Trump and Covid

My first reason for rejecting Trump is his instability, which, in my opinion, disqualifies him from a position with warmaking powers. But another aspect of his personality is his inability to constructively lead. His response to Covid is the best example. All the reports from his advisers indicate that he cannot handle bad news of any kind and responds with anger or denial. This is not that big of a problem if no crises come up, but it is a fatal flaw for a leader faced with a real problem. He denied the reality of Covid throughout the beginning of the crisis, and then once the crisis was in full swing, he delegated the problem to the states. It's true that in our system the governors control some aspects of disease response, but historically they follow the president's lead on issues like this. He simply hasn't led. This has been especially damaging in the area of marshaling resources: the president is the natural coordinator given his powers to command war production for items of national importance. We are six months into the pandemic and we have not solved the PPE problem. I can't buy an N95 mask on Amazon. This is not a technology problem. Because the companies that produce these products don't believe that the pandemic will go on forever, they are not investing in new production facilities. And so we, and what's worse, first responders, do not have the necessary protective gear needed. Trump is the only one who can solve this problem, and he has chosen to ignore it. Note that because of his inaction, this problem is actually not being solved. There does not appear to be any prospect of new production facilities coming online in this country at scale so long as he is in office. This suggests that we are looking at an additional minimum six-month delay before a solution for this problem. Of course, if he is reelected, then there would be no reason to expect the problem to be solved in the forseeable future. A comparison of our situation with Europe's shows the depth of Trump's failure. Despite getting hit with the infection first, and so having at least a month less of time to prepare, and despite living conditions which make the fight against Covid harder, i.e., many more people living in dense cities using mass transit, Europe is largely done with the pandemic. People who don't deal with foreigners have in many cases dispensed with masks except on trains and buses, and are free to go out to dinner in actual restaurants. Sports leagues are starting up again. The daily death rate over there is two orders of magnitude less than ours. There are several European nations with higher cumulative death rates than ours, e.g., Belgium, but if you look at the graphs is clear that this will not continue. What's happening here is that Belgium went through the entire Covid experience and is done now with a daily death rate close to zero. We are nowhere near done, and it appears from the graphs that by the time we are finished the only competitors for us for the highest death rate will be Brazil and Mexico. No developed country will be anywhere near us. Biden is normal and likely defer to experts on the pandemic like most presidents would. With a typical president I'm sure there would have been mistakes and it would likely not have been a great experience, but we would probably have outperformed Europe's thanks to our car lifestyle which in most cities lends itself better to isolating people from their neighbors.

What does the Trump Phenomenon Tell Us About the U.S.?

One of my Swiss cousins sent me an essay making the claim that Trump and his followers are emblematic of America's decline from greatness. My view of what's happened here is different from that writer's, even if I can understand that point of view. My feeling is that the character of the United States did not change with Trump; rather his arrival has revealed an aspect of our character that has been here for a long time. There is a school of thought that there has for generations been an angry, paranoid strain of American politics, most identified with the historian Richard Hofstadter's writings (cf The Paranoid Style in American Politics) where he connected the conservative right wing politics of 1964 with older movements in American history going back a century. Trump's followers' obsession with nonexistent conspiracies and anger at the "other" carries this tradition forward.

This is not to say that I haven't been shocked by what has happened, just that I think, with hindsight, the signs of this were here already, although only embodied in fringier candidates of the past like George Wallace. But one thing to keep in mind is that Trump ran a completely dishonest populist campaign in 2016, promising at various times to 1.) produce a comprehensive public health plan that would cover more people than Obamacare, 2.) raise taxes on the 1%, and 3.) pursue and punish corporations. So his election was not necessarily a mandate for the policies he revealed only after getting elected. And it's going to be much harder for him to take a populist angle this time, and this is why I think it is unlikely that he will be reelected. My biggest concern in the election to come is the prospect of Russian hacking of the voting apparatus, a prospect the Republican Senate has not been interested in countering.

Another amazing aspect of the American character that has been revealed in the last few years: Americans take their democracy and its institutions for granted, and are completely complacent with respect to the threat of authoritarianism. It is clear that we are working with an honor system here, where the president has way too much power but has traditionally held back from exercising it. Now we have a guy who doesn't care about tradition, and so he is exercising power to a degree which is way beyond our traditional norms, but is in some cases legal, and in other cases illegal but punishable only by impeachment, which seems to be off the table for the moment. This is true on both the left and right -- the anger against Trump is almost all due to his specific policies of the moment, not to his abuse of our institutions. If Americans cared about democracy, then a key issue during the coming election would be how we should restructure our institutions to make it easier to rein in a criminal president. For example, it clearly is a weakness of our institutional architecture that the president directly controls the Department of Justice and has the ability to replace inspectors general. But I don't see people making much of an issue of this. The Republicans love Trump, Democrats hate him, and independents are trending -- for now -- toward dislike for him. But our vulnerability to dictatorship that he has so clearly revealed? That does not seem to be on the radar at all!

Reading about our history one sees so much talk about American liberty and freedom, but this talk does not reflect concern or focus of any depth. I think we are lucky for the moment that Trump's political instincts are not very sound, and so he persists with policies which are loved by his base but not the majority of the country. The successful American dictator of the future will craft his policies to appeal to a majority of the people. That man -- or woman -- will rule like a king.

Covid: How to Manage Going Forward?

I would like to see us

• develop a test which is easy to self administer.
• package this test in a kit which includes an electronic component that evaluates the test result and cryptographically generates a key whose value encapsulates the result, the time, and the person's unique ID.
• support incorporating this result into a location aware phone app, which shares the information with a public database.
• present this test status to the network so that other people in the vicinity can see it.

In this way each person has a silent but visible state: infected, not infected, and immune. So there is no document check, but if an infected -- or untested -- person steps onto a subway car, everyone in the car would be alerted through their phones that they are in proximity to this infection threat.

If it is determined that it is possible for a person to be infected but not initially have a positive test result, then this app could automate contact tracing by keeping a rolling buffer of recent locations. Server-side code would trace backwards to the most recent clean test result to see who has been physically close to the infected person during the intervening window of time. People at risk would be given a new state: quarantined. The quarantine could be brief depending on the sensitivity of the test to those early-stage infections.

Anyone not participating in this scheme would be obligated to maintain social distancing and wear an N-95 mask when indoors. (Obviously this is a policy for the future when the N-95 shortage has been resolved.) Obviously people in this category would not be allowed to participate in group events.

Ideally this would not be a permanent scheme, but just a measure taken until covid is definitively eliminated.