The First Debate: A Kindergarten Food Fight Between Biden and Trump

Trump, Biden Both Lose

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

I really felt sorry for Donald Trump after his three Presidential debates with Hillary Clinton in 2016. Before the debates, I had not only predicted on this blog that Trump would win the Presidency, I had even predicted how he would do it. I’d warned that Clinton would rack up big popular-vote margins in the big states on the West and East Coasts and would actually have won the election if America were truly a democracy instead of a republic (read James Madison in Federalist #10 for the best explanation I know of about the difference). But Trump would eke out small victories in Rust Belt and Sun Belt states and thereby become the second consecutive Republican President to win his first term in the electoral college while losing the popular vote.

Then Trump came out in the debates and almost literally went stark staring mad. As I wrote in October 2016, “At least when Adolf Hitler went crazy — sometime in 1942-43 Hitler switched from being a rational, cunning person pursuing an evil agenda to someone insane — he did it in the privacy of his various bunkers and only the highest officials in the Nazi government had to deal with it. Trump is doing it in the glare of national TV and on Twitter, where he stays up until the wee hours of the morning and shares with us the ravings previous generations of madmen either wrote down in incomprehensible journals or muttered to themselves in the hallways of asylums. When he first announced his campaign, a lot of people said, ‘He must be smart — he’s so rich!’ Now they’re wondering, ‘How did he get to be so rich when he’s so crazy?’”

By the time November 8, 2016 rolled around I was convinced Trump would lose the Presidential election because I didn’t think enough Americans would vote for him when he was so obviously bonkers. The insults, the stalking, the visceral contempt for Hillary Clinton that oozed from every pore of his bloated body, even the showmanship stunt of trying to get four of Bill Clinton’s old paramours (including Juanita Broaddrick, the one who had accused Bill Clinton of out-and-out rape) into the audience at one of the debates, all seemed like the desperate attempts of a man who couldn’t win a fair fight to unleash his own obsessions on the American people. Surely, I thought, whatever their level of contempt for Hillary Clinton -- bought and paid for by Richard Mellon Scaife and other super-rich Right-wingers who had paid a small fortune to collect (or invent) lies about her for over 25 years, the American people wouldn’t elect a President who was so obviously bat-shit crazy.

Well, I was right the first time. I was right in summer 2016 when I was urging the Democrats either to nominate Bernie Sanders or at least find a moderate who didn’t have Hillary’s hellacious political baggage (like Joe Biden, who’s going to have a hard time beating Trump in 2020 but would probably have had a better shot in 2016; alas, he bowed out of the race because he was still grieving the loss of his late son Beau … even though Beau himself had told his dad on his deathbed that he should run) because the huge level of hostility towards Hillary made her unelectable. She was still unelectable on November 8, 2016, and not just because she’s a woman (though sexism obviously had a lot to do with her defeat) but because years of Right-wing propaganda had turned the American people against her on a personal level and convinced them that she would not be able to serve out her term because she’d be convicted of a crime.

And, more to the point, Hillary Clinton epitomized the Washington elite. When her campaign started using the slogan that she was the “most prepared” candidate ever to have run for President in terms of the number of offices she’d held and the responsibilities she’d fulfilled, I wondered who on her staff had so totally misread the American electorate in 2016 that they’d came up with something so antithetical to the numbers of Americans who desperately wanted a major change -- and didn’t much care whether it came from Bernie Sanders on the Left or Donald Trump on the Right. Later I read Hillary’s campaign memoir What Happened and learned that stupid “most prepared” slogan had been the brainchild of Hillary herself.

In 2016 Trump was extraordinarily lucky in the opponents he drew -- self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” Sanders running in a country of people who have been indoctrinated for decades to see “democracy” and “socialism” as antithetical terms, and the much-hated wife of one of America’s quirkiest politicians, whose private life in general and sex life in particular would forever tarnish his legacy. (Ironically, when Bill Clinton was impeached for lying under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, the sexist hatred of his wife was one of the things that kept his poll ratings up; millions of American men said, “If I were married to that, I’d cheat on her, too.”)

This year Trump came on the debate stage in Ohio -- a state no Republican has ever won the presidency without carrying it -- on September 29 and was his typical boorish self: consistently interrupting, mocking his opponent with cutting asides, flagrantly misrepresenting both Joe Biden’s record and his own, He surprised some people -- including MS-NBC commentator Brian Williams -- by waiting until the 47th minute of a nearly two-hour debate (it was supposed to be just 90 minutes but, not surprisingly, it ran over) to bring up Biden’s scapegrace son Hunter. Biden launched into a full-throated defense of his son … unfortunately, his other son, Beau, who was clearly daddy’s favorite even before Beau’s tragic death from cancer and has become even more exalted in Joe Biden’s memory after his loss.

Hunter Biden seems to have lived his entire life in his late brother’s shadow. Joe Biden has almost certainly never said to him, “The wrong brother died,” as Dewey Cox’s father says to him over and over in Walk Hard, a marvelous parody of musical biopics, but I suspect he’s felt it. I suspect everything that’s gone wrong in Hunter’s life -- from his issues with drugs (Trump claimed during the debate that Hunter Biden had been dishonorably discharged from the U.S. military due to drug use; Biden denied it) to his attempts to monetize his relationship to the then-vice president by joining corporate boards in Ukraine and China with zero relevant experience in those companies’ businesses -- seems to me to have come about because when it comes to his one surviving child by his first wife, Joe Biden’s fabled gift for “empathy” seems to have failed him almost completely.

Not, of course, that Trump was willing to let his attacks on Hunter Biden stop there. Trump couldn’t just say that Hunter Biden had done the “swampy” thing of joining the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, that obviously wanted him just to exploit his family connections. He also had to say that Joe Biden had threatened to withhold aid from Ukraine unless they fired a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma -- which Biden did, though there were extenuating circumstances (both the European Union and anti-corruption activists in Ukraine itself wanted the guy out because they thought he was being too easy on corruption), and through much of the second half of the debate Trump was screaming over Biden that Hunter received $3.5 million from the mayor of Moscow … and Biden was equally vehemently (and rudely) denying it.

For the most part, the September 29 debate looked more like a fight between two students in a kindergarten classroom. Moderator Chris Wallace, who for years has tried to convince people he’s every bit as legitimate a journalist as his late father, Mike Wallace, even though he works for Fox News, vainly tried his best to keep his two quarrelling candidates on message and get them at least to feint towards answering his questions. At times he seemed to wish he could break up the two candidates and send them to opposite corners of the room until they agreed to play nice with each other. Wallace pointed out that both candidates were interrupting each other, but Trump was interrupting more -- which will probably get his objectivity questioned from Trump partisans who will denounce him as “fake news” and demand that Fox owner Rupert Murdoch fire him.

Trump was certainly living up to his bull-in-the-china-shop reputation. He scored at least one legitimate point against Biden, pointing out that in 1994 Biden pushed a “tough-on-crime” bill through the U.S. Senate that, among other things, raised the mandatory minimum sentences for federal drug crimes; set the penalties for crack based on the amount of substance rather than the amount of active drug (a scheme cooked up by African-American Democratic Congressmember Charles Rangel, who thought penalizing crack more harshly than powder cocaine would stop the crack epidemic in the African-American community), and labeled large numbers of young African-American men as “super-predators” who would have to be locked up in prison for life because there was no way to rehabilitate them.

Biden, indeed, emerges as one of the principal villains in Radley Balko’s 2014 book Rise of the Military Cop, about how the federal “War on Drugs” led to the militarization of American law enforcement at all levels, the rise of SWAT teams, the use of no-knock warrants (like the one that got Breonna Taylor killed in Louisville, Kentucky) in drug cases, an overall erosion of the idea that one’s home is one’s castle, and the “qualified immunity” virtually all American police officers have that protects them from wrongful-death suits. According to Balko, throughout his tenure in the U.S. Senate Biden would respond to harsh anti-crime bills sponsored by Republicans by introducing even harsher measures and getting Democrats to sign onto them by declaring that if they didn’t, Republicans would say they were being “soft on crime.”

Trump can legitimately claim that Democrats in general, and Biden in particular, helped create the mass incarceration of African-Americans and the climate by which police officers think they can kill them at will and never suffer any consequences, while Trump signed the First Step Act at the end of 2019 which started rolling back the harsh minimum sentences and other provisions of Biden’s anti-crime bills. He tried doing that in the debate, but he also repeated his mantra that he’s the candidate of “law and order” and challenging Biden to use the words “law and order” to express something desirable. Biden’s rather awkward response that he’s for “law and order -- and justice” showed he was aware of the trap Trump was setting for him but wasn’t politically or rhetorically agile enough to avoid falling into it completely.

Indeed, throughout the debate one of Trump’s savviest moves was to tie Biden to the radical Left of the Democratic Party. Few people outside Trump’s hard-core base are likely to believe that Biden is a radical Leftist himself, but a lot of voters will be susceptible to Trump’s argument that Biden won’t be a strong enough leader to keep the radical Left from taking control of the Democratic Party, a Democratic Congress and ultimately the country. It was fascinating to watch Trump accuse Biden of wanting to destroy all private health insurance in the U.S. -- and Biden respond by moving even farther to the Right on health care than the position he staked out during the campaign.

Tonight Biden said that the much-vaunted “public option” he wants to add to the Affordable Care Act [ACA] (assuming it survives the Supreme Court challenge, scheduled to be heard only 11 days after the election -- which, with Amy Coney Barrett headed for a warp-speed party-line confirmation, it’s virtually certain that the Act will be dead and buried before the new President takes office) will be available only to people poor enough to qualify for Medicaid and who live in states that haven’t invoked the Medicaid expansion under the Act. It’s a far cry from what “the public option” meant when the Affordable Care Act was first debated in 2009-2010 and even when Biden proposed it in the Democratic campaign -- a chance for people unsatisfied with the available options for private health insurance to buy a government-sponsored single-payer plan as an alternative.

The health insurance industry moved heaven and earth to keep the “public option” out of the original Affordable Care Act out of fear that if it were available, millions of Americans would choose it over private insurance because it would provide better, more comprehensive coverage than private plans; ensure that people had free choice of doctors and other health-care providers instead of being locked into only the handful of providers under the “narrow networks” under ACA-subsidized private plans, and would cost less. But the rich donors and other powerful people in the Democratic Party establishment who ensured Biden’s nomination did so, among other reasons, to make sure America’s for-profit health insurance industry would never have to face public competition.

At one point, as Biden was backing away from support for the so-called “Green New Deal” and saying he wanted to eliminate fracking but not get rid of it completely, Trump talked over him and said, “You’ve just lost the Left.” It’s a reflection of the bind the Democratic Party in general, and its Presidential candidates in particular,, have been in ever since America’s current Right-leaning political alignment emerged in 1968. Since then the Republicans have won eight Presidential elections to the Democrats’ five, and one of the main reasons for that has been the ongoing split in the Democrats’ base between progressives who want radical social change and at least a partial challenge to capitalism and the rule of “The Market” that has become America’s secular religion, and moderates who venerate capitalism and just want to tweak it around the edges a little to make it slightly more fair.

One could watch Joe Biden in the September 29 debate and see him caught between anti-capitalist yin and pro-capitalist yang. He needed to sound progressive, but not too progressive, and precisely because of his long record in government service (which Trump kept taunting him about -- more than once Trump said, “I’ve done more in 47 months than you’ve done in 47 years”) he’s having a harder time pulling off that balancing act than the three Democrats who’ve actually won Presidential elections since 1968 (Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama) or the two other leading “moderate” candidates in this year’s primaries, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttegieg.

I’m still angry that the Democratic National Committee drove Klobuchar and Buttegieg out of the race and gave the dedazo to Biden on the strength of Biden’s primary victory in South Carolina -- South Carolina, the cradle of the Confederacy and a state the Democrats have zero chance of carrying this year. I’m amazed that the Democrats in South Carolina nominated an African-American, Jaime Harrison, to take on incumbent Republican Lindsey Graham -- a white candidate could presumably have had a shot at “flipping”: this seat, but the cradle of the Confederacy is not ready to elect a Black Senator no matter how well he’s doing in the polls.

Remember the “Bradley effect,” the pattern that Black candidates will always do five points worse than they do in the polls because a lot of voters are racist but don’t want to admit it to survey researchers? I’ve long felt Trump is the beneficiary of a “reverse Bradley effect” in which he will always do five points better than in the polls because of racist voters who won’t tell pollsters they’re voting for him. These are what Trump calls his “invisible voters” and claims they’ll win the election for him. One reason Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 was that the Democrats were lured into a false sense of security by the polls and didn’t realize they were really behind in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio -- and they may be making the same mistake again this year.

Joe Biden had two main tasks in the September 29 debate. He succeeded in one of them: he didn’t make any obvious gaffes. He stumbled over his own words a few times (as did Trump) but he didn’t say or do anything to support Trump’s repeated accusations that Biden is cognitively impaired or that he’s not up to the mental strain of being President. Unfortunately, he failed at the other task: he let Trump’s insults and interruptions get to him. Though he didn’t talk over Trump anywhere nearly as often as Trump talked over him, Biden talked over Trump enough times he did not seem like “the adult in the room.” Indeed, as I noted earlier, they sometimes came across like two kindergarteners fighting each other in class -- and Chris Wallace did not have the disciplinary options a kindergarten teacher has at his or her disposal to deal with unruly kids. He couldn’t declare a time-out or send them to their corners -- as much as I suspect he wanted to.

If the debate changed any minds or affected those legendary creatures, the “undecided voters,” it probably made them think, “A plague on both your houses,” and made it less likely that they’ll vote at all. And that’s going to hurt Biden more than Trump, since the Democrats need a huge turnout of voters to crush Trump, the Republican Party and the Right-wing media power of talk radio and Fox News that have created the Trump constituency and helped bring it to power. Trump and the Republicans have consciously pursued a strategy of not attempting to add to their base, but quite the opposite: subtracting from the other side’s base through outright voter suppression and psychological tactics to discourage people who’d vote against them from voting at all. In losing his cool so often and so dramatically in their first debate, Biden helped the Republicans and played right into Trump’s strategy.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is Dead: Long Live Amy Coney Barrett!

How Donald Trump’s Choice to Replace Ginsburg Will Totally Destroy Her Legacy

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

I’ve just finished watching the telecast of President Donald Trump’s announcement of Indiana federal appeals judge Amy Coney Barrett as his third appointee to the United States Supreme Court. The telecast was vintage Trump, showing a heartstring-twanging dedication to “family” (well, at least he got his third wife Melania to smile in his presence, which almost never happens), dragging out not only Judge Barrett but also her husband and seven children, two of whom are Black. The Barretts adopted them from Haiti, and their appearance had the same sort of staged air as the African-Americans who trooped across the various stages of the Republican Convention: “You see? We’re not racists!”

Both President Trump and Judge Barrett herself brought forth the sad tale of her youngest son, Tiny Tim -- oops, his name is Benjamin, but you can forgive that mistake because he has Down’s Syndrome and Judge Barrett proclaimed that of all their kids, he’s the one they love best. It reminded me of how Sarah Palin used to parade (metaphorically) her own Down’s baby and use it as an excuse for why she was against abortion and wanted to make it illegal: “If you let women have abortions, wonderful chiuldren like this would have never been born!”

Though Trump floated the names of two other candidates -- like Barrett, both Federalist Society Right-wing attorneys appointed to the federal appeals bench by Trump himself -- Barrett was the virtually certain choice from the get-go. She’d actually been one of the finalists for his last Supreme Court pick, which went to Brett “I Like Beer” Kavanaugh instead because Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) had said she wouldn’t vote for a nominee who was outright committed to reversing Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision establishing women’s constitutional right to at least some abortions. Instead Trump needed to put forth a pick who would continue the Court’s Right-wing strategy of giving Roe the death of a thousand cuts -- establishing more and more “exceptions” in which states could limit abortions until the theoretical right to one became meaningless.

Of the people on Trump’s short list, Coney Barrett was probably the most intelligent -- which will make her the most dangerous -- and the most outspoken in terms of just how far Right she wants to take the court. If Coney Barrett is confirmed -- which, since the Republicans have a U.S. Senate majority and their leader, Mitch McConnell, has a hammer-lock on the process, is virtually certain -- Roe v. Wade is almost certainly headed for the same judicial scrap heap as Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson. The difference, of course, is that when the Supreme Court reversed those noxious precedents they expanded civil rights for people of color in general and African-Americans in particular. The reversal of Roe would make millions of American women essentially slaves to their wombs.

Coney Barrett’s arrival on the court will also spell the end of the Affordable Care Act and the exclusion of millions of Americans from access to health care -- in the middle of the worst pandemic in over 100 years. The original decision upholding so-called “Obamacare” came in June 2012 and showed the court split 4-4 on whether the law was within Congress’s constitutional power “to regulate Commerce between the States” -- a provision known as the Interstate Commerce Clause and the basis of virtually all federal power to regulate the economy. Four justices -- led by the since-retired Anthony Kennedy -- said that the Affordable Care Act exceeded Congress’s power under the commerce clause. Four justices said it didn’t.

In what turned out to be the controlling opinion, chief justice John Roberts said it didn’t matter whether the law as a whole was within the scope of the Commerce Clause because its centerpiece -- the so-called “individual mandate” requiring all Americans either to buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the government to cover the costs of caring for uninsured people -- was essentially a tax, and the federal government certainly had the power to tax. Coney Barrett, in a 2017 law review article, said Roberts had pushed the law “beyond its plausible meaning” in upholding it.

Then, at the end of 2017, with Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of both houses of Congress, they pushed through a huge tax cut benefiting mostly wealthy individuals and corporations -- and among the provisions of this law was one repealing the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act. States with Republican attorneys general came together and sued to ask that the courts throw out the entire law on the grounds that without the individual mandate, all of it would have to be declared unconstitutional. A federal judge in Texas actually ruled that way, and the case has since moved up the appellate court ladder and is scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court on November 14 -- 11 days after the Presidential election.

With Coney Barrett, Trump’s two other appointees -- Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh -- and the two other members who voted against the Affordable Care Act in the first place, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, all in place, the Affordable Care Act is almost certainly doomed. Goodbye to protections against discrimination in health care on the basis of pre-existing conditions -- and hello to a positive test for COVID-19 being used as a “pre-existing condition” and an excuse to deny you health coverage. Goodbye to the provisions that allowed parents to keep their kids on their health plans until the kids turned 26. Hello once again to some of the most exploitative pre-ACA practices of the health insurance industry, including low-ball “insurance” policies that covered virtually nothing and lifetime caps on benefits that left many patients with cancer or other long-term degenerative diseases without access to care at all. And goodbye to the expansions of Medicaid that allowed millions of Americans to have health coverage after having been denied it for years.

Goodbye, also, to the forlorn hopes of many progressive Democrats and Leftists in the U.S. of replacing America’s current convoluted non-system of health insurance with a single-payer “Medicare for All” system. If a five-vote majority of the Supreme Court is ready to strike down even s relatively mild, incremental a reform as the Affordable Care Act -- which was originally cooked up by th e Right-wing American Enterprise Institute as an alternative to single-payer (though they later disavowed it and now regard the ACA as an affront to American “freedom”) -- one can readily imagine how scathing they would be in their opinion invalidating any attempt by a Democratic President and Congress to put the for-profit health industry out of business at all.

There’s one other aspect of Coney Barrett’s appointment that will doom the hopes of progressives, liberals and Democrats. Coney Barrett’s presence on the court will almost certainly ensure that Donald Trump’s presidency continues after January 20, 2021 regardless of how people vote in the November 3, 2020 election. Already Donald Trump has signaled his intention to challenge the election results in court if he loses. “Get rid of the ballots, and there won’t be a transfer [of power],” he has said. If Trump is leading in the six key “swing states” on election night, he will file suit to block any further counting of ballots and insist the courts declare him the winner. If he’s behind on election night, a so-called “army of Republican lawyers” will invade every one of the states where the results are close and challenge them in court on the ground of the alleged falsity of mail-in ballots.

Donald Trump will literally stop at nothing to stay in power. Already Republican lawyers are working with their party’s legislators in “swing states” where Republicans hold political power to take the authority to pick the state’s Presidential electors away from the voters and appoint a slate of Trump electors themselves. The ultimate arbiter of all the legal tricks Trump and his people will cook up to keep Trump in office will be the United States Supreme Court -- and with three of his own appointees on it as well as two other justices who are their (and his) ideological clones, Trump has no rational reason to doubt that the Supreme Court will award him the election no matter what. That’s why worried Democrats are saying that in order to become President, Joe Biden not only has to win, but to win by such a landslide margin the election result will be unchallengeable -- and though the polls have consistently shown Biden ahead, none of them have indicated a landslide.

Justice Ginsburg’s Doomed Legacy

The rush on the part of President Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and all but two of the Republicans in the U.S. Senate to full the seat left open by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing on September 18 after a years-long battle with cancer has virtually crowded out any public discussion and assessment of Ginsburg’s legacy. So is the virtual certainty that her replacement by Amy Coney Barrett will consign most, if not all, of the gains for women, people of color, Queer people and other traditionally marginalized groups Ginsburg helped to achieve, both as a women’s rights and human rights attorney before she joined the Court and as a justice on it.

When Ruth Bader was born in 1933, America was a very different place, especially in its attitude towards women. Only 13 years had passed since American women had finally won the right to vote. In most states, married women could not own property independent of their husbands; once a woman married, everything she owned became her husband’s property, and if they divorced he could keep it all. And a husband’s dominion over his wife wasn’t limited to property: it covered her body as well. Until 1977 -- 1977! -- California’s rape law defined rape as forcing a woman other than your wife to have sex with you.

In Ginsburg’s childhood abortion was illegal in all 50 U.S. states, and most banned birth control as well. Private employers were totally free to have policies refusing to hire married women -- the idea was that if you had a husband it was his responsibility to support you -- and in the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s Hollywood made a lot of movies about young couples who couldn’t get married (or have sex) until the man was making enough money to support both of them. Some films even told stories of young couples who were married but had to pretend they weren’t -- and engage in elaborate stratagems for concealing their true status -- because they needed both their incomes to survive.

Ruth was determined to change all that. She was one of the first women to graduate from Harvard Law School -- though when she applied the registrar told her openly, “Why should you take a place that should go to a man?”, and she ended up getting her law degree not at Harvard but at Columbia because her husband Marty Ginsburg had had to move to New York to pursue his career as a tax attorney. She was turned down for a Supreme Court clerkship because she was a woman, and eventually she made it her life’s work to overturn all forms of discrimination based on gender. Commenting on laws that barred women from physically strenuous occupations on the ground they needed to be “protected,” Ginsburg snapped back that such laws “put women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.”

Ginsburg can be compared to two other progressive icons who served on the U.S. Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis and Thurgood Marshall. As a lawyer, Brandeis had taken on the economic and social horrors unchecked lassiez-faire capitalism was wreaking on working people in the early 20th century. He was the first proponent of the doctrine of the “Living Constitution” -- the idea that the Constitution should be enforced based not on the “original intent” of the people who wrote it, but how they applied in the modern world. He also based many of his cases on public-health and sociological data to document how laws that looked fair on their face, like the so-called “freedom of contract” between a giant corporation and an individual worker, were in fact unjust instruments of social control of the many by the few. Brandeis so strongly relied on this sort of information to defend minimum-wage laws and other workers’ legislation that to this day an appellate brief that cites social-science data extensively is known as a “Brandeis brief.”

Thurgood Marshall “made his bones” as a social-change attorney through his position as executive director lead counsel for the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund in the 1940’s and 1950’s. With invaluable assistance from two nearly forgotten associates, Black attorneys Spottswood Robinson and Robert Carter, Marshall led the NAACP to victory in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, which abolished the so-called “separate but equal” doctrine the Supreme Court had approved 58 years earlier in Plessy v. Ferguson. Marshall and his fellow NAACP attorneys fought a step-by-step attack on segregated schools for two decades, working their way down from graduate schools to colleges and finally to K-12 public schools. Like Brandeis, Marshall used social-science data to show how Black-only schools were in fact far inferior to white schools, but their very existence sent a message to Black children telling them they were inferior. The United States Supreme Court finally agreed with him; in a unanimous decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in May 1954, “Segregated schools are inherently unequal.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg sought, both as an attorney practicing before the Supreme Court and later as a judge, to have the Court declare that discrimination against women was as constitutionally offensive as discrimination against Blacks. She represented Sharon Frontiero, a woman in the Air Force who had sought an on-base housing allowance and was told those were only given to men and she should consider herself lucky they let her be in the Air Force at all. She also represented Stephen Weisenfeld, who lost his wife in childbirth and applied for survivor’s benefits from the Social Security Administration to help raise their child as a single parent. He was told that benefit was only available to women who lost their husbands, not men who lost their wives. It was even called the “mothers’ benefit.” Ginsburg challenged this as discrimination based on gender -- and won. But in the 2018 documentary RBG she said that, though she was glad Frontiero won an 8-1 decision from the Supreme Court, only four of the justices went along with hert belief that the Constitution bans discrimination based on gender and makes women a “suspect class” deserving the strictest scrutiny of any legislation that treats them differently from men.

Ginsburg’s replacement by Amy Coney Barrett will follow the pattern of President George H. W. Bush when he replaced Thurgood Marshall with Clarence Thomas, Just as Bush appointed another Black man but one with views and a public record almost totally the opposite political and judicial philosophy, Trump has appointed a white woman with a diametrically opposite postion to Ginsburg’s on women’s issues -- especially whether women have and deserve control over their own bodies, or whether the government can essentially legislate that women are slaves to their wombs.

Coney Barrett has said it’s her personal “conviction” that “life begins at conception” and she’s written -- inaccurately -- that Roe v. Wade “essentially permitted abortion on demand.” (In fact Roe divided pregnancy into three trimesters and allowed increased government regulation of abortion in each succeeding trimester -- and it was attacked at the time for reading such a system into a Constitution that says nothing explicit about women, pregnancy or their control of their own bodies.) What’s more, as Harry Litman argues in a mostly excellent overview of Barrett’s judicial philosophy in the September 24 Los Angeles Times:

“Barrett, like Justices Samuel Alito and [Clarence] Thomas, has articulated a relatively weak view of stare decisis, or respect for Supreme Court precedent. Roe owes its continued vitality to stare decisis. [Last year chief justice John Roberts provided the fifth vote to strike down a law restricting abortions in Louisiana almost identical to one the court had struck down in Texas a year before, prior to Justice Kennedy’s retirement and replacement by Brett Kavanaugh. Though Roberts had been against the Texas decision, he changed his vote on the Louisiana case because he didn’t think the court would ahve credbibility if it revered itself just one year after the original decision,]

“In her time [as a law professor] at Notre Dame, Barrett has made a kind of academic subdiscipline of undermining the doctrine [of stare decisis]. In fgour separate articles, she has suggested, among other things, that it sometimes violates the due process clause and that it stands in tension with an ‘originalist’ reading of the Constitution. … I would expect her to combine with Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to achieve the far Right’s Holy Grail of overturning Roe. And that may be just the beginning of the wrecking-ball jurisprudence.”

Litman points to dissents Coney Barrett filed in her current position as a judge on the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that suggest how she would rule as a Supreme Court justice. She wanted to strike down a law that bars convicted felons from owning handguns -- which may explain why, in the little ceremony in which Trump introduced her as his nominee, they both stressed their absolute loyalty and determination to maintain “your Second Amendment rights.” She also took the side of the Trump administration against the Seventh Circuit majority in voting to uphold a Trump executive order banning immigrants deemed likely to require public assistance from entering the U.S.

The Federalist Society Plot

Amy Coney Barrett owes her imminent arrival on the Supreme Court to a decades-long plot to take over not just the Court but the entire federal judiciary. It was the brainchild of probably the most important man in America you’ve never heard of: Leonard Leo. In 1982 he founded an organization called the Federalist Society to identify radical-Right law students and mentor them in their subsequent careers. The idea was to push as many Federalist Society members into judicial office as possible so that the U.S. courts as a whole would be pushed towards a pro-business, anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-environmentalist, anti-civil rights agenda.

The Federalist Society has largely achieved its goal thanks to the particular support of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and, since 2017, President Trump. In 2013, McConnell, then still the Senate Minority Leader, started to have his Republicans use the filibuster and the so-called “blue slip” process (by which no federal judicial appointment could go through the U.S. Senate until both the nominee’s home-state Senators filed blue slips approving the nomination) to prevent President Obama from making judicial appointments. The Democrats responded by eliminating the filibuster for all judicial appointments except the Supreme Court, and Obama got a few of his picks for judges through the Senate.

But the precedent turned costly for the Democrats when the Republicans regained control of the Senate in the 2014 midterm elections. McConnell adopted a scorched-earth policy to make sure virtually none of Obama’s judges got confirmed. HIs most famous coup was denying Obama’s last Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, a Senate hearing on the ground that it was already 2016, a Presidential election year, and therefore the seat should be held open until the next President was elected. But McConnell didn’t just block Obama from filling a seat on the Supreme Court; he held over 200 federal judgeships vacant so there would be a cornucopia of openings available for a Republican President to fill after the 2016 election.

Just what McConnell would have done if Democrat Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election is a mystery -- though we had two hints when Republican Senator Ron Johnson said of Garland’s nomination and McConnell’s blocking it, “We will not allow Democrats to ‘flip’ the Supreme Court,” and Ted Cruz said he’d vote to keep the late Antonin Scalia’s seat open until a Republican President could fill it, whether that took four, eight or 12 years. Instead Donald Trump became President and eagerly appointed all the judges the Federalist Society told him to -- which is why Trump, despite his stumbles in filling many other government jobs, has nominated judges quickly and efficiently -- and McConnell’s Republican Senate majority has equally efficiently confirmed them. McConnell also got his Republicans to end the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees when Trump picked Neil Gorsuch in 2017, so as much as they’re much as they like to chatter about “all options being on the table, Senate Democrats have no options whatsoever to keep Amy Coney Barrett off the Supreme Court.

The Court’s Historic Role

Harry Litman ended his September 24 Los Angeles Times article on Coney Barrett’s record and philosophy with a surprisingly inaccurate and ahistorical analysis of the Supreme Court’s historical role in American politics. “Barring a miracle, the court Trump is fashioning will be viewed for decades with anxiety by the majority in a society that has traditionally looked to it as the ultimate bulwark against government oppression,” Litman wrote. “That would be a shame for the court, but it will be a catastrophe for Americans whose liberties will be on the chopping block.”

In fact, for most of the nation’s history the United States Supreme Court has been a bulwark of protection for economic and social privilege. Ever since the appointment of John Marshall as Chief Justice by President John Adams in 1800 -- when he, like Trump today, was reaching the end of his first term and facing an election in which he was unlikely to win a second one -- the Court has been a conservative, and sometimes a downright reactionary, force in American history. Ever since 1803, when Marshall proclaimed the doctrine of “judicial review” -- the power, mentioned nowhere in the Constitution, of the Supreme Court to invalidate laws passed by Congress or a state legislature by declaring them unconstitutional -- it has mostly been used to protect the powerful, not to block oppression.

In 1857 the Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that not only did Black people “have no rights white people are obliged to respect,” but once you were a slave you were always a slave, even if you fled to a “free state” where slavery was illegal. In the 1880’s the Court invalidated the 1875 Civil Rights Act (almost identical to the one passed in 1964) and declared that corporations were “persons” and therefore had the same guarantees of political freedom and due process as flesh-and-blood individuals. The result of this was a string of decisions that invalidated laws to establish minimum wages and protect workers’ health and safety on the ground that they violated the “substantive due process” of corporations and the “freedom of contract” of workers to take jobs at less than a state-mandated minimum wage.

In the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton rhetorically asked, “Just when does Donald Trump think America was ‘great’ so we can return to it and ‘make America great again’?” As I’ve written in these pages before, Trump’s policies and governing style have made it clear when that was: the 1880’s, when there were no laws restricting corporate power, America’s first restrictions on immigration -- the Chinese Exclusion Acts -- were passed, labor unions were illegal, the environment wasn’t even an issue, and the Supreme Court had endorsed a permanent second-class status for African-Americans in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which said the Fourteenth Amendment allowed segregation of whites and Blacks into facilities that were theoretically “separate but equal” but in practice were separate and highly unequal.

Things only began to change when the abuses of corporate power and the government’s acquiescence or active support of it brought forth reactions from a nascent American Left. Populists, progressives, socialists and anarchists began to organize, with different ideas of what to do about the power of rampant capitalism but a determination that something needed to be done to curb corporate power. Presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson eventually adopted parts of the progressive agenda and got Congress to act on it, but the courts remained a roadblock to change.

The clashes between a President and Congress determined to enact progressive legislation and a diehard Supreme Court determined to block it reached its height in the mid-1930’s. During Franklin Roosevelt’s first term the Court overturned law after law designed to bring about an end to the Great Depression and a fairer, more equitable distribution of economic opportunity and power. In 1937 Roosevelt introduced a bill in Congress to expand the Supreme Court from nine to 15 justices -- but even coming off the greatest Presidential landslide in our history and with substantial Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, Roosevelt’s bill was denounced as “court-packing” and was an abject failure.

The immediate tug-of-war between a progressive President and Congress and a defiantly Right-wing Supreme Court ended in 1937, when Owen Roberts became what today would be called a “swing Justice” and started voting to uphold New Deal legislation instead of joining his four Republican colleagues to overturn it. Ultimately the Court started to swing Left by sheer attrition -- Roosevelt lasted long enough as President he was able to outlive the dinosaurs on the Court and replace them with liberal icons like Hugo Black and William Douglas. Further appointments by Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, strengthened the Court’s progressive tendencies, but the brief heyday of the Supreme Court began in 1953, when chief justice Fred Vinson died and Republican President Dwight Eisenhower replaced him with California Governor Earl Warren.

The 16 years of the so-called “Warren Court” marked a brief interlude of far-reaching progressivism that shaped public perceptions of the Supreme Court. Liberals who had once denounced its power to throw out legislation as unconstitutional now embraced it, while Right-wingers who had once seen the Court as a bulwark against progressive ideas denounced it and even called for Warren’s impeachment. Under Warren, the Supreme Court abolished the legal basis for racial segregation, vastly expanded the due-process rights of criminal suspects (including guaranteeing them access to legal counsel and forbidding police from extracting confessions by torture), established the “one man, one vote” doctrine that required regular reapportionment of Congressional and state legislative districts after every census, and upheld the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (thereby reversing the decision in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 that had thrown out a similar law as unconstitutional) and the Voting Rights Act of 1962. The Warren court also strengthened the separation of church and state by banning forced prayer in schools, and it found a “penumbral” right of personal privacy in the Constitution that allowed it to invalidate state laws banning married couples from using birth control.

Richard Nixon’s assumption of the Presidency in 1969 and his appointment of Warren Burger to replace Warren that year slowed but didn’t stop the run of progressive Supreme Court decisions Warren’s court had started. Of Nixon’s four Court appointees, only William Rehnquist was an out-and-out Right-winger; Burger and Lewis Powell were moderates and Harry Blackmun was a liberal who wrote perhaps the Court’s most controversial decision of the 20th century, Roe v. Wade (1973). (Ironically, the dissent against Roe was written by Byron “Whizzer” White, who’d been appointed to the Court by Democrat John F. Kennedy.) It wasn’t until Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter (who didn’t get to appoint any Supreme Court justices at all) in 1980 that the Court began to swing Rightward and reassume its traditional role in American history as defender of the powers and privileges of the rich.

Reagan promoted William Rehnquist -- who, as a law clerk to Justice Robert Jackson in 1953, had argued that the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision legitimizing racial segregation “was right and should be reaffirmed” -- from associate justice to chief justice. He appointed Antonin Scalia to the court and tried to get Robert Bork, a far-Right attorney and appeals judge who had written a ruling upholding laws that made Gay sex illegal, onto the Court, but when progressives pressured Senate Democrats to reject Bork’s confirmation Reagan appointed Anthony Kennedy, a strong progressive on two issues -- juvenile justice and Queer rights -- but a total Right-winger on everything else. Kennedy wrote the Citizens United decision that virtually wiped out government’s ability to keep rich people and corporations from buying elections, and he wrote an opinion striking down the Affordable Care Act in 2012 he was hoping would be the Court’s decision -- until John Roberts, appointed chief justice by George W. Bush after Rehnquist’s death, double-crossed him and wrote his own opinion saving the law.

Reagan made one other appointment of long-term significance to the Supreme Court. He put Sandra Day O’Connor on the court, breaking the glass ceiling and giving the Court its first woman Justice. O’Connor, an appeals court judge from Arizona, was sponsored for the position by her home-state Republican Senator, Barry Goldwater, whom I’ve described in these pages before as “a principled conservative when that wasn’t an oxymoron.” When Rev. Jerry Falwell, who had organized the Moral Majority and considerably boosted Reagan’s election, announced that it was “the duty of all good Christians” to oppose O’Connor because she’d followed Supreme Court precedents and issued pro-abortion decisions in Arizona, Goldwater snapped back, “I think it’s the duty of every good Christian to kick Jerry Falwell’s ass.” On the Supreme Court, O’Connor declined to overturn Roe but concocted the doctrine that states could regulate abortion as long as they didn’t put “an undue burden” on women seeking them -- which led to the grim joke in the legal profession, “What’s an ‘undue burden’ on a woman seeking an abortion?” “Whatever Sandra Day O’Connor says it is.” (After she retired it became, “Whatever Anthony Kennedy says it is,” and when he retired it became, “Whatever Brett Kavanaugh says it is.”)

Reagan and the Republican Presidents who succeeded him slowly but steadily moved the Supreme Court back to its traditional position on the Right of American politics. George H, W. Bush appointed the moderate David Souter but also the far-Right Clarence Thomas, thereby replacing Thurgood Marshall with a Black man with totally opposite views on ideology and judicial philosophy -- just as Trump is replacing Ginsburg with another white woman but one who’s her polar opposite. George W. Bush got solid Right-winger Samuel Alito on the Court as well as John Roberts, who has almost always voted with the Right but has drawn back on a few issues -- notably the Affordable Care Act and Louisiana’s abortion law -- where he thought a Right-wing decision would damage the credibility of the Supreme Court as an institution.

With Amy Coney Barrett joining Thomas, Alito and Trump’s two previous appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, the Court is now dominated by a bloc of five far-Right justices who couldn’t care less about the credibility of the Supreme Court as an institution. They’re ready and willing to declare open season on just about every remaining progressive Court decision of the last 70 years. Even if Joe Biden becomes President in 2021 (something the five Right-wingers on the current Court will probably have the power to prevent, as I explained earlier) and the Democrats regain control of the U.S. Senate, just about everything they try to do on any major domestic issue will be thrown out by the Supreme Court -- just as nearly all Franklin Roosevelt’s major legislation was invalidated by the Court in 1933-36.

The only open question is just how far the Right-wing Court majority will go. They will almost certainly throw out the Affordable Care Act and Roe v. Wade. They will probably reverse the Warren Court’s finding of a “penumbral” right to privacy and thereby allow the government once again to interfere directly in the most intimate details of people’s private lives, especially who they can have sex with, how, and how they may deal with the good and bad consequences therefrom. Even if they don’t outright overrule the Court’s previous decisions allowing Queer people to have sex and marry each other, they will no doubt increase the latitude the Court has already given government clerks and other officials with “sincere religious convictions” against homosexuality (i.e., evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics) to refuse to treat Queer people equally.

The current Supreme Court can also be expected to mount the same sort of all-out assault on workers’ rights, consumers’ rights and the environment as their ideological forebears in the 1880’s. They will tightly limit the reach of the Interstate Commerce Clause -- the part of the Constitution that gives the President and Congress power to control the abuses of private corporations and wealthy individuals -- and throw out willy-nilly virtually all attempts by government to control economic and workplace abuses by the rich against the not-so-rich. They will probably also endorse the concept of “regulatory takings,” the idea that if a local government tells a landowner what he can or can’t do with his land, they have to pay him or her to compensate for the potential profit those government restrictions will cost the property owner. This will wipe out virtually all zoning laws, since few local governments will be able to compensate property owners for the money they potentially lose by not being able to do what they want with their land.

The new Supreme Court majority will bring the United States closer to the Libertarian ideal of a just society -- which just about anyone who isn’t part of their cult would regard as highly unjust. One reason the American Right is so determined to get rid of the Affordable Care Act is it’s a major expansion of the American welfare state at a time when the Right is determined to get rid of all of it. If President Trump gets re-elected and the Republicans keep control of the Senate, you can expect them to respond to the ballooning government deficits created by the 2017 welfare-for-the-rich tax cuts and the SARS-CoV-2 relief programs by demanding huge cutbacks in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- and eventually their complete elimination.

It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the current Supreme Court could overrule the 1964 Civil Rights Act -- just as a previous and less conservative Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013. At the very least they will allow more people with “strong religious objections” to African-Americans and other people of color to discriminate against them The current Court will also do Trump’s bidding on immigration and allow him to put a virtual stranglehold on immigrants entering the U.S., especially from lower-income countries -- and if Biden and the Democrats win in 2020 and try to do something positive on immigration, the current Court will probably throw it out.

But the most catastrophic potential of the new hard-Right court majority is their likely attitude against virtually any legislation to protect the environment. The world in general and the United States in particular is already on a suicidal course that ignores human-caused climate change and exalts the use of fossil fuels and the environmentally devastating process of “fracking” needed to produce them in a world that is quickly running out of them. Judging from recent Supreme Court decisions invalidating environmental regulations, the new Court majority may simply declare the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act unconstitutional -- or, if they don’t go that far, they’ll subject environmental legislation to the same “death by a thousand cuts” they’ve already imposed on reproductive choice and are likely to on civil rights. The ultimate casualty of the new Supreme Court majority may well be the continued existence of the human species.

Mr. Trump's Wild Ride

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“[T]here’s an ingrained distrust in our society of highly intelligent, highly trained, highly competent persons. One need only look at the last presidential election for proof of that. The public obviously wanted a figurehead, who’d look good and make comforting noises.”
-- John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Since he first emerged as a national celebrity in the 1980’s, I have regarded Donald Trump with such loathing, revulsion and utter lack of respect I didn’t think there was anything he could do that would make me hate him more than I already did. But he did it. On September 9 veteran journalist and Presidential chronicler Bob Woodward released a series of interviews he had done with Trump for a new book about him called Rage -- a follow-up to Woodward’s earlier Trump book, Fear. Though Trump hadn’t agreed to be interviewed for Fear, and he had railed against the book in public and on Twitter, for some reason he agreed to give Woodward 18 hours’ worth of interviews for Rage, both in-person and by phone, from February to July.

The most significant portions of the interviews were the ones about the current pandemic involving the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease it causes, COVID-19. What was most amazing and infuriating about Trump’s comments to Woodward was that as early as February 7 Trump was aware that the new virus was far more deadly than “your standard flus” and that it was particularly dangerous because it was airborne. He also quoted estimates from scientists that about 5 percent of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 would die from it. That wasn’t what Trump told the American people when he started talking about the disease the next day; he said it was “just like the flu” and it would “go away” on its own when the weather warmed up starting in April.

When I heard Trump’s dismissive public comments on the pandemic I assumed it was just Trump being his usual notoriously closed-minded self. I thought he was using that part of his brain that comes to a firm conclusion and clings to it no matter how many facts contradict it. I thought he was doing with SARS-CoV-2 what he’d done when he said during the 2016 campaign that “I know more about ISIS than the generals” and got into endless arguments with his economic advisers over his tariffs on China and other countries, (Trump clung to the notion that by putting tariffs on China he was costing the Chinese money; in fact, Americans pay the cost of those tariffs through higher prices for goods.)

What was so shocking about the statements Trump made to Woodward was they proved he knew the truth about the pandemic all along -- and yet he chose in his public statements to the people of the country he was supposed to be leading to say just the opposite. What’s more, he told Woodward that was precisely what he was doing. “I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” More recently, Trump has defended his feel-good public pronouncements on SARS-CoV-2 by saying they were meant to show “confidence” and “strength.” He added, “You cannot show a sense of panic, or you’re going to have bigger problems than you had before.”

Never mind that in the three political campaigns Trump has been involved with since he first announced for President in 2015 Trump has always tried to get people to vote for him and his Republican Party by panicking them about some threat he was either wildly inflating or totally making up. In 2016 it was alleged hordes of “murderers, rapists [and] drug dealers” seeking to immigrate to the U.S, from Mexico. In the 2018 midterm campaign it was “caravans” full of “bad hombres” trying to sneak into the U.S. to swell the ranks of Central American gangs like MS-13 (which is real, but actually started in the U.S.) and slaughter Americans right and left.

Today it’s marauding bands of Black Lives Matter protesters whom Trump routinely denounces as “anarchists,” “socialists” and members of Antifa ready to sweep through suburbs, destroy property and rape the “suburban housewives” Trump says he’s protecting by not enforcing the laws against racial discrimination in housing (laws Trump’s company was convicted of violating in the 1970’s, by the way). “Antifa” exists, but it’s mostly a loose federation of college students -- mostly white and relatively well-to-do -- whose purpose is either to prevent Right-wing speakers from appearing on college campuses or disrupting their talks if they are presented.

I don’t agree with Antifa’s tactics -- I’m a First Amendment absolutist who believes the solution to bad speech is not to shut (or shout) it down but to overwhelm it with good speech -- but the cartoon version of it Trump presents is just ridiculous. Besides, as my husband Charles pointed out, if you’re against “Antifa” -- whose name is shorthand for “anti-fascist” -- does that make you “profa”? Certainly Trump has shown an astonishing love of dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman -- all of whom have ordered the murders of their critics -- while dismissing America’s traditional demoicratic allies. He’s attempted to allocate money for his pet projects by executive fiat -- under our Constitution it’s the job of Congress, not the President, to decide how the federal government spends its money.

Trump and his pet attorney general, William Barr, have taken over the defense of the defamation lawsuit filed against him by a woman he allegedly raped. In traditional monarchies this is called lese-majeste, the doctrine that the King can do no wrong and therefore it is the job of government to punish anyone who says anything nasty or critical about the King. Like the 17th and 18th century French king Louis XIV -- who said “L’etat c’est moi” (“The state? It is I”) and was known as the “Sun-King” because, he said, the nation revolved around him the way the earth revolves around the sun, Trump sees himself not as a constitutional president but an absolute monarch whose will is -- or at least should be -- law.

Why Did Trump Downplay the Pandemic?

Perhaps the most amazing aspect of Trump’s bizarre attitude towards SARS-CoV-2 -- downplaying the threat of the virus and the COVID-19 in public while acknowledging the best available science on it in private to Bob Woodward -- is what on earth was in it for Donald Trump. Much of the case against Trump is based on the idea that he really doesn’t give a damn about any other human being besides Donald Trump -- indeed, the Democratic convention’s main pitch for Joe Biden as an alternative is that Biden is a normal human being who actually cares about other people -- but it’s still hard to figure out what Trump had to gain (or thought he had to gain) by deliberately following a path of evasion and obfuscation that has likely led to almost 200,000 Americans dying of COVID-19, many of whom might have been saved by more decisive and science-driven action from Trump and the federal government.

Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian tried to explain that in her column September 13. She said Trump downplayed the danger from SARS-CoV-2 “[b]ecause the truth would do nothing to boost support for his re-election.” She argued that Trump couldn’t acknowledge the truth because it would have compelled him to stop holding the big Nuremberg-style rallies -- six of them, all indoors (and therefore more efficient at spreading the virus), in the 3 ½ weeks following his first interview with Woodward, without requiring attendees either to wear masks or stay six feet apart from each other -- Trump sees as crucial both for energizing his base and maintaining his own morale.

Trump, Abcarian argued, “did not lie about COVID because he feared he would panic Americans. He lied about COVID for entirely selfish reasons. He knew he was not capable of handling a national catastrophe, and he needed those rallies for his ego. His need to be venerated far outweighs his concern for the lives of his supporters, or anyone else.”

And yet I’m not so sure that if Trump had chosen his Road Not Taken -- had he leveled with the American people starting February 8 and taken the crisis seriously from Day One -- it wouldn’t have been better for Donald Trump. Had he pushed masks and so-called “social distancing” from the beginning -- had he turned himself into a promotion for responsibility by wearing a mask in public himself -- had he called for a quicker and more complete shutdown of the U.S. economy and fully invoked the Defense Production Act to ensure doctors and hospitals had all the equipment they needed to fight the disease and treat the people with it, Trump would probably be coasting to an easy re-election instead of fighting to close a narrowing but still pesky gap in the polls.

In his most recent public rally at an airport in Michigan, Trump had the gall to compare himself to Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill as wartime leaders. I was particularly fascinated by that because I’d already started thinking of Churchill’s leadership of Britain during World War II as not only the polar opposite of Trump’s, but as the model for what America’s policy towards SARS-CoV-2 should have been.

Winston Churchill took office in early 1940, when World War II was just a few months old and Britain was getting its ass kicked by its principal opponents, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. He didn’t lie to the British people. He didn’t sugar-coat the danger they were in. He began his first speech as prime minister by calling it “a solemn hour,” and later he said, “I have never promised the British people anything but blood, tears, toil and sweat.” It’s true that when something did go right for Britain’s war effort, like the successful evacuation of most of the British army from Dunkirk, France or Britain’s ability to mount a capable defense against Nazi bombers in the Battle of Britain, Churchill publicly praised it.

But Churchill never told the British people that they wouldn’t have to sacrifice. He was honest that many of them would lose their properties and comforts because of the war, and some of them would lose their lives. And he did something else that boosted the British people: when their cities were bombed, Churchill would visit the ruins. He would talk to people who had lost their homes and everything they owned, comfort them and assure them that it would all be worth it in the end. Churchill’s visits to bombing sites were so effective Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels tried to persuade Adolf Hitler to do the same when the Allies started bombing Germany. (Hitler never went to a bombed-out site in Germany. Perhaps he was worried about messing up his hair.)

Had Trump done the right thing and responded to SARS-CoV-2 the way he should have -- had he acted on the information he repeated to Bob Woodward on February 7 -- the pandemic would have done for him what the 9/11 attacks did for George W. Bush. Had Trump followed the advice of the actual scientists on his task force and locked down the country more quickly and more completely, he would in fact have been the strong, decisive leader he sees himself as now. A successful containment of the virus and a major public-health effort both to stop its spread and take care of people who had it would have established Trump as a leader to reckon with.

Perhaps, as Right-wing commentator Erick Erickson argued in a column Abcarian quoted from, “If Trump had raised the alarm in February, Democrats and much of the media would have claimed he was trying to distract from the impeachment. You can deny it all you want, but it is true.” (Trump was acquitted by the Republican Senate on February 5, two days before his first interview with Woodward.) But if the Democrats and the media had reacted the way Erickson says they would have, they would have looked small-minded and even dangerous. They would quickly have realized there was no way to gain politically from attacking a fact- and reason-based response to the pandemic -- even if it happened to come from Donald Trump.

Indeed, had Trump followed the Road Not Taken on SARS-CoV-2 he might have been able to get through other parts of his agenda the way George W. Bush was able to use the “War on Terror” to launch a stupid, unnecessary and counterproductive war in Iraq (which the two Democratic Presidential nominees who’ve faced Trump both voted for, by the way). Trump actually was benefiting in the polls in the early days of the pandemic -- his approval ratings in polls approached 50 percent -- reflecting a national tendency to rally behind the leader in a time of crisis.

Trump’s “COVID bounce” in the polls didn’t last, but it could have if he’d put together the planning and hard work needed to sustain an effective response to the virus. That, I suspect, is the real reason he didn’t. Trump has always been an executive who wants to get by on as little hard work as possible, and he’s also a master improviser who hates the whole notion of planning. To me the most revealing thing Bob Woodward had to say about Trump in his first book about him, Fear, was that Trump felt 2012 Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney had spent too much time and energy planning for what he would do as President and too little time and energy making sure he won the election. Trump saw Romney’s planning as a “jinx” and was not about to repeat his “mistake.”

The characteristics needed to lead a successful response to a public health crisis are not that different from those needed to win a war. They require both the ability to make and follow through on a plan and the ability to change course if circumstances require it. Trump has neither of those skills. As I was thinking over this article I called my brother and he asked me if America had ever faced a national crisis with a President less suited for the task of leading us through it, I answered, “James Buchanan” -- the Pennsylvania Democrat and Southern sympathizer who was the last President before the Civil War and unwittingly did just about everything he could to bring that conflict on and make it longer and bloodier.

Pulling America out of its SARS-CoV-2 crisis won’t be easy no matter who wins the Presidential election in November. By now the whole idea of whether there is a viral threat at all, let alone what we should do about it, has become so politicized the very act of wearing or not wearing a mask outdoors has become as much a statement of political allegiance as a MAGA hat. Even if Trump loses (and I fully expect him to win, both because polls have repeatedly underestimated his level of support and the Republicans are doing so well at suppressing the potential vote against him), he will still be out there with 1.4 million followers on Twitter ready to join him in a scorched-earth campaign against anything the Democrats will try to do about anything.

I began this article quoting a 1972 science-fiction novel by the late John Brunner called The Sheep Look Up. It’s mostly about a cascading series of environmental catastrophes, including pollution that literally blots out the sun, the death of the Mediterranean Sea, the elimination of beaches as places of recreation, a series of pandemics that sweeps the world one after another, and at the end of the book a giant fire that burns all of what’s left of the United States of America. It’s also about the power of “the Syndicate,” the corporate ruling class which runs everything, to quietly and methodically eliminate any individual or group that tries to resist; and about “Prexy,” the idiot Americans have elected President who ignores the evidence of environmental destruction and regards going after pro-environment activists as his first priority.

As the California forests burn, as the government tells us to wear face masks and wash our hands repeatedly, as it gets harder and more expensive to buy decent, healthy food and a pandemic sweeps the world, John Brunner’s dystopian fiction begins to look more and more like dystopian fact. And Donald Trump, who has never met a source of pollution he doesn’t want to see increase, leads his nation and his planet closer and faster to the ultimate catastrophe that will either render the human race extinct or at least decimate us and throw us off our perch atop the biosphere.