America Is a Country Besieged by Its Own President
By John Cassidy
July 24, 2020
This week marked the
fifty-first anniversary of the moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Edwin (Buzz)
Aldrin. I am just about old enough to remember how, in Leeds, the city in
northern England where I grew up, people gathered around their radios and
television sets to witness the historic event. My paternal grandmother, a fiery
Irish woman, refused to believe it was real: the entire thing had been staged
in a desert somewhere, she insisted.
That
was a minority position. To most of the world, the landing symbolized American
leadership and power. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that most of the people I
grew up with loved the United States, or even openly admired it. Barely
disguised resentment at the manner in which this country had eclipsed the
British Empire was combined with a widespread contention that America was a
shallow place beset by crass commercialism, high crime rates, and gaping racial
rifts. But beneath the British condescension, there was also a respect for
America: its technological know-how, its organizational efficiency, its
democratic traditions, and its sheer heft. When my dad was away, working in
Scotland, he saw the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy sail up the Firth of Forth. The vast
aircraft carrier was almost a quarter of a mile long, he reported back to us in
wonderment.
A
half century later, the rest of the world is looking on in horror as this
country lurches from one disaster to another. Trapped in a leadership vacuum
created by the narcissistic reality-TV star who occupies the Oval Office, the
United States seems powerless to arrest the spread of a pandemic that
most industrialized countries contained months ago. As the cumulative number of infections surpasses
four million, an economic rebound that began when many states prematurely
reopened their economies appears to be stalling. And, with an
election just three and a half months away, that same President, in a desperate
effort to save his political skin, seems intent on creating violent clashes in
some of America’s biggest conurbations.
So
many bad things are happening, it’s hard to keep up. In many states, covid-19 hospitalizations are rising
rapidly. On Wednesday, more than eleven hundred deaths were reported nationwide—the highest figure
since May, according to the Covid Tracking Project—and on Thursday there were
more than a thousand. “The epidemic in the United States resembled that of a
developing country,” Dr. David Ho, a virologist at Columbia University, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, on Wednesday
night. “This is certainly very, very sad to see.”
Things
are so bad that it is tempting to describe the United States as a failing
state. That shorthand phrase, which I have used myself on occasion, doesn’t
fully capture the current situation. Even in these dire circumstances, parts of
the American system are still functioning as they were designed to. Across the
country, medical professionals, public-health officials, and local politicians
are trying their damnedest to fight the virus. Public opinion is generally
supportive of more stringent measures. According to a survey that the
research firm Morning Consult carried out for Politico, a large majority of
Americans would support statewide mask mandates that are enforced with fines or
prison sentences for scofflaws.
Meanwhile,
Trump is still trying to exploit the protests that followed the killing
of George Floyd. Early on, these efforts were met
with some resistance. In early June, when he wanted to summon the U.S. Army
into American cities, the Pentagon brass, including the Defense Secretary and
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, opposed the idea. But
Trump doesn’t like being thwarted. With the connivance of Attorney General
William Barr, his Administration put together Operation Diligent Valor, a
military-sounding name for dispatching agents under the jurisdiction of the
Department of Homeland Security onto the streets of Portland in camouflage
gear, armed with tear gas and rubber bullets. On Wednesday night, federal
agents teargassed the city’s mayor,
Ted Wheeler, as he joined protesters on the streets.
Earlier
in the day, President Trump had announced that he was
sending federal agents into two more American cities—Albuquerque and
Chicago—under the guise of expanding an anti-crime initiative, Operation
Legend. Barr launched the campaign a couple of weeks ago. It was named after LeGend
Talifarro, a four-year-old who was shot and killed in June, in Kansas City,
where the first federal agents were dispatched.
From
the start, local elected officials in Portland opposed the decision to send
paramilitary forces to their city. “Authoritarian governments, not democratic
republics, send unmarked authorities after protesters,” the Oregon senator Jeff
Merkley tweeted, last week. There
has also been pushback from other quarters. A Pentagon spokesperson said, “We
saw this take place back in June, when there were some law enforcement that
wore uniforms that make them appear military. . . . The
Secretary has expressed a concern of this within the Administration, that we
want a system where people can tell the difference.”
On
Wednesday, Tom Ridge, a veteran Republican who served as the governor of
Pennsylvania and as the first Secretary of Homeland Security, said that the agency
wasn’t established “to be the President’s personal militia.” Ridge added, “Had
I been governor even now, I would welcome the opportunity to work with any
federal agency to reduce crime or lawlessness in any of the cities. But . . .
it would be a cold day in hell before I would consent to a unilateral,
uninvited intervention into one of my cities.”
In
Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said that the city would gladly accept federal
assistance in fighting crime, but she also issued a warning. “We welcome actual
partnership, but we do not welcome dictatorship,” she said. “We do not welcome
authoritarianism, and we do not welcome the unconstitutional arrests and
detainments of our residents, and that is something I will not tolerate.”
These
developments suggest that America as a whole isn’t failing—not yet, anyway. But
its system of government, its stated values, and its claims to greatness are
all under siege by a President who lacks the moral compass, self-doubt, and
respect for historical norms that would restrain another leader.
To be sure, Trump isn’t
solely responsible for the virus raging out of control. The recent surge in
California, which moved early and effectively to introduce a lockdown,
demonstrates the scale of the challenge that covid-19 represents. But many experts agree that the
President’s response—or lack of response—has made things much worse than they
needed to be. “It’s a failure of leadership in the national government,” Barry
Bloom, a professor of public health at Harvard, told the Financial
Times. “Our president effectively said, ‘Let’s forget about the epidemic,
we have to get the economy back on track so we can win the election’. That is
killing a lot of people.”
Mercifully,
Trump’s “law and order” gambit hasn’t led to any fatalities yet, although Mayor
Wheeler has warned, “My biggest fear is that somebody’s going to die.” Some
commentators are making a comparison to 1968, when Richard Nixon exploited
violent unrest to help him defeat Hubert Humphrey. The analogy isn’t entirely
off the mark, but Nixon was a challenger, not the President. If he had been in
a position to dispatch federal agents to assist police sent by Richard Daley,
the mayor of Chicago, to crack the heads of protesters outside the Democratic convention,
it is conceivable he would have done it. But such a nefarious possibility
didn’t arise.
Now
it has, and what makes the situation even more dangerous is the resounding
silence of many Republicans. By sending in anonymous federal agents to snatch protesters
from the streets, Trump is stretching the powers of the Presidency to foment
civil strife and distract attention from his failure to deal with the pandemic.
Apart from Senator Rand Paul, a longtime libertarian who spoke out on Monday,
barely a single elected G.O.P. official has raised a voice in protest. (Ridge,
of course, is retired.)
From
the Roman Republic to Weimar Germany, and to Russia and Turkey in this century,
history shows that democratic decay is a gradual process, and authoritarian
leaders rarely, if ever, achieve unchecked power without the acquiescence of
some elements of the political establishment. America isn’t there , and
hopefully it never will be. At this moment, though, its claim to be a model for
other countries is looking horribly tattered. The election can’t come soon
enough.
