The Amash factor

Well, then.

As I expected, my Twitter feed this morning is bursting with people accusing each other of consigning the nation to doom depending on how his entry into the race is likely to affect the decision they'll make the first Tuesday in November.

I'm in an interesting position these days. Well, at least I find it interesting. As with the whole national debate shouting match over when, how and how fast to reopen the economy, as well as a few other issues, with regard to Amash joining the presidential fray, I feel no need to commit myself to a hard and fast take at this throbbingly inflamed moment. I reserve the right to chill and rub my chin a bit.

This is odd, because I am on record as declaring myself to be an absolutist. I adhere to certain immutable principles, which I've largely distilled into my personal articulation of the three pillars of conservatism:

1.) Free market economics: A good or a service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth.  Period.  No other entity - certainly not government - has any business being involved in reaching that agreement.  Therefore, public-policy inquiries that concern themselves with macro-level phenomenon such as wealth inequality or “fair” wages are not only pointless but tyrannical by definition.

2.) The understanding that Western civilization is a unique blessing to the world: Both the Greco-Roman tradition from which the West has distilled the political structure of a representative democracy and the above-mentioned free-market economy, and the Judeo-Christian tradition from which it acquired an accurate understanding of the Creator’s nature and humankind’s proper relationship to the creator are the two most significant avenues of advancement our species has ever discovered.  (And much falls under this point that needs serious discussion at this time, such as the fact that there are only two genders, male and female, and that their is no fluidity between them, and that the family structure of a husband, wife and children thereof is the overwhelmingly normal one and the one most conducive to a happy and prosperous society.)

3.) A foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature:  Evil is real and always with us.  A nation-state seeking a righteous world(such as the United States of America) should only form close alliances with other nations that have demonstrated a track record of common values.  Regimes that are clearly tyrannical and / or expansionist should never be appeased.  Indeed, foreign policy should be guided by thinking on how to at least eventually remove such regimes as problems on the world stage.

Now, these are hard and fast positions. There's nothing situational about them.

The fact that Amash is driven by principles and they align with mine to a considerable degree is impressive. Phoniness of varying degrees and types is so pervasive in the political world that his steadfastness in itself is refreshing. (Actually, even though the principles to which, say, AOC adheres are completely loony and would destroy human freedom and civilizational advancement, I have to commend her for having a body of principles and sticking to it.)

My co-host for the Barney & Clyde, Clyde Myers, podcast hates the Amash development. On our last episode, we had the so-far-leading Libertarian Party candidate, Jacob Hornberger as our guest for the full hour, and I know Clyde was electrified. Heck, I was mightily impressed. And as Hornberger said early on, their party's dilemma for several election cycles has been the dilution of their own set of principles. Amash strays from those just enough that the dilemma seems likely to beset them again.

Of course, the main point of departure - the area outside our Venn diagram overlap, as Clyde and I like to say - between Ron Paul / Lew Rockwell / Jacob Hornberger libertarianism and conservatism as I delineate it above is that pesky Pillar Number Three. I feel that the libertarian view of foreign policy and national security ignores the glaring fact about human history: war is a given at any time and in every place. The determination of boundaries of geographical / political entities, such as tribal lands, kingdoms, empires and nation-states has generally involved some armed conflict. More specifically, Pax Americana, the 75-year-old US-led world order that has by and large prevented the world stage's bad guys from achieving ultimate victory, has been a blessing to humankind. The US and its network of allies represents the pinnacle of civilization. Our national interest, and that of our closest allies, is not based on mere amassing of power but a striving after righteousness. 

Now, to the question of whether pressing the button for Amash is a throwaway vote, a gratuitous and pointless gesture, let's consider the three choices we can assume we'd have before us when it's just each of us and God standing there looking at the ballot. 

Clearly, being a conservative and not a Trumpist, it's hard for me to swallow the prospect of the eternal record book showing I cast my vote for someone so glaringly unfit for the presidency. Take a scroll through LITD's posts, going back to mid-2015, under the label "Donald Trump" and you'll see that I've had that position since he came down the escalator and announced his decision to run. His handling of this coronavirus crisis has amplified all that I'd concluded. 

Then there is Joe Biden. The fact that he holds the positions that modern Democrats have to hold - that the extermination of fetal Americans is acceptable, that the global climate is in some kind of trouble that requires us to abandon human advancement, that two people of the same sex can be married, as that term had been commonly understood by the entire human species until about ten years ago, that government should be involved in health care - makes him an instant non-starter. But that is going to be a given no matter who the Democrats would select as their nominee. It's those traits that are peculiar to him (and some of which are quite peculiar) and make him particularly objectionable.

He's an empty suit. He was a crummy student in high school, college and law school (and ran into some plagiarism trouble in that last stop), getting by on being a charismatic glad-hand and a good athlete. 

He can be quite nasty. The driver of truck that killed his first wife and infant daughter went to his grave never getting an apology from Biden for the false accusation that he'd been drunk at the time of the collision. More recently, the remark about how Republicans would like to "put y'all back in chains" to a black audience was sadly characteristic of his bared-teeth style.

Now there's this business of the sexual-assault allegation. I touched this one. Such accusations have to be handled very carefully. It's way too easy to ruin a man's life, or at least put a cloud over it, in cases in which the story is not true. Just ask the Duke lacrosse team, the fraternity at the University of Virginia about which a lurid Rolling Stone article was written, or Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. But now footage of Tara Reade's mother calling in to the Larry King Live television program in 1993 has surfaced, and Business Insider has reported that a former neighbor of Reade's "recalls a conversation with her in 1995 or 1996 in which Reade tearfully describe being sexually assaulted by Biden." And then this:

Finally, on Tuesday, a 2008 essay by the late Alexander Cockburn surfacedin which the journalist reported that Biden had made "unwelcome and unwanted" sexual advances against a woman in 1972 or 1973 — and that he was well known on Capitol Hill for making "loutish sexual advances to staffers, interns, and the like." That establishes a possible longstanding pattern of Biden's behavior that further validates Reade's accusation (and potentially opens the door to others).

Again, let me say that I'm not coming to a conclusive position about this. It's entirely possible that Joe Biden is innocent of all allegations. But it's possible he's not. This must be looked into further.

Then there's Justin Amash. And I say, the fact that he's principled is mainly what commends him. Even in instances in which he voted in ways I might, at first glance, question, further consideration makes clear why he behaved as he did. For instance, when he voted present in the matter of defunding Planned Parenthood, he did so because of his discomfort with setting the precedent of naming a specific organization in a piece of legislation. He takes the position that marriage means the union of one man and one woman, but feels that the matter ought not to be decided by government. With regard to the US forcefully inserting itself into world-stage situations, he feels that Congress ought to vote on every instance in which that's being considered.

He's opposed to tax increases and subsidies. He's a Christian.

There's a lot to like.

So I will take my sweet time to weigh all the considerations.

The grim backdrop to this is that no matter what I decide, he's not going to be president. It's going to be one of the unacceptable choices.

It's very late in the day.

Tuesday roundup

Albert Mohler offers a discomforting but important essay in which he starts out looking at the impact of COVID-19 on higher education generally and then narrows the focus to the prospects for Southern Baptist Seminary and Boyce College.

Here's how he sets the table:

Where you find faithful Christianity, you find teaching and learning. The university itself emerged from an explicitly Christian foundation with Christ reigning over the entire curriculum. Where you find faithful churches, you find a learned ministry and faithful theological education. The mission of a theological seminary is to educate ministers in truth so that they will preach the Bible and minister to Christ’s people in faithfulness and truth.

Throughout the long centuries of Christianity, churches have established what became colleges, universities, and seminaries – and the schools that remain faithful are the schools that serve Christ and the church.

The COVID-19 crisis presents what is likely to be an existential crisis for many of these schools. In an interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Robert Zemsky predicted that twenty percent of all institutions of higher education might close for good in the wake of the coronavirus. The prediction was made back in March. The actual number is likely to be higher than twenty percent.

The reasons are fairly easy to understand, and the challenges to higher education did not begin with COVID-19. The entire sector of higher education has been facing a future of declining birthrates, costs that have escalated beyond sustainability, and a business model that is outdated. Any wise president has known for years that changes are coming, and the wisest were leading their schools through change and adjustment.

COVID-19 is a bomb set in the midst of those plans, and it has detonated. In an unprecedented act of necessity, schools had to send their students home. Dorms are practically empty, classrooms are dark, gymnasiums and stadiums are silent, and libraries are inhabited only by librarians. This is not the way it was supposed to be, but this is the way that it is, and there will be no quick return to normal. In truth, we all know that some new “normal” awaits the schools that manage to survive and thus earn the opportunity to thrive once again.

The coronavirus just collapsed a decade of institutional strategy and planning to a matter of weeks. The stress test tremors we all saw coming has become an earthquake.

The three stages of impact that higher education will have to deal with are the immediate situation, the coming 2020/2021 academic year, and the other side of the crisis. He recommends that those in academe brace themselves. Some of what they'll see won't be pretty.

Oriana Skylar Mastro of the American Enterprise Institute has a piece in Foreign Policy entitled "5 Things To Know If Kim Jong-un Dies."  They are: If the regime collapses, it will happen quickly. The United States is prepared, kind of. North Korean Nukes would need to be secured quickly. China would take the lead militarily, whether the United States likes it or not. The collapse of the regime would likely set back America's position in Asia.

That last point is to a fair degree due to the phenomenon Matthew Continetti was talking about in the piece I discussed in the post below: Trump's erratic behavior toward Kim - threatening fire and fury and then appeasing him with three summits - along with such stunts as demanding that South Korea and Japan pay the US to host our troops, basically reducing them to the status of a mercenary army - has weakened our network of alliances there.

At Law & Liberty, Mary Elizabeth Halper reviews Fred K. Drogula's biography of Cato the Younger.  It seems to me that there's somewhat of a parallel between Cato's position vis-a-vis Julius Caesar and our present situation. Cato was a conservative senator in the last days of the Roman republic. Cato prized integrity foremost among virtues, which made his dealings with the autocratic and mercurial Caesar, shall we say, difficult. Halper's verdict: Drogula intimates that Cato just despised Caeser because he had a burr in his saddle and doesn't even consider that Cato was disgusted with Caesar's power-lust.

Somebody at the Washington Post has taken the time to analyze what President Trump's participation in the press briefings has consisted of proportionally:

A Washington Post analysis of the 35 briefings held since March 16 finds that the president spoke more than 28 hours across those press conferences. The paper drew on annotated transcripts from the data analytics company Factba.se, focusing on the last three weeks of briefings in particular, which have seen the U.S. death toll climb past 50,000.

And between April 6 and April 24, Trump spoke for 13 hours — more than twice as long as Dr. Deborah Birx, who oversees the administration’s virus response and spoke for almost six hours, or Vice President Mike Pence, the coronavirus task force leader, who spoke for about 5½ hours. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, spoke for just over two hours. 

In other words, the president took up 60% of the briefings. The Washington Post report added that Trump answered questions addressed to someone else on the stage more than a third of the time, including queries that had already been answered by the intended official.

So what was the content of Trump’s remarks during those 13 hours? Two hours were spent on attacks — mostly against Democrats (drawing roughly 30 minutes), the media (for around 25 minutes), the nation’s governors (more than 22 minutes) and China (almost 21 minutes), according to the report.

About 45 minutes were spent praising himself and his administration, including three instances in which he played videos that featured support for him and his administration. 

Just 4½ minutes were spent expressing condolences for coronavirus victims.

This situation is tough on all of us. Let's do a lot of praying for each other, ourselves, the nation and the world.

Employing some tact with our allies, even if we were a little frustrated with them, would have proved useful now that China is an even bigger threat

Matthew Continetti has a must-read piece at National Review today on the pressing need for the US to rally its allies in standing up to China. It's not going to be a walk in the park, given the feathers that Donald Trump has ruffled.

Part of the reason we find ourselves at this juncture was the overly sunny view previous administrations had of the Middle Kingdom in its modern Maoist iteration:

America’s attempt to integrate China into the global economy as a “responsible stakeholder” failed. China’s economy has become more statist, its political system more repressive, its foreign policy more bullying, its ambitions more outsized than they were 20 years ago. China did not challenge American leadership directly. It altered the character of international institutions from within.

And the US in those days still had the naive view that various international bodies it had helped create were living up to their charters. The reality was that the world's bad guys were using them to further their aims:

 The multilateral institutions that comprise the American-led liberal international order have been decaying for some time. Coronavirus has accelerated the deterioration. NATO, the United Nations, the European Union, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization — they are unresponsive, unaccountable, divided, demoralized, defunct. The world is a more dangerous place.

We are used to autocratic domination of the U.N. General Assembly and the secretariat’s various commissions. No one bats an eye when Russia or China vetoes a Security Council measure. Less publicized were the concessions made to China as part of the Paris Climate Accord. Or the fact that the World Trade Organization treats the world’s second-largest economy as a “developing” nation. But the way Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director of the WHO, caviled and covered for Beijing as the coronavirus spread throughout the world is impossible to ignore. Drift, confusion, and chaos result.

And then along came the Very Stable Genius with his bull-in-a-china-shop (excuse the pun) modus operandi:

Where others might try a kind word or some quiet diplomacy to inspire reform and collaboration, he turns against the very institutions America created to force them to live up to their commitments. He browbeats NATO members into spending more on defense. He cheers for Brexit and supports the EU’s internal critics. He cripples the WTO’s arbitration mechanism and threatens to withdraw entirely. He suspends funding for the WHO.

There may be some short-term wins to point to, but there are implications to those:

Allies may accede to your demands, but resentment builds. The foundations of the alliance weaken. Unpredictability inspires fear and caution. If sustained for too long, though, it conveys irresoluteness and fecklessness. Adversaries begin to probe. They buzz flights and collapse the oil price, resume shelling U.S. troops and harassing U.S. naval vessels, begin tailing container ships in the South China Sea.

There's also cyber-espionage, intellectual property theft, the use of American film studios and communications companies with considerable Chinese ownership stake to spread propaganda and sow a general feeling of chaos.

So what is to be done?

By all means, punish the World Health Organization for collaborating with China. But also be prepared to stand up another mechanism to do the good work its founders intended. Go ahead, demand allies live up to their commitments. But also recognize that partnerships of like-minded nations were critical to success in the First Cold War. This is the time to build new institutions that reflect the realities of a 21st century that pits liberal democracies against an authoritarian surveillance state. For every moment that passes without American leadership brings us closer to a world where the sun never sets on the five golden stars.

Building these new institutions is going to require vision, a commodity that appears to be at a premium at present.

How has the Very Stable Genius politically jeopardized the Republican Party? Let us count the ways

It's pretty clear to anyone outside the cult that Donald Trump did himself and the party which let him become its standard-bearer no favors this week. His original remarks the other day about disinfectant and light immediately left even close aides aghast. When he tried to spin them as sarcasm the next day, it was seen as beyond lame.  And now a queasiness is spreading throughout Republican ranks. 

Well, on the level on which things get done politically, the throne-sniffers are still in charge. There is no room for actual conservatives in the policy-making and strategizing ranks. A longtime party activist was kicked off a Georgia state committee Zoom call last night for daring to criticize Trump.

Ms. Moscato, the ostracized activist, now vows to actively support Biden. I've had social-media conversations with a number of actual conservatives who are going to go this route. Personally, it's a bridge too far. I'm closely monitoring Justin Amash's thought processes this week.

But the fact that a number of conservatives really see getting behind Biden as the most viable option in this grim moment speaks to how strongly conservatives feel about Trump's ruinous effect on what we hold dear and have defended as long as we've been culturally and politically engaged. The way it's mainly put when they are pressed to come up with a succinct defense of their position is that the most urgent order of business is the removal of Trump.

There has even been some punditry put forth specifically knocking the consideration of supporting Amash. I've respectfully considered it, but ultimately it boils down to the binary-choice argument that prevailed in 2016 (and which I resisted with my vote on the first Tuesday that November).

No, the fact is that Justin Amash embodies so much - north of 80 percent - of what I'm looking for in a Republican presidential candidate. He'd be someone worth considering even if the VSG were not a factor. And if we keep going down this binary-choice path, when neither of the choices has the slightest appeal to actual conservatives, the principles we stand for and the worldview we embrace recedes to the point of being a quaint footnote in our civilization's history. 

I am not here tossing my support behind Amash. There's a decent chance that I will go that way.

My main point, though, is that we have let, as Rick Perry put it in the last election cycle, a "cancer on conservatism" metastasize into the pathetic mess we're seeing at the nightly pandemic press briefings.  (And, no, you won't get me to digress into a back-and-forth on the fact that Perry took the Energy Secretary gig anyway. That's a conversation for another day.)

Donald Trump is unfit to be president. He has turned the Republican Party into something grotesque, not to mention useless. And, most importantly to me, he has tossed a cluster bomb into the conservative movement, and cleaning up the damage and carnage is a task we ought not to have to be occupying ourselves with in a moment of national crisis.

It didn't have to be this way.

A question for the Very Stable Genius: why are you bugged that Governor Hogan got testing kits from South Korea?

You've been after governors to ramp up their state-level efforts to do more testing, saying that the federal government isn't an "ordering clerk." You even got a little testy about it, pun intended.

Fair enough. Generally speaking, and certainly in regard to this matter, I'm big on keeping government activity as local as possible.

So Republican Maryland governor Larry Hogan, using some connections his South Korean wife Yumi had, obtained 500,000 kits:

The governor said they quietly combatted 13-hour time differences and regulatory red tape to get the shipment, as Mr. Trump says he’ll support state efforts but he expects governors to do the heavy lifting.

So what's up with this?

Donald Trump insulted the governor of Maryland for purchasing coronavirus testing kits from South Korea, claiming he "didn't understand too much about what was going on" while defending the administration's slow response to the pandemic.

The president insisted during a White House press briefing on Monday that Governor Larry Hogan (R—Md) didn’t actually need to purchase the reported 500,000 testing kits from South Korea. The country confirmed its first case of the novel virus on 20 January — the same day as the US — and quickly managed to ramp up its testing capabilities, in turn reducing the spread of transmissions.

“Some of the governors like, as an example, the governor from Maryland, didn't really understand the list, he didn't understand too much about what was going on”, Mr Trump said, citing a list of nearly 5,000 federally-operated labs accepting coronavirus tests nationwide. The White House reportedly distributed the list to state governments in recent days.

“I don’t think he needed to go to South Korea,” the president continued. “I think he needed to get a little knowledge — would have been helpful.”

Governor Hogan opted to be the bigger person and respond graciously:

Mr Hogan also tweeted on Monday night that he was “grateful to President Trump for sending us a list of federal labs”, as well as for “generously offering Maryland use of them” for Covid-19 testing.

He added: “Accessing these federal labs will be critical for utilising the 500,000 tests we have acquired from South Korea.” 

Vice President Pence, as usual, had to play cleanup, a role he's surely tiring of, even though he publicly continues to gush over the VSG:

On Monday, the vice president said about Mr Hogan’s purchasing of testing kits from South Korea: “I wouldn't begrudge him or his health officials for ordering tests."

This was not a good look for a president whose political future hinges on the public sensing that testing is going to become much more widely available.

An ocean of Kool-Aid was guzzled on Laura Ingraham's show last night

Laura Ingraham was one of the very first hard-core Trumpists. In 2015, when several appealing and viable Republican candidates for president were still in the running, she started disingenuously framing the race as a dichotomy between the Very Stable Genius and Jeb Bush, who was polling near the bottom of the pack.

Since then, she's spent every microsecond of her professional life burnishing her bona fides as a throne-sniffer.

She outdid herself last night on her FNC program. She had the nation's premier expert on the coronavirus pandemic, followed by a psychologist better known as a television personality and book hustler than he is for the field in which he's trained.

She was set straight by Anthony Fauci when she tried the couldn't-it-just-go-away line on him:

“On the question of a vaccine, we don’t have a vaccine for SARS,” Ingraham said. “We don’t have a vaccine for HIV, and life did go on, right? So the idea that we’re definitely going to have a vaccine, we didn’t really approach much else in the same way as we’re pegging going back to normal with a vaccine, did we?”

Fauci responded by pointing out the stark differences between HIV, the virus that caused SARS and the novel coronavirus. He said HIV was “entirely different” because researchers developed effective treatments that allow people to live with HIV/AIDS. And SARS, he said, disappeared on its own, which ended efforts to develop a vaccine.

“I think it is a little bit misleading, maybe, to compare what we’re going through now with HIV or SARS,” Fauci told Ingraham. “They’re really different.”

“But, we don’t know,” Ingraham said in response. “This could disappear. I mean, SARS did pretty much disappear. This could as well, correct?”

“You know, anything could, Laura,” Fauci said. “But I have to tell you, the degree of efficiency of transmissibility of this is really unprecedented in anything that I’ve seen. It’s an extraordinarily efficient virus in transmitting from one person to another. Those kind of viruses don’t just disappear.” 

Fauci spent the rest of his time on “The Ingraham Angle” explaining the need for a piecemeal approach to reopening the economy. He stressed that states should meet all of the criteria in each phase of the White House’s guidelines before moving on to the next and remaining vigilant, and willing to close down again, for renewed outbreaks.

Next up was Dr. Phil, who peddles the "reasoning" that other causes of death statistically dwarf COVID-19:

Dr. Phil, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology but is not licensed to practice medicine, spoke about the mental toll of isolation under the stay-at-home orders aimed at slowing the spread of coronavirus. He suggested more people will suffer mental-health issues, like anxiety and depression, because of job losses and economic impacts of the pandemic than will catch the virus.

That’s when the TV psychologist compared coronavirus deaths to those caused by automobile accidents, smoking and drowning. Fauci has criticized the comparison to car accidents in the past, calling it a “false equivalency.” 

“We have people dying, 45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 a year from swimming pools, but we don’t shut the country down for that,” Dr. Phil said.

Memo to Dr. Phil: none of those forms of checking out are contagious.

Ingraham's show is preceded by one hosted by another of the original slavish leg-humpers, Sean Hannity, who had as his guest Dr. Oz, another television personality and book hustler. He's better known as a pop health consultant that as a surgeon, which he also is.

Dr. Oz's remarks were so offensive he's since had to apologize:

Dr. Oz is backtracking on comments he made on Fox News amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The TV doc (real name: Mehmet Oz) faced backlash for saying on Hannity that schools should reopen to get the country going again — as that “may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality.” He said those deaths “might be a trade-off some folks would consider.”

The Dr. Oz Show host has since apologized, saying he he “misspoke” when he minimized the risk and potential loss of life.

“I’ve realized my comments about risks around opening schools have confused and upset people, which was never my intention,” he said in a recorded video. “I misspoke. As a heart surgeon, I spent my career fighting to save lives in the operating room by minimizing risks.”

He continued, “At the same time, I’m being asked constantly: How will we be able to get people back to their normal lives. To do that, one of the important steps will be figuring out how do we get our children safely back to school. We know for many kids, school is a place of security, nutrition and learning that is missing right now. These are issues we are all wrestling with and I will continue looking for solutions to beat this virus.”

Earlier today, I posted an essay at Precipice, my Substack page,  on the essentiality of extending grace wherever possible at this precarious moment. I understand that the case could be made that there's little grace to be detected in what I'm writing here. About that I say this: seeking to be an agent of grace at every opportunity does not preclude pointing out the dissemination of poison. Trumpism, when heated to a boil, is a poisonous flavor of Kool-Aid and must be recognized as such. It leads people under its spell to abandon all sense of responsibility in order to advance the glorification of their cult leader.

It cannot go unremarked upon.

 

 

 

The truth that becomes more unavoidable with each passing day

What Jay says . . .

Jay Nordlinger

@jaynordlinger

Pity the Trump 'splainers for a moment. Every day, he gives them a lot of 'splaining to do.

Yeah, the past few days have not been kind to the notion that the Very Stable Genius is brimming with leadership skills. 

He sounded resolute as he put forth what he thought were going to be bold initiatives, but reality had other ideas:

President Donald Trump said Monday he had the “ultimate authority” to dictate to states how to reopen their economies, and that he’d craft his plans with advice from a council of top business, medical, and political leaders.

By Wednesday, both claims fell apart. He retreated from ordering governors to reopen, after constitutional scholars and even some conservative Republicans said it was beyond his power. And he backed away from an economic council, announcing he’d hold a marathon series of calls with business leaders instead.

For the president, it’s becoming a pattern.

Trump’s public statements on the coronavirus outbreak show him running into the limits of his power, as well as his ability to bend events, politicians and even the national narrative to his will. While he’s previously used his political standing and bluster to compel cabinet members and fellow Republicans to carry out his wishes, he’s found a virus that’s killed more than 27,000 Americans so far to be undeterred by his usual tactics.

Governors and business leaders, at the same time, are insisting on vastly expanded testing capacity and increased access to medical supplies before they consider relaxing social distancing practices that have crippled the economy and frustrated the president.

The result: Trump’s record on the virus is replete with rapid reversals and claims that had to be walked back when they later proved exaggerated or even false.

He claimed that the outbreak was under control when it was quietly spreading across the country. He pushed an Easter reopening only to be dissuaded by doctors who stuck to the facts. He said any American could obtain tests for the virus when the diagnostics were in scarce supply. He promoted a nationwide website that ended up serving only a few communities and a drug that hasn’t been proven effective against the disease.

The assistance programs are off to a shaky start as well:

“Why don’t you say, ‘It’s gotten off to a tremendous start, but there are some little glitches’ -- which, by the way, have been worked out? It would be so much nicer if you’d do that.” – President Trump, April 6, White House Briefing Room, Washington, D.C.

The president has repeatedly denied any problems with the Paycheck Protection Program, a tentpole of the $2.2 trillion economic stimulus passed by Congress to blunt the fallout from the coronavirus shutdown, calling it a “very successful rollout.”

There’s been reason for cheerleading, with the program likely to have fully obligated its $349 billion initial allocation as soon as Wednesday. But it has also been plagued by glitches at the Small Business Administration’s website as well as bureaucratic and legal wrangling between government agencies and banks.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers wrote Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin last week asking him to waive a requirement in the law requiring banks to disburse the money within 10 days of approving a loan, saying “initial compliance challenges have tested the mettle of banks nationwide and limited their bandwith to disburse the required capital.”

And one website that has crowd-sourced information about the loans – covidloantracker.com – says that of more than 9,000 small businesses who applied for the government assistance and reported data to the site, just 5% had received money by Wednesday morning.

Businesses are also struggling to access assistance through the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, which provides small businesses with loans of as much as $2 million. Requests for the funds have far exceeded the $17 billion allocated by Congress, and the National Federation of Independent Business said in a letter sent to congressional leaders on Tuesday that its research found “none of the small business owners who applied for EIDLs have received a loan or an emergency grant.”

“Small businesses are relying on these loans and grants and are exhausting reserves and savings while they await delivery,” the trade group representing small businesses wrote.

Trump faces another potential political liability after the Treasury Department decided to redesign stimulus checks being sent to Americans to include the president’s name. Administration officials are worried the change could further delay processing and distribution of money to individuals who don’t receive tax rebates through direct deposit, the Washington Post reported.
“I do understand it’s not delaying anything and I’m satisfied with that. I don’t imagine it’s a big deal,” the president said Thursday.

His bluster yesterday about invoking the power to adjourn Congress to get recess appointments for an undersecretary of agriculture, two Federal Reserve seats, and a Director of National Intelligence strikes some as ill-advised:

Jonathan Turley, a constitutional lawyer who argued against Trump's impeachment last year, said the power has never been used before "and should not be used now." 

"Senators of both parties should vote to support the congressional control over adjournment. Absent a 'disagreement' there is no presidential power to adjourn under Article II. A pandemic should not be an invitation for pandemonium," he tweeted.

Barb McQuade, a former federal prosecutor and University of Michigan law professor, questioned whether Trump really has the power to dismiss Congress.

“No and no. Trump has no authority over a separate and co-equal branch of government. It is odd that he keeps boasting of authority he lacks, while rejecting responsibility he has," she said. 

One thing the pandemic has made clear that China is not just a rival. It is at least an adversary and maybe ought to be regarded as an enemy, our deep business ties to that nation notwithstanding:

We often ascribe a basic level of humanity to even the cruelest leaders, but People’s Republic of China leader Xi Jinping’s actions have forced us to rethink this assumption. Although the emergence of the novel coronavirus now known as SARS-CoV-2 was probably not due to China’s actions, the emphasis that its authoritarian system places on hiding bad news likely gave the disease a sizable head start infecting the world. But most ominously, China’s obsession with image and Machtpolitik raises serious questions about its lack of moral limits.

At some point the Chinese Communist Party learned of the epidemic and made a decision to hide its existence, hoping it went away. Exposés in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Postand the Chinese mainland’s Caixin show that the information that did flow out of China early in the crisis did so only because of the courage of individual Chinese people in the face of government repression. People in the Wuhan epicenter, however, began to get wise — and scared (here and here) — by the end of December 2019, forcing their government to say something. The authorities gave the impression of a nontransmissible disease already under containment. We know now this was entirely false, likely designed more to ease civil unrest than protect the people.

The mayor of Wuhan even suggested that the central government prevented him from revealing details about the epidemic until January 20. Considering the first public announcements came out of Wuhan on January 1, we can assume that Xi had a sense of the danger prior to that.

Clearly, downplaying the disease wasn’t working and it was time for the Party to get serious. But how serious? Would it provide full cooperation to the international community? Would being seen as the source of this virus hurt its international image? Beyond these, there was a darker dimension: the more Beijing cooperated, the less the disease stood to affect other countries. This includes countries China sees as a threat to its existence, like the United States. Why should China suffer the effects of a pandemic while others stayed safe — and increased their strength relative to China — based on China’s own costly experience?

Now, a longstanding bedrock principle of commonly understood conservatism is that a leader of a Western nation - and in particular a US president - does not appease nations with aims inimical to its own. That went out the window with Trump's stance toward China. But then, nearly everyone, even most Trumpists, understand that he is no conservative.

His track record incudes statements like this:

"China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus," Trump tweeted on January 24, "The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!"

Speaking on Fox News on January 30, Trump said China was "working very hard" to stop the coronavirus outbreak.

"And we are in great shape," he said. "China is not in great shape right now, unfortunately. But they're working very hard. We'll see what happens. But we're working very closely with China and other countries."

And this:

In a series of tweets on February 7, Trump again praised the Chinese President's handling of the crisis.

"Just had a long and very good conversation by phone with President Xi of China. He is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus. He feels they are doing very well, even building hospitals in a matter of only days. Nothing is easy, but he will be successful, especially as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone. Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation. We are working closely with China to help!"

That same day in a press conference, Trump said he spoke to Xi, who said the country was handling it "really well." 

"I just spoke to President Xi last night, and, you know, we're working on the -- the problem, the virus. It's a -- it's a very tough situation. But I think he's going to handle it. I think he's handled it really well. We're helping wherever we can."
Three days later, on February 10, Trump again praised China on Fox Business saying they had the outbreak under control. 

"I think China is very, you know, professionally run in the sense that they have everything under control," Trump said. "I really believe they are going to have it under control fairly soon. You know in April, supposedly, it dies with the hotter weather. And that's a beautiful date to look forward to. But China I can tell you is working very hard." 

And this:

Speaking to reporters on February 23 on the White House South Lawn, Trump was asked if Xi should be doing anything differently in his handling of the crisis.

"No, I think President Xi is working very, very hard. I spoke to him. He's working very hard. I think he's doing a very good job. It's a big problem. But President Xi loves his country. He's working very hard to solve the problem and he will solve the problem. OK?"

In news conferences on February 25 and 26,Trump again praised China for "working very hard" to fight coronavirus. On February 29, he praised measures put in place by China and said similar measures could be put in place in the US to prevent spread.

"We've been in very close contact with China, including myself with President Xi. He very much wanted this to happen," said Trump. "He wanted this to get out and finished and be done. He worked -- he's been working very, very hard, I can tell you that. And they're making a lot of progress in China." 

And speaking of appeasing enemies, this is what North Korea, whose Dear Leader writes beautiful letters, has been up to lately:

North Korea on Sunday fired two suspected ballistic missiles into the sea, South Korea and Japan said, continuing a streak of weapons launches that suggests leader Kim Jong Un is trying to strengthen domestic support amid worries about a possible coronavirus outbreak in the country. 

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said it detected the projectiles flying from the North Korean eastern coastal city of Wonsan into the waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan on Sunday morning. The projectiles flew about 230 kilometers (143 miles) at a maximum altitude of 30 kilometers (19 miles), the statement said.

The sum total of these developments is not reassuring.

Some folks really need to consider that they're playing with fire

It was too much to ask, wasn't it?

However noble the impulse, it turns out to have been a fool's errand to hope that post-America could rise to the level of unity that the United States of America could muster in such instances as responding to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Then again, maybe that was the outlier. Really, when else has the nation so rallied? The Civil War was the antithesis of coming together. There was a brief - very brief - moment of unity after the September 2001 attacks. We started politicizing hurricane responses a few short years later. After identity politics thoroughly polluted our institutions ranging from universities to corporations to the realm of arts and entertainment to religion, it had probably become impossible to assume a common purpose for anything predicated on our basic roles as Americans.

And then, in terms of our choices for president, we swung between a standard-bearer for the view that America had been inherently unfair throughout its history, was in need of fundamental transformation and had much to atone for on the world stage, to a huckster peddling a return to some kind of tawdry and vaguely conceived "greatness" that cobbled together a mishmash of elements from irreconcilable worldviews.

It was enough to make a continent-sized nation state dizzy indeed.

And then came this, a crisis with no precedent that could provide any set of guidelines. It was ripe for a cacophony of hot takes, accusations and reciprocations.

No one is permitted to have an assessment along the lines of, "Given the sociocultural circumstances going into this, we did about as well as could be expected." This crisis either has to be treated with the kind of urgency that leaves questions of permanent damage to individual sovereignty sidelined indefinitely, or minimized so that we can have a V-shaped economic recovery and put this episode behind us like a bad dream.

Let's here address what could be seen as refutations to my point. Both Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo have praised President Trump's cooperation and quickness to provide material resources they've requested. That's encouraging indeed.

But we'd be remiss to overlook the fact that Newsom has said that the current crisis presents an "opportunity for reimagining a [more] progressive era as it relates to capitalism" and that "we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern." Cuomo's track record shows that he is no less an inhabitant of that end of the ideological spectrum, having announced legislation in January of this year to permanently ban fracking, and and a year earlier signing a bill legalizing abortion up to the moment of birth.

Democrats in Congress have twice now, since this virus has brought our economy to its knees, held up aid packages that would get cash money directly into the hands of businesses and individuals in order to load those packages up with wish-list nods to environmentalism and identity politics.

And left-of-center elected officials quite plainly have accomplices in the news-reporting industry - "the mainstream media." Two things about that: A.) It's undeniable and on display daily across an array of print, broadcast and online outlets, and B.) There are solid, responsible fact-gatherers and analysts at most of those same outlets. It's childish to paint them with such a broad brush that point B doesn't get acknowledged.

That the preponderance of the journalistic realm has leaned left has been a fact for decades. It went after Reagan and both Bushes with an aggressiveness that stood in glaring contrast to its treatment of the Clinton and Obama administrations. If there is a heightened intensity to its attack-mode way of operating in the Trump era, it's due to the fact that, in addition to the normal seething resentment that a Republican won the most recent election, Trump, as everyone who is not a diehard Trumpist can see, is uniquely obnoxious, narcissistic, petty, and impulsive among U.S. presidents, at least in the last 150 years.

And now, having set the table thusly, I say this: It is that factor - Trump's unfitness - that is the more significant influence on our difficulty with being effective in responding to the COVID-19 crisis. There is, of course, what he does and doesn't do that directly affects day-to-day attempts to meet the challenge, but, at least as importantly, how the blind fealty to him among his cult worshippers clouds their ability to take in the full array of considerations before us.

Let's start with the man himself, though. Only a Trumpist unwilling to take his full measure - a columnist willing to title a piece "The Very Remarkable Donald Trump," for instance - can overlook ominous expressions of authoritarianism such as this:

For the purpose of creating conflict and confusion, some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government. Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect....

....It is the decision of the President, and for many good reasons. With that being said, the Administration and I are working closely with the Governors, and this will continue. A decision by me, in conjunction with the Governors and input from others, will be made shortly!

or petty, unseemly and distracting preoccupations such as this:

Just watched Mike Wallace wannabe, Chris Wallace, on

@FoxNews

. I am now convinced that he is even worse than Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd of Meet the Press(please!), or the people over at Deface the Nation. What the hell is happening to

@FoxNews

. It’s a whole new ballgame over there!

Now, on to what slavish devotion is bringing out in his slavish devotees. It's made Wayne Allen Root call for replacing Doctors Birx and Fauci with Larry Kudlow at the daily briefings. It's made Laura Ingraham call for Trump to announce to said doctors a firm May 1 date for "opening the country back up" and demanding that they deal with formulating a protocol to accommodate that.

It's led the likes of engineer-entrepreneur-Senate candidate Shiva Ayyadurai to float conspiracy theories about Dr. Fauci being a puppet of "Big Pharma." It's made it necessary for Dr. Fauci to need a security detail.

What do these people, from the Very Stable Genius on down, envision after this "opening the country back up" has been accomplished? I'm not even just talking about the very real public-health risks involved. I'm not even just talking about the reconsiderations American business will need to undertake regarding its heavily China-dependent supply chains. Do they not see that very real transformation has taken place regarding who we are culturally and spiritually? You do not sequester the entire populace in its homes for two months or more and expect it to re-emerge as if the whole episode were a mere hiccup in our history.

We're at a point at which people had better consider that their utterances have consequences. Yes, economic resuscitation is an integral factor among those that need to be balanced. Yes, this is taking a toll on the psyche of a people known for action-taking. But when we are at the point of ginning up raw, inflamed animosity toward an objective public-health expert, when the U.S. president shows himself to be utterly ignorant of long-established understandings of the purviews of the federal-level executive and legislative branches, as well as of the relative purviews of the federal government and state governments, and when a public intellectual who had at one time rightly earned respect as a champion of our civilization's bedrock principles has so completely swallowed the Kool-Aid as to deny that we're in a pandemic, we're at an alarming juncture indeed.

It's often said by perpetual optimists these days that "we'll get through this." Of course we will. The kind of shape we'll be in when we do, though, depends on whether ostensible adults can get a grip on themselves and choose to assume little responsibility.