segunda-feira, 30 de novembro de 2020

Opinion: This is how democracies die

 



Opinion

This is how democracies die

 

Defending our constitution requires more than outrage

 



by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

Sun 21 Jan 2018 07.00 GMTLast modified on Wed 26 Feb 2020 17.59 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2018/jan/21/this-is-how-democracies-die

 

Blatant dictatorship – in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule – has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different means.

 

Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves. Like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, elected leaders have subverted democratic institutions in Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Ukraine.

 

Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box. The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive. With a classic coup d’état, as in Pinochet’s Chile, the death of a democracy is immediate and evident to all. The presidential palace burns. The president is killed, imprisoned or shipped off into exile. The constitution is suspended or scrapped.

 

On the electoral road, none of these things happen. There are no tanks in the streets. Constitutions and other nominally democratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance.

 

Many government efforts to subvert democracy are “legal”, in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy – making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption or cleaning up the electoral process.

 

Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship. Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles. This sows public confusion. People do not immediately realize what is happening. Many continue to believe they are living under a democracy.

 

Because there is no single moment – no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution – in which the regime obviously “crosses the line” into dictatorship, nothing may set off society’s alarm bells. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.

 

•••

 

How vulnerable is American democracy to this form of backsliding? The foundations of our democracy are certainly stronger than those in Venezuela, Turkey or Hungary. But are they strong enough?

 

Answering such a question requires stepping back from daily headlines and breaking news alerts to widen our view, drawing lessons from the experiences of other democracies around the world and throughout history.

 

 When fear or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled

 

A comparative approach reveals how elected autocrats in different parts of the world employ remarkably similar strategies to subvert democratic institutions. As these patterns become visible, the steps toward breakdown grow less ambiguous –and easier to combat. Knowing how citizens in other democracies have successfully resisted elected autocrats, or why they tragically failed to do so, is essential to those seeking to defend American democracy today.

 

We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share of them, including Henry Ford, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace.

 

An essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place – by keeping them off mainstream party tickets, refusing to endorse or align with them and, when necessary, making common cause with rivals in support of democratic candidates.

 

Isolating popular extremists requires political courage. But when fear, opportunism or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled.

 

Once a would-be authoritarian makes it to power, democracies face a second critical test: will the autocratic leader subvert democratic institutions or be constrained by them?

 

Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended – by political parties and organized citizens but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not.

 

This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy – packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence) and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy – gradually, subtly, and even legally – to kill it.

 

•••

 

America failed the first test in November 2016, when we elected a president with a dubious allegiance to democratic norms.

 

Donald Trump’s surprise victory was made possible not only by public disaffection but also by the Republican party’s failure to keep an extremist demagogue within its own ranks from gaining the nomination.

 

 By the time Obama became president, many Republicans in particular questioned the legitimacy of their Democratic rivals

How serious is the threat now? Many observers take comfort in our constitution, which was designed precisely to thwart and contain demagogues like Trump. Our Madisonian system of checks and balances has endured for more than two centuries. It survived the civil war, the great depression, the Cold War and Watergate. Surely, then, it will be able to survive Trump.

 

We are less certain. Historically, our system of checks and balances has worked pretty well – but not, or not entirely, because of the constitutional system designed by the founders. Democracies work best – and survive longer – where constitutions are reinforced by unwritten democratic norms.

 

Two basic norms have preserved America’s checks and balances in ways we have come to take for granted: mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, or the idea that

politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives.

 

These two norms undergirded American democracy for most of the 20th century. Leaders of the two major parties accepted one another as legitimate and resisted the temptation to use their temporary control of institutions to maximum partisan advantage. Norms of toleration and restraint served as the soft guardrails of American democracy, helping it avoid the kind of partisan fight to the death that has destroyed democracies elsewhere in the world, including Europe in the 1930s and South America in the 1960s and 1970s.

 

Today, however, the guardrails of American democracy are weakening. The erosion of our democratic norms began in the 1980s and 1990s and accelerated in the 2000s. By the time Barack Obama became president, many Republicans in particular questioned the legitimacy of their Democratic rivals and had abandoned forbearance for a strategy of winning by any means necessary.

 

Trump may have accelerated this process, but he didn’t cause it. The challenges facing American democracy run deeper. The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization – one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.

 

America’s efforts to achieve racial equality as our society grows increasingly diverse have fueled an insidious reaction and intensifying polarization. And if one thing is clear from studying breakdowns throughout history, it’s that extreme polarization can kill democracies.

 

There are, therefore, reasons for alarm. Not only did Americans elect a demagogue in 2016, but we did so at a time when the norms that once protected our democracy were already coming unmoored.

 

But if other countries’ experiences teach us that that polarization can kill democracies, they also teach us that breakdown is neither inevitable nor irreversible.

 

Many Americans are justifiably frightened by what is happening to our country. But protecting our democracy requires more than just fright or outrage. We must be humble and bold. We must learn from other countries to see the warning signs – and recognize the false alarms. We must be aware of the fateful missteps that have wrecked other democracies. And we must see how citizens have risen to meet the great democratic crises of the past, overcoming their own deep-seated divisions to avert breakdown.

 

History doesn’t repeat itself. But it rhymes. The promise of history is that we can find the rhymes before it is too late.

 

This is an extract from How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, professors of government at Harvard University, published in the UK by Viking and in the US by Crown

Boris Johnson will get a deal: but it will be a betrayal of the Brexiters // 5 signs this is the real Brexit crunch (and 4 that it isn’t)

 



Boris Johnson will get a deal: but it will be a betrayal of the Brexiters

Polly Toynbee

This is the moment when he’ll have to accept that no-deal is a disaster – and break all those fairy-dust promises

 

Mon 30 Nov 2020 17.40 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/30/boris-johnson-deal-betrayal-brexiters-no-deal

 

Ignore the blustering brinkmanship: there will be a deal between Britain and the EU. This week, next week or in the final second before the clock strikes 12, this Brexit-crazed government will sign on the line.

 

It needs no crystal ball to foresee a deal. Though this government is disgraceful and dishonest, it is not certifiably insane. It will not kill off the car industry, manufacturing, farming, finance and fishing. It will not cut off security and police relations with Europe. Nor will it want a hard border in Ireland, breaking the Good Friday agreement. And nor will it freeze friendship with the new US president, nor leave relations with our nearest neighbours and traders irreparably rancorous.

 

The Faragists, and the hardcore MPs in the European Research Group, want that door-slam, still seeking the forever unattainable sovereignty phantasm. But for Boris Johnson’s Brexit cabinet, this is the moment of truth. Finally ministers have to face up to the futility of what they have done: they will struggle to deny their Brexit idea was a lie, never available. For the Brexiteers, Johnson’s deal will fail miserably. That’s because any deal would always trade some of that sovereignty fairy dust for something more tangible – such as no massive tariff on British beef.

 

However hard he bluffs and fibs to disguise the inconvenient truth, Johnson will sign a deal that agrees to align with EU standards on working rights, animal welfare, the environment and much else. For any future divergences there will be an adjudications body, which may or may not be the European court of justice.

 

Fish will be reapportioned, with complexity and transitions that try to shield the hard fact: we took back control of our waters in theory, but gave it up in the same breath because there is no fishing industry without that vital EU market to buy more than 70% of our catch. Our 12,000 fisher folk were shamefully exploited as Brexit visual aids; everyone knew they were destined to be sold down the Channel. This is the last bitter cod-liver oil pill that UK negotiators are struggling to swallow, but they will.

 

Lawbreaking clauses in the internal markets bill repudiating last year’s EU withdrawal agreement will be abandoned. The Northern Ireland protocol will stand – so there will be a border down the Irish Sea, with customs posts. That’s despite Johnson pledging, “There’s no question of there being checks on goods going from Northern Ireland to Great Britain or Great Britain to Northern Ireland.”

 

Those who shout betrayal will be dead right. Everyone who voted Brexit, or for Johnson, believing his magical cake-and-eat-it deal was oven-ready will be betrayed. His party’s manifesto read: “Boris Johnson’s new deal takes the whole country out of the EU as one United Kingdom.” No, Northern Ireland is left out. And watch another crack in the union open under an SNP victory in next May’s Holyrood elections. Betrayed are any who believed last year’s Tory manifesto unicorn: “Get Brexit done – and we will see a pent-up tidal wave of investment into our country.”

 

A deal was always inevitable because the rules laid out by Margaret Thatcher’s single market are crystal clear: the more you want to trade with the market, the more you must conform to it. Johnson will attempt whoops of Waterloo triumph as he tries to smear lipstick on his pig of a deal. The EU will politely suck lemons, though Emmanuel Macron may spit back.

 

Here’s the verdict from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) on the deal, hidden in annexes and unearthed by Jill Rutter for UK in a Changing Europe. The deal will cause a 4% drop in GDP. Even the pandemic won’t hide the Brexit hit to manufacturing and finance, as mountainous red tape includes 270m customs declarations (as opposed to 55m now) and 50,000 new customs agents. New customs IT will only go live on 23 December; road hauliers have no handbooks; lorry parks are unfinished. No wonder the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, was silent on Brexit in his spending review last week.

 

All ministers have been forced to look over the no-deal abyss. That’s why they know they face the worst of all worlds: they will eat their words and betray fellow Brexiters, yet still carpet-bomb the country’s economy.

 

Labour must hose down victory cheers for this deal with an icy shower of contempt. Naturally, Labour says it will examine the deal first. But then Keir Starmer must forensically shred its several-hundred pages. Those arguing that voting for it might bring back “red wall” seats are fighting the last war: voting for it is to own it, and its effects will be painfully clear by the next election. David Cameron backed the Iraq war and it hamstrung his later attacks on its calamitous consequences.

 

As shadow Brexit secretary, Starmer laid out six tests. The key demand was to meet the Tories’ pledge to deliver the “exact same benefits” we get from the single market and customs union.

 

The upcoming deal will spectacularly fail that test: voting for it risks Starmer’s reputation for straight-dealing. The border chaos, shortages on shelves, even medicines delayed may last for months, but the OBR and Bank of England have exposed deeper damage to come. Looking back, it will seem clear that an opposition should have opposed it. Abstention is not pusillanimous, but the only honourable option.

 

And there’s also the possibility that Johnson’s delays might mean a deal comes too late for parliament to vote on it. So at the very least, Labour should not decide how to vote until it sees the bill.

 

Of course, Labour could be obliged to vote for it and save the nation if a humiliated Johnson can’t stop his MPs voting it down. But that’s unlikely; and to vote for this atrocious deal in any other circumstance would be Starmer’s first serious mistake.

 

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist


5 signs this is the real Brexit crunch (and 4 that it isn’t)

 

After weeks of false hope an EU-UK trade deal was imminent, this week finally could be the week.

 


BY EMILIO CASALICCHIO AND BARBARA MOENS

November 30, 2020 9:50 pm

https://www.politico.eu/article/five-signs-this-is-the-real-brexit-crunch-and-four-that-it-isnt/

 

LONDON — Brexit-watchers are used to "crunch" weeks coming to nothing.

 

Most weeks since the European Council summit in October — which the U.K. insisted was a deadline, before it wasn't — have been tipped as the week a deal could be done. But still negotiations continue.

 

This week, however, could be different. There are numerous signs suggesting a deal could come together in the next few days, and a feeling among observers that things are finally getting serious.

 

POLITICO has rounded up some of the indications that this could be the week ... plus a few that suggest this saga will roll on once again.

 

1. Both sides are pointing to this week

Politicians and officials on both sides say things are coming to a head. "I do think that this is a very significant week," Dominic Raab told the BBC at the weekend. "The last real major week subject to any further postponement, in terms of the timing."

 

Numerous EU figures have flagged this week as the one to watch, arguing the ratification process becomes complicated otherwise. Getting a deal approved by national and regional parliaments — which would be needed if the EU determines the final deal is a so-called "mixed agreement" — is no longer possible. But even ratification by the U.K. and European Parliaments plus sign-off by EU countries — the process if its scope is judged to only cover competences assigned to Brussels — is becoming increasingly difficult.

 

2. An actual deadline looms

There's just one month to go until the Brexit transition period ends. The deadline for the end of talks can be put off but cannot end up in 2021 without the two sides falling off a cliff edge and tariffs kicking in.

 

Britain will be out of the single market and customs union on January 1 and negotiations after its departure could be a different ball game. Both sides want to avoid the imposition of tariffs. So ratification claims aside, something needs to happen before December 31, and time is running short.

 

3. The timetable has gone out the window

Talks are at such a crunch stage that the formal agenda for what will be discussed has been scrapped, with both sides taking each day as it comes, a U.K. official told POLITICO's London Playbook.

 

When formal negotiating rounds began, timetables were made public, showing exactly what would be discussed and when. That feels like a long time ago now. Talks also stretched late into the night on Sunday, Downing Street confirmed.

 

4. An offer on fish

The row over fish is finally getting a little more light as well as heat. Last week, RTE's Tony Connelly reported that the EU was offering that up to 18 percent of the fish quota in U.K. waters currently allocated to EU27 fleets be restored to the U.K.

 

Brussels quickly insisted it was one of a number of ideas floating around and a U.K. official dismissed it as "derisory." The British fishing industry agreed that the alleged offer was nowhere near good enough, but saw hope in the move. "The gesture, if true, is significant because it indicates a movement away from the very inflexible negotiating mandate they set for themselves," said Barrie Deas, chief executive of the National Federation of Fishermen's Organizations.

 

Meanwhile, Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney on Monday began debating who should have right of access to fish based on where they originate and live — a public indication that the EU might be willing to base quota decisions on so-called "zonal attachment." That's a core demand from the U.K., which allocates quotas based on where fish stocks live instead of starting from baselines set out in historical agreements. EU officials have accepted this position behind the scenes for months, but the public comments suggest the rubber is hitting the road in the negotiating room.

 

The EU dismisses the suggestion, alluded to in London, that fish is the real sticking point, and instead insists the so-called "level playing field" rules designed to ensure British business can't undercut the bloc while retaining access to the EU market are the crucial element. This difference in emphasis between the two sides on the real sticking points suggests both sides may be preparing to compromise.

 

5. Business pressure

Firms on both sides are getting extra nervous and piling the pressure on politicians to come up with solutions. The less time there is between a deal and the end of the transition, the less time companies have to prepare for changes.

 

BusinessEurope last week issued a cry for help, arguing in a statement that, after the coronavirus shock, nations "cannot afford another major disruption caused by a no-deal situation," and adding: "It is time to conclude an agreement."

 

On the U.K. side, firms have been tearing their hair out about the lack of information about the future, while business leaders have urged the EU to phase in its border controls to ease the end of the transition.

 

Meanwhile, the war of words between the U.K. and the haulage industry appears to have been put aside, as all involved knuckle down to make the necessary preparations for January. One haulage representative said Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove was listening to concerns more than in recent months.

 

But but but ...

We've been here so many times before and there is a fair chance this week will turn out like all the others and not produce a deal. Here are four arguments for another dead-end.

 

1. A no-deal could shake things up

If the two sides fail to reach a deal, World Trade Organization rules kick in and tariffs are required for goods crossing borders. But trade talks could continue in the hope a better solution could be found.

 

Some on the Brussels side think a rupture might focus minds in London. “When they gather the size of the disruption, they will start knocking on our door soon enough,” one EU official said. “The logic of international trade negotiations is relatively simple: size matters.”

 

London has suggested in the past that it won't return to talks immediately after a no-deal exit.

 

2. No-one wants to blink first

Both sides think running the clock down will put greater pressure on the other to cave first — but neither wants to be the one to walk away from the table.

 

Taken to its limits, that could mean a no-deal exit almost by accident. “We might end up sleepwalking toward the end of the transition period,” the same EU official said.

 

3. EU countries want to step up no-deal preparations

EU countries are increasing pressure on the European Commission to boost its no-deal preparation by publishing contingency measures.

 

“We’re staying at the table as long as meaningful, but we should really allow no-deal preparations in parallel,” an EU diplomat said. Cautious of being seen to undermine the trade talks, the Commission continues to hold off on those plans but it remains to be seen how long they can ignore the pressure coming from different capitals.

 

However, German Chancellor Angel Merkel cautioned against contingency planning. "I would wait with it as long as it is possible," she told a videoconference with European affairs lawmakers from different national parliaments and the European Parliament. "Instead, we should put all our energy into the final stage of the negotiations.”

 

 4. There is still a month to go.

A month is still a month. While the EU is mulling its options to get around the ratification issue, talks could go down to the wire. One EU diplomat said there could be a "tricky, technical" solution found to allow the bloc to ratify the deal after the transition ends.

 

If that's possible, the clock can continue to tick down. All parties lie about the deadlines in trade deals, and the talks have already gone on longer than the two sides said they could. Surely they could be squeezed a little further.

 

Hans Joachim Von Der Burchard and Shawn Pogatchnik contributed reporting.


Steve Inskeep: Will Trump Remain In The Popular Imagination? | Trump Raises $170 Million as He Denies His Loss and Eyes the Future


Trump Raises $170 Million as He Denies His Loss and Eyes the Future

 

The president’s campaign has ratcheted up its appeals for cash, but the first 75 percent of every contribution is going to a new political action committee that could fund his next political move.

 

President Trump’s campaign has told supporters that it needs donations for an “Election Defense Fund,” but much of the money could be used to seed his next political steps.

 


By Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman

Nov. 30, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/30/us/politics/trump-campaign-donations.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

 

President Trump has raised about $170 million since Election Day as his campaign operation has continued to aggressively solicit donations with hyped-up appeals that have funded his fruitless attempts to overturn the election and that have seeded his post-presidential political ambitions, according to a person familiar with the matter.

 

The money, much of which was raised in the first week after the election, according to the person, has arrived as Mr. Trump has made false claims about fraud and sought to undermine public confidence in the legitimacy of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.

 

Instead of slowing down after the election, Mr. Trump’s campaign has ratcheted up its volume of email solicitations for cash, telling supporters that money was needed for an “Election Defense Fund.”

 

In reality, the fine print shows that the first 75 percent of every contribution currently goes to a new political action committee that Mr. Trump set up in mid-November, Save America, which can be used to fund his political activities going forward, including staff and travel. The other 25 percent of each donation is directed to the Republican National Committee.

 

A donor has to give $5,000 to Mr. Trump’s new PAC before any funds go to his recount account.

 

Still, the Trump campaign continues to urgently ask for cash. On Monday, Mr. Trump signed a campaign email that breathlessly told supporters that the end of November — nearly four weeks after Election Day — represented “our most IMPORTANT deadline EVER.”

 

The Washington Post reported earlier on Monday that Mr. Trump’s postelection efforts had raised more than $150 million. Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, declined to comment on the fund-raising.

 

The $170 million figure, raised in less than four weeks, is an enormous sum that rivals the amounts of money brought in at the peak of the campaign. While a breakdown of the money was not immediately available, the deluge of donations would appear to have paid off any remaining Trump campaign debt (in the first days after the election, the fine print showed that contributions were earmarked for that purpose). The money is also likely to provide Mr. Trump with a sizable financial head start in paying for his post-presidency political activities.

 

Despite the influx of cash, both the Trump campaign and the R.N.C. have reduced the size of their staffs since the election.

 

In October, Mr. Trump’s campaign began automatically checking a box on its website so that more donors would make additional, weekly donations from their accounts through Dec. 14 — the day the Electoral College will vote — to create a postelection revenue stream. Donors can opt out with an extra click, but critics called the tactic misleading.

 

Mr. Trump’s team created the political action committee, known as a leadership PAC, in part to capture the influx of postelection money, according to people familiar with the matter.

 

Currently, donors on Mr. Trump’s website are opted in with a prechecked box to make monthly contributions.

 

Rob Flaherty, who served as Mr. Biden’s digital director, said on Twitter that the huge sums raised by Mr. Trump since the election were “plain and simple grift.”

 

On Monday, Arizona and Wisconsin, two key battlegrounds that Mr. Biden flipped this year, certified their election results, formalizing Mr. Biden’s victory as Mr. Trump and his allies have continued to complain without evidence of fraud.

 

Shane Goldmacher is a national political reporter and was previously the chief political correspondent for the Metro Desk. Before joining The Times, he worked at Politico, where he covered national Republican politics and the 2016 presidential campaign. @ShaneGoldmacher

 

Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent. She joined The Times in 2015 as a campaign correspondent and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. @maggieNYT


'Shut The Hell Up': Arizona GOP At War Over Trump's Election Loss | The ...

Trump campaign lawyer says former cybersecurity chief should be 'shot'

 



WHITE HOUSE

Trump campaign lawyer says former cybersecurity chief should be 'shot'

 

Joe DiGenova made the comments about Chris Krebs, who was fired by President Donald Trump after declaring the 2020 elections as secure.

 

By MATTHEW CHOI

11/30/2020 09:15 PM EST

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/30/trump-campaign-lawyer-cybersecurity-chief-shot-441577

 

An attorney for President Donald Trump’s reelection efforts said on Monday that Chris Krebs, the former head of U.S. cybersecurity, should be “shot” for going against the president’s conspiracy theories and declaring the 2020 elections as secure.

 

“Anybody who thinks the election went well, like that idiot Krebs who used to be the head of cybersecurity,” said Trump campaign lawyer Joe DiGenova, “that guy is a class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot.”

 

DiGenova made the remarks on a Monday episode of the “The Howie Carr Show,” which has a history of showcasing Trump’s claims and allies. During the show, DiGenova also listed a number of allegations of mass election irregularities — a phenomenon that elections officials in states across the country agreed was not an issue — in his team’s improbable effort to extend the Trump presidency.

 

Trump fired Krebs nearly two weeks ago after the former director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency attested that the 2020 elections were among the safest in history. The president, whose personnel decisions have a record of being weighted by his perception of loyalty, fired Krebs by tweet, insisting that the election had been stolen from him.

 

“There were massive improprieties and fraud — including dead people voting, Poll Watchers not allowed into polling locations, ‘glitches’ in the voting machines which changed ... votes from Trump to Biden, late voting, and many more,” Trump tweeted at the time, leveling false assertions. “Therefore, effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated.”

 

The president also lashed out against Krebs after he participated in a “60 Minutes” interview, broadcast on Sunday, in which Krebs warned against the dangers of the president’s election conspiracy theories. In the days since the election, Trump has angrily tweeted at members of his own party who have refused to buy into his unfounded claims of mass improprieties. Krebs is a Republican, but members of both parties largely viewed him as an apolitical professional civil servant.

 

DiGenova is part of the team of lawyers, led by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, that is fighting against the 2020 election results. Though self-dubbed an “elite strike force,” the team’s scattered public appearances have raised more eyebrows for their outlandishness than their mission. Their conspiracy theories have included allegations related to megadonor George Soros and Hugo Chavez, the deceased former leader of Venezuela.

 

Before joining Trump's legal team, DiGenova served as U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. He also worked for Trump as part of the president‘s personal legal defense amid investigations into Russia‘s involvement in the 2016 election.

Scott Atlas resigns as Trump's coronavirus adviser

 



Scott Atlas resigns as Trump's coronavirus adviser

 

The radiologist with no previous infectious disease experience clashed with the administration's public health experts.

 

By DAN DIAMOND

11/30/2020 07:57 PM EST

Updated: 11/30/2020 08:33 PM EST

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/30/scott-atlas-resigns-trump-adviser-441597

 

Scott Atlas, the controversial physician who became President Donald Trump's hand-picked coronavirus adviser, resigned from the White House on Monday.

 

"I always relied on the latest science and evidence, without any political consideration or influence," Atlas wrote in his resignation letter, which he posted to Twitter on Monday night.

 

A radiologist with no previous experience fighting infectious disease, Atlas joined the White House in August after TV appearances on Fox News where he decried fears about Covid-19 as overblown. But the doctor — who won Trump's favor by repeatedly pitching the president on a rosier outlook about the worsening pandemic — clashed with the administration's public health experts, who warned that Atlas was misleading Trump about the severity of the crisis. Deborah Birx, an infectious disease specialist who had been tapped in February to serve as the White House's coronavirus coordinator, was increasingly marginalized this fall in favor of Atlas.

 

Senior medical experts also battled with Atlas after he appeared to advocate the concept of "herd immunity" — the controversial theory that the United States can quickly and safely achieve widespread immunity to the coronavirus by allowing it to spread unfettered among healthy people.

 

Atlas, a fellow at Stanford University's conservative Hoover Institution, has been repeatedly denounced by Stanford faculty, and the school sought to distance itself from his statements after he downplayed the value of masks to curb the spread of Covid-19.

 

Atlas joined the administration as a Special Government Employee, and his 130-day detail will run out this week — although some SGEs stay for much longer, an administration official noted to POLITICO.

 

There's "really nothing left for him to advise on," added a senior administration official who's been in meetings with Atlas. The arrival of Covid-19 vaccines means that herd immunity is likely coming the traditional way, the official said — through widespread vaccination, rather than the approach advocated by Atlas.

 

Meanwhile, Trump's interest in "an alternate reality" on the coronavirus outbreak has waned in recent days, the senior official said, with the president increasingly focused on contesting the election results. "Both sides seemed to reach the end of their utility to each other," the senior official said.

 

Fox News first reported Atlas' departure.

The Long Darkness Before Dawn

 


The Long Darkness Before Dawn

With vaccines and a new administration, the pandemic will be tamed. But experts say the coming months “are going to be just horrible.”

 

Some epidemiologists predict that the death toll from Covid-19 could be close to twice the 250,000 figure that the nation surpassed last week.

 



Donald G. McNeil Jr.

By Donald G. McNeil Jr.

Nov. 30, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/30/health/coronavirus-vaccines-treatments.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

 

Each week, good news about vaccines or antibody treatments surfaces, offering hope that an end to the pandemic is at hand.

 

And yet this holiday season presents a grim reckoning. The United States has reached an appalling milestone: more than one million new coronavirus cases every week. Hospitals in some states are full to bursting. The number of deaths is rising and seems on track to easily surpass the 2,200-a-day average in the spring, when the pandemic was concentrated in the New York metropolitan area.

 

Our failure to protect ourselves has caught up to us.

 

The nation now must endure a critical period of transition, one that threatens to last far too long, as we set aside justifiable optimism about next spring and confront the dark winter ahead. Some epidemiologists predict that the death toll by March could be close to twice the 250,000 figure that the nation surpassed only last week.

 

“The next three months are going to be just horrible,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health and one of two dozen experts interviewed by The New York Times about the near future.

 

This juncture, perhaps more than any to date, exposes the deep political divisions that have allowed the pandemic to take root and bloom, and that will determine the depth of the winter ahead. Even as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged Americans to avoid holiday travel and many health officials asked families to cancel big gatherings, more than six million Americans took flights during Thanksgiving week, which is about 40 percent of last year’s air traffic. And President Trump, the one person most capable of altering the trajectory between now and spring, seems unwilling to help his successor do what must be done to save the lives of tens of thousands of Americans.

 

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has assembled excellent advisers and a sensible plan for tackling the pandemic, public health experts said. But Mitchell Warren, the founder of AVAC, an AIDS advocacy group that focuses on several diseases, said Mr. Biden’s hands appeared tied until Inauguration Day on Jan. 20: “There’s not a ton of power in being president-elect.”

 

By late December, the first doses of vaccine may be available to Americans, federal officials have said. Priorities are still being set, but vaccinations are expected to go first to health care workers, nursing home residents and others at highest risk. How long it will take to reach younger Americans depends on many factors, including how many vaccines are approved and how fast they can be made.

 

In mid-October, I surprised some New York Times readers by shifting from pessimism to optimism, with the epidemic in the United States most likely ending sooner than I expected. Now that at least two vaccines with efficacy greater than 90 percent have emerged, I am even more hopeful about what 2021 holds.

 

But even as the medical response to the virus is improving, the politics of public health remain a deeply vexing challenge.

 

The regions of the country now among those hit hardest by the virus — Midwestern and Mountain States and rural counties, including in the Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming — are the ones that voted heavily for Mr. Trump in the recent election. The president could help save his millions of supporters by urging them to wear masks, avoid crowds and skip holiday gatherings this year. But that seemed unlikely to occur, many health experts said.

 

“That is outside of his DNA,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a preventive medicine specialist at Vanderbilt University medical school. “It would mean admitting he was wrong and Tony Fauci was right.”

 

In a bitter paradox, some experts noted, Mr. Trump could have been the hero of this pandemic. Operation Warp Speed, which his administration announced in May, appears on track to deliver vaccines and therapies in record-breaking time. The United States may well become the first country to bring the virus to heel through pharmaceutical prowess.

 

Had Mr. Trump heeded his medical advisers in late spring and adopted measures to curb new infections, the nation could now be on track to exit the epidemic next year with far fewer deaths per capita than many other nations.

 

But during his campaign, Mr. Trump spent little time explaining the importance of Operation Warp Speed; it has invested more than $12 billion in six vaccines based on three complex new technologies, as well as antibody therapies with nearly unpronounceable names like bamlanivimab.

 

 

Some health experts expressed concern that Mr. Trump might continue to undermine the coronavirus effort after he leaves office, by contradicting and diminishing any measure proposed by Mr. Biden.

 

“The thinking over here,” said Dr. David L. Heyman, a former C.D.C. official who now oversees the Center on Global Health Security at Chatham House in London, “is that he will continue to harass the White House to mobilize his people for 2024 for himself or his daughter or sons.”

 

The fight over masks

 

The antidote to hopelessness is agency, and Americans can protect themselves even without Mr. Trump’s advice by wearing masks and keeping their distance from others.

 

Reluctant officials are finally coming around to ordering such measures. The governors of Iowa and New Hampshire issued mask mandates for the first time in mid-November; the governors of Kansas, North Carolina and Hawaii strengthened theirs. But average Americans are sharply divided over masks.

 

“There is pretty broad support for mask mandates even among Republicans,” said Martha Louise Lincoln, a medical historian at San Francisco State University. “But among extreme right-wing voters there’s still a perception that they’re a sign of weakness or a symbol of being duped.”

 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidelines on Nov. 10, advocating more clearly than before that everyone, infected or healthy, should wear a mask.

 

Various studies, involving machines puffing fine mists, have shown that high-quality masks can significantly reduce the spread of pathogens between people in conversation.

 

And the common-sense evidence that masks work has become overwhelming. Dozens of “superspreader events” have taken place in venues where most people were not masked — in bars and restaurants, at summer camps, at funerals, on airplanes, in churches, at choir practice.

 

In contrast, none have been known to occur in venues where most people wore masks, such as grocery stores. One well-known C.D.C. study showed that, even in a Springfield, Mo., hair salon where two stylists were infected, not one of the 139 customers whose hair they cut over the course of 10 days caught the disease. A city health order had required that both the stylists and the customers be masked.

 

Even in the most dangerous environments — hospital emergency rooms — there have been no reported superspreader events since personal protective gear became widely available. (Many individual doctors and nurses have been infected, however; an incident in South Bend, Ind., in which multiple nurses were infected turned out to be related to a wedding.)

 

By contrast, the White House, where masks have been shunned, has been the scene of at least one, and possibly more superspreader events.

 

A study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington estimated that 130,000 lives could be saved by February if mask use became universal in the United States immediately. Masks can also preserve the economy: A study by Goldman Sachs estimated that universal use would save $1 trillion that may be lost to business shutdowns and medical bills.

 

A new year, and new health advice

 

Mr. Biden has said that he intends to tackle the pandemic from his first full day in office, on Jan. 21. But because coronavirus deaths follow new cases by some weeks, any results of his actions may not be apparent before early spring.

 

The experts generally praised the panel of advisers chosen by Mr. Biden, depicting them as reputable scientists who could credibly reach out to many groups hard-hit by the pandemic, including Black and Hispanic Americans.

 

But several experts, some of whom spoke anonymously to avoid offending friends and colleagues, said the panel needed different skills and a different kind of balance.

 

Some felt that it should have more scientific expertise, and suggested recruiting more vaccinologists, such as Dr. Paul A. Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and more epidemiologists, such as Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch and Natalie E. Dean of the University of Florida.

 

Others said the panel needed more behavioral scientists adept at fighting rumors, which have been a major obstacle.

 

“We’re facing extremely complex and poorly understood dynamics around disinformation, conspiratorial theories, paranoia and mistrust,” Dr. Lincoln noted.

 

Among the suggested names with those skills were Heidi J. Larson of the Vaccine Confidence Project in London, Carl T. Bergstrom of the University of Washington and Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina.

 

Others said the panel had too many members tied to the Obama-Biden administration. Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, for example, was an architect of the Affordable Care Act and Dr. Eric Goosby was Mr. Obama’s global AIDS coordinator. To reach Mr. Trump’s base, they said, the panel needs credible Republican experts.

 

“Otherwise,” said Dr. Leana Wen, a former Baltimore health commissioner, “there will be even more of a mistaken perception that this is Democrats and doctors trying to shut down the economy, when actually controlling the virus is key to economic recovery.”

 

Experts suggested adding Dr. Bill Frist, a transplant surgeon and former Republican senator, or Dr. Marc K. Siegel, an internist and Fox News opinion writer.

 

Mr. Warren suggested consulting marketing experts and recruiting “everyone from Santa Claus to LeBron James” as trusted spokesmen.

 

Another expert suggested adding Dr. Mehmet C. Oz, a heart surgeon and television personality who was criticized for promoting hydroxychloroquine on Fox News (he later relented), and possibly even asking Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson to join, because they are popular with Mr. Trump’s base and might be persuaded to accept science that would save the lives of their own viewers.

 

Mr. Biden’s plan

 

Mr. Biden’s plan for tackling the pandemic is outlined on his website.

 

It calls for far more widespread testing, delivered free; a ban on out-of-pocket costs for medical care for the virus; having the military build temporary hospitals if necessary; cooperation with American businesses to create more personal protective gear and ventilators; more food relief for the poor, and other measures.

 

The Road to a Coronavirus Vaccine

 

Words to Know About Vaccines

Confused by the all technical terms used to describe how vaccines work and are investigated? Let us help:

 

  • Adverse event: A health problem that crops up in volunteers in a clinical trial of a vaccine or a drug. An adverse event isn’t always caused by the treatment tested in the trial.
  • Antibody: A protein produced by the immune system that can attach to a pathogen such as the coronavirus and stop it from infecting cells.
  • Approval, licensure and emergency use authorization: Drugs, vaccines and medical devices cannot be sold in the United States without gaining approval from the Food and Drug Administration, also known as licensure. After a company submits the results of  clinical trials to the F.D.A. for consideration, the agency decides whether the product is safe and effective, a process that generally takes many months. If the country is facing an emergency — like a pandemic — a company may apply instead for an emergency use authorization, which can be granted considerably faster.
  • Background rate: How often a health problem, known as an adverse event, arises in the general population. To determine if a vaccine or a drug is safe, researchers compare the rate of adverse events in a trial to the background rate.
  • Efficacy: A measurement of how effective a treatment was in a clinical trial. To test a coronavirus vaccine, for instance, researchers compare how many people in the vaccinated and placebo groups get Covid-19. The real-world effectiveness of a vaccine may turn out to be different from its efficacy in a trial.
  • Phase 1, 2, and 3 trials: Clinical trials typically take place in three stages. Phase 1 trials usually involve a few dozen people and are designed to observe whether a vaccine or drug is safe. Phase 2 trials, involving hundreds of people, allow researchers to try out different doses and gather more measurements about the vaccine’s effects on the immune system. Phase 3 trials, involving thousands or tens of thousands of volunteers, determine the safety and efficacy of the vaccine or drug by waiting to see how many people are protected from the disease it’s designed to fight.
  • Placebo: A substance that has no therapeutic effect, often used in a clinical trial. To see if a vaccine can prevent Covid-19, for example, researchers may inject the vaccine into half of their volunteers, while the other half get a placebo of salt water. They can then compare how many people in each group get infected.
  • Post-market surveillance: The monitoring that takes place after a vaccine or drug has been approved and is regularly prescribed by doctors. This surveillance typically confirms that the treatment is safe. On rare occasions, it detects side effects in certain groups of people that were missed during clinical trials.
  • Preclinical research: Studies that take place before the start of a clinical trial, typically involving experiments where a treatment is tested on cells or in animals.
  • Viral vector vaccines: A type of vaccine that uses a harmless virus to chauffeur immune-system-stimulating ingredients into the human body. Viral vectors are used in several experimental Covid-19 vaccines, including those developed by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson. Both of these companies are using a common cold virus called an adenovirus as their vector. The adenovirus carries coronavirus genes.
  • Trial protocol: A series of procedures to be carried out during a clinical trial.
  •  

Mr. Biden has said he supports a national mask mandate, although his plan calls on governors to impose state ones.

 

All the experts interviewed by The Times praised the plan, but several felt it was not aggressive enough. The pandemic is raging so far beyond control, they argued, that it can be contained only with deeply unpopular but necessary measures, such as rigorously enforced mask laws, closing bars and restaurants, requiring regular testing in schools and workplaces, isolating the infected away from their families, prohibiting travel from high-prevalence areas to low ones, and imposing quarantines that are enforced rather than merely requested.

 

Many other countries have imposed such measures despite fierce opposition from some citizens, they said, and they have helped.

 

“Colleges are the Wuhans of this fall surge,” said Dr. Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan’s medical school. Universities, he and other experts said, must stop students from going back and forth between their hometowns and college towns, both of which have many vulnerable residents.

 

The key to enforcing mask laws, noted Dr. Robert Klitzman, a psychiatrist and bioethicist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, is to punish not people but the owners of buildings that ignore restrictions; Quebec, he noted, fines stores $4,500 if customers are unmasked.

 

But after a very divisive election, other experts said, it will be hard to get many Americans to cooperate, especially if Mr. Trump encourages resistance.

 

Also, there are legal limits on what the federal government can do. American “sanitary codes” and quarantine laws are overwhelmingly based on state and local powers, many of which were granted in the 19th century, when epidemics constantly swept the nation’s cities. The federal government’s powers generally extend to interstate matters.

 

So, for instance, while the Biden administration could easily make it a federal crime to refuse to wear a mask on a cross-country flight — or put offenders on the “no fly list” that was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center — it probably cannot make every resident of South Dakota wear a mask if Gov. Kristi Noem and the State Legislature oppose the measure. Ms. Noem has said that she will not enforce mask mandates or lockdowns even if Mr. Biden, as president, orders them.

 

The hope for vaccines

 

A mural honoring health care professionals and other essential workers by artists from the HomeGrowNM Trading Post in Albuquerque.Credit...Adria Malcolm for The New York Times

The health experts interviewed by The Times all expressed excitement that the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were reported to be 95 percent effective with no serious safety problems. On Nov. 23, a third vaccine, from AstraZeneca, also appeared to be effective, although exactly how effective is disputed.

 

“This is an amazing feat of science we’ve just seen, to go from a gene sequence on Jan. 10 to a vaccine by Nov. 10,” said Dr. Lawrence Corey, who is harmonizing disparate vaccine trials so their results can be easily compared.

 

However, experts still want to read the data, not just what Dr. Offit called “science by news release.”

 

(Pharmaceutical companies often wait until they have publishable data before announcing clinical trial results. But when news is likely to jolt a stock’s price, it is released immediately to reduce the chance of anyone connected to the company engaging in insider trading, or even appearing to.)

 

Mr. Biden will inherit the fruits of Operation Warp Speed and oversee their distribution. Members of his transition team, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to reveal its deliberations, said they were already discussing two sensitive topics: whether to create a secure way for vaccinated individuals to prove they have received both shots, and whether Covid vaccines should ultimately be made mandatory — either by the federal government, or by state governments, employers, school systems or the like.

 

Making vaccines mandatory may be a political struggle, but it is within the scope of American law. In 1905, in a landmark case, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the Supreme Court upheld the right of a state government to make smallpox vaccination mandatory, on the grounds that it protected the public health — despite the fact that the crude smallpox vaccines of that era could cause severe side effects in some people.

 

It is also within American religious tradition. Virtually every major religion has held that vaccines are permitted, and some even hold that their members are obliged to be vaccinated for the common good.

 

Some experts not on the committee were adamant that, once Covid vaccines are proven to be both effective and safe, they should be made obligatory.

 

Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, noted that his institution already has mandatory testing for all students and staff. He said that companies he advises would like to eventually make vaccination mandatory for all employees, but would prefer the government took the lead by requiring them.

 

At Dr. Offit’s pediatric hospital, every member must have had all routine vaccines and get an annual flu shot — or face dismissal.

 

“It’s not optional,” he said. “You’re taking care of children. And yes, down the line, I think vaccination will have to be mandatory. It’s your responsibility as a citizen.”

 

The next dozen weeks will be long and painful. But spring is likely to bring highly effective vaccines and a renewed commitment to medical leadership, something that has been missing under Mr. Trump.

 

“The C.D.C. will have to be rebuilt, and its guidelines and the F.D.A.’s have to be promptly re-evaluated,” said Dr. Robert L. Murphy, director of the Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University’s medical school. “The Biden team will move quickly. It’s not like they don’t know what to do.”

 

[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]

 

Donald G. McNeil Jr. is a science reporter covering epidemics and diseases of the world’s poor. He joined The Times in 1976, has reported from 60 countries and is a winner of the John Chancellor Award.