Keystone XL Pipeline Canceled. Here’s What It Means for the Future Fight Against Fossil Fuels

Keystone XL Pipeline Canceled. Here’s What It Means for the Future Fight Against Fossil Fuels

No KXL sign held up at a 2011 rally in front of the White House
Keystone XL protest at the white house in Washington D.C, on November 6, 2011. Credit: Emma Cassidy, via tarsandaction.

 

President Joe Biden, in one of his first actions after entering the White House, signed an executive order Wednesday canceling the permit for the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline. The move blocks construction of the 1,200-mile pipeline, and puts an end to a saga that has persisted for more than a decade.

The cross-border pipeline would have carried 830,000 barrels per day of Canadian tar sands oil to the Gulf of Mexico, where it would be refined and exported, providing a crucial outlet for landlocked oil from Alberta. But the mundane infrastructure project became a symbol of the broader fight against climate change, sparking a sustained campaign against drilling and fossil fuel infrastructure across the continent.

“We only achieve huge wins like this by speaking out together,” Madonna Thunder Hawk of the Lakota People’s Law Project said in a statement. “Rescinding KXL’s permit is a promising early signal that the new administration is listening to our concerns and will take issues of climate and Indigenous justice seriously. We have to insist that it not stop there.”

The cancelation of Keystone XL cements a legacy of climate activism, a movement that has grown into a powerful force in American politics. The end of the pipeline is also a major victory for the many Native American tribes who have consistently been at the forefront of battles against fossil fuel infrastructure.

At the same time, many more pipelines are under construction or are on the drawing board, having eclipsed Keystone XL long ago in terms of importance to the industry.

In 2015, then-President Barack Obama denied a key permit for the project, citing the need to lead on climate, a move that at the time seemed like the final word on the matter. However, President Donald Trump immediately revived the pipeline proposal when he assumed office in 2017.

Despite the backing of the U.S. government, the pipeline project faced some legal hurdles during the Trump era that delayed construction. President Biden’s executive order issued on January 20 once again puts the project on ice. TC Energy, the pipeline’s sponsor, said it would suspend operations and “consider its options.”

We applaud President Biden’s swift action to rescind Keystone XL’s improperly obtained permits and stop this disastrous project in its tracks yet again,” David Turnbull, Strategic Communications Director at Oil Change International, said in a statement. “Keystone XL would be a disaster for our climate, a disaster for First Nations communities at the source of the tar sands in Canada, and a disaster for communities across a broad swath of our country along its route.”

The Power of Activism

The fatal blow to Keystone XL is a major victory for a coalition of opponents who have fought the fossil fuel project for well over a decade. The fight defined a new era for the environmental movement.

In the early Obama years, national environmental groups placed a lot of faith in legislative efforts at the federal level without building power at the grassroots — a strategy then symbolized by the failed cap-and-trade bill in 2009. In the wake of that defeat, and with the legislative route cut off after Republicans swept the House of Representatives in 2010, the Obama administration turned to executive action. One of those key moves included introducing in 2014 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan to regulate climate emissions from power plants, though its implementation was eventually blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court as the plan was ensnared in legal challenges.

At that point, environmental groups took the climate fight to the grassroots level. And instead of looking at market-based solutions like cap-and-trade, they turned to a “keep it in the ground” strategy, focusing on blocking new supplies of oil, gas, and coal, as well as fossil fuel infrastructure.

And the science supports activists’ calls to keep fossil fuels in the ground. The United Nations says that governments need to wind down fossil fuel production at a rate of six percent per year over the next decade in order to have a shot at meeting a 1.5-degree Celsius warming target and avoiding catastrophic climate impacts.

This anti-fossil fuel development push, however, was not embraced universally by all environmental groups, and conflicted with President Obama’s “all of the above” mantra when it came to the types of energy actions and solutions he would pursue, but the keep-it-in-the-ground strategy became increasingly mainstream for activists in the second Obama term and into the Trump era.

Amid this rising grassroots action to stop the Keystone XL pipeline came an increasing awareness and recognition on behalf of environmental groups of the importance of Indigenous Rights and concepts related to environmental justice, broadening the narrow focus on greenhouse gases that had characterized many prior efforts.

This awareness, however, did not always come easily. “It has always been a challenge for folks to understand the strategic value of an Indigenous Rights framework when it comes to protecting land and water,” Dallas Goldtooth, an organizer with the Indigenous Environment Network, told DeSmog via email.

Indeed, Indigenous peoples have been at the forefront of pipeline resistance since the earliest days of Keystone XL. Goldtooth pointed out that the fight against Keystone XL began with First Nations Dene families in Northern Alberta who lived close to toxic tar sands operations.

And the campaign against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 was led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe along with other Indigenous peoples and, to a lesser extent, non-Native allies. Today, some of the largest campaigns against pipelines are also led by Indigenous peoples, including opposition to Line 3, the Trans Mountain Expansion, and the Coastal GasLink pipeline.

More Projects in the Pipeline

But while the defeat of Keystone XL is historically momentous, it raises questions about other routes for Canadian tar sands. After sitting on the drawing board for years, Canada’s oil industry has already turned to alternative pipelines, such as Enbridge’s Line 3 replacement through Minnesota and, even more importantly, the Trans Mountain Expansion from Alberta to British Columbia.

With Line 3 and TMX [Trans Mountain Expansion], Alberta has sufficient capacity to get its oil to market,” Werner Antweiler, a business professor at the University of British Columbia, told DeSmog.

In fact, scrapping Keystone XL arguably makes these other projects more urgent. “For the federal government of Canada, which has a vested interest in the commercial success of TMX, the cancelation of the KXL project may ultimately be good news because it ensures that there is sufficient demand for TMX capacity,” Antweiler said. “This means it is more likely now that TMX will become commercially viable and can be sold back to private investors profitably after construction is complete.”

This at a time when Keystone XL proved to be an expensive gamble. In 2019, Alberta invested $1.1 billion in Keystone XL in order to add momentum to the controversial project, funding its first year of construction. Now the province may end up selling the vast quantities of pipe for scrap, while also hoping to obtain damages from the United States.

Others are less convinced that the cancelation of one project is a boon to another. Even the Trans Mountain Expansion faces uncertainties in a world of energy transition. “Looking back a century ago, as one-by-one carriage manufacturers shut down as car manufacturers expanded production, prospects for the remaining carriage manufacturers didn’t improve,” Tom Green, a Climate Solutions Policy Analyst at the David Suzuki Foundation, told DeSmog.

Canada can take its cue from Biden: recognize the costly Trans Mountain pipeline isn’t needed or viable, it doesn’t fit with our climate commitments, and instead of throwing ever more money into a pit, government should invest those funds in the energy system of the future,” he said.

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include a statement from Oil Change International.

U.S. and Canada underestimating climate risk from abandoned oil and gas wells: study

U.S. and Canada underestimating climate risk from abandoned oil and gas wells: study

Nichola Groom                      January 20, 2021

FILE PHOTO: An abandoned natural gas well stands on the property of Hanson Rower in Salyersville

 

(Reuters) – Methane leaking out of the more than 4 million abandoned oil and gas wells in the United States and Canada is a far greater contributor to climate change than government estimates suggest, researchers from McGill University said on Wednesday.

Canada has underestimated methane emissions from its abandoned wells by as much as 150%, while official U.S. estimates are about 20% below actual levels, the study, published in Environmental Science and Technology, found.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Environment and Climate Change Canada did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the study.

More than a century of oil and gas drilling has left behind millions of abandoned wells around the globe, posing a serious threat https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-drilling-abandoned-specialreport/special-report-millions-of-abandoned-oil-wells-are-leaking-methane-a-climate-menace-idUSKBN23N1NL to the climate that governments are only starting to understand, according to a Reuters special report last year.

Methane has more than 80 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide in its first 20 years in the atmosphere.

In 2019, methane emissions from abandoned wells were included for the first time in U.S. and Canadian greenhouse gas inventories submitted to the United Nations.

But the McGill study found there are about 500,000 wells in the United States that are undocumented along with about 60,000 in Canada. It also found that the EPA and ECCC had come up with emissions estimates that were far too low – a conclusion the researchers said was based on their own analysis of emissions levels from different types of abandoned wells in seven U.S. states and two Canadian provinces.

Emissions measurements were also not available from major oil and gas-producing states and provinces like Texas and Alberta, adding to uncertainty around the official data, the study said.

The study was co-authored by McGill professor Mary Kang, who in 2014 was the first to measure methane emissions from old drilling sites in Pennsylvania.

(Reporting by Nichola Groom; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

Mary Schmich: A Catholic pastor speaks out about Trump. Some parishioners walk out

Mary Schmich: A Catholic pastor speaks out about Trump. Some parishioners walk out

Mary Schmich, Chicago Tribune                     January 19, 2021
With new rules in place, parishes reopen for Masses - Chicagoland - Chicago  Catholic
On the Sunday morning after the deadly riot at the United States Capitol, Father William Corcoran put on his black suit and clerical collar and stepped into St. Elizabeth Seton church in the Chicago suburb of Orland Hills to celebrate the 7:30 a.m. Mass.

 

When it was time for the homily, he stood in front of the “celebrant’s chair” on the altar and removed his mask so that he could be clearly heard. He looked out at the 140 or so masked parishioners who sat in the sanctuary, which was still ornamented for Christmas.

He had a feeling this might not go well.

At the 5 p.m. Mass the day before, nine people had walked out as he delivered the remarks he prepared to say again now. He spoke without notes both times but figures he came close to the version eventually published in the church bulletin, which began like this:

“On this Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, we drink in the last goodness and glories of the Christmas season, and begin ordinary time on Monday.”

So far, so good. Then came the next sentence.

“Goodness and glory,” he continued, “are not two words that we would use describing our past week when we saw an angry and violent mob seize our United States Capitol and interrupt Congress in its duty of certifying the State Elector votes for President and Vice-President. Such an action has left many of us angry, and hurt. Since then we have entered a typical moment of finger pointing, blame, and holding people responsible for what happened. Such finger pointing is not new. In the very story of creation Adam points his finger at Eve for tempting him with the apple, and Eve points to the snake as the cause for all the trouble. Finger pointing often leads to avoidance of responsibility.”

Those words alone would have shaken some parishioners. The most remarkable part, however, was still to come.

“I too want to engage in finger pointing,” said Father Bill, as he’s known in the parish, “and point to myself, and accept personal responsibility in part for what happened in the Capitol this past Wednesday.”

Corcoran went on to name the many times he failed to speak out about Donald Trump’s ugly behavior. Like when the president talked about grabbing women. When he mocked a disabled reporter. When he dissed John McCain.

He talked about the German Catholic Church’s failure to condemn Adolf Hitler, about the failure of the American Catholic Church when faced with the sexual abuse committed by priests.

“As President Trump has lied about so many things,” he told the congregation, “I have never spoken out, and fear we are teaching the young that truth and facts do not matter.”

By Corcoran’s count, a dozen people walked out of Mass that morning. Nearly two dozen more at the 9:30 Mass. “Probably 30,” he estimates, at the 11:30.

Each time he was startled. Saddened. “Awful,” is how he described it later.

And each time he knew he was doing what he had to do.

Corcoran’s struggle with speaking out reflects the struggle many Americans have faced during Donald Trump’s tenure. If speaking out against the president hurts people you care for, do you do it? Do you do it at the risk of being misunderstood or vilified? If you do it, how do you do it, and when?

Corcoran is approaching 65 and he’s been a priest for nearly 40 years. He grew up as the older brother to four sisters in a German-Irish neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side where people identified by Catholic parish. His was Little Flower. He has spent eight years as pastor at St. Elizabeth Seton, a large congregation he describes as middle to upper-middle class.

“Solid citizens,” he says. “Very nice people.”

Corcoran sees one of his jobs as “keeping people together.” Until recently, he worried that denouncing Trump’s behavior would divide the congregation unnecessarily. The Capitol insurrection changed his mind.

“To remain silent now, in the face of this violence,” he says, “was to give tacit permission that this is how we settle some things.”

After he spoke out, Corcoran received calls and emails from several upset parishioners. Some said they come to church to find peace and instead they’d found confrontation. Some had questions: Why hadn’t he condemned the looting that sprang from last summer’s racial justice protests? Why doesn’t he speak out more against abortion?

“One that struck me very hard was someone who didn’t feel welcome or that, because they support Trump, they don’t belong here anymore,” he says.

In the past week, as he talked to distressed parishioners, he has questioned himself: Could he have called out the violence without naming Trump? Should he have waited a couple of weeks when feelings weren’t so raw? He keeps coming back to one word: no.

Still, he’s “sorrowful” over the hurt felt by those who walked out.

“The people who walked out are my parishioners,” he says. “I’m obligated to care for them as well.”

But maybe, he thinks, caring for them means speaking the truth.

“When you lance a boil, it’s messy, it’s painful, it’s smelly,” he says. “But it lets the poison out. We need to let some poison out of the system for the process of healing.”

Corcoran has taken consolation from the many parishioners who are relieved that he finally spoke up. Some have thanked him for being courageous, a word he waves away.

“I didn’t think it was courageous,” he said. “I thought it was necessary.”

Legacy of lies — how Trump weaponized mistruths during his presidency

ABC News

Legacy of lies — how Trump weaponized mistruths during his presidency

Trump has riddled his presidency with false and misleading statements.

 

 

President Donald Trump is not a beacon of truth.

In the best light, Trump was seen as occasionally struggling with the truth. As someone who espoused “truthful hyperbole,” Trump’s supporters viewed him as a showman who sometimes exaggerated, but ultimately fulfilled his most important promises, such as filling the Supreme Court with conservative judges.

But many took a decidedly darker view. His critics and even a number of supporters say something far more sinister and pervasive was at work — Trump weaponizing misinformation, or and even lies, to achieve his goals. The president advanced falsehoods on everything from the mundane to what some called the “big lie” — that the 2020 election was stolen, a repeated assertion that ended in the Capitol Siege.

In the current political landscape he nurtured, truth seekers – whether scientists, academics, journalists or intelligence agency officials — were often attacked, or in some inspector general’s cases, fired, simply because the facts unavoidably collided with the alternate reality created in the White House — one amplified by Trump’s allies in Congress and right-wing media.

 

The Washington Post Fact Checker’s ongoing database of false or misleading claims made by Trump since assuming office stands at more than 30,500.

Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist and author of “Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul” told ABC News she viewed Trump’s “pattern of lying seems to consist of beginning with a conscious lie intended to deceive others — or to cover up who he really is — but as more people believe him and the adulations of crowds gratify him in irresistible ways, he comes to believe in his own lies.”

“He has adopted almost a practice of preferentially lying over telling the truth,” she added. “His grandiose sense of himself, on the other hand, does not allow for any possibility that he is wrong.”

Here are four memorable falsehoods from Trump’s presidency to show how Trump repeatedly shaded the truth on matters great and small:

TRUMP: The presidential election was ‘rigged’ and ‘stolen.’

TRUTH: Joe Biden legally won the election.

Whether Trump believed it or not, he peddled a conspiracy theory that the election was “stolen” from him and unfairly handed to President-elect Joe Biden. His constant complaint in his final weeks of campaigning was one he had made repeatedly primed his supporters for in the past: the election would be “rigged” against him.

He ramped up “the big lie” after Biden was projected to win the presidency.

Trump and his allies brought at least 60 lawsuits challenging the 2020 elections to date, ending with only a single court victory related to voter ID laws — which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court later overturned. Former Attorney General Bill Barr also said in December the Justice Department found no evidence of fraud able to overturn the election.

Despite being unable to substantiate his bold claim, Trump made it a topic for debate, and his allies in Congress helped breathe life into the claim. The election lie culminated on Jan. 6, 2021 when thousands of Trump’s supporters marched on the Capitol after his urging at a “Save America Rally” at the Ellipse, a park near the White House, demanding Vice President Mike Pence stop Congress from affirming Biden’s victory.

 

“Make no mistake, this election was stolen from me, from you, and from the country,” Trump told a crowd of thousands of angry supporters.

The subsequent siege on the Capitol left at least five people dead and burned images into history of a desecrated U.S. Capitol. But experts argue the entire event might have been stopped sooner had Trump admitted the truth to his supporters — that there was no legal way the election could be overturned in his favor.

Asked whether Trump will ever be able to admit the loss, and thus the lie, Lee, who is also currently president of the World Mental Health Coalition, said, “Probably not.”

She said people like Trump have an “apparent fragile sense of self” which makes it difficult to receive criticism or disapproval. “This makes him more likely to fall into a psychotic spiral in the situation of a major rejection, such as election defeat, rather than admit loss,” Lee said. “And this is, indeed, what has happened,” Lee said.

 

Robert Erikson, a political science professor at Columbia University, agreed that Trump “makes up the truth that he wants to be true.”

“He can never be wrong, and that’s why losing is such a blow to him. He convinces himself and everyone else that he really won the election in a landslide. He can’t fill in the blanks about how this fraud occurred — because it’s just total lunacy — but that’s what he wants people to believe,” Erikson said.

Erikson added that with Trump’s departure, the public might see Republican senators revert back to the truth, noting Republican Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell is “already done with Trump” in reportedly telling senators to vote their conscience in the upcoming impeachment trial on an article which stems from the election lie.

“If they don’t stand up for the truth, then they’re overestimating the power of this base that still wants them to falsely believe the election was stolen,” Erikson warned.

 

The most recent Gallup poll on Trump’s favorability found that he is leaving office with his lowest approval rating of his four years in office at 34%. Trump is the only president not to reach 50% approval rating during his time in office, since Gallup started polling the number in 1938.

But despite no evidence to support the view, according to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, one out of every three Americans — and two in every three Republicans — believes that there was widespread voter fraud in the presidential election, indicating damage on the country’s democratic institutions needing repairs far beyond the Capitol’s shattered glass.

TRUMP: The coronavirus pandemic is under control.

TRUTH: The US exceeded the White House’s 2020 death estimate by 100K lives.

One of the most dangerous lies of Trump’s involved the most serious threat to his presidency: his downplaying of the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump admitted to legendary journalist Bob Woodward in a phone call on Feb. 7 he knew the virus was “deadly,” airborne, and more serious than “your strenuous flus.” Meanwhile, in public and on Twitter, he compared the virus to the seasonal flu and dismissed climbing case numbers.

 

“I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic,” Trump said in a March 19 call with Woodward, according to an audio clip.

Trump, asked by ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl in September, “Why did you lie to the American people and why should we trust what you have to say now?” dismissed the question.

“That’s a terrible question and the phraseology. I didn’t lie. What I said is we have to be calm. We can’t be panicked.” Trump said, before Karl pressed again on the contradiction. “I want to show our country will be fine one way or the other whether we lose one person — we shouldn’t lose any.”

Trump also repeatedly spread misinformation about coronavirus testingmasks, unproven treatments — once claiming that injecting bleach might treat the virus before saying later he was being “sarcastic” — while attacking public health experts along the way who disputed his view that the virus wasn’t just going to “disappear.”

“I think Trump understands the facts about how bad COVID is and probably knows masks work, but he is always appealing to his base,” said Erikson. “What Trump always does — and what ordinary politicians do to not do — is always appealing to his base rather than expanding his base, and the virus didn’t fall in line with them.”

A year into the crisis, more than 400,000 Americans have died from COVID-19.

TRUMP: ‘We had the biggest audience in the history of inaugural speeches.’

TRUTH: Photos from previous inaugurations tell a different story.

The Trump administration kicked off with the lie mocked around the world when Trump used his first full day in office in 2017 to excoriate a media report that estimated the crowd size of his inauguration at 250,000 attendees as a “lie” and instead, to insist he saw at least one million people.

“We had a massive field of people, you saw that. Packed,” Trump said in a speech at the Central Intelligence Agency. “I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks and they show … an empty field. I said, wait a minute, I made a speech! I looked out, the field was … it looked like a million, a million-and-a-half people.”

Later that day, he dispatched White House press secretary Sean Spicer, in Spicer’s first briefing room appearance, to claim “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”

 

Spicer did not provide evidence and acknowledged the National Park Service in 1995 stopped tallying crowd size on the National Mall. He instead offered varied explanations for why photos made it appear as if the crowd was smaller than the “massive” one Trump pushed. (This was described by then-senior counselor Kellyanne Conway as providing the media with “alternative facts.”)

PolitiFact, a nonprofit project operated by the Poynter Institute, estimates Trump’s inauguration saw between 250,000 and 600,000 attendees. Nielsen, which records the U.S. live television viewing figures, said an estimated 31 million people tuned in to watch the 2017 inauguration, about 19% lower than the number who watched Obama’s 2009 inauguration.

But the lie, made apparent by photos and footage, set the tone for a White House which would come to often contradict fact.

 

In Trump’s first interview as president, presented with his priorities in his first days of office, told ABC News he “won’t allow” anyone to “demean me unfairly, because we had a massive crowd of people.”

“I looked over that sea of people, and I said to myself, ‘wow’, and I’ve seen crowds before. Big, big crowds. That was some crowd,” Trump said. “We had the biggest audience in the history of inaugural speeches.”

“They were showing pictures that were very unflattering, as unflattering — from certain angles — that were taken early and lots of other things,” he added, maintaining his position, despite having no clear-cut evidence.

TRUMP: Alabama ‘will most likely be hit’ from Hurricane Dorian.

TRUTH: Alabama was not in the storm’s line, federal officials said.

In Sept. 2019, as Hurricane Dorian barreled toward Florida and Georgia, Trump tweeted that Alabama was one of the states at great risk from the storm’s wrath, saying it “will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.”

After Alabamians, and beyond, on Twitter went into a frenzy, the National Weather Service office in Birmingham soon tweeted that Alabama was not in the line of the storm.

But Trump, unwilling to admit the error, attempted to prove that his incorrect Alabama tweet was actually correct. After drawing widespread criticism for his inaccurate warning, Trump held up a map in an Oval Office briefing on Dorian that appeared to have a line drawn on it in black making it seem as if he had been right all along.

The event would later be known on social media as “Sharpiegate.”

The map Trump displayed had one addition not on the one disseminated by the National Hurricane Center: what appeared to be a drawn-on semicircle appended to the “cone of uncertainty” showing the hurricane’s potential projected impact — extending the cone into Alabama.

 

Hours after the Wednesday Dorian briefing, Trump denied knowing how or why the map had been altered when asked if he could explain how the change was made, saying. “No, I just know, yeah. I know that Alabama was in the original forecast.” White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley tweeted Wednesday night that the line was, in fact, from a black Sharpie, and he criticized the media for focusing on it.

Almost a week later, the National Weather Service’s parent organization, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also weighed in, disputing the earlier tweet and siding with Trump in an unsigned statement.

But many experts, including a former director of the National Hurricane Center, took the side of Birmingham forecasters on social media and called the parent statement was “so disappointing,” — illustrating how Trump’s falsehoods eroded the credibility of the institutions around him, too.

“Either NOAA Leadership truly agrees with what they posted or they were ordered to do it,” Bill Read wrote on Facebook. “If it is the former, the statement shows a lack of understanding of how to use probabilistic forecasts in conjunction with other forecast information. Embarrassing. If it is the latter, the statement shows a lack of courage on their part by not supporting the people in the field who are actually doing the work. Heartbreaking.”

As with most of Trump’s false or misleading statements, enabled by the power of the presidency and his allies, “Sharpiegate,” too, appeared to blow over.

ABC News’ Ben Gittleson, Jordyn Phelps and Meg Cunningham contributed to this report.

What does Biden’s diverse Cabinet mean for a divided country

CNN

Analysis: What does Biden’s diverse Cabinet mean for a divided country

January 18, 2021

 

Americans are demanding leaders atone for the forces of White supremacy that motivated a mob to storm the US Capitol on January 6 in its refusal to accept President Donald Trump’s loss. And people of color, despite their rising political power, have been among the communities hardest hit by the Covid-19 pandemic and other disparities.
Biden has achieved a historic feat that observers hope will help begin the process of repairing a broken country. The President-elect has the most racially diverse presidential Cabinet in the history of the US. A CNN analysis found that 50% of nominees for Cabinet positions and Cabinet-level positions are people of color. That figure includes Vice President-elect Kamala Harris who will be the first Black and South Asian person and first woman to hold the position. Former President Barack Obama set the previous record for diversity with a Cabinet that was 42% people of color.
Civil rights leaders have praised Biden for keeping his promise of creating a Cabinet that better reflects the country’s changing demographics. However, this is only the first step and they are cautiously optimistic.
Biden’s administration will be expected to enact policies that lead to substantive change for communities of color. The Cabinet will be judged on whether it can end the Covid-19 pandemic and ensure vaccine access to underserved communities, support voting rights legislation, revive the economy, push police reform that addresses the fact that Black people are killed by police at higher rates, and reverse Trump’s anti-immigration policies. Civil rights activists will also be looking for Biden to consider people of color for deputy roles in the Cabinet as well as judges and US attorneys.
“We believe that Biden’s Cabinet appointments are just the starting point for a slate of demands that Black people and other people of color have,” said Arisha Hatch, vice president of Color of Change. “For us, diversity is just table stakes. It’s like the baseline thing that needs to happen.”
Diversity on a ‘new level’
Biden will be turning the tide of a majority White and male Trump administration that was only 16% people of color.
Trump garnered criticism for the lack of diversity in his Cabinet and his failure to address issues of concern to communities of color.
Throughout Trump’s presidency, he used offensive rhetoric to target Muslims, Mexicans, Syrian refugees, Africans, congresswomen of color, and Black athletes protesting racial inequality.
During an impeachment hearing for Trump on Wednesday, Rep. Cori Bush, a freshman Democrat from Missouri, called Trump a White supremacist.
“If we fail to remove a White supremacist President who incited a White supremacist insurrection, it’s communities like Missouri’s first district that suffer the most,” Bush said during her speech. “The 117th Congress must understand that we have a mandate to legislate in defense of Black lives. The first step in that process is to root out White supremacy starting with impeaching the White supremacist in chief.”
A 2019 study by the Pew Research Center found that 56% of Americans believed that Trump made race relations worse in the US.
The country experienced a reckoning on racism last summer when mass protests erupted after the controversial police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans. Covid-19 exacerbated already existing health disparities as people of color have died from the virus at higher rates than White people.
Inequality has now become a central focus for this country and many social justice advocates are looking for Biden to right the wrongs of the Trump administration.
In December, lawmakers and civil rights groups pressured Biden to appoint Black, Latino and Asian nominees to his Cabinet, citing the nation’s heightened alert on race and justice.
Douglas Brinkley, a CNN presidential historian, said Biden’s diverse Cabinet is taking the White House to a “new level” that past presidents haven’t been able to accomplish.
Former President Bill Clinton, Brinkley said, attempted to create a diverse Cabinet when he chose four Black and two Hispanic department heads.
Still, Clinton came under fire for passing the 1994 Crime Bill, which strengthened law enforcement across the country, provided federal money for new cops and prisons, and ordered mandatory life sentences for repeat offenders. Critics say the bill led to mass incarceration of Black people. Biden, who authored the bill, has defended aspects of it while also calling it a “mistake” and blaming its negative impacts on state governments.
Brinkley said Biden and his Cabinet have an opportunity to disprove critics who say Democrats rely on voters of color but don’t meet their expectations.
“This is coming at a time when the Republican party seems to be doubling down on being the party of White Americans only,” Brinkley said. “There’s a feeling here of a last gasp of particularly White male privilege going on here and Biden is trying to shatter that impression of America by making sure his Cabinet is very diverse and that should be applauded.”
Falling short with Asian Americans

 

While Black and Latino leaders say they are pleased with the Cabinet picks, Biden did not meet the expectations of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus that asked for top-tier representation in the Cabinet.
Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial group in the nation and make up 6% of the US population.
Biden nominated two Asian people to Cabinet level positions. Neera Tanden will be the Office of Management and Budget Director and Katherine Tai was named US Trade Representative. Both will be the first Asian American women in their roles.
Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Chair and California Rep. Judy Chu called it “incredibly disheartening” that an Asian American Pacific Islander was not selected for a Cabinet secretary job for the first time since 2000.
“Despite the diversity amongst these Cabinets selections, we are deeply disappointed by the decision to exclude AAPIs from the 15 Cabinet Secretary positions who oversee executive departments in our government,” Chu said. “The glaring omission of an AAPI Cabinet Secretary in the self-declared ‘most diverse Cabinet in history’ is not lost on us and sends a demoralizing message to our nation’s fastest growing racial group and voting bloc that AAPIs do not need to be counted the same way as other key constituency groups.”
According to CNN exit polls, Asian Americans backed Biden at 61%.
Biden has promised to meet the concerns of AAPI’s including appointing them as judges and federal officials, protecting the Affordable Care Act to mitigate their barriers to healthcare access, fighting the rise in hate crimes against their community, and rescinding Trump’s Muslim ban.
A ‘milestone,’ but it’s only a first step

 

In December, Biden met with several Black civil rights leaders who pushed Biden to tap Black people for high level Cabinet roles and not just second-tier positions.
Many wanted Biden to pick a Black attorney general who would crack down on police violence in the Black community and voting rights. Biden ultimately selected Merrick Garland for the role.
Black Americans make up 12% of the US population and have faced oppression dating back to slavery and the Jim Crow era. Black people are also three times more likely than White people to be killed by police, according to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Biden ultimately picked five Black people for his Cabinet including incoming Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who will be the first Black person to lead the Pentagon, and Ohio Rep. Marcia Fudge, who was named HUD secretary. Other Black nominees include incoming EPA Administrator Michael Regan, who will be the first Black man to head the department; Cecilia Rouse, incoming chair of the Council of Economic Advisers and the first Black person to hold the post; and Linda Thomas-Greenfield will be U.N. Ambassador.
Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, was among the civil rights leaders who met with Biden and said the President-elect has achieved a “milestone” with this diverse Cabinet.
Morial said he believes their push for diversity was crucial to ensure Biden kept his word.
Now Biden will be charged with prioritizing equitable Covid-19 vaccine access, economic equality and increased funding for Black-owned businesses, voting rights and other issues affecting the Black community, Morial said.
“He has successfully gotten to first base,” Morial said. “I think for people who are fair minded and open minded, the truth is that the way people feel will very much be predicated on how they (Biden’s Cabinet) perform.”
Biden makes gains with Latinos
Latino leaders have also praised Biden for his Cabinet picks. Latinos hold the largest minority population in the country at 18%.
selected four Latino people for his Cabinet and three are Cabinet secretaries. The nominees include Xavier Becerra, for Secretary of Health and Human Services; Miguel Cardona for Secretary of Education, Alejandro Mayorkas for Secretary of Homeland Security; and Isabel Guzman who will be the Small Business Administrator. Becerra and Mayorkas will be the first Latinos to lead their departments.
Last week, the heads of UnidosUs, Hispanic Federation and other national groups met with Biden, Harris and their Hispanic Cabinet nominees to discuss the challenges facing the Latino community. Among the issues discussed were the devastating toll Covid-19 has had on Latino Americans, health care access, immigration, and jobs, the leaders said in a statement.
“The President-elect knows our people are hurting,” said Janet Murguía, UnidosUS President and CEO. “He wants to address the health and economic impact on the Latino community and understands the need to address systemic inequality by putting equity at the center of his economic and health care response. This feels like a new day, a huge change.”
Eric Rodriguez, senior vice president of UnidosUS, said he expects Biden to undo the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies that he called “cruel and heartless and gutless.”
Rodriguez said having a diverse Cabinet will help Biden gain the trust of people of color.
“Having that cultural experience and background is just so important to being able to communicate and get information from those communities,” Rodriguez said.
Native Americans celebrate historic appointment
Biden was also lauded by Native Americans when he nominated Deb Haaland for secretary of the Interior, which will make her the first Native American to lead a Cabinet agency.
Crystal Echo Hawk, executive director of IllumiNative, said she now wants to see Biden’s Cabinet boost funding for Covid-19 relief in Native American communities and ensure vaccine access. Echo Hawk said Native Americans have been sickened or dying from Covid-19 at high rates because of the “deliberate and long-term under-funding” of their health care systems.
Native Americans are also asking Biden to undo the repeated attempts by the Trump administration to undermine tribal sovereignty over their lands and sacred sites, suspend Trump’s decision to lease drilling rights on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and rebuild the relationship between tribal leaders and the federal government, Echo Hawk said.
“We are encouraged to see these strides toward political representation that looks like the United States and the constituents the Cabinet serves,” Echo Hawk said. “However, this must be accompanied by policies that transform the systems of power that have shutout Native, Black, Latinx, and other communities of color for generations.”

Billionaires backed Republicans who sought to reverse US election results

The Guardian

Billionaires backed Republicans who sought to reverse US election results

Guardian analysis shows Club for Growth has spent $20m supporting 42 rightwing lawmakers who voted to invalidate Biden victory.

Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington              January 15, 2021

The Club for Growth’s biggest beneficiaries include Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, above, the duo who led the effort to overturn the election result.

The Club for Growth’s biggest beneficiaries include Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, above, the duo who led the effort to overturn the election result. Photograph: Erin Scott/EPA

An anti-tax group funded primarily by billionaires has emerged as one of the biggest backers of the Republican lawmakers who sought to overturn the US election results, according to an analysis by the Guardian.

The Club for Growth has supported the campaigns of 42 of the rightwing Republicans senators and members of the House of Representatives who voted last week to challenge US election results, doling out an estimated $ 20m to directly and indirectly support their campaigns in 2018 and 2020, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

About 30 of the Republican hardliners received more than $100,000 in indirect and direct support from the group.

The Club for Growth’s biggest beneficiaries include Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, the two Republican senators who led the effort to invalidate Joe Biden’s electoral victory, and the newly elected far-right gun-rights activist Lauren Boebert, a QAnon conspiracy theorist. Boebert was criticized last week for tweeting about the House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s location during the attack on the Capitol, even after lawmakers were told not to do so by police.

Public records show the Club for Growth’s largest funders are the billionaire Richard Uihlein, the Republican co-founder of the Uline shipping supply company in Wisconsin, and Jeffrey Yass, the co-founder of Susquehanna International Group, an options trading group based in Philadelphia that also owns a sports betting company in Dublin.

While Uihlein and Yass have kept a lower profile than other billionaire donors such as Michael Bloomberg and the late Sheldon Adelson, their backing of the Club for Growth has helped to transform the organization from one traditionally known as an anti-regulatory and anti-tax pro-business pressure group to one that backs some of the most radical and anti-democratic Republican lawmakers in Congress.

“Here’s the thing about the hyper wealthy. They believe that their hyper-wealth grants them the ability to not be accountable. And that is not the case. If you’ve made billions of dollars, good on you. But that doesn’t make you any less accountable for funding anti-democratic or authoritarian candidates and movements,” said Reed Galen, a former Republican strategist who co-founded the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump campaigners.

Galen said he believed groups such as the Club for Growth now served to cater to Republican donors’ own personal agenda, and not what used to be considered “conservative principles”.

The Lincoln Project has said it would devote resources to putting pressure not just on Hawley, which the group accused of committing sedition, but also on his donors.

The Club for Growth has so far escaped scrutiny for its role supporting the anti-democratic Republicans because it does not primarily make direct contributions to candidates. Instead, it uses its funds to make “outside” spending decisions, like attacking a candidate’s opponents.

The newly elected far-right gun-rights activist Lauren Boebert, a QAnon conspiracy theorist, is a beneficiary of the Club for Growth.
The newly elected far-right gun-rights activist Lauren Boebert, a QAnon conspiracy theorist, is a beneficiary of the Club for Growth. Photograph: Us House Of Representatives Handout/EPA

 

In 2018, Club for Growth spent nearly $3m attacking the Democratic senator Claire McCaskill in Missouri, a race that was ultimately won by Hawley, the 41-year-old Yale law graduate with presidential ambitions who has amplified Donald Trump’s baseless lies about election fraud.

That year, it also spent $1.2m to attack the Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who challenged – and then narrowly lost – against Cruz.

Other legislators supported by Club for Growth include Matt Rosendale, who this week called for the resignation of fellow Republican Liz Cheney after she said she would support impeachment of the president, and Lance Gooden, who accused Pelosi of being just as responsible for last week’s riot as Trump.

Dozens of the Republicans supported by Club for Growth voted to challenge the election results even after insurrectionist stormed the Capitol, which led to five deaths, including the murder of a police officer.

Neither the Club for Growth nor McIntosh responded to requests for comment.

Public records show that Richard Uihlein, whose family founded Schlitz beer, donated $27m to the Club for Growth in 2020, and $6.7m in 2018. Uihlein and his wife, Liz, have been called “the most powerful conservative couple you’ve never heard of” by the New York Times. Richard Uihlein, the New York Times said, was known for underwriting “firebrand anti-establishment” candidates like Roy Moore, who Uihlein supported in a Senate race even after it was alleged he had sexually abused underage girls. Moore denied the allegations.

A spokesman for the Uihleins declined to comment.

Yass of Susquehanna International, who is listed on public documents as having donated $20.7m to the Club for Growth in 2020 and $3.8m in 2018, also declined to comment. Yass is one of six founders of Susquehanna, called a “crucial engine of the $5tn global exchange-traded fund market” in a 2018 Bloomberg News profile. The company was grounded on the basis of the six founders mutual love of poker and the notion that training for “probability-based” decisions could be useful in trading markets. Susquehanna’s Dublin-based company, Nellie Analytics, wagers on sports.

In a 2020 conference on the business of sports betting, Yass said sports betting was a $250bn industry globally, but that with “help” from legislators, it could become a trillion-dollar industry.

A 2009 profile of Yass in Philadelphia magazine described how secrecy pervades Susquehanna, and that people who know the company say “stealth” is a word often used to describe its modus operandi. The article suggested Yass was largely silent about his company because he does not like to share what he does and how, and that those who know him believe he is “very nervous” about his own security.

Yass, who is described in some media accounts as a libertarian, also donated to the Protect America Pac, an organization affiliated with Republican senator Rand Paul. The Pac’s website falsely claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election.

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Johnson & Johnson Is Working on a COVID-19 Vaccine That Requires a Single Dose

Johnson & Johnson Is Working on a COVID-19 Vaccine That Requires a Single Dose

Korin Miller                              January 18, 2021
Photo credit: Stefan Cristian Cioata - Getty Images
Photo credit: Stefan Cristian Cioata – Getty Images – From Prevention

 

While Pfizer and Moderna both have COVID-19 vaccines authorized for emergency use in the U.S., other vaccine candidates are still in the works, including a single-dose option from Johnson & Johnson, which has about 45,000 people enrolled in ongoing phase 3 clinical trials. According to early data just released by the company, this vaccine also shows major promise.

Interim phase 1/2a data were published on Jan. 13 in the New England Journal of Medicine, and the results show the company’s vaccine candidate created an immune response in patients for at least 71 days—the full length of time measured in the study so far.

The vaccine was also “generally well-tolerated” in study participants, Johnson & Johnson said in a press release. While the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are similar, Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine also has plenty of differences. Here’s what we know so far, plus what lies ahead.

How does the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine work?

Johnson & Johnson has an andenovector vaccine, which uses double-stranded DNA to promote an immune response in the body. This technology works differently than the mRNA vaccines available from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which both use single-stranded RNA.

In the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, researchers added a piece of genetic material from the novel coronavirus’ spike protein (the piece that latches onto human cells) into another virus, Adenovirus 26, which was modified so it has the ability to enter cells but not reproduce inside of them. Adenoviruses are common viruses that usually cause cold-like symptoms, but because the one used in the vaccine was altered and cannot replicate, it can’t make you sick. (Other COVID-19 vaccines, including Oxford and AstraZeneca’s candidate, uses similar adenovirus technology.)

When you get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the modified adenovirus carrying a piece of the spike protein latches onto the surface of your cells. It’s pulled inside, where the modified virus travels to the cell nucleus, home to its DNA. The adenovirus then puts its DNA into the nucleus, the spike protein gene is read by the cell, and it’s then copied into messenger RNA (mRNA).

After that, the mRNA leaves the nucleus and serves as a set of instructions for other cells, so they begin making spike proteins. Those are then recognized by your immune system, and your body reacts by producing antibodies to the perceived threat (even though no threat exists).

Your immune system cells then remember how to fight the distinct piece of SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, so if you come into contact with it in the future, your body will have the capability to fight it more efficiently.

This technology is unique but Johnson & Johnson has a lot of experience with it, as it’s already been used for its Ebola vaccine. “They’ve given hundreds of thousands of doses of this similar vaccine,” which has had no major safety issues, says William Schaffner, M.D., an infectious disease specialist and professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

While it’s still being tested, Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine may only require one shot rather than two. Its trials so far have found that giving both one or two doses of the vaccine spurred an effective immune responses against SARS-CoV-2 in study participants, but nothing is set in stone until phase 3 clinical trials are complete and the company has enough data to support its single dose.

How effective is the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine?

It’s not entirely clear at this point. Published data from the early stage trials found that more than 90% of people who were vaccinated developed neutralizing antibodies (which are expected to stop SARS-CoV-2 from infecting your cells) 29 days after they received the first dose of the vaccine. Two months after the first dose, all participants had developed neutralizing antibodies, which stayed put for at least 71 days.

What are the side effects of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine?

According to the data so far, it may cause “mild-to-moderate side effects typically associated with vaccinations,” similar to those expected from the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. This includes cold-like symptoms, like a headache, body aches, pain at the injection site, and a fever—a normal sign that the body’s immune response is being primed.

How is the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine stored?

One of the biggest perks of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is its durability. Because it doesn’t harbor delicate mRNA like the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines (which need to stay frozen), it’s much less fragile and can stay stable in a normal refrigerator (36–46°F) for up to three months.

“That’s a big advantage,” says Thomas Russo, M.D., professor and chief of infectious disease at the University at Buffalo in New York. Safely storing the other available vaccines, particularly the Pfizer vaccine (which needs to be kept at a frigid -94°F), presents challenges for the average doctor’s office or pharmacy, as most locations don’t have specialty freezers that reach those temperatures.

When will it be granted an emergency use authorization by the FDA?

“It’s too soon to say because we don’t have phase 3 clinical data yet,” says infectious disease expert Amesh A. Adalja, M.D., senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

However, he’s hopeful, because “the phase 2 clinical trial results look strong.” Dr. Russo agrees that “as of right now, there are no major concerns with the safety signals.”

Johnson & Johnson’s phase 3 clinical trial is expected to wrap up by mid-February. If everything checks out, the company can apply for emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Dr. Russo says. Once the FDA grants its approval, it’s possible that the vaccine could be authorized sometime in March.

In August, the company signed a $1 billion contract with the federal government, pledging to produce 12 million doses of its vaccine by February and 100 million doses by the end of June. However, The New York Times reports production may be about two months behind schedule.

Will you get to choose which COVID-19 vaccine you get?

At this point, that doesn’t seem likely. “In this initial phase of vaccinations, there’s probably not going to be much of a choice for people,” Dr. Adalja says. Rather, the health department or agency administering the vaccine will make the decision, mostly based on which vaccine is readily available in a specific area.

But a lot of this really comes down to what the data will say. “Exactly how effective is this vaccine?” Dr. Schaffner says. “If there’s a noteworthy difference, that might change things.”

Almost a third of recovered Covid patients return to hospital in five months and one in eight die

Almost a third of recovered Covid patients return to hospital in five months and one in eight die

Sarah Knapton                           January 17, 2021
Paramedics transport a patient from the ambulance to the emergency department at the the Royal London Hospital - Barcroft Media 
Paramedics transport a patient from the ambulance to the emergency department at the the Royal London Hospital – Barcroft Media

 

Almost a third of recovered Covid patients will end up back in hospital within five months and one in eight will die, alarming new figures have shown.

Research by Leicester University and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found there is a devastating long-term toll on survivors of severe coronavirus, with many people developing heart problems, diabetes and chronic liver and kidney conditions.

Out of 47,780 people who were discharged from hospital in the first wave, 29.4 per cent were readmitted to hospital within 140 days, and 12.3 per cent of the total died.

The current cut-off point for recording Covid deaths is 28 days after a positive test, so it may mean thousands more people should be included in the coronavirus death statistics.

Researchers have called for urgent monitoring of people who have been discharged from hospital.

Study author Kamlesh Khunti, professor of primary care diabetes and vascular medicine at Leicester University, said: “This is the largest study of people discharged from hospital after being admitted with Covid.

“People seem to be going home, getting long-term effects, coming back in and dying. We see nearly 30 per cent have been readmitted, and that’s a lot of people. The numbers are so large.

“The message here is we really need to prepare for long Covid. It’s a mammoth task to follow up with these patients and the NHS is really pushed at the moment, but some sort of monitoring needs to be arranged.”

The study found that Covid survivors were nearly three and a half times more likely to be readmitted to hospital, and die, in the 140 days timeframe than other hospital outpatients.

Prof Khunti said the team had been surprised to find that many people were going back in with a new diagnosis, and many had developed heart, kidney and liver problems, as well as diabetes.

He said it was important to make sure people were placed on protective therapies, such as statins and aspirin.

“We don’t know if it’s because Covid destroyed the beta cells which make insulin and you get Type 1 diabetes, or whether it causes insulin resistance, and you develop Type 2, but we are seeing these surprising new diagnoses of diabetes,” he added.

“We’ve seen studies where survivors have had MRS scans and they’ve cardiac problems and liver problems.

“These people urgently require follow up and the need to be on things like aspirin and statins.”

The new study was published on a pre-print server and is yet to be peer reviewed. However experts described the paper as “important”.

Commenting on the study on Twitter, Christina Pagel, director of the clinical operational research unit at University College London said: “This is such important work. Covid is about so much more than death. A significant burden of long-term illness after hospitalization for Covid.”

Last year, researchers at North Bristol NHS Trust found that three quarters of virus patients treated at Bristol’s Southmead Hospital were still experiencing problems three months later.

Symptoms included breathlessness, excessive fatigue and muscle aches, leaving people struggling to wash, dress and return to work.

Some patients say they have been left needing a wheelchair since contracting the virus, while others claim they can no longer walk up the stairs without experiencing chest pain.

In December, the ONS estimated that one in 10 people who catch coronavirus go on to suffer long Covid with symptoms lasting three months or more.

Overall, roughly 186,000 people in private households in England in the week beginning November 22 were living with Covid-19 symptoms that had persisted for between five and 12 weeks, the most up-to-date ONS data shows.

Editorial: Our disastrous president

Editorial: Our disastrous president

President Donald Trump stops to talk to reporters and members of the media as he walks to Marine One to depart from the South Lawn at the White House on Friday, March 22, 2019. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford ** Usable by LA, BS, CT, DP, FL, HC, MC, OS, SD, CGT and CCT **
President Trump stops to talk to reporters as he walks to Marine One to depart from the South Lawn at the White House on March 22, 2019. (Jabin Botsford / Washington Post)

 

Having failed in his effort to thwart the voters’ will and hold on to power, Donald J. Trump will leave the White House under the cloud of a second impeachment and facing the humiliation of a trial in the Senate for inciting an insurrection. But the Trump administration didn’t just end badly; it was a disaster from the start.

The question of whether Trump has been the worst president in American history can be debated, but he clearly was one of the worst. He deserves that infamous description not primarily because of poor policy decisions — though there were plenty of those — but because of his defects of character and temperament.

Yes, there have been presidents with personal failings who nevertheless exercised strong leadership and respected democratic institutions. But from the time Trump took office he displayed a constellation of flaws — narcissism, mendacity, an exaggerated view of his own ability and a chilling lack of empathy — that infected his presidency and divided the nation.

Trump began his administration with a lie about the size of the crowd at his inauguration, and the fabrications kept coming. His presidency ends with Trump clinging to the fiction that the election that ousted him was “rigged” — the same fantasy that impelled his crazed followers to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6 in a siege that led to five deaths.

In 2017 this newspaper published a series of editorials under the title “Our Dishonest President,” in which we drew a connection between Trump’s contempt for the truth and other alarming features of his presidency, including his attacks on the news media (“fake news”) and his undermining of vital institutions, such as the federal judiciary and the electoral process.

In the last editorial in that series, we said that Trump was “reckless and unmanageable, a danger to the Constitution, a threat to our democratic institutions.” That was an accurate indictment of Trump in 2017, and it sadly proved prophetic about the way he has behaved since.

Take the outrageous abuse of power that led to Trump’s first impeachment: his attempt to pressure the president of Ukraine, a nation desperately dependent on U.S. security aid, to interfere in the U.S. election by investigating Joe Biden. That episode exposed Trump’s inability to distinguish his own interests from those of the nation, a blind spot that also has figured in his refusal to admit that he lost the 2020 election and in his contempt for Congress, the intelligence community and career diplomats.

Another character defect — lack of empathy — was evident in Trump’s casual bigotry toward immigrants and people of color. That attitude was reflected in a series of disastrous policies. They range from a ban on travel to the United States primarily directed at predominantly Muslim countries to the separation of children from their parents at the Mexican border to the attempt to exclude immigrants lacking documentation from the census count used to apportion seats in Congress.

Trump portrayed himself as a champion of Black Americans, bizarrely boasting that he had done more for them than any president with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln. Some of his policies — such as his support for modest criminal justice initiatives, tax incentives for investment in economically distressed areas and funding for historically black colleges and universities — may have benefited some Black Americans. But they are utterly overshadowed by other words and acts, including his claim that Black Lives Matter was a symbol of hate and his racially freighted claim that a Biden victory would harm “suburban housewives” by destroying their neighborhoods with fair-housing policies.

You could argue that Trump is merely continuing the politics of racial dog-whistling that have animated some Republican candidates since at least Richard M. Nixon. It was that, but it also reflected how cruel and insensitive Trump’s words and deeds could be.

The most damaging outcome of Trump’s narcissism was his sabotaging of efforts to control the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump can legitimately take credit for his administration’s commitment to developing vaccines at “warp speed.” But he undermined the larger effort to contain the virus by minimizing its dangers, questioning the value of testing, promoting questionable treatments and mocking the wearing of masks. Long before he exhorted his followers to “fight like hell” at the U.S. Capitol, he urged opponents of COVID-19 safety measures to “liberate” their states and, in a foreshadowing of his friendly comments about the mob at the U.S. Capitol, expressed sympathy for armed demonstrators who occupied the Michigan Statehouse.

Even those who believe that Trump promised a positive new direction for the Republican Party — opposition to “endless wars” and free trade and support for government investment at home, budget deficits be damned — must recognize that he undermined his own agenda with his erratic behavior, inattention to detail and ego-driven insistence on settling personal scores.

The president’s defenders can argue that none of these failings prevented the Trump administration from achieving successes in domestic and foreign policy. Indeed, there were accomplishments.

Although Trump was wrong to boast that he presided over “the greatest economy in the history of America,” unemployment did decline significantly during his administration before soaring in the COVID-19 pandemic. With the cooperation of the Republican-controlled Senate, he placed three conservative justices on the Supreme Court and appointed more than 200 judges to lower federal courts.

Abroad, the administration successfully encouraged Israel and several Arab nations to normalize relations and rightly engaged the Taliban in negotiations designed to bring U.S. forces home from Afghanistan. But the president’s overconfidence in his own abilities led him to think that flattering Kim Jong Un was the way to make progress on controlling North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. And his repudiation of the Iran nuclear agreement, seemingly motivated more by a desire to overturn an Obama administration achievement than by a desire to prevent Iran more effectively from developing nuclear weapons, was a strategic failure that alienated U.S. allies.

Trump’s legacy will be defined primarily not by his occasional achievements — or even by his policy errors — but by the way this deeply flawed man debased his office, stoked divisions and brought a democracy to the brink of self-destruction, all for the greater glory of Donald J. Trump.

In the end, you have to trust the government when it comes to the vaccine, don’t you?

Chicago SunTimes

In the end, you have to trust the government when it comes to the vaccine, don’t you?

I intend to get vaccinated because it’s the right thing to do. As an old codger, I owe it to the younger generation to set a good example.

“I’m ready to roll up my sleeve and say ‘I still believe’ in this country,” writes Phil Kadner. “Just tell me where and when to show up.”  Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times.

 

Do you trust the government with your life? That’s what this comes down to.

I am trying very hard to answer “Yes” to that question, although everything in my life’s experience says, “Are you crazy?”

I am speaking about the COVID-19 vaccine.

I have decided I will get the vaccinations — two shots — when they become available to me. I think. Ask me again tomorrow and I may not be so sure.

But right now, I intend to get vaccinated because it is the right thing to do. As an old codger, I owe it to the younger generation to set a good example and I have always wanted to be the fellow in the disaster movie who says, “Leave me behind. You get to safety youngsters. I’ll hold them off.”

Okay. That might not be the right quote here. But I think you understand my intent.

Just tell me where to show up for the big moment.

That’s the thing that’s bugging me. No one seems to know how this is going to work. Once the medical people get their shots and the people in nursing homes get theirs, and the first responders, and the teachers, what’s the plan exactly?

As an old guy with some medical conditions that put me at high risk, I should be pretty high up on the list to get vaccinated. But is someone going to call me on the phone and say, “Get your sleeve rolled up, stand away from the door, we’re coming in,” or what?

Will I get an email saying, “Congratulations, you have won a free COVID-19 shot, all you have to do is agree to the five pages of terms and conditions and your vaccine will arrive in the mail?”

Just tell me what’s next.

Are we all going to get in our cars and form a line at the vehicle emissions testing site? I’m willing to do that, but there must be many toilet facilities nearby because old codgers need to make frequent pit stops, if you know what I mean? In fact, watching those miles-long car lines for vaccinations in Florida, I could think of little else.

I keep hearing that COVID vaccine shipments are getting lost and vials are being taken out of the freezer and forgotten, which I find worrisome. I don’t want to get a dose of the vaccine that has lost its potency.

Speaking of potency, I heard on the TV news that someone is thinking of diluting the doses, splitting them in half, so more people can be vaccinated. Did anyone actually test this stuff or are people at the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control just playing games with us?

I can’t help thinking that rich people, public figures, celebrities and other folks of influence are going to end up getting the vaccine before the rest of us.

Hearing that NFL and NBA players are getting tested repeatedly for COVID-19 before games while millions of other Americans are told testing is unavailable may have something to do with that.

I mean, there’s always somebody happy to use the road shoulder to cut around the rest of the traffic in a construction zone. Special rules for special people.

We have to trust the government here. But the incompetence, the finger-pointing between state and national governments, the lack of accountability, are troubling.

It’s not easy, even for someone who has been an advocate of national health care for many years, to say this will all work out in the end. I mean, the end has arrived for hundreds of thousands of people. Many of them trusted the government. Many of them died because they did not.

I’m ready to roll up my sleeve and say “I still believe” in this country. Just tell me where and when to show up. As for you youngsters out there who are afraid, just stand behind me. It’s going to be all right.

See. I got my disaster movie moment after all.

Contact Phil Kadner at philkadner@gmail.com