Bill Gates Is the Most Interesting Man in the World

Bill Gates Is the Most Interesting Man in the World

He’s everywhere, this lavender-sweatered Mister Rogers for the curious and quarantined.

By Timothy Egan

Contributing Opinion Writer

·         May 22, 2020

·          

“It tires me to talk to rich men,” said Teddy Roosevelt, himself a product of wealth. “You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worth hearing. But as a rule, they don’t know anything outside their own businesses.”

Had T.R. spent time with Bill Gates, the polymath who predicted the pandemic in a TED Talk, he likely would have made an exception.

Gates is everywhere these days, a lavender-sweatered Mister Rogers for the curious and quarantined. With the United States surrendering in the global war against a disease without borders, Gates has filled the void. The U.S. is isolated, pitied, scorned. Gates, by one measure, is the most admired man in the world.

Beyond the $300 million that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given to blunt the spread of the virus, Gates has made himself a spokesman for science. It needs one. While President Trump spouts life-threatening nonsense, Gates calmly explains how a spike protein of coronavirus fits into the urgent hunt for a vaccine.

He’s the prophet who warned in 2015 that a pandemic was a greater risk to humankind than nuclear war. Five years before that, he challenged the world health community to commit to a decade of vaccines, and anted up $10 billion to get it started.

In 2018, he took the stage in Beijing with a jar of human poop. This, at the Reinvented Toilet Expo, was his way of stressing that about 500,000 young children die every year from diseases linked to poor sanitation — a problem his foundation has tackled.

He appears on both Fox News and MSNBC. He talks regularly with Dr. Anthony Fauci and peddles pandemic notes to Stephen Colbert. He recommends “A Gentleman in Moscow,” the Amor Towles novel about a hotel prisoner in Soviet Russia, on his personal blog, where he also praises the honesty of “These Truths,” Jill Lepore’s magisterial telling of our nation’s history.

Do I need to know that he and Melinda enjoy “This is Us,” the sap-heavy television series? No. But as they’ve already given away more than $50 billion as self-described “impatient optimists working to reduce inequality,” I’ll take their gloss on pop culture over an update on Kim Kardashian’s lip gloss.

Big Philanthropy can be about diplomatic power and muscle under the guise of charity. But there’s an inescapable truth about the world’s second-richest man’s decision to give away his fortune: The Gates Foundation has helped save millions of lives.

With the coronavirus, which Gates has called “the most dramatic thing ever in my lifetime by a lot,” his approach is to inject a turbocharger of money at many different levels. The foundation calls it “catalytic philanthropy.” To speed up the steps needed to get a vaccine to the world, for example, he’s funding the construction of factories to manufacture seven possible coronavirus vaccines, even if most of them fail.

Many tycoons tend to get miserly and coldhearted as they age. Gates has evolved in the opposite direction. Early on, the co-founder of Microsoft was arrogant, insufferable, whiny and socially distant when that was considered offensive — a monopoly capitalist without the imagination of his rival and friend Steve Jobs.

His initial efforts at philanthropy — giving computers away to underserved libraries and schools — opened him up to criticism (largely unfair) that the donations were part of a scheme to expand the market for Microsoft products. Gates soldiered on, making himself an expert in infectious diseases. He helped to create a market for lifesaving drugs that are often ignored by Big Pharma.

It’s uncanny how spot-on he was in that 2015 speech. The greatest threat to the world was “not missiles but microbes,” he said. “You have a virus where people feel well enough while they’re infected so they get on a plane,” he said.

The first major American outbreak, in a nursing home just 11 miles from Gates’s house near Seattle, made him regret that he had not spoken out even more. He had warned Trump, just before he took office, of the seismic dangers of a pandemic.

Now, of course, Gates is the boogeyman in the fevered minds of many a delusional Trumper. The global lunacy community — anti-vaxxers, science deniers, Russian agents — has spread so many conspiracy theories regarding Gates that misinformation about him is now among the most widespread of all coronavirus falsehoods.

The crackpots who have targeted Gates include Roger Stone, Laura Ingraham and the anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Would you get in a lifeboat with that trio?

The world needs a strong American response precisely because the disease has become a huge American problem. With less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States accounts for more than 30 percent of the planet’s coronavirus cases. When Trump snubs the World Health Organization, he hurts American citizens.

The safer route for a billionaire trying to avoid social media predators is idle-rich vacuity. But Gates, who had urged nations to simulate “germ games not war games,” will not sit this one out from the safety of a yacht. He’s smart enough to see that this virus does not pick sides.

Dowd: Covid Dreams, Rump Nightmares

Covid Dreams, Trump Nightmares

Of masks, unmasking and dropping our professional masks for our medical ones.

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

·         May 23, 2020, 2:29 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON — My corona dreams are so crazy and vibrant, with star turns by politicians, celebrities, zombies and my late mother, that sometimes as I wake, I groggily think the virus that devoured the globe has to be a dystopian vision.

Then, still sliding into consciousness, I muse that Donald Trump lumbering around the White House must have been a dream, too. How is it possible that this man is actually president?

But the Trump carnival of dread, with its twin fixations on masks and unmasking, is all too real.

On Thursday, as China played King Kong with Hong Kong; as unemployment rose to 38.6 million; as broken dams unleashed a flood in Central Michigan; as the president continued to stubbornly and recklessly claim he was taking hydroxychloroquine, causing sales to soar; as the news sunk in that if the U.S. had acted even a week sooner on social distancing that 36,000 people might still be alive; as Senate Republicans finally cemented themselves to Trump and his crazy schemes; as Trump stuck to his threat of withholding federal funds to Michigan and Nevada if those states enabled voters to vote; as a partisan know-nothing was put in charge of all our intelligence; as Trump pulled out of another major arms control pact; as Mike Pompeo basked in getting Trump to fire another inspector general (this one looking into a backdoor deal to sell arms to Saudi Arabia and brazen grifting by the Pompeos), the cliffhanger president made sure the focus was on just one little thing: Would he or wouldn’t he wear a mask as he toured the Ford plant in Ypsilanti?

After donning it for a few private moments with Ford executives, Trump removed the mask for the public part of the tour, saying he “didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it.”

While you know Barack Obama would have been all about the mask, showing the nation the proper example, Trump is afraid his followers will think he’s a wimp if he wears it, that he’s conceding the danger of a pandemic many in MAGA-land think is exaggerated or some sort of hoax.

The mask should be a medical signal, not a political one. But Trump rejects the mask because of a misbegotten image of masculinity and power. In denying the mask, he denies reality, science and the fact that the country is in a crouch. Trump has proved that people wearing a mask can present more truth than people not wearing a mask.

His latest con, something that he stupidly refers to as “Obamagate,” a scandal about unmasking, is also misbegotten. You can’t create a scandal about Obama out of nothing just because you hate the fact that he went by the book while you dwell in a murky world of transgressions, that he glides while you lurch.

Even as Trump tries to paint Joe Biden as gaga, he is doing something truly gaga: He is running the government that is responding to the worst pandemic in a century at the same time he is the leader of the resistance to his own government, urging people and states to open up whenever they see fit, recommending Clorox injections, stifling Dr. Fauci, refusing to wear the mask.

The fact is that Donald Trump has been wearing a mask for a long time, like Eleanor Rigby “wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door.” He studied larger-than-life titans like George Steinbrenner and Lee Iacocca and invented a swaggering character called Donald Trump with a career marked by evasions, deceptions and disguises.

The young builder was intent, as T.S. Eliot wrote, to take the time “to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” Early on, Donald locked in his costume for the masquerade, the look of a C.E.O. in the ’80s. His body armor was a dark suit, white shirt and monochromatic silk tie. His hair was a blond helmet, his war paint was orange.

“He is the most vaudevillian performance artist who ever inhabited the White House,” says his biographer Tim O’Brien. “He has a consuming desire to always be center stage, yet he never wants to reveal who he really is. He masks his finances, his taxes, his friendships, his ongoing family conflicts of interest, his ignorance and his inadequacies. He’s constantly making up areas of expertise he doesn’t have.

“He doesn’t read the Bible and he doesn’t live as a Christian and love thy neighbor. But he is demanding that the churches be reopened because his evangelical base will love that. Everything he’s doing right now is to stave off a loss in November.”

Just as Obama admitted at the end of his presidency that he had not always been “attentive enough” to the parts of the job he did not care for, the theatrics, the “simplistic” displays of feelings and emotions designed “to satisfy the cable news hype-fest,” Trump’s presidency is the reductio ad absurdum of all that. It is all theatrics, all performance, all form with no content. His script is the only truth.

Those of us who have donned protective masks to fight the virus have taken off our professional masks — makeup, fashion, artifice. Now we see celebrities and journalists in their own habitats without hair and makeup, and that has made them seem more fully human.

Humanity is showing through — everywhere except, ironically, with the unmasked Trump.

As we saw with Joe Biden’s latest contretemps, telling Charlamagne Tha God, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black,” Biden has his flaws. God love him.

But Trump without a mask is more of a masked person than Biden with a mask.

Summer, Highland Falls

Billy Joel

They say that these are not the best of times
But they're the only times I've ever known
And I believe there is a time for meditation
In cathedrals of our own

Now I have seen that sad surrender in my lover's eyes
And I can only stand apart and sympathize
For we are always what our situations hand us
It's either sadness or euphoria

So we'll argue and we'll compromise
And realize that nothing's ever changed
For all our mutual experience

Our separate conclusions are the same

Now we are forced to recognize our inhumanity
Reason coexists with our insanity
Though we choose between reality and madness
It's either sadness or euphoria

How thoughtlessly we dissipate our energies
Perhaps we'll help fulfill each other's fantasies
And as we stand upon the ledges of our lives with our respective similarities

It's either sadness or euphoria

Rump Has No Plan

Donald Trump Has No Plan

Thousands are dying each week, the economy is cratering, and the president is at a total loss.

May 12, 2020

David A. Graham

Staff writer at The Atlantic

It’s been 111 days since the first reported case of the coronavirus in the United States. It’s been 57 days since President Trump issued social-distancing guidelines, and 12 days since they expired.

Yet the Trump administration still has no plan for dealing with the global pandemic or its fallout. The president has cast doubt on the need for a vaccine or expanded testing. He has no evident plan for contact tracing. He has no treatment ideas beyond the drug remdesivir, since Trump’s marketing campaign for hydroxychloroquine ended in disaster. And, facing the worst economy since the Great Depression, the White House has no plan for that, either, beyond a quixotic hope that consumer demand will snap back as soon as businesses reopen.

Echoing his breezy language in the earliest days of the pandemic, Trump has in recent days returned to a blithe faith that the disease will simply disappear of its own accord, without a major government response.

“I feel about vaccines like I feel about tests: This is going to go away without a vaccine,” Trump said Friday. “It’s going to go away, and we’re not going to see it again, hopefully, after a period of time.”

He added: “They say it’s going to go—that doesn’t mean this year—doesn’t mean it’s going to be gone, frankly, by fall or after the fall. But eventually it’s going to go away. The question is, will we need a vaccine? At some point it’s going to probably go away by itself. If we had a vaccine that would be very helpful.”

As for the cratering economy, which on Friday produced the worst jobs numbers on record, Trump shrugged. “We’re in no rush, we’re in no rush,” he said.

The president’s shiftlessness in the face of the greatest crisis of his presidency, and the greatest political threat during it, is confounding. Of course, Trump has faced mortal political threats before; less than five months ago, he became only the third president in American history to be impeached. He’s shown a remarkable ability to survive damaging situations. And his plans have often been derided by skeptics as unwise, unrealistic, or simplistic. This situation is different, though: Grappling with a multifront crisis, Trump seems to have no plan at all.

Let’s begin with efforts against the illness itself. The 45 days during which Trump recommended social distancing were meant to prevent hospitals from being swamped with patients, and give the government time to devise more effective measures. But when that period ended at the end of April, Trump simply let his recommendations lapse, opting not to extend them in favor of vague calls for reopening the economy.

Those six weeks didn’t actually buy the country much time, because the White House wasted them. With New York City removed from the numbers, the national curve hasn’t flattened at all. States continue to fend for themselves on tests and personal protective equipment. Trump held a White House event yesterday to tout growth in testing in the U.S., but the president’s rhetoric was misleading. The U.S. does not, as he claimed, lead the world in testing, on a per capita basis. He also continues to compare the U.S. rate favorably to South Korea’s, eliding that South Korea was able to control its outbreak sooner by testing faster, and thereby reducing its need for testing.

As my colleague Robinson Meyer has reported, based on figures in the COVID Tracking Project, which is housed at The Atlantic, the U.S. has increased testing but still needs to expand it dramatically to match expert recommendations. “To an almost astonishing degree, the U.S. has no national plan for achieving this goal,” Meyer writes. “There is no effort at the federal level that has mustered anything like the funding, coordination, or real resources that experts across the political spectrum say is needed to safely reopen the country.”

One possible problem is that to muster the kind of government effort required to catch up, Trump might have to acknowledge that his various premature “Mission accomplished” announcements were grievously wrong. Instead, he has repeated them. “We have met the moment. And we have prevailed,” he said yesterday.

Having declared victory, Trump has begun calling for the country to reopen. He is correct to note that social distancing has knocked the American economy flat, but once again, he has no plan for how the reopening should occur. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did have a plan—but as the Associated Press first reported, the White House quashed it, telling the CDC its guidelines would never “see the light of day,” then lied about the process by which they were killed.

In any case, the White House push to reopen is based on a serious misunderstanding of the causes of the economic damage. In Trump’s imagination, which seems fired largely by the rowdy and often heavily armed—but highly unrepresentative—protesters gathering in state capitols, the problem is that governors and mayors have tyrannically consigned brave American “warriors” to their homes, when in fact the populace wants to be going about its business of haircuts and meals out and gym sessions as though there weren’t a deadly pandemic sweeping the country.

This is simply wrong. Commerce has ground to a halt because many Americans have decided they don’t want to risk infecting themselves or their family, regardless of whether there are formal government policies instructing or mandating that they stay home. As Jordan Weissmann (drawing on OpenTable data) points out, restaurants in states that have lifted stay-at-home orders have seen a tiny increase in attendance, but nowhere near enough to save those restaurants, much less float the economy. Nate Silver notes that states that have opened up aren’t seeing significantly more movement than those that haven’t.

In short, Trump has placed most of his energy behind a vain hope, without any plan to accomplish reopening even if it were plausible. That has distracted his administration from any other efforts to boost the economy for what is likely to be a very long slog. The first three phases of stimulus have been, despite some complaints, positive measures, but they’re also clearly insufficient; Friday’s epochally bad jobs report came despite the billions Washington has already spent.

The government will need to spend much more to prop up the economy. This should be no problem, at least as a matter of politics. Democrats are already clamoring for more spending, and there’s little chance Republicans would balk en masse if Trump demanded a new bill. Some members of the administration acknowledge the seriousness of the problem. The White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett on Sunday forecast unemployment rates topping 20 percent, though he said he hoped policies so far had bought the White House time.

But others are inexplicably sanguine. Larry Kudlow, who incapably played an economist on television before being hired as the director of the National Economic Council, dismissed any need for new spending anytime soon. “We put all this money in, which is fine,” he said Friday at the White House. “It’s well worth it. Let’s see what happens. As we move into the reopening phase this month, maybe spill over to June, let’s have a look at it before we decide who, what, where, when.”

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who worked well with Democrats on earlier phases of stimulus and has few clear ideological precommitments, would be a logical champion for more spending, but he appeared to remain fixated on reopening during a Sunday interview on Fox News.

Meanwhile, a faction of fiscal conservatives, reportedly led by new White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and budget chief Russ Vought, has suddenly discovered the concern for deficits that Republicans displayed throughout the Obama presidency and abandoned completely when Trump became president. They’ve returned to the theme at the worst possible time, both economically and politically. Austerity will only further crush the economy, and a cratering economy will make Trump’s reelection tougher.

Surveying the situation, Eric Levitz concludes that Republicans are simply “not cynical enough” to recognize the opportunity posed by stimulus spending: “For Republicans, some things are more important than winning elections—and, apparently, denying government assistance to desperate workers and their underfed children is one of them.”

That charge might be leveled at fiscal conservatives, as inconstant in their creed as they may be, but it is clearly not true of Trump. The president has no particular attachment to desperate workers or underfed children, as he has demonstrated throughout his life and now in his time as president. But he also has no attachment to fiscal conservatism either, nor will he be out-cynic’ed. For Trump, as for Vince Lombardi, winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.

Even with a clear imperative to spend, Democrats eager to work with him, and little need for wonky detail—all he has to do is sign a huge check—Trump hasn’t managed to commit to the most straightforward thing he can do to boost the economy and therefore his own reelection chances.

This isn’t because Trump is confident about November. White House reporters say the president is privately “glum and shell-shocked by his declining popularity.” His public behavior betrays the stress. He tweeted incessantly and manically on Sunday, then stormed out of a press conference yesterday after a jarring, testy exchange with reporters. He has begun a bizarre bombardment of his predecessor, Barack Obama, part of an unending search for villains. Trump is also deeply engaged in other efforts to boost his chances, including a campaign against voting by mail—a step many experts say is necessary to protect voters’ health, but which he has concluded (without much evidence) will help Democrats in November.

So much of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus was easily foretold. Experts had warned for years of a global pandemic. The president is obviously overmatched in his job. Trump badly botched the response to previous natural disasters, most prominently Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and pundits had predicted that he would stumble worse when faced with a larger test. His chaotic style of governance, lack of faith in his advisers, and inability to maintain his attention were all manifest before the coronavirus, and are on vivid display now. He has never been interested in the actual work of policy. None of this should have been a surprise to anyone paying attention for the past three years.

But through it all, Trump displayed a clear will to win, and a keen instinct for what it took to do that. This makes his failure to come up with even a semblance of a plan—good, bad, or unclear—a true mystery. Yesterday, the U.S. death toll crossed 81,000, a mark Trump had previously said it would never touch. More recently, he’s offered 100,000 as a likely figure. Will the president have a plan for the pandemic by then? At the moment, he’s in no rush.

Frum: The System Failed...

The System Failed the Test of Trump

The story of recent years is of institutions that were unable to constrain the presidency.

May 21, 2020

David Frum

Staff writer at The Atlantic

Have you ever known anyone swindled by a scam? It’s remarkable how determined they remain to defend the swindler, and for how long—and how they try to shift the blame to those who tried to warn them of the swindle. The pain of being seen as a fool hurts more than the loss of money; it’s more important to protect the ego against indignity than to visit justice upon the perpetrator. We human beings so often prefer a lie that affirms us to a truth that challenges us.

Americans are living now through the worst pandemic in a century and the severest economic crisis since the Great Depression. At every turn, President Donald Trump has made the crises worse. Had somebody else been president in December 2019—Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush—fewer Americans would have met untimely deaths; fewer Americans would now be unemployed; fewer businesses would be heading toward bankruptcy.

On the eve of the 2016 election, a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist opined in The Washington Post: “If Trump wins, he’ll be held more or less in check by the House and Senate, because that’s the way our system of government is set up. Not even Republicans are eager to follow Trump’s lead.”

I cite that column—published under the headline “Calm Down. We’ll Be Fine No Matter Who Wins”—not to single it out, but precisely because it was so un-singular. The keepers of the institutions could imagine Trump testing the system. They could not imagine the system failing the test.

And yet fail it did. The story of the Trump years is a story of institutions that failed. The Department of Justice failed. The inspectors general failed. Congressional oversight failed. The national-security establishment failed. The courts failed. Trump has done things that no previous American president would ever have dared, that no previous president sank low enough even to imagine. Sometimes he was stopped, more often not. But whether stopped or not in any particular case, he has never ceased pressing ahead to do even worse the next time.

The only check remaining is that of the 2020 ballot box. Not Trump alone, but the great political party behind him, is working to ensure that election is as unfree and unfair as possible. In that effort, they have mobilized the active or tacit support of millions of Americans.

This post was excerpted from Frum’s recent book.

Trump is a swindler, but the Trumpocalypse of 2020 represents something a lot bigger and a lot worse than a swindle. In the fall of 2019, a nonpartisan research organization studied the distinctive attitudes of Republicans who watched Fox News as their primary source of information. Among that group, 55 percent said there was virtually nothing President Trump could do that would change their minds about supporting him. Fox News and the Facebook feed have become for many Americans friends more intimate and trusted than family or neighbors. The validation of their prejudices by television and Facebook is a validation of themselves.

And so, for the sake of flag and faith, millions of decent conservative Americans countenanced scandals, wrongs, disloyalty, and crime. Trump’s followers live in an isolated knowledge community that has developed its own situational ethics. They wanted to lock up Hillary Clinton for sending and receiving emails on a personal server, not caring even slightly when Ivanka Trump did the exact same thing or when Trump outright blabbed to the Russian foreign minister secrets much more vital than anything Clinton could possibly have risked. They plunged into the QAnon fantasy of a wise and good Trump poised to crush a global ring of child molesters, in order to avoid the reality of a malignant Trump who by his own admission had preyed upon teenage beauty-pageant contestants.

And if Trump’s supporters are not interested in holding him to account, most of the institutions of American government haven’t proved capable of doing so either. The Trump years demonstrated the very great extent to which presidential cooperation with the law is voluntary, especially if he retains a loyal attorney general, and a sufficient blocking vote in Congress.

It’s illegal for federal employees to overspend on travel to benefit themselves or their colleagues. In 2012, a senior executive at the General Services Administration was sentenced to three months in prison, three months under house arrest, and three years’ parole for taking personal side jaunts and overspending on lavish retreats for his staff.

Yet when Vice President Pence visited Ireland in 2019, he wasted hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars by staying not in Dublin, the site of his meetings, but at Trump’s golf course 180 miles away, on the opposite coast of the island. Pence tried to make things right by paying for his own room, but that only added a direct personal payoff to Trump to the many other ethical breaches of the trip. Any other federal employee who wasted travel expenses in order to direct money to his supervisor would find himself in serious trouble: facing at least a firing, possibly prison time if the behavior was egregious enough. But not Pence. Not the Trump staffers who meet every Tuesday evening with lobbyists at the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C. In the George W. Bush White House, where I once worked, you showed you belonged by wearing cowboy boots; in the Trump White House, by repaying some of your salary back into the boss’s pockets.

It is illegal for government employees to use their positions to engage in certain political activities. They are especially forbidden to engage directly in election campaigns while on the government payroll. The presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway appeared to violate this law—the Hatch Act—so persistently and flagrantly that she triggered an internal investigation. In June 2019, the investigation reported that indeed she had broken the law repeatedly and intentionally.

If Conway had been a career government employee, she would have been dismissed from her position immediately. By courtesy, however, the enforcement of the Hatch Act upon political appointees is left to the president directly. The investigation, therefore, concluded with a recommendation to the president, rather than a direct order, that Conway be subject to “appropriate disciplinary action”: in other words, that she be fired.

Trump disregarded the recommendation. Conway mocked the finding to reporters. As one journalist read the recommendation to her, she replied: “Blah, blah, blah. If you’re trying to silence me through the Hatch Act, it’s not going to work. Let me know when the jail sentence starts.”

At some point in the 2020 campaign, some federal worker will get excited about the election and post something intemperate on Facebook or do something else to infringe the 1939 law. She will be disciplined—fired if the offense is egregious or visible enough—and she will know that this law that applies to her was ignored in the much worse case of a higher-ranked person. Or perhaps in 2020, the law will be extra-scrupulously obeyed by federal workers, precisely because they already know that there is one law for Trump cronies and a different law for everybody else.

No other major democracy operates so political a system of law enforcement as the United States. The 93 U.S. attorneys are all political appointees. They report to an assistant attorney general for the criminal division, also a political appointee. The AAG reports to a deputy attorney general and finally the attorney general—all political. Ideally, while people are appointed to those posts for political reasons, they do not do their jobs in a political way. 

Americans can be proud that this ideal is so often voluntarily met. But when not voluntarily met, the ideal is difficult to enforce.

In other democracies, the equivalents of the AAG for the criminal division are career civil servants. The British attorney general has no role in the operation of the Crown Prosecution Service. Germany’s general federal prosecutor is even more insulated from politics. 

Problems arise in these systems too. Justin Trudeau’s government in Canada was rocked by the charge that the prime minister had leaned on prosecutors in that country to go easy on a corporation that had been generous in its campaign contributions to his party. But in those other countries, the brute political pressure that Trump applied via Attorney General William Barr on the Department of Justice is much less likely to have an effect.

At one point in 2019, Trump simultaneously refused all cooperation with 20 distinct congressional investigations—testing whether there was much Congress could do about it. There proved to be surprisingly little. Congress’s contempt powers lag far behind those of courts. As the Congressional Research Service warned in 2017:

A number of obstacles face Congress in any attempt to enforce a subpoena issued against an executive branch official. Although the courts have reaffirmed Congress’s constitutional authority to issue and enforce subpoenas, efforts to punish an executive branch official for non-compliance … will likely prove unavailing in many, if not most, circumstances. Even outright lying to Congress can prove exceptionally difficult to punish.

 “Almost no one is prosecuted for lying to Congress,” concludes the leading law-review article on the subject. “In fact, only six people have been convicted of perjury or related charges in relation to Congress in the last sixty years.” Those words were published in 2006, but a report by Roll Call in 2018 found they still held true. The pitcher Roger Clemens was indicted for lying to Congress about steroids in 2009. He was acquitted on all charges in 2012. If you’re a Trump executive-branch official, you must like your chances of getting away with lying—or worse.

Some wonder: Why doesn’t Congress act? But there is no “Congress.” There are only the two parties in Congress. The members of the two parties cannot even agree on methods of evidence or standards of behavior. Republican Representative Ted Yoho from Florida spoke for troublingly many members of his caucus when he said of a fellow member of Congress that he “works for the president; he answers to the president.” Yoho’s district around Gainesville, Florida, voted 41 percent against Donald Trump in 2016. Those voters are also Yoho’s constituents, but he does not answer to any of them. In his mind, he is a party man first and only.

Congress as an institution cannot function on this kind of partisan mentality. There can be no meaningful oversight of the executive branch if the only standards are “Yay, team!” and “Boo, team!” The party of the president should be just as keen as the other party to enforce subpoenas and punish contempt, because both parties in Congress should feel the same concern for the powers of Congress. But of course, that’s not how things work.

Almost all Republicans in the House of Representatives, and the great majority of Republicans in the Senate, will act to defend a president they despise against charges they know to be true. The worst of them will hare after crazy conspiracy theories. Most, though, will voice their concern and then find ways to avoid their duty. The system that protects all of us has failed because the protectors of that system have failed to protect it for us.

Democracy does not fly on autopilot. If the people responsible for the institutions of democracy will not do the job, the job will not be done. While the job goes undone, the United States and the world careen toward conflict and crisis.