COVID-19 and the New American Autocracy

Piecing together patterns and glimpses at policies being implemented that fly in the face of a true and open democracy… they present a scary picture of the powerful antidemocratic change in our federal government. I’ve already presented the legions of misstatements, conspiracy theories, blame and policy missteps from the President that clearly have exacerbated the reach and power of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the Trump/GOP administration are also using the pandemic to implement many of their conservative policies without even applying executive orders or moving the new policies through the legislative process as contemplated by the Constitution.

We’ve seen how some states (with Trump support) – like Texas, Ohio and Mississippi – are effectively repealing Roe vs Wade by designating abortions as non-essential medical services (as if you could suspend a pregnancy) that are not permitted during COVID-restrictions, but other constitutional violations and unilateral presidential legislation are everywhere.

The First Amendment continues to remain under assault. Donald Trump desperately needs to control the news, is addicted to receiving praise from federal bureaucrats, not just from his political appointees, and wages vicious and vituperative vendettas against anyone of significance who dares to criticize him, make him responsible for anything negative or simply fails to heap Fox-News-like adoring praise on his many “accomplishments,” even if totally fabricated.

Transparency is his enemy since the facts behind his glaring missteps and misstatements, his attempts to blame others, contradict almost every positive step in countering the pandemic that he chooses to take credit for. Having failed in curtailing which journalists can attend his press briefings, having lost his attempt to control his Twitter critics, Trump and his administration continue to assail the First Amendment. After CNN focused on a White House press briefing only after the medical professionals began speaking: “CNN has been informed by a spokesman for Vice President Michael Pence that it cannot have access to top government health officials grappling with the nation’s coronavirus pandemic unless it televises specific portions of the Trump Administration’s daily briefings on the spread of the disease.” Variety, April 9^th.  Self-aggrandizement sessions! Pence backed off this mandate later in the day under obvious instructions from his counsel on exactly what the First Amendment protects.

But wait, there’s more! When the president signed the massive stimulus bill, he issued a statement asserting that he could limit how much information the Treasury’s newly created special inspector general for pandemic recovery could share with lawmakers in Congress. This statement directly contradicted the statute he just signed.

“The law said Congress must be informed ‘without delay’ if administration officials refuse to provide information. But in his signing statement, Trump said, ‘I do not understand, and my administration will not treat, this provision as permitting the [inspector general] to issue reports to the Congress without the presidential supervision required.’” Los Angeles Times, April 5^th. Indeed, the Inspector General that Trump appointed to review the implementation of that stimulus spending is a White House counsel very used to doing the President’s bidding. With a rubber stamp from the GOP Senate majority that exonerated the impeached President without questioning a single witness, Donald Trump believes that he is now free of any notion of accountability, to Congress or anyone else. Not exactly the hallmark of a true democracy.

Donald Trump is doing such an abominable job of handling the COVID-19 pandemic, making a terrible situation vastly worse, that he and the GOP generally believe that even gerrymandering and the existing voting restrictions aimed against Democrat-leaning minorities are not enough to preserve their electability. In times of a highly contagious virus, common sense would tell you that in-person voting, where it can be avoided, is dangerous. 40% of Americans already vote by mail, but that form of voting is still not permitted in many states. Even though Donald Trump himself votes by mail in his new home state of Florida and without a shred of supporting evidence, he has concocted a theory that vote-by-mail is fraught with fraud. His GOP cronies have picked up the call.

“President Trump and his Republican allies are launching an aggressive strategy to fight what many of the administration’s own health officials view as one of the most effective ways to make voting safer amid the deadly spread of Covid-19: the expanded use of mail-in ballots.

“The scene Tuesday [4/7] of Wisconsinites in masks and gloves gathering in long lines to vote, after Republicans sued to defeat extended, mail-in ballot deadlines, did not deter the president and top officials in his party. Republican leaders said they were pushing ahead to fight state-level statutes that could expand absentee balloting in Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona and elsewhere. In New Mexico, Republicans are battling an effort to go to a mail-in-only primary, and they vowed on Wednesday [4/8] to fight a new move to expand postal balloting in Minnesota.

“The new political effort is clearly aimed at helping the president’s re-election prospects, as well as bolstering Republicans running further down the ballot. While his advisers tend to see the issue in more nuanced terms, Mr. Trump obviously views the issue in a stark, partisan way: He has complained that under Democratic plans for national expansion of early voting and voting by mail, ‘you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.’” New York Times, April 8^th.

Watching Trump rambling even more than normal at his daily press briefing, often in a quiet mumbling voice, head hung down, you know he knows how badly he has failed… and knows that it is increasingly how the public perceives him. But unless courts stop Trump, the pandemic allows him sequentially to implement his platforms and voting limits as if he were an absolute monarch.

Another example on immigration: “The U.S. government used an obscure public health law to justify one of its most aggressive border crackdowns ever. People fleeing violence and poverty to seek refuge in the U.S. are whisked to the nearest border crossing and returned to Mexico without a chance to apply for asylum. It eclipses President Donald Trump's other policies to curtail immigration — which often rely on help from Mexico — by setting aside decades-old national and international laws…

“The Trump administration has offered little detail on the rules that, unlike its other immigration policies, have yet to be challenged in court. The secrecy means the rules got little attention as they took effect March 20, the same day Trump announced the southern border was closed to nonessential travel…

“The administration tapped a law allowing the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to ban foreigners if their entry would create ‘a serious danger’ to the spread of communicable disease. The U.S. has the most cases in the world by far. CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield issued a 30-day order but said he may extend the rules…

“The U.S. also is returning Central American children who travel with grandparents, siblings and other relatives, said a congressional aide who was briefed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the information was not intended for public release. Previously, children who weren't with parents or guardians were considered unaccompanied and automatically put into the asylum pipeline.” Associated Press, April 9^th.

While there remains a policy that if a “migrant claims a ‘reasonably believable’ fear of being tortured [they] can be referred for additional screening under the U.N. Convention Against Torture, a lesser form of asylum that's harder to qualify for.” There’s just one catch: asylum seekers are not even allowed to present their explanation to border agents, who are simply turning them away without listening. Are all those medical doctors here in the United States on H-1B visas afraid that if they get the virus as part of their mission and are unable to work for a while, will they be deported? Oddly enough, that is genuine risk in Trump-land.

Without any public hearing, Trump’s autocracy is effectively “repealing” statutes and duly passed administrative regulations … because he and his cronies can (or think they can): Another example: “The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a sweeping suspension of its enforcement of environmental laws Thursday [3/26], telling companies they would not need to meet environmental standards during the coronavirus outbreak.  

“The temporary policy, for which the EPA has set no end date, would allow any number of industries to skirt environmental laws, with the agency saying it will not ‘seek penalties for noncompliance with routine monitoring and reporting obligations.’” TheHill.com, March 26^th.

Having diverted and delayed desperately needed medical supplies and equipment from reaching states where the governors have been critical of Trump’s handling of the pandemic (e.g., Michigan and Washington), with the Trump administration taking proprietary federal ownership over federal emergency reserves (“The notion of the federal stockpile was it's supposed to be our [federal] stockpile.” Jared Kushner on April 2^nd), the Trump administration is going to states that received some of those supplies… and taking them back, even from areas with heavy infection rates:

“Although President Trump has directed states and hospitals to secure what supplies they can, the federal government is quietly seizing orders, leaving medical providers across the country in the dark about where the materials are going and how they can get what they need to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

“Hospital and clinic officials in seven states described the seizures in interviews over the last week. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is not publicly reporting the acquisitions, despite the outlay of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, nor has the administration detailed how it decides which supplies to seize and where to reroute them.

“Officials who’ve had materials seized say they’ve received no guidance from the government about how or if they will get access to the supplies they ordered. That has stoked concerns about how public funds are being spent and whether the Trump administration is fairly distributing scarce medical supplies…

“The medical leaders on the front lines of the fight to control the coronavirus say they are grasping for explanations. ‘We can’t get any answers,’ said a California hospital official who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation from the White House… In Florida, a large medical system saw a shipment of thermometers taken away. And officials at a system in Massachusetts were unable to determine where its order of masks went… ‘Are they stockpiling this stuff? Are they distributing it? We don’t know,’ one official said. And are we going to ever get any of it back if we need supplies? It would be nice to know these things.’” Los Angeles Times, April 8^th.

Want more evidence that the Trump administration doesn’t know what it doing? “As the Trump administration depleted the national stockpile of medical supplies over the last month to fight the coronavirus, it sent hundreds of thousands of masks, respirators and other protective equipment to states with very small outbreaks, new records show.

“That left medical workers in areas hit hardest by the pandemic, including New York, New Jersey, Michigan and Washington, hustling to find the supplies they needed with relatively little aid from the stockpile. Yet Hawaii, Montana and Nebraska, which each have had fewer than 500 recorded cases, each received more than 79,000 of the critically needed N95 masks.

“The distribution of scarce medical equipment has emerged as a key point of controversy in the administration’s response, as states have been left to scramble on their own to get what they need. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services have refused to divulge details of what equipment was going to what states.” LA Times.

 We have a rising dictator wannabe beginning to achieve his power-centric aspirations. Those states that have been the most effective in containing the pandemic have been those that began to take steps and impose strict distancing restrictions earlier in defiance of the President’s platitudes and false projections. Those that followed Trump revolving door of misstatements and contradictions have fared the worst.

But Donald Trump as a dictator has a huge set of issues he cannot control. COVID-19 does not care if it is investigated, if it is vilified in the press, lied about, lied to, marginalized or denied. It cannot be arrested, executive-ordered out of existence, defeated with missiles or rendered illegal. Pandemic reality just is… always showing obviously false statements for what they are. Other than rely on those self-same scientific and medical elites that Trump and so many of his anti-science followers despise, Trump cannot unilaterally stop this virus. He is helpless… powerless… and he hates that. But he can continue to make it worse.

Letting America go back to work too early, for example, places the nation at severe risk for a “second wave.” Trump has taken so many distorted steps so far that he has accelerated the spread of the disease and made its containment that much more difficult. He has led this nation to one set of statistics that lead the world: we have the highest number of infected individuals and the highest number of fatalities on earth. And remember, the United States has six times the per capita infection/mortality rate of South Korea. Leadership and planning made the difference.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and seriously, think what would happen if Trump and friends were able to contain the election (they cannot seem to contain the virus) to secure Trump and GOP domination in November.