2020 Archives

What do you call a crisis that kills a hundred thousand Americans? It all depends on who does the dying. At first, it seemed like it was mostly white people infected and/or killed by the coronavirus. As the scale of the coronavirus pandemic dawned on Americans during the month of March, most of the media attention was given to white people like Tom Hanks, while the danger of coronavirus to black people went largely underreported by American media. It was around this time when both the media and the White House decreed it a national emergency.

Bill Barr is covering up for Donald Trump. Trump's first national security adviser, General Michael Flynn, had a phone call with the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, just after President Obama had imposed sanctions on Russia for interfering in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump. Flynn "urged Mr. Kislyak in a phone call not to escalate tensions with a retaliatory move against the United States-perhaps by kicking American diplomats and spies out of Russia." Flynn denied that the call was about sanctions, but it has become pretty clear based on new reports that what took place was "a back-channel discussion with a top Russian official that might lead to the new Trump administration gutting the sanctions its predecessor put in place to punish the Russians." In any other time, a national security adviser who acted this way would be considered a traitor. But not in Bill Barr's America.

In the 4,000-year-old "Epic of Gilgamesh," the arrogant eponymous king killed Humbaba, the giant guardian of the forest so that he could cut down the cedar stands in what is now northern Iraq to build his great city of Uruk. Gilgamesh's people then diverted the Euphrates River to irrigate fields of barley. To avenge Humbaba's murder and the destruction of the forest, the gods cursed Gilgamesh and his people. One Sumerian writer mournedthat "the earth turned white. It was one of our first stories about environmental destruction — in this case, a salt buildup from irrigation that turned the fields to desert.

The Constitution provides a couple of mechanisms for Trump to lose the 2020 election—both the popular vote and the Electoral College—and still hold the office of president for a second term. It’s keeping historians and constitutional scholars up at night and, based on offline conversations I’ve had with D.C. conservatives I know, is something the GOP and partisans within the Trump administration are already discussing.