The Intentional Collapse of the Federal Government

Pandemic federalism: four official and unofficial regional working groups (West Coast; Great Lakes; Chesapeake; Northeast) on the coordinated reopening of the states. The executive branch is AWOL.

Throughout the natural disasters (esp. in Puerto Rico), global pandemic, economic collapse, and now social unrest brought on by police violence, the Trump administration has excised itself from command and control and implicitly reasserted the Articles of Confederation. In this dynamic, all the federal government does is coordinate information between actors, with no formal authority to act on a thing. Coordination is good, but frankly, Trump is not even using his epicenter in power to do that. A central tendency of this administration is to shift blame and decision-making away from the White House, then position themselves to both take credit and deny culpability for things that go wrong. What this reveals is that the turn toward the unitary presidency is not a turn toward a unitary government–Trump, Pompeo and Barr instead want the president to do whatever they want at the national stage without actually governing the people of the United States. On the one hand that may mean the dawning fascist America will not occur through police state clamping down–a good thing–but will instead occur from societal collapse and government failure, leading a vocal minority of people to assert uniform control at the local level. This bottom-up fascism is not likely to occur, especially given the blue states are the economic engines of America. The most likely result is needless destruction until Joe Biden becomes president and reasserts some form of gainful government. While Biden is aligned to the Reaganite austerity regime of the last 40 years, there is a fair chance he will eschew his previous loyalties and realign the country back towards a government of the people and for the people. While time will tell on these last couple of points, what is clear now is local and state leaders only have each other to rely upon. The one saving grace is that every single governor and mayor in America is more competent than President Trump, so while he will continue sniping on Twitter to encourage the race war, at least in his enforcement capacity he won’t make things much worse. The anti-government ideology of Reagan and his followers is culminating in a hollowing out of the state and a divestment of federal actors from the subnational stage. Some may say this is a good thing, but the cost of this movement toward private power-only will lead to an incredible backlash and likely remove Republicans from federal power for a generation. Can’t say I didn’t warn you, Mitch.

As far as the these Covid-19 regional groups go, they are better than nothing, but will wholly fail at containing the virus. The main reason is states do not have the legal authority to close down their borders, which would violate centuries of legal precedent that states cannot inhibit interstate commerce. So while I applaud the create use of subnational associations to fill the void of national leadership, it will not work in the end. Until President Trump gives a shit about Coronavirus, it is here to stay.

Anatomy of a Protest Turned Riot

Mass mobilization in the form of street demonstrations is arguably the most effective form of political activism. While voting directly authorizes who has public power, votes do not advertise intent or any nuance behind what is generally a lesser of two evils election. Coming out en masse sends an indisputable message to those in power that the population has taken issue with a systemic issue—generally institutional racism or wealth inequality—and seek to use media to build awareness. This process is protected by the 1st Amendment right to free speech and association and is an essential behavior in democratically governed societies.

But like all political conflict, the groups involved in lawful protest are heterogeneous. Indeed, protests almost always attract a diverse configuration of good and bad actors with different motives, ready to use the crowd as cover to achieve their own discrete goals. The ongoing protests and riots over George Floyd’s murder are doubly compounded by a global pandemic and economy in collapse, creating a crisis of governance unlike anything in modern American history. These conditions, mixed with the political environment, contribute to the nature of the protests that have turned into riots across the nation. How does this happen? This post will dissect the various actors that generally get involved in protests, based on my first-hand experience from my Occupy days and now 24/7 monitoring of local news stations from coast to coast. Contemporary social justice protests have 3 overarching groups—Believers, Opportunists, and Infiltrators—and 14 varied subgroups. Their convergence in a single space and/or the bad actions of one group are the principle causes for protests turning sour.

Believers

Every protest has at its core people who have rallied together to contest the dominant political order. In this case, that is people who are fed up with institutional racism in America that makes murdering a Black man in broad daylight a common past time of police departments. Generally this group will be among the most moderate forces in the protest, willing to express their rights to expression while avoiding anything that can be perceived as violent. In general, believers—especially on the social justice end of the spectrum—will work to keep protests peaceful in the non-violent tradition. We can further disaggregate the group as:

Community Leaders and Organizers

This is the leadership cartel within any protest. They generally amplify the core message of the group and coordinate between groups to establish both timing, locations, and strategy. Back in the 1960s, there were relatively few groups organizing mass action for civil rights and against state-sanctioned brutality against Black people. This is where you get more iconic figures who became symbolic leaders of entire movements, like Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, and even young folks like John Lewis. But with time, we are seeing these groups become increasingly decentralized. For example, the most well known coordinating group against police violence toward Black people is Black Lives Matter. The leadership structure and approach of BLM is almost intentionally light on centralization, simply providing a valence and banner for other groups to organize underneath. That shifts to the leadership within any given community, where you will have national and local teams that get people out and communicate with government officials and law enforcement on the broad plans of the protest. This group also includes renowned local leaders who have experience organizing social movements and negotiating with those in power to move the ball forward in an incremental way. Every protest needs some degree of leadership, even if they ultimately have little ability to manage the crowd.

Vanguard and Provocateurs

Protesters do not all agree on tactics, but a constant in protest movements are frontline believers that seek to (physically) hold the line and potentially bate the police into a publicized massacre which will build awareness of the struggle. While I subscribe to the non-violent tradition of social change, I cannot deny that images of violence against peaceful demonstrators are the most effective iconography to get reference publics and the viewing audience to sympathize with the cause. But obviously baiting cops is not without its risks, so this group is the most volatile of the essential believer group. However, they are different from some later groups because they seek to instigate a limited response from police, not a full-fledged violent conflict. And moreover, they care about the eventual outcome of the campaign and are not simply there to fuck shit up. They may or may not be anarchists, but generally frontliners are experienced at both manipulation of the out-group (cops) and seasoned at crowd control on their side. I have personally witnessed these people talk down both cops and more rowdy protestors in an effort to deescalate, so their discipline is essential for a successful protest, both in peace and if need be, in limited violent exchanges.

Youth

Most mass-based protests require young people to serve as the lion’s share of feet on the ground. This is commonly well-meaning college kids and other young people who are getting their first dose of activism in a system that greatly discourages political involvement. Additionally, they also have little to lose by getting a rap sheet—it might even be a badge of honor. For the most part, there will be some level of youth leaders, but they do not take a large role in guiding the overall behavior of protesters. They tend to form all levels (front, middle and back) of the protest lines, but in general they just wander, chant, and at times break some shit out of ignorance or confusion. They may also check the certain unruly elements in a crowd, depending on the level of consciousness within smaller cells of friends and other crowd goers. Non-criminal youth are not likely to get overly amped during a protest, but people well-versed in criminality at a young age will vandalize if they see others doing it.

Neighborhood Families

An often under-valued core group of protests is the regular neighborhood families that understand the need for law and order and social cohesion, but nonetheless think change is needed to defray systemically biased abuse in the system. Classic swing group: if they are with you, you win, but if they are against you, your job is much harder. These are the people that will even bring young children to protests to normalize the contestation of power and maintain a certain facade that bystanders may acquiesce to: namely, if there are vulnerable populations around, people may behave a little better. It is controversial, but some parents will put their children in harm’s way to some degree, but if you see kids at a protest, it is less likely to be parental negligence and more about a show of community solidarity. Now, if you go to a protest and do not see a single middle-aged person, or a guy with a stroller, it likely means the protest will see violence. Parents have an extrasensory perception of threat and will not go to the riskier and more volatile protests.

Reference Publics

These are the apolitical people that might not even know what is going on, but once they catch wind they will honk their horns, cheer on protestors, or even join in. Protests become a social end for some people, and that is often in this group. Like young people, they pad the numbers of the protest and help it swell into numbers that police may have difficulty herding into specific areas. This group gets a real time education in civic participation that might not otherwise occur if there was not a crowd.

Opportunists

In contrast to believers, there are opportunistic actors who may seek to co-opt a protest for their own goals. While it is true these people may believe in their group’s goals, what differentiates them from core believers is that the discrete goal of the protest is not their only goal—they have an additional larger purpose that may encourage them to partake in certain behaviors believers may not get into. While many people who intend to agitate are true believers, it is my general suspicion (based on experience and conjecture) that the most violent and volatile groups fall in the opportunist and infiltrator camps, since the overarching goal of the movement is secondary to their parochial goals. In short, opportunists see a large crowd and view it as an opportunity to accomplish peripheral or personal goals.

Vandalizers and Looters

Most protests at some point devolve into property crimes of one form or another. But the people that commit these offenses are not a monolith. Indeed, looters have different profiles. Some people that face daily material deprivation could easily justify looting a department store when they have nothing and are desperate. Even if these people are convicted of their crimes, we should not entirely demonize them. While they detract from protests, the struggle to survive in a highly unequal society will push people to act in suboptimal ways. But is someone breaking into a Target to steal toilet paper worse than a president who has made $1,000,000 off charging taxpayers for him to stay at his own properties? Hardly, but I digress. We have also seen roaming caravans of looters, as many as 20 cars deep. This is unlikely to just be desperate people acting out, instead pointing to coordinated criminal syndicates, many of whom are not poor by any stretch. Just check out the cars they drive. Broadly speaking, there are four types of property destructing protesters: looters of need, looters of want, political vandals, and general vandals. Need looters steal staples from department stores, want looters steal clothing and electronics from boutiques, political vandals target government vehicles/buildings, and general vandals indiscriminately fuck shit up. There is an important difference between lighting a police car on fire—violent, but political in purpose—and tagging a mom and pop shop up with your tagger handle, or breaking into a Foot Locker to steal shoes. If most protests engage violence to some extent, there is a qualitative difference in intent and target depending on the group. For many, a protest is a great opportunity to enrich one’s self. Considering the historically high levels of  hunger and insecurity, it should be expected than any given protest of large numbers would attract a mix of desperate actors and career criminals. You can tell the difference in their targets. The people storming CVS or Target and taking toilet paper or food are desperate people who have been abandoned by a callous federal government under Trump. We should not think of these looters in the same way we think of the next two groups. Looters that target high-end boutiques in LA or a Foot Locker in Philly may be desperate, but they are channeling it into superfluous acts of selfishness, taking racks of clothes they cannot wear or shoes that don’t fit them. They may hope to resell the stolen merch, or they just love the thrill of stealing. Finally, there are some who do not want anything (food or apparel) and simply want to break shit. These last two groups gain the most media coverage and are often the costliest to the protest movement itself, as it paints the people on the street as up to no good and worthy of oppression. It is important to recognize any individual may resort to looting even against their higher-minded self, simply because the chaos of large protests restructures how social actors engage their environment. Anyone witnessing large-scale looting faces a group pressure to engage, which is importantly why decent people may succumb to this behavior at times.

Brawlers and Instigators

Unlike looters and vandalizers, there is another group that comes to protest specifically to fight people and draw others into the mayhem. People in several other groups appear to have similar behavior to this group, but the key distinction here is there goal is not to undermine the protest or enact a political agenda: all they want is to feel alive and fight someone. In this group will be bad apples with a career in violent crime, some homeless, some people with mental illness, and young folks who love the action. It is worth noting most criminals in America are non-violent, homeless people are more victims of crime than criminals themselves, and that mental illness manifests in many ways, sometimes but not always including violence. These folks will fight cops and protestors alike, depending on their personal profile and opportunities to draw people into manageable levels of conflict, although some of these folks have a death wish and suicide by cop or getting whooped by a protestor is as good as gold. Again, these are mostly non-ideological people who simply know traditional social rules go out the window in very large demonstrations, so they use the opportunity to have an exciting day of fucking up other humans. You will find these people toward the frontlines if cops are their target or roaming around menacing if protesters are the target. Relatively few in overall number, they tend to operate alone or with a very close cadre of one or two other people. In my experience, these are the people that get arrested the most, as cops may already have some knowledge of them and understand their loose association with other protesters. Finally, there are also people that love to stir up drama and leave others to pick up the pieces, so you do have instigators who are bitchmade and just want to see others fight. If that is how you get off, you are a truly pathetic piece of shit. For the most part, you can never snuff out all of the brawlers and instigators, but if protests are to remain peaceful, you need protesters to regulate this group as well.

Antifa

There are, however, ideological groups that use any protest as an opportunity to hit the streets and challenge authority. Broadly, these are anarchists and anti-system folks who may have legitimate critiques of American imperialism. While their presence may be useful because people are power, their behavior against fellow protesters makes them a constant thorn in the righteous quest for a better society. One of the leading groups that fits this is so-called “Antifa”: anti-fascist online cosplay community (afocc). I have had friends who were active members, and many of the ones I knew personally were fine people. But the anonymous pieces of shit who come out in all black with military boots, a mask when no one is wearing a mask (pre-Covid), a homemade shield, and carrying a fucking hammer are not good people. The core idea of anti-fascist ideology is to come out whenever Nazis or their favorite politicians come to town, which is unequivocally good. You must challenge fascists with counter protests to limit their reach within a community. But many of the contemporary self-stylized “Antifa” folks are just angsty teenagers or immature adults who live in their mom’s basement and are a perfect left-wing analog of right-wing incels. (And they only get the label “left-wing” because they adopt left-wing iconography and rhetoric—there is nothing left-wing about devaluing human life in service of gratuitous violence.) This club does not have a monopoly on opposing fascism, and oddly enough, their more ornery members willingly accept fascist practices. They believe their expressed rage will make them feel alive for a few moments, where violence becomes an end it itself. That often devolves to the initial property damage in a protest, usually smashing the windows of Starbucks and mom and pop shops alike, as well as turning on any protesters that ask them to stop fucking up their community. They come in from neighboring suburbs and do more harm than good. And just to be clear, Antifa is a decentralized collective with very loose membership, so I hope the group itself can develop some codes of conduct for its followers, and then disown those that dabble in community terror. For any given protest in SF, Berkeley or Oakland, these are the second worst actors, bested only by the racist cops that precipitate the demonstration itself. Many self-described Antifa protesters are more committed to destruction than social uplift, and demonstrators must pay special attention to policing the worst members of this group. Just because Trump singles them out (while selectively ignoring systemic oppression, police violence, and white supremacy) does not mean these folks are not a legitimate problem. They are and have been for decades. Only the protesters themselves can regulate them.

Black Separatists

Specifically on race-related protests, Black separatists usually show up. For the most part they are allies in spirit, and at worst a small group that may have motives that differ from the integrated crowd. They are distinguished by the difference between their goals and broader multicultural anti-racism campaigns—they want to build group insularity to justify a recession from society (like any identity-based separatist group). Black separatism has a vibrant intellectual tradition in America, from Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to the Nation of Islam, both accurately diagnosing the central problems in the U.S. while prescribing a clear but difficult to achieve alternative. Frankly, I myself go back and forth between support for Black separatism or integration, optimistically supporting both ideas: integration should be possible for those who want it and recession may be a suitable last resort for others. However, unlike the programmatic Black Panthers of the 60s and 70s, contemporary Black separatists have more in common with fascist doctrines than social uplift. An example is the women’s march organizer Tamika Mallory, who has espoused her own bigotry in support of Louis Farrakhan, who has forged alliances with white supremacists for several generations at this point. I do not have enough evidence to say what members of this group have done during these protests, but their goals are not police reform. They want to create and use a crisis in the system to force people out of deal-making pragmatic politics, toward social identity as the end in itself. Then segregation becomes a virtue because there will be a semblance of self-determination. This is where Farrakhan, David Duke of the KKK, and President Trump’s classism all align, albeit for different rationales. Intellectually, these are eminently debatable points, but it is worth noting if police stopped killing unarmed Black folks, this group would have less justification for their prescribed solutions. That alone is a potential conflict of interest within ostensibly non-violent protests, since any mass gathering is also an opportunity for mass violence. Again, it is important to note this is a relatively small group that may use conflict to control the narrative on America, but in any given protest a Black protester is more likely to fit the believer subgroups than this very particular, but notable splinter ideology. To my knowledge, this group is hardly ever responsible for a protest turning bad, but there is some dissensus between their vision of America and that of most left-wing protesters, including the Black inter-generational intelligentsia. But it important to note that some members of the crowd may want protests to turn violent to use it as propaganda for their espoused cause.

Traveling Far-Right Militias and White Supremacists

These recent protests have seen an onslaught of militia groups coming in with the specific goals of: destroying cities; to make the poor and ethnic minorities look ungovernable; to justify stereotypes and dismissive resentment against their plight; and foment the Great American Race War. States like Michigan have entrenched militia cultures persisting off and on for its entire statehood. The recent militia movement started in the 1970s and is extremely anti-govermment. Since they hate everyone who is protesting—city folk, Black people, Asians, Latinos, latte liberals, NPR listeners/PBS watchers—they show up to specifically fuck up the community, fight other protesters, and cause havoc on the streets. This may include taking the first shot at a cop from around the middle of the crowd to get a response dedicated to the front of the crowd. This is a much larger issue in the Midwest than East Coast, South or West, but they are willing to travel pretty far to stir up great social discord. Trump’s online messages and verbal rhetoric are directed at this group, and when he said “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”, he was not talking about government response. He was declaring open season on the protestors and residents of the cities for private citizens to mobilize in service of protecting the existing hierarchy. We should expect more and more white supremacists and their allies to as national leaders spur them on and our politics continues to degrade.

Infiltrators

Every single protest I have been to had infiltrators. They show up in plain clothes as sleeper cells, then they erupt to start some sort of intra-protester conflict, or to sabotage the protests. They will dart through a crowd of people at high-speeds, then hop out near the epicenter and start a fight. (This happened to me once in Occupy Oakland, but I was partly to blame because I hit their car with my canteen because they nearly ran over several people. Luckily, only a boisterous girl wanted to have a face-to-face screaming match, then a 300-lb dude swatted me to side and said “don’t hit women.” Good lesson. By the way, before this lady approached me, she got something from her trunk, which I assume was a gun. So I lucked out by encountering a set of infiltrators that had a larger mission than just fucking with me. I wonder what they ended up doing?) The point of infiltration is to exploit the general anonymity and feelings of unity among protestors to subvert the entire enterprise. All powerful contemporary American social movements face infiltration, primarily from three actors:

FBI/CIA

Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the FBI has infiltrated and surveilled groups, generally on the left. This is not just COINTEL stuff, but targeted assassinations like Fred Hampton in Chicago in 1969. Or in the 1980s, the CIA fed crack cocaine into central LA to poison a generation of poor people (and fund a futile campaign against the Contras in Nicaragua). Within mass movements, they show up and blend in with the group, likely to provide intelligence on protestors: their tactics and identities. A generous interpretation of their goals may also be to snuff out the violent elements in a crowd, but I have never witnessed anyone stop the violent folks in a protest except other protesters (leading to either the perpetrator running away or smashing a nice person in the face with a hammer). Currently, the FBI is concentrating on leftist more than rightists, so I would expect they have embedded some undercovers in protests, but I doubt they are contributing to any violence. Surveillance is their goal right now.

Local Police Departments

As the militarization of American police has skyrocketed since the end of the Cold War, local police have all sorts of contraptions to engage crowds, including literal tanks. But the tried and true method of infiltration and then selectively arresting certain groups occurs in many protests. Another common tactic is to go undercover, get to know the protesters, maybe even exchanging phone numbers, then after the fact raiding these folks for unlawful assembly (and whatever law with which they overcharge demonstrators). However, given the shortage of manpower across the country—leading to unpoliced looting and fires throughout Los Angeles’ west side yesterday—I doubt local PDs are infiltrating along traditional lines. They are more concerned with crowd control and ad hoc incident responses. In normal times, this is a core group to be wary of, but right now, their infiltration is the least of anyone’s worries—especially if uniformed officers are macing children and teargassing peaceful protesters.

Foreign Actors

Foreign actors have several purposes for getting involved domestic conflicts, both to monitor their own nationals who may participate and to further foment social discord. There approach is both in-person and online-only. An example of the in-person occurred when I used to protest in Berkeley. You would see people with masks and no press credentials exclusively taking photos and videos of the crowd. Walking up to each person, taking account of identifying information. While this behavior is more likely to be local PD or feds, foreigners are distinguished in who they want to get information on, namely their own citizens. For example, Chinese international students in Berkeley are monitored by one or two in-person agents that seek to deter and capture impermissible behavior. Several of my friends during undergrad were children of CCP officials, and they are fully aware of the myriad ways in which they are monitored. They know that protesting without their face covered will results in some sort of retaliation, either against them or their family back home. An example of the online-only model is occurring currently, as seen in Russian trolls using Facebook and Twitter attempting to get far-right and far-left protesters to show up to the same space at the same time. They often tell each target group different stories for why they should join in, while concealing from each group the duplicity of their deceptive messages. While blaming foreigners is an American pastime, at most foreign influence in social justice protests is peripheral around the margins.

Politically-connected Mercenaries

Arguably the most important group of infiltrators, paid mercenaries are currently being deployed by Betsy DeVos and Erik Prince, among others, to sabotage protests, exacerbate riots, and attack protestors. Their goal is similar to the white supremacists that they align with, but a key difference is the non-ideological nature of their agents. The wealthy of this country hire former military and police to serve as a event security—typical behavior. But then they slowly condition these people to accept bounty jobs, such as kidnappings, non-government extrajudicial extraditions, and private acts of terror that never get media coverage. They were recently mobilized in the Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio state capitols to terrorize elected officials without proposing some alternative vision They might even work for foreign interests, like Michael Flynn was when he planned the kidnapping of Fethullah Gulan from his compound in PA back to Turkey. Money is easily converted into private violence, and Trump cabinet is extremely involved in the private mercenary industry of America. The tell for when these people are in a group is not looting or arrests, but is usually incendiary behavior against other protesters, usually from a flank position. They will monitor the protesters, then strike at specific point, either as a quick attack and retreat, or to create a bulge and send the crowd running. The media is very unlikely to cover the exploits of this group, but any seasoned protester needs to watch out for these heavily militarized groups (they often have body armor, armored vehicles and long guns. A likely hypothesis is that as local and federal justice entities reform, these mercenaries will play a larger role in directly checking the ambitions of social reformers, both inside and outside of public demonstrations.

Heterogeneity of Mass Demonstrations

This post is an attempt to explain to participants and onlookers how protests convert from peaceful to violent—it is a product of the heterogeneous groups that converge in large protests. This comes nearly 10 years after I initially felt the need to document the bad actors taking advantage of the Occupy Movement back in my protest days. With the rise of a fascist (albeit incompetent) president who is using these protests for his political goals, and four simultaneous crises (a federal government that cannot govern; a pandemic; mass unemployment; social unrest), social disorder is only likely to get worse. When protests get out of hand, it is important to understand why even a normal person may succumb to looting. But that is not the only story here, as there are concerted forces at work that seek to undermine and pervert the righteous nature of these protests. Since we have no national leadership, all Americans need to protest safely and be vigilant for bad actors that may seek to harm them and their communities. March safely, everyone.

Why Does Trump Oppose a National Coronavirus Testing Regime?

The single most important component of a comprehensive response to a viral pandemic is to identify how widespread the virus is in the public. To execute this directive, nations may have to prioritize developing testing capacity through acquiring swabs, chemical agents, and functioning lab capacity. Any individual or organization that seeks to secure tests in a global pandemic will face high levels of scarcity in one or more of the aforementioned elements of a testing regime, and therefore will have to bid against others in the quest for supplies. This runs up the price for the materials, causes delays, and increases the chance of receiving fraudulent materials from profit-motivated actors. Since only the wealthiest and best connected can thrive in this environment, while most others cannot, the virus will just circulate undetected or partly detected, cycling between populations (including eventually touching the very people that could afford tests, lest they entirely withdraw from society).

To solve the issues of individual level suboptimization, collective structures need to be erected for the good of society. Since localities and states face the same fragmentation as individuals, especially if movement of travel is not restricted between states, the only sensible answer is a nationwide plan to test as many Americans as possible. Ideally, this would extend to all individuals, regardless of symptoms, but the current shortage of materials has limited the testing protocols to ER-level patients, wealthy individuals, or employees of resource-rich organizations. Not testing for asymptomatic carriers means we will never reach the point where we understand how widespread the virus is within society, making national planning around reopening the economy extremely difficult if one cares about public health.

All this is to say testing is the most essential component of a national planning strategy. While social isolation in ones home and personal protective equipment are more important at the individual level, we are essentially flying blind without a sufficiently comprehensive testing regime. The president can, at the very least, provide the technical means for states to collaborate on a unified strategy, a la the Articles of Confederation, or more presciently invoke national emergency powers, a la the Constitution. While Trump has had conference calls and provided written guidance to states of what they could do, while declaring a national emergency to release funds and flexibility to states and banning Chinese and EU nationals from entering the country (while initially exempting countries that house his golf resorts), he has not fully maximized interjurisdictional coordination nor his emergency powers. So we are essentially operating in some combination of pre-Articles of Confederation and pre-Constitution frameworks in the year 2020. The America First wannabe strong man finally has the opportunity to use emergency powers, and he either does it haphazardly or oddly declines to use them. Good grief, the incompetence…

Additionally, the president has statutory support to use the Defense Production Act of 1950 to compel vital industrial companies to make specific products for mass deployment, like facemasks, swabs, ventilators, protective shields, and chemical reagents, among other essential supplies. But importantly, Trump has only invoked the DPA in name, signing a vague authorization, and one time specifically compelling General Motors to make ventilators. While that is useful, I am sufficiently confident he did this to spite GM for previous issues he has had with the company. While 3M, DuPont, and others are price-gouging and selling products to foreign countries, Trump is still erring toward grievance-led decisionmaking.

All of this summary is prefatory to answer the question: why does Trump oppose a nationwide testing regime, coordinated and supplied by the federal government? In my assessment there are five potential answers, each one explaining part of the equation.

1. Blame: Likely the main reason (and one contemporaneously reported by the media early in the pandemic) is that Trump views the diagnostic measure of testing as threatening to his popularity and reelection prospects. The reasoning: because if people know the true number of infections, they will freak out and blame him. That is mostly correct, so at least he is operating in reality on this, a reality filled with paranoia and fear. Facing consequences for one’s (in)action is an important part of daily life, something most children learn between 5 and 9 years old. Trump, at 73, has not learned this. Nor has he taken his Oath of Office as a public servant seriously. So even if testing would lead to a negative view of him (and it would), knowledge is power, and the public and other governmental officials would better internalize the seriousness of the situation at adhering to mitigation protocols. The correct decision for a leader in this situation is to do everything they can to reduce the harm of a global viral pandemic–nationalize the cost of testing and nationalize the dissemination of tests–but this truth conflicts with Trump’s perceived self-interests. And it may in fact be the case that Trump would receive more approval if he followed the correct path here, as I suspect fearful Americans would appreciate sound governmental leadership.

2. Spooking Others: As a fearful man, Trump may also believe the necessary level of action may spook the stock market and/or piss off conservative business leaders, like the My Pillow guy. He definitely cares about how other people perceive him–he is very poor at getting this correct–but the My Pillow Guy is clearly ride or die with Trump. Any business leaders that supported Trump in December 2019 will support him forever. Period. On the stock market, it will go down with a global meltdown, so his short-sighted, denialist thinking is certainly inferior to long-term vision and virtuous public servant behavior. One additional argument for restricting testing is to defray mass pandemonium from occurring, but that’s a risk irrespective of testing. (Potentially, you could test and act but not publicize results broadly, which is probably occurring in one form or another by different agencies and jurisdictions.)

3. Crisis Profiteering: By maintaining the dog-eat-dog market conditions on testing materials (among other types of materials like protective equipment, food, and cleaning supplies like toilet paper), Trump is ensuring the supply is scare, demand is high, and therefore costs will rise. This is needless and serves no public good other than some businesses profiting while we lose the war. He may want to continue price-gouging for the entire duration of the pandemic, while working with Jared and Ivanka to figure out a new way to bilk the federal government out of money since he cannot house his assistants and the secret service on his properties (Trump will likely reap a big winfall through the PPP program). Maintaining private extortion in service of hierarchy is a standard hypothesis in contemporary American politics and sociology, so this explanation would likely occur in some form or another by every contemporary president. But better national emergency leaders would only accept the grift if it also meant solving the pressing public problem. Here we just increased inequality with no public good.

4. Laziness: A general hypothesis to explain governmental failures under Trump is laziness and incompetence. Pepper that with fear of blame and Trump’s inaction is a standard response for someone who has failed his way up through his entire life.  However, this explanation is unlikely here since he would have to exert zero actual energy in authorizing a nationwide testing regime. The same people that currently do what he tells them would also have to do 100% of the work on this, but at least they would have his imprimatur. He might rightly think it would go poorly, since his administration cannot do much right, and that could haunt him in the future, going back to explanation 1. In any case, it is much easier for Trump to stand around and do nothing than suddenly figure out how to be forward-looking and capable leader.

5. Ideology: the purportedly non-ideological president (except on migration, race, trade, and kleptocracy) is actually highly ideological in a definitional sense. Ideology is a reflected and projected ordered system to make coherent frequently contradictory ideas to provide for minimal cognitive dissonance in the user. (A political ideology just contextualizes which ideas are included.) By that definition, Trump is actually one of the most ideological presidents in U.S. history. His ideology is predicated on several pillars: views of eugenics and “good breeding,” social Darwinism, and just as a perverse twist, the power of positive thinking. These outlooks pair with his sociopathy developed as a child, malignant narcissism, and kleptocratic wiring to create a hot mess of a human dumpster fire. And that person happens to be in charge of a once-a-century global pandemic. In this view, Trump’s aversion to creating a comprehensive national testing delivery system is because he a) does not think reality can be forced upon him and/or b) does not care if people die. In a more bounded way, Trump may also simply believe that this is not the federal government’s responsibility, as he does outwardly state. But that is a consequence and not cause of his anti-testing decision matrix. It starts because of his denial of reality and belief that he can will anything into existence. He could think “if there are no tests, there are no positive tests. So we’re good.” That may work in a cult of personality, but people losing family members to Coronavirus may see it differently.

Republican Austerity and Deprivation Orthodoxy at Risk?

One of the most important developments of the phase one-phase two-phase three legislative vessels to mitigate the fallout from a botched executive branch containment of Coronavirus is the incredible breaking of GOP orthodoxy by key figures within the party. Specifically, Mitt Romney (R-UT), Josh Hawley (R-MO), and Marco Rubio (R-FL) each injected pragmatic, comprehensive, and fulsome ideas to a stale Senate caucus that under Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has prided itself on not solving national problems.

Since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the GOP has primarily operated under three core precepts: 1) run government poorly to self-evidently prove to the public that government is a problem, thus increasing anti-government sentiment and absenteeism among voters 2) liquidate the state through tax expenditures, tax cuts, and somehow legal grift and self-dealing practices by politicians and 3) privatize or entirely remove as many socially gainful programs to increase the level of inequality in the public. All of these have contributed to Trump’s ascendance and yet, his administration continues to operate on all three tracts like any nominal Republican would execute. But importantly, the president, his supporters, and the media have fashioned Trump a populist like Andrew Jackson, which is starkly at odds with Reaganism.

Trump’s populism has always been social in nature, which in America often means demonizing racial and ethnic minorities, but if part of his ascension is the fiction of economic populism, than that seems to actually be reconstructed some of the ideological commitments within the party. Importantly, this is not because Trump gives a fuck about working families, but people like Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Hawley may want to create an actual basis to claim the party is economically populist. Until this pandemic, the only evidence of this was seen in Cotton and David Perdue’s (R-GA) immigration bill that would effectively ban poor people from entering the country for work. Trump’s xenophobia drives his interest in the immigration restrictions, but Cotton and Perdue (Cotton mainly) were using economic populist language for why the U.S. should restrict low-skill migration to the country: allowing the foreign working class to work in the U.S. allows local companies to pay less because of the workers’ tenuous legal status. This then displaces the wage levels for similarly situated domestic workers, forcing them into unemployment or accepting lower pay. Whether they are entirely genuine in their rhetorical shift and whether refugees and undocumented workers lower wages on a systemic level are both reasons to be skeptical of their approach. But the movement to fill in actual economic populism around the base of social populism does mean there are forces within the GOP that want to reconstruct the party to be worker-based–not just in symbols, but in policy. This occurring while the Democrats are increasingly suburban and managerial in their interest coalition–capped off my nominating Joe Biden to be their candidate against Trump–gives the GOP a real chance to be a majority governing coalition, similar to what Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party pulled off in the UK in 2019.

But moving beyond immigration was always difficult for the GOP and no other economic populist policies have emerged–even rhetorically–from party players since Trump has taken office. That was until the debate about the phase three package. The GOP wanted to bailout out corporations and and the Democrats wanted to boost unemployment benefits. This is the same symmetry that occurred in 2009 during the Great Recession. But in an odd historical twist, this outmoded and insufficient response was not enough for some Republican lawmakers.

First, Mitt Romney governing instincts kicked in when he proposed a direct payment of $1000 per adult to help Americans pay bills and buy food. Not to be outdone, ostensible “liberal” Kamala Harris proposed a $500 payment per family after Romney already went public. Second, while Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) dismissed direct payments in favor of beefing up unempoyment insurance provisions–which are good but not enough–Hawley recommended MONTHLY payments of at least $1500 for low-income and middle class families. And third, while Chuck Schumer was focused like a laser on making sure bailout money did not go directly to Trump’s businesses–which they obviously would not matter what safeguards go into the legislation–Marco Rubio worked with Ben Cardin (D-MD) to corral their caucuses to support a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) similar to the ones that European nations like Denmark are using to keep payrolls intact and defray mass business closure and unemployment. While the payments to individuals were limited to a one-time $1200 dispensation and the UBI to families did not even make it to the amendment stage, all of these GOP recommended policies are improvements over the bipartisan corporate consensus. They optimistically point to a more varigated politics that can potentially create bipartisan solutions where current party leaders continue to rely on 1980s policy frameworks.

While I continue to view Hawley with suspicion over his radical far-right views on social issues and habit of endless pandering in committee hearings, any member of the GOP willing to prioritize actual economic support (other than tax cuts) for regular people is an incredible twist of events. Regardless of whether Romney thinks corporations as inherently virtuous or that Hawley looks like someone with constant bouts of pink eye, they both set the LEFT flank of the debate on the Senate phase three bill. And while Rubio will have to work very hard to not backslide into his neo-con, compulsive liar self, if he matures into an effective lawmaker that provides pragmatic solutions to economic problems, he might just become president one day.

If the left side of the Democratic coalition continues to push insurgent candidates into Congress and this new economic populist right decides they want to create a populist governing coalition, party be damned, then American politics may just get out of the endless elitist bent and partisan gridlock that typifies the Sixth Party System.

Defeatist Trump Commits Mass Manslaughter While Seeking Reelection

“We have it totally under control, it’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control, it’s uh, gonna be just fine.” (1/22/20)

“And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, uh, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” (2/26/20)

If “we have between 100,000 and 200,000 [dead Americans], uh, we all together have done a very good job” (2/29/20)

Trump’s sundry issues with truth, accountability, leadership, coherence, effectiveness, reflectiveness, conscientiousness, self-dealing, egomania, and understanding the meaning of life would all suggest the president would be a poor head of government during a pandemic. He does not understand death on a mass scale, borne from his inability to empathize and difficulty understanding orders of magnitude. Trump’s sociopathy is way too strong to expect the gravity of the situation to compel him to behave more competently. Because of his inability to understand causal sequencing, nuance, and scale, Trump will single-handily exacerbate the death toll and infected rates for Covid-19.

And indeed, that is the case: a more competent leader could have mitigated Covid-19 transmission in the U.S., if not prevent its global ascension altogether through a better understanding of international integration strategies. This episode again shows the folly of willing your mindstate into existence by denying reality. The power of positive thinking is one thing, but complete denial of the world you actually live in is mentally inexcusable. Humans are structured by our environments as much as we alter the environment. A real estate developer is the last profession that might understand this. To be a strong decision-maker, you have to first understand what is, not just the vision you have for the future.

But Trump is not a very good decision-maker. Nor does he have the ability to use reason to create society-wide gainful outcomes. He is a product of a cynical, hateful politics that relies on misdirected emotion and empirical ignorance to survive. His magical thinking is negligent and irresponsible. His malignant narcissism is inexcusable. And for all of this, he has direct culpability in Americans needlessly dying. The only reason there is a lockdown is because of Trump’s negligence, and the reason governors have to create a piecemeal state-by-state lockdown is because Trump’s lack of regard for public health meant he could not issue a national lockdown. Then in the midst of a pandemic, he defunds the World Health Organization to shift attention from his incompetence (by further displaying his incompetence). At every step of the way, not only has Trump made the wrong decisions, but he has made the decisions most antithetical to solving the crisis.

But the weirdest part of all of it is not the expected catastrophe. Instead, his flip from it not being a big deal to proudly proclaiming it could kill hundreds of thousands of people was an incredible failure of public leadership. No president in American history has rhetorically offered so many Americans up for the slaughter due to their own negligence. The defeatism in his odd acceptance that people will die (despite his repeated proclamations that it would be not be the case) is truly incredible. He is the weakest president this country has had since James Buchanan, and is obviously worse at dealing with the hand that is dealt. Congratulations, Donnie, you are THE WORST president in U.S. history. While the country burns, another record for the idiot king…