ModeShift

Three days ago, March 23, President Trump signaled his intent to relax guidelines on self-quarantining, saying “the cure can’t be worse than the disease.” Health authorities and citizens all over the country (including me) reacted with profound dismay at such a precipitous and apparently dangerous decision.

But across a separate civic and political landscape — call it The Great Divide — the president’s decision to open the economy and tilt away from public safety is evidence of why Trump is revered. His public opinion poll numbers on performance are inching up and Gallup this week said that 60 percent of Americans they polled give him high marks for managing the crisis.

I spent several days this week trying to understand that surprising finding by studying reporting and commentary across the Trump-supporting on-line media community.

I occasionally read and view popular arch-conservative media, and have a working knowledge of its message and rancor. But following what looks to be the most consequential presidential decision of our lifetimes, I wanted to know more about what led to it. I wanted to develop deeper insight into why the president was so confident about the March 23 announcement.

Some of this may be familiar to you in the abstract. A good bit was new to me. My conclusion is that even if the virus really gets out of hand and kills thousands more Americans, Trump could win the 2020 election. His supporters are mobilized and energized to vote in droves. The lapses and insults and erratic behavior that make Trump a loathed figure on the left are precisely the personality traits that solidify his popularity on the right. Democrats are going to need to get ‘way down in the muck and fight as never before to inspire and motivate their supporters to turn out in record numbers to beat him.

One reason, according to billions of words written and hours of video broadcast by Trump-supporting media, is that in their eyes, and through their eyes to the hearts and minds of their faithful audiences, Donald Trump can do no wrong. The president’s supporters, roughly half of voting age Americans, adore him. Not only is he seen as a once-in-a-generation leader, he is superbly adept at commanding the moment just the way they think it ought to be dominated. His supporters see Trump as prepared and capable of not only making the right decisions, but also doing so with joyful acid attacks on people and institutions they loathe – Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the New York Times and Washington Post, CNN, Democrats, liberals, and most especially Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

A second reason for Trump’s staying power is that his supporters see an attack on him as an insult to them, a hostile misguided rocket strike on their principles and values. Criticism of Trump produces measures of angry, stinging bitterness I’ve never before encountered when reporting on political figures.

“These globalist vultures hate the American worker more than anyone,” Wayne Dupree, a columnist widely distributed on Trump-supporting blogs and web sites, wrote on March 23. “That’s why these ghouls want open borders, migrants, illegal aliens, and things like NAFTA—all of the things that have put us in this vulnerable place with the coronavirus. Globalism kills, and Pelosi and Schumer are the faces of it.”

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, added this the same day: “One of the responses he shut down is another deep state attempted coup, coordinated with their international puppet partners to attack the economy in grand scale of illusion, counting on The People not to look at comparative statistics (tested negative, positive, recovered, dead, total population).”

Continue reading “Behind Trump’s Decisions, Unfathomable to the Left, Lies a Deep Reserve of Tribute on the Right”

SOMERSET, KY — An editor in New York who is a good friend and one of the great newsroom leaders of our time remarked to me four days ago, “Honestly, I think this is going to be far bigger than 9/11 in its impact on Americans’ lives.”

In a brief sentence he tied together the two national catastrophes of this century, and projected the COVID-19 pandemic will be worse. There is one more way the 9/11 attack and the virus are joined. They both display the indefensible negligence of the presidents in charge during those times. Both President George W. Bush and President Donald J. Trump failed to pay attention to readily apparent evidence of impending calamity. And both neglected the advice of their expert staff or disbanded White House directorates charged with tracking events outside our borders that posed grave threats to the United States.

The result of 9/11 was 2,996 deaths, 25,000 injured, and wearying, still-ongoing, expensive alterations in security precautions at airports and in public buildings .

As of today 4,100 COVID-19 cases have been reported in the U.S. since the first case on January 20 in Seattle; 71 people have died from it. The most optimistic predictions by medical experts is that tens of thousands more Americans will contract the virus over the next month and thousands will die.

The lapses in Oval Office oversight of the nation’s safety in the leadup to both calamities is striking and dispiriting. Before getting into the particulars let me just state plainly that on a personal level my family was put directly in harm’s way by 9/11 and by COVID-19. On a political level it’s hard for me to fathom how voters see Republican presidents as safe-keepers of our nation. The last two have been disasters.

You may recall that in his second term, President Bill Clinton escalated anti-terrorist directorates at the CIA and the FBI and formed the Counterterrorism Security Group in the National Security Council in the White House. The program and policy change came in response to the August 7, 1998 Al Qaeda truck bomb attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania that killed 224 people. They gained added traction late in 2000 following the bombing of the USS Cole while the warship refueled in Yemen. The attack killed 17 sailors, wounded 40, and caused $250 million in damage.

President Bush retained the Counterterrorism Security Group in the White House after his inauguration in January 2001. But its credibility and stature steadily waned in the following months even though its director, Richard Clarke, a Clinton Administration appointee and the national counterterrorism director, was delivering accurate projections about the capability of Al Qaeda and its deadly intent.

President Bush and his team received regular warnings from the Clarke Counterterrorism Security Group and the CIA counter terrorism office. In a classfied briefing on August 6, 2001 the president was warned, according to the headline “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” about an imminent attack.

On September 4, 2001, a week before the attack, senior Bush administration officials met to discuss terrorism following weeks of intelligence about odd movements of terrorist cells and closing of terrorist training camps. According to the 9/11 Commission report, before the meeting Clarke sent Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice “an impassioned personal note.” He criticized U.S. counterterrorism efforts past and present. The ‘real question’ before the principals, he wrote, was ‘are we serious about dealing with the al Qida threat? . . . Is al Qida a big deal? . . . “Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG has not succeeded in stopping al Qida attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US,” Clarke wrote. “What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier? That future day could happen at any time.”

Fast forward to the new era of deadly pathogens killing lots of people. In March 2014 an outbreak of Ebola occurred in West Africa. President Barack Obama and his medical and health agencies responded almost immediately, leading the global response to quell sickness and death. On November 4, 2016 President Obama signed an executive order to establish a global health security directorate in the National Security Council to coordinate US government activities and fill an international leadership and collaboration role to “achieve a world safe and secure from infectious disease threats.”

In May 2018, as the Trump administration was busy limiting funding for federal health and science agencies, John Bolton, then national security advisor, dismantled the global health security directorate.

Continue reading “COVID-19 and 9/11 — Catastrophes of Leadership”

SOMERSET, KY — On February 29, 2020, a day after President Trump headlined one of his cult rallies in South Carolina and called the coronavirus the Democrat’s “new hoax,” I was in New York City with my wife, Gabrielle Gray, celebrating my mother’s 90th birthday.

The timeline, as you’ll see, is crucial to understanding the dimensions of an emergency that has unfolded in New York and the United States in the 15 days since, and is quickly getting worse.

First a word about the party, which was a lovely, joyous gathering at a restaurant on Madison Avenue highlighted by toasts and Jo-Anne Schneider’s grace and energy — and by the attendance of her children, grandsons and granddaughters, a niece and nephew, cousins, and in-laws who arrived from five states and both coasts. We are a family that enjoys gathering for big events and as Anne Schneider, my sister-in-law, noted, this was another “Schneider state occasion.”

In the weeks before the party we asked everybody to send 10 words that best described my mother’s values. Assembled in a word cloud by my younger brother, the three most notable values that define my mother are loyalty, family, discipline. From my perspective: Perfect

It is March 15 today, more than two weeks later, and for Americans who regard their own health and the safety of their family, friends, and colleagues with any degree of maturity, nothing is quite the same.

Hoarding of food and supplies — particularly toilet paper — is occurring around the country. Tens of thousands of schools closed. Colleges and universities closed. The NBA, Major League Soccer, and Major League Baseball postponed play. The NCAA cancelled March Madness. Airports and airplanes emptied. Elbow bumps replaced handshakes and hugs. Millions of people, including me and Gabrielle, hunkered down in their homes preparing themselves for a kind of determined self-isolation that could last weeks. Maybe months. Everybody I know is inspecting themselves and anyone near them for signs of a dry cough, headache, sore throat, fatigue, and fever — the telltale early symptoms of COVID19.

Continue reading “Alien Nation In Time of Virus”