“On some great and glorious day…the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron.”
 --H. L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920
 
And here we are. It took almost a century for Mencken’s prediction in all its horror to come to pass. It is not totally shocking that a political party that has spent almost the last half-century attacking government and disdaining truth, science and expertise and that tried to position a Sarah Palin one heartbeat away from the presidency would nominate a con man with no sense of decency. What is astonishing is that so many millions of Americans fall for his lies and cruelty.
 
People who scorn the sober advice of healthcare professionals in favor of someone who advocates ingesting bleach, taking risky medications, and eschewing masks and social distancing are playing a very dangerous game, one that could kill a number of them, their loved ones and others. Turning wise counsel into a culture war and political statement is reprehensible. Defiance of good judgment in the pursuit of so-called freedom is just plain foolish.
 
What is even more head-scratching is that these fervent Trump cultists don’t understand that their idol doesn’t care a whit about what happens to them. This is all about him and his re-election. If thousands of his supporters die as a consequence, it won’t affect him in the least. By giving him a pass, they are risking their own lives while endorsing the train wreck he is making of America and the planet.
 
When not pulling all-nighters tweeting insanities, inanities and incendiaries, Donald Trump is busy dismantling our leadership role in the world, decimating democratic values and the rule of law, making Americans’ lives miserable and costing us tens of thousands of our fellow citizens. All in the pursuit of petulance and re-election, not necessarily in that order.
 
But this big, top-of-the-fold stuff is not all that Trump is doing to destroy lives and livelihoods. For example, he was about to do even more damage, sub rosa because it contradicted his usual fake, chickenhawk concern for “our great military” that he fought so vigorously to avoid joining back in the day. It was only due to tremendous push-back from both blue and red state governors that he backed off. His latest war on decency took the form of trying to end the deployment of our National Guard currently on the frontlines of the COVID-19 crisis--one day before they become eligible for federal retirement and education benefits. After 90 days of active duty, Guardsmen fighting the pandemic would have their service count toward the benefits they deserve. But Trump wanted to end their deployment at 89 days. This is yet another example of the heartless cruelty at the center of his warped, soulless governing philosophy.
 
A president’s NUMBER ONE job is to keep Americans safe. Screwing the National Guard is just a small indicator of his disinterest in and inability to do that. Trump’s mammoth failure goes light years beyond that of any prior president. His botching of the job is historic and catastrophic and is a firable offense. November cannot come fast enough.
 
Dick Hermann
May 29, 2020

​Guess what! Suddenly, congressional Republicans are concerned about deficits and debt. This was one of the bedrock principles of what used to be the Republican Party before it mutated into the Trump Cult. Naively, I thought that after appropriating $3 trillion for Covid-19 relief, even the old codgers who cling to power under the guise of the GOP had finally, after 100 years, seen the Keynesian light, i.e., that the way to combat an economic downturn is to increase government spending.
 
But no, it is not to be. Mitch McConnell and even Donald Trump, whose ignorance of basic economics is exceeded only by his staggering historical illiteracy, are, voilà, suddenly worried about running up the national debt. This is, of course, after these characters pushed through a $2 trillion tax cut for the wealthy and big corporations in the days when coronavirus was still percolating only in bats. And that was on top of an equally large tax cut that Bush 43 gift-wrapped for the usual Republican suspects back in the aughts.
 
It’s instructive to look at what World War II cost America and compare it to today: The war cost $4.1 trillion in 2020 dollars. If you subtract the sale of war bonds, which covered 63 percent of the cost, you are left with $1.517 trillion in war debt (in 2020 dollars) at the end of the conflict, which amounted to 329 percent of GDP (without even considering the federal government’s non-war debt). Compare that to today, when even adding in $3 trillion (so far) of Covid-19 expenditures, total public debt adds up to 128 percent of GDP. We have a very long way to go before we arrive at World War II debt-to-GDP ratios.
 
What Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Congress understood back then was that a nation facing an existential crisis must spend whatever it takes to survive. Trump and McConnell and their clueless colleagues clearly do not understand that and we are the ones who will suffer the consequences.
 
By saving the country, the West and democracy back then, the money invested in the war was money well spent. Moreover, after the war, the wise growth policies pursued by the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations brought that ratio down to pre-war levels by 1962. The 30 years of robust economic growth that followed the war give the lie to Trump’s spurious claims of creating “the greatest economy in history.”
 
We need to spend whatever it takes to assure our physical and economic survival. Anything less is a dereliction of duty and risks a societal devastation from which we might never recover.
 
Dick Hermann
May 22, 2020

​Donald Trump has declared victory over the coronavirus and turned his total attention to the one thing that consumes every millisecond of his existence: doing whatever is necessary to advance the well-being of Donald Trump. In the present circumstance, that means reopening the economy in hopes of generating a “V-shaped recovery,” perhaps his best hope of winning re-election.
 
For Trump, who is utterly incapable of nuance, every decisional calculus is the same: Will it help me or hurt me? That is as abstract as his thinking gets.
 
Consequently, the White House wrecking ball that has wreaked so much havoc and done so much damage for the last three-and-a-half years is now hurtling down on the heads of every American, confronting us with a Hobson’s choice of risking our jobs vs. risking our health. He, Vice President Pence and key White House staffers get tested daily for Covid-19. A positive test is followed immediately by extensive contact tracing, isolation and quarantine. The other 327 million Americans don’t need any of that, proclaims the president. Let them eat ventilators.
 
There are ways to reopen the economy safely without sacrificing the health, safety and lives of the public. A number of states are attempting to do that by introducing the same extensive safety measures that the White House has instituted for its favored few. What is holding them back is that there are not enough testing kits thanks to the Trump administration’s monumental failure to provide them.
 
Trump’s inability to see grays or subtleties has other negative consequences. He refuses to wear a mask because his Fox News propagandists tell him it makes him look weak and gives the impression that his “victory” over the virus might be a Pyrrhic one (you think?). Instead of modeling safe behavior for the citizenry, he demonstrates recklessness. The effect of this is that his locked-in base concludes that masks aren’t necessary, thus risking themselves and everyone with whom they come in contact to possible exposure to Covid-19 and its life-threatening consequences.
 
Instead of leading by example, Trump gives us lies, distortions, insults, raging tweetstorms, self-adulation, and complaints about not being sufficiently praised by governors and the media. Worse, this is compounded by his intellectual laziness, incompetence, moral bankruptcy and failure to step up to the plate and make even a pretense of understanding what is going on and lead us out of this catastrophe. Thus, with only 4 percent of the world’s population, we account for almost one-third of the global total of Covid-19 illnesses and just under one-third of the planet’s deaths. By any measure, we are doing worse than any of the other 33 developed nations in combatting the virus. Welcome to the Third World. He won’t own up to it, but there is only one place and one individual to which the finger of blame points for this disastrous performance.
 
With Trump at the helm, it is certain to get worse.
 
Dick Hermann
May 15, 2020

​Any lingering doubts that Donald Trump, his Senate partner-in-crime Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party are, despite their protestations, no friends of working men and women can finally be laid to rest. Trump and his political enablers have been playing white blue collar workers for years now, a cynical game that is the successor to the “Southern Strategy,” the brainchild of Richard Nixon that was key to his, Ronald Reagan, the Bushes and Trump’s electoral victories. That tactic effectively exploited Southern white fear of and anger about the civil rights movement. Trump took that to another level by pretending to sympathize with the fears, anger and grievances of white blue collar workers left behind by a changing global economy. The fact that he cares not at all for them is evident in his willingness to trade their illnesses and deaths for a re-election strategy.
 
Trump’s executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to compel beef, pork and poultry processing plants to reopen is a direct assault on workers’ health and lives. No industry’s workers have suffered more from Covid-19 infections than these individuals. Nationwide, more than 5,000 have contracted Covid-19 and the death toll keeps mounting. In one Iowa meat packing plant, 58 percent of the tested labor force was positive, forcing the plant to close. Similar plants have closed all over the country because of the rapid spread of the virus in the close working conditions in these plants where social distancing is virtually impossible. What Trump has done is to force this underpaid workforce that processes our food to choose between their jobs and their lives.
 
The rationale for the executive order is “to ensure a continued supply of protein for Americans.“ This ignores that there are plenty of alternative protein sources, including eggs, cheese and other dairy, seeds such as Quinoa, soy and many other plant-based products.
 
The executive order references the joint guidance (i.e., suggestions, not mandates) for meat processors issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The opening paragraph of the guidance document tells you all you need to know about how effective this is likely to be in protecting worker health: “…workers may be permitted to continue work following potential exposure to COVID-19, provided they remain asymptomatic and additional precautions are implemented to protect them and the community.” One such precaution being implemented is providing workers with only one facemask a week. These facemasks are supposed to be for one-time use only and then discarded.
 
Meat processing is a close-order occupation. It is by its nature a highly dangerous environment. That is not going to change.
 
Worse, the executive order directs the U.S. Department of Labor to issue regulations protecting plant owners from liability if workers who return to the job come down with Covid-19. In other words, if you get sick and perhaps die because you returned to work, you or your heirs have no recourse.
 
Senate Majority Leader McConnell wants to take corporate liability protection to the next level and confer it across-the board on all employers. Fortunately, the House of Representatives will not go along with the sycophantic Senate Republicans whose contempt for the very people they and Trump profess to champion appears to know no bounds. However, that does not mean that McConnell won’t use this existential threat to workers as a negotiating ploy during the next round of relief bills to be considered by Congress. House Democrats may be pressured to give in on liability in return for getting some relief for desperate states and municipalities strapped for money to pay essential public sector laborers like cops, fire fighters, teachers, transit employees and sanitation workers. Trump and McConnell’s war on workers includes them, too.
 
When faced with doing good vs. doing harm, so far Trump and McConnell always choose the latter. The war on America’s workers is just the latest example of this tragic truism.
 
Dick Hermann
May 8, 2020

“…among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
       -Declaration of Independence
 
There is a reason why “Life” leads the list of “unalienable rights” specified in the Declaration of Independence. No reopening of the economy can proceed safely without first paying attention to survival.
 
Since the Trump administration has fallen down on its core responsibility to keep Americans safe, it falls to governors, mayors and city managers to step into the federal breach and assume responsibility for getting us through this catastrophe with as little damage to health and the economy as possible. Testing, which has become the poster child for the Trump government’s epic fail, is still woefully inadequate after two-plus months of lackluster attempts and a bodyguard of blatant administration lies beginning with Trump’s March 9 CDC visit when he claimed that “anyone who needs a test can get a test.” That was not true then and it’s not true now. While other countries test vast swaths of their populations, the United States cannot.
 
We hear a great deal of mumbo jumbo every day at Trump’s surreal press conferences about testing, mainly lies about test availability and unwarranted self-praise for the feeble number of tests being conducted. The real story about testing is that it is yet another of the many areas where the Trump administration has repeatedly demonstrated that it cannot manage the Covid-19 crisis. Again, the absence of federal competence means that it is up to state and local leaders instead. But testing is only the first step in the process of re-opening the nation and rebuilding our decimated economy. Contact tracing is the crucial next step.
 
Contract tracing means the ability to identify people who may have been in contact with someone who tests positive so that they can get treatment, be monitored, quarantined and kept from spreading the infection to others. The Trump administration, incredibly, has no plan for contact tracing, yet another epic fail. As with everything else concerning the virus, the buck has been passed to the states.
 
South Korea understood this necessity from its first alert (the same day as the U.S.) that a pandemic was imminent. The country immediately took steps to implement widespread testing and contact tracing, and the results have been impressive. Similarly, Taiwan and Germany have demonstrated competence in combatting the virus. By their quick responses, all three countries put the U.S. to shame.
 
States, municipalities and tribes need to act now to put effective contact tracing programs in place and not rely on the inept Trump government to perform any function essential to this process. That means hiring and training an army of contact tracers and providing them with the resources and protocols they will need to do this incredibly important job effectively. While a competent federal government would task the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) with recruitment and training of contact tracers—these two basic functions are OPM’s bread-and-butter—this won’t happen because Trump and his sycophants live in the moment. Judgment and planning are beyond them. It will be up to lower levels of government to get this right.
 
Successful foreign models (e.g., South Korea, Germany) for recruiting, training and managing contact tracers should be consulted and applied here. The Trump administration’s unreasoning hostility to anything foreign should not deter governors and mayors from directly contacting the knowledgeable authorities in those countries and learning from them how to conduct an effective contact tracing program. At a minimum, it should include:

• The basics of contact tracing
• Interviewing skills
• Key questions to ask
• Likely questions to answer
• Quarantine monitoring and follow-up
• Health information privacy and confidentiality
• Cultural sensitivity
• Communicating with the hearing-impaired
• Reporting requirements
• Continuous coaching and mentoring for quality improvement
• Technology

 
There is no percentage in delaying contact tracing program implementation in hopes that the Trump administration will get its act together. It won’t. States, cities and tribes must act now or suffer the life-and-death consequences.
 
Dick Hermann
May 1, 2020