Why the “Reagan Revolution” Scheme to Gut America’s Middle Class is Coming to an End

The Hartmann Report

Why the “Reagan Revolution” Scheme to Gut America’s Middle Class is Coming to an End

The signal was in Biden’s speech, but entirely missed by the press

Thom Hartmann          March 13, 2021

Alex McCarthy at Unsplash

 

As we stand on the edge of the end of the Reagan Revolution, an end signaled by one particular phrase in President Biden‘s speech in early March (which I’ll get to in a minute), its really important that Americans understand the backstory.

Reagan and his conservative buddies intentionally gutted the American middle class, but they did so not just out of greed but also with what they thought was a good and noble justification.

As I lay out in more granular detail in my new book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, back in the early 1950s conservative thinker Russell Kirk proposed a startling hypothesis that would fundamentally change our nation and the world.

The American middle-class at that time was growing more rapidly than any middle-class had ever grown in the history of the world, in terms of the number of people in the middle class, the income of those people, and the overall wealth that those people were accumulating. The middle-class was growing in wealth and income back then, in fact, faster than were the top 1%.

Kirk postulated in 1951 that if the middle-class got too wealthy, we would see an absolute collapse of our nation’s social order, producing chaos, riots and possibly even the end of the republic.

The first chapter of his 1951 book, The Conservative Mind, is devoted to Edmund Burke, the British conservative who Thomas Paine visited for two weeks in 1787 on his way to get arrested in the French revolution. Paine was so outraged by Burke’s arguments that he wrote an entire book rebutting them titled The Rights Of Man.

Burke was defending, among other things, Britain’s restrictions on who could vote or participate in politics based on wealth and land ownership, as well as the British maximum wage.

That’s right, maximum wage.

Burke and his contemporaries in the late 1700s believed that if working-class people made too much money, they would challenge the social order and collapse the British form of government. So Parliament passed a law making it illegal for employers to pay people over a certain amount, so as to keep wage-earners right at the edge of poverty throughout their lives. (For the outcome of this policy, read pretty much any Dickens novel.)

Picking up on this, Kirk’s followers argued that if the American middle-class got too rich there would be similarly dire consequences. Young people would cease to respect their elders, women would stop respecting (and depending on) their husbands, and minorities would begin making outrageous demands and set the country on fire.

When Kirk laid this out in 1951, only a few conservative intellectuals took him seriously. People like William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater were electrified by his writings and line of thinking, but Republicans like then-President Dwight Eisenhower said, of people like Kirk and his rich buddies, “Their numbers are negligible and they are stupid.“

And then came the 1960s.

In 1961, the birth control pill was legalized and by 1964 was in widespread use; this helped kick off the modern-day Women’s Liberation Movement, as women, now in control of their reproductive capacity, demanded equality in politics and the workplace. Bra burning became a thing, at least in pop culture lore.

By 1967, young people on college campuses we’re also in revolt; the object of their scorn was an illegal war in Vietnam that President Johnson had lied us into. Along with national protest, draft card burning was also a thing.

And throughout that decade African Americans were increasingly demanding an end to police violence and an expansion of Civil Rights. In response to several brutal and well-publicized instances of police violence against Black people in the late 1960s, riots broke out and several of our cities were on fire.

These three movements all hitting America at the same time got the attention of conservatives and Republicans who had previously ignored or even ridiculed Kirk back in the 1950s. Suddenly, he seemed like a prophet.

The Republican/Conservative “solution” to the “crisis” these three movements represented was put into place in 1981: the explicit goal of the so-called Reagan Revolution was to take the middle class down a peg and end the protests and social instability.

Their plan was to declare war on labor unions so wages could slide back down again, end free college all across the nation so students would be in fear rather than willing to protest, and increase the penalties Nixon had already put on drugs so they could use those laws against hippy antiwar protesters and Black people.

As Nixon‘s right hand man, John Ehrlichman, told reporter Dan Baum: “You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. Do you understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.“

While it looks from the outside like the singular mission of the Reagan Revolution was simply to help rich people and giant corporations get richer and bigger, the ideologues driving the movement actually believed they were helping to restore safety and stability to the United States, both politically and economically.

The middle class was out of control, they believed, and something had to be done. Looking back at the “solutions” England used around the time of the American Revolution and advocated by Edmund Burke and other conservative thinkers throughout history, they saw a solution to the crisis…that also had the pleasant side effect of helping their biggest donors and thus boosting their political fortunes.

Reagan massively cut taxes on rich people, and raised taxes on working-class people 11 times.

For example, he put a tax on Social Security income and unemployment income, and put in a mechanism to track and tax tips income all of which had previously been tax-free but were exclusively needed and used by middle-class people.

He ended the deductability of credit-card, car-loan and student-debt interest, overwhelmingly claimed by working-class people. At the same time, he cut the top tax bracket for millionaires and multimillionaires from 74% to 25%. (There were no billionaires in America then, in large part because of previous tax policies; the explosion of billionaires followed Reagan’s, Bush’s and Trump’s massive tax cuts on the rich.)

He declared war on labor unions, crushed PATCO in less than a week, and over the next decade the result of his war on labor was that union membership went from about a third of the American workforce when he came into office to around 10% at the end of the Reagan/Bush presidencies. It’s at 6% of the private workforce now.

He and Bush also husbanded the moribund 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT, which let Clinton help create the WTO) and NAFTA, which Clinton signed and thus opened a floodgate for American companies to move manufacturing overseas, leaving American workers underemployed while radically cutting corporate labor costs and union membership.

And, sure enough, Reagan’s doubling-down on the War on Drugs was successful in shattering Black communities.

His War on Labor cut average inflation-adjusted minimum and median wages by more over a couple of decades than anybody had seen since the Republican Great Depression of the 1920s and ’30s.

And his War on Colleges jacked up the cost of education so high that an entire generation is today so saddled with more than $1.5 trillion in student debt that many aren’t willing to jeopardize it all by “acting up” on campuses.

The key to selling all this to the American people was the idea that the US shouldn’t protect the rights of workers, subsidize education, or enforce Civil Rights laws because, “conservatives” said, government itself is a remote, dangerous and incompetent power that can legally use guns to enforce its will.

As Reagan told us in his first inaugural, government was not the solution to our problems, but instead was the problem itself.

He ridiculed the formerly-noble idea of service to one’s country and joked that there were really no good people left in government because if they were smart or competent they’d be working in the private sector for a lot more money.

He told us that the nine most frightening words in the English language were, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, billionaires associated with the Republicans built a massive infrastructure of think tanks and media outlets to promote and amplify this message.

It so completely swept America that by the 1990s even President Bill Clinton was saying things like, “The era of big government is over,” and “This is the end of welfare as we know it.” Limbaugh, Hannity and other right-wing radio talkers were getting millions a year in subsidies from groups like the Heritage Foundation. Fox News today carries on the tradition.

Which brings us to President Joe Biden’s speech.

Probably the most important thing he said in that speech was almost completely ignored by the mainstream American press. It certainly didn’t make a single headline, anywhere.

Yet President Biden said something that Presidents Clinton and Obama were absolutely unwilling to say, so deeply ingrained was the Reagan orthodoxy about the dangers of “big government” during their presidencies.

President Biden said, “We need to remember the government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it’s us. All of us. We, the people.“

This was an all-out declaration of war on the underlying premise of the Reagan Revolution. And a full-throated embrace of the first three words of the Constitution, “We, the people.”

In March, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt talked about the “mysterious cycle in human events.” He correctly identified the end of the Republican orthodoxy cycle of the 1920s, embodied in the presidencies of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, of deregulation, privatization and tax cuts.

(Warren Harding in 1920 successfully ran for president on two slogans. The first was “A return to normalcy,” which meant dropping Democratic President Woodrow Wilson’s 90% tax bracket down to 25%, something Harding did in his first few years in office. The second was, “Less government in business, more business in government.” In other words, deregulate and privatize. These actions, of course, brought us the Great Crash of 1929 and what was known for a generation as the Republican Great Depression.)

Americans are now watching, for the third time in just 30 years, a Democratic president clean up the economic and social debris of a prior Republican presidency.

They’re starting to figure out that crushing the middle-class didn’t produce prosperity and stability, but instead destroyed tens of millions of people’s lives and dreams.

And they’re seeing the hollowness of the Republican’s promises as we all watch, aghast, as the GOP scrambles to mobilize the last remnants of its white racist base, at the same time waging an all-out war on the ability of Black, young and working-class people to vote.

President Biden’s speech was the beginning of the end for the Republicans, although it appears only a few of them realize it.

Let’s hope the damage the GOP has done over the last 40 years isn’t so severe that America can’t be brought back from the brink of chaos and desperation.

Hopefully, it’s a new day in America.

Could Rubber From Dandelions Make Tires More Sustainable?

Could Rubber From Dandelions Make Tires More Sustainable?

Could Rubber From Dandelions Make Tires More Sustainable?
Planting dandelions could help reduce deforestation caused by traditional rubber plantations. Tashka / Getty Images.

 

In 1931, Soviet scientists were on the hunt for a natural source of rubber that would help the USSR become self-sufficient in key materials.

They scoured the vast and various territories of the Soviet Union and tested over 1,000 different species looking for an alternative to the South American rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensi. Eventually, on the steppes of Kazakhstan, they found one.

By 1941, the Russian dandelion, Taraxacum koksaghyz, supplied 30% of the USSR’s rubber. During the Second World War, shortages of Havea rubber prompted other countries, including the United States, Britain and Germany, to begin cultivating dandelion rubber.

Once the war was over and supplies returned to normal, these countries — including, ultimately, the Soviets — switched back to Hevea tree rubber because it was cheaper.

But now, with demand for rubber continuing to grow, there is renewed interest in the Russian dandelion, particularly from the tire industry, which consumes 70% of the world’s rubber supply.

Diversifying Natural Rubber

Overall, 65% of rubber consumed worldwide is derived from fossil fuels. This synthetic rubber is cheaper and more hardwearing than its natural counterpart. But natural rubber disperses heat better and has better grip, which is why tires are made with a mix of both.

Today, 90% of natural rubber comes from Havea plantations in Southeast Asia, which have been linked to deforestation. And there are commercial as well as environmental reasons the tire industry would like to find an alternative.

Havea rubber trees are vulnerable to a fungal leaf blight that has hit plantations in South America, making some in the tire industry nervous about such dependence on a single crop, with little genetic diversity, grown in a single geographical region.

Developing the Dandelion

Over recent years, projects in both Europe and the US have been taking a fresh shot at making dandelion rubber commercially viable.

Among them is Taraxagum, a collaboration between Continental Tires and the Fraunhofer Institute of Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology in Aachen, Germany.

“Continental Tires tested the performance of the material and said that it was brilliant — in some cases better than Hevea rubber,” said Dirk Prüfer, a plant biotechnologist on the Taraxagum team.

Both Continental and competitor Apollo Tyres have used dandelion rubber to manufacture bike tires, and Continental reports “promising” tests on dandelion truck tires.

Apollo was part of the EU-funded DRIVE4EU consortium, a project that ran from 2014 to 2018 and worked on developing the entire production chain for dandelion rubber, starting with cultivation.

Unlike the rubber tree, the Russian dandelion thrives in temperate climates.

“We cultivated the dandelion in Belgium, the Netherlands and Kazakhstan,” said Ingrid van der Meer, coordinator of DRIVE4EU, adding that other researchers had previously cultivated the crop in Sweden, Germany and the United States.

Fewer Chemicals and Poorer Soils

The Russian dandelion can also be grown on relatively poor soils, meaning it doesn’t have to compete with agriculture. Prüfer said his team was researching whether brownfield land — former industrial sites that may be heavily polluted — might even be suitable.

“There are big areas like this near Cologne or Aachen that could potentially be used for cultivation,” Prüfer said.

Once the dandelions are harvested “hot-water extraction” is used to separate out the rubber. “The roots are chopped up mechanically and water is added,” van der Meer explained. “It has to be heated up, but no large volumes of chemicals are needed.

This is in contrast to Hevea rubber extraction, which requires the use of organic solvents, resulting in chemical waste that poses an environmental hazard if not disposed of properly.

Environmental Problems Persist

But while the Russian dandelion could make the production of tires greener, it won’t improve their environmental impact once they leave the factory.

As tires are used, they shed microplastics, which are then carried on air and end up in oceans. A recent study found that this source of ocean microplastics amounts to 100,000 metric tons each year.

Then, at the end of their life, most tires finish up in landfill, in part because the mix of rubbers make them difficult to recycle.

“Tires are meant to optimize different kinds of properties, so it’s not easy to just use one kind of rubber,” said Francesco Piccihoni, an expert in rubber recycling at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

“You could make tires from only natural rubber but it degrades faster, meaning you would have to change the tires much more often,” Piccihoni added.

Even shifting rubber farming to European wastelands wouldn’t automatically avert deforestation in Asia. Georg Cadisch, an expert in tropical agronomy at the University of Hohenheim in Germany, says forests will continue to be felled as long as the land can be used more profitably for agriculture.

“Rubber farmers need to survive, so they would simply produce other crops,” he said, adding that rubber plantations in China and Thailand have already been replaced with crops like palm oil or bananas.

Bright Prospects?

Still, proponents of the Russian dandelion argue that as demand rises, we need a source of rubber that doesn’t rely on expanding into new areas of forest. Growing it close to European and US tire factories would also means fewer CO2 emissions from transport.

And as far as performance goes, tire makers are impressed.

“The moment natural rubber from the dandelion is available in significant quantities, Apollo will resume using the material and develop other tire products,” chief technical officer Daniele Lorenzetti said.

As things stand, though, the supply chain needs some work. “To compete with other rubbers, the production costs of dandelion rubber need to match the market price. This is not yet the case,” said van der Meer, who will continue working on optimizing Russian dandelion cultivation.

For now, Europe’s wastelands aren’t about to be swathed in sunny yellow. But there might just be a bright future for a material that had been consigned to Soviet history.

Reposted with permission from Deutsche Welle.

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace Reveals What Now ‘Terrifies’ Her About The GOP

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace Reveals What Now ‘Terrifies’ Her About The GOP

Lee Moran, Reporter, HuffPost                    

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on Monday told “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert what really scares her about the Republican Party following its capitulation to former President Donald Trump.

Wallace, who served as White House communications director under former President George W. Bush, described herself as a “self-loathing former Republican.” She lamented how the GOP today isn’t even trying to spin events and is now just built on a foundation of B.S.

“They are so far from the truth that you can no longer have a conversation with them about how to solve anything because they don’t agree on what the problems are, and that terrifies me,” the “Deadline: White House” anchor said.

Watch the full interview here:

 

Marine Veteran Launches Missouri Senate Bid After Roy Blunt Retirement

Marine Veteran Launches Missouri Senate Bid After Roy Blunt Retirement

Kevin Robillard, Senior Political Reporter                 March 9, 2021

Lucas Kunce, a Marine veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who now works at a think tank dedicated to battling corporate monopolies, announced Tuesday morning he’s running for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in Missouri.

Kunce, who grew up working class on the east side of the state capital of Jefferson City, joins a potentially crowded Democratic primary field in a solidly Republican state. Incumbent Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) announced Monday he would retire rather than seek a third term in Congress’s upper chamber.

Blunt’s announcement set off a flurry of moves on both sides of the political aisle in the state, though an eventual GOP candidate is all but certain to be heavily favored in the general election ― Donald Trump won the state by 15 percentage points in the 2020 presidential race.

“I think Missourians are ready for someone who’s lived through the struggles they’ve lived through,” Kunce told HuffPost in an interview Monday, recounting how his neighbors helped watch him and his siblings while his parents were in the hospital with a younger sister who battled a heart condition. “I didn’t just experience the struggles, I experienced the way we take care of each other.”

Kunce attended Yale on a scholarship and returned home to attend law school at the University of Missouri before joining the Marines, where he completed one tour in Iraq and two in Afghanistan before finishing his career at the Pentagon, where he says he first saw how corporate consolidation drove up costs for taxpayers and forced the government to buy foreign-made goods. Kunce now works as the director of national security for the American Economic Liberties Project.

The oppressive corporate monopoly structure we’re living under right now, we need to break that.Lucas Kunce, Democratic candidate for Senate

Kunce is the third announced Democrat in the race, following former state Sen. Scott Sifton and gay rights activist Tim Shepard. Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, who would be a leading candidate, told the Kansas City Star he is considering a run for statewide office.

While the primary field could get crowded, Kunce is set to get an early boost: The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has close ties to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), is expected to endorsed Kunce later this week. The group has more than 10,000 members in Missouri.

Kunce indicated he plans to make economic concentration and corporate power a major issue in his campaign.

“The oppressive corporate monopoly structure we’re living under right now, we need to break that,” he said, noting a slew of Missouri-based companies, including Anheuser-Busch and Monsanto, have become foreign-owned in recent years. “Pharmaceutical cartels, big agriculture, big tech, defense monopolies ― all of them make it hard for a regular person to compete in the economy.”

Despite Missouri’s steady conservative drift in recent years, Kunce said Democratic successes backing referendums on what he calls “the four Ws” – wages, weed, workers and wellness ― indicate there is still support for liberal policy goals in the state.

Still, Republicans are rightly confident about their ability to hold Blunt’s seat. Though some national Republicans worry that a primary victory by former Gov. Eric Greitens ― who resigned following sexual misconduct allegations ― could put the seat in jeopardy, he’s just one of many potential GOP nominees. Rep. Ann Wagner, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe and Attorney General Eric Schmitt all indicated they are considering running for the Senate seat.

The U.S. Senate is split 50-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris giving Democrats the majority edge. History indicates Republicans, as the party out of power, should gain seats in the midterm elections. Democrats are expected to target GOP-held seats in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and North Carolina, while hoping races in Ohio, Iowa and Missouri can become competitive.

Republicans are targeting incumbent Democratic senators in Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire and Nevada.

In 2018, Diplomats Warned of Risky Coronavirus Experiments in a Wuhan Lab. No One Listened.

In 2018, Diplomats Warned of Risky Coronavirus Experiments in a Wuhan Lab. No One Listened.

Josh Rogin                      

 

On January 15, in its last days, President Donald Trump’s State Department put out a statement with serious claims about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. The statement said the U.S. intelligence community had evidence that several researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory were sick with Covid-like symptoms in autumn 2019—implying the Chinese government had hidden crucial information about the outbreak for months—and that the WIV lab, despite “presenting itself as a civilian institution,” was conducting secret research projects with the Chinese military. The State Department alleged a Chinese government cover-up and asserted that “Beijing continues today to withhold vital information that scientists need to protect the world from this deadly virus, and the next one.”

 

The exact origin of the new coronavirus remains a mystery to this day, but the search for answers is not just about assigning blame. Unless the source is located, the true path of the virus can’t be traced, and scientists can’t properly study the best ways to prevent future outbreaks.

The original Chinese government story, that the pandemic spread from a seafood market in Wuhan, was the first and therefore most widely accepted theory. But cracks in that theory slowly emerged throughout the late winter and spring of 2020. The first known case of Covid-19 in Wuhan, it was revealed in February, had no connection to the market. The Chinese government closed the market in January and sanitized it before proper samples could be taken. It wouldn’t be until May that the Chinese Centers for Disease Control disavowed the market theory, admitting it had no idea how the outbreak began, but by then it had become the story of record, in China and internationally.

In the spring of 2020, inside the U.S. government, some officials began to see and collect evidence of a different, perhaps more troubling theory—that the outbreak had a connection to one of the laboratories in Wuhan, among them the WIV, a world leading center of research on bat coronaviruses.

To some inside the government, the name of the laboratory was familiar. Its research on bat viruses had already drawn the attention of U.S. diplomats and officials at the Beijing Embassy in late 2017, prompting them to alert Washington that the lab’s own scientists had reported “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”

But their cables to Washington were ignored.

When I published the warnings from these cables in April 2020, they added fuel to a debate that had already gone from a scientific and forensic question to a hot-button political issue, as the previously internal U.S. government debate over the lab’s possible connection spilled into public view. The next day, Trump said he was “investigating,” and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on Beijing to “come clean” about the origin of the outbreak. Two weeks later, Pompeo said there was “enormous evidence” pointing to the lab, but he didn’t provide any of said evidence. As Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s relationship unraveled and administration officials openly blamed the Wuhan lab, the U.S.-China relationship only went further downhill.

As the pandemic set in worldwide, the origin story was largely set aside in the public coverage of the crisis. But the internal government debate continued, now over whether the United States should release more information about what it knew about the lab and its possible connection to the outbreak. The January 15 statement was cleared by the intelligence community, but the underlying data was still held secret. Likely changing no minds, it was meant as a signal—showing that circumstantial evidence did exist, and that the theory deserved further investigation.

Now, the new Joe Biden team is walking a tightrope, calling on Beijing to release more data, while declining to endorse or dispute the Trump administration’s controversial claims. The origin story remains entangled both in domestic politics and U.S.-China relations. Last month, National security adviser Jake Sullivan issued a statement expressing “deep concerns” about a forthcoming report from a team assembled by the World Health Organization that toured Wuhan—even visiting the lab—but was denied crucial data by the Chinese authorities.

But more than four years ago, long before this question blew up into an international point of tension between China and the United States, the story started with a simple warning.

***

In late 2017, top health and science officials at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing attended a conference in the Chinese capital. There, they saw a presentation on a new study put out by a group of Chinese scientists, including several from the Wuhan lab, in conjunction with the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Since the 2002 outbreak of SARS—the deadly disease caused by a coronavirus transmitted by bats in China—scientists around the world had been looking for ways to predict and limit future outbreaks of similar diseases. To aid the effort, the NIH had funded a number of projects that involved the WIV scientists, including much of the Wuhan lab’s work with bat coronaviruses. The new study was entitled “Discovery of a Rich Gene Pool of Bat SARS-Related Coronaviruses Provides New Insights into the Origin of SARS Coronavirus.”

These researchers, the American officials learned, had found a population of bats from caves in Yunnan province that gave them insight into how SARS coronaviruses originated and spread. The researchers boasted that they may have found the cave where the original SARS coronavirus originated. But all the U.S. diplomats cared about was that these scientists had discovered three new viruses that had a unique characteristic: they contained a “spike protein” that was particularly good at grabbing on to a specific receptor in human lung cells known as an ACE2 receptor. That means the viruses were potentially very dangerous for humans—and that these viruses were now in a lab with which they, the U.S. diplomats, were largely unfamiliar.

Knowing the significance of the Wuhan virologists’ discovery, and knowing that the WIV’s top-level biosafety laboratory (BSL-4) was relatively new, the U.S. Embassy health and science officials in Beijing decided to go to Wuhan and check it out. In total, the embassy sent three teams of experts in late 2017 and early 2018 to meet with the WIV scientists, among them Shi Zhengli, often referred to as the “bat woman” because of her extensive experience studying coronaviruses found in bats.

When they sat down with the scientists at the WIV, the American diplomats were shocked by what they heard. The Chinese researchers told them they didn’t have enough properly trained technicians to safely operate their BSL-4 lab. The Wuhan scientists were asking for more support to get the lab up to top standards.

The diplomats wrote two cables to Washington reporting on their visits to the Wuhan lab. More should be done to help the lab meet top safety standards, they said, and they urged Washington to get on it. They also warned that the WIV researchers had found new bat coronaviruses could easily infect human cells, and which used the same cellular route that had been used by the original SARS coronavirus.

Taken together, those two points—a particularly dangerous groups of viruses being studied in a lab with real safety problems—were intended as a warning about a potential public-health crisis, one of the cable writers told me. They kept the cables unclassified because they wanted more people back home to be able to read and share them, according to the cable writer. But there was no response from State Department headquarters and they were never made public. And as U.S.-China tensions rose over the course of 2018, American diplomats lost access to labs such as the one at the WIV.

“The cable was a warning shot,” one U.S. official said. “They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on.” The world would be paying attention soon enough—but by then, it would be too late.

The cables were not leaked to me by any Trump administration political official, as many in the media wrongly assumed. In fact, Secretary of State Pompeo was angry when he found out about the leak. He needed to keep up the veneer of good relations with China, and these revelations would make that job more difficult. Trump and President Xi had agreed during their March 26 phone call to halt the war of words that had erupted when a Chinese diplomat alleged on Twitter that the outbreak might have been caused by the U.S. Army. That had prompted Trump to start calling it the “China virus,” deliberately blaming Beijing in a racist way. Xi had warned Trump in that call that China’s level of cooperation on releasing critical equipment in America’s darkest moment would be jeopardized by continued accusations.

After receiving the cables from a source, I called around to get reactions from other American officials I trusted. What I found was that, just months into the pandemic, a large swath of the government already believed the virus had escaped from the WIV lab, rather than having leaped from an animal to a human at the Wuhan seafood market or some other random natural setting, as the Chinese government had claimed.

Any theory of the pandemic’s origins had to account for the fact that the outbreak of the novel coronavirus—or, by its official name, SARS-CoV-2—first appeared in Wuhan, on the doorstep of the lab that possessed one of the world’s largest collections of bat coronaviruses and that possessed the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, a virus known as RaTG13 that Shi identified in her lab.

Shi, in her March interview, said that when she was first told about the virus outbreak in her town, she thought the officials had gotten it wrong, because she would have guessed that such a virus would break out in southern China, where most of the bats live. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” she said.

By April, U.S. officials at the NSC and the State Department had begun to compile circumstantial evidence that the WIV lab, rather than the seafood market, was actually the source of the virus. The former explanation for the outbreak was entirely plausible, they felt, whereas the latter would be an extreme coincidence. But the officials couldn’t say that out loud because there wasn’t firm proof either way. And if the U.S. government accused China of lying about the outbreak without firm evidence, Beijing would surely escalate tensions even more, which meant that Americans might not get the medical supplies that were desperately needed to combat the rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States.

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton seemed not to have been concerned about any of those considerations. On February 16, he had offered a totally unfounded theory of his own, claiming on Fox News that the virus might have come from China’s biowarfare program—suggesting, in other words, that it had been engineered deliberately to kill humans. This wasn’t supported by any known research: To this day, scientists largely agree that the virus was not “engineered” to be deadly; SARS-CoV-2 showed no evidence of direct genetic manipulation. Furthermore, the WIV lab had published some of its research about bat coronaviruses that can infect humans—not exactly the level of secrecy you would expect for a clandestine weapons program.

As Cotton’s speculation vaulted the origin story into the news in an incendiary new way, he undermined the ongoing effort in other parts of the U.S. government to pinpoint the exact origins and nature of the coronavirus pandemic. From then on, journalists and politicians alike would conflate the false idea of the coronavirus being a Chinese bioweapon with the plausible idea that the virus had accidentally been released from the WIV lab, making it a far more politically loaded question to pursue.

***

After I published a Washington Post column on the Wuhan cables on April 14, Pompeo publicly called on Beijing to “come clean” about the origin of the outbreak and weeks later declared there was “enormous evidence” to that effect beyond the Wuhan cables themselves. But he refused to produce any other proof.

At the same time, some members of the intelligence community leaked to my colleagues that they had discovered “no firm evidence” that the outbreak originated in the lab. That was true in a sense. Deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger had asked the intelligence community to look for evidence of all possible scenarios for the outbreak, including the market or a lab accident, but they hadn’t found any firm links to either. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There was a gap in the intelligence. And the intelligence community didn’t know either way.

Large parts of the scientific community also decried my report, pointing to the fact that natural spillovers have been the cause of other viral outbreaks, and that they were the culprit more often than accidents. But many of the scientists who spoke out to defend the lab were Shi’s research partners and funders, like the head of the global public health nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak; their research was tied to hers, and if the Wuhan lab were implicated in the pandemic, they would have to answer a lot of tough questions.

Likewise, the American scientists who knew and worked with Shi could not say for sure her lab was unconnected to the outbreak, because there’s no way they could know exactly what the WIV lab was doing outside their cooperative projects. Beijing threatened Australia and the EU for even suggesting an independent investigation into the origins of the virus.

In May, Chinese CDC officials declared on Chinese state media that they had ruled out the possibility that the seafood market was the origin of the virus, completely abandoning the original official story. As for the “bat woman” herself, Shi didn’t think the lab accident theory was so crazy. In her March interview, she described frantically searching her own lab’s records after learning of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. “Could they have come from our lab?” she recalled asking herself.

Shi said she was relieved when she didn’t find the new coronavirus in her files. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said. “I had not slept a wink in days.” Of course, if she had found the virus, she likely would not have been able to admit it, given that the Chinese government was going around the world insisting the lab had not been involved in the outbreak.

***

A key argument of those Chinese and American scientists disputing the lab accident theory is that Chinese researchers had performed their work out in the open and had disclosed the coronavirus research they were performing. This argument was used to attack anyone who didn’t believe the Chinese scientists’ firm denials their labs could possibly have been responsible for the outbreak.

But one senior administration official told me that many officials in various parts of the U.S. government, especially the NSC and the State Department, came to believe that these researchers had not been as forthcoming as had been claimed.

What they were worried about was something called “gain-of-function” research, in which the virulence or transmissibility of dangerous pathogens is deliberately increased. The purpose is to help scientists predict how viruses might evolve in ways that hurt humans before it happens in nature. But by bypassing pathogens’ natural evolutionary cycles, these experiments create risks of a human-made outbreak if a lab accident were to occur. For this reason, the Obama administration issued a moratorium on gain-of-function experiments in October 2014.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology had openly participated in gain-of-function research in partnership with U.S. universities and institutions. But the official told me the U.S. government had evidence that Chinese labs were performing gain-of-function research on a much larger scale than was publicly disclosed, meaning they were taking more risks in more labs than anyone outside China was aware of. This insight, in turn, fed into the lab-accident hypothesis in a new and troubling way.

A little-noticed study was released in early July 2020 by a group of Chinese researchers in Beijing, including several affiliated with the Academy of Military Medical Science. These scientists said they had created a new model for studying SARS-CoV-2 by creating mice with human-like lung characteristics by using the CRISPR gene-editing technology to give the mice lung cells with the human ACE2 receptor — the cell receptor that allowed coronaviruses to so easily infect human lungs.

After consultations with experts, some U.S. officials came to believe this Beijing lab was likely conducting coronavirus experiments on mice fitted with ACE2 receptors well before the coronavirus outbreak—research they hadn’t disclosed and continued not to admit to. In its January 15 statement, the State Department alleged that although the Wuhan Institute of Virology disclosed some of its participation in gain-of-function research, it has not disclosed its work on RaTG13 and “has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.” That, by itself, did not help to explain how SARS-CoV-2 originated. But it was clear that officials believed there was a lot of risky coronavirus research going on in Chinese labs that the rest of the world was simply not aware of.

“This was just a peek under a curtain of an entire galaxy of activity, including labs and military labs in Beijing and Wuhan playing around with coronaviruses in ACE2 mice in unsafe labs,” the senior administration official said. “It suggests we are getting a peek at a body of activity that isn’t understood in the West or even has precedent here.”

This pattern of deception and obfuscation, combined with the new revelations about how Chinese labs were handling dangerous coronaviruses in ways their Western counterparts didn’t know about, led some U.S. officials to become increasingly convinced that Chinese authorities were manipulating scientific information to fit their narrative. But there was so little transparency, it was impossible for the U.S. government to prove, one way or the other. “If there was a smoking gun, the CCP [Communist Party of China] buried it along with anyone who would dare speak up about it,” one U.S. official told me. “We’ll probably never be able to prove it one way or the other, which was Beijing’s goal all along.”

Back in 2017, the U.S. diplomats who had visited the lab in Wuhan had foreseen these very events, but nobody had listened and nothing had been done. “We were trying to warn that that lab was a serious danger,” one of the cable writers who had visited the lab told me. “I have to admit, I thought it would be maybe a SARS-like outbreak again. If I knew it would turn out to be the greatest pandemic in human history, I would have made a bigger stink about it.”

The Secret Life of the White House

The New Yorker – The Political Scene

The Secret Life of the White House

The residence staff, many of whom have worked there for decades, balance their service of the First Family with their long-term loyalty to the house itself.

February 24, 2021

A White House Houseman stands in front of a window.
The binding ethos of many White House residence workers is discretion and service to the physical structure—and, by extension, to the President who occupies it. Photograph by Tina Hager / White House Photo Office. 

Before Inauguration Day, the White House residence staff were already exhausted. For several weeks, many of them had worked sixteen-hour days preparing for the transition—the approximately six-hour-long window between when the Trumps would depart and the Bidens arrive. White House transitions typically demand superhuman effort, but this year’s was among the most physically demanding in recent memory. At risk of falling ill with the coronavirus, staffers worked in close quarters to transform the upstairs rooms of the White House, where the windows don’t open and are paned with thick, bulletproof glass, in accordance with the strong preference of the Secret Service.

In previous transitions, the residence staff brought the White House to a state of as-ready-as-possible without making major changes until the new First Family arrived and redecorated. If a departing family took a personal sofa with them, the staff replaced it with one from the White House collection, so that the incoming family need not walk into a bare room. But, under a new White House chief usher, Timothy Harleth, the transition became a far more ambitious affair. Hired by the Trumps, in 2017, Harleth had previously been a rooms manager at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Early in the Administration, he had hired a “creative manager,” and on Inauguration Day Harleth enlisted that person to make the upstairs rooms look “ ‘Architectural Digest’-ready,” a residence worker said. In the frantic final hours, the creative manager was laying out guestbooks and new stationery, filling the bookcases with decorative plates and candles, and staging throws on furniture. “They wanted these rooms to look like a high-end hotel,” the worker added.

Harleth wanted to make a good impression on Joe and Jill Biden, who could have extended his tenure. But, Harleth told me, shortly after eleven o’clock on January 20th, less than an hour before the official Presidential changeover, one of the last remaining Trump officials, in the Office of Administration, came to Harleth’s office and told him that the Bidens had requested his departure. The Biden White House hedged on the matter, telling CNN that Harleth was “let go before the Bidens arrived.” (The Trumps could not be reached for comment.) Harleth was shocked at the time, but a week later he told me, “Every family deserves to have the people they want there.”

With or without Harleth, the residence staff soldiered on. The move unfolded at a rapid but methodical pace, with boxes upon boxes stacked and transferred between the historic rooms. “The White House is not big,” another career White House employee, whom I will call Jason, said. “The East Room is chock-full of boxes.” The White House’s two elevators, only one big enough to move furniture, were in constant use. “If you could carry something, it wasn’t going down the elevator,” Jason said. The move was conducted while keeping up appearances for a nationally televised Inauguration celebration later that night. “Imagine your house is being used for a TV show while you were moving, and no one could know you were moving,” Jason said. And, as they always have, the residence staff pulled it off. By the end of the morning, they had set out the Bidens’ family photographs and stocked the kitchen with the family’s favorite foods.

The full story of the residence staffers’ ecosystem is rarely told. Many of the workers have served multiple Presidents, and for that reason they call themselves lifers. Their binding ethos is discretion and loyalty to the White House itself—and, by extension, to whoever is President. They are perpetually insecure in their jobs. Although their employment continues across a transition, it is never guaranteed—they serve at the pleasure of the President. Keeping their jobs requires persuading his staff of their indispensable authority on the arcane methods necessary to operate the old and leaky structure, and of their loyalty and willingness to adapt to a First Family’s needs. They balance those requirements with another: to protect the physical White House itself, often from the people who occupy it.

I met the White House lifers while working as a speechwriter for President Barack Obama. For the past four years, I have spoken with dozens of lifers, former and current, about how they survived the Trump Presidency. I came to understand that the White House does not shed the identities of past Presidents so much as it accumulates them, abides them up to a point, and, ultimately, waits them out. By continuing to do their jobs and serve whoever moves in, the lifers embody the White House’s independence. Donald Trump was yet another test that they survived.

The residence staff numbers ninety people: butlers, chefs, curators, florists, housekeepers, electricians, and others who work in the bowels of the White House. They not only serve a First Family’s use of the White House as a home. They also serve its use of the White House as a stage to advance a political agenda.

Under Trump, that stage grew deathly quiet. On multiple occasions, Trump held events in the White House’s grand rooms—the gold-curtained East Room, the Diplomatic Reception Room, the marble-columned State Floor—to advance his chief political cause: himself. Amid a thirty-five-day government shutdown, Trump served hundreds of hamburgers, buffet style, to the Clemson University Tigers, the N.C.A.A. college-football champions, in the State Dining Room. More recently, he held the Republican Party’s 2020 National Convention on the South Lawn and an Election Night watch party in the East Room. But the level of publicity that those events generated belied how few of them occurred. Among the lifers, a malaise set in. “Nothing happens. It’s a bare-minimum situation,” Jason told me, before Biden’s Inauguration. “For four years, we’ve done two months’ worth of events.” The Trumps hosted only two state dinners, compared with six that the Obamas hosted during their first term.

The covid-19 pandemic increased the White House’s emptiness. “People stayed home. Everything from food service to national security—if it could be done at home, it was done at home,” Jason said. Harleth told me that the residence staff took covid-19 precautions more seriously than others at the Trump White House. “We were the ones wearing P.P.E., pushing to get our folks tested,” he said. Still, he conceded, “most of our folks can’t easily telework,” and by his count seven or eight residence staff workers contracted the virus. Once they recovered, those workers were asked to fill in for others, because of their presumed immunity. “It meant that they could work safely while others stayed home,” Harleth said. According to Jason, the lifers were given conflicting advice: stay home; later, come in. “There was lots and lots of confusion, no direction from the top, a complete lack of empathy, sympathy,” he said. “The Christmas parties with maskless hordes were catered, but [the staff] would have to be there for this and that. Someone’s got to be there, not everyone can leave while the catering crew comes in. There was not a steady message on how to keep you safe.”

When not upstairs, in the family quarters, the staff works in a labyrinth of rooms below the White House’s northern steps, a space concealed from onlookers milling about on Pennsylvania Avenue. Their corridor is a covered portion of the original northern driveway, with push-button double doors at either end. As I remember it, between those doors, trucks and forklifts rolled in and out, delivering groceries and carting away trash. An Adirondack bench under a flapping white awning was a place to smoke when it rained. Inside, carpenters and electricians pushed rolling carts of tools between white linoleum countertops. Fresh flowers filled walk-in freezers that resembled a Costco produce aisle. Plastic storage boxes stacked against the wall were labelled with their contents: “linens and lawn ornaments,” “tablecloths and patio-furniture covers,” for use on the Truman Balcony. On the occasion of a state dinner, florists laid out thousands of orchids, like dolls, on every available surface, a blinding sea of white. At times, operations men packed the hall with stacks of East Room chairs, backed with bevelled slats painted gold, cream cushions tied to their seats. Around Easter, the Fourth of July, Halloween, and Thanksgiving, lifers filled the hall with enormous craft pumpkins and rabbits, and also red-white-and-blue bunting, for use on the South Lawn. During Christmas, the corridor was transformed into a canapé-making assembly line, overpowered by the smell of fresh pine needles, bacon, baking bread, and propane from the temporary ovens set up on the drive.

Daniel Shanks White House Usher sets a table.
According to Daniel Shanks, who was an usher for twenty-two years, a shift in relations between First Families and lifers has changed the feeling of the White House.Photograph by Tina Hager / White House Photo Office

 

When I worked at the White House, I walked through the lifers’ corridor in the mornings, past a Secret Service officer seated by a telephone, head drooping at the end of a sixteen-hour double shift. Dale Haney, the chief groundskeeper since 1972, who is still at the White House, was often walking through the corridor with the Obamas’ dogs, their leashes in one hand and his boxed lunch or breakfast in the other. Butlers and valets leaned against the doorways, talking with chefs. The letter “R” printed on their blue plastic badges granted them access to the upper floors of the house, and they wore expressions of smiling, unyielding discretion. History is etched in the corridor’s stone walls. When the British burned the White House in 1814, oxygen-starved flames rushed out, licking them. A few are still unpainted so that passersby can study the charred spots. Hitches for nineteenth-century horse-drawn carriages stick out from the stones. Chiselled grooves, slightly askew, convey the wobble of the hands that carved them. In 1794, Thomas Jefferson helped recruit Scottish stonemasons to complete the White House.

The lifers’ constancy is useful in a house where the occupants change every four to eight years. Originally, Presidents paid the staffers’ wages, but in the nineteenth century, when the lifers’ ranks grew, Congress began paying their salaries instead, solidifying their status as fixed employees of the house. “The President’s House,” a two-volume history by William Seale, tells many of their stories. A doorkeeper named Tom Pendel began working at the White House in 1864, during the Lincoln Administration. Pendel babysat Lincoln’s youngest son, Tad. He fetched Lincoln to inform him of the arrival of guests or of bad news from the front lines during the Civil War. He nailed wood strips and lines of tallow candles inside the White House windowsills to illuminate the building in celebration of Union military victories. On those occasions, hundreds of people would gather on Pennsylvania Avenue and sing to Lincoln, who would stand at a window to address the crowd. Pendel would “draw the curtain back and stand just out of sight against a wall, holding a candle high, so that the President could be seen,” Seale wrote. After Lincoln’s assassination, Pendel remained at his Pennsylvania Avenue post. Under Rutherford B. Hayes, in a time of particularly high tourist traffic at the White House, Pendel policed souvenir hunters, who would snip tassels from the drapes or pocket inkwells and chandelier pendants. During the Garfield Administration, Pendel repeatedly turned away Garfield’s future assassin—a man who had sought a government position and to whom Pendel said, each time, “The President is unable to see you today.” Pendel held an umbrella over Grover Cleveland’s wife on the rainy Inauguration Day when she moved out of the White House, and he was standing in the entrance hall when news rang out that Cleveland’s successor William McKinley had been shot. Pendel died in 1911, at the age of eighty-four, while standing at his front-door post during the Taft Administration.

Before he retired as the White House maître d’, in 1983, John Ficklin had been on staff for forty-four years, serving nine Presidents in total. Around the time of his retirement, Ficklin spoke to the Washington Post about his career. The son of a slave, Ficklin found work at the White House during F.D.R.’s Administration, through his brother, a White House butler at the time. Ficklin became the head butler under Eisenhower. “You just can’t put down on paper everything that a butler would do,” he told the Post. “Instead of calling someone and saying the President or First Lady wants such and such, you’d just go do it yourself.” About the nearly all-Black butler staff, Ficklin told the Post that he had interviewed white people for butler positions over the years but few seemed really to want the job: “We got quite a few applications, but when it came down to really working, they weren’t very interested.”

Historically, many residence-staff jobs have been passed down through generations of Washington, D.C.,’s Black and white families. “It’s a long tradition,” Betty Monkman, who started in the White House curator’s office in 1967 and retired as chief curator in 2002, told me. Those who worked in the residence “were local people, family members—somebody was always a cousin of somebody else on staff.” When Monkman started, during the Johnson Administration, segregation was still fresh in people’s minds. “I heard many stories about segregated lunchrooms for the residence staff—they were integrated in the fifties,” she told me. “Even when I started, in the late sixties, it wasn’t so integrated in terms of the roles people played. For a long time, African-Americans were butlers, maids, and housemen, versus the engineers, electricians, painters, and carpenters, who were white. Bit by bit, they were hired into the trades.” The distinction meant that white workers often had control of their whereabouts, whereas Black workers had to sit at the ready, to be summoned upstairs at any moment.

For decades, many department heads were white. George W. Bush hired the first Black chief usher, Stephen Rochon. Rochon came from outside the White House, breaking a long tradition of hiring the chief usher from the residence staff. Previously a rear admiral in the Coast Guard, Rochon attempted to bring military efficiency to the staff, but he never gained their full trust, according to those I spoke with. He took great pride in the history of the White House and the role of chief usher, but he gave endless personal tours, a violation of the staff credo to remain behind the scenes. Some of the staff supposed that the tours were Rochon’s undoing; the Obamas reassigned him to the Department of Homeland Security. The Obamas hired or promoted first-generation immigrants and women of color to the roles of head chef and chief florist, and they replaced Rochon with Angella Reid, who is Black. She, too, was an outsider, coming to the White House from the Ritz-Carlton company, where she had worked for twenty-one years. Work was difficult for the residence staff under Reid, who earned respect but also a reputation as a taskmaster, and who ran the White House with the exacting and fear-inducing sensibilities of a luxury-hotel manager. Several people told me that Reid made a point of humiliating workers, disparaging their performance in front of their colleagues. (In a statement, Reid said that working at the White House “was not only a highlight of my career but memories I will hold dear for my entire life. I look back fondly and often think about the residence staff, continuing to root them all on. I wish them nothing but the best.”)

The Obama Administration brought a new set of challenges, from the lifers’ perspective. The family hosted events late into the night and again the next morning. They also had some notions that clashed with the lifers’ sensibilities, including setting up a Nintendo Wii in the China Room for their daughters during a holiday break and holding exercise classes in the East Room. “Lincoln lay in state in that room. Kennedy lay in state in that room,” Bill Yosses, the White House pastry chef from 2007 to 2014, told me. The Internet, or lack thereof, was a problem at first, because Obama, his family, and staff were used to accomplishing tasks online; the lifers lacked Internet in many of their offices, and, in some cases, shared e-mail accounts. Early in the Administration, when he realized that valets were fulfilling his Amazon orders from their homes, Obama ordered the installation of good Internet for the residence workers’ use.

In other ways, the Obama Administration adapted to the residence staff. For decades, the stage built for speeches and events in the East Room left a couple feet of space between the risers and the ground, exposing unsightly cables. So Dale Haney, the longtime groundskeeper, would line a row of potted ferns along the stage to conceal the gap. But Desiree Rogers, the Obamas’ first social secretary, sought to expel pervasive nineties frump. Yosses said, “The ferns became a four-letter word.” As he recalled it, Haney “always had his ferns ready. He’s, like, ‘Oh you need risers? I’ll get the ferns.’ But Desiree was, like, ‘No fucking ferns. I don’t want ferns.’ ” Rogers left, after just over a year on the job, and the ferns returned. “It was just too easy,” Yosses said. Rogers disputes saying this, and maintains that there was “a wide selection of greenery around the stages at all times.”

The residence staff will tell you that they avoid discussing politics at work, yet in recent years that pact has frayed, as it has elsewhere in America. Tensions surface more than in the past, prompted at times by knowledge of their colleagues’ Facebook posts. “Most people know more or less where people stand,” the residence worker told me. About half of the lifers are people of color, which raises questions about how they tolerated working for Trump. “We have to be impressed with the idea that a bunch of Black and brown people can survive this daily onslaught,” Jason told me. “It speaks to their diligence and loyalty to the house itself—they are not really there for the person.” But they were not impervious to the tone of the Administration. Under Trump, Jason said, Black and brown lifers noted that white people on staff were “saying some real shit . . . meaning they’re comfortable to say what they want to say.”

A little over four years ago, the lifers awaited the Trumps with nervous anticipation. They knew little about the new President, beyond that he owned hotels and fired people on television. He lived in a gilded penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue modelled after the Palace of Versailles, the very building that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson deemed the anti-White House. In his stump speech, Trump objected to the routine of holding big state dinners in tents on the South Lawn, and promised to build a hundred-million-dollar ballroom. There was “an anticipation of radical change and substantial change, because of the whole ‘Apprentice’ thing, you know—‘You’re fired!’ ” Daniel Shanks, who served as the usher responsible for food and beverage at the residence for twenty-two years, and who retired in October, 2017, recalled. “That wasn’t dispelled immediately, because there was nobody to dispel it.”

Five months in, the Trumps did fire someone: Angella Reid. “It’s not uncommon that you might have a transition of staff when a new Administration comes in. And it’s simply nothing more than that,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was then the deputy White House press secretary, said at the time. After Reid’s firing, the residence staff braced for what might come. The Trumps’ selection of Timothy Harleth, who was relatively young and mid-career, caused some head-scratching. “He didn’t carry the mystique,” Shanks told me. “He was someone from down the street.” Another lifer remembered Harleth’s unceremonious first day, when the new boss wandered the corridor where the workers sit, poking his head around and asking, “Hello, is anybody back there?”

Some workers I spoke with saw Harleth as a kindlier manager than Reid, and expressed respect and admiration for his efforts. But, ultimately, Reid and Harleth shared the same ambitions: to make the White House run more like a hotel, an objective at odds with the philosophy of the longest-serving lifers, who say that a hotel is a place where guests pay to stay. The White House, they will tell you, is a home. According to residence staff workers, Harleth cracked down on overtime pay and led peppy, hotel-staff-style stand-up meetings. As his tenure progressed, he hired former industry colleagues from the Trump International Hotel and the Mandarin Oriental. By the time Harleth left, several workers told me that they believed he was hostile to the lifers. “He saw us as dinosaurs . . . recalcitrant, most likely to complain, most likely to resist change,” the residence worker said. “There was a real condescension on his part for the people who had been there a long time.”

Harleth told me that he was most proud of overseeing renovations to the White House: polishing handrails that hadn’t “been touched in seventy years,” redoing marble floors, replacing doors, restoring wood floors and drapery. Renovations in the Rose Garden involved the removal of the garden’s ten trees, which one garden historian and Reagan Administration staffer said had left her “aghast.” “As politically charged as it was, the work in the Rose Garden was closest to my heart, because of the effort that went behind that,” Harleth said, adding that plant disease had blighted the garden. It’s a healthier space now as a result,” he said. He also cited innovations that he brought to entertaining, such as synchronized plate service, in which each course is set before all the guests at once. “It’s very easy to criticize and say that this is a home, not a hotel, as opposed to taking an issue and debating the merits of whatever is at hand,” he said. Nevertheless, Harleth, who told me that he supported Bernie Sanders, said that he had deep respect for the residence staff, who taught him “the value and the meaning of service to the country—that’s what they do every day, through their service to the Presidency.”

The former Trump Hotel colleagues whom Harleth hired included Arvind Chadha, who was charged with new authority to oversee the butlers. But the butlers, the consummate lifers and innermost layer of the residence staff, were not easily managed—their proximity to the President gives them independent power that other residence staffers lack. “The butlers don’t like anybody and nobody likes the butlers,” Dennis Hawk, who worked as the head of operations until June of 2020, told me. In the battle between Chadha and the butlers, the butlers easily outmaneuvered him, one lifer told me, over the summer. “Arvind thought he knew what he was doing, but he had no clue,” Hawk said. “He’d tell people he could do things without knowing he couldn’t,” he added, giving as an example the time Chadha promised to fit three hundred chairs in the East Room while also abiding by social-distancing requirements. (Chadha did not respond to a request for comment.)

Shanks told me that he left the White House because he had hit a length-of-service mark that made retirement advantageous, and because, at seventy, he was about to be married. He also felt the staff was changing, and although some of the changes had been positive it was time for him to move on. Other lifers left under Trump for similar reasons. The chief curator, housekeeper, and calligrapher all retired, with eighty-five years of combined service to the White House among them. Also departed: an electrician, a butler, the lead carpenter, a longtime housekeeper (for reasons of illness), a laundrywoman, two florists, and two ushers; one, Jim Doherty, who supervised the trades, died suddenly, in his fifties, and with him went a vast knowledge of the building’s every squeaky hinge. Many lifers who retired did not say that Trump, specifically, caused them leave. Pat Blair, the former chief calligrapher, who retired in 2018, told me, “It just felt like the right time—the end of an era.”

Most of the turnover reflects a broader culture clash that pits old and new ways of running a grand household against each other. Cataloguing the changes of recent decades, lifers point to the shift from hiring through word of mouth across generations of families to recruiting from Washington’s hotels, and to an increased use of outside consultants and decorators. The shift means the staff often takes direction rather than giving it. It also results in more cooled relationships over all between the lifers and First Families. The butlers remained more distant with the Obamas, who had never had a staff of housekeepers and craved privacy. The Trumps treated the residence staff like a “twenty-four-hour concierge desk,” according to Jonathan Lee, who served in the calligrapher’s office until 2017. (He was fired without explanation, though Lee speculates that the cause was Trump officials learning that he had held a political role under Obama.)

According to Shanks, the shift in relations between the First Families and lifers has changed the feeling of the White House. “The Obamas and the Trumps were the first Administrations when the residence was considered the upper floors and not the entire building. For us, it’s always been that the ‘home’ was from ‘basement to the sniper on the roof,’ ” Shanks said. “It doesn’t have the concept of the home of the First Family that it used to, but, again, that’s more societal.” Now it feels more like the public rooms are a museum or a convention center. In the twenty-first century, Shanks suggested, the White House became a sound set—events are less about the impression they will make on the people attending them and more about the buzz they will create online.

Traditionally, Inauguration Day at the White House flows as a series of fixed events orchestrated by the lifers: tea in the Blue Room, move out, move in, and, at night, a party for hundreds of people. “They go out the door and hours later, when a new family walks in, we’re totally devoted,” Shanks said. “We’ve made that split of having served and now serving.”

Between Obama’s departure and Trump’s arrival, the residence staff had just five hours to transform the private quarters. Reid, then the chief usher, stood before the elevator doors, directing the movement of furniture in and out. Lifers darted from room to room, carrying art, hanging drapes, laying out gowns, painting a few walls, unpacking china, and assembling beds. They held objects up to the White House curators, who would reply “ours” or “theirs.” There was a false alarm when someone thought a new mattress was the wrong size. In the frantic final hour, another lifer opened Sasha Obama’s bedroom closet and groaned, because it was still filled with the teen-ager’s clothes.

Four years later, when the hour came for the Trumps’ departure, the staff gathered in a hallway on the ground floor. Donald and Melania Trump each spoke brief words of thanks, and Harleth presented the outgoing family with the flags that had flown over the White House during their time there, a long-standing tradition. That was the last time that many of the staff saw Harleth. Moments before the Bidens arrived, they were told that Harleth had been fired. For some, it was an emotional moment. “He’s been a very strong leader in terms of he’s the one in charge, and to have him disappear on such an important day—we were just reeling from the emotion of it,” the residence worker said. Suddenly, moments before the Bidens walked through the doors, the exhausted staff were once again thrust into uncertainty over what the future held. As the residence worker told me, “Tim wasn’t without his faults, but he was the most competent and least partisan of the last three we’ve had.”

Meanwhile, outside, the Bidens ambled west on Pennsylvania Avenue, in the late-afternoon sunshine. Biden jogged over to greet and acknowledge questions from a trickle of supporters and reporters lining the bike racks, a mainstay of Secret Service crowd control. They turned left and walked up the right flank of the north drive, slowly, amid a noisy Rockwellian jumble of flags, horns, photographers, and advance staff. The Bidens stood on the top step of the North Portico, atop the workers’ main passage, and gazed out, as “God Bless America” played. Joe and Jill Biden embraced, squeezed hands, and turned to enter the White House as President and First Lady for the first time. Some observers noticed that they were made to wait for an awkward moment before the White House’s front doors opened—this, several people told me, was a sign of a departed chief usher. (The Bidens have named an acting chief usher and have not permanently filled the role.)

Inside, the residence staff was staged on the State Floor, ready to greet the Bidens. When they bid goodbye to the Trumps, hours earlier, they had all stood in one room. But now they were spread out in a line, through the entire floor, to put more distance between their bodies. “It’s like night and day,” the residence worker told me, describing the difference between the two families’ concern over social distancing. “The Bidens came in and the first thing they did was make a loop of the State Floor and greet the staff,” the worker said, pausing, and then beginning to cry. “We were all very flattered. Usually we meet them in the first days or first weeks, but never in the first minutes.” The Bidens went down the line, greeting the staff, some of whom spoke brief, deferential words of welcome and said that they were glad they were there. To one of the well-wishers, Biden was heard to respond, “We’re glad we’re here, too.”

This piece was supported by the Robert B. Silvers Foundation.

‘Let the people vote’: Biden signs executive order to expand voting access

NBC News

‘Let the people vote’: Biden signs executive order to expand voting access

Biden issued the order after the House passed an election and ethics reform package and as GOP legislatures try to enact more restrictive voting measures.
Image: U.S. President Joe Biden makes remarks from the White House after his coronavirus pandemic relief legislation passed in the Senate, in Washington

President Joe Biden speaks at the White House after his coronavirus pandemic relief legislation passed in the Senate on Saturday. Erin Scott / Reuters

President Joe Biden signed an executive order Sunday calling on federal agencies to expand voting access as part of his administration’s efforts “to promote and defend the right to vote for all Americans who are legally entitled to participate in elections.”

“It is the responsibility of the federal government to expand access to, and education about, voter registration and election information, and to combat misinformation, in order to enable all eligible Americans to participate in our democracy,” the order read.

Biden announced the order in virtual remarks played before the Martin and Coretta King Unity Breakfast in Selma, Alabama, which commemorates the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where police beat Black demonstrators fighting for access to the ballot box along their march.

The House on Friday passed H.R. 1, a wide-ranging package of electoral and ethics reforms that Biden said he would sign into law should it make it through the Senate. Republican legislatures across the country are seeking to enact more restrictive voting measures after former President Donald Trump’s defeat in November.

In his remarks Sunday, Biden said the Republican efforts were “an all-out assault on the right to vote.”

“During the current legislative session, elected officials in 43 states have already introduced more than 250 bills to make it harder for Americans to vote,” he said. “We cannot let them succeed.”

Biden said H.R. 1 was “a landmark piece of legislation that is urgently needed to protect the right to vote, the integrity of our elections, and to repair and strengthen our democracy.”

“I hope the Senate does its work so that I can sign it into law,” he said. “I also urge Congress to fully restore the Voting Rights Act, named in John Lewis’ honor.

“Let the people vote,” he added.

Biden marks “Bloody Sunday” by signing voting rights order.

Biden’s order calls on federal agencies to “consider ways to expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process,” make it easier for federal employees to vote by recommending how to “expand the federal government’s policy of granting employees time off to vote” and increase access to the ballot for voters with disabilities, Native Americans, active-duty military service members, overseas Americans and eligible federal prisoners.

H.R. 1 remains Democrats’ best hope to secure increased voter protections, however. As an official said, the Biden administration does not have the jurisdiction to override restrictive voting measures enacted at the state level.

LeBron James launches new ad for campaign to protect Black voting rights

NBC News

LeBron James launches new ad for campaign to protect Black voting rights

“They saw what we’re capable of, and they fear it,” James said of the get-out-the-vote effort among black voters in Georgia.
Image: LeBron James

LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers helped found More Than a Vote, a group that works to increase Black voter registration. David Sherman / NBAE via Getty Images file

A new ad campaign narrated by LeBron James is taking aim at Georgia and other states that are pushing laws restricting access to the ballot box. The Protect Our Power campaign was launched by the organization More Than a Vote, founded by Black artists and athletes, and the ad will air ahead of the NBA All-Star Game on Sunday.

The 30-second ad is a collection of images and videos from this summer’s wave of Black Lives Matter protests and Black politicians, athletes and activists — juxtaposed with clips of the destruction from the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

“Look what we made happen. What our voices made possible,” James said in his narration. “And now, look what they’re trying to do to silence us. Using every trick in the book, and attacking democracy itself. Because they saw what we’re capable of, and they fear it.”

The organization was founded last year after the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, and it just announced partnerships with the Georgia NAACP, Black Voters Matter Fund, Fair Fight Action and the New Georgia Project to go after bills being advanced in the state.

Republicans in Georgia are pushing legislation to change voting processes based on former President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud. Parallel efforts can be seen in Arizona and Iowa. Civil rights organizations across the country say that, if passed, the laws would target Black voters disproportionately.

Once such bill was passed by the Republican-controlled Georgia House on Monday. It would limit early voting on Sundays, further restrict absentee ballots and change processes for ballot drops.

“Black and brown voters changed the game in 2020. So in response, lawmakers are trying to change the rules in 2021,” ​one of the new co-owners of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream, Renee Montgomery, a More Than a Vote member, said in a news release​. “We know that as athletes and as leaders we have to keep our foot on the gas to protect our power, preserve and expand our voting rights, and to continue turning moments into momentum. More Than a Vote is just getting started.”

Sen. Tina Smith supports ending filibuster

Star Tribune

Sen. Tina Smith supports ending filibuster

The Minnesota Democrat says the 60-vote threshold should be abolished.

WASHINGTON – Sen. Tina Smith said Thursday she supports abolishing the Senate filibuster amid growing debate over whether Democrats should throw out the 60-vote threshold now that they control the chamber.

“I believe that the filibuster should be abolished in all cases, not just for any particular piece of legislation,” Smith said. “We have already abolished the filibuster for judicial nominations and the Supreme Court, and to me this is a very important step that we need to take in order to make sure that the Senate can function and can do the work that we need to do.”

The Minnesota Democrat, who was elected to a full term in the 2020 election after being appointed to replace former Sen. Al Franken, said the issue was “sort of a theoretical” one when Republicans were in the majority. But with Democrats now holding a razor-thin edge by virtue of Vice President Kamala Harris’ ability to cast a tiebreaking vote, the issue has become more timely, Smith said.

But even with Smith’s support, she conceded that Democrats still lack enough support to eliminate the filibuster.

“To be honest, it’s not clear to me that there is a majority in the Senate right now that is in favor of getting rid of the filibuster,” Smith said.

The filibuster has become a major political flash point in the early days of President Joe Biden’s administration, given the expansive policy changes Democrats hope to make now that they have control of the White House and Congress.

Because the filibuster allows the GOP minority to try to block most legislation it opposes, Democrats are using the budget reconciliation process to try to pass a $1.9 trillion COVID relief package, meaning the legislation only needs the votes of the 50 Democratic senators and Harris.

On Wednesday night, the Democrat-controlled House passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and soon after, the voting and ethics overhaul Democrats named the For the People Act. But even after passing the House, both need at least some GOP support in the Senate to overcome the 60-vote threshold. That’s unlikely to happen given the steep GOP resistance to the measures.

Minnesota’s GOP House delegation opposed both bills, and former President Donald Trump criticized the House version of the For the People Act as “a disaster” and a “monster,” during his Sunday CPAC speech as he called for the further tightening of voting restrictions.

What’s at stake in the filibuster discussions also hasn’t been lost on Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. She said Thursday night that “something has to change or we’re going to be just in this quagmire of not being able to advance legislation,” and emphasized that she has already supported filibuster reform.

Klobuchar is a leading driver of the For the People Act on the Senate side. Before the House passed its version Wednesday, she had already announced a hearing in the Senate’s Committee on Rules and Administration, which she chairs. The House passed a version of the bill in 2019, months after Democrats won back control of the chamber. But the legislation failed to gain traction in the then-GOP-controlled Senate.

“I’ve acknowledged there’s different ways you could do it,” Klobuchar said of filibuster reform. “You can get rid of it, which I support. You can change the numbers needed, which is something that we had talked about in early days, you know, have less numbers, not to get to 60. You can require what we call a talking filibuster, where you have to actually be there and object and speak the whole time.”

Fears of further inaction in the Senate despite Democratic control have only added to the filibuster debate.

Smith’s stance on what has become a key issue early in the Biden era is playing out against a backdrop of division within her own party over the filibuster.

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia has maintained his clear resistance to doing away with the filibuster, along with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz.

In an explanation on Facebook of her stance, Smith said when she arrived in the Senate she “started out believing that we should keep the filibuster.”

“I kept thinking about what would happen, what would stop a conservative president and a conservative Congress from doing terrible damage, for example, to women’s health care without the filibuster,” Smith said. “But the more I’ve thought about this, the more I realized that the filibuster has long been the enemy of progress.”

California is bone dry. Will March bring more misery or a miracle?

California is bone dry. Will March bring more misery or a miracle?

Paul Duginski                      March 5, 2021
The most recent U.S. Drought Monitor data released Thursday.
The most recent U.S. Drought Monitor data released Thursday. (Paul Duginski / Los Angeles Times)

California, and Southern California in particular, is bone dry.

The calendar says spring officially begins with the equinox March 20, but the meteorological winter — consisting of December, January and February — is already in the record books. In other words, the wettest months are over. Let’s take a look at where the Golden State stands.

How dry?

Downtown Los Angeles received 1.84 inches of rain in December, when it normally would get 2.33 inches. Some 2.44 inches of rain fell in January, when L.A. normally expects 3.12 inches. And just a trace (that is, not enough to be measured) fell in February, when 3.80 inches normally falls. January and February are normally the two wettest months in L.A., after which the chances for rain diminish rapidly with the approach of spring and the end of the rainy season.

A graph of rainfall in downtown Los Angeles shows this year's monthly totals far below normal
Disappointing rainfall in downtown Los Angeles reflected a dry winter in Southern California. (Paul Duginski / Los Angeles Times)

Just 4.55 inches of rain fell over Los Angeles as of Thursday, when it normally should have received 11.68 inches to date.

It’s not just Southern California

Los Angeles and Southern California have lots of company in this respect. The state and the West are gripped by persistent drought, including large areas of exceptional drought in the Southwest, where the 2020 monsoon was a no-show, as the most recent U.S. Drought Monitor report shows. Many water agencies are discussing water conservation measures, and the North Marin Water District is considering voluntary and mandatory water conservation orders.

A map of California with percentage of normal rainfall in various cities ranging from 38% to 79%
California’s rainfall picture looks bleak as the meteorological winter — the state’s wettest months — comes to a close. (Paul Duginski / Los Angeles Times)

 

Talk of conservation is likely to spread if the drought persists, as is expected, according to the outlook below.

A map of the U.S. shows drought in most of the U.S. expected to continue or worsen
Persistent drought will continue in the West. (Paul Duginski / Los Angeles Times)
Why is this happening?

California has been plagued by an unusual and persistent upper-level ridge of high pressure in the Pacific off the West Coast. This has been blocking the storm track since last fall, making for a dry pattern that favors Santa Ana winds.

A weather map shows an arrow representing a storm track being pushed by high pressure over the Pacific
The predominant weather pattern since Oct. 1 has favored dry weather with more Santa Ana winds in Southern California. (Paul Duginski / Los Angeles Times)

 

This pattern is consistent with La Niña, which is still in effect in the equatorial Pacific. La Niña occurs when the sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific are below average. Easterly winds over that region strengthen, and rainfall usually decreases over the central and eastern tropical Pacific and increases over the western Pacific, Indonesia and the Philippines. This pattern favors warmer, drier conditions across the southern part of the U.S. and cooler, wetter conditions in the northern U.S.

A globe with radar imagery showing ocean surface temperatures
La Niña continues in the equatorial Pacific, indicated here by the blue area of cooler sea surface temperatures. (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Los Angeles Times)

 

In the big picture, the drought in the West can be seen as a long-term event, interspersed with a few wet years, that has continued over the last two decades. The longer it lasts, the worse it gets, as climatologist Bill Patzert points out. It affects groundwater and the wildfire situation, and the effects build over time. The longer the drought goes, the greater the push for conservation.

A graph on drought conditions in the western U.S. from 2000 to 2021 shows a current peak
Except for a few wet years, the West has been suffering drought for the last two decades. (Paul Duginski / Los Angeles Times)

Not only is the drought stubborn, as the chart above shows, but the dramatic rise in extreme and exceptional drought after 2020, compared with the extremes in other years since 2000, is also notable.

What are the chances of a ‘March miracle’?

The outlook for March isn’t overly encouraging. Cooler-than-average temperatures are forecast in California, and the Southwest either looks drier than average, or has equal chances of being wetter or drier than average. In other words, no “March miracle” appears to be in the offing.

Two maps show cooler than normal temperatures for the West and drier than normal precipitation for the Southwest
The temperature and precipitation outlooks for March. (Paul Duginski / Los Angeles Times)

“Now that the ides of March are approaching, the snow and rain drama is whether California will have March misery or a miracle,” Patzert said.

Last-minute relief in March and April 2020 brought Southern California up to about normal, but record-breaking heat in the summer and fall intensified the existing widespread drought throughout the West.

Given that the seasonal average for downtown Los Angeles is 14.93 inches, “there is only one March in the historical record that would put downtown L.A. above average. That was the super El Niño year of 1884, the wettest March and rain year in our history,” Patzert said. “That El Niño delivered colossal March rains of 12.36 inches. In the present modest-to-strong La Niña year, that would be the longest of shots. Think of shooting a basket from the Forum to Staples Center.”