went on lockdown, Morales was told to go home. Fortunately, she’s still being paid.

“The only information they told us was that we had to go home, but we were going to still receive pay and our health insurance,” Morales said. “I think it’s very nice of them, we need to pay the rent, we need to buy food for our family, and also, because everybody is at home I can take care of my kids and do homework with them while we are at home.”

Morales told Salon she isn’t sure when she’ll return to the tech company’s campus, but right now she is still being paid $22.20 an hour for the shifts she’d usually work.

“They’re doing the right thing,” Morales said.

But not all tech companies are created equally. Augustina Sanchez has worked at the Yahoo cafeteria at the Sunnyvale campus for 12 years as a front of house worker. Two weeks ago she received a letter stating that she was laid off.

“I have tried to do the best that I can to really make sure that the cafeteria has the best service, showing up every single day, and making my best effort every single day,” Sanchez told Salon via a translator. “To get this news was just really upsetting and really sad, this was news that I wasn’t anticipating, and so emotionally it just really made me upset, and very sad.”

Economically, Sanchez said this puts her in a terrible situation as a single parent.

“My son is almost about to graduate from university, he doesn’t have a secure job yet and so for me to lose my job right now, as the person supporting us, is something that’s really worrisome,” Sanchez said. “Unemployment isn’t going to cover my full cost of my rent, and food, and so we’re going to have to look at how we have to adjust and, and how to survive during the next few months.”

Sanchez was one of 91 workers employed by Eurest, a subsidiary of the Compass Group, who was a subcontractor for the Yahoo-Verizon campus.

Jessica Gonzalez had been working at the Yahoo cafeteria as a barista for three years, which was her first job since she arrived in the United States from El Salvador. She said she received her letter of termination on September 4, and that it came as a surprise.

“We all have children and families that are dependent on us and dependent on our jobs, and so for Verizon to make the decision to stop paying us is affecting hundreds of people and all of all of our different family members in our community,” Gonzalez told Salon through a translator. “

Salon didn’t receive a response to a request for comment from Compass Group before publication to get a comment on the reasoning behind the layoffs. In a statement, Maria Noel Fernandez, campaign director for Silicon Valley Rising, expressed disappointment in Verizon — especially since it doesn’t appear to be financially struggling during the pandemic.

“Verizon made over $4 billion just last quarter, but now it’s taking away income and healthcare coverage from these mostly Black and Brown workers in the midst of a global pandemic,” Fernandez told Salon. “Facebook, Cisco, Google, and other big tech firms are acting responsibly by devoting a tiny fraction of their billions to looking after the people who have kept tech campuses running for years — Verizon needs to step up and do the same.”

Last week, many of the workers who were laid off—who are members of Unite Here Local 19—protested the layoffs outside the campus where they used to work, and publicly prepared unemployment applications.

“As the union representing food service workers in Silicon Valley, we are disheartened by Verizon’s decision to put the cafeteria workers who have loyally served their campus at risk by laying them off during a pandemic,” Enrique L. Fernandez, Business Manager for Unite Here Local 19, said in a statement.

Donald Trump’s fatal flaw: Of his many defects, Bob Woodward may have identified the worst

According to interviews recorded by Bob Woodward for his book, “Rage,” Donald Trump was briefed by national security adviser Robert O’Brien on Jan. 28 of this year that the coronavirus “will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” that the virus was five times more deadly than ordinary flu, that it was spread when “you just breathe the air,” and that it would soon become a worldwide pandemic. At the moment Trump told Woodward these things, on Feb. 7, the president had one job: Persuade the American people to work together to deal effectively with this threat to their health and well-being.

That would mean, in the coming months, that Trump would have to convince people it was not just in their interest, but necessary for their very survival, to do a whole bunch of stuff they would not want to do. They would have to endure lengthy “lockdowns,” when they would essentially be confined to their homes. They would have to take their kids out of school and learn to cope with “remote learning” from home. Many of them would have to close down their businesses or be laid off from their jobs. Sports competitions, from junior high and high school level right on through college and professional sports like baseball and basketball, would be canceled. Concerts would be canceled. Museums and zoos and national parks and public attractions like Disneyland and other amusement parks would close. Restaurants and bars would close. People wouldn’t be able to gather in large groups to attend conventions or watch movies or plays or attend their children’s graduations, or even in smaller groups for birthdays and dinner parties and weddings. People would be forbidden to visit their elderly relatives in nursing homes. If their family members got sick, they would not be able to visit them in hospitals. If loved ones died, it would not be possible to celebrate their lives in person at funerals. It would become necessary for people to learn how to “socially distance” themselves and even to wear protective masks when they were around others.

But Donald Trump didn’t know how to convince others to do things they didn’t want to do. All he understood was fear and money. Trump had spent his entire life dealing with people in two ways: He would try to intimidate and frighten them, and if that didn’t work, he would buy them off. Two things which you and I probably look at as to be avoided, yes, like a plague — meeting with lawyers and accountants — Donald Trump did on practically a daily basis. This was the way Trump moved through the world. When he encountered a problem, he would get one of his lawyers to threaten lawsuits or file them, and when the lawsuits failed, he’d ask his accountants to figure out a way to move money that wasn’t his — for example, money from his supposed charitable foundation — so he could buy his way out of trouble with a settlement.

The revelations from Woodward’s interviews with Trump don’t tell us much that we didn’t already know. Trump knew all about the dangers of the virus. Of course he did. Trump lied about what he knew. Ditto. Trump is contemptuous of “his” generals, calling them “a bunch of pussies.” We learned only days before he had called those who gave their lives in battle “losers” and “suckers,” so we knew that, too.

What we haven’t learned yet is why. If Trump knew way back in February that the coronavirus was as dangerous as the 1918 flu pandemic and was likely to cause severe damage to the economy, why didn’t he do what he’d always done and buy his way out of it? Why didn’t he propose a package of about $8 trillion to $10 trillion that would attack the virus with health care spending and protect the economy with a massive stimulus? It was a perfect setup: He could have convinced the supine Republicans to go along, the Democrats would have been all for it, he would be spending someone else’s money, and he might well be coasting his way to re-election by now. But once he had made his case that the virus was just a “hoax,” that it was “like a flu,” and that the U.S. had “pretty much shut it down,” he forfeited his chance to spend his way through the crisis.

Instead, what we got was more than 6.6 million cases of coronavirus, nearly 200,000 dead, and another Trumpian tsunami of lies and cheerleading. Open up! Send the kids back to school! Play ball! It’s going to just disappear! Look at the stock market! Unemployment is down!

The words “magical thinking” come up all the time to describe Trump’s approach to the biggest national disaster faced by this country in a hundred years. But it’s worse than that. It’s not just the lies and dissembling and projection onto others — Look at Biden in that silly mask! Trump’s failures come from a deep, dark well of fear and cowardice and inadequacy. He doesn’t believe in himself, so he has never believed in his ability to influence others.

Donald Trump had no understanding of what I call the exercise of power in the absence of money. This is power at its most absolute, the power to motivate soldiers to risk their lives in combat, the power to motivate doctors and nurses to risk their lives treating patients with deadly communicable diseases, the power that motivates someone to give his or her life for another.

You can’t threaten soldiers with court martial to get them to charge an enemy that is shooting at them. You can’t offer a doctor or a nurse a raise, or threaten to cut their pay, to get them to put on a gown and a mask and gloves and treat patients sick with diseases that could kill them as well as the patients. This is what Donald Trump has never understood: You can’t force someone to do things they don’t want to do. You have to get them to want it.

You do that by leading from the front, as they used to say in the Army. Leading by example. If it’s necessary to convince people to wear masks in order to save lives, then you do something you don’t want to do and wear one yourself. If people are losing their jobs, and you’re asking them to live with less, then you get off the golf course and stop unnecessary crap like redesigning the Rose Garden. If hundreds of thousands of your fellow Americans are dying from a virus that’s not their fault, you write letters of condolence and figure out a way to attend some virtual funerals. You share their sacrifice. You show some respect.

But that’s not Donald Trump. He has no respect. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself, and from his contempt for veterans and what he has told Bob Woodward about his haphazard handling of the pandemic, he isn’t very good at that either. Even as a narcissist, he’s a failure.

In Texas, Republicans fight voting by mail expansion while encouraging their voters to use it

Standing in front of a blue curtain adorned with the seal of the Republican Party of Texas, Allen West offered up what he deemed an “instructional video” for Harris County Clerk Chris Hollins.

It had been a week since Hollins had announced his office would send an application for a mail-in ballot to every registered voter in the county — all 2.4 million of them. Since then, his plans had sparked alarm among top state Republicans, leading to two lawsuits meant to halt it before he could get the applications out.

Purporting to detail the difference between what Hollins, a Democrat, wanted to pursue and “what is really lawful,” West — who recently took the reins of the Texas GOP — inaccurately claimed Democrats were pursuing a “wanton mailing out of ballots.”

“There’s a wrong way and there’s a right way,” West said, touting the GOP’s approach of contacting voters and reminding them to send in their applications.

In reality, Hollins was merely sending applications for a mail-in ballot — something West’s own party has done for years. In recent weeks, voters across the state have been finding in their mailboxes unsolicited applications to request absentee ballots. Some of those mailers — depicting images of President Donald Trump — were from the Republican Party of Texas that West chairs.

As states across the country scramble to make voting safer in a pandemic, Texas is in the small minority of those requiring voters who want to cast their ballots by mail to present an excuse beyond the risk of contracting the coronavirus at polling places. But the ongoing attempts by the White House to sow doubt over the reliability of voting by mail has left Texas voters in a blur of cognitive dissonance. Local officials are being reprimanded by the state’s Republican leadership for attempting to proactively send applications for mail-in ballots, while the people doing the scolding are still urging their voters to fill them out.

What was once a lightly used and largely uncontroversial voting option in Texas — one even Republicans relied on — is now the crux of the latest fight over who gets to vote and, equally as crucial in a pandemic, who has access to safe voting.

“Ensuring vulnerable populations can vote by mail during a pandemic is designed to protect human life & access to the vote,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said on Twitter this week after the county’s mailing plan was temporarily blocked by the Texas Supreme Court. “Those who stand in the way—using voter suppression as an electoral strategy—are throwing a wrench in democracy. We’ll keep fighting.”

“Between a rock and a hard place”

With the novel risks of interacting with others in close quarters, the coronavirus pandemic forced widened awareness of voting by mail options in the country.

Some states pushed forward to broaden eligibility for ballots that could be filled out at home and mailed in or dropped off. Other states began to take the initiative to send out applications to all of their voters. And still other states relied on universal vote-by-mail election systems that have existed for years with little controversy or questions about reliability.

Texas kept its strict eligibility criteria and fought to fend off efforts by state Democrats, civil rights groups and individual voters to expand eligibility through the courts.

That’s left in place automatic eligibility for voters who are 65 and older — a group of voters who are much more likely to be white and generally considered to make up part of the Texas GOP’s base. Other voters qualify if they’ll be out of the county they’re registered in during the entire election period, if they’re confined in jail but otherwise still eligible or if they cite a disability or illness.

In the past, only a small portion of voters have used the vote-by-mail option. But even without expanding eligibility, local election officials are expecting a jump in absentee voters — primarily among voters who have always been eligible but usually vote in person, but also among voters citing a disability or illness that could make voting in person a risky endeavor.

While a lack of immunity to COVID-19 alone does not allow a voter to request a ballot based on disability, the Texas Supreme Court ruled it was up to voters to decide if that lack of immunity combined with their own medical history allowed them to meet the state’s eligibility criteria. The state election code defines disability broadly, indicating a voter is eligible to vote by mail if they have a “sickness or physical condition” that prevents them from voting in person without the likelihood of “needing personal assistance or of injuring the voter’s health.” It’s up to the voter to decide this, and election officials don’t have the authority to question a voter’s reasoning.

“The statute leaves this decision up to the individual,” Nathan Hecht, the chief of the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court recently told the Houston Chronicle’s editorial board. “You can’t ask them. There is no form they have to fill out, they don’t have to swear to it, don’t have to sign anything; all they have to do is say, ‘I want (a mail-in ballot) because in my view I need one.'”

But the partisan fight over voting by mail ushered in by the coronavirus pandemic has forced Republicans into what have at times seemed like conflicting positions.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick characterized efforts to expand mail-in voting during the pandemic as a “scam by Democrats” that would lead to “the end of America.” In a rolling series of tweets, President Donald Trump has pushed concerns of widespread fraud — which are unsubstantiated — in mail-in ballots. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton quoted a local prosecutor saying voting by mail “invites fraud.”

Meanwhile, the Texas GOP sent out applications with mailers urging voters to make a plan to request their mail-in ballots. Fighting in court against Harris County’s plan, Paxton’s office argued “voting by mail is a cumbersome process with many steps to limit fraud.”

Luke Twombly, a spokesperson for the Texas GOP, confirmed the party had sent out ballot applications “like we do every year” to older voters and voters with disabilities that would allow them to qualify. Twombly did not respond to a follow up question on how the party determined voters who would be eligible based on a disability, nor did he respond to questions asking for specifics on the party’s get-out-the-vote efforts tied to voting by mail.

“The cynical explanation is that the intent here is to make it as easy as possible for Republicans to vote by mail but discouraging others and casting doubt over the process following the lead of the president,” said Rick Hasen, an elections lawyer and professor at the University of California-Irvine. “I think that’s a real fine needle to thread.”

It might be in the GOP’s best interest to “encourage voters to vote safely” by mail, particularly as the state’s vote-by-mail rules allow many of their base voters to be automatically eligible for an absentee ballot, but the president is complicating matters for them, Hasen said

“They are caught between a rock and a hard place,” Hasen said.

Some Texas Republicans quietly express frustration that party leaders are casting doubt on a system that they have worked for years to cultivate. West and other prominent Texas Republicans have floated unsubstantiated concerns that increased mail-in voting creates opportunities for widespread voter fraud. In interviews with multiple Republican operatives and attorneys who have worked on campaigns in the state, all suggested privately that the modernized system precludes such a scenario. None of these Republicans would go on the record, for fear of alienating colleagues.

There are some documented cases of fraud in mail-in voting in Texas. But like voter fraud overall, it remains rare.

“This issue … of fraud and voting fraud and all that was brought up years ago, 19 years ago when I was secretary of state,” said U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Laredo Democrat who was appointed Texas secretary of state by former Gov. George W. Bush, a Republican. “I looked at it as secretary of state, and it was so rare, so rare,”

Pointing to a 2018 Trump administration voter fraud commission study that did not find widespread fraud in the U.S. voting system, Cuellar said he finds the voter fraud rhetoric frustrating.

“I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but those cases are few and far between,” he added.

To be sure, expanding the number of people voting by mail in Texas doesn’t come without risks.

There are real concerns that an increase in inexperienced absentee voters could result in increased mistakes on applications and mail-in ballots that could keep a voter from receiving their ballot or result in a rejected ballot. Texas voters must also navigate a mismatch between the U.S. Postal Service’s mailing timelines and the state’s deadlines for requesting and returning mail-in ballots.

“We need to be careful about blanket sending out blanket applications,” said Derek Ryan, a Republican voter data expert. “It’s one thing to send an application to people over 65 who are eligible under state law. It’s one thing to send voters that application; it’s a different ball game when you’re sending it to every voter in the county. It’s obviously going to cause some confusion.”

Paxton’s office echoed that concern in suing to stop Harris County’s application mailings, claiming a mass-mailing would lead voters to “wrongly think they are eligible to vote a mail ballot.” The state is also arguing local elections officials are only allowed to send applications to voters who request them.

(The decision on whether a Texan who is younger than 65 is eligible to vote by mail lies with the voter. And there is no state law that specifically prohibits local election officials from sending out applications for mail-in ballots.)

In an effort to combat confusion among voters, Harris County said it intended to send the applications for mail-in ballots with “detailed guidance to inform voters that they may not qualify to vote by mail and to describe who does qualify based on the recent Texas Supreme Court decision.” In its mailers, the Texas GOP instructs voters to “take immediate action” by confirming they meet the eligibility requirements and filling out an application proactively sent out by the party.

Ryan, the Republican voter data expert, suggested that a past Republican campaign emphasis on vote-by-mail lends credibility to the objections Republicans are raising in Harris County.

“Voting by mail is our bread and butter,” said Ryan, the Republican voter data expert. “I kind of dismiss that more ballot by mail votes automatically favor the Democrats over the Republicans. That might not necessarily be the case. I think that kind of says the Republicans who are opposed to it aren’t necessarily doing it because they think it benefits the Democrats. They’re doing it because of election integrity.”

But in light of those objections, the Texas Democratic Party painted the GOP’s mailings to voters who did not request them as “a shocking display of hypocrisy.”

“It seems if Republicans had their way, the only requirement for Texans to cast a mail-in ballot would be ‘are you voting for Donald Trump?’,” Abhi Rahman, the party’s communications director, said in a statement this week.

The Texas Democratic Party previously announced it was sending out more than 815,000 applications for mail-in ballots to eligible Texas voters in August.

Court battles continue

Sixty days out from the election, the rules for voting by mail in Texas remain largely the same. Though the fight over absentee voting has progressed from a clash over who is eligible to a fight over who can automatically receive an application, some counties — and both political parties — are moving forward with mailing out applications to voters they believe are eligible to vote by mail.

“There’s a national agenda and Texas voters are being pawns of somebody else’s national agenda,” said Myrna Pérez, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It’s disappointing and I think you see evidence of this in the language and how people are talking about it and the campaign we’re seeing. …You see evidence of this in the way people act and what they expect is appropriate for their own voters.”

The Texas Democratic Party is still fighting in court to expand eligibility for mail-in voting for voters younger than 65, though it’s becoming increasingly unclear if that litigation will be resolved in time for the general election.

Meanwhile, Harris County has indicated it isn’t backing down from its plan to send out applications to every voter — even if those applications go out later than they planned. While the USPS has set 15 days out from election day as the cutoff for ballot requests, Texas allows voters to to get their requests in until a week and a half before that deadline. For the general election, that’s Oct. 23.

The Texas attorney general’s office and Harris County convened Friday afternoon to confer on a hearing schedule. They’ll be in court next week.

Disclosure: The Texas Secretary of State has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Trump campaign ad misspells “Nobel” — while touting Trump’s nomination for peace prize

An official campaign ad on social media touting President Trump being nominated for the Nobel Peace Price by a Norwegian right-wing politician has misspelled “Nobel” as “Noble.”

The ad also falsely proclaimed that Trump has “has achieved PEACE in the MIDDLE EAST,” along with the caption “President Trump was nominated for the Noble Peace Prize.”

An official Trump campaign ad on social media managed to misspell Nobel as "Noble" while celebrating Trump's nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize by an publicity-hungry anti-immigration crank from Norway. https://t.co/igjsXtsiYD

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 11, 2020

The Daily Beast has confirmed the ad to be authentic, also pointing out that Trump himself misspelled the word in April in a tweet attacking journalists covering his Russia investigation.

Does anybody get the meaning of what a so-called Noble (not Nobel) Prize is, especially as it pertains to Reporters and Journalists? Noble is defined as, “having or showing fine personal qualities or high moral principles and ideals.” Does sarcasm ever work?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 26, 2020

The climate crisis is happening right now. Just look at California’s weekend

Two weeks ago, after freak lightning strikes torched Northern California but before the inferno of Labor Day weekend had begun, a friend called to talk, like you do when the world is turning to crap and nothing is stable or makes sense. In the past six months she’d fled New York for rural West Marin (due to the pandemic), and West Marin for San Francisco (due to smoke). Now she was planning to leave San Francisco for Los Angeles, as the gross air had descended here. We joked, as I’d joked with every friend this summer, that we should all just drop out and start a commune on a lake in Maine. “Every commune needs lesbians!” she said. “I’ll be our lesbian! California is going to become unlivable!”

Two weeks ago, this was a funny conversation. By Sunday, it was not.

This was the weekend that climate change, in California, stopped being about the future. The weekend that the idea that COVID-19 was worse than climate change, or fascism was worse than climate change, disappeared. The experts, of course, had known this for some time. But by the point August turned into September, the drumbeat of California’s environmental anomalies had grown so horrid and relentless that not even the professionals could stay detached. Way back, a lifetime ago, on Sept. 3, Daniel Swain, UCLA’s extreme-weather climate scientist who’s made a name from himself by tweeting, in plain language, just what the hell is going on, wrote, “This *gesturing wildly and in every direction* is utterly exhausting.”

Still, through Friday the 4th and into Saturday the 5th, Swain tried his professional best to keep his readers up to date on the all-time record high temperatures in a staggering number of California cities and the unheard-of airlift rescue of 200 people from the Creek Fire surrounding Mammoth Lake. But by Saturday evening, his emotional and lexicographical reserves were growing thin. “Yeah, it is almost literally unbelievable, but I’ve been saying that a lot lately,” he wrote while commenting how the Creek Fire had exploded to more than 100,000 acres even before it reached the part of the Sierra where, due to climate change, bark beetles killed millions of trees.

For a moment early Sunday morning, he appeared to get his vocabulary and mojo back: “Active pyrocumulonimbus (“fire thunderstorm”) activity occurred through night — resembling volcanic eruption …”

But by 8 a.m. he’d exhausted his vocabulary and himself: “These are getting harder and harder to write.”

The stakes had shifted; the essential subject-object dynamic changed. The earth — at least the part of it that is California — was no longer a backdrop for our actions, the set of our play. It had become the diva, the star of our horrible drama, the villain demolishing cascades of plans for all of us little specks hubristic enough to believe we could still make them.

Midmorning Sunday, hoping to escape the heat and smoke, I walked across San Francisco’s Great Highway, on the far western edge of the city, to Ocean Beach. Last year, the city closed part of the Great Highway due to blowing sand (and it plans to move a whole stretch in the future due to sea level rise). This spring, the city closed the road again, so residents could exercise, socially distanced. Then on Sunday, Mayor London Breed shut down not just the Great Highway but the parking lots along Ocean Beach. Labor Day weekend is Burning Man weekend in the traditional Bay Area calendar. Given that Burning Man 2020 was canceled, 1,000 people gathered Saturday night on the beach instead.

The next day the mayor called the partiers “absolutely reckless and selfish,” and she closed the beach parking to make an example of them.

Marin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Maine. Since March we’d been canceling plans and making backup plans, and then scrubbing those plans, too.

Back at my house, I sat in front of my fan and my HEPA filter. My mother called. She was going to see my sister in Marin that day, because Marin was going to be cooler than Napa, where she lived. But Mill Valley was 106. Napa was 110. And there is still our pandemic, so no socializing in the air conditioning inside.

I tried to call Gov. Gavin Newsom, who declared a state of emergency in Fresno, Madera, Mariposa, San Bernardino and San Diego counties that day. I called former Gov. Jerry Brown. I wanted a civic parental figure, a leader to help me, and the rest of California, think about the state’s past and its future, to analyze how we’d come to this point where we’d made so many plans we later had to call off. When Brown called me back, he was in a very practical mood. What he would say to Californians who are feeling grief this weekend over the condition of the planet and the state?

“OK, No. 1, I wouldn’t talk about the planet,” he said. “That’s a very abstract idea.”

He was all for the individual actions we all know we need to take — change the cars we drive, the foods we eat. But what he really felt we needed to do was harness our values, consolidate our pain into outward pressure and political power, not retreat into fantasy communes. World leaders have not done nearly enough to meet the climate crisis because we have not demanded enough of them. So, Brown said, we need to break down and reverse engineer the problem. Start the causal chain: “build the belief that builds the consensus that allows the leaders to make the decisions that we need to make.” This could be grounded in individuals, right here, this weekend. But the consensus and accountability needed to fan out across the globe. “When I say that leaders I mean the mayor, the city council, the governor, the legislator, the Congress, the president, President Xi, President Putin, Prime Minister Modi, the whole crowd. They’ve got to get on board. If any of the major players play hooky, then we all will suffer.”

Since 2006, when California passed its landmark greenhouse gas reduction legislation, the state has basked in a glowing reputation with regard to climate policy. In some ways we legitimately earned our gold star. But we’ve also used sleight of hand: shell games of carbon credits, a focus on inventing incredible new sustainable-energy tech while still pumping over 10 million barrels of oil a year out of the ground. With the wildfires, too, we put on a fantastic performance: uniformed firefighting armies, a huge air show. But in our overzealous suppression efforts we left our forests choked with fuel. Now we have megafires like the ones that shut down eight national forests (and camping in all national forests in California) this weekend. Fires so powerful they create their own weather. Not even our dazzling army can fight them.

So is Brown hopeful we’ll meet this moment?

The Jesuit-trained, student-of-Buddhism governor took a deep breath and let his spiritual side talk. “I focus on what I can do. Hope is an interesting virtue,” he said. “There’s three, right? There’s faith, there’s hope and there’s charity. And we all know what faith is: You either believe or you don’t believe.” Charity: “You’re generous, you help people, you love people OK, I know what that is. Hope. Hope is what? A state of mind? I’m not quite sure.”

Brown paused again. “Hope derives from a belief that life has good things in store. I definitely think that’s possible. I also think the alternate is possible, too.”

At dusk, Sunday night, I sat on my back porch with my husband and drank a cocktail the color of the smoky orange sky. We’ve both been writing about fire and as a result, we both know too much. We know that even if California starts lighting prescribed fires at the rate we need to ignite them, our Septembers will be filled with smoke for the rest of our lives. But we need to make those plans anyway, and we need to keep them, too. The timing never feels right for the big, important parts of life. Your children are too young and then they’re too old.

The climate crisis was too distant … until Sunday in California. Then we woke up with its thick, hot smoke upon us and realized it was smothering our lives.

Trump’s law-and-order campaign relies on an American tradition of racist and anti-immigrant politics

The Republican Party made it clear in its national convention that it intends to make restoring “law and order” central to this fall’s presidential campaign.

As he did when he first ran in 2016, President Donald Trump highlighted law and order in his 2020 acceptance speech.

“Your vote,” Trump said, “will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans and whether … we will defend the American way of life or allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.”

For a student of the politics of law and order, the president’s rhetoric is familiar. It builds on, and borrows from, a strand of thinking running back to the early years of the republic.

Throughout this nation’s history, appeals to law and order have been as much about defending privilege as dealing with crime. They have been used in political campaigns to stigmatize racial, ethnic and religious groups and resist calls for social justice made by, and on behalf of, those groups.

19th-century American law and order

The first stirrings of law-and-order politics in the U.S. occurred in the 1830s in response to agitation for expansion of the vote. At the time, only whites who owned property could vote. Reformers wanted to extend the franchise to all white men.

In 1840 Samuel Ward King, the governor of Rhode Island, formed the Law and Order Party to oppose such proposals. Troubled by an influx of immigrants, his party wanted to preserve the state charter that disenfranchised the 60% of the state’s white, male residents who did not own property.

But the tide of reform proved to be too strong, and in 1843 the charter was changed, extending suffrage to any native-born adult male, regardless of race, who could pay a poll tax of US$1. This change led to the demise of Rhode Island’s Law and Order Party.

Fifteen years later, another Law and Order Party emerged, this time in Kansas. It promoted the cause of slavery, which it claimed was ordained by God. As David Atchison, one of the party’s leaders, said, “We believe slavery is a trust and guardianship given us of God for the good of both races. Without sugar, cotton, and cheap clothing, can civilization maintain its progress?”

Toward the end of the 19th century, law-and-order rhetoric played a key role in the Prohibition movement to ban alcohol. This movement was led by rural Protestants whose political power was being challenged by a growing population of urban, Irish-Catholic immigrants.

As Frances Willard, a prominent leader of that cause, said, “There is a war in America … between the rum shops and religion. They stand over against each other, insurmountable and unalterable foes.”

Resisting social change

The politics of law and order remained animated by resistance of social change during the 20th century. While it did not have much political purchase during the early part of the century, the phrase “law and order” was used by Republican Gov. Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts in a 1920 speech to rally opposition to labor union organizers.

As crime rates rose and urban disorder intensified in the 1960s, the attraction of law and order as a campaign issue grew as well.

In 1964, Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater took up the law-and-order banner in his campaign against President Lyndon Johnson.

Goldwater linked the problem of crime with the prevalence of public welfare programs and decried “the growing menace in our country … to personal safety, to life, to limb and property, in homes, in churches, on the playgrounds, and places of business, particularly in our great cities.”

In 1968, both Republican Richard Nixon and George Wallace, a former governor of Alabama running as an independent, seized on the law-and-order issue in the presidential campaign. Nixon promised, “The wave of crime is not going to be the wave of the future in the United States of America. We shall reestablish freedom in America.”

Nixon made law and order, which some scholars said was a coded racial appeal, a key part of a “Southern strategy” that sought to get Southern Democrats to switch their allegiance to the Republican Party.

In the 1988 presidential race, GOP candidate George H.W. Bush stressed law and order in his campaign against Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. His criticism of Dukakis was crystallized in the so-called “Willie Horton” ad. Horton had been convicted of murder but was released from prison under a prison furlough program during Dukakis’ tenure – only to commit serious crimes again. The ad featured images of prisoners moving through a revolving door and a picture of an African American man that was clearly intended to refer to Horton.

It was a devastating line of attack, and Bush won the election.

Four years later, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, the Democratic candidate for president, tried to make law and order a pro-Democratic issue. He argued that Bush had not kept his promise to control crime and said, “We cannot take our country back until we take our neighborhoods back.”

But Clinton also took the unprecedented step of connecting law and order and the promotion of civil rights.

“I want to be tough on crime and good for civil rights,” Clinton said. “You can’t have civil justice without order and safety.”

Clinton won the election.

Trump takes it further

Many accounts of President Trump’s law-and-order campaign trace its roots back to Nixon’s 1968 campaign. But I believe it has an older pedigree, running much deeper into America’s past.

In his mobilization of resentments against immigrants and others who threaten “the American way of life,” the president is very much within the centuries-old tradition of law-and-order appeals.

In another sense, he is inverting modern law-and-order politics. To date, it has been used by challengers in campaigns designed to appeal to people who believe that they are losing ground as society changes.

In 2016, Trump ran just such a campaign. He cited rampant lawlessness and “race riots in our streets on a monthly basis” as reasons to “change our leadership immediately.”

He is again warning of lawlessness and rioting, but this time as a central reason not to change the nation’s leadership.

Democratic candidate Joe Biden correctly highlighted the irony and audacity of that effort by reminding Americans that Trump “keeps telling you if only he was president … you’d feel safe. Well, he is president.”

Austin Sarat, Associate Provost and Associate Dean of the Faculty and Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

“Downright criminal”: Report that “racist Trump stooge” tried to censor CDC reports rocks experts

Days after President Donald Trump admitted to knowingly downplaying the Covid-19 pandemic in his statements to the public, new reporting late Friday revealed that Trump political aides have been reviewing—and in some cases altering—weekly CDC reports about the deadly virus in an effort to bring them into closer alignment with the president’s false narrative and claims.

Politico reported Friday evening that the Health and Human Services Department’s politically appointed communications aides, led by former Trump campaign official Michael Caputo—a Republican strategist with no medical expertise—”have attempted to add caveats to the CDC’s findings, including an effort to retroactively change agency reports that they said wrongly inflated the risks of Covid-19 and should have made clear that Americans sickened by the virus may have been infected because of their own behavior.”

The primary target of the Trump officials’ interference, according to Politico, has been the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWR), a crucial resource for experts, public officials, and members of the public seeking to track the spread of Covid-19. While CDC officials have pushed back on meddling from political appointees, Politico reported that the agency has “increasingly agreed to allow the political officials to review the reports and, in a few cases, compromised on the wording.”

According to one internal email obtained by Politico, Caputo aide Paul Alexander accused the CDC—an agency directed by Trump appointee Robert Redfield—of “writing hit pieces on the administration” and attempting to use its weekly reports to “hurt the president.”

“CDC tried to report as if once kids get together, there will be spread and this will impact school re-opening,” wrote Alexander, an assistant professor of health research at McMaster University in Toronto. “Very misleading by CDC and shame on them. Their aim is clear.”

Alexander demanded that Redfield allow the HHS aide to personally edit the CDC’s reports, which are authored by career scientists.

“The reports must be read by someone outside of CDC like myself, and we cannot allow the reporting to go on as it has been, for it is outrageous. Its lunacy,” Alexander, who has also attempted to alter the public messaging of Dr. Anthony Fauci, wrote to Redfield. “Nothing to go out unless I read and agree with the findings how they CDC, wrote it and I tweak it to ensure it is fair and balanced and ‘complete.'”

Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves called the emails “explosive” and said Caputo should resign immediately.

“This is just beyond the pale,” Gonsalves tweeted. “Caputo, with acquiescence of Redfield, has started to twist the science to Donald Trump’s advantage. It’s sick and disgusting.”

In one email to CDC officials obtained by POLITICO, a Caputo aide blistered scientists and called for already-published reports to be retroactively altered. pic.twitter.com/QSFhMlU00i

— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) September 12, 2020

According to Politico, attempts by political appointees to alter the MMWR to their liking “began in earnest after a May report authored by senior CDC official Anne Schuchat, which reviewed the spread of Covid-19 in the United States and caused significant strife within the health department.”

“HHS officials, including Secretary Alex Azar, believed that Schuchat was implying that the Trump administration moved too slowly to respond to the outbreak,” Politico continued. “The HHS criticism was mystifying to CDC officials, who believed that Schuchat was merely recounting the state of affairs and not rendering judgment on the response.”

In addition to trying to change the language of CDC scientists to make it fit with the president’s rosy depiction of the pandemic, Caputo and his aides have also moved “to halt the release of some CDC reports, including delaying a report that addressed how doctors were prescribing hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug favored by Trump as a coronavirus treatment despite scant evidence,” Politico reported Friday.

“The report, which was held for about a month after Caputo’s team raised questions about its authors’ political leanings, was finally published last week,” Politico noted. “It said that “the potential benefits of these drugs do not outweigh their risks.”

Downright criminal stuff here. The whole executive branch will need an audit. https://t.co/FifycXnJfE via @politico

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) September 12, 2020

Politico’s new reporting represents just the latest evidence of the Trump administration’s ongoing interference in the activities of public health agencies, an effort lawmakers and experts have denounced as a deliberate campaign to undermine trust in Covid-19 data and advance the president’s political agenda.

“A Trump stooge with a history of racist statements and no medical background is doctoring CDC reports warning Americans on Covid because they make Trump look bad,” Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.) tweeted late Friday, referring to Caputo.

Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, said the “Trump CDC is dead to me if they muzzle the MMWR.”

“To kill the MMWR,” Feigl-Ding added, “is akin to burning science.”

Is South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, a Trump superfan, the nation’s worst COVID governor?

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican who is the first woman to lead that rural and sparsely populated state, is taking her turn in the national hot seat as the Mount Rushmore State has become the nation’s latest coronavirus “hot spot.” In distinctly Trump-like fashion, the Trump-friendly Noem has turned to right-wing outlets like Fox News to lash out at critical media coverage and rail against an “elite class of so-called experts.” But as was the case with Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Georgia’s Brian Kemp and Arizona’s Doug Ducey, conservative media has rushed to circle the wagons around Noem just as the fuller picture of her failed handling of the coronavirus crisis becomes clearer.

South Dakota is now considered in the “red zone” for COVID-19 cases after ranking as the second-worst-hit state in the nation for new cases and test positivity per capita over the last two weeks, according to the latest document prepared for governors by the White House Coronavirus Task Force. But Noem is one of 14 Republican governors who have ignored the task force guidelines to curb the spread of COVID-19, even as the White House says that increasing case counts in South Dakota and “remarkably high” test positivity are “deeply concerning” given insufficient testing levels in the state.

While the World Health Organization’s benchmark for business re-openings is a 5% rate of positive tests, South Dakota has seen a positivity rate above 10% since Aug. 16. Both daily active cases and hospitalizations have more than doubled in South Dakota since the start of August, and no other state has seen such a rapid expansion rate. Over the past week, there have been an average of 236 confirmed cases per day, an increase of 48% from the average only two weeks earlier. That’s out of a total state population of roughly 885,000, which ranks 46th in the nation.

Despite such troubling trends, Noem is among the few state governors who never imposed a shelter-in-place order. Her administration has refused to impose any restrictions on businesses or public activities, contrary to calls from South Dakota’s largest medical association. And Noem has resisted issuing a face-mask mandate — even though guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have said for months that everyone should wear a facial covering while in public to help curb the spread of the coronavirus. She’s even encouraged parents to send their kids back to school “without masks.” As of the end of August, more than 550 people had been infected at the state’s universities, with another 200 cases recently reported in K-12 schools.

Noem initially attempted to conceal the latest statistics out of her state. When the Argus Leader, the daily newspaper in Sioux Falls, requested a copy of the weekly reports sent to the state health department from the White House task force, Noem’s office refused. When Trump repeatedly touted the drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential COVID remedy, Noem was was among the first to launch a trial of the unproven drug, which was later quietly dropped.

Noem’s public rhetoric also has a distinctively Trumpian flavor. She recently asserted that “about 95% of the population … is not at risk for serious infection” and announced that “South Dakota is open for business” after four workers at a Smithfield Foods meatpacking plant in the state died and another 48 were hospitalized. She made a big show out of not requiring social distancing or masks at Trump’s pre-Fourth of July event at Mount Rushmore, appearing on Fox News with host Laura Ingraham to brag about the lack of safety precautions. The state reversed its longstanding fireworks ban and spent $1.5 million on the event. Noem reportedly even gifted Trump with “a four-foot replica of Mount Rushmore that included a fifth presidential likeness: his.” In return, the president flew her back to Washington aboard Air Force One.

Noem has been tying herself ever more closely to the president since narrowly winning election in 2018 — after a last-minute campaign push by Trump and Vice President Mike Pence helped her edge out her Democratic challenger in the closest South Dakota governor’s race in decades. Noem won a congressional seat in the Tea Party Republican wave of 2010, and served as her state’s sole House member for eight years, but only won 51% of the vote against Democrat Billie Sutton in what is generally a die-hard red state.

More recently, Noem — who counts onetime Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski as a top adviser — has embarked on a multi-state campaign tour as an official surrogate for Trump’s re-election campaign. During the pandemic, she has traveled to Republican events in states like Ohio and Iowa, in the latter state finding a kindred spirit in Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, who has also resisted a statewide mask mandate in the face of official recommendations amid a surge in cases. The 48-year-old Noem clearly aims to become a national right-wing star, and has spent $130,000 in taxpayer funds to build a studio in the basement of the State Capitol for her frequent Fox News appearances — including one this past week to defend her decision to promote the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, one of the largest public events held since the start of this pandemic.

More than 460,000 people from across North America descended on the small city of Sturgis, in western South Dakota, for the 10-day rally that ran Aug. 7-16. That came even after the city council surveyed local residents and found that more than 62% opposed holding the rally. Sturgis officials went forward anyway, unable to say no to the $800 million in revenue the rally generates.

Most bikers and enthusiasts who attended the event did not wear masks or practice social distancing, as the Associated Press reported at the time. South Dakota shot up to No. 2 in the country in per capita cases shortly thereafter. It’s hard to conclude that’s merely a coincidence. As of last week, the AP had identified 290 cases in 12 states tied to the rally. In South Dakota, 118 residents who attended the rally have subsequently tested positive for COVID-19, and one has died. Noem has since allowed the state fair to continue as planned and announced plans to add a 13,000-person concert to the annual “Governor’s Hunt” that celebrates South Dakota’s pheasant season in October, which she has promised will be ” bigger and better than ever before.”

Noem now stands alongside Florida’s GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, who allowed the Daytona Bike Week to proceed in March with 500,000 people attending, in terms of permitting potential super-spreader events. According to an Aug. 8 article by the New York Times’ Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman, Lewandowski unsuccessfully lobbied Trump to attend the Sturgis rally in an effort to boost Noem’s profile.

Her biggest turn in the spotlight so far came a few weeks later during her address to the Republican National Convention, in which Noem ignored the spread of coronavirus in her state in favor of culture-war platitudes about saving Confederate monuments from left-wing mobs. (South Dakota did not become a state until 1889, and the Dakota Territory played no role in the Civil War.) Noem then ordered the South Dakota Department of Tourism to run a 30-second spot she narrated on Fox News during the convention, at a price of $819,000. That was part of a $5 million tourism campaign using federal coronavirus relief funds that comes with great potential personal gain for the governor.

Like the president she admires, Noem has a history of using her office to boost family members. She hired her daughter as a policy analyst while the latter was still in college, and hired her son-in-law for a different position in the governor’s office. Her daughter got a promotion and hefty pay raise at a time when other state employees did not. Without citing any specific threats, Noem’s team proposed a $400,000 security fence to be erected around her residence, mostly at taxpayer expense.

Meanwhile, Noem has publicly boasted about turning down federal unemployment relief, citing a healthy state economy she attributes to never locking down. She rejected an additional $300 in unemployment benefits per week for unemployed South Dakotans, refusing to kick in the required $100 in state-provided benefits and claiming South Dakota had recovered nearly 80% of its job losses since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Noem told Fox News this week that her response has been “a balanced approach” and pointed to the state’s tax revenues, which who 8.7% more money coming in this fiscal year than projected.

Noem was quick, however, to reach out to the Trump administration to stop sovereign Native American nations from erecting coronavirus checkpoints on highways leading into their territory, even as the virus spread through Native communities. She told Trump in June that she needed federal assistance “to bring a prompt end to these unlawful tribal checkpoints/blockades on U.S./State highways” as “a final alternative to formal litigation.” It’s unclear what type of federal reinforcement she sought, but the governor later suggested that her opposition to coronavirus checkpoints in Indian Country was linked to the Keystone XL pipeline protests.

“‘For every action that we take, and the tribes take, they’re setting precedent,” Noem warned in a letter to the Department of Justice. “If we allow checkpoints to shut down traffic in this situation, then we are setting precedent for that to happen far into the future in many other situations as well.” She has subsequently refused to meet with the state legislature’s bipartisan State-Tribal Relations Committee.

Noem’s Trumpian words and deeds, along with her charismatic media appearances and her determination to strip benefits from the unemployed have made her favorite among virtually all factions of the right. Expect her to be a leading Republican presidential contender within the decade.

Hugo Weaving sounds off on Republicans, alt-right twisting “The Matrix” and “V for Vendetta”

“The Matrix” co-director Lilly Wachowski went viral on social media in May after she slammed Ivanka Trump and Elon Musk for using the red pills at the center of her 1999 science-fiction movie to show support for Donald Trump and the Republican party. It was hardly the first time such a connection has been made, as Trump supporters and alt-right groups have been coopting “The Matrix” for several years now. In a new interview with The Daily Beast, “Matrix” actor Hugo Weaving says right wingers who are using “The Matrix” to express support for their political agenda have no idea what “The Matrix” truly represents.

“I am befuddled by it,” Weaving said. “It just goes to show how people don’t read below surfaces. They don’t read between the lines. They will take something that they think is cool and they will repurpose it to fit themselves when the original intention or meaning of that thing was quite the opposite.”

Weaving notices the same issue happening with the infamous Guy Fawkes mask his character wears in “V for Vendetta,” the 2006 James McTeigue-directed dystopian drama that the Wachowski sisters produced. Weaving noticed recently a group of people holding guns and wearing the “V for Vendetta” face masks while protesting the Black Lives Matter movement.

“I was like, ‘Wow, man. That couldn’t be more the opposite of what it stands for!’ Weaving said. “The original V was based on Guy Fawkes, and these guys were trying to blow up the House of Parliament. They were young Catholic protesters who were being persecuted by their government, trying to rebel against that, and taking very violent course of action to make their cause. To me, that mask has always represented questioning the government. And somehow now it’s guys who are generally unhappy with what’s going on, or guys who think they look cool.”

“The same with ‘The Matrix,'” Weaving continued. “There was something to do with looking cool in black with a gun, and then you can go into a school and shoot people and somehow you’re immune from the consequences of that because you feel like you’re cool — you feel like you’re V, or you feel like you’re Neo or something. It’s a very, very shallow reading of the intention of a film.”

As Weaving explains it, the “problem with culture” is that “these films are profoundly thought through, but it’s too easy to look cool, have a cool haircut, and have a gun, and you think that’s all you need to do in life. But you haven’t thought about what that gun is for, and what that haircut is for, and what those black clothes are meant to be. What are you trying to do all this for? Is it all narcissism and ego? Or is it about community and thinking about what’s right for other people?”

“When you get such a split in society, it’s because there isn’t the leadership at the top,” Weaving concluded. “They aren’t thinking about other people and are only thinking about themselves. Trump is the classic, most unbelievable example. ‘Narcissist’ is a stupid thing to say, it’s so obvious. He doesn’t give a flying f**k about anyone else but himself. It’s just unbelievable that he’s the president.”

Weaving will not be appearing in “The Matrix 4” due to scheduling conflicts. Head over to The Daily Beast to read the full interview.

Kate Winslet: “What the f**k was I doing working with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski?”

Kate Winslet is sounding off on her regrets over working with Woody Allen on “Wonder Wheel” and Roman Polanski on “Carnage.” Allen has been accused of molesting his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow when she was a child, while Polanski was arrested in 1977 for raping a 13-year-old girl. Ahead of the world premiere of her new romance “Ammonite,” Winslet tells Vanity Fair it’s disgraceful that Hollywood held the two controversial filmmakers in high regard for so long.

“It’s like, what the f**k was I doing working with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski?” Winslet said. “It’s unbelievable to me now how those men were held in such high regard, so widely in the film industry and for as long as they were. It’s f**king disgraceful. And I have to take responsibility for the fact that I worked with them both. I can’t turn back the clock. I’m grappling with those regrets but what do we have if we aren’t able to just be f**king truthful about all of it?”

Winslet’s comments to Vanity Fair differ from an interview she gave to The New York Times in September 2017 ahead of the “Wonder Wheel” premiere at the New York Film Festival. The Oscar winner defended working with Allen at the time, saying, “As the actor in the film, you just have to step away and say, I don’t know anything, really, and whether any of it is true or false. Having thought it all through, you put it to one side and just work with the person. Woody Allen is an incredible director. So is Roman Polanski. I had an extraordinary working experience with both of those men, and that’s the truth.”

Working on “Ammonite” also changed Winslet’s views on the kinds of roles she wants to tackle moving forward in her career. “It’s made me really aware of being even more committed to honoring what women want to be saying for themselves in films and how we really want to be portrayed, regardless of sexual orientation,” the actress told Vanity Fair. “Because life is f**king short and I’d like to do my best when it comes to setting a decent example to younger women. We’re handing them a pretty f**ked-up world, so I’d like to do my bit in having some proper integrity.”

Winslet herself has experienced harassment on film sets, starting with her breakout role in Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures.” The actress recalled the filming of an intimate scene where she and co-star Melanie Lynskey were naked from the waist up and one of the camera boys said to someone else, “Well, I guess it’s hard-d**ks day, boys.”

“I was like, ‘Uh,’ but I did this weird thing that you do when you’re younger of just going, ‘Well, that wasn’t very nice, but we’d better not say anything,'” Winslet said. “And so I just carried on. I must have sort of buried it, because I had forgotten. But now it’s crystal clear. I can actually remember what the guy looked like. I remember his name, and he really was a nice guy, but when you’re younger, you do this nonsense thing of just thinking, ‘That’s what men say.’ And they do it sometimes like they’re breathing. I don’t know a single girl, actually, who hasn’t experienced some level of harassment on that level. Even if they’re just words, they’re so powerful. It’s like bullying.”

Head over to Vanity Fair’s website to read more from Winslet’s latest profile.

Exercise and diet are more important than ever with COVID at large

If your life these days is anything like mine, a pre-pandemic routine that included regular exercise and disciplined eating has probably given way to sedentary evenings on a big chair, binge-watching reruns of your favorite TV series while guzzling chocolate ice cream or mac ‘n’ cheese.

But let’s not beat ourselves up about it. Several doctors I spoke with recently said most of their patients and many of their colleagues are struggling to maintain healthy habits amid the anxiety of the pandemic. “The Quarantine 15” (pounds, that is) is a real phenomenon.

The double challenge of protecting our health, including our immune systems, while battling unhealthy temptations “is a struggle everyone is dealing with,” says Dr. David Kilgore, director of the integrative medicine program at the University of California-Irvine.

Well before COVID-19, more than 40% of U.S. adults were obese, which puts them at risk for COVID-19’s worst outcomes. But even people accustomed to physical fitness and good nutrition are having trouble breaking the bad habits they’ve developed over the past five months.

Karen Clark, a resident of Knoxville, Tennessee, discovered competitive rowing later in life, and her multiple weekly workouts burned off any excess calories she consumed. But the pandemic changed everything: She could no longer meet up with her teammates to row and stopped working out at the YMCA.

Suddenly, she was cooped up at home. And, as for many people, that led to a more sedentary lifestyle, chained to the desk, with no meetings outside the house or walks to lunch with colleagues.

“I reverted to comfort food and comfortable routines and watching an awful lot of Netflix and Amazon Prime, just like everybody else,” Clark says. “When I gained 10 pounds and I was 25, I just cut out the beer and ice cream for a week. When you gain 12 pounds at 62, it’s a long road back.”

She started along that road in July, when she stopped buying chips, ice cream and other treats. And in August, she rediscovered the rowing machine in her basement.

But don’t worry if you lack Clark’s discipline, or a rowing machine. You can still regain some control over your life.

A good way to start is to establish some basic daily routines, since in many cases that’s exactly what the pandemic has taken away, says Dr. W. Scott Butsch, director of obesity medicine at the Cleveland Clinic’s Bariatric and Metabolic Institute. He recommends you “bookend” your day with physical activity, which can be as simple as a short walk in the morning and a longer one after work.

And, especially if you have kids at home who will be studying remotely this fall, prepare your meals at the beginning of the day, or even the beginning of the week, he says.

If you haven’t exercised in a while, “start slow and gradually get yourself up to where you can tolerate an elevated heart rate,” says Dr. Leticia Polanco, a family medicine doctor with the South Bay Primary Medical Group, just south of San Diego. If your gym is closed or you can’t get together with your regular exercise buddies, there are plenty of ways to get your body moving at home and in your neighborhood, she says.

Go for a walk, a run or a bike ride, if one of those activities appeals to you. Though many jurisdictions across the United States require residents to wear masks when out in public, it may not be necessary — and may even be harmful to some people with respiratory conditions — while doing strenuous exercise.

“It’s clearly hard to exercise with a mask on,” says Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. “We go hiking up in the foothills and we take our masks with us and we don’t wear them unless somebody starts coming the other way. Then we will put the mask on, and then we take it off and we keep going.”

If you prefer to avoid the mask question altogether, think of your house as a cleverly disguised gym. Put on music and dance, or hula-hoop, Polanco suggests. You can also pump iron if you have dumbbells, or find a cable TV station with yoga or other workout programs.

If you search on the internet for “exercise videos,” you will find countless workouts for beginners and experienced fitness buffs alike. Try one of the seven-minute workout apps so popular these days. You can download them from Google Play or the Apple Store.

If you miss the camaraderie of exercising with others, virtual fitness groups might seem like a pale substitute, but they can provide motivation and accountability, as well as livestreamed video workouts with like-minded exercisers. One way to find such groups is to search for “virtual fitness community.”

Many gyms are also offering live digital fitness classes and physical training sessions, often advertised on their websites.

If group sports is your thing, you may or may not have options, depending on where you live.

In Los Angeles, indoor and outdoor group sports in municipal parks are shut down until further notice. The only sports allowed are tennis and golf.

In Montgomery County, Maryland, the Ron Schell Draft League, a softball league for men 50 and older, will resume play early this month after sitting out the spring season due to COVID-19, says Dave Hyder, the league’s commissioner.

But he says it has been difficult to get enough players because of worries about COVID.

“In the senior group, you have quite a lot of people who are in a high-risk category or may have a spouse in a high-risk category, and they don’t want to chance playing,” says Hyder, 67, who does plan to play.

Players will have to stay at least 6 feet apart and wear masks while off the field. On the field, the catcher is the only player required to wear a mask. That’s because masks can steam up glasses or slip, causing impaired vision that could be dangerous to base runners or fielders, Hyder explains.

Whatever form of exercise you choose, remember it won’t keep you healthy unless you also reduce consumption of fatty and sugary foods that can raise your risk of chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension — all COVID-19 risk factors.

Kim Guess, a dietitian at UC-Berkeley, recommends that people lay in a healthy supply of beans and lentils, whole grains, nuts and seeds, as well as frozen vegetables, tofu, tempeh and canned fish, such as tuna and salmon.

“Start with something really simple,” she said. “It could even be a vegetable side dish to go with what they’re used to preparing.”

Whatever first steps you decide to take, now is a good time to start eating better and moving your body more.

Staying healthy is “so important these days, more than at any other time, because we are fighting this virus which doesn’t have a treatment,” says the Cleveland Clinic’s Butsch. “The treatment is our immune system.”

This KHN story first published on California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Wildfires are getting worse. Will forests start to burn themselves out?

Thousands of lightning strikes have put California under a “fire siege” since mid-August, setting parched grasses, shrubs, and trees ablaze across the state. Last week, when word got out that wildfires had entered Big Basin Redwoods State Park, many feared for the fate of its namesake redwood forest. But by Friday, those fears were dispelled. The “Mother of the Forest” and other ancient trees remained healthy. This was not the first time their thick, fire-resistant bark has withstood such heat.

Forests in the West are used to fire, even dependent on fire, and many tree species have adaptations that help them survive or regenerate in the wake of one. But wildfires are changing, becoming more severe and more frequent. As the climate warms and heat and drought in the West become more extreme, these shifts are expected to intensify. The result is a Gordian Knot of feedback loops that threaten Western forests in unprecedented ways, and scientists are racing to understand how the relationship between forests and fire is changing in response.

One question is whether the increase in fire frequency might eventually burn itself out. “There is this hope, I guess you could call it a hope in some way, that that will eventually cause a negative feedback,” said Brian Buma, an ecologist at the University of Colorado in Denver. “You’ll get a bunch of fires and everything will be burned up and there won’t be a lot of fuel left, and so fire frequency may go down.”

Buma went looking for evidence of whether this was already happening. By overlaying maps of fires throughout the Western United States from the past 30 years, a time during which fires have increased in frequency, he could look at whether more recent fires tended to ignite the same areas as older fires, or whether they stopped burning when they hit the perimeter of previous fires. He published his findings in the journal Environmental Research Letters in January. Generally, over shorter, five- to 10-year periods, previously burned areas did not re-burn. These results support the idea that management practices like prescribed and cultural burns could prevent catastrophic fires, Buma said.

However, overall, re-burns have been increasing, and Buma found that after 10 to 20 years, the fact of a previous fire made no difference as to whether an area would burn. “It no longer matters that something burned 20 years ago, it will burn again more or less just fine,” he said. Since that number is retrospective, he expects that particularly hot or dry summers in the future could shrink the interval between burns in many places. Drought was correlated with shorter intervals between fires in much of the study area.

A fire every 20 years could be bad news for forest resilience, which is a measure of how well a forest can grow back to its previous state after a disturbance. Some species can take as long as 25 years to re-establish after a fire. After a particularly bad burn, if the forest doesn’t recover well, the real estate available to burn may change. Some forests will convert to shrublands and grasslands, which are much more flammable than trees and regenerate more quickly, potentially increasing fire frequency even more, Buma explained.

Re-burns are just one factor that threaten to suffocate forests. Temperature, dryness, and available seed can also limit forest regeneration after a fire, especially in lower elevations. Another recent study published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeology considered these factors and looked at how forests in the Southern Rocky Mountains could fare under future climate scenarios.

The Southern Rockies stretch from Southern Wyoming down through Colorado to Northern New Mexico and hold more than 10 million acres of forest defined by ponderosa pine and Douglas fir. The authors brought together datasets from previous studies of post-fire regeneration of these species and found that in the past 30 years, they have already become less resilient.

Many trees will survive a low-intensity fire, and their seeds will eventually re-establish the forest to what it once was. But the recent, more intense fires that have blazed through the West have cleared large areas of forest, making it much harder for seeds to get there. Even when there are available sources of seed after a fire, if the young trees are plagued by hotter, drier conditions, they might not survive.

“In lower-elevation forests where you might see a tree that survived a fire in a given area, there weren’t even any seedlings on the ground,” said Kyle Rodman, who conducted the research while earning his PhD at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Even though the seed was there to produce those trees, they weren’t surviving because it was just so warm and dry.”

Rodman and his co-authors projected what might happen to these forests under two scenarios: one if humans began seriously curbing carbon emissions in the near term, by around 2040, and another if we just go on emitting on our current trajectory through the end of the century. Even under the more optimistic scenario, less than 20 percent of the study area will remain suitable for these species. In the worst-case scenario, that number drops to less than 5 percent.

Rodman said these numbers are important to understand what’s going on at a broad scale, but that there will be a lot of variability within the region. “Ecology is a messy science,” he said. “There are many moving parts that go into deciding what’s going to happen. Some places will be resilient in the future and some places probably won’t. We’re trying to build some tools to allow people to get a little bit better sense of what might happen.”

Portland and Kenosha violence was predictable — and preventable

The U.S. reached a deadly moment in protests over racial injustice, as back-to-back shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon, on Aug. 25 and 29 took the lives of three people and seriously injured another.

It was tragic — but not surprising.

The alleged shooters were at the protests for different reasons: One was a pro-police supporter who believed he was protecting local businesses in Kenosha and the other an “antifa supporter” and “fixture of anti-police demostrations” in Portland. The victims included apparent supporters of Black Lives Matter protests and a supporter of a far-right group. Together, they reflect an escalating risk of spontaneous violence as heavily armed citizen vigilantes and individuals mobilize at demonstrations and protests.

As a scholar of extremism and director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, I have spent the past few months watching people mobilize across the political spectrum — about Second Amendment rights, state shelter-in-place orders and police brutality, and in reaction to those protests — while leaders respond insufficiently to the threat of violence.

Foreseeable conflict

I wasn’t the only one expecting violence. In mid-July, terrorism expert J.J. McNab testified before Congress about her concern “that there will be a shootout at one or more of the Black Lives Matter protests,” warning of the dangers of having heavily armed groups with conflicting goals at the same events.

The danger existed long before that, though. In my new book, “Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right,” I explain that the past three years — from the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, through mass shootings in Pittsburgh and El Paso to this more recent violence — have shown the growing activity of the extremist fringe in U.S. society.

Yet over the past year, the presence of a wide range of militia and vigilante groups has repeatedly caught local communities and national leaders unprepared to handle the threat they pose.

The pandemic has changed some things: The threat from planned extremist violence, like in Christchurch, New Zealand in March 2019 and Poway, California the following month, is probably lower now — in part because there are fewer large public gatherings for extremists to target. But the threat of spontaneous violence — especially at protests organized around racial injustice and police brutality — is high.

Militia and vigilante groups’ conflicting goals

Americans’ collective inaction to stem the growth of militia and vigilante groups is, in part, rooted in confusion about their goals.

Extremist and paramilitary groups in the U.S. are motivated by a wide range of competing factors. Some are white supremacists seeking to spark a race war. Others are fighting a government they perceive to be tyrannical. Still others are oriented around vigilante support for or defense of local businesses and law enforcement.

Left-wing militias have also grown in recent years, primarily organized around resistance to the far right. These include the recently formed Not F**cking Around Coalition, a Black militia group that has shown up at protests this summer to challenge white supremacists.

At this summer’s protests, that division has been on clear display. Even within groups that ostensibly share the same goals — such as the Boogaloo bois, who call for revolution or civil war — there is little alignment.

In late May, three alleged members of the Boogaloo movement were arrested in Las Vegas for allegedly plotting to spark violence at a Black Lives Matter protest. But a month later in Richmond, Boogaloo groups marched alongside Black protesters and chanted to “drown out the white supremacists” who showed up.

Despite their conflicting goals, militia and vigilante groups all share a sense of dire threat and a belief that their lives, their future survival or people they want to protect are threatened by some outside group. This is “us versus them” thinking at its most extreme; militias feel compelled to defend against those threats.

Conditions ripe for online radicalization

Extremists thrive when people feel uncertain and isolated. They invite new members to join a community and engage heroically to thwart a pressing threat. One review of existing literature finds that almost all recent research finds the “need for belonging” is key to extremism, along with a need for control.

That’s why the current moment is a tinderbox for paramilitary and extremist growth. Millions of Americans are anxious about an unseen virus, are isolated during shutdowns, face widespread economic uncertainty and are spending much more time online, where encounters with propaganda and misinformation are more likely.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been explosive growth in radical political groups, civilian militia, vigilante and conspiracy group membership on social media — across the ideological spectrum. Earlier this summer, Facebook banned hundreds of accounts associated with the far-right “boogaloo” scene, which advocates for revolution and civil war. Last month, Facebook removed nearly 10,000 QAnon groups and 980 “offline anarchist groups,” including some that “identify as Antifa.”

Social media plays a role in the radicalization of 90% of recent extremists in the U.S. The current situation is no exception.

Throughout the spring and summer of 2020, across the country, heavily armed vigilante and militia members responded to incendiary calls to action and to misinformation on social media related to state regulations on gun ownership, shelter-in-place orders and, finally, Black Lives Matter protests. Calls have gone out to “armed citizens to protect our lives and property” to show up at protests to defend against “evil thugs.”

In Kenosha, local law enforcement legitimized vigilante and militia presence by thanking them for being there. “We appreciate you guys,” one police officer in an armored vehicle says on a widely circulated video as he tossed a water bottle to armed militia members. Thanking citizen vigilantes for their support essentially empowers individuals to take matters into their own hands.

Under these conditions, if there’s anything surprising about the violence that has erupted, it’s that it took so long for it to happen.

A video of Kenosha police thanking armed civilians.

What can be done?

There are several ways to reduce the threat of future violence, but they all include minimizing the number of people who feel empowered — by local authorities or elected officials — to act violently.

Leaders at all political levels could affirm people’s right to protest peacefully while unequivocally condemning vigilante and militia mobilization, regardless of the reason. Many studies have found that incendiary or hateful rhetoric from politicians both deepens political polarization and increases support for political violence. Research in Germany has shown that when politicians use incendiary language, violence increases. But when they use different words, violence drops.

If public rhetoric doesn’t cool down, I expect escalating polarization and politicization of the protests and vigilante violence may make matters worse in the coming months. I’m particularly concerned because firearms purchases have skyrocketed during the pandemic.

However, communities could work to interrupt the radicalization of young people, and adults. My own research lab recently released a guide for parents and caregivers to online radicalization, in collaboration with the Southern Poverty Law Center, in order to better help recognize risk and build resilience to extremist narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic. This fall we will study how tools like that affect parents’ abilities to intervene at early stages of radicalization.

Our aim is to reduce the chances of people adopting extremist views and joining militia or vigilante groups in the first place. After all, having fewer extremists seems likely to reduce extremist violence.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Professor of Education and Sociology, American University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Susan Collins and Democratic rival Sarah Gideon square off in Maine’s first Senate debate

Four candidates running for the U.S. Senate in Maine will appear on the debate stage together Friday for the first time in one of the most closely-watched races in the country.

The running battle between Republican Sen. Susan Collins and Democratic rival Sara Gideon, the speaker of the state House of Representatives, could determine control of the U.S. Senate. It has drawn national attention and a steady flood of out-of-state contributions — the campaigns and outside donors have so far poured more than $60 million into appealing to Maine’s one million registered voters.

The two will be joined onstage by Max Linn and Lisa Savage, independents who, while not polling double-digits, could play spoiler roles in the ranked-choice election.

“We’re glad we can offer voters an up-close look as the candidates make their case under questioning,” Cliff Schechtman, the executive editor of the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, said. “It’s so vital now for the public to have enough information to make an informed decision.”

Gideon has for months held a slim but steady lead over Collins, who has struggled to square her moderate, bipartisan reputation with the vagaries of hardline Trumpism.

A Bangor Daily News/AARP poll released Thursday shows Gideon with a one-point lead — significantly smaller than her margins to date. However, while that poll included Savage, it did not include the conservative independent Linn, who could pull from Collins in November.

The nominally pro-choice Collins has taken hard hits for her support for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, especially among critical women voters in the state, and has recently come under fire over allegations of corruption.

Salon exclusively reported Wednesday that the ethics watchdog American Democracy Legal Fund filed a complaint with the U.S. Senate Ethics Committee requesting an investigation into accusations that the three-term incumbent used her office to financially benefit her husband, and subsequently, herself.

The Democratic PAC American Bridge will attempt to capitalize on the recent allegations, launching a multi-pronged campaign — through digital ads, as well a website and text messages — targeting registered independent voters in the Pine State.

“Susan Collins is a corrupt politician who used her office to benefit herself, which is why ethics watchdogs are calling for an investigation into her unethical behavior,” American Bridge 21st Century spokesperson Zach Hudson told Salon. “Susan Collins’ net worth rose by millions as she was using her Senate office to help her husband’s lobbying business. She’s working for herself — not Mainers.”

Gideon, an experienced and popular politician who won the Democratic primary easily, has attacked Collins over her vote to confirm Kavanaugh and her support for President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax bill. She has also tried to elevate her own efforts on climate change, education, the opioid crisis and women’s health issues, such as abortion access and reproductive care.

Collins, for her part, has leaned on the Paycheck Protection Program, the provision of the CARES Act she co-authored, which doled out more than $2 billion in forgivable small business loans.

The Collins campaign also sees Gideon as vulnerable to financial woes of her own, in particular her tax delinquency following a failed real estate venture.

Collins has refused to say whether she supports Trump’s re-election. And where Collins stands on Trump – or her continued refusal to weigh in – could be a key litmus test for Maine voters who despise the president, as well as for die-hard Trump supporters whose support Collins needs to be re-elected.

Collins and Gideon have stolen the headlines, but the debate will give voters an opportunity to learn more about the independents, Savage and Linn.

Savage, a Green Independent, is running to Gideon’s left on a platform reminiscent of Bernie Sanders’ failed presidential bid — including the Green New Deal, Medicare for All and tuition-free college education.

“I’m amazed at the interest in this debate not just in Maine but across the nation,” Savage told The Portland Press Herald in a statement. “People are curious about how ranked-choice voting changes the game, allowing people to vote their hopes rather than their fears without being told they are ‘spoiling’ the election. I’m interested to see other candidates’ RCV strategies.”

Linn ran as a Trump Republican against Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, in 2018, but he failed to qualify for the primary. He claims that state Republican leaders bullied him out of challenging Collins this year.

“When I first started my campaign for United States Senate, I was told by establishment operatives that I would never be in a debate and my voice would never be heard,” Linn told The Press Herald. “Well they were wrong. What I can promise is that I am bringing high energy and the best damn platform in the race, and the $100 million dollar dark money Goliath better be ready for a fight.”

“The Duchess” proves that not every stand-up comedian should get a series

A running joke about Netflix is that if you have a pulse and decent timing, it’ll probably give you a comedy special. That’s not the worst sin to be accused of given the current state of the world; at this point many of us will take a laugh almost anywhere that we can get it.

Browse a few of its offerings, and one soon discovers that not every stand-up special in Netflix’s library is created equal and many, including stand-up comedian Katherine Ryan, fit the descriptor of “an acquired taste.”

Keeping that in mind, it’s easy to see why Ryan’s semi-autobiographical series “The Duchess” hits people the wrong way. Throughout most of its six episodes the U.K.-based Canadian comedian labors to stuff crass punchlines into starched settings populated by prim and etiquette-obsessed Brits. One early scene smacks us across the face with this strategy by showing Ryan’s fictional alter ego escorting her 9-year-old daughter Olive (Katy Byrne) to school while wearing a sweater splashed with the advertisement “World’s Smallest Pussy.”

This, if one were to hazard a guess, is a sample of Katherine’s personal brand as well as Ryan’s. She casts herself in “The Duchess” as a single mom whose feminist, body-positive ceramics have made her something of a celebrity in the U.K. Or perhaps more accurately, she plied her artistic talent to extend the 15 minutes of fame she fell into by getting knocked up by Shep (Rory Keenan), a scuzzy former boy band star who drank and drugged his career into oblivion.

Katherine hates Shep, and her co-dependent relationship with Olive gives an excuse for her control issues and aversion to intimacy while also giving Olive the impression that she is more of an equal partner to her mother than, say, her “love” interest Evan (Steen Raskopoulos), a stable and successful dentist.

Evan genuinely adores Katherine, which is why he puts up with her keeping him at arm’s length. Meanwhile, when Katherine decides she wants to get pregnant again, her idiot logic concludes that the most stable path is to ensure that Olives younger sibling shares the same paternal DNA…which means propositioning Shep to help her make another baby.

Katherine is awful. Shep, who espouses a philosophy of living off the grid to cover of his failure, is fairly despicable. Even Olive can be a selfish, manipulative brat when she’s really on her game. None of these factors prevent “The Duchess” from being a success. The list of comedies that spin stunning humor out of this precise se-up or ones closely resembling such a situation is longer than I could list here.

Maybe Ryan was hoping to fill the voids left by the absence of irreverent Britcoms “Absolutely Fabulous” or “Catastrophe,” but what we got instead is some kind of sparkly disaster.

With defter hands at the reins “The Duchess” might have stabilized its balance between lowbrow and charming; no such luck. Between the way Ryan exaggeratedly flounces about and the blunt deliberate emphasis on her character’s cool raunchiness, Katherine is about as trying as they come. And that’s before Ryan forces mama Katherine’s uncouth bombshells into every cranny of the script possible regardless of whether it fits.

If dick jokes were bullets, her torso would be crossed with a pair of fully-loaded bandoliers, encrusted in sequins and beads and a marabou fringe; the problem is that her aim is too frequently way, way off.

As someone who has high admiration for skillful exercises in embroidered vulgarity, I’ll admit that there certainly were moments with “The Duchess” that made me laugh out loud – moments, within six half-hours. A surprise boy band performance in the finale is gloriously cringeworthy, as is an earlier conference in the headmaster’s office at Olive school where we find out about the comedy lessons she’s been picking up at home.

In spite of its galloping clumsiness, Ryan writes plenty of heart into the scenes she shares with Byrne, who somehow makes Olive a beacon of sweetness and a stabilizing force. Whatever success “The Duchess” can claim originates in Katherine and Olive’s obvious fierce devotion to one another even though other characters point out how co-dependent they are. (Mother and daughter share the same bed, which makes Katherine’s adult sleepovers awkward in the extreme.)

But the lack of elegance in establishing her interactions with the uptight fellow mothers against whom Katherine is supposed to be contrasted, or the overnight shift with which her adversary and foil suddenly becomes her friend, makes much of the humor seem forced. There’s some inspired crude in here, to be sure, but you have to bust through a lot of gravelly stupidity to get to it.

Having said all that, Ryan’s fans might guzzle this down as lustily as Katherine gulps down her bubbly. To everyone else, “The Duchess” is an eyeful and an earful without much reward for any pain we may experience. On the bright side, it makes committing to an hour of tepid stand-up suddenly seem reasonable.

“The Duchess” is currently streaming on Netflix.

David Talbot on Donald Trump: “He’s a walking time bomb”

In Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael S. Schmidt’s new book, “Donald Trump v. the United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President,” Schmidt reports that when Trump was taken to Walter Reed Medical Center in November of 2019, Vice President Mike Pence was “on standby to take over the powers of the presidency temporarily if Trump had to undergo a procedure that would have required him to be anesthetized.”

When that information appeared in the New York Times in late August, Trump responded with his usual degree of restraint and decorum, taking to Twitter to announce that “they are trying to say that your favorite President, me, went to Walter Reed Medical Center, having suffered a series of mini-strokes.” The topic certainly does seem to be on Trump’s mind, given that the Times report did not in fact mention stroke.

Curious to understand what might be going on here, I reached out to someone who definitely knows about strokes and has been candid about the experience — Salon’s own founder, author David Talbot.

In 2017, Talbot suffered a major stroke, a physically and emotionally life-changing experience he chronicled in his latest book, “Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of My Stroke.” I spoke to Talbot via phone earlier this week about what it feels like to have a stroke, the impact it had on him and what he sees when he looks at Trump. As usual, this interview has been condensed and edited for print.

This new book coming out sparked rumors that Trump had a quote-unquote “mini stroke.” “Stroke” is a controversial term. You describe in your book what it really feels like to have a stroke, and how that experience also runs on a spectrum. I feel like the word “stroke” is also so deeply misunderstood.

It’s a loaded word, like [it was] for “cancer” years ago. It was such a toxic and dangerous term for people to even use. People avoided even using “the C-word” because they felt condemned by it in some way. I think it’s the same for any brain trauma.

I think about the way that you describe reacting when you were having it, like, “Nope, this isn’t happening.” And then there’s all of the taboo around it. You see in someone like Trump — of course he would never admit if he had had some sort of neurological event.

For anybody who has any brain trauma, it’s very alarming. First and foremost, you’re afraid that you’re going to die or be severely impaired in some way. That happened to my mother. She did have a series of aneurysms and strokes. Each one debilitated her, and it finally killed her. That’s in my family history, and I know others who’ve been killed or severely disabled by strokes or head injuries of some sort. So your first fear is denial: “This can’t be happening to me.” I think that’s what I felt. And then I went into a strange kind of shock. I think it was where I was in denial and I wanted to keep it private. It was a rare, strange, kind of drug-like experience. It was kind of my own thing, and I wanted to protect it.

I think for anybody who’s in a public position — It happened to me at Salon, I wrote about having this health incident where I passed out at my desk. It was obviously related to work stress. Even a guy who’s as sick and as callous as he [Trump] is, notoriously, has to feel enormous stress in this job.

He knows he’s in over his head. He didn’t do the job. Obama said it right at the Democratic Convention. It must be a terrible feeling on some level for [Trump] to realize he’s incapable of doing this job. He’s filled with so much empty boasting and pride that he can’t admit any weakness. For a man like that, it must be a double blow. He realizes he’s not up to the job. He’s now age 74, he’s obese. He’s a prime candidate for a stroke, if he hasn’t them already. And I kind of suspect he has, based on his coherence. I think then he’s due to have one. He certainly would have one in a second term — a heart attack or a stroke, keel over in some way.

His kid brother Robert just died. That’s got to weigh heavily on him too. That has got to get through even to his thick skull that he is mortal, that he is in danger of some kind of collapse. I saw him deliver his speeches at the RNC, this creepy “Triumph of the Will” tableau in front of the White House. By the end, it was over 70 minutes, he was hanging on to lectern for dear life to support him. I thought he was going to keel over delivering his speech. He was out of breath, he wheezes through his nose.

Clearly the guy is not healthy. Yet the White House doctor is colluding with the coverup, keeps saying nothing is wrong. But I suspect it was a very frightening medical emergency [for him] in November. He brought up the mini-strokes, Michael Schmidt didn’t do it in his book. He did. He felt he had to deny it. He’s been hearing the rumors, or he knows he suffered some mini-strokes.

It seems to me it’s cognitive. I’m not an expert, I’m not a medical expert. I’ve had a stroke and I know therapists who deal with stroke survivors. It seems to me, based on my limited lay experience, that he does have some cognitive disability. He rambles in his interviews. He’s not coherent often. He’s not linear. Even if you compare his speech today to when he was in his prime, The Donald in New York, he seems to me a lot more diminished in his speaking ability.

I know even from having migraines that when something affects your brain, it affects your mind. When I get a migraine, I become anxious and distressed. Something is storming around in my brain. That is very scary.

It is, because you’re not in control. I felt like a wounded animal when I was having my stroke. I felt very interior, I felt like I was withdrawing into very private dark place within my universe. It was a place I knew I’d never been before. It was like being on a strange planet. I had a major stroke, but even if you have a minor version where you suddenly lose it or can’t pick up on the conversation or you miss a beat somehow, that must be very frightening.

The man I see is in distress. He’s covering it up with even more bluster than usual. If you compare him to earlier periods of his career, he’s clearly lost a step or two. He’s flailing around, charging with Biden with being mentally incompetent. Biden’s no spring chicken either.

We do have this strange coincidence where the two leading presidential candidates are elderly men. People do wonder about their durability in the White House office, which is enormously stressful. You’ve seen all the before and after of Obama as he goes into office and as he leaves office. Obama is significantly grayer and older looking. Clinton, he had his own heart problems after he left office. The job wears on you.

I know just from my own experience running a publication during the dot-com era, the kind of stress you can have and how it can wear you down, and add to whatever issues you have. I would say that he would not survive a second term based on my layperson’s observations. I think he’s under enormous stress and he’s a walking time bomb. And his weight — I think he’s put on weight.

“Stroke” is such a decisive word. You think of a stroke as a thing, a single event. Yet it is not. A stroke can be something that takes place over time. You were talking to people, you drove yourself home. That is something that I think maybe people don’t understand about the process of it that makes it a unique medical event.

In my case, it was a 48 hour event. The trauma lasted 48 hours; there were obviously lingering effects. It was called a stuttering stroke and they had to monitor me to see how much damage it would do in that 48 hour period. Frankly, they do it in a cold, clinical way where they evaluate whether you’re worth their effort to put you into rehabilitation afterward. Some people, sadly, they just have to warehouse because they’re beyond help, at least current medical ability.

Thank God the stroke left me intellectually intact enough that I was capable of being put in a rehab program, but I was a mess. It took me months, probably over a year, to get back to where I am now. Even now I have some speech issues. My vision has been affected and I can’t drive. I’ve had to learn to accommodate my disabilities. That’s part of being a mature adult, realizing I can’t be the same and I never will be, and learning to live with that diminished capacity. It’s liberating in some ways. It has been for me. I just appreciate much more strongly certain things about my life, my family, my friends. I appreciate the work I can continue to do and how it’s left me mentally intact enough to still have a fulfilling life.

But I have to wake up every day and adjust my expectations. Every day I have to go, “Oh, I can’t see as clearly any more. Oh, I’m kind of permanently dizzy. I can’t walk as confidently as I used to and I certainly can’t get behind the wheel without endangering myself and others.” It’s limited my life, but as I say in my book, it’s also liberated me in lots of ways.

I think Donald Trump is not, clearly, in that place. I think clearly he’s a man who’s defying his rapidly advancing physical problems. He’s still heavily in denial. He’s married all these younger women. He kept firing them and hiring new ones. He’s a man who a captive of his own ego, and that’s a candidate for tragedy.

I know from my own experience, illness just changes your whole world. It changes your priorities. It makes the time that you have in this world very real. You can either find the beauty in that and find the new stuff that’s good in that. Or you can just dig in and go into denial.

There’s a before and after, that will always define your life. If you try to deny the new you, then you’re just setting yourself up for endless frustration and sadness and bitterness. I didn’t want to live my life that way. I decided right away to adjust to the new me and glory in it and say goodbye to the old me. There are obviously still some aspects of me in the new me — but part of myself I had to say goodbye to.

Was there anything you wished that you knew as it was happening to you? That you wished you knew beforehand?

I wish that I had been able to discern more quickly what was going on. I would have driven myself into the hospital that I passed on my way home that night from having dinner with friends. There is a clot buster that can be administered that can dissolve the clot. It has some risk. Some people, it creates hemorrhage in the brain and they die from it. But [that risk] is increasingly low. So I would have probably taken it.

A friend of my family read my post on Facebook before I put it in the book, and she then experienced a stroke while she was driving on the freeway in Berkeley. She drove herself to Alta Bates hospital and they gave her this clot busting drug. If you saw her today, you would never know that she had suffered a stroke. It really prevented the damage I sustained. That’s one regret.

And when you’re lying in bed in the hospital and you’re coming to, you start thinking. “Why the heck was I leading such a stressful life? Why didn’t I lose some weight? Why didn’t I reduce my blood pressure?” I felt like I sort of was where Trump was, like I was armored and plowing through life as an alpha male. I thought, “Hey, if I keel over, I keel over.” But the truth is that you often don’t keel over. You actually are just incapacitated in some way, and then you put more responsibility on your family and the people who care about you.

“Insecure” star Sujata Day redefines South Asian stereotypes in spelling bee movie

Spike Lee’s 1989 hit “Do the Right Thing” did it for me. Beyond just seeing Black people in a film, Lee created world that captured our mannerisms, language and culture in a way that 7-year-old me had never seen in a movie before. “Do the Right Thing” made me and a whole generation of artists come to feel like we mattered, and “Awkward Black Girl” and “Insecure” star Sujata Day is positioning herself to do the same with her feature film debut “Definition Please.”

Written, produced, directed by and starring Day, “Definition Please” follows Monica Chowdry (Day), a National Spelling Bee champ who hasn’t really accomplished much in life as she deals with a sick mom and mentally ill, but fun and energetic brother as they all walk the line between South Asian and American culture, looking for meaning.

I recently got a chance to talk with Day about the film, which recently showed at the Bentonville Film Festival. Read a Q&A of our conversation below to hear more about the Day’s transition from acting to producing and directing and the advice she has on being productive during the COVID-19 quarantine.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I thought your film was really funny and then it just got real, really really fast. And for me, that’s how life is, you know, things are going well, and then you get hit with a ton of bricks.

Could you talk about what it feels like dealing with such heavy content and where the ideas came from?

Yeah, I’ll take you all the way back. I think I I’ll take you back to fourth grade, where I won my class spelling bee. And you think that’s a really big deal, but it’s actually not because there were only 10 people in my grade. So, it wasn’t that crazy that I won. But then I went to regionals, which was really stressful. And I went up in the first round, and I spelled “radish” wrong. I spelled it with two D’s instead of one.

Ten people in your entire grade? That’s a really small school!

That’s a small school. I went to a little private Catholic school. So, I went to the regionals and I lost on the word “radish” and I came back to school, and all my friends were clowning me for losing on such an easy word. And honestly, I was like, you know what, I deserve this clowning because it is an easy word. I didn’t get out on some crazy five-syllable word. Ever since then, I started getting really into the spelling bees that were on ESPN every year. And I was always really happy to see South Asian Americans winning these spelling bees. Last year while we were on set filming, there were eight winners and seven of the eight winners were Indian American.

And so that idea stuck with me for a while and in 2015, I was in a UCB improv sketch writing class. And I decided to have one of the themes of my sketches be a “Where are they now?” for spelling bee winners. If you Google spelling bee winners, you always see that they’re doing really amazing stuff with their triple PhDs, working at NASA, or they’re killing it on the professional Poker Tour. And the question that I answered in my sketch was, well, what if one of these amazing 10-year-old spellers grew up to be a loser and just lived at home and didn’t achieve anything in their life? So that was my four-page comedic sketch. And then a couple years later I went to the Sundance Film Festival for the first time, and my friend Justin’s film was playing there. I thought it was amazing and asked him, “How did it come to fruition?”

I loved the character, who plays Monica’s roller coaster of a relationship with her brother Sonny. Because he’s very layered character with a whole lot of different things going on. But something that we don’t see in comedy or we don’t see it films enough is pyramid schemes and how they prey on people with their Platinum level, “member of the month” BS. I thought that was cool, how you shed light on the monster of fraud, was that based on a personal experience?

So, I feel like living in L.A., I’ve had friends and colleagues and just people that I’ve come in contact with that will invite me to like a makeup party or a skincare party or try this acai juice from Brazil. And I’d be like, what do I have to do? I’ll try it but I don’t want to like buy anything extra or I already use, you know, facewash and I don’t need it. And so, I’m seeing that a lot. And for a place like L.A. where everyone kind of has like six different side hustles, I thought that was a nice characteristic to give to Sonny, since he does live in L.A. and works at a gym. I figured he would have a couple different side hustles. And that was based on a couple friends of mine that I’ve seen.

Was it difficult making the leap from being in front of the camera to actually directing, writing, and producing a feature? Producing sounds like a lot of sleepless nights and a lot of stress. Actors, you know, get to study their lines, do their parts and go home, but you got to tap into the business side as a producer ,and I imagine it’s a lot to handle.

So, I will say I had a little bit of tiny practice in 2016, when I made my first short and I also wrote it, produced it, directed it and starred in it. I did all of this three years ago on a much smaller level. And after I did my short everyone asked me when was I going to make another, because they really liked what I had created. And I said, “Nah, I’m ready to make a feature,” so I started writing that.

Makes sense, you got to level up.

I made sure when I really focused on the writing and rewriting, over and over –– getting notes from trusted friends and writer friends and colleagues. So, when it was time to produce, I could take my writer hat off and go into full producer mode. Raising money for the movie, and that was just a mode that I was stuck in, making calls, having meetings, getting money, doing what needed to be done to get the film made. Once all of that was done, I was able to do some storyboards and move all of that energy to directing.

I’ve got to start putting the cast and crew together. And that’s what I’ll say. I’ll say that it was very much me being over-prepared for every single aspect of the filmmaking, making sure that I knew my lines going into the day. And just making sure that the environment on the set day was really positive and open to the actors and everyone felt good. And we were all doing this for fun. We were all stuck in the middle of Pennsylvania. A lot of my cast and crew was coming out of L.A. and other big cities.

What do you feel like the most difficult part was, in regards to running the whole show and being in charge of the production?

I think the most difficult part was raising the money. Moving forward, I would hope that I don’t have to do that anymore and that someone else can help me with that aspect of it. But every other part was so fulfilling, and creative and amazing. And I made sure that I had an amazing team surrounding me because of course, it takes a village. I would have rehearsals before we left L.A. to go prep in Pennsylvania, and I would have rehearsals with actors coming to my apartment, and we would just be reading the scripts in my living room. And when Ritesh Rajan came over to us to play Sonny, it was just a cold read. That first day he came over and he was sitting on my couch, and he just starts like bawling. And he’s so like 110% into scenes. And I’m sitting there like, “Oh s**t,” like, I gotta live up to it, I got to get up to this level in terms of acting. So, I made sure that everyone around me was actually better than me at their job. I had to get up to all their levels, so that I could compete and, and not be embarrassed about what I was doing.

When you do that work as a writer, and you do that work as a director, and then you find that kind of talent. It seems like, it becomes easier to get other people to buy into your dream. So, when you’re trying to fundraise it gives you more confidence to be able to make sure that you get everything you need to get the project done.

Yeah, that was a really cool part about it even towards the end when I needed some extra money. I actually just tweeted about that this morning, I have a blerd bunch that I hang out with every Sunday. And before quarantine, we were actually brunching every single Sunday in person. And it’s just a group of Black and brown nerds that get together and we don’t really talk about the business. We just talk about video games, comic books and movies. And they really came through when I was like, “Oh, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to have the funds to finish this movie.” And they just came through and got the funds together.

Nerds tend to have disposable income. They get made fun of and grow up to be the person who says, “You need $200,000? Okay, I got you. Go have a good day!”

Yeah! So, it was definitely a family/friend endeavor of getting the thing made. And it was all a really positive process. Like, I hope that other first-time filmmakers have the kind of experience that I had, which was so fulfilling every step of the way.

I felt like, representation was a really important part of the film, too. You don’t, you know, growing up, I imagine that you don’t see a whole lot of films with the South Asian experience, or South Asian in America experience and where those two cultures meet and collide. So, what did that mean to you?

I think that was a really big thing for me, because I think one of the first times I ever saw myself in a movie was “Bend it Like Beckham.” And when I saw that movie, I was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s a girl that has the same kind of problems that I do,” and I had never felt that way, really about a film.

I just wanted to create something that I wanted to see, you know, just like Issa Rae creating “Awkward Black Girl.” She just wanted to create something that she wanted to see and hadn’t seen before. So, for me, it was really important because I watched all these indie movies and I love them so much. And I’m always like checking out what’s at Sundance. I see all these really cool like family sibling drama, but they’re always about white people. And I’m like, “Wait, but POC go through the similar issues like this.” I really wanted to focus on a South Asian American family, but also telling a very American story, which you’re right, this was set in America, and you don’t see a lot of South Asian American films that are set in America that aren’t filled with stereotypes and things that when I’m watching it, I’m like, “Wait, that person would never do that!” It was nice to bring authenticity to the screen and put it out there.

Normally when you see an Asian family, a South Asian family, a lot of times you see a kid going to school to be a doctor, a scientist, you have to be some kind of mathematical genius. And that’s it. It’s not the worse stereotype; however, sometimes there’s no room for comedy and no room for the parts of American culture that makes it into the family and no space for all of the human things that that we that we tend to appreciate. That’s why I loved your film so much, you peeled back those layers. You feel like Hollywood is moving into a direction where it’s going to be like more open to tell those stories in a more authentic way?

I hope that Hollywood is moving in the right direction. I think there’s a lot of TV and film that is inspiring right now like Michaela Coel’s “I May Destroy You,” and Issa Rae’s “Insecure” –– and there are so many creators that are getting the chance to tell these stories and I hope that studios continue to put support and backing into these really specific special stories. I’m just a little bit weary because I feel like whenever there’s a really successful movie like a “Crazy Rich Asians,” or “Girls Trip,” or “Get Out,” Hollywood is so surprised by how much money these movies make and acts like no, there are audiences out there wanting to see POC in films.

I also think the layer of mental illness was needed and done well. Based on my social context, therapy isn’t something that we just didn’t do. Now people are starting to do things to try to, you know, understand that these are real serious issues and illnesses. Your mom in the film didn’t even want to go to hospitals and that’s just like another layer. I think that was done really well too. Could you talk about mental illness or the dislike and distrust of Western medicine in general?

Yeah, I think that’s that was really important subject for me to discuss because I grew up in a very white suburb of Pennsylvania, but I was lucky to have a very large Indian community to hang out with on the weekends. So, I’d be going in the temple on Sundays and to Hindu camp in the summertime. I noticed that there was a difference between my white friends and my Indian friends in terms of dealing with problems around mental illness. Whereas my white friends would just be able to go to their parents and be like, “Ah, I want to kill myself,” and then the mom would be like, “Oh my gosh, we got to like, get you into therapy! What do you need?” And so, for my Indian friends, I noticed that they would either just like run away from home, and then the parents would be like, “Why did you run away? You know, we gave him everything he needed, he gets food, he, he gets good grades, what is the problem?” And we’re just sitting there being like, “Yo, he’s depressed,” or “He’s stressed out from all of his AP classes,” or “He did terrible on his SAT’s and he thinks that you’re gonna punish him. “

So, I saw that difference. And I saw how, within POC communities, we just never talk about feelings and emotions. And if we’re stressed out or have mental problems, it’s just not something that we bring up and with my parents who are immigrants; there’s that other added layer of them sacrificing so much to come over here. So, all of our problems seem tiny compared to my parents’ issues when they first came to America. That was something that I really wanted to focus on and delve into it on a real authentic level in terms of I know people with mental illness, some extended members of my family deal with mental illness. I wanted to look at it from a point of view that was not only affecting the person itself, who has the mental illness, but all the people around him.

Yeah, I though you did that really well. It’s difficult to try to cross that line between comedy and real issues. What are some of the things that that you want viewers to walk away with after seeing the film?

Well, especially now since we’re all in quarantine, and we’re worried about COVID. I would love for people to watch this movie and come away with a sense of empathy. And maybe you’re not the same culture that I am, or you’re not the same color that I am. But you see this film about people with real human problems, and universal issues that we’re all dealing with. I hope that audiences walk away saying, “Hey, I know someone like that,” or “I never thought that about an Indian American person.” Because that’s something that I also go through. So, I would love for people to come away with a sense of empathy.

So where are we going to see the film or as anything going on as far as distribution?

We are talking to a couple of dream buyers right now, and I’m really excited. But also started our festival circuit, which I love. I did film festivals with my short film in 2017. And it was just so much fun. I think the only the only disappointing thing about festivals this year is obviously it’s all virtual. So, we can’t travel to these really cool towns in the middle of nowhere to watch our film with an audience.

I know you’re excited. What’s next for you?

Well, I’ve been really productive during quarantine. So, I wrote a pilot and I also wrote my second feature, and I have been sending the feature out to different actors that I’d like to attach and that feature is an absurd comedy, which is very different from “Definition Please.” I’m excited I’ve been working on a lot of comedy, it allows me to escape from what’s happening in the real world and it’s been mentally healthy for me to do that.

Tucker Carlson: “If we’re going to survive as a country, we must defeat” Black Lives Matter

Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Thursday proclaimed to his audience, which is the largest in cable news, that America “must defeat” the Black Lives Matter movement “if we’re going to survive as a country.”

In the racially-charged screed, Carlson, who once called white supremacy a “hoax” on the heels of a mass shooting targeting Latinx immigrants in Texas, attempted to cast blame for the deep racial divisions in the U.S. on Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president.

The Obama presidency left “a wake of destruction” behind, according to Carlson. However, the economy gained a net 11.6 million jobs, and the unemployment rate dropped below the historical norm under Obama. Average weekly earnings were up 4.2% after inflation. Fifteen million people got access to healthcare, and premium increases slowed. Renewables such as solar and wind power increased 369%, coal production dropped 38% and fossil fuel emissions declined 11%.

Obama’s presidency also turned in results traditionally valued by conservatives. After-tax corporate profits and stock prices both set records, and the S&P 500 rose 166%. Handgun production leaped 207% to a record high, and illegal immigration dropped: Border Patrol apprehended 35% fewer people trying to cross from Mexico.

Those so-called destructive events sparked a movement, or “a population so hostile to its political leaders that they elected Donald Trump president,” according to Carlson.

After Obama left office, his family “became unimaginably wealthy — legitimately rich — with huge estates in different parts of the country,” Carlson claimed.

“Where did Barack Obama get all that money?” Carlson wondered. “No one asks. We’re too busy hating each other. Obama stokes that hatred, because it helps him.”

To exemplify this stoking of hatred, Carlson played a clip of Obama’s address from last month’s Democratic National Convention:

Americans of all races joining together to declare in the face of injustice and brutality at the hands of the state, that Black lives matter — no more but no less . . .

To the young people who led us this summer, telling us we need to be better: In so many ways, you are this country’s dreams fulfilled.

“The young people who led us this summer,” Carlson echoed.

“It’s hard to believe Barack Obama said that,” he continued, adding that Obama knew that “the same young leaders” had “burned buildings, looted stores — murdered people.”

Four former Minneapolis cops have been charged in the murder of George Floyd in police custody. Last month, Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old Trump supporter and law enforcement advocate, was charged with “intentional and reckless homicide” after allegedly killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wis.

“The violence that Obama’s youth brigades have unleashed on this country in anything have increased racial bigotry and distrust,” Carlson said. “The riots have certainly accelerated residential segregation as higher income people flee the racially diverse cities for sedate monochromatic destinations such as Martha’s Vineyard, where by the way, Barack Obama himself lives.”

Carlson predicted that Obama’s efforts would some day create a nation so rife with danger that the former president would leave the country he once led.

“Someday, Obama and many leaders like him may flee farther than that. An island off the coast of Massachusetts won’t be far enough,” the Fox News host said. “They’ll be in Switzerland by then, or Austria, or New Zealand or somewhere where they won’t have to live with the consequences of the society that they created.”

“But for the rest of us who plan to stay, we have no choice. We have to fight,” the host, who recently sold his multimillion-dollar home in Washington, said.

Carlson also said on Thursday that Black Lives Matter and antifa — which is not an organized group — are the same “poison” as anarchism, which must be defeated.

“Anarchism goes by many names. Right now, it’s called ‘antifa’ and ‘BLM.’ But the poison is always the same. And the consequences of imbibing it never change,” Carlson alleged. “If we’re going to survive as a country, we must defeat this.”

In a July edition of “The Federalist Radio Hour” Carlson also said, “I think Black Lives Matter is poison.”

“Their job isn’t to make it possible for my children to live in this country,” he said.

Carlson recently cited his children’s safety as a reason he moved away from the nation’s capital. Carlson has said on-air that he often broadcasts from a rental property in rural Maine. The Fox News host once told GQ that’s the region where he first developed his hardline stance on immigration:

He calls his time in Andover “the pivotal experience of my political life.” The town is nearly all white, and unemployment has been high since most of the manufacturing jobs left 30 years ago.

“It’s been a longitudinal study of the same place. It had stores and a barbershop, and a car-repair place, and I used to get my hair cut there as a kid.” Carlson pauses for a second and sighs. “And I’ve watched the town collapse.”

. . .

“Everything I say on immigration is totally sincere,” says Carlson. “That’s not a subject that I’m demagoguing on. Our immigration policy is insane and really hurting the country.”

You can watch the video below via Media Matters:

Trump, you’re no FDR or Winston Churchill — but you’re a lot like Charles Lindbergh

Oh boy, Donald Trump’s delusions of grandeur and his pattern of pathological lying have come crashing together once again. This time, Trump is trying to defend himself in the face of journalist Bob Woodward’s audio recordings revealing that while Trump was minimizing the threat of the coronavirus in public, in private he knew full well how serious the dangers were. And his strategy is — wait for it — to compare himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

On Thursday night at a campaign rally in Freeland, Michigan, Trump insisted that when he told Woodward, “I wanted to always play it down,” he was just channeling the strength of these historic leaders of the Allied powers during World War II.

Trump compared his public lies about the seriousness of the pandemic to FDR’s famous “fear itself” quote and falsely claimed that Churchill gave speeches from the rooftops when “Hitler was bombing London.”

Who among us can forget when Churchill reassured the British public that “one day … like a miracle” the Nazis “will disappear”?

Or when FDR, in addressing the nation after the Pearl Harbor attacks, insisted that “99%” of the bombings were “totally harmless” and fears about the spread of fascism were a “new hoax” perpetuated by shady deep-state conspirators?

Jokes aside, it’s obviously preposterous of Trump to try to make this claim. As numerous commenters pointed out, whatever flaws Churchill and Roosevelt may have had, they were big proponents of rallying their countries in the face of severe adversity by telling the public the truth about the seriousness of the situation. They certainly did not lie about things constantly or look for ways to hide the true nature of the problem.

In fact, in Roosevelt’s famous “fear itself” speech, which Trump referred to, Roosevelt literally also said, “This is pre-eminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today.”

But while Trump has nothing in common with either Roosevelt or Churchill, he does resemble another prominent figure from the era quite a bit: Charles Lindbergh, the famed aviator who spent the months before the U.S. joined the war aggressively campaigning for America to hide its head in the sand, Trump-style, and avoid facing the real threat of fascism head on.

Trump’s Michigan rally came very close to the 79th anniversary of Lindbergh’s famous 1941 speech in Des Moines, Iowa, in which he accused “the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration,” as well as “Communists” and “intellectuals,” of being “war agitators” who have “marshaled the power of their propaganda, their money, their patronage” to frighten Americans into joining the fight against Hitler and the Nazis.

To make matters worse, Lindbergh asserted that the “greatest danger to this country” lay in what he called the “large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government” of “the Jewish people.”

Trump has not peddled overt anti-Semitism (though he has dabbled in its coded forms), and seeks to present himself as an ally of Israel and the Jewish community. But the general themes of Lindbergh’s speech downplaying the threat of fascism closely match Trump’s arguments about the coronavirus.

As the New York Times reported on Feb. 28:

Mr. Trump said that news outlets like CNN were “doing everything they can to instill fear in people,” while some Democrats were “trying to gain political favor by saying a lot of untruths.” His acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, went even further, telling conservative activists that journalists were hyping the coronavirus because “they think this will bring down the president; that’s what this is all about.”

It’s the same accusation that Lindbergh leveled at Democrats and the media in 1941: They’re inventing this threat for nefarious political gain, and you’d be a fool to fall for it.

Of course, for Lindbergh to ascribe ulterior motives to Roosevelt and “the Jewish people” was in all likelihood a form of projection. There’s significant evidence that Lindbergh’s wasn’t opposed to the U.S. entering the war because he was a principled pacifist, but because he had fascist sympathies.

Lindbergh was part of the “America First” movement, which may have started as a pacifist tendency, but was soon overrun by people who didn’t want to go to war with the Nazis because they rather liked them. Lindbergh’s official line was that it was none of America’s business if Europeans wanted to kill each other, the ulterior motives kept peeking through.

Most infamously, Lindbergh was presented with the Service Cross of the German Eagle by Hermann Göring in 1938. While Lindbergh found the Nazis’ tactics against what he called their “difficult Jewish problem” distasteful, he still maintained an admiration for Hitler’s government and wrote, “We should be working with them and not constantly crossing swords.”

Basically, Lindbergh hated the idea of white people fighting other white people, saying they should instead “band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our European blood” and save their powder for the fight against “dilution by foreign races.”

(Yes, Trump adopted “America First” as a slogan in his 2016 campaign, either because he wasn’t entirely aware of the history or because he really enjoys seeing how many head-nods toward fascism he can get away with. Quite likely a little of both.)

Similarly, Trump’s ulterior motives for downplaying the threat of the coronavirus have never been far below the surface: He thinks the pandemic and the economic collapse, which have both been made significantly worse by his callous and cruel mismanagement, hurt his chances at re-election. That’s why he has openly mused about simply preventing people from getting tested, clearly believing that would make it easier to deny the virus is a problem in the first place.

To this end, Trump has heavily promoted conspiracy theories accusing shadowy forces of exaggerating the threat of the coronavirus and withholding effective treatments in a deliberate attempt to tank the economy and, of course, deprive him of his beloved campaign rallies. The idea is to paint people who take this disease seriously as having narrow and sinister motives, and to deflect attention from the fact that he’s clearly the one operating in bad faith.

Lindbergh was scheduled to give a speech at an America First rally on Dec. 10, 1941, but it was pre-empted by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor three days earlier. That was after Lindbergh had assured audiences the previous year that “no nation in Asia has developed their aviation sufficiently to be a serious menace to the United States at this time.” His confidence was no doubt due to his overtly racist belief that aviation was “a tool specially shaped for Western hands” and “one of those priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black and Brown.”

(It’s tempting to compare Lindbergh’s views with Trump’s ludicrous statements about how desegregation and anti-discrimination policies pose a threat to the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream,” but this article is about the pandemic and I want to stay focused.)

Lindbergh’s racist efforts to pooh-pooh the threat of Japanese air power failed the reality test in dramatic fashion, just as Trump’s various efforts to pooh-pooh the severity and contagiousness of the coronavirus has run up against the incontrovertible fact of 192,000 dead, and counting, as of Friday morning. (Just by way of reference, that’s roughly 83 times the number of Americans killed in the Pearl Harbor attack.)

At this point in our history, we can see where Lindbergh and Trump diverge: At least Lindbergh was chastened enough by Pearl Harbor to shut up. He even tried to re-enlist in the Army Air Corps, but was rebuffed by the Roosevelt administration, although he later flew about 50 combat missions in the Pacific as a civilian consultant. Trump, on the other hand, continues to cling to the hope he can bamboozle voters into believing that this coronavirus thing is no big deal and will go away any day now.

A couple of weeks ago, Twitter removed a tweet Trump had promoted that falsely claimed 94% of coronavirus deaths were falsified. Despite allowing himself, reluctantly, to be photographed in a mask a couple of times after spending months mocking people who wore them, Trump was back at it again on Tuesday, refusing to wear a mask at a North Carolina rally and making fun of restrictions on crowd size. At his Thursday rally in Michigan — where few people in the packed crowd wore masks, telling reporters it was a “fake pandemic” and that “the Good Lord takes care of me” — Trump asserted that the U.S. was doing great on the pandemic “relative to other countries and other parts of the world.”

As you probably know, this is a blatant lie: The U.S. has more COVID-19 cases than any other country in the world.

Perhaps the difference between the two men is that Lindbergh, as despicable a person as he may have been, became famous for doing something that required courage, intelligence and skill, which was to become the first person to fly an airplane across the Atlantic Ocean.

Trump, on the other hand, has spent his life bouncing from one failed venture to another, cheating and grifting to create the illusion of enormous wealth and great success. And so while Lindbergh eventually had to concede reality, Trump will never quit believing he can flim-flam his way through this crisis, no matter how many corpses pile up in his wake.

Top economic adviser defends Trump for downplaying threat of COVID-19: “The president led wisely”

President Donald Trump has been widely criticized this week because of the bombshell revelations in veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” which shows that back in February, Trump was privately acknowledging that COVID-19 had “deadly” potential and could become the worst health crisis in over 100 years —even though publicly, Trump was claiming that it didn’t pose a major threat to the United States. Trump has defended his coronavirus lies by claiming that he didn’t want to create a “panic,” and his economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, is defending the president’s COVID-19 response.

Kudlow told CBS News, “I think we did the right thing, and I think we did it pretty well. We did the best we could, and I think it’s really quite effective. I think the president led wisely, I think the vice president led wisely.”

Trump’s critics have been stressing that tens of thousands of lives in the U.S. could have been saved if the president had publicly acknowledge the danger that COVID-19 posed earlier and had promoted social distancing measures back in January and February. But Kudlow is echoing Trump’s talking point that he didn’t want to cause a “panic.”

Kudlow told CBS told, “As a member of the coronavirus task force — Vice President Pence’s task force — I can tell you that the president’s public posture, where he wanted calm not panic, in no way reflected or slowed the internal process of building an across-the-board infrastructure to combat the virus.”

The U.S. has, for months, been the COVID-19 epicenter of the world. According to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the worldwide COVID-19 death count has passed 910,000 — and more than 191,000 of those deaths are in the United States.

Is Donald Trump mostly evil or mostly ignorant? Bob Woodward’s book offers an answer: Both

It figures that Bob Woodward, the man who helped to take down Richard Nixon 45 years ago, would follow up with a big book about Nixon’s natural heir to the presidency, Donald Trump. Just as Nixon was undone by tape recordings he foolishly made to document his own corruption, so too Trump foolishly allowed himself to be recorded by Woodward. That’s what sets Woodward’s book “Rage” apart from all the other Trump books that have come before: We can hear the quotes in Trump’s own voice, so he can’t get away with calling it fake news.

I think most of us who have been observing this surreal presidency for the past four years have wondered whether Trump is more ignorant than malevolent or vice versa. (Obviously, he’s both: It’s just a question of which is dominant.) It’s been especially hard to know during this pandemic catastrophe because the president has made so many ill-informed comments and odious decisions, from the inane hydroxychloroquine campaign to his decision not to implement a national testing program because most of the people dying in the early days were in blue states.

Listening to Trump blithely tell Woodward at the beginning of February that he knew the pandemic was going to kill a whole lot more people than the flu and that it was an airborne disease proves that he is malevolent first and foremost. You can hear it in his voice — so blandly detached and dispassionate as he talks about what he describes as “deadly stuff.” We know he’d been warned about the likelihood of the virus coming to America by this point. Woodward even reports that national security adviser Robert O’Brien had told Trump in January that the virus would be the “biggest national security threat you face in your presidency.”

It’s clear that Trump simply didn’t care about that. And he never changed. CNN reports this anecdote from the book that backs up that impression:

On March 19, as the coronavirus pandemic was exploding, Woodward asked Trump if he ever sat down alone with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to learn more about the virus.”Yes, I guess, but honestly there’s not a lot of time for that, Bob,” Trump said to Woodward. “This is a busy White House. We’ve got a lot of things happening. And then this came up.”

Woodward notes in the book that Trump had found the time to “carve out hours” to do interviews with him throughout the crisis.

When Trump says he didn’t want to start a “panic” it’s obvious that he meant he didn’t want a stock market panic. Recall that he reportedly went nuts when Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, did what any public health scientist would do and announced on Feb. 25 that the coronavirus (which Trump already knew was “deadly stuff”) was likely to cause massive disruption in the United States. The markets nosedived and Trump was livid, threatening to fire her for doing her job.

The markets had already been dropping before that, but Trump was convinced that he could prop them up with lies and rosy scenarios. They did rebound after the big crash in March, which Trump undoubtedly attributes to his happy talk and his forceful demands that the economy open up regardless of the death and destruction that might result. And maybe he’s right about that.

Recall that when states started to open up their economies and the markets began to rebound in May, Trump initially announced he would disband the coronavirus task force altogether. As far as he was concerned, the problem had been solved. (After an outcry, the White House kept the task force, although they stopped meeting as often.)

It’s obvious that Trump has never, from the beginning, cared in the slightest about the pain and suffering caused by this deadly virus. I’m reminded of that anecdote about an early April task force meeting in which Trump wanted to open up the economy immediately and just let the pandemic “wash over the country.” He was told that would result in many, many deaths. Yet, according to the Washington Post, he raised that idea repeatedly — and essentially, that’s the plan he ultimately implemented by default. (Indeed, Trump has now elevated Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist he saw on Fox News who believes in herd immunity — but has no particular expertise in epidemics or infectious disease — to a high-status advisory position in the White House.) .

We can say now that when it comes to the pandemic at least, malevolence was the driving force behind Trump’s decisions.

But I think the other revelations reported in this book so far can better be attributed to ignorance. For instance, in the very first conversation they had, he told Woodward all about his new secret nuclear program that he claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping knew nothing about — but would be very impressed if they did. Woodward confirmed this with other sources, but was told that people in the national security realm were a bit shocked that Trump had told a journalist about it.

That’s just dumb. So is all the ridiculous folderol over North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, whom Trump believed could be cajoled into giving up his nuclear weapons by snuggling up to him. Woodward asked people in the CIA about Kim’s “beautiful letters” to Trump and was told that while intelligence officials didn’t know who had actually written them, they were “masterpieces.”

The analysts marveled at the skill someone brought to finding the exact mixture of flattery while appealing to Trump’s sense of grandiosity and being center stage in history.

It’s pretty obvious who was being played in that relationship.

Meanwhile, Trump’s former Defense Secretary James Mattis and former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats went on the record with Woodward. Coats told him that Trump “doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie,” while Mattis said the president “has no moral compass.” And those were the nicer quotes.

Mattis in particular is scathing, telling Woodward, “What we’re doing is we’re actually showing [enemy nations] how to destroy America. That’s what we’re showing them. How to isolate us from all of our allies. How to take us down. And it’s working very well. We are declaring war on one another inside America. It’s actually working against us right now.”

When asked whether he thinks it’s possible for a president to be tough and also keep the peace he replied. “Not with the current occupant. He doesn’t understand. He has no mental framework for these things. He hasn’t read.”

So, malevolence or ignorance? When it comes to politics and domestic policy, the evidence strongly suggests that malevolence governs Donald Trump — but that ignorance rules when it comes to national security.

On Wednesday night, Trump told Sean Hannity on the latter’s Fox News prime-time show, “I probably, almost definitely won’t read [Woodward’s book] because I don’t have time to read it.” He won’t be calling it fake news, though. Because, lordy, there are tapes. Richard Nixon must be rolling over in his grave with laughter.

Artificial (un)intelligence and the U.S. military

With Covid-19 incapacitating startling numbers of U.S. service members and modern weapons proving increasingly lethal, the American military is relyingever more frequently on intelligent robots to conduct hazardous combat operations. Such devices, known in the military as “autonomous weapons systems,” include robotic sentries, battlefield-surveillance drones, and autonomous submarines. So far, in other words, robotic devices are merely replacing standard weaponry on conventional battlefields. Now, however, in a giant leap of faith, the Pentagon is seeking to take this process to an entirely new level — by replacing not just ordinary soldiers and their weapons, but potentially admirals and generals with robotic systems.

Admittedly, those systems are still in the development stage, but the Pentagon is now rushing their future deployment as a matter of national urgency. Every component of a modern general staff — including battle planning, intelligence-gathering, logistics, communications, and decision-making — is, according to the Pentagon’s latest plans, to be turned over to complex arrangements of sensors, computers, and software. All these will then be integrated into a “system of systems,” now dubbed the Joint All-Domain Command-and-Control, or JADC2 (since acronyms remain the essence of military life). Eventually, that amalgam of systems may indeed assume most of the functions currently performed by American generals and their senior staff officers.

The notion of using machines to make command-level decisions is not, of course, an entirely new one. It has, in truth, been a long time coming. During the Cold War, following the introduction of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with extremely short flight times, both military strategists and science-fiction writers began to imagine mechanical systems that would control such nuclear weaponry in the event of human incapacity.

In Stanley Kubrick’s satiric 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove, for example, the fictional Russian leader Dimitri Kissov reveals that the Soviet Union has installed a “doomsday machine” capable of obliterating all human life that would detonate automatically should the country come under attack by American nuclear forces. Efforts by crazed anti-Soviet U.S. Air Force officers to provoke a war with Moscow then succeed in triggering that machine and so bring about human annihilation. In reality, fearing that they might experience a surprise attack of just this sort, the Soviets later did install a semi-automatic retaliatory system they dubbed “Perimeter,” designed to launch Soviet ICBMs in the event that sensors detected nuclear explosions and all communications from Moscow had been silenced. Some analysts believe that an upgraded version of Perimeter is still in operation, leaving us in an all-too-real version of a Strangelovian world.

In yet another sci-fi version of such automated command systems, the 1983 film WarGames, starring Matthew Broderick as a teenage hacker, portrayed a supercomputer called the War Operations Plan Response, or WOPR (pronounced “whopper”) installed at the North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) headquarters in Colorado. When the Broderick character hacks into it and starts playing what he believes is a game called “World War III,” the computer concludes an actual Soviet attack is underway and launches a nuclear retaliatory response. Although fictitious, the movie accurately depicts many aspects of the U.S. nuclear command-control-and-communications (NC3) system, which was then and still remains highly automated.

Such devices, both real and imagined, were relatively primitive by today’s standards, being capable solely of determining that a nuclear attack was under way and ordering a catastrophic response. Now, as a result of vast improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, machines can collect and assess massive amounts of sensor data, swiftly detect key trends and patterns, and potentially issue orders to combat units as to where to attack and when.

Time Compression and Human Fallibility

The substitution of intelligent machines for humans at senior command levels is becoming essential, U.S. strategists argue, because an exponential growth in sensor information combined with the increasing speed of warfare is making it nearly impossible for humans to keep track of crucial battlefield developments. If future scenarios prove accurate, battles that once unfolded over days or weeks could transpire in the space of hours, or even minutes, while battlefield information will be pouring in as multitudinous data points, overwhelming staff officers. Only advanced computers, it is claimed, could process so much information and make informed combat decisions within the necessary timeframe.

Such time compression and the expansion of sensor data may apply to any form of combat, but especially to the most terrifying of them all, nuclear war. When ICBMs were the principal means of such combat, decisionmakers had up to 30 minutes between the time a missile was launched and the moment of detonation in which to determine whether a potential attack was real or merely a false satellite reading (as did sometimes occur during the Cold War). Now, that may not sound like much time, but with the recent introduction of hypersonic missiles, such assessment times could shrink to as little as five minutes. Under such circumstances, it’s a lot to expect even the most alert decision-makers to reach an informed judgment on the nature of a potential attack. Hence the appeal (to some) of automated decision-making systems.

“Attack-time compression has placed America’s senior leadership in a situation where the existing NC3 system may not act rapidly enough,” military analysts Adam Lowther and Curtis McGiffin argued at War on the Rocks, a security-oriented website. “Thus, it may be necessary to develop a system based on artificial intelligence, with predetermined response decisions, that detects, decides, and directs strategic forces with such speed that the attack-time compression challenge does not place the United States in an impossible position.”

This notion, that an artificial intelligence-powered device — in essence, a more intelligent version of the doomsday machine or the WOPR — should be empowered to assess enemy behavior and then, on the basis of “predetermined response options,” decide humanity’s fate, has naturally produced some unease in the community of military analysts (as it should for the rest of us as well). Nevertheless, American strategists continue to argue that battlefield assessment and decision-making — for both conventional and nuclear warfare — should increasingly be delegated to machines.

“AI-powered intelligence systems may provide the ability to integrate and sort through large troves of data from different sources and geographic locations to identify patterns and highlight useful information,” the Congressional Research Service noted in a November 2019 summary of Pentagon thinking. “As the complexity of AI systems matures,” it added, “AI algorithms may also be capable of providing commanders with a menu of viable courses of action based on real-time analysis of the battlespace, in turn enabling faster adaptation to complex events.”

The key wording there is “a menu of viable courses of action based on real-time analysis of the battlespace.” This might leave the impression that human generals and admirals (not to speak of their commander-in-chief) will still be making the ultimate life-and-death decisions for both their own forces and the planet. Given such anticipated attack-time compression in future high-intensity combat with China and/or Russia, however, humans may no longer have the time or ability to analyze the battlespace themselves and so will come to rely on AI algorithms for such assessments. As a result, human commanders may simply find themselves endorsing decisions made by machines — and so, in the end, become superfluous.

Creating Robot Generals

Despite whatever misgivings they may have about their future job security, America’s top generals are moving swiftly to develop and deploy that JADC2 automated command mechanism. Overseen by the Air Force, it’s proving to be a computer-driven amalgam of devices for collecting real-time intelligence on enemy forces from vast numbers of sensor devices (satellites, ground radars, electronic listening posts, and so on), processing that data into actionable combat information, and providing precise attack instructions to every combat unit and weapons system engaged in a conflict — whether belonging to the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, or the newly formed Space Force and Cyber Command.

What, exactly, the JADC2 will consist of is not widely known, partly because many of its component systems are still shrouded in secrecy and partly because much of the essential technology is still in the development stage. Delegated with responsibility for overseeing the project, the Air Force is working with Lockheed Martin and other large defense contractors to design and develop key elements of the system.

One such building block is its Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), a data-collection and distribution system intended to provide fighter pilots with up-to-the-minute data on enemy positions and help guide their combat moves. Another key component is the Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS), designed to connect radar systems to anti-aircraft and missile-defense launchers and provide them with precise firing instructions. Over time, the Air Force and its multiple contractors will seek to integrate ABMS and IBCS into a giant network of systems connecting every sensor, shooter, and commander in the country’s armed forces — a military “internet of things,” as some have put it.

To test this concept and provide an example of how it might operate in the future, the Army conducted a live-fire artillery exercise this August in Germany using components (or facsimiles) of the future JADC2 system. In the first stage of the test, satellite images of (presumed) Russian troop positions were sent to an Army ground terminal, where an AI software program called Prometheus combed through the data to select enemy targets. Next, another AI program called SHOT computed the optimal match of available Army weaponry to those intended targets and sent this information, along with precise firing coordinates, to the Army’s Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System (AFATDS) for immediate action, where human commanders could choose to implement it or not. In the exercise, those human commanders had the mental space to give the matter a moment’s thought; in a shooting war, they might just leave everything to the machines, as the system’s designers clearly intend them to do.

In the future, the Army is planning even more ambitious tests of this evolving technology under an initiative called Project Convergence. From what’s been said publicly about it, Convergence will undertake ever more complex exercises involving satellites, Air Force fighters equipped with the ABMS system, Army helicopters, drones, artillery pieces, and tactical vehicles. Eventually, all of this will form the underlying “architecture” of the JADC2, linking every military sensor system to every combat unit and weapons system — leaving the generals with little to do but sit by and watch.

Why Robot generals could get it wrong

Given the complexity of modern warfare and the challenge of time compression in future combat, the urge of American strategists to replace human commanders with robotic ones is certainly understandable. Robot generals and admirals might theoretically be able to process staggering amounts of information in brief periods of time, while keeping track of both friendly and enemy forces and devising optimal ways to counter enemy moves on a future battlefield. But there are many good reasons to doubt the reliability of robot decision-makers and the wisdom of using them in place of human officers.

To begin with, many of these technologies are still in their infancy, and almost all are prone to malfunctions that can neither be easily anticipated nor understood. And don’t forget that even advanced algorithms can be fooled, or “spoofed,” by skilled professionals.

In addition, unlike humans, AI-enabled decision-making systems will lack an ability to assess intent or context. Does a sudden enemy troop deployment, for example, indicate an imminent attack, a bluff, or just a normal rotation of forces? Human analysts can use their understanding of the current political moment and the actors involved to help guide their assessment of the situation. Machines lack that ability and may assume the worst, initiating military action that could have been avoided.

Such a problem will only be compounded by the “training” such decision-making algorithms will undergo as they are adapted to military situations. Just as facial recognition software has proved to be tainted by an over-reliance on images of white males in the training process — making them less adept at recognizing, say, African-American women — military decision-making algorithms are likely to be distorted by an over-reliance on the combat-oriented scenarios selected by American military professionals for training purposes. “Worst-case thinking” is a natural inclination of such officers – after all, who wants to be caught unprepared for a possible enemy surprise attack? — and such biases will undoubtedly become part of the “menus of viable courses of action” provided by decision-making robots.

Once integrated into decision-making algorithms, such biases could, in turn, prove exceedingly dangerous in any future encounters between U.S. and Russian troops in Europe or American and Chinese forces in Asia. A clash of this sort might, after all, arise at any time, thanks to some misunderstanding or local incident that rapidly gains momentum — a sudden clash between U.S. and Chinese warships off Taiwan, for example, or between American and Russian patrols in one of the Baltic states. Neither side may have intended to ignite a full-scale conflict and leaders on both sides might normally move to negotiate a cease-fire. But remember, these will no longer simply be human conflicts. In the wake of such an incident, the JADC2 could detect some enemy move that it determines poses an imminent risk to allied forces and so immediately launch an all-out attack by American planes, missiles, and artillery, escalating the conflict and foreclosing any chance of an early negotiated settlement.

Such prospects become truly frightening when what’s at stake is the onset of nuclear war. It’s hard to imagine any conflict among the major powers starting out as a nuclear war, but it’s far easier to envision a scenario in which the great powers — after having become embroiled in a conventional conflict — reach a point where one side or the other considers the use of atomic arms to stave off defeat. American military doctrine, in fact, has always held outthe possibility of using so-called tactical nuclear weapons in response to a massive Soviet (now Russian) assault in Europe. Russian military doctrine, it is widely assumed, incorporates similar options. Under such circumstances, a future JADC2 could misinterpret enemy moves as signaling preparation for a nuclear launch and order a pre-emptive strike by U.S. nuclear forces, thereby igniting World War III.

War is a nasty, brutal activity and, given almost two decades of failed conflicts that have gone under the label of “the war on terror,” causing thousands of American casualties (both physical and mental), it’s easy to understand why robot enthusiasts are so eager to see another kind of mentality take over American war-making. As a start, they contend, especially in a pandemic world, that it’s only humane to replace human soldiers on the battlefield with robots and so diminish human casualties (at least among combatants). This claim does not, of course, address the argument that robot soldiers and drone aircraft lack the ability to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants on the battlefield and so cannot be trusted to comply with the laws of war or international humanitarian law — which, at least theoretically, protect civilians from unnecessary harm — and so should be banned.

Fraught as all of that may be on future battlefields, replacing generals and admirals with robots is another matter altogether. Not only do legal and moral arguments arise with a vengeance, as the survival of major civilian populations could be put at risk by computer-derived combat decisions, but there’s no guarantee that American GIs would suffer fewer casualties in the battles that ensued. Maybe it’s time, then, for Congress to ask some tough questions about the advisability of automating combat decision-making before this country pours billions of additional taxpayer dollars into an enterprise that could, in fact, lead to the end of the world as we know it. Maybe it’s time as well for the leaders of China, Russia, and this country to limit or ban the deployment of hypersonic missiles and other weaponry that will compress life-and-death decisions for humanity into just a few minutes, thereby justifying the automation of such fateful judgments.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. He is the author of 15 books, the latest of which is All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

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PTSD expert Seth Norrholm: Americans “are being psychologically abused by Donald Trump”

Timed with the release of his new book “Rage,” to be published next week, famed journalist Bob Woodward has released recordings of Donald Trump admitting that the coronavirus pandemic will be extremely lethal and could potentially kill hundreds of thousands of people in the United States. Donald Trump told Woodward this in a February interview, when there was still a reasonable chance that thousands of lives could have been saved, had Trump chosen to act in a responsible manner.

Woodward’s newspaper, the Washington Post, reported on the aftermath of these revelations, including Trump’s acknowledgment “that he intentionally played down the deadly nature of the rapidly spreading coronavirus last winter as an attempt to avoid a ‘frenzy’ ….”:

“So the fact is, I’m a cheerleader for this country. I love our country. And I don’t want people to be frightened,” Trump told reporters at the White House after announcing his potential Supreme Court nominees if he wins reelection. “I don’t want to create panic, as you say. And certainly, I’m not going to drive this country or the world into a frenzy. We want to show confidence. We want to show strength.”

None of this should be a surprise given Donald Trump’s character, evident mental pathologies and overall pattern of behavior.

Trump’s admission is contrary to his public protestations that the pandemic is a “hoax” perpetrated or exaggerated by Democrats to damage him in the election, as well as his claims the virus is not that dangerous and will go away on its own, people should not wear masks, and that public health experts and medical researchers are sharing “fake news” about the lethal nature of the coronavirus.

As psychologist John Gartner cautioned in a recent conversation here at Salon: “Donald Trump is the most successful bio-terrorist in human history. This is not an accident.”

Ultimately, Trump’s sabotage and willful negligence — to which he has now effectively confessed — is a crime against humanity. At worst, it approaches de facto genocide; at best, it could be called negligent homicide on a mass scale.

On Twitter, former CIA Director John Brennan described Donald Trump as a human “abomination,” writing, “If he had a conscience or a soul, he would resign. Tragically for us, he has neither.”

The American people should know by now that Donald Trump does not care about their safety, health or well-being. Yet again, Donald Trump has betrayed his presidential oath of office. From his coronavirus pandemic to a democracy under siege from his authoritarian movement, a failed economy, an increase in right-wing violence and terrorism, and a public embrace of white supremacy, Trump and his regime are emotionally and physically abusing the American people.

But Trump’s lies about the coronavirus pandemic and his personal responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of deaths that have followed will not force his followers to abandon him. Trumpism is a death cult. Human sacrifice is one of its central rites and rituals. Unfortunately, many of Trump’s disciples are willing to both die and kill for him.

Dr. Seth Norrholm is a translational neuroscientist and one of the world’s leading experts on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and fear. He is currently the scientific director at the Neuroscience Center for Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma (NeuroCAST) in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit.

In this conversation, Dr. Norrholm explains how Donald Trump’s behavior towards the American people resembles that of a domestic abuser. He also details how Donald Trump and his regime are causing the American people to experience symptoms and behaviors similar to PTSD — and that post-Trump PTSD will impact the country’s public health for many years into the future. Norrholm also offers advice on how the American people can handle the increase in stress and anxiety as Election Day 2020 approaches in the midst of a deadly pandemic and Trump’s escalating threats and violence.

There are people on Twitter and social media all day long discussing Donald Trump and this moment. Trump’s administration is actively traumatizing the American people to the point where public opinion polls show that Donald Trump makes them feel unsafe. Other research shows a large increase in emotional and mental health problems which are correlated with Trump’s time in office.

What are Trump and his regime doing to the emotional health of the American people? The long-term impact is going to be great.

From 2015 forward, it is a constant timeline of one risk or threat or breaking of norms after another from the Trump administration. There has been no real respite.

Looking at this through social media, it is very much like an addiction where some people will log into Twitter in the morning and then you will see them log off at night and they will actually say, “See you in the morning, folks.” Twitter and other social media is almost like a running commentary of their day.

The Age of Trump is the story of authoritarianism and how it can damage the mental health of an entire society. Why has there been such reluctance by most of the mainstream American news media to discuss emotional life as connected to politics in this moment?

Part of the problem with emotions is vagueness. Therefore, the news media and analysts tend to shy away from discussing emotions. I also think that part of the challenge is that American society tends to be forgiving. For example, if the president were to go public and say that, “Look, I’ve battled an addiction to painkillers or alcohol,” or that he has early stage Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, the news media and public would accept it. Why? Because it is a hard diagnosis. It is something tangible. But because with Donald Trump we are talking about behavior which is open to interpretation and involves concepts from psychology that deal with emotions and personality, it is very difficult for the average person to understand. This is true of the news media as well. Therefore, emotions in general are much less discussed by the American news media.

This has meant that the American news media has for the most part covered Donald Trump using the existing heuristics which are, “Here is the president’s schedule. Here’s what he did today. Here’s what he said.” Donald Trump should not have been covered that way. The assumption that he is somehow “presidential” and acts in a normal way should have been discarded.

Then there is the other side, with Fox News and other right-wing news media which Trump’s followers listen to. That side is proceeding with, “This is how we have to defend our position.” That is when we see cult psychology, a shared psychosis where the members have to radically defend their positions because the alternative is admitting that they were wrong. It is as if American society has lost the ability to admit wrong and apologize where whole groups of partisans and Trumpists can’t simply say, “Look, I read the situation wrong and I made a mistake.”

There is a cycle of ups and downs, highs and lows, hopes and disappointments in the Age of Trump where at one moment it seems like he will be stopped and then he somehow survives and becomes more powerful. How does that roller coaster of emotions impact the American people?

This fits the model of an abusive relationship. If you think about an abusive relationship, the victim often tells themselves, “Tomorrow it’ll be better because family’s coming to town.” Or they have filed a police report or taken other steps to change the abusive situation. But what happens when those steps do not work to stop the abuse? That cycle has a compounding negative cumulative impact.

The American people are being psychologically abused by Donald Trump. Consider all the reports about his criminality from the Russia scandal onward, the whistleblowers, all the cumulative evidence.

The American people, the abuse victim says, “OK, I’ve got some hope. The authorities are looking into it.” Then [Bill] Barr is brought on and the Mueller report is diluted and misrepresented, and nothing happens in terms of consequences. So the American people, who are the abuse victim, then says, “OK, that didn’t work.” Then there is a period of mourning, dejection and sadness. Then the American people say, “OK, what’s the next step I can take?” Then they see Trump being impeached. Now the conclusion is, “OK, this is going to be the mechanism by which I could end this abusive relationship.” Now we go through the process from December to January, and there is a parade of witnesses with all this damning information. Trump looked like he was done for. And again, Trump gets away with it all.

Trump’s bellicosity and the reminders that he has access to a vast nuclear arsenal is akin to an abuser saying to a partner, “Remember, I sleep with my revolver.” So the bottom line is that we as mental health professionals were already looking at a post-Trump era of exacerbated mental illness that has now been compounded with an unchecked pandemic that has killed nearly 200,000 and altered millions of lives.

The American people, as Trump’s abuse victims, then say, “Damn it, this is another instance where nothing happened.” Now the hope is that on Election Day something will change, and Trump will be gone.

What does that cycle of emotions do to the human brain?

There is research on Hurricane Katrina survivors, mass shooting survivors and other examples where the trauma was a distinct event. With Trump and this national calamity, it is an ongoing event which involves repeated exposure to chronic stress.

From an evolutionary perspective, the human stress response system only knows one way to function, which is essentially the fight or flight response. So, you recognize that threat, there’s a physiological response, your autonomic nervous system kicks in, your heart rate accelerates, cortisol is released. That is an evolutionary response to acute threats in the environment.

When a person is repeatedly stressed, the human body continues to release cortisol. The heart rate stays elevated. This can have long-term effects.

There are a number of studies which show that excessive cortisol can have a number of neuropsychiatric effects. This includes changing the neuronal structure, which can reduce the number of synaptic contacts that neurons have with one another. Excessive cortisol can damage different areas of the brain. That too has a range of consequences, whether it is learning and memory deficits and emotional dysregulation. Anger and mood disorders can become much more pronounced.

There is definitely going to be post-Trump syndrome — especially for those people who have been more engaged with current events. They are obviously at much more risk than a person who says, “You know what? This is just politics.”

If you are someone who is genetically more predisposed to be an anxious person, that can be buffered if you are placed in a situation where you have got resources such as a job and a home. Even with the genetics involved, if those buffers are in place such a person may not ever experience anxiety. When people start losing their jobs and health care in massive numbers, that is a tipping point for overcoming learned helplessness and resisting.

In total, there are going to be a host of post-Trump biological and psychological consequences that as a society we are going to be dealing with for a long time.

Stress also impacts people’s individual dreams and also the collective subconscious of a society. There has been research on the dreams the German people experienced under the Nazis. Likewise, there are mental health professionals who are compiling lists of the types of dreams people are experiencing under the Trump regime. What do we know about stress and dreams?

Conflicts can bleed into dreams. This is especially true of unresolved conflicts. Viewing the Trump presidency as a type of unresolved conflict reveals quite a few things. The Trump administration is the daily stressor. It has all these tentacles and there seems to be no resolution in sight. The stress from the Trump administration is filling in gaps in our dream state.

With an assault victim, there may be some way of confronting the perpetrator and exacting revenge. Dreams reflect unresolved conflicts, but they also are a form of “re-experiencing” where the elements of the traumatic event are part of the dream content. This can take several forms.

A soldier who was hit by an IED explosion may have a dream in which they’re in the Humvee and the IED does not go off, or it goes off and there is a different consequence. These events can be replayed or played out in different scenarios in the dream state. It can be very vivid, to the point where a trauma victim may re-experience the trauma in a dream to the point where there is some kind of resolution. This may be facing the perpetrator or finding happiness and joy again. But then the person wakes up and has an extreme feeling of being let down because it was all just a dream.

Those types of intrusive re-experiencing thoughts and memories are going to play out in individuals who are particularly susceptible to what is happening today with the Trump administration and what it is doing to the American people.

What are your thoughts about Donald Trump’s mind and personality? How does Trump think about his behavior and the harm he is causing?

In the mind of a malignant or severe narcissist, it only takes a small scintilla of possibility that there was some type of “deep state” attack against him. Of course, that is highly unlikely. But even if there is such a remote possibility, that is all that is needed for a severe narcissist like Trump to build upon. That is why he has such an affinity for conspiracy theories, because it gives him a psychological out for his apparent crimes and other wrongdoing.

The malignant narcissist lives in this altered reality where there is a type of idealized self. Trump sees himself as an eternal emperor. He is a king in his mind who is all-knowing and all-powerful. But behind that facade Donald Trump is a vulnerable and in many ways a childlike individual. Trump is fighting so very hard to keep that veneer up in the public.

I was asked some years ago, what is the best course of action when dealing with a severe narcissist? It is repeated confrontation. It’s calling out the lies in real time. It’s calling out the hypocrisy. It is confronting the public veneer.

I know this won’t happen, but I would love for a journalist to say, “Are you wearing makeup, Mr. President? Is that self-tanner, or are you wearing makeup? Why is your face orange and your ears white?” That is how one deals with a narcissist. Confrontation. I wish Hillary Clinton had done that to Donald Trump. She did try, though.

During Hillary Clinton’s debates with Trump, she or one of the journalists there should have said to Trump, “You want to take away women’s reproductive rights. Have any of your lovers ever had an abortion?” On national TV before the world Trump should have been asked that question. But of course, none of the people there had such courage.

That is exactly what needs to happen. Trump views himself as the most powerful person in the world. There is no linear or logical flow to Donald Trump’s responses and thinking. It is all based on emotions. This is why we see so much flip-flopping from Donald Trump, because he says what feels good and feels right at the time for the audience which is in front of him.

He is just chasing one emotion to the next. Trump lives moment to moment because of his emotion-based thinking. That is Trump’s way of avoiding any accountability or having to deal with the details of policy and governance. The lies are of course another way of Trump to maintain the public face he likes to present, the illusion of his strength.

Bob Woodward’s new book reveals that Donald Trump knew in February that the coronavirus was an especially deadly airborne virus that could potentially kill hundreds of thousands of people. Trump knew this and publicly lied about it, downplaying the danger and interfering with relief efforts for personal and political gain. In essence, Trump lied and many tens of thousands of people are now dead, and more will die. How does that impact the emotions of the American people, to know that their president is actively hurting them?

People are smart, they pay attention. Most rational people recognized that no solutions or pathways out of this pandemic went through the Trump administration. The longstanding guardrails for public safety were torn down or silenced. The CDC was muzzled, the WHO was belittled, the scientific experts were either shouted down, spoken over or misquoted. People knew that the answers they were looking for and the practical solutions that they were seeking lay with their state and local officials. That was our advice in the mental health community early on: Focus on what is being done in your town by your EMTs, by your health care providers, by your mayors and by your governors. We as a people had to accept that we couldn’t trust the president and those in his orbit and that trust in the office and in our principles must be regained over a long period of time.

What advice would you have for people in terms of managing their emotions in these final weeks leading up to Election Day?

The best advice in times of high stress and crisis is to maintain routines as best as possible, to keep up with hobbies, maintain friendships and relationships, and take the time to recognize and express your emotions. It’s normal to feel afraid, anxious, on edge and angry, and for that to seep into your daily activities. One of our strongest drivers of stress and anxiety is unpredictability and lack of control. This has especially been the case for the past few years, and certainly for the past six months. Do things you can control, like your diet, exercise, time with friends and family (even if at a distance), and — if it helps you rather than adds to your stress — be an activist. Make a plan for voting, encourage others to vote, support your candidates up and down the ticket. Focus on what you can personally do and not too much on what others are doing.