There Is Nothing for You Here, page 34
January 2020 saw a novel coronavirus, COVID-19, turn into a global pandemic. It was the worst health crisis in a century, since the influenza pandemic of 1918. Other emergencies exacerbated and magnified its effects. The year was marked by the largest number of hurricanes on record battering the Gulf Coast and the Caribbean. There were widespread wildfires in California, droughts and floods across other parts of the country. On occasions it had an apocalyptic feel. Some unfortunate cities and regions, including some of the United States’ poorest communities, got hit by different natural disasters multiple times.
This was a harbinger of difficult times ahead. Indeed, public health officials, scientists, and other analysts had warned for decades that we were in danger of a repeat of 1918. In a few years or decades, this annus horribilis of 2020 might not look so unusual, they said.
The coronavirus’s apparent jump from an animal host to humans somewhere around Wuhan in China was perhaps just one consequence of environmental degradation as mankind continued to encroach on global ecosystems. Climate change further raised the specter of a permanently shifting Rust Belt across America—a swath of economic blight and urban decay that would no longer be confined to the country’s former industrial regions. As some places in the United States became more risky or difficult to live in because of rising sea levels and more frequent catastrophic “weather events,” people would have to move. This would compound the dislocation from deindustrialization and economic downturns since the 1980s and put new demographic pressure on regions and resources outside the climate danger zones. The surge in illegal immigration across the southern border from places like Guatemala and Honduras was already a warning sign, as people fled regions devastated by myriad hurricanes and laid waste by years of drought, where they could no longer subsist on small-scale farming.
In 2020, I went from sheltering in place for months at home in preparation for the impeachment process to sheltering in place at home in the collective effort to stem the transmission of the disease. In early March my day job as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution became virtual, and it remained so extending through 2021. This, paradoxically, gave me time to contemplate the situation we were all in together and gave me space to write this book.
I was immediately struck by how much the U.S., the UK, and Russia, the three countries that had defined my personal and professional life, now resembled each other in their failure to mount a serious, well-coordinated response to dealing with the pandemic. All three countries had some of the world’s highest levels of COVID-19 infection and devastating death rates among citizens and frontline health-care workers—as did other countries with populist politics and leaders, such as Brazil and India. In all of these places, scientific experts were drowned out by posturing populist politicians. Public health took a back seat to the exigencies of personalized politics. Political divisions became chasms over even the most basic medical advice, such as wearing masks and maintaining physical distance to slow the spread of the disease. Even the development of vaccines, such as Russia’s Sputnik V, became an opportunity to play great power geopolitics rather than just focusing on getting people vaccinated.
Fast on the heels of the pandemic in the United States came the May 25, 2020, murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Floyd’s death, his neck pressed beneath the knee of a police officer during a heavy-handed arrest, sparked nationwide protests against police brutality and highlighted the continued persecution of Black Americans decades after the civil rights movement. The United Kingdom was also swept up in the Black Lives Matter protests, as a younger generation of Brits contemplated the integral role the UK had played in the Atlantic slave trade and its own history of racism and heavy-handed policing.
Again I was struck by how inadequate the government-level responses were to address this painful and complex issue, especially against the backdrop of the coronavirus, which hit Black and other minority communities hard in both countries. In Russia, Vladimir Putin—faced with his own domestic problems, including the rampaging coronavirus and a growing opposition movement—did not waste an opportunity to comment on the situation and to criticize the United States for mishandling race relations. He was clearly only too happy to be able to divert the Russian public’s attention away from deficiencies at home to debacles abroad.
Although I knew that things could always get worse, it was easy to think that we had reached the apogee of populism at home and abroad. In the Trump years, and especially in Trump’s final year in office, the three countries that had shaped my personal and professional lives had reached a specific juncture where their fates completely intersected and entwined. All three had faced the challenges of managing major economic and technological shifts and had had to deal with the political consequences of postindustrial decline. Prime among those political consequences: governments seemingly without the interest or ability to solve the deadly serious challenges of the twenty-first century.
Since the 1980s and 1990s, large portions of the British, Russian, and American populations had found themselves stuck in hollowed-out towns and regions in their equivalent Rust Bfelts. In the case of Russia, millions were literally left out in the cold in frigid Siberian towns and cities thousands of miles from anywhere else. The despair that ravaged the three countries’ forgotten places after decades of wrenching transition had fed populism and authoritarianism and undermined democracy. Lost generations in all three countries foresaw nothing but persistent disadvantage and lack of opportunity and wanted someone, preferably some strongman, to fix things for them with a series of bold moves.
The strongmen had arrived, but the rest of the populist dream had gone unfulfilled. And now life was upended. Everyone was imperiled by a deadly disease. The global pandemic was another shock to fragile systems, a negative force multiplier that compounded preexisting problems. If ever there was proof that the decline of opportunity posed an existential threat, this was it.
The Populists’ Pandemic
Populist governments are, almost by definition, ill-suited to handle complex problems of governance. Style, swagger, and atmospherics, superficial and simplistic solutions, and enthusiastic sloganeering form the core of the populist’s playbook—and are the antithesis of the toolkit needed to deal with a deadly pandemic.
To reach the levels of logistical organization required for implementing mass testing and other public health policies, as well as rolling out a nationwide vaccination program, a government must be methodical. It has to plan ahead, let seasoned experts take the lead, and pull people together around a clear set of goals and messages. Combating the coronavirus could not be done in an ad hoc manner, relying on a loose coalition of friends, family, and loyalists and pitting people against each other. It would take real leadership, and that was one thing that populists seemed wholly uninterested in providing.
Against the backdrop of high political drama, the United States hit a grim set of milestones over the course of the year. By Inauguration Day in January 2021, four hundred thousand Americans had died of COVID-19. Almost twenty-five million people had contracted the coronavirus, and close to two hundred thousand more were infected daily. This tragic trajectory would worsen over many more months until the advent of mass vaccination efforts in 2021.
This tsunami of infection and death was the consequence of the Trump administration’s systematic dismissal of the gravity and extent of the pandemic, which the government’s own watchdog agency, the General Accounting Office (GAO), pointed out in a damning 346-page report. The GAO report revealed that only 10 percent of its recommendations to address critical gaps in the medical supply chain had been implemented by the time Trump left office. Urgent action was still needed on this and multiple other fronts to deal with the “greatest public health pandemic in a hundred years.”
In a negative report from the Lancet Commission in early 2021, the commission cochairs asserted that as many as 40 percent of U.S. deaths from COVID-19 in 2020 could have been prevented through better public health measures. They also laid part of the blame for the high mortality rate on the deterioration of the U.S. health system in the previous two decades and on the increase in America’s socioeconomic and spatial inequalities. The commissioners noted that the United States’ long-standing failure to provide full health insurance coverage for the American population, and Trump’s efforts to weaken the Affordable Care Act since 2016, had all contributed to the impact of the pandemic.
Trump followed the same pattern on the pandemic that he had on foreign policy. In January 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, and an adviser to several American presidents since the 1980s, gave an extensive interview to the New York Times. Dr. Fauci described in detail what it had been like to work with President Trump on the White House Coronavirus Task Force. He related experiences that were very similar to mine at the NSC in trying to work on national security issues.
Trump had been as dismissive of the U.S. government’s medical experts as he was of other career professionals. He sought to remain the center of attention, push the government bureaucracy aside, downplay the virus, and play up his own “take charge” actions. Not wanting to appear weak, he refused to wear a mask in public and relentlessly made fun of anyone around him who did—even after he, his wife, his youngest son, and dozens of White House staffers contracted the virus in October. Similarly, the president solicited advice from friends and took their opinions, or whatever he heard on Fox News, more seriously than his advisers’ recommendations on stemming transmission, treating the virus, and dealing with the overall crisis.
Dr. Fauci recounted how he had first been invited to the White House and told to “bring my white coat and stand there as he [President Trump] signed an executive order regarding something about influenza.” Just like everyone else—be they a steelworker, a military general, or one of the West Wing Fox News–clone women staffers—Dr. Fauci was supposed to appear in costume. He had to look the part of a Central Casting medical doctor and take part in one of Trump’s populist big shows.
At times Trump’s press conferences on the pandemic took on the same qualities as the agony at the 2018 Helsinki summit with Putin. During one particularly mortifying event in April, Trump (having as usual paid little attention to his briefing materials) stoked public outrage by appearing to suggest that bleach could be injected to kill the virus. His comments on the virus and the means of combating it produced the same kind of word fog as his pronouncements on other topics, with the original meaning lost in transmission.
When the president offered this ludicrous suggestion on live television, the pained expression on the face of Dr. Deborah Birx, another professional member of the task force based at the White House, was captured vividly on camera. Her stricken look immediately brought back memories of my predicament at Helsinki. I wondered if she too was contemplating staging a fake medical emergency. But of course Dr. Birx was in the middle of a real one.
The consequences of this and other coronavirus press conferences that Trump botched were even more dire than Helsinki had been. At least a handful of people reported attempting to dose themselves prophylactically with sometimes toxic compounds seemingly endorsed by the president. As a result, Dr. Fauci found himself constantly having to correct the president to make sure that the American population received the appropriate public health message.
Before long, Dr. Fauci ended up not just on the “nasty list” but on the enemies list for crossing the president. Other people, loyalists with skimpy credentials for dealing with infectious diseases, were brought in to supersede him. Dr. Fauci was discouraged from giving public comments. He received death threats on the internet. An envelope filled with white powder was sent to his office. He had to be sprayed down by a hazmat team as a precaution. His wife and children were harassed with phone calls. Everything that I had experienced, Dr. Fauci suffered with more intensity. In the end he had to have a permanent security detail.
In many respects, the White House’s approach to the pandemic had been prefigured at the very beginning of the Trump administration. In his 2018 book The Fifth Risk, the American author Michael Lewis recounted a series of interviews he had conducted with public servants as the outgoing Obama administration attempted to pass on information and responsibility to the incoming Trump team during the formal transition period in 2016–2017. Career officials and some of Obama’s team told Lewis that most of the Trump appointees had little, if any, interest in learning what others had done or how the institutions they were taking over worked. They were determined to wing it. They thought they could simply start from scratch, steeped in the belief that every administration could approach ongoing issues as a blank slate—and in any case, “the other guys were idiots.”
Lewis catalogued the five major things that career officials and appointees from the prior administration worried could go wrong. The fifth risk in the list was the one that proved the most prescient and consequential during the pandemic in 2020: incompetence and the failure of project management.
Trump’s Slow-Motion Coup
Eventually Trump left office too. But before he did, for four years his supporters were duped. They were fed conspiracies and lies—on the internet, on social media platforms, and in speeches, interviews, and other public pronouncements—about the supposed actions of his enemies. Even the basic facts of events that could easily be documented and refuted by others were the subject of falsehoods, beginning with the size of the crowd at Trump’s January 2017 inauguration.
The president told so many lies so often that it was more surprising when he told the truth. One of his top political consultants, Kellyanne Conway, referred to the president’s lies as “alternative facts.” The small lies gained the credence of truth when they were voiced by the president of the United States—especially for his voters. They paved the way for the Big Lie, Trump’s whopper: the contention that “his enemies” had perpetrated a colossal voter fraud. Joe Biden had stolen the November 2020 election; he, Trump, actually had won. The people—his millions of followers—needed to rise in protest and take their country back. For him.
President Trump’s time in the White House, the American people’s house, came to an ignominious end in January 2021. In the course of a little over a year, Trump careened from one impeachment trial to another, becoming the first president in the history of the United States to be impeached twice by the U.S. Congress. Both impeachments were related to his attempts to stay in power for a second term. In the first, the president was caught behind the scenes trying to use foreign actors to harm a primary political opponent. In the second, the whole country watched him openly incite domestic actors to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Trump had long made it clear that he was prepared to use every lever at his disposal as president. The storming of the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, by a mob fired up by the president was just one episode in a long series of provocative moves to bend the system to his will. It was, in its essence, the culmination of a slow-motion coup attempt, perpetrated by Trump to keep himself in power even if he actually lost the election. Although coups historically tend to be the product of clandestine plots and sudden, violent military takeovers, Trump’s attempt played out over a period of months. This did not make it any less threatening.
Trump’s acquittal in his first Senate impeachment trial clearly had emboldened him. For four years he had stress-tested the U.S. democratic system to see if anyone would counter or rein him in. Whenever they did not, he pressed ahead. The failure of the first impeachment effort was proof positive for Trump that he could do whatever he wanted to hang on to power and get away with it. So it was little wonder that his unchecked behavior only grew worse.
Trump repeatedly stated that he “deserved” two or even three terms in office because he had been treated “unfairly” and “cheated” out of the first two years of his presidency by the “Russia hoax,” the Mueller investigation, and then by the first impeachment trial. I myself heard him say that multiple times. Sometimes Trump would muse and tweet about the possibility of abolishing presidential term limits entirely and staying in power indefinitely. In the immediate aftermath of his acquittal in the January 2020 Senate impeachment trial, he retweeted a video suggesting that he would be president “4eva.” He would float these ideas to see if anyone contradicted him. People rarely did. If there was some pushback in the media, he would say it was a joke, he was only kidding, and move on.
Perhaps because he had endured the ignominy of hosting the now-infamous Helsinki press conference, President Sauli Niinistö of Finland turned out to be one of the few who attempted to spotlight what President Trump was up to. During an October 2019 meeting in the Oval Office, the Finnish president listened quietly as Trump railed against Democrats, the news media, and the impending impeachment in response to reporters’ questions. When attention finally turned to him, President Niinistö praised America’s history of democratic development. He told Trump, “Mr. President, you have a great democracy. Keep it going on.” Members of his staff, whom I worked with closely during my time at the NSC, later confided to me that President Niinistö was greatly concerned by Trump’s words and attitudes. He didn’t take Trump’s comments as a joke at all. He could see where this all might lead.
The worst-case scenario, indeed, was exactly what happened. It became clear that Trump’s intent was not simply to stress-test American democracy but to exploit the weak points that he found. He wanted to effect a “self-coup,” along the lines of Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s, who dissolved the French parliament and declared himself Emperor Napoleon III in December 1851, and Nicolas Maduro, the leader of Venezuela, who refused to step down after losing national elections in 2017.
