How the pandemic is a accelerating a worldwide shift to authoritarianism — especially in America

April 30, 2020 By LUKE READER - History News Network- Commentary

I’ve spent the past few semesters teaching seminars on democracy, populism, and authoritarianism. It is not an exaggeration to say that the coronavirus pandemic represents a fresh challenge to democracy, not just in the United States, but across the world.

Events of recent years – Brexit, the election of President Trump, and the rise of nativist, populist movements in countries as diverse as Hungary, Turkey, and Brazil – had already led experts like Tim Snyder and Yascha Mounk to warn that the norms upholding liberal democracy are globally at risk.

There are some similarities between modern-day authoritarian movements and their 20th century predecessors. They frequently promote illiberal us vs. them sentiments that champion an idealized citizenry, engage in ‘blood and soil’ nationalism, assert a racial or religious identity, engage in post-truth politics, and reject expertise. But contemporary authoritarianism prefers majoritarian democracy to totalitarianism. As Ece Temelkuran shows in her book How to Lose a Country (2019), this is because authoritarian leaders want the imprimatur of popular support for their plans to reshape institutions like courts, bureaucracies, parliaments, and the media.

The rise of authoritarianism has shown that liberal democracy is not as robust as its adherents once thought. In How Democracy Ends (2018), David Runciman, professor of politics and history at Cambridge University, argues that the democratic institutions of many countries are no longer fit for purpose. Anger at economic inequality, neglect, and continued rhetoric about the supposed inadequacy of government, have left the structures upholding liberal democracy vulnerable to attack

The coronavirus has accentuated this sense of fragility. Authoritarian leaders have seized the opportunity presented by the pandemic. The Chinese government has extended further the reach of its surveillance state. Vladimir Putin has used the pandemic as cover for his push to amend the Russian constitution and maintain his hold on power. In Israel, embattled prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the pandemic to shut down the courts and close parliament, maintaining his hold on power and delaying his looming trial for corruption. In Hungary, recently passed legislation granted prime minister Viktor Orban near absolute power. The Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro recently joined protests urging a military coup, continuing attacks on the nation’s courts and legislature he views as obstructions.

The lessons from these nations are germane for the United States.

Demands by the Trump administration for emergency powers to fight the pandemic, such as greater restrictions on border-crossings, immigration, and asylum claims, and requests by the Department of Justice for the right to detain people without trial or to suspend court proceedings in the event of a national crisis, have led to disquiet. In a recent podcast, Sarah Churchwell, professor of public humanities at the School of Advanced Study in London and the author of Behold America(2018), an intellectual history of America First, urged caution before granting emergency powers to an administration determined to hang onto power through the invocation of a wartime presidency.

Donald Trump has never hidden his authoritarian intentions. Indeed, the coronavirus seems to have amplified these tendencies. From the start, his administration sought to connect the pandemic to the wider interests of the White House. This process has played out in two different ways.

The narrative of the Trump presidency – the idea that it is under constant assault by the so-called deep-state – continues unabated. Initially, Trump claimed the coronavirus was a hoax designed to imperil an economy whose success he claims as his own and to sabotage his November re-election. Fear of fifth-columnists has guided decision-making. There has been a tendency to ignore expertise unless it reflects White House opinion. The federal government has not offered a unified response to the crisis. Task forces are mostly staffed by unqualified cronies. Nor is there a clear chain-of-command. The president speaks proudly of leading by gut-instinct, claiming he knows better than on-the-spot officials what different states and localities need.

But the coronavirus also gives the administration a chance to deepen the us vs. them narrative that characterizes the Trump presidency. The White House has continued its nativist culture-war policies, branding COVID-19 the ‘Chinese virus,’ and suggesting the pandemic is mostly a problem for urban centers and Democratic states. Daily press conferences offer the president a national platform for campaign boosterism and ritual denunciations of media opponents. States have had to compete with each other and the federal government for scarce ventilators and personal protective equipment like face-masks, goggles, and respirators.

Public opinion about the response to COVID-19 is beginning to reflect partisan divides. According to Pew Research, while most people support social distancing, 85% of Republicans believe the president had handled the crisis well; only 12% of Democrats think the same. Just 52% of Republicans consider coronavirus a major threat to public health, compared with nearly 80% of Democrats.

So does the handling of the coronavirus mark a failure of government policy? It depends what the administration wanted from the crisis. What appears a public health fiasco also resembles patterns of autocratic behavior seen across the globe long before the pandemic began: dismissal of expertise; railing against supposed enemies; and the exploitation of crisis to pursue self-interested goals.

Recent demonstrations against governors enforcing stay-at-home orders reflect these authoritarian patterns. This is not just because some protestors bear arms, wave Confederate flags and other white supremacist symbols, or carry presidential campaign banners. Supporters of the president fear the economic damage caused by the pandemic will undermine his 2020 reelection campaign. ‘Astroturfing’ by wealthy far-right activists, openly supported by Donald Trump and Fox News, is trying to create the illusion that there is popular support for overriding the advice of experts and reopening the economy, even if it sacrifices lives in the process.

Accelerating division is the point. If the pandemic has revealed America as a ‘failed state,’ as George Packer contends in the Atlantic, we only appear to be a failed state for some.

Luke Reader is a SAGES Teaching Fellow in the history department at Case Western Reserve University. He is writing a book about Brexit and popular culture. Luke Reader is on twitter @WritesReader.

Wealthy right-wingers are shoveling their own supporters into the pandemic to preserve racist inequality: political scientist

April 30, 2020 By Travis Gettys


President Donald Trump’s right-wing allies are sacrificing their followers to preserve inequality, according to a new analysis by a political scientist.

Relatively small but widespread protests, promoted by right-wing corporate interests, have sprung up across the country, revealing a poisonous ideology that’s stoked by political and business elites, wrote political scientist Joe Lowndes for The New Republic.

“Their hope is that people already conditioned by an ideology centered on the marketplace, the individual, and the nation will be more likely to believe that their lives and livelihoods are under greater threat from state-ordered economic shutdowns and coercive social measures than they are from the disease,” wrote Lowndes, who teaches at the University of Oregon.

Trump’s allies are hoping Americans believe they can work and shop their way out of the COVID-19 crisis, no matter what the cost in human lives, rather than reorder the political system to create a more just and egalitarian society, Lowndes argued.

“Demands to re-open states provide great cover for the Trump administration, the Republican Party in Congress, red-state governors, and the Federal Reserve, who are working to keep current wealth stratifications in place and protect the rich from economic harm — and doing so without much pushback from Democrats,” Lowndes wrote. “As conditions become more dire, the right will do all it can to enlist the loyalty of middle- and working-class victims of the crisis. Here, the logics of race and nation will become increasingly important.”

The right uses the historical philosophies of self-reliance and individualism as cover for racist opposition to social welfare programs, and those same dynamics are being amplified by the coronavirus crisis.

“In a basic way, this vision of freedom is conveyed by the defiance of guidelines to stop the spread of the virus,” Lowndes wrote. “It isn’t just the protesters. The dozen or so Republicans in the House of Representatives refusing to wear masks when called to vote on the latest coronavirus relief bill performed precisely that kind of political theater for their constituents. It is meant as a tough-guy taunt, to show their own robustness and the weakness of their opponents.”

Lowndes notes that demonstrators repeat Fox News talking points at those protests and focus their venom on city dwellers, which reflects the growing divide between rural and urban areas, and helps cover for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s threat to bankrupt “blue states.”

“Defenders of the current political order will continue to do whatever is necessary protect wealth and privilege,” Lowndes wrote. “They understand that to address the enormity of the economic crisis would upend the neoliberal consensus of this second Gilded Age, which has greatly enriched a few while systematically dismantling public goods, disempowering workers, and diminishing democratic rule. Their hope is that enough Americans go along with this resistance, even if it kills them.”

Angry meat packing employee dares Trump to work shifts with him during pandemic: ‘Join the fun!’
April 30, 2020 By Brad Reed


A worker at a meat-packing plant in Indiana is none too happy with President Donald Trump’s order that he stay at work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Indianapolis Star reports that Gary Harris, a 20-year veteran at the Tyson Foods meat plant in Logansport, Indiana, is daring the president to put his own health on the line and help them process meat to keep food on American families’ tables.

“If he does that I think they should bring the president down here and have him work shoulder-to-shoulder and join the fun,” said Harris.

Harris explained that more than 100 employees at the Logansport plant have already tested positive for COVID-19, which has created severe stress and anxiety among his fellow workers.

“God help the people on the line,” he said. “Everyone is scared and worried, no one knows who has it and who doesn’t because the company won’t say.”


Tyson temporarily shut down the Logansport plant over the weekend, and both the company and United Food and Commercial Workers Local 700 have said that the plant needs to remain shut down until it is safe to return.

“The reality is that these workers are putting their lives on the line every day to keep our country fed during this deadly outbreak,” UFCW International President Marc Perrone this week. “To protect America’s food supply, America’s meatpacking workers must be protected.”

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Jared Kushner cheers his own coronavirus work on Trump’s favorite morning show
UPDATED KUSHNER COVID-19 TASK FORCE BEGUN APRIL 2020 ENDING APRIL 2020
 April 30, 2020 By Igor Derysh, Salon


Jared Kushner cheered his own work as part of the White House response to the coronavirus pandemic as “a great success story” during an appearance on President Donald Trump’s favorite morning show as confirmed cases passed 1 million in the U.S.

“We’re on the other side of the medical aspect of this,” Kushner, who has no previous medical experience, told the co-hosts of “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday.

“We’ve achieved all the different milestones that are needed. The federal government rose to the challenge,” he added. “And this is a great success story, and I think that’s really what needs to be told.”

The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) announced hours later that it had sent a letter to the independent Office of Government Ethics calling for an investigation into a shadow coronavirus task force run by Kushner after members appeared “to have violated federal conflicts of interest and transparency laws.”

Despite the bleak new milestone for the country which has recorded the largest number of cases worldwide, Kushner painted a rosy picture as he predicted a “rocking” economy.

“I think you’ll see by June a lot of the country should be back to normal and the hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again,” Kushner continued, knocking “the eternal-lockdown crowd” for “making jokes on late-night television.”

Kushner’s predictions directly conflict with those of the nation’s top infectious disease expert, who recently cautioned that a return to normalcy would not be the same as turning on a “light switch.”

“In many respects, it would be, you know, anywhere from presumptuous to impossible for me to say, ‘This is what’s going to happen in June,'” Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told ABC News’ David Muir earlier this month. “We don’t know. It’s really going to depend on what happens with the virus, as we pull back on mitigation.”

Though infection rates have begun to decline in hotspots such as New York and New Orleans, they are on the rise in rural states. Public health experts, including those on the official White House task force, have repeatedly cautioned against attempting a return to normal before tests, contact tracing and a vaccine are readily available.

Eager to draw on Kushner’s private-sector experience, which includes operating both a beleaguered newspaper and a beleaguered family real estate empire, the administration solicited his help in early March at the behest of Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short.

Critics on of all political stripes have blasted the administration’s bungled response for months, pointing to a failed testing rollout, a dangerous dearth of medical equipment and the president’s own statements, which included floating a bizarre and dangerous idea to “inject” disinfectant into coronavirus patients.

In terms that recall the “irregular” Ukrainian diplomatic channel that took its cues from Rudy Giuliani, officials refer to Kushner’s group as a “shadow” team that operates parallel to official administration health agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control

Kushner reportedly recruited government allies and private industry representatives onto the squad, focusing first on establishing drive-through testing and distributing healthcare supplies. The efforts did not meet with initial success and reportedly sowed confusion.

“We don’t know who these people are,” an official told The Post. “Who is this? We’re all getting these emails.”

Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, called his role “essential” but others have been less charitable. For example, the comedian John Oliver called the president’s son-in-law a “f*cking moron.” (Oliver is likely an intended target of Kushner’s remarks dismissing “the eternal-lockdown crowd” that would “make jokes on late-night television” about him.)

The U.S. recently passed South Korea in tests per capita, but the country needs to build on those numbers significantly before it can begin rebooting the economy in earnest, according to both experts and the White House’s own guidance.

“I’m very confident we have all the testing we need to start reopening the country,” Kushner told “Fox & Friends,” claiming that states now have “excess capacity” for testing.

“What you must be able to do is to have in place the capability of rapidly identifying by testing, getting someone who’s infected out of the circulation, obviously taken care of if they need medical help if they could be handled at home, do contact tracing, do it in an efficient way where it means something,” Fauci told ABC News. “Not contact tracing many, many, many days after an individual actually is exposed.”

A recent report by Harvard University bio-ethicists indicates that the U.S. needs to be testing 20 million people a day for a safe and large-scale reopening by the summer

“Somebody asked me why [testing] took so long,” Kushner said. “I actually said, ‘You should look at how did we do this so quickly.'”

Jared Kushner’s ‘princely arrogance’ set back the coronavirus response by weeks: report
April 29, 2020 By Igor Derysh, Salon

President Donald Trump’s obsession with settling scores in the wake of his impeachment and the “princely arrogance” of his son-in-law Jared Kushner delayed the response from the White House in the critical early days of the coronavirus outbreak, numerous Republicans and administration officials told Vanity Fair’s Gabe Sherman.

As the number of coronavirus cases in New York reached 4,000, Trump continued to fume about impeachment while dismissing concerns about the outbreak, a Republican in frequent contact with the administration told Sherman.

“Trump was obsessed with Pelosi, Schiff, the media — just obsessed,” the source said of the president. “He would say, ‘They’re using it against me!’ It was unhinged.”

When Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar tried to warn Trump about the virus, the president repeatedly interrupted him to lament his decision to ban certain vaping products, according to the report. Kushner also dismissed concerns from Azar and other officials.

“Jared kept saying the stock market would go down, and Trump wouldn’t get re-elected,” a Republican familiar with the situation told Sherman. A source close to Kushner denied the claim.

And as the outbreak grew, so did Kushner’s influence.

“Jared is running everything,” one former White House official told Sherman. “He’s the de facto president of the United States.”

While former chief of staff John Kelly “marginalized” Kushner, former acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who has since been replaced with former Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., had no such power.

“Jared treats Mick like the help,” one prominent Republican told Vanity Fair.

The sources described Kushner’s “princely arrogance” as a “fixture in the West Wing,” Sherman wrote. Kushner had a “famously unshakable belief in his own judgment” but “hardened to a degree that was sometimes shocking.”

“I told Jared that if Trump won a second term, he wouldn’t have to worry about running again. And you can really help people. Jared just looked at me and said, ‘I don’t care about any of that,'” a New York business executive who met with Kushner at the White House last fall told Sherman. “I wanted to tell Jared, ‘You don’t say that part out loud — even in private.'”

A source close to Kushner said that he had “no recollection” of that remark.

Weeks passed before advisers convinced Trump to do anything about the virus. The president partially banned certain travel from China on Jan. 31.

After he was acquitted in his Senate impeachment trial, Trump turned days later to settling scores with career officials who testified against him while downplaying the threat posed by the outbreak.

“We only have 11 cases, and they are all getting better,” Trump declared on Feb. 11.

Frustrated with Azar, Trump placed Vice President Mike Pence at the helm of the White House coronavirus task force weeks later.

“Pence lives in mortal fear of being booted off the ticket,” a Republican who heard the comments told Sherman. “Trump constantly reminds Mike that he almost didn’t choose him.”

As the outbreak continued to grow, Trump blamed the media for amplifying the threat and claimed to aides that journalists would try to intentionally infect him with the virus.

“This is full-blown, pathological, paranoid-level delusion,” a former West Wing official told Sherman.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson drove to Mar-a-Lago to warn the president to take the threat seriously during this time. Kushner pushed back, urging Trump not to declare a national emergency because it “would tank the markets,” a source familiar with the situation told Sherman. A person close to Kushner denied the claim.

Kushner officially joined the coronavirus response team on March 12 and put together a “shadow network” of tech entrepreneurs. As the response effort came under criticism, Kushner sought to scapegoat Azar for the delays in testing.

“This was a total mess,” Kushner told people, according to the report. “To be honest, when I got involved, I was a little intimidated. But I know how to make this government run now.”


“The arrogance was on full display,” a source told Sherman.

Kushner pushed for a “public-private approach” like the kind he “used for his Mideast peace plan.” He sought advice from billionaires like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg but “wrought chaos” in the White House, because business leaders did not know who to contact about helping with supplies. During this time, Kushner pushed experimental treatments to Trump that he learned from Silicon Valley executives, a Republican familiar with the situation told Sherman. A person close to Kushner denied this.

“Jared is bringing conspiracy theories to Trump about potential treatments,” the Republican said.

A former West Wing official added that “Trump is like an 11-year-old boy waiting for the fairy godmother to bring him a magic pill.”

Kushner also dismissed pleas from governors about severe shortages of ventilators as the caseload grew.

“I have all this data about ICU capacity. I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators,” Kushner said during a White House meeting, according to a participant.

Trump later grew “enraged” after Kushner oversold a plan for Google to roll out a testing website.

“Jared told Trump that Google was doing an entire website that would be up in 72 hours and had 1,100 people working on it 24/7. That’s just a lie,” a person briefed on the discussions told Sherman.

A White House official denied the claim.

“This is just another false story focused on rumors about palace intrigue instead of the actual aggressive measures President Trump has implemented to keep the American people safe and healthy,” the official told Sherman.

Kushner’s role in the coronavirus response has drawn scrutiny. The House Oversight and Homeland Security committees called on the administration to provide documents related to his work.

On Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., sent letters seeking explanation about the equipment supply chain Kushner has helped oversee.

“Given the ‘unprecedented’ nature of this partnership, and the numerous reported problems with states and hospital officials being unable to obtain personal protective equipment and other medical supplies, or having shipments of these materials seized by federal officials and spirited to unknown destinations, the American people need an explanation for how these supplies are obtained, priced and distributed,” the letters said.

The government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) also called for an ethics investigation Monday into Kushner’s team. The organization submitted a complaint to the Office of Government Ethics alleging that Kushner’s team appears to have “violated federal conflicts of interest and transparency laws.”
“Jared Kushner’s task force appears to be playing a critical role in our government’s response to a catastrophic pandemic with literally life or death consequences, and yet Americans have no way to know whether task force members are acting in our interest or their own,” CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder. said “We need task force members to be disclosing their interests and avoiding conflicts of interest rather than acting in secret with no oversight.”

Ex-Republican blasts ‘elitist punk’ Jared Kushner for calling Trump’s COVID-19 response a ‘success’

April 29, 2020 By Sarah K. Burris


Former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh unleashed on President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner during a Wednesday appearance on MSNBC.

His advice to the Trump administration was to simply shut up and stay out of the news because it’s making things so much worse.

“Everybody but Donald Trump and Sean Hannity knows that every time Donald Trump opens his mouth he makes everything worse, and he makes the American people less safe,” said Walsh. “Trump shouldn’t speak anymore. And he certainly, Steve, shouldn’t have his son-in-law, Jared Kushner out there calling this a great success story.”

He noted that the U.S. now has over 60,000 Americans who have died and “millions and millions of Americans losing their jobs and their livelihoods.”

“We are on the precipice of a looming great depression, and this elitist punk, Jared Kushner calls that a success story?” Walsh asked rhetorically. “We would all be better off if Jared didn’t speak and if Donald Trump didn’t speak between now and November.”

 
 NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH JOE WALSH FROM THE EAGLES

Jared Kushner is MIA from White House coronavirus response after stepping into lead role: officials

April 27, 2020 By Igor Derysh, Salon

President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner “has been notably removed from coronavirus-related operations” in recent weeks after taking a leading role on supply chain issues, multiple White House officials told The Daily Beast.

Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, are working on an effort with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow on plans to reopen the economy, which will require a large increase in testing and a reliable supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) for hospitals. But Kushner has been absent from the efforts to scale up testing and PPE supplies despite leading a “shadow” coronavirus task force to beef up the supply chain.

One White House official told The Daily Beast that it was “unclear” what Kushner and his team had been doing over the past two weeks. Another source told the outlet that Kushner’s team had not provided any updates in “about a week.”

One administration official defended Kushner by arguing that “there is less requirement of Jared on a day-to-day basis,” because the supply chain has allegedly improved. State officials have rejected that claim, noting that many hospitals are still short on supplies and testing is nowhere near the scale it needs to reach in order to start easing social distancing restrictions.

The complaints have drawn Trump’s ire, but none of it has been directed toward Kushner. The Daily Beast reported that the president has privately been “defensive” about his son-in-law’s role and complained to aides that Kushner has not gotten the praise from the media which he deserves.

“[Jared] could be in his office just googling ‘coronavirus,’ show the results to the president and still get a gold sticker from his dad-in-law,” one senior administration official who works with the coronavirus task force told the outlet. “He is solving the coronavirus like he’s bringing peace to the [Middle East].”

Congress has been less impressed. The House Oversight and Reform Committee and the Homeland Security Committee have called on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to turn over communications related to Kushner. However, the agency has reportedly not responded.

The chairs of the two committees said they were “troubled” that Kushner might be “circumventing protocols that ensure all states’ requests are handled appropriately” and “directing FEMA and HHS officials to prioritize specific requests from people who are able to get Kushner on the phone.”

Kushner’s attempts to improve the system have actually disrupted the supply chain, former Homeland Security officials said.

“He muddied up a process that was really not needing a fix,” Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, told The Daily Beast. “What that does is disempower FEMA, because if at any moment Jared or one of his henchmen demand assets to be redistributed at their discretion, FEMA’s planning gets disrupted. I’ve never seen operations on something this scale being run out of the White House. Usually, it’s policy and communications that they handle . . . but you would never run logistical operations out of the White House.”

Kushner and his team, which includes tech start-up entrepreneurs whom White House officials have derided as a “frat party” that “descended from a UFO and invaded the federal government,” ostensibly set out to improve the logistics around ventilators, testing and PPE. Kushner cast a wide net, apparently even recruiting Dr. Kurt Kloss, the father of Kushner’s sister-in-law and supermodel Karlie Kloss, who polled his Facebook friends for advice to fix the response effort.

“I’ve put members of my team into a lot of components,” he told The New York Times. “What we’ve been able to do is get people very quick answers.”

Kushner has worked the phones to provide equipment to states in dire need, drawing praise from New York’s Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, both Democrats. But he was also instrumental in creating “Project Airbridge,” a federal effort to fly supplies in from China for private companies to sell to states in the U.S. The program has been criticized for subsidizing big pharmaceutical companies with taxpayer dollars and allowing the companies to in turn sell the equipment to states without regulating the costs.

Hospital officials and governors have also complained that FEMA has confiscated ventilators and PPE from states, which the agency denies. State officials told The Daily Beast that Kushner’s team “has interfered with the supply chain so much so that they are unable to hold on to the supplies they bought.”

“We are still hearing reports that the administration is causing chaos for states looking to acquire [personal protective equipment] and other medical equipment. Worse yet, they are providing Congress with little details on their current operations and how they will improve,” House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., told the outlet. “It is incredibly troubling that Jared Kushner, someone with no public health or emergency management experience, seems to have a leading role in leading the response to this pandemic.”

Thompson and Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., demanded answers from FEMA Administrator Peter Gaynor about Kushner’s work behind the scenes.

“It appears that Mr. Kushner is unclear about basic facts regarding the purpose of the Strategic National Stockpile,” the chairs said in a letter. “We request that FEMA provide . . . all communications between any FEMA employee and Jared Kushner regarding the acquisition, distribution of, or federally directed sale of any form of PPE or of medical supplies and equipment to be used for the diagnosis or treatment of COVID-19.”

KAKISTOCRACY

Kushner’s unusual coronavirus role seen as a dangerous symptom of the dysfunction of the Trump administration

April 22, 2020 By Pro Publica

On April 2, Jared Kushner uncharacteristically took to the podium to speak at the White House’s daily coronavirus briefing. He’d been given the task, he said, of assisting Vice President Mike Pence’s Coronavirus Task Force with supply chain issues. “The president,” Kushner said, “wanted us to make sure we think outside the box, make sure we’re finding all the best thinkers in the country, making sure we’re getting all the best ideas, and that we’re doing everything possible to make sure that we can keep Americans safe.”

That very day, he said, President Donald Trump told him that “he was hearing from friends of his in New York that the New York public hospital system was running low on critical supply.” So Kushner called Dr. Mitchell Katz, who runs the 12-hospital system, which serves, in a normal year, over a million patients. Kushner said he’d asked Katz which supply he was most nervous about: “He told me it was the N95 masks. I asked what his daily burn was. And I basically got that number.”

Trump has made many false and misleading claims from that and other lecterns: 18,000 such statements during his presidency, according to the most recent tally by The Washington Post, 350 of them on the coronavirus alone.

But Kushner fulfilled his promise. The confirmation came from a perhaps unlikely source, a former candidate to be the Democratic nominee against Trump, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. The day after Kushner’s briefing, de Blasio said Kushner and Trump had called him about the supplies. “And lo and behold, Dr. Mitch Katz sent me a photo a couple hours ago that they had been delivered to Health and Hospitals, so that’s going to really help us get through a lot of the month of April. I’m very thankful for that.” In a follow-up email, Freddi Goldstein, the mayor’s press secretary, confirmed the receipt of 1 million N95 masks and over 500,000 Tyvek gowns. She said of Kushner, “He’s been very responsive and helpful thus far.”

Praise for Kushner has been resounding from Democratic officials in New York and New Jersey. De Blasio has thanked him repeatedly, as have New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and Sen. Cory Booker. Even New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in his alternating dance of praise and opprobrium for the White House, has singled out Kushner for accolades (and no barbs). As a senior official in the Murphy administration put it: “I have found Jared to be incredibly responsive. We talk a few times a day on the phone.” The official said text exchanges are even more frequent.

In a chaotic environment, the New Jersey boy turned Manhattan businessman turned senior White House adviser is using his clout to help the cities and states at the epicenter of a global pandemic get the aid they need.

Yet there’s another side to the equation. Kushner’s role is also a symptom of the dysfunction of the Trump administration, according to critics, some of whom worked in emergency management under Republican and Democratic administrations. The ad hoc nature of Kushner’s mission and its lack of transparency make it hard for people — and government agencies — to know exactly what he’s doing. So far, those officials say, there’s little sign Kushner or anyone at the White House is helping New York or New Jersey with their urgent longer-term needs, particularly more testing and billions from Congress to ease the gaping holes that have emerged in local budgets.

“If you can reach Jared, if you can applaud Jared, if you can convince him that you’re the most needy, he will deliver for you,” said Juliette Kayyem, faculty chair of the homeland security project at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a former assistant secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration. But his role bypasses long-held tenets of how the federal government should work in a national emergency, she said, without addressing systemic problems, much less reinventing the bureaucracy. “What’s outside the box? What process is outside the box? It can’t possibly be Kushner’s [giving out his] cellphone number,” Kayyem said. “But that’s what it appears to be.”

She added: “The system is designed not to work that way because in any disaster, and in particular, one that’s in 50 states, there’s demand everywhere. And there’s demand today and there will be demand tomorrow. You need a centralized repository more than a single guy on a phone to determine what your needs are and where you’re going to deliver, and you can’t do that by transactional relationships.”

To state the obvious: Kushner can’t possibly return calls and fulfill requests from 50 governors, hundreds of mayors and thousands of emergency officials around the country.

It’s not just a problem of scalability, Kayyem said. “It’s dangerous to disrupt it,” she said of the supply chain. “Confusion is the last thing you want, when you’re talking about a supply chain.” In both New York and New Jersey, officials said, FEMA was unaware that supplies promised by Kushner’s group had been shipped, days after the shipments had been made.

Neither the White House nor FEMA responded to requests for comment.
It’s easy to malign government operations in the midst of a national calamity, but, experts say, there’s a reason that the systems are organized the way they have been: They can work if they’re managed well. Peter Ragone worked as communications director for de Blasio when the Ebola virus seemed to threaten New York. “What struck me then is that the federal government was an incredible partner,” said Ragone, who has since become a Democratic political strategist. “We were on the phone with the Centers for Disease Control, the White House, HHS, all the time nonstop. In fact, the CDC even came to our press conferences.”

Now, in the middle of a national emergency, the federal system meant to fight disasters has a free agent — one with no evident experience in any aspect of it — playing a potent but undefined role.

Putting a powerful person outside the existing White House structure “poses a challenge,” said Mark Harvey, who was the senior director for resilience on the Trump administration’s national security staff until January and is now a resident fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics. “One of the great successful practices that we had in the White House across administrations,” said Harvey, who cautions that the current disaster is unprecedented in scope and duration, “was that whenever there was a domestic crisis, we had one single point of coordination within the White House that would then work with all of the interagency partners across the federal government. And it didn’t matter where information came into the white house. It all came to that central point.”

In January, ProPublica and WNYC described Kushner as the second most powerful man in the administration, and his portfolio has only grown since then. He’s never been as central to the nation’s future as he is at this moment. As we reported then, people who worked with Kushner said he views himself as a disrupter. His grandparents survived Nazi-occupied Poland, escaped and immigrated to America against all odds. His father, unlike other New Jersey Jewish developers at the time, aggressively raised his profile and his family fortune. And Jared Kushner found success by taking what others saw as impossible, foolhardy risks: In his mid-20s, he became the publisher of a weekly newspaper, The New York Observer in an era when newspapers were cratering, and pushed his editors in chief — five of them in as many years — to focus less on substantive articles and more on helping his friends and punishing his enemies.

Then he purchased a Manhattan skyscraper (666 Fifth Avenue) on the eve of the Great Recession. The building nearly failed under the Kushners’ ownership before they managed, barely, to refinance it. The lesson he took from this, according to someone familiar with the deal, “was not ‘holy shit, I almost lost everything,’ it was ‘I should take on as much risk as I can.’”

Over a dozen people who have worked with Kushner in New York and New Jersey say he has long relied on phone relationships. “So much of Jared’s business was relationships,” one associate said. “In order to be able to get deals done you have to be able to call somebody.” Another added: “He has a huge rolodex. … He would be like: ‘I will just make a call. I will call so-and-so.’ He was young and rich and powerful, and he got along with people. That was a big part of his M.O.: to make a call, to make something happen.”

At the White House briefing, Kushner shifted the responsibility for gathering supplies squarely to the states. “The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be state stockpiles that they then use.”

“That’s exactly what it’s meant for,” Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly retorted the next day on the public radio show “Here and Now.” “And always has been and has to continue to be. The federal government actually has a responsibility to gather that stuff together and distribute it.”

The day after Kushner’s press briefing, the Strategic National Stockpile, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, quietly changed its website. It had stated: “The Strategic National Stockpile is the nation’s largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out.” After Kushner described it differently, the language was adjusted to match what he’d said: “The Strategic National Stockpile’s role is to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies.” Rather than fix the system, the federal government rewrote the description to lower the bar for itself.

Kelly, a Democrat, said she did not have a line to Kushner or into the White House. So to get her state’s needs met, she went through Kansas’ Republican congressional delegation. After multiple rounds of requests through the state’s senators over a period of weeks, federal supplies arrived days ago.

Still, a lack of federal assistance remains a common complaint among governors and there’s little indication that Kushner has made a difference. In a radio interview in late March, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said she was told the White House is preventing her state from getting aid. Whitmer, who is seen as a potential Democratic vice presidential nominee, said vendors are “being told not to send stuff to Michigan. It’s really concerning.” Trump said at one press conference, within a day of Whitmer’s interview, that he told Pence, “Don’t call the woman in Michigan.” As of April 19, Whitmer was still expressing concern that the federal government wasn’t helping her state obtain needed testing supplies. Meanwhile, Trump was openly supporting protests against Whitmer.

During the same TV interview in which Whitmer spoke, a Republican governor, Mike DeWine of Ohio, echoed Whitmer’s pleas for federal supplies, all but begging the Food and Drug Administration to provide key testing supplies. “If anybody in the FDA is watching,” DeWine said, “this could really take our capacity up.” Neither governor mentioned Kushner (and neither responded to requests for comment).

The head of the National Governors Association, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, said he has had one conversation with Kushner, which helped his state get 138 ventilators, according to reporting by Luke Broadwater of The Baltimore Sun. Hogan, a Republican, has sparred with Trump, and this week Maryland obtained coronavirus tests from South Korea without federal assistance. “If there was an easier way,” Hogan said, “we certainly would’ve taken it.” (Hogan did not reply to a request for comment.)

Officially, Kushner is not addressing the supply chain issues all by himself. He has a task force. But details have been scant. On April 16, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal and Tom Carper wrote to the White House expressing concerns about Kushner’s task force. “Mr. Kushner’s task force,” they wrote, “reportedly includes ‘a suite of McKinsey consultants,’ a private equity executive, and a host of other representatives from private industries. Though they have purportedly signed ‘voluntary service agreements’ and have avoided participating in procurement processes, questions remain as to who exactly comprises this task force, the vetting process for its members, and what role the members play in addressing issues related to the pandemic.

“Moreover, reports indicate that Mr. Kushner’s task force has been ‘attract[ing] companies seeking to entrench themselves in hopes of winning lucrative government contracts down the line,’” the senators continued. “underscoring the need for robust ethics oversight. Mr. Kushner and his task force appear to have substantial, and often disruptive, influence over White House policy initiatives related to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Kushner has had many roles in the Trump administration. Before working on the virus, he took on the job of chief White House liaison to Trump/Pence 2020. The campaign has been active, raising money, noting, as campaign aide Lara Trump (the wife of the president’s son Eric) recently did, that the coronavirus daily briefings have supplanted rallies as a way to energize Trump supporters.

When asked if Kushner is still overseeing the campaign while also working on obtaining masks and gowns for struggling localities, a friend of the Kushner family texted back: “100%.”

States smuggle COVID-19 medical supplies to avoid federal seizures as House probes Jared Kushner
April 21, 2020 By Igor Derysh, Salon

States have been forced to resort to smuggling shipments of personal protective equipment (PPE) after federal officials seized supplies ordered by hospitals without informing officials.

Governors have long complained that the Trump administration has left them to bid against each other on the open market for critical supplies for health workers. However, numerous officials recently claimed that the federal government had seized supplies ordered by the states. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, told CNN that the state bought 500 ventilators before they were “swept up” by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, said the Trump administration “confiscated” its order of 3 million masks

Now, states and hospital officials are concealing shipments of supplies from the federal government in order to avoid detection. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, recently secretly bought millions of masks and gloves from China. He kept the details under wraps, “because we’ve heard reports of Trump trying to take PPE in China and when it gets to the United States,” a source familiar with the situation told the Chicago Sun-Times.

“The governor has clearly outlined the challenges this administration has faced as we’ve worked around the clock to purchase PPE for our health-care workers and first responders,” a spokesperson for Pritzker told the outlet. “The supply chain has been likened to the Wild West, and once you have purchased supplies, ensuring they get to the state is another Herculean feat.”

Dr. Andrew Artenstein, the chief physician executive at Baystate Health in Massachusetts, revealed in a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine that he was questioned by the FBI after the hospital staff worked “around the clock” to secure a shipment of PPE.

“Deals, some bizarre and convoluted, and many involving large sums of money, have dissolved at the last minute when we were outbid or outmuscled, sometimes by the federal government. Then we got lucky, but getting the supplies wasn’t easy,” he wrote, detailing the measures his supply chain team took to get the equipment.

“Two semi-trailer trucks, cleverly marked as food-service vehicles, met us at the warehouse. When fully loaded, the trucks would take two distinct routes back to Massachusetts to minimize the chances that their contents would be detained or redirected,” he recalled. “Before we could send the funds by wire transfer, two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived, showed their badges, and started questioning me. No, this shipment was not headed for resale or the black market. The agents checked my credentials, and I tried to convince them that the shipment of PPE was bound for hospitals. After receiving my assurances and hearing about our health system’s urgent needs, the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks. But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure.”

Conservative pundit David Frum said the letter was “like a story from the last days of the Soviet Union.”

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said he heard about the seizures first-hand from law enforcement and health care workers.

“It has got to stop,” he tweeted. “The administration is supposed to be coordinating this, not making the problem worse for our hospitals and first responders.”

Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and a group of House Democrats called on FEMA to provide any documents related to the seizures.

“Officials and health care providers in California, Florida, Washington, Illinois, Oregon, Alaska and Texas have described similar experiences,” the lawmakers said in a letter to FEMA Administrator Peter Gaynor. “FEMA must explain their actions,” Nadler added.

The seizures had already come under scrutiny from two other House committees after The New York Times reported that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner had “surprised” FEMA officials by redirecting supplies. Kushner himself said during a White House coronavirus briefing that he had supplies delivered to New York after Trump got a call “from his friends” about the conditions in the city’s hospitals.

Though the FEMA operation is overseen by Gaynor and Navy Rear Adm. John Plowczyk, the logistics chief for the Joint Chief of Staff, Kushner has lead a so-called “shadow” task force staffed with former start-up entrepreneurs, according to The Times. The group has clashed with senior officials, one of whom described the team as a “frat party” that “descended from a UFO and invaded the federal government.”

House Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., called on Gaynor to explain “the role of Jared Kushner in managing FEMA’s operational efforts to obtain and distribute” supplies.

“It appears that Mr. Kushner is unclear about basic facts regarding the purpose of the Strategic National Stockpile,” the lawmakers said, citing Kushner’s claim that “our stockpile” is “not supposed to be the state stockpiles that they then use.”

The lawmakers were “troubled” that Kushner may be “circumventing protocols that ensure all states’ requests are handled appropriately,” they wrote. “We are particularly troubled that Mr. Kushner’s work may even involve ‘directing FEMA and HHS officials to prioritize specific requests from people who are able to get Kushner on the phone.'”

Trump enables Jared Kushner's coronavirus task force, revealing the dangers of nepotism

The Trump family has repeatedly used the White House to enrich themselves, but this is about way more than profits.

Jared Kushner attends the daily coronavirus response briefing at the White House on Thursday, April 2, 2020.Tom Brenner / Reuters
April 6, 2020 By Jordan Libowitz, communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

According to President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence is in charge of America's response to the coronavirus crisis. This choice was, in itself, controversial since Pence has no real experience in this area and his one attempt at dealing with a public health problem as governor of Indiana turned out very poorly. But what many Americans don't know is that an equally unqualified if apparently even more loyal Trump adherent is secretly running his own coronavirus task force, leaving a series of ethics issues in wake.

An equally unqualified if apparently even more loyal Trump adherent is secretly running his own coronavirus task force.

Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner is running a shadow coronavirus response task force. He's doing it off the books, with closed-door meetings and private email accounts. Recently, The Atlantic reported that a company co-founded by Kushner's brother — which used to be partly owned by Jared — developed a government website to direct Americans to coronavirus testing sites at the government's request. The website was created and then, for reasons that remain unclear, never went public.

This isn't normal Trump family grift; it is taking place with lives at stake. As the (original) headline of New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg's column read last week: "Jared Kushner is going to get us all killed."

Change in Headline pic.twitter.com/vt91qwuM4E— Editing TheGrayLady (@nyt_diff) April 3, 2020

Since the website never officially launched, we didn't find out about it until after the fact. And there's still much we don't know, mainly whether Kushner was involved in trying to direct government business to his family (Oscar Health says it wasn't paid for the project). While personal and family benefit is the modus operandi of the Trump administration, this goes beyond Trump's trying to host the G-7 summit at his struggling Doral golf resort. And what's worse, Kushner is going out of his way not to create government records of his actions, in an apparent violation of multiple laws.

VIDEO Jared Kusher 'doesn't know what the hell he's talking about,' commander of Katrina task force says APRIL 3, 2020 04:40

Because this task force isn't operating publicly, we don't actually know what Trump's son-in-law is doing. Think about that. The nation is in crisis, much of it in lockdown, and the man with the president's ear is essentially operating without accountability. This doesn't prove that anything nefarious is going on. But if you were going to try to steer emergency government funds into your family's bank account without people finding out, this is how you'd do it.

What we do know about Kushner's efforts don't exactly inspire confidence. The father-in-law of Jared's brother posted in a Facebook group for doctors, "I have direct channel to person now in charge at White House and have been asked for recommendations." This is the government equivalent of the kid who doesn't read the book and writes his book report based on the back cover during the class it's due. But it also suggests how closely Jared's brother is tied to the government's response. Jared Kushner isn't concerned with creating a firewall between his work and his family — just the opposite.

This isn't even the first time we've seen potential issues with Kushner's position and a company co-founded by his brother. For one, he's had a lot of problems with his financial disclosures. One of the more troubling was failing to disclose his co-ownership of Cadre, a real estate investment startup that likely benefited from the opportunity zones program his wife, Ivanka Trump, championed. After refusing to divest from Cadre for years despite controversy, Kushner got permission in March to sell his stake and take advantage of a tax benefit meant to help people divest from assets in which they have a conflict of interest. Why did it take him so long? Perhaps not coincidentally, the value of his shares rose while he refused to divest.

This also isn't the only way the Kushner family could benefit from the pandemic. While the coronavirus stimulus package blocks money from going to support the president and members of his family, including Kushner, the Kushner family business could benefit from a provision that lets apartment building owners pause federal payments on federal mortgages on low-income housing. And real estate investors (like the Kushners) with major on-paper losses can now stretch them out over years for a big tax break.

The GOP is right to investigate powerful children. They can start with Ivanka.

We tend to have a short attention span when it comes to Trump family scandals, but Kushner's past few years prove he is unqualified to be running anything in this administration. Remember that Kushner got his security clearance thanks only to his father-in-law, over the objections of career security officials. Rather than use traditional diplomatic channels, Kushner has reportedly communicated with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman over WhatsApp and even kept American staffers out of his meetings with prince. Kushner also has a history of conducting business over private email accounts.

The Trump administration's solution to everything seems to just be "put Jared in charge of it." Kushner is currently tasked in some capacity with solving the coronavirus pandemic, ending the opioid crisis, bringing about peace in the Middle East, reforming the government and running the Trump campaign, all out of his White House office.

The Trump administration’s solution to everything seems to just be “put Jared in charge of it.”

Which brings us to one last problem. The thing about Kushner running the campaign from the White House is that there's a law against that, the Hatch Act. While the act has an exemption that does allow some political activity by senior political appointees paid by the White House, the exemption doesn't apply to him, as he doesn't take a salary. Following the law should be the absolute minimum for serving in a high position in government. Meanwhile, Trump's shift in seriousness regarding the coronavirus, according to a former White House official, has been influenced by his campaign advisers' fears that his lackluster response will soon hurt him with his base. If Kushner is running both the campaign and the coronavirus response, how much is the former influencing the latter?

Kushner shouldn't be in the White House. The Trump administration had to overturn nepotism guidelines just to get him in there. Since he's been there, he's confirmed every fear about nepotistic appointments — he's not qualified to do the job he has, but he keeps getting more and more roles and power, culminating in his new role at the center of the pandemic response, where he is reportedly making life-or-death decisions based on what he hears from "friends." Meanwhile, he's been making millions on the side, potentially with the help of his office.

The Trump family has repeatedly used the White House to enrich themselves, but this is about more than profits. As the number of coronavirus deaths continues to rise, Jared Kushner's unqualified, unethical time in the White House has been marked by inaction and personal benefit. And now, it may get people killed.

Jordan Libowitz is the communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonpartisan, nonprofit government watchdog dedicated to fighting the influence of money in politics.

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/04/trump-reportedly-threatened-to-fire-top.html

Trump officials are pushing spy agencies to pursue ‘unsubstantiated’ conspiracy theory

April 30, 2020 By Alex Henderson, AlterNet
As critical as President Donald Trump has become of the Chinese government’s initial response to coronavirus, he has something in common with Chinese officials: Trump, at first, failed to take the COVID-19 threat seriously. Exactly how COVID-19 started has been debated by health experts; a conspiracy theory on the far right claims that the deadly virus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China. And according to a New York Times article published on April 30, “senior Trump Administration officials” have “pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support” that “unsubstantiated theory.”

Times reporters Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, Edward Wong and Adam Goldman explain, “The effort comes as President Trump escalates a public campaign to blame China for the pandemic. Some intelligence analysts are concerned that the pressure from (Trump) Administration officials will distort assessments about the virus and that they could be used as a political weapon in an intensifying battle with China over a disease that has infected more than three million people across the globe.”

The Times journalists, note, however, that “most intelligence agencies remain skeptical that conclusive evidence of a link to a lab can be found, and scientists who have studied the genetics of the coronavirus say that the overwhelming probability is that it leapt from animal to human in a non-laboratory setting.”

According to the four Times reporters, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (a former CIA director) has “taken the lead” in pursuing the conspiracy theory — which many scientists have been critical of. In a report published in Nature Medicine in March, five scientists asserted, “We do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

Mazzetti, Barnes, Wong and Goldman report that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “has yet to unearth any data beyond circumstantial evidence to bolster the lab theory, according to current and former government officials — and the agency has told policymakers it lacks enough information to either affirm or refute it. Only getting access to the lab itself and the virus samples it contains could provide definitive proof if it exists, the officials said.”

Trump orders Intel to find link between COVID-19 and Wuhan lab: New York Times

THE WAR PRESIDENT USES WAR JINGOISM DURING PANDEMIC


April 30, 2020 By Brad Reed 


Trump administration officials have ordered intelligence agencies to search for a link between the novel coronavirus and a government-run laboratory in China, according to the New York Times.

So far, there has been no direct evidence that the virus came from the Wuhan lab, and the official explanation for the origins of the disease remains that someone contracted it from eating contaminated meat they bought at a Wuhan market.

However, the Times reports that some intel analysts are worried that Trump will try to manipulate information to blame China to distract from his own administration’s failings on containing the disease.

“Most intelligence agencies remain skeptical that conclusive evidence of a link to a lab can be found, and scientists who have studied the genetics of the coronavirus say that the overwhelming probability is that it leapt from animal to human in a nonlaboratory setting, as was the case with H.I.V., Ebola and SARS,” the paper notes.

Trump has alternately blamed and praised China for its handling of the disease, as he has tried to walk a careful line between scapegoating the country while maintaining his relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping.