The Reckoning

by Mary L. Trump;

  In the fall, the administration started to present the incremental gains in the monthly jobs report as a sign the economy was growing, when in actuality it was slowly recovering the millions of jobs that it had hemorrhaged in the spring.

  The abysmal pandemic response was a failure of leadership and a dereliction of duty that demanded Donald’s removal from office. It was his enablers’ conscious choice to keep him there and allow the devastation to continue.

  As for the rest of us, it simply became too much to challenge every single one of his transgressions.

  On July 17, 2020, Donald had told Fox News host Chris Wallace, “I don’t agree with the statement that if everybody wears a mask, everything disappears.” No, because giving credit to a piece of cloth would somehow take something away from him.

  This is not about being unlucky enough to live in a time when a pandemic occurred, it’s about the fact that the pandemic was allowed to worsen and grow. In all likelihood, nobody could have prevented the pandemic from starting, but so many lives were willfully sacrificed on the altar of Donald’s reelection campaign, and the economy was allowed to fail for most of us because it succeeded for the very, very few, netting more than a trillion dollars for American billionaires as the stock market soared while millions of wage earners lost their jobs and had to resort to food banks to feed their families. It’s impossible to say how Donald would have reacted if the stock market had been unaffected by the early warnings about COVID, but once he made the link between the virus and the Dow Jones Industrial Average—the only economic indicator that has ever mattered to him—he would continue to associate speaking honestly about COVID with an adverse impact on the economy.

  As soon as he made the determination, which was breathtakingly stupid and cynical, that the economy was much more important than people’s health, the economy and COVID became detached from each other in a way that they never should have been.

  As another bogus justification for opening up the economy while COVID was still raging, Donald said, “My administration is committed to preventing the tragedy of suicide, ending the opioid crisis, and improving mental and behavioral health.… The pandemic has also exacerbated mental and behavioral-health conditions as a result of stress from prolonged lockdown orders, lost employment, and social isolation.” Considering it was his behavior that prolonged the lockdown, this was hypocritical at best, and the most extreme form of gaslighting at worst.

  * * *

  The maliciously willful ineptitude undermined our faith in government. But Donald betrayed the people he lied to. Public denigration—started by him, echoed by his most vocal supporters, and amplified by right-wing media outlets—compromised the authority of his infectious disease experts, most notably Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at the most critical time and led millions of American citizens to discount Fauci’s expert advice about mask wearing and social distancing. To this day Donald has made a heroic vaccination campaign all the more difficult by sowing seeds of doubt about the very thing that can make this pandemic stop once and for all.

  It was easy to be angry at people who refused to wear masks, but they were doing what many Americans have had ingrained in them from childhood—they were listening to their elected officials. They were listening to the people in whom they had put their trust with their votes—their mayor, their representative, their senator, their governor, or the man in the Oval Office. They can’t be faulted for that. If you’re a conservative in America, and your leaders are telling you that wearing a mask makes you a liberal, or makes you look weak, then you’re going to show you’re tough by refusing to wear one even if that means exposing you and those you love to a potentially deadly virus.

  Like so much of government, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which falls under the Department of Health and Human Services, has historically been allowed to do its work independently of politics. This changed after Michael Caputo, who had no previous experience in public health, was put in place to oversee the health department’s communications. He in turn hired Paul Alexander, a part-time health professor, to an unpaid position as his science adviser. In May 2020, political appointees began to put pressure on the CDC when it released a report stating that community-wide mitigation efforts were needed to slow transmission. Eventually Robert Redfield, a virologist and director of the CDC, caved, allowed a political agenda to take precedence over science-based recommendations meant to protect the health and safety of the American people. Standard practice had been for hospitals to pass patient data and other relevant statistics to the CDC, which then compiled a database that was made publicly available. Without warning, hospitals were ordered instead to send data directly to HHS in Washington, where access by researchers and health officials who relied on the data for their decision-making processes was denied. Nothing like this had happened since the CDC’s founding in 1946.

  The COVID Tracking Project (CTP) was launched by The Atlantic in order to make up for this potentially devastating shift in policy. As journalist and founder of Talking Points Memo Josh Marshall wrote, “The project … was perhaps the most important single journalistic effort of the COVID pandemic, truly a marvel of synthesis, data visualization and fact-checking. And yet it was a genuine disgrace that it had to exist at all. This kind of effort is an elementary governmental and public health function. But the CDC just didn’t do it.”

  By September, Paul Alexander was bragging about pressuring CDC officials to change their reports in order to reflect the administration’s political message, not the science, all so they aligned with Donald’s talking points.

  How does an organization that should be entirely apolitical and left in the hands of people with the most expertise and the best chance of solving the problem get sidelined, its experts fired, in the process thwarting the actions that could be taken to save people?

  How does one person have that much control over the CDC or the Defense Production Act or which states get vaccines or PPE? How is that allowed? Caputo was not a scientist, not a medical professional, not an epidemiologist. Yet, every step of the way, he interfered and did exactly the wrong thing even though he had at his disposal all of the necessary scientific expertise. He even accused the CDC of harboring a “resistance unit” opposed to Donald.

  Other public servants were harassed, threatened, and forced to resign just when we needed them most.

  * * *

  A generation ago, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, created a moment of great unity—not just in this country but across the world. We were all traumatized to varying degrees, and our shared horror created solidarity. We received the message that we were all in it together, no matter how far away from the attacks we were.

  In January 2021, more people died nearly every day than were killed in the World Trade Center, yet COVID has been one of the most divisive tragedies in American history—all because one man didn’t have the decency to wear a mask.

  COVID is directly affecting every single person on the planet, creating an even greater opportunity to unite us around this common cause. Imagine if Donald’s administration had led a global response to COVID. Imagine if we had helped other countries—that could have been unifying, too. A real leader would have said, “I don’t care about politics or my reelection. My only mission is to do everything in my power to save lives.” But Donald and his henchmen couldn’t even see their way clear to getting help to states whose governors didn’t kiss Donald’s ass sufficiently.

  After his release from Walter Reed Hospital, where he had been admitted after experiencing severe COVID symptoms, Donald climbed a grand exterior staircase to the White House’s Truman balcony. Doing his best Mussolini imitation, he took off his mask in a macho display of invulnerability. He clenched his teeth and jutted out his jaw, just as my grandmother did when she was biting back anger or clamping down on her pain. In Donald, I saw the latter. I have asthma, so I am acutely awa
re of what it looks like when somebody is struggling to breathe. He was in pain, he was afraid, but he would never admit that to anybody—not even himself. Because, as always, the consequences of admitting vulnerability were much more frightening to him than being honest.

  At the presidential debate in late September, shortly before his testing positive for COVID, he had mocked Joe Biden for wearing a mask at all times. Such mockery was wildly irresponsible, counterproductive, and dangerous in terms of public health.

  In the more than two months between the election and Joe Biden’s inauguration, Donald would go largely silent about the pandemic, aside from a handful of tweets mostly taking credit for Operation Warp Speed and Pfizer’s development of a vaccine (which wasn’t funded by Operation Warp Speed, although the federal government did commit to buying 100 million doses).

  Donald’s decisive loss meant the end of the federal government’s conversation about COVID for the months he remained in office. There were no guidelines, no information, no leadership, no progress, and no more presidential briefings (although since they had often been fact-free and dangerous, this wasn’t a bad thing). But Donald was still in the Oval Office and this country continued to suffer a mass casualty event every single day. Also, he had seventy-five more days to do a lot of damage.

  He made the pivot to the Big Lie in the early morning hours after Election Day, before the results were even announced. He completely believed that he could turn things around. There was no reason for him not to—he always had. And let’s face it, seventy-four million of us, if the 2020 election results are any indication, never felt that they’d been betrayed at all. Or, worse, those voters put the betrayal to the side because they understood the degree to which having a white supremacist in the Oval Office benefited them.

  When your motive is not simply winning at all costs but grievance and revenge, you’re more dangerous than a straight-up sociopath. Donald is much worse than that—he’s someone with a gaping wound where his soul should be.

  In one of his last tweets before he was removed from Twitter altogether, Donald slammed the CDC—his CDC—for exaggerating the case count and death toll. His denials notwithstanding, January 2021 would be the deadliest month in the United States since the virus began to spread a year earlier, killing one American every twenty-eight seconds.

  PART III

  American Exceptionalism

  CHAPTER 5

  Suffering in Silence

  It is a truism that the winners write history, and at the heart of our American system of government are an unacknowledged paradox and a false paradigm. The paradox is the unresolvable tension between the concepts of liberty and equality laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the embrace of chattel slavery in the Constitution. The paradigm is the myth that there is, first, such a thing as “race,” and, second, that there is a fixed hierarchy with whites at the top and Blacks at the bottom.

  Because of this paradox and false paradigm, the country has developed along two tracks that run parallel to each other but nevertheless continuously impact each other. One, based in historical fact, is the genocide of two groups of people—Native Americans and Africans—and the enslavement of the latter. The other is the myth of white supremacy, which is the story white America has told since the country’s inception and that continues to drive the racial divide. It is the denial of white supremacy and the vehement need to deny it, however, that have ensured that the traumas upon which this country was founded would never heal, that they would in fact worsen over time, compounded by the continuing neglect of our democratic ideals and the pressing need of the white majority to pretend the traumas never happened.

  Born in the flight from persecution and toward promise, our country was actually built on the backs and with the blood of Native Americans and enslaved Africans. When the Civil War ended, white Americans had a chance to atone, at least in some measure, by ensuring true equality for all people—by returning stolen land and sovereignty to Native Americans and guaranteeing and protecting freedmen and freedwomen’s full rights as citizens.

  The terrible irony is that white supremacy demanded that Blacks be excluded from society, despite their desire to be fully integrated, while Native Americans, who wanted nothing more than the return of their land and their sovereignty, were forced to assimilate, no matter what the cost to them.

  We can only imagine, but never know, the trauma caused not only by the physical pain, but by the pain of isolation and despair and, once forced into the hostile world of the slave trader and the plantation, by the loss of dignity.

  * * *

  It’s important to remember that although many Northerners hated slavery, they held deeply racist ideas about Black people. After all, running alongside the two and a half centuries of slavery were two and a half centuries’ worth of justifications for slavery. Whether people owned other human beings or not, they all grew up in a society that both approved of slavery, and also, for the most part, espoused the beliefs that Black people are inferior and that Christian doctrine supports their enslavement. If you lived in the North, slavery was unacceptable, but so too was the full equality of Black people.

  Black achievement during Reconstruction was extraordinary. As social psychologist Susan Opotow writes, however, “Local inclusionary gains too may be lost if the larger society does not recognize, accept, and adopt them. There are more ways to achieve partial rather than complete inclusion. And there are more ways to fail than to succeed. For inclusionary efforts to influence the future of post-war societies, they need to be significant and sustained.”

  The scope of the postwar project was beyond the comprehension even of those who most supported Black suffrage and equality. In twelve short years Blacks were expected to prove their worth, despite having received no restitution and minimal assistance and, most consequentially, while living in a society that actively interfered with any attempts on the part of Blacks to exercise their newly won rights. What was required was for white attitudes about Blacks, which were the direct result of by now deeply ingrained and often unacknowledged racism and white supremacy, to be completely reversed. Under these circumstances failure was the only option. And by the end of Reconstruction, most Black Americans in the South had been effectively reenslaved. As Bryan Stevenson has said, “Slavery didn’t end in 1865, it just evolved.”

  * * *

  During the Jim Crow period, Black Americans continued to lose what they’d worked and suffered for. Pressure on Blacks to conform to rules imposed by the Redeemers increased, as did efforts to contain them. Black people who had achieved some measure of autonomy and sense of agency at the beginning of Reconstruction suddenly found themselves once again having to watch every move they made. Fear of doing the “wrong thing” pervaded the lives of Blacks and ground down any sense of safety or security, because in the end the “wrong thing” was Black existence. One tactic whites used in achieving this atmosphere of excessive caution was to inject uncertainty into even the most mundane encounters between whites and Blacks. Blacks could be arrested or lynched for such infractions as looking at a white woman the “wrong way,” for not stepping off the sidewalk to make room for a white person, or for failing to call a white man “sir.”

  * * *

  From the beginning, the goal for whites was the control not just of Black bodies but of Black agency. There is no way for a human being to live freely if the act of living itself is deemed dangerous and threatening by those in power. Otherwise, what conclusion can be drawn when the punishments were so incommensurate with the infractions? If Southern whites really believed that Blacks were incapable of feeling pain, then why did they go to such great lengths to cause them such agony? If you were a white man who believed so profoundly in your own native superiority, why did you need a mob of other white men to emasculate a Black man who’d already been rendered powerless? The backlash that accompanied each cycle of advancement was too strong to overcome. The urgency of white supremacy requires that white soci
ety always find a way to achieve homeostasis. In America this homeostasis can only occur when white people are at the top of the hierarchy and Black people are at the bottom of it.

  * * *

  In order to understand, as far as that’s possible, the impact of the sustained trauma from the first generation of enslaved Africans onward, we need to put it in context.

  One potential response when a person witnesses or experiences a traumatic event is for him or her to develop post-traumatic stress disorder. Symptoms may include intrusive memories, avoidance, alterations in moods and cognition, and changes in arousal. If untreated, these symptoms can persist over the course of a lifetime and significantly impact a person’s ability to function.

  The diagnosis of complex PTSD is a potential consequence if an individual is repeatedly subjected to a trauma or “totalitarian control over a prolonged period,” according to Judith Herman, in her seminal work, Trauma and Recovery. Dr. Joy DeGruy, a researcher and educator, has introduced the concept of post-traumatic slave syndrome, “a condition that exists when a population has experienced multigenerational trauma resulting from centuries of slavery and continues to experience oppression and institutionalized racism today.”

  In addition to the traumatic fear of death enslaved people experienced every day of their lives, they were also subjected to spiritual abuse suffered when they lost their culture and were forbidden to practice their native religions; emotional abuse when forced to watch or participate in the abuse of other enslaved people or when separated from their families; psychological abuse resulting from the interdiction against literacy; sexual abuse in the form of rape or being forced to participate publicly in sexual acts; and physical abuse that took the form of whippings, beatings, and whatever creative tortures their “owners” could devise. The psychological and emotional impact of the totality of all of these abuses would have been incalculable. What would the effects be on the next generation and the generations to follow?