Emily Murphy's America
The Trump administration is finally allowing the transition process to move forward, a de-facto acknowledgement that President Trump lost the election. And the letter from General Services Administrator Emily Murphy to Joe Biden allowing the transition to start was perhaps a more apt concession by the Trump administration than the president himself could have given. (Trump seems unlikely to ever concede anyway.) Murphy, who spent more than a week delaying the acknowledgment of an election that she clearly knows that Trump lost while slowing down the transition process for a nation dealing with a deadly pandemic, of course cast herself as the victim, instead of the millions of people desperate to have an administration that takes the virus seriously in charge. According to her letter, it was Murphy who was following democratic norms and values, not the people arguing that Trump obviously lost and such a clear loss should result in a quick start to the transition, like in 2016. It was the liberals unfairly pressuring Murphy, not her boss the president, who has literally made a career of pressuring people in ethically-dubious ways. It was Murphy’s children and pets (she really did invoke her pets) who were threatened, not the black people in Detroit and Philadelphia, who not only have to live in a country with the deck stacked against them but had to endure two weeks of the ruling party of the nation trying to disqualify their votes on trumped up accusations of massive voting irregularities. Murphy, who works for Donald Trump, repeatedly cast herself as a defender of constitutional and legal norms in her letter.
Give. Me. A. Fucking. Break. Murphy’s letter was petty and harmless but also infuriating. It was the encapsulation of four years of own-the-libs-the-rules--apply-to-thee-but-not-to-me-how-dare-you-criticize-me-for-doing-stuff-I-know-is-wrong behavior. It was perfectly Trumpian. George W. Bush did everything he could to ease Barack Obama’s transition, Obama did the same for Trump. I think a President Jeb Bush or John Kasich would have accepted a defeat to Biden with something close to dignity. Murphy could have become head of the GSA under Bush or Kasich and she would have probably handled the transition normally. But she and a lot of other people have watched and learned from our nation’s current leader. He has changed them. And America will be living with those changed people long after Jan 20.
2020 will probably go down as one of the hardest years of our lives. That is almost entirely because of the coronavirus. But the year was made harder and more stressful by how America’s government handled the virus and other issues. And that’s a story of Trump and a lot of Emily Murphys, people who either publicly took stances that didn’t make any sense out of loyalty to Trump or more likely, have fundamentally shifted their views and behavior after four years of Trump being in charge.
So much has happened in 2020. But here’s the year in brief. In early February, all but one Republican in the U.S. Senate opted to allow Trump to remain in office, despite clear and obvious evidence that he had used his powers to try to force the Ukrainian government to investigate the family of Biden, who Trump correctly foresaw would be a formidable opponent. About three weeks later, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned that based on what she had seen in other countries, the spread of COVID-19 could result in a “severe” disruption of American life.
The Trump administration responded to Messonnier’s comments by basically making sure that she never spoke in public again about the virus. Instead of speaking honestly about the virus and dealing with it, the administration decided on a strategy of 1. trying to downplay the virus’ spread 2. limiting testing that would document that spread and 3. encouraging Americans to keep on living as if nothing had changed. Trump repeatedly suggested American life would return to normal again by Easter (April 12) and that churches should be open for in-person services that day. He later set a deadline of May 1 for the country to reopen, using the pulpit of the presidency to basically bully local officials into joining his campaign to minimize the virus. At White House briefings on COVID-19, Vice-President Pence and Trump took center stage, shifting these sessions away from giving medical information to U.S. citizens and towards downplaying the virus for Pence and Trump’s electoral purposes. Trump’s favorite medical expert shifted from Anthony Fauci to Deborah Birx to Scott Atlas, with the goal being to find the person who would most align with Trump’s campaign to not take the virus too seriously. The president refused to wear a mask, even as medical experts said that mask-wearing was important and that America needed its top leader to communicate that message. Trump and his top advisers disregard for COVID protocols resulted in at least two outbreaks among White House staff and senior Republicans, including the president himself being hospitalized after getting the virus.
Trump, joined by congressional Republicans, basically did force the country to reopen prematurely. A logical policy response would have been for the federal government to basically bail out restaurants, bars, gyms and other non-essential businesses until the virus was really gone and to pay the people who work at these businesses while they stayed home. The federal government could also have given money to states and localities to make up for the losses of tax revenue due to closed businesses.
Instead, without much federal aid, mayors and governors had to allow businesses to open, so local governments could get tax revenue and employees at these businesses could make money and feed their families. The odd dynamic of in-person schooling being closed while bars are open is not because the broader American public thinks that bars are more important than schools or because teacher unions have too much power. It’s because teachers get paid while teaching online, while bar employees won’t have money to eat if the bar is closed and the government has not set up a program for them to get money otherwise. This schools-closed, bars-open dynamic is largely the result of policy choices made by Trump and the Republican Party in Congress (limited federal aid, limited unemployment benefits, etc.)
“It says a lot that this basic point is often ignored: small businesses and workers don’t have to be facing devastation during COVID. It is a conservative policy choice not to pass sweeping federal aid and instead scapegoat governors who shut things down for public health,” said Susan Demas of the Michigan Advance.
Trump also turned “do you take COVID-19 really seriously?” into a partisan question, with the strong implication being no if you want to remain a Republican-politician-in-good-standing. So if you look at maps of the places where COVID-19 is spreading the most, the rates for positive COVID-19 tests are highest and masks are not being required, those maps look similar to the electoral maps, with the Trumpy-states also being the ones struggling with the worst COVID outbreaks while having the fewest mitigation policies. Tennessee’s Bill Lee, South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, and Iowa’s Kim Reynolds, all Republicans, seem to dueling to be the governor who makes the most callous statements while virus rates surge in their states, perhaps thinkingly correctly that this is the best tact if your goal is to win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
More than 250,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the United States this year. Those who have died are disproportionately black. Black people overwhelmingly want Trump out of office, so his final move to remain president has been especially galling. “Republicans Rewrite an Old Playbook on Disenfranchising Black Americans” read the headline of a New York Times news story (not an editorial) on Monday.
Donald Trump will be out of office on Jan 20. But an anti-democratic, racist contingent in his party existed before Trump’s 2016 presidential run, has gained strength during his presidency and will likely endure for years if not decades. America is a democracy (it held an election and the ruling party was defeated and will leave office) but seems to be getting less democratic. Those 250,000 people aren’t coming back--and I truly believe a serious, sustained national response to COVID-19 could have saved some of their lives.
Early in Trump’s 2016 campaign, as other Republican presidential candidates started trying to match Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric, then President Obama said, “Slamming the door in the face of refugees would betray our deepest values. That's not who we are. And it's not what we're going to do.” Trump was elected president. America basically did start barring refugees from entering the country. Maybe this is who we are.
Five years later, Obama sounds different.
“I recognize that there are those who believe that it’s time to discard the myth—that an examination of America’s past and an even cursory glance at today’s headlines show that this nation’s ideals have always been secondary to conquest and subjugation, a racial caste system and rapacious capitalism, and that to pretend otherwise is to be complicit in a game that was rigged from the start,” Obama wrote in an essay in the Atlantic released earlier this month as part of his book tour.
“I don’t know,” he added. “What I can say for certain is that I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America.”
I don’t know either.
I’m not ready to give up on the possibility of America--in part because I have nowhere else to go, no relevant connections to other nations or skills that would make it easy for me to immigrate. I am not ready to give up on my fellow Americans---the black people who keep voting even as Democratic mayors and Republicans governors and presidents do little to improve their lives, the civil rights lawyers and activists who fight so hard to defend the right to vote, the millions of people who have protested in defense of ideals like democracy and racial equality over the last several years. But a nation that can’t get everyone to wear masks to save lives or have an election where the losing side accepts defeat might best be described as a failing or failed nation. At least right now, the story of America might be best understood as the story of Emily Murphy, not Barack Obama.