Until Barr ran the DOJ, its Civil Rights Division had taken the lead on addressing affirmative action, segregation, predatory lending, and voting rights. Under his and Sessions’s leadership, the message being sent by the Trump administration was that, in the words of Vanita Gupta, President Biden’s associate attorney general, “civil rights enforcement is superfluous and can be easily cut. At worst, it really is part of a systematic agenda to roll back civil rights.” In the words of Kristen Clarke, the new head of the Civil Rights Division under President Biden, “No administration has done more to obstruct and defy the mission of the division in its 63-year existence.”
It is worth noting that Jeff Sessions, a racist who opposes civil rights and whose extreme views previously cost him a federal judgeship, received fifty-one votes from Republicans in his confirmation as attorney general in 2017. Kristen Clarke, who has dedicated her professional life to combating racism and defending civil rights, received only one Republican vote for her confirmation in 2021.
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It may be a unique accomplishment in the history of American government that two of the worst, if not the two worst, secretaries of state came out of the same administration. Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO, who served from 2017 to 2018, and Mike Pompeo, the former director of the CIA, who served out the rest of Donald’s only term, both richly deserve the honor. Ironically, they achieved this distinction by following very different paths—Tillerson because he was never able to forge an alliance with Donald or the administration, and Pompeo because there was no daylight between him and his boss.
It is impossible to know what Tillerson’s motives were for wanting to be secretary of state, and it’s impossible to know what his agenda was. In his one year at State, he exerted no influence in the administration and accomplished nothing of note. He did, however, oversee the greatest depletion of expertise and experience in the department’s history—there were mass resignations, the number of new applicants plummeted, and the core of career diplomats was gutted when 60 percent of them left. Only about 40 percent of political appointees were confirmed, while important positions, like ambassador to South Korea and assistant secretaries supervising vital regions like Asia and the Middle East, were left unfilled. Altogether, these unfathomable staffing changes destroyed morale and weakened the State Department for a “generation,” according to George Washington University’s Elizabeth Saunders as quoted in a November 2017 piece in Vox.
Continuity of personnel is crucial to preserving institutional memory, and, whether he intended this explicitly or not, Tillerson endangered that continuity while also undermining the core mission of diplomacy. Without diplomacy the default becomes aggression, which unfortunately suited his successor, Pompeo, perfectly.
If his leadership abilities had been commensurate with his inflated sense of self, Pompeo might have been able to turn things around at State. As it was, the thin-skinned and belligerent secretary took a muscular approach when dealing with our allies and adversaries alike. At the end of Pompeo’s tenure, North Korea had more nuclear weapons (despite Donald’s claim of their great love for each other, Kim Jong-Un did not agree to adhere to the 2005 pledge to give up his nation’s nuclear program) and Iran was closer to building one. Pompeo and his style were so unpopular abroad that he had to cancel his January 2021 “victory” lap in Europe because nobody wanted to meet with him.
Tillerson and Pompeo both had a negative and far-reaching impact on the State Department, but the real reason America’s standing in the world fell further and faster than it ever had was down to Donald. His duplicity, double-dealing, and inability to see things from any perspective other than his own made our allies wary and put our adversaries on notice—Donald could be flattered and baited into doing their bidding.
To what extent these institutions recover under the Biden administration and beyond is yet to be seen. The question is how do we prevent such devastation from happening again?
Donald’s unilateral withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the Iran nuclear deal—and the Paris Climate Accord undermined the good faith we had built up among our allies over decades and resulted in a loss of trust that still plagues us.
As Mieke Eoyang, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy in the Biden administration, points out, by looking at Donald’s foreign policy approach through the lens of “his selfishness and disregard for the truth,” we see that his attempts to try to make our national security personnel loyal to his personal interests and “his erratic nature have undermined other countries’ ability to trust America’s word in treaties.”
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On December 18, 2019, the House voted almost entirely along party lines to impeach Donald for obstruction of justice and abuse of power after it came to light that he had pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky into finding dirt on his presumed opponent in the 2020 election in exchange for releasing desperately needed aid. This violation of his oath of office was compounded by the fact that Donald essentially stonewalled the House inquiry into this event by instructing officials in his administration to ignore subpoenas and refuse to hand over documents.
Before the Senate trial even began, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear that it would be a travesty. “I’m not an impartial juror,” he said. “This is a political process. There is not anything judicial about it. Impeachment is a political decision.” Lindsey Graham, senator from South Carolina, who had been sucking up to Donald since the inauguration despite having said during the primary, “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office,” followed McConnell’s lead: “I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind. I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here.… I will do everything I can to make [the impeachment trial] die quickly.” The Republican majority proceeded to do just that when on January 31, 2020, the Senate voted 51–49 not to allow witnesses to testify. Five days later Donald was acquitted. The vote was 52–48 to acquit on the abuse of power charge and 53–47 to acquit on the obstruction of Congress charge.
Ominously, Susan Collins, Republican senator from Maine, said after the acquittal, “I believe that the president has learned from this case. The president has been impeached. That’s a pretty big lesson.” She wasn’t wrong, of course, but the lesson Donald learned wasn’t the lesson Collins presumably had in mind.
The vote, though predictable, was yet another blow. After three years, we were already beaten down.
And then came the Plague.
CHAPTER 4
Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here
In early 2020, my uncle Donald made the following comments:
“It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. This is deadly stuff.”
“WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.”
Unfortunately, the first was made privately in a February interview with Bob Woodward, in which he also said, “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” The one written in all caps was a tweet to his tens of millions of followers posted on March 22. The public would not learn about the Woodward conversation until September.
In early February, Donald had just emerged unscathed from his first impeachment trial over his attempt to strong-arm the new president of Ukraine in the summer of 2019 into finding dirt on Joe Biden, whom he deemed his greatest threat in the 2020 presidential election. With his acquittal, and the tacit go-ahead from the Republican majority in Congress to use the (illegal) assistance of foreign powers—through coercion or by simply asking, “Russia, if you’re listening”—he turned his attention full throttle to crafting his reelection campaign.
A few days before the tweet, I was watching with growing horror, from afar, the chaos in Italy, where overwhelmed hospitals were having to ration care. I tried to fend off the belief that such devastation could happen here, that we would allow it to happen here, but finally gave in to t
he reality that of course we would allow it to happen here—Donald was in charge.
Almost overnight, the growing dread became an intimate terror that disrupted sleep and altered my—and our—very experience of time. I learned that I had been in contact with two people who came down with serious cases of COVID, so I was separated from my daughter, who had just been sent home from her abruptly shuttered college, by two flights of stairs and hastily hung plastic sheeting that I’d bought in a panic at our local Ace Hardware store. During the two weeks I was stuck in my basement quarantining, it was hard to process the news that painful death by suffocation awaited far too many people. I thought often of my father, because just like him, hundreds and then thousands of people were dying without anybody who loved them present to hold their hand.
Nassau County, where I lived, had the third-worst rate of COVID infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in the country, and eventually the world, following only New York City and Westchester County. From our vantage point, the “problem” Donald referenced was the out-of-control life-threatening virus and the mass death it was causing. My friends in Manhattan described the nonstop blare of ambulance sirens twenty-four hours a day, and the unsettling hum of refrigerated trucks lined up outside of hospitals, morgues, and funeral homes to hold the overflow of the dead.
It was hard to see how any cure could be worse.
The only upside was the sense that this emergency couldn’t possibly last for more than a month or two. We didn’t know it, of course, but we were nowhere near the end. It was only going to get worse. Then it was going to get worse than that.
The growing nightmare of climate change and our having put someone in the Oval Office who claimed “I don’t believe it” at a crucial point of no return had already made me wonder if the planet was trying to get rid of us; now I was sure. You can debate religion or economic policy. But debating climate change and COVID-19 is tantamount to debating gravity or evolution. What you believe in those contexts is irrelevant because climate change and COVID-19 will continue to exist, ravaging our planet and our populations, whether you believe in them or not.
It had been a century since the last major pandemic—why now? Why couldn’t it have happened during the Obama administration, one of the most competent in modern history? Obama’s team had already written a pandemic playbook in 2016, designed to develop a coordinated U.S. government response to “high-consequence emerging disease threat anywhere in the world.” In other words, it would prepare us for something like the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. One of the first things Donald’s team did when they took over the White House was to throw the playbook out. Mitch McConnell claimed they’d received no briefings or information of any kind, but this was far from the truth. In an interview with CNN, Jeremy Konyndyk, a member of Obama’s Ebola response team, said, “They [the new administration] were extensively briefed, to the extent that they paid attention to these things during the transition.”
If Hillary Clinton, the winner of the popular vote in 2016, had been in office when the coronavirus arrived, she would have pulled out all the stops to contain it. Anybody else but Donald would have. And there are three things anybody else would not have done: politicize lifesaving measures like wearing a mask; set up a false dichotomy between the economy and the value of human life; and make the calculation that endangering lives and eventually killing hundreds of thousands of people was a winning campaign strategy. On Memorial Day 2020, the White House ordered flags lowered to half-staff, but that was its only gesture of recognition, a pale shadow of solidarity.
As the year of COVID unfolded, it became clear that we were being betrayed by our own federal government. In some cases, we were also betrayed by our neighbors, people whose dangerous beliefs had previously been contained at the margins of society but had now been brought to the forefront and empowered. With Donald’s explicit encouragement—“LIBERATE MICHIGAN! LIBERATE MINNESOTA!”—they wielded assault weapons at statehouses all over the country in the name of reclaiming their freedom from restrictions intended to save their lives, threatening lawmakers and spreading the virus. Their rights were unbound from responsibility to anything but their own misguided self-interest.
Donald’s behavior functionally lacked empathy and stemmed from his fear of being associated with weakness. Increased testing would reveal the scope of the situation. In his mind, this would undermine his public and private belief that none of it was his responsibility. As he had in the three years prior, he lied, created chaos, and sought to divide us in ways we didn’t see coming.
The irony is that through his inaction and the ensuing effort to cover it up, he became responsible for everything that has followed: the collapse of the economy, the fraying of our social fabric, and mass death.
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In 2017, Donald gifted corporations with billions of dollars in tax cuts, which was touted as freeing up money for investment in more jobs, but was actually used for stock buybacks that increased stockholder wealth and did nothing for workers. Three years later, the Paycheck Protection Program was designed to throw even more money at corporations, while Republicans in Congress seemed intent on leaving the vast majority of Americans, including “essential” workers who risked their lives in order to provide services so the rest of us could stay safely home, out in the cold. People who had done their best and still had to live without a safety net when their jobs vanished as businesses shuttered were told that, even during a global pandemic, giving them a subsistence wage wasn’t possible because it would encourage an unseemly dependence on the government. That was called “socialism” or “welfare.” That the tax cuts and payroll bailout were corporate welfare was never discussed. The message was clear: the economy needed to open and the lives of workers were expendable. Donald ordered the meatpacking plants to stay open, despite the out-of-control rates of infection there. At the time, it was hard not to think that this was less incompetent than willful. As the months passed, plenty of evidence surfaced that it was all done on purpose.
With a week to go before the 2020 presidential election, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said, “We’re not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics, and other mitigations.” It was a startling admission, but Meadows was simply putting into words what the administration had made clear with its actions all along—it would do nothing to encourage the American people to take steps that, according to officials in their own government, would mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. Donald, for his part, deliberately put people in danger at his crowded masks-optional rallies because, as he proclaimed, “we live in a free society.” His need for attention and adulation was far more important than his followers’ safety or lives. For the twenty-first-century Republican Party as led by Donald and his enablers, freedom—to own guns or flout pandemic regulations—came to mean doing whatever you want regardless of the consequences to other people. This impulse, more than anything, is what Donald had tapped into over the course of his single term in the Oval Office.
Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist, puts this trend, as exemplified by the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus, in its proper context: the Republican Party’s long-standing desire to shrink the federal government and eliminate its regulatory capacity. This included drastically downsizing the U.S. Public Health Service, thereby short-circuiting its ability to protect the health and safety of the American people.
It was all so unnecessary. Nobody would have bolted from Donald’s base if he had embraced a commonsense approach to COVID. Tens of thousands of lives would have been spared, and the economy, after a short-term hit, would have bounced back. His most deranged supporters would have hailed him as a hero—and a lot of his detractors would have, too. But Donald is constitutionally incapable of leading. He is constitutionally incapable of making the right choice if in any way, real or imagined, doing so might conflict with his self-interest. Because COVID hit blue states first an
d was found to affect communities of color disproportionately, it was even easier for him to make that choice. It also ensured that his base would embrace the China-virus-is-a-hoax narrative, because it reinforced their belief in white supremacy and catered to their own need for divisiveness.
It was Donald’s conscious choice to stand aside and do nothing while this virus invaded our country, ravaging our bodies, our communities, and our economy. States were forced to compete with one another to buy vital supplies from private contractors, but adding insult to injury, Donald’s administration then intercepted and commandeered those supplies so FEMA could distribute them back to private contractors who resold them at a profit while state governments were struggling to keep the lights on as their tax base shriveled.
On August 3, 2020, a day before the United States surpassed 150,000 deaths from COVID, Donald’s interview with Axios reporter Jonathan Swan aired on HBO. “It is what it is,” he said after Swan pointed out that a thousand Americans were dying every day. That was a popular expression in my family, and hearing it sent a chill down my spine. Whenever my grandfather, my aunt, or one of my uncles had said it, it was always with a cruel indifference to somebody else in despair. Donald had said it to me at my grandparents’ house in Queens when I’d asked why my grandfather insisted that my father’s ashes were to be buried in the family plot instead of scattered off the coast of Montauk, as he’d wanted. “It is what it is, honeybunch.”
The Reckoning Page 7