Now that Trump and Leon Musk have unchecked power: All Americans will be vulnerable to their selfish chaos

Echo opinion column published in The New York Times by Lydia Polgreen:  I Never Panic. I’m Panicking Now. 😱

For over a month now, my mother has been pestering me about her missing passport. It was in her closet, she said, and suddenly it was gone. It was expired, and renewing would be easier if she had the old one. She had no immediate travel plans, just a vague desire to visit Ethiopia, the country where she was born and raised, at some point in the future.

As we often do with our elders, I gently brushed off her increasingly insistent requests for help. She lives in Maryland; I live in New York. It hardly felt urgent. She is forgetful. She misplaces things all the time. It would turn up, I was sure.

When I woke up the morning after Donald Trump had been swept back to the presidency by a slim but decisive margin, I was seized by a sudden, cold panic with the thought ‘Where is Mom’s passport?’ What if Trump’s administration made good on its deportation promises and she suddenly needed to prove that she is, indeed, a naturalized citizen of this country? Did my frail, 73-year-old mother have her papers in order should the knock come on her door?

This feeling caught me completely by surprise, much more so than Trump’s victory, which, after all, was a very likely possibility. I am not given to panic. I think catastrophic thinking is almost always overblown. Panic and alarm💥❗ : These are feelings that a lifetime of observing the world from a sanguine (aka "optimistic"), journalistic remove, always taking the long view, had taught me to extinguish the moment they flared. What good can come from such strong emotion❓

After all, we’ve been here before, haven’t we? Trump was president once before, and even though he managed to enact a great deal of cruelty and bungle a pandemic, most of us survived, didn’t we? He was never that popular with voters, but even an uninspiring candidate like Joe Biden managed to defeat him soundly at the ballot box.

Yet ,as I’ve tried to summon that sanguine (aka "optimistic") self over the past two weeks, she has stubbornly refused to show up.

I have a sense that many other people are feeling similarly abandoned by their more resilient selves, instead finding a new, excruciating sense of vulnerability. The sensation has only deepened as Trump’s preposterous cabinet announcements have rolled out and his cruel policy plans for grotesque campaigns of deportation, vengeful prosecution and heedless budget slashing come into view. Despite myself, I am panicking.
It is hard not to ask what clues I might have missed along the way. For instance, why hadn’t I paid more attention to what my mother’s fixation on finding her passport might have told me? She was asking about it in part because she was considering returning to Ethiopia permanently in search of a lower cost of living. Like a lot of Americans, particularly immigrants, she has been very worried about money. She lives on the Social Security and veteran’s benefits my father earned. Groceries are expensive, even for an older woman living alone who doesn’t have much of an appetite. The electricity bill for her tiny apartment, her cable TV and internet: These things seem, as a portion of her meager income, obscenely expensive, never mind the escalating costs of prescription medication.

Another blow came a couple of months ago, when the giant corporation that owns the apartment complex where she lives hiked her rent by nearly 10 percent. When I saw the amount, I felt a wave of nausea. I assured her that of course my brothers and I would help, but how would a person who did not have an affluent child with no children of her own manage such a sudden, sharp hike in the cost of something as essential as shelter? And in any case, she hated the idea of being a burden on her children. Looking now at her situation, indeed around my neighborhood and city, our country, this world, I can see that we are clearly on the wrong track.

Thinking about this election has felt a bit like staring into the sun. The blaze blinds rather than illuminates. Most especially at times of confusion and overwhelm, I have found it useful to turn toward similar but more distant stars for understanding. It is useful to ask: Where have I seen this particular shade of light? 

When have I felt the scorch of this particular form of heat?

My mind instantly went to the first time I became acutely acquainted with my own vulnerability, almost 20 years ago. I was 29 and had just started a job as a foreign correspondent for The Times in West Africa. Many of my friends in New York were envious because I was moving overseas right after George W. Bush had been re-elected, this time winning both the popular vote and the Electoral College, despite the moral atrocity of the Iraq war and so much else.

But all that hardly crossed my mind. I was thrilled to start my dream assignment. I was so insulated from worry by my youthful cloak of invincibility that I brushed aside strange things that were happening with my body. Usually I had a voracious appetite, but I was somehow never hungry. Despite this, my trousers kept getting snugger even as my watch band got looser. A sharp, jangling pain rattled in my belly when driving across potholed streets.

One day at the beach a woman congratulated me on my pregnancy. I was not pregnant, but it was undeniable that I looked as though I was. Shaken from my complacency, I went to the doctor. Within a couple of days I was on a plane headed back to New York, where I would be diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer.


It was a disease that typically struck much older women, and I had no family history to explain its early arrival. It was, my oncologist assured me, just dumb luck.

Six months later, after surgery and rounds of chemotherapy, I returned to my dream job. But I had been unmistakably altered by the experience. Once, I feared almost nothing. Not in a reckless way, but through the cool, rational assessment of odds. I had once been able to say, when boarding rickety commercial airplanes in impoverished countries, what are the odds of this plane crashing? Traveling by road, I knew, was statistically speaking much more dangerous. Cancer demolished this equanimity. If that random, extremely unlikely diagnosis could happen to me, then anything could. For a time this fear was all-consuming and paralyzing. Eventually, I learned to integrate this new uncertainty into my risk calculus and got on with my life and work.

What that experience taught me is that none of us know the direction or velocity of our vulnerability. It is, mercifully, unimaginable to us. The best-case scenario for the luckiest among us is a gentle drift into frailty and old age. We will all die, one way or another, and so will everyone we love. Thankfully, I have remained cancer free. I was both wildly unlucky and incredibly lucky at the same time.

Trump’s victory feels like a diagnosis, though Americans disagree profoundly on whether he is the disease, symptom or cure.


Anyone who has faced mysterious symptoms knows that diagnosis brings its own bleak satisfactions, even or especially if the news is very bad. Cancer, with apologies to Susan Sontag, is an irresistible metaphor for our current moment. If 2016, felt like a fluke, a bolt of lightning akin to a freak accident, this feels systemic. What is cancer, after all, but something mysterious and unconstrained that our own body builds within itself?

America is about to undergo a radical course of treatment. My mother hoped Kamala Harris’s promises to take on corporate landlords, to lower prescription drug prices and protect Medicare and Social Security would help her live a better life. Ultimately, what appears to be, at best, a very narrow majority of Americans decided to vote for Trump’s hard medicine.

Early signs make it likely that his second term will make his first look like child’s play. With control of Congress and a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, there is little holding back his darkest impulses to punish his enemies and reward his friends. He seems determined to take his slender victory and treat it like a historic mandate to reshape American life in profound ways.


Regardless of how you voted, we are all about to find out precisely how vulnerable we really are.

A Trumpian cabinet of dangerous clowns and they are certainly not funny

Echo letters to the editor published in the Los Angeles Times

Trumpian cabinet picks

To the editor: President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet selections that have raised eyebrows even among conventional Republicans include the incompetent team -Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services secretary, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and Pete Hegseth for Defense secretary. Of course, at the top of the list is his pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz.

Gabbard and Gaetz will be found questionable by moderate Republicans as well as Democrats.

By all standards, Marco Rubio for secretary of State is the most welcome addition to Trump’s Cabinet.

Further evidence that might provide a better perspective of Trump’s limited appeal to voters and thus a mandate to challenge his appointees is the revelation that this election was among the closest we’ve ever had. Imagine what Vice President Kamala Harris might have accomplished with a normal campaign lasting a full year.

From: Lynn Lorenz, Newport Beach California

To the editor: Legend has it that the Roman emperor Caligula (who claimed he was a god) planned to appoint his favorite horse to the Roman Senate.

I suspect that horse would have done less damage than nearly anyone chosen by Trump for a government post this month.

From: Lanore Pearlman, in Claremont California

Oppostion to incompetent Robert F. Kennedy jr from the Public Health Association of America

One of the leading public health associations came out against President-elect Trump's incompetent nomination of vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for HHS secretary

Published in MedPage Today by Joyce Frieden 

Kennedy's selection, which would have to be either confirmed by the Senate or finalized temporarily in a recess appointment, "raises serious concerns for the health of the American people," Georges Benjamin, MD, executive director of the American Public Health Association (APHA), said in a press releaseopens in a new tab or window headlined, "America deserves better than RFK Jr."

"To effectively lead our nation's top health agency, a candidate should have the proper training, management skills, temperament, and the trust of the public," he wrote. 

"Unfortunately, Mr. Kennedy fails on all fronts."

"Kennedy's past statements and views on vaccines alone should disqualify him from consideration," Benjamin continued. "He has stated that 'there's no vaccine that is safe and effective' and touted misinformation claiming that vaccines cause autism. A serious candidate for this position would follow the decades of real-world evidence that shows that vaccines are safe and prevent as many as 5 million deaths each year."

"The American people deserve better than Mr. Kennedy," he noted. "We need an HHS secretary under the Trump administration who will listen to science, not discredit it ... We urge President-elect Trump to select a qualified health leader that is properly trained and has the management skills to be the nation's top health official. We look forward to working with the incoming administration to advance effective, evidence-based approaches to improve the health of the nation."

Kennedy's selection has been a controversial one largely because of his skepticism on the safety and value of vaccines. He also said he supports getting rid of fluoride in the drinking water.

The APHA's (American Public Health Association's) statement is in sharp contrast to the response from physician associations, which have remained mostly quiet probably because, if confirmed, Kennedy will hold enormous sway over issues that physician groups care about. Several major physician organizations have not put out a statement at all, while others, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), have put out statements in support of vaccination but mentioned the nomination obliquely or omitted it entirely.

"[This] nomination ... offers an important opportunity to share the settled science on vaccines with government leaders, policymakers, and the American public," AAP President Benjamin Hoffman, MD, said in that group's statement. "This is a conversation pediatricians have every day with families, and we welcome the chance to do the same with national leaders."

"Vaccines are the safest and most cost-effective way to protect children, families, and communities from disease, disability, and death," he continued. "Continuing national investment in vaccine access is absolutely essential to support healthy communities ... As pediatricians, we firmly believe the most effective way for HHS to ensure the future health of our nation is to protect and support the health of our children: by ensuring that science continues to underpin all decision-making, policies, and programs."

The American College of Physicians (ACP) did not comment directly on the nomination at all in its statement. "Vaccines are vital to our ability to prevent diseases that threaten public health," said ACP President Isaac Opole, MBChB, PhD. "The ACP remains concerned about the spread of disinformation and misinformation regarding vaccination ... It is critical that policymakers and government officials understand the importance of vaccines, evidence-based medicine, and other ways that our public health infrastructure protects all of us."

Doctors for America did not put out a statement, but did post an "advocacy alert asking members to write to their senators to urge them to oppose Kennedy's nomination. The group's mission statement says it "mobilizes doctors and medical students to be leaders in putting patients over politics on the pressing issues of the day to improve the health of our patients, communities, and nation."

"We oppose the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services because he is unqualified and has a dangerous track record of spreading false information about health," the alert noted. "Our nation's health and healthcare system are in need of reform and improvement. The American public deserves to have full, unbiased information on how to protect their health. But the nomination of RFK Jr. leaves us deeply concerned that he will harm the nation's health by continuing to spread false health information."

Antisemitism in Michigan

An echo opinion letter published in The Michigan Daily , aka,"The Daily" newspaper by an annonomous contributor. The Michigan Daily is an independent, student-run newspaper serving the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor communities since 1890.

It has been a tumultuous year for both Jewish and Palestinian residents in the state, including at the University of Michigan.

Letter to the Editor: Hamas’ antisemitism cannot be glossed over.Content warning: This article contains mentions of violence.

I have always been proud to be Jewish ✡️— proud of the culture, values and resilience of the Jewish people. 🕎

But now, more than anything, I am afraid: afraid of the rise of antisemitism across the world, afraid of the surge of antisemitic tropes here on campus and afraid of the antisemitic ideology perpetuated by The Michigan Daily by publications such as: “Breaking walls, building solidarity: Unveiling the apartheid struggle in Palestine.”

I want to begin by saying that just because I am Jewish does not mean that I support all the actions of the Israeli government, the same way that being American does not mean I support all the policies enacted by the former and now President-elect Donald Trump 😟😩. Since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and the displacement of many Palestinian people, there is no doubt that Israeli governmental policy has inflicted harm on those residing in the West Bank and Gaza. I understand and empathize with the hurt and frustration of the Palestinians living in these territories who are not granted full rights under the Israeli government.

There is a very important distinction to be made between being pro-Palestine and supporting Hamas. Hamas is an openly extremist group, designated by the U.S. Department of State as a foreign terrorist organization, and internationally recognized as a terrorist organization by the European Union, Japan, Egypt and Canada as well. The original charter of Hamas calls for not only the “obliteration” of the state of Israel, but the genocide of all Jews worldwide. Witnessing the amount of support that people on this campus have pledged toward the recent actions taken by Hamas has been incredibly upsetting for those of us that still bear the generational scars of the last genocide of Jews.

The article published by The Daily completely justifies Hamas’s recent attack on Israel. While it mentions deaths of some Israeli soldiers, it conveniently leaves out the more than 1000 innocent civilians, including young children, who were kidnapped and brutally murdered by Hamas. The author cites openly biased and anti-Israel sources, such as the Jewish Voice for Peace, cherry-picking evidence to fit their one-sided narrative.

But, most dangerous is the author’s propagation of false information. Upon an in-depth review of the article, I found multiple of the author’s claims to be completely unfounded:

The author claims that “the United Nations has explicitly stated that ‘the (Israeli barrier) wall is a tool for ethnic cleansing.’ ” This was not a position taken by the United Nations as an entity, but rather a sentiment expressed by the Saudi Arabian Delegate, Al Anazi, in December 2006, during a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly.

The author accuses The New York Times, Fox News and the Times of Israel of fabrication, simply for “presenting this recent act of resistance as an act of terrorism.”

The inflammatory one-sided narrative perpetuated by the author, along with the blatant distribution of misinformation, has huge implications for the University of Michigan’s Jewish community. The deaths of our people are not, and should not, ever be justified.

Violence between Israel and Palestine is one of the most nuanced and complicated conflicts in modern history, and one which I don’t pretend to be an expert on, but the facts are the facts: Hamas is a terrorist group, openly supporting Nazi ideology and determined to destroy both the state of Israel and the Jewish people. Mutilating bodies, raping women and burning innocent civilians alive is never justifiable. 

As a Jewish woman I cannot stay silent and let my peers accept these falsities as truths. Being a Jew on campus these past weeks, I have not only felt terrible sadness, I have also felt unsafe and uncomfortable. Personally witnessing protesters holding up signs with various antisemitic sentiments has been a 💀scary and disheartening experience 😟.

Everyone has the right to their own opinion; but before forming an opinion, I urge you to consider the facts beyond those cited in this one-sided article. I am not in support of suppressing anyone’s voice — I only aim to lift up the voices of my Jewish peers. We are scared💀, but we will never be silenced.

This contributor has asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons, The Daily granted this request.

Donald Trump selects his cast of loyalty bonded clowns for a cabinet focused on retribution priorities

Echo essay published in The New Yorker by David Remnick:

In the first few days after the reëlection of Donald Trump, one heard across the fruited plains and the canyons of the great cities a noisy welter of accusation, self-laceration, celebration, and rationalization.

 

There were also conspicuous assurances of normalcy that went like this: The sun went down in the evening and came up in the morning. Democracy did not end or even falter; the election was democracy, after all. The once and future President would surely dispense with his frenzied campaign threats and get down to the mundane task of governing. Making America great yet again required sobriety and competence, and Trump and his councillors would undoubtedly recognize that obligation.

For the titans of business, the new Administration promised untold prosperity: regulation would ease, tax rates decline. 

Elon Musk would make government just as civil, generous, and “efficient” as his social-media platform, X. Jeff Bezos, having ordered the editorial board of his newspaper to spike its endorsement of Kamala Harris, selflessly tweeted “big congratulations” to Trump, on his “extraordinary political comeback.” 

Wall Street executives and Sand Hill Road philosophers exulted that the “mergers-and-acquisitions climate” would now bring opportunities beyond imagining. (How these opportunities might benefit the working class they presumably would clarify at a later date.)

Meanwhile, the President-elect convened his loyalists at Mar-a-Lago, where they went about putting together a White House staff and a Cabinet. Historically, this is a deliberative process that can, even with the noblest intentions, go horribly wrong. In “The Best and the Brightest,” David Halberstam wrote about an American tradition of mandarins in Washington as an aristocracy come to power, convinced of its own disinterested quality, believing itself above both petty partisan interest and material greed. 

But, the suggestion also meant the holding and wielding of power was judged offensive by these same people, who preferred to view their role as service.

Halberstam’s larger subject was the aristocracy of Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, and all the other exceptional men of the Ivy League and corporate boardrooms who helped guide the country into the (disasterous❗) Vietnam War.

At least as a matter of rhetoric, Trump is uninterested in conventional notions of expertise (which smacks of élitism). Nor is he focussed on assembling a council of constructive disagreement, a team of rivals (which smacks of disloyalty). 

As Trump's personnel choices rolled out in recent days, it became clear that they pointed wholly to his long-held priorities—and they are not the common good. The nominations of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, and Tulsi Gabbard as the director of National Intelligence are the residue of Trump’s resentments and his thirst for retribution.

In Gaetz, who faces allegations (which he denies) of illegal drug use and having sex with an underage girl, Trump sees himself, a man wrongly judged, he insists, as liable for sexual abuse. 

In Kennedy, an anti-vax conspiracy theorist, he sees a vindication of his own suspicion of science and his wildly erratic handling of the COVID crisis. In Hegseth, who defends war criminals and lambastes “woke” generals, he sees vengeance against the military establishmentarians who called him unfit. In Gabbard, who finds the good in foreign dictators, he sees someone who might shape the work of the intelligence agencies to help justify ending U.S. support for Ukraine. In other words, Trump’s nominations—in their reckless endorsement of the dangerously unqualified—look like the most flagrant act of vindictive trolling since the rise of the Internet. But it is a trolling beyond mischief. All these appointees are meant to bolster Trump’s effort to lay waste to the officials and the institutions that he has come to despise or regard as threats to his power or person. These appointees are not intended to be his advisers. They are his shock troops.

Or could it be that the President-elect is out to reduce the country to the status of a global laughingstock? Until this spate of appointments, observers had long remarked that Trump had no sense of humor. Al Franken, late of the U.S. Senate and “Saturday Night Live,” is among those who have said that they have never heard Trump laugh. Smirk, perhaps, at the misfortune of others, but not laugh in the joyful sense.

Back in the days when Trump swanned about Manhattan as a caricature rich guy and gonif construction magnate, he was part of a metropolitan jokescape, up there in lights with John Gotti and Leona Helmsley. Spy, the satirical magazine of its time, fact-checked his finances (inflated) and his books (preposterous). Trump was not amused. His lawyers sent frequent letters to the editors, threatening litigation. He found himself in a similar mood, many years later, when Barack Obama, who had suffered Trump’s constant insinuations about his place of birth, took the occasion of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner to rib the political aspirations of the host of “The Celebrity Apprentice.” Trump left the ballroom in a funk, nurturing, perhaps, an ominous resolve.

Trump has always been obsessed with dramas of dominance and submission, strength and weakness, who is laughing at whom. This is his lens for human relations generally, and particularly when it comes to politics, foreign and domestic. As long ago as January, 2016, Niraj Chokshi, then an enterprising reporter for the Washington Post, calculated the many times that Trump had pointed out that someone—Russia, China, OPEC, “the Persians,” “the mullahs”—was “laughing at us.” More recently, in this, his third Presidential campaign, Trump told a crowd at Mar-a-Lago, “November 5th is going to go down as the single most important day in the history of our country.” He added, “Right now, we’re not respected. Right now, our country is known as a joke. It’s a joke.”

Now Trump’s critics and an increasing number of his supporters are taking stock of his most disgraceful appointments—these men and women of perfect jawlines, dubious reputations, and rotten ideas. They wonder if this is not the ultimate joke, with national endangerment as its punch line. Dean Acheson, who helped Harry Truman design NATO and rebuild Europe under the Marshall Plan, titled his memoir “Present at the Creation.” Which of Donald Trump’s new advisers will line up to write the sequel? 

Donald Trump and his hypocriticl cult are now stuck with his priority revenge policies.

 GOP’s march to tyranny finds its ultimate success with Trump

Echo opinion letter published in the Boston Globe:

The Purge begins.

The Republican Party‘s relentless march toward repressive, divisive, bigoted policies began with the Tea Party movement and found its ultimate success with the rise of an unhinged, immoral cult leader.

Donald Trump and his lily-livered, hypocritical apologists have transformed the party creed from one that celebrated private freedom, social responsibility, and fiscal temperance into one that defines personal freedom based on their narrow white Christian lens, demeans the value of helping those less fortunate, and dismantles policies that grow economic opportunities in order to satisfy the avarice of wealthy people and institutions seeking to minimize taxes and limitations on their pursuits.

As with previous Republican administrations, Trump’s policies are bound to send our economy into a tailspin and hurt the aggrieved working class who helped put him in office.

Trump’s second term will demonstrate the existential danger of the Republican Party he leads. Words, facts, and appeals to long-held values and moral codes have had little or no impact on this drift into tyranny. The pain of promised punishment of Trump’s detractors, rising inequality, international disgrace, and deteriorating communities, environment, and living circumstances that follow may be the only cure for the mindless angry fervor that has gripped half of the American voting public.

From Louise A. Venden in Cambridge, Massachusettes

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is incompetent and his dangerous HHS appointment will make America sick again

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Health and Human Services Department will make America sick again.😰

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Zeynep Tufekci

How Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Could Destroy One of Civilization’s Best Achievements- our Public Health.

Even among the chaos generated by Donald Trump’s recent cabinet picks, one stands out for the extensive suffering and lasting institutional damage it may cause: his choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Health and Human Services Department.

Modern public health is one of civilization’s great achievements. In 1900, up to 30 percent of infants in some U.S. cities never made it to their first birthday. Since that time, vaccines, sanitation and effective medications have eliminated many previously commonplace illnesses and consigned others to extreme rarity. It’s easy to take much of that for granted, especially as those days have receded from living memory, but those achievements are fragile and can be lost.

The danger isn’t merely that Kennedy — who has almost no experience in government or large-scale administration, and who has shown a sometimes breathtakingly loose connection to the truth — would be incompetent or misleading. At the helm of a department with over 80,000 employees and a $3 trillion budget, one that oversees key agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, he would have control over the nation’s medicines, food safety, vaccines and medical research. With that power he could inflict significant harm to the public health system — and to the public trust that would be needed to rebuild it once he’s gone.

Kennedy has brought attention to some worthwhile public health concerns, such as the downsides of ultraprocessed foods and the value of exercise. But beyond those reasonable issues, he has filled the internet and the airwaves with views on vaccines, food safety, medicines and supplements that are a mix of grave misrepresentations and far-fetched conspiracies.

Outside of the medical community, few people still know about all the diseases whose safe and effective vaccines he is lying about, so let me remind you about one of them: diphtheria. Once known as “the strangling angel of children,” it causes its young victims to slowly and painfully suffocate, turn blue and gasp as a thick film fills their throat. They lie dying for many agonizing days. The disease has been all but wiped out, but in Spain a few years ago, it cost the life of an unvaccinated boy of 6. His distraught antivax parents promptly vaccinated their surviving child.

Kennedy doesn’t mention those gruesome realities. The core of his method is to mislead and confuse with selective citations that overlook key, even overwhelming evidence. He has falsely suggested that AIDS isn’t caused by H.I.V. With no evidence, he once mused that Covid was deliberately made to target Black and Caucasian people, while ensuring that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” When he was called out for trafficking in racist, antisemitic tropes, he walked the claim back, but only a little.

And throughout it all, he has pursued a course of relentless self-promotion, the consequences be damned. After an incorrect preparation of the M.M.R. vaccine killed two infants in Samoa, Kennedy jumped on the tragedy, spreading misleading information about it on social media.

Over the previous year, vaccination rates on the island had plummeted to less than 30 percent, a decline that has been attributed to vocal antivaccine groups. By the next year, a measles outbreak resulted in about 5,700 cases and more than 80 deaths, mostly among children under 5. It was then that Kennedy traveled to Samoa to meet with some of those activists, after having loudly cast doubt on the M.M.R. vaccine’s efficacy. The outbreak was halted only after the government declared a curfew, with desperate parents instructed to fly a red flag in front of their homes to alert mobile vaccine crews that their children needed shots.

As the head of Health and Human Services, a position that has, as one former secretary, Alex Azar, put it, “a shocking amount of power by the stroke of a pen,” Kennedy could go far beyond making false claims. For example, he could attempt to stop N.I.H. research on infectious diseases, as he recently vowed to do, or take actions that would make vaccines less available and lower their uptake.

And the victims wouldn’t just be children in families that consciously opt out. Many vaccines aren’t available for any children before the age of 6 months, and it takes years to complete the full schedule to get robust protection. That means infants and young kids are extremely vulnerable, as are immunocompromised people, cancer patients and the elderly. 

Globally, childhood vaccination rates have already stalled, and any further decline could mean outbreaks start happening much more widely.

All of that is bad enough under the best of times. But what if another pandemic rolls around? Here’s what Kennedy has to say about Covid vaccines, the greatest achievement of Trump’s first term: The “powerful vaccine cartel,” which he described as being led by Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates, worked “to prolong the pandemic and amplify its mortal effects” and “led an effort to deliberately derail America’s access to lifesaving drugs and medicines” such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine in favor of their nefarious vaccine project. In fact, both those medications were subjected to rigorous research, and proved to be ineffective against Covid.

If pandemics sound like yesterday’s news, the H5N1 outbreak among the nation’s dairy cattle continues to rage, as does the avian flu version ravaging birds everywhere. And there are strong signs that many human infections are going undetected.

Yet, Kennedy has been a vigorous proponent of raw milk, which unlike pasteurized milk has been shown to carry extremely high levels of the virus.

As for the legitimate public health issues that many people feel grateful to him for shining a light on, Republican senators could surely reject Kennedy and pressure Trump to find someone else to raise those issues, someone who won’t take a wrecking ball to the precious public health system that protects the nation’s children. Besides, someone who doesn’t respect scientific evidence and can’t tell quackery from credible suspicion isn’t likely to be that much help on those topics.

The COVID pandemic left a lot of people outraged, and some of their anger is justified. The tendency of many Democrats and some public health authorities to circle the wagons and issue blanket denials made things only worse.

We still need a fair reckoning of what went right and what very much did not. But it hasn’t come. Instead, public anger has been stoked, misdirected and exploited by those who seem less interested in solutions than in burning it all down.

Some Republican senators may be tempted to approve Kennedy’s nomination simply because they, too, are angry, or think that some agencies are overdue for a good shake-up.

That would be a grave mistake.

Donald Trump said he can end the Russian war on Ukraine. But so far there is no progress while Ukranians suffer

 Trump risks unraveling world order with his Ukraine approach.

Will Trump concede America’s great source of strength or nourish it? An echo essay published in the Boston Globe by Timothy Snyder.

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump was vague on foreign policy, claiming only that he would be strong and that other leaders were his friends and would listen to him. Now that he is president-elect, those words and those expectations begin to make contact with reality. Among many other boasts, Trump declared that he could end the war in Ukraine immediately. The outlines seem to involve giving the Russians what they want and then expecting the Ukrainians to concede.

In other words, Trump’s idea is to be weak, export weakness, and see what happens. What happens will not look like strength. Were Trump to fail to achieve such a deal, Russia would be in a better position thanks to Trump’s concessions and Ukrainians would be dying in greater numbers to defend their country.

Should Trump manage to force Ukraine into a weaker position where it loses the war, this would be more disastrous still.

It’s easy to take things for granted, especially for Americans. We tend to see other people as problems, not solutions. We imagine that somehow we are the ones doing the real work in Ukraine, when the truth is that Ukrainians are fighting a war of unimaginable cruelty with an endurance that has protected our own way of life. The simple strength of what they are doing is undeniable: They are fulfilling the entire NATO mission on their own, doing all the fighting, supported by American and European aid.

Thanks to Ukrainians, the international legal order is sustained. It depends on the principle that borders are inviolable, which they are defending. Thanks to Ukrainians, nuclear war is less likely. Because they resist the nuclear threats of a nuclear power with an effective conventional response, other countries are not building nuclear weapons. Should Americans choose to weaken Ukraine, this will change quickly. And Ukraine is deterring China from offensive actions in the Pacific by showing how difficult such operations are.

The connection between Ukraine and Taiwan is important. As the Taiwanese know very well, and as they keep trying to explain to Americans, Ukraine is doing something very special for the stability of East Asia. Ukraine deters China without provoking it in any way. That is something that the United States cannot do — any action we take toward China can be seen as provocative. But in aiding Ukraine, the United States can keep China at bay — and make less likely a whole series of other disastrous scenarios. Supporting Ukraine is the anchor of any sound and effective China policy.

If Trump sells out Ukraine, in other words, the present world order collapses around him, and he will look weak, for the very good reason that he has behaved like a weakling. He might well think that he can change the subject from Ukraine after he betrays it — and it seems he has already prepared for that with his notion that Ukraine is already completely destroyed. If people believe that lie, then they wouldn’t worry — Trump could hope — about the destruction that actually follows when Trump abandons Ukraine.

And the consequences beyond Ukraine will be far greater. The legal order will be ignored; nuclear weapons will proliferate; Russia will triumph; and China will rejoice.

No doubt Trump could persuade some of his more ardent followers that none of this matters, at least for a while. But even they will suspect that Trump’s actions on Ukraine are not at his own initiative.

Elon Musk is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most important apologist, and Trump is spending time with Musk and bringing Musk onto a phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. That looks not only strange but weak. It is not clear whether Putin will even take a call from Trump. Trump claims that he spoke to Putin and demanded de-escalation; the result was an official denial that such a call had taken place, the destruction of a dam, and one of the largest drone and missile attacks of the war. Putin seems to be trying to intimidate Trump.

In Russia, the media and politicians make no secret of their conviction that Trump is their water boy — their “Trumpushka.” Russian television has aired naked photographs of Trump’s wife, which is a curious welcome. 

Putin’s great hope for winning that war has always been Trump. He expects Trump not only to surrender Ukraine but to initiate the phone call himself.

Trump is being played as a weakling by people who laugh at him as such. None of this, of course, has to happen. Trump calls himself a dealmaker; he could start acting like one. Instead of announcing that he is in a hurry to seal a deal, thereby giving Putin every incentive to slow things down, he could say that he is working for the best deal.

Then the logic becomes clear. Getting to yes would involve strengthening Ukraine rather than weakening it, because one bargains from strength, not weakness. If Trump actually wanted to look like a competent negotiator, he would plan to arm Ukraine.

It appears that Trump will name Florida Senator Marco Rubio of Florida as secretary of state and Representative Michael Waltz of Florida as national security adviser. Both men are regarded as China hardliners. Both are intelligent enough to know that conceding Ukraine means giving in to China and that helping Ukraine defend itself deters China.

Trump will have plenty of room for maneuver. He is not bound by the various taboos the Biden administration set for itself. Trump could choose to distinguish himself from his predecessor by delivering more weapons, more quickly and by talking about victory for Ukraine. This would not only be good in itself but would also make an actual peace deal far more likely.

It does not matter in the end whether Trump blusters or whether Putin mocks him. What matters is whether Trump concedes America’s great source of strength or nourishes it. The logic of all this is simple and strategic. It goes beyond the personalities concerned. Trump’s problem, though, is that he cannot seem to get beyond his own personality. And so while we might hope for strength from Trump, we cannot expect it.

Timothy Snyder is the Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and the author of a number of books, including “On Tyranny” and “On Freedom.”

Saying "Thank You For Your Service" is NOT a DonOLD Trump quote. Instead he said "suckers" and "losers" OMG!

As a Vietnam veteran, I will not be participating in my town’s Veterans Day commemoration this year. Echo opinion letter published in the Boston Globe:  

In 1964, I enlisted in the United States Coast Guard, as did my father in 1942, and as would my nephew in the 1980s. 

After two years of sea duty on a cutter based in New Bedford, I volunteered to stay with my ship when it was ordered to the South China Sea in spring 1967. 

My shipmates and I boarded and searched the many fishing boats and commercial ships in and around the Mekong Delta. We provided fire support to allied units on the ground, rescued downed pilots, and conducted clinics in many of the villages in the area. I was proud of my service.

I have been struggling with my fellow Americans’ choice in this election. I’ve been thinking about President-elect Donald Trump’s previous remarks about US troops, how he’d called fallen service members “suckers” and “losers,” according to his former chief of staff.

My shipmates and I, and hundreds of thousands of men and women in uniform, put ourselves in harm’s way for this country. 

While I do not speak for my fellow veterans, Trump’s election to a second term has me questioning my own service. 

The medals, the pageantry, the many heartfelt “Thank you for your service” comments notwithstanding, I believe our service has been devalued by millions of my fellow Americans. So I’ll be having a quiet lunch Monday with a Vietnam vet buddy, and we’ll try to get over this apparent dismissal of our service as irrelevant. I could cry.
😢
From Jim Canavan  in Scituate, Massachusetts

In the dangerous era of Trumpzi-Putinism: Who will be America's version of Alexei Navalny?

Dead Last: Authoritarian rule always entails corruption. With Donald Trump in office, watch your wallet. By Rachel Maddow

If nothing else, it was an insult to historians.

At the change of each Administration, C-SPAN conducts a broad survey of Presidential scholars, asking them to rank every Commander-in-Chief across ten aspects of leadership. The 2021 survey, published less than six months after the January 6th mob attack on Congress, ranked Donald Trump among the worst Presidents in U.S. history. Never before had a modern President had his name down in the dregs among feckless forgotten Whigs (poor William Henry Harrison’s term lasted only thirty-two days) and impeached scoundrels like Andrew Johnson.

Given the shocking, violent end of Trump’s first term, that scalding snap judgment in 2021 was no surprise. The following year, the Siena College survey of Presidential scholars also listed Trump among the worst Presidents ever. In this past June’s debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, Biden cited another academic survey—the 2024 “Presidential Greatness Project”—in which a hundred and fifty-four scholars and historians ranked Trump dead last, even below James Buchanan, whose disastrous Presidency dragged the nation into the bloody maw of the Civil War.

Two hundred and forty-eight years is a long throw for a constitutional republic, and throughout the course of it we’ve had our share of stinkers in the Oval Office. Still, when hundreds of experts in multiple surveys put a man in strong contention for the title of the Worst President in the Nation’s History, it says something about our respect for expertise that we decided to give the man another go.

Even if history hasn’t been a guiding light for voters in this election, it may yet offer some hints about what to expect next: in short, watch your wallet. If history is a guide, it might be worth remembering that America’s most ambitious and accomplished demagogues have also all been crooks.

In 1939, the U.S. Justice Department sent prosecutors to Louisiana to clean up the Huey Long political machine, which was still chugging along four years after Long’s murder. Part of Long’s legacy in the state was a magnificent Louisiana grift that became known as the “hot oil” scam. Long’s puppet governor and the bagman who used to collect Long’s cash bribes from state contractors each took a personal financial cut of every barrel of off-the-books (so-called “hot”) oil produced in the state.

One middleman testified about sending an express-mail package of forty-eight thousand dollars in one-thousand-dollar bills to Long’s bribe collector. The governor admitted that in his one term in office he pocketed almost five hundred thousand dollars (more than ten million in today’s dollars). The governor and the bagman went to prison, but the judge hearing the hot-oil case expressed doubt about whether any of the lower-level functionaries who had been press-ganged into the scheme really had a choice. “It is a matter of general and common knowledge that the state of Louisiana was more or less under a dictatorship,” he said.

If there was a rival for Long’s oratorical skill and demagogic power in the nineteen-thirties, it was Father Charles E. Coughlin, whose tens of millions of weekly radio listeners were treated to his frequent harangues against the “filthy gold standard,” which he ascribed to Jews and communists. Coughlin instead preached the virtues of what he called “Gentile silver.” (Throughout the 1930s, Charles E. Coughlin was one of the most influential men in the United States. He was a Catholic priest in the metro Detroit Michigan area who became politically active. Foreshadowing modern talk radio and televangelism.)

Although Coughlin never betrayed any personal stake in this line of pseudo-theological monetary invective, a U.S. Treasury audit in 1934 found that, alongside entities like Chase National Bank of Manhattan, one of the largest single holders of silver in the United States was an unmarried secretary in Royal Oak, Michigan: Miss Amy Collins. Collins turned out to be Coughlin’s secretary.

Coughlin’s office soon released a letter in Collins’s name, insisting that the purchase of those half a million ounces of silver was her own idea, pursued at her own initiative, and that “Neither Father Coughlin nor any other officer except myself”, had anything to do with it.

One of the underappreciated demagogues of the second half of the twentieth century was Vice-President Spiro Agnew*, whose meteoric rise from local Maryland politics to the White House was aided more than anything by admiration, among Nixon’s advisers, for his relentless invective against protesters and civil-rights groups. As Nixon’s Vice-President, Agnew developed his own zealous national following by training rhetorical fire on the press and, when he fell under criminal investigation, on the legal system.

In 1973, Agnew, facing the prospect of a forty-count felony indictment, was allowed to plead nolo contendere to a single count and escaped all the other charges in exchange for his resignation. Because Agnew’s nolo count was a tax-related charge, it’s sometimes forgotten that the bill of particulars against him described not run-of-the-mill tax fiddling but the sitting Vice-President of the United States literally taking envelopes full of cash at the White House and stuffing them into his desk.

In our own time, Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation has done more than anyone, anywhere, to remind us that authoritarian rule always entails thievery. Three years ago, as Navalny voluntarily returned to Russia after surviving an assassination attempt, he released a film titled “Putin’s Palace,” revealing evidence that the Russian leader had a secret billion-dollar Black Sea lair, which Navalny called “the biggest bribe in history.” (The Kremlin denied that the palace belonged to Putin.)

After Navalny’s death in an arctic Russian prison earlier this year, his foundation released a follow-up video, which showed hidden-camera footage of the inside of the palace, including plush bedrooms, a gaudy chapel, and a dirty construction trailer used by workers at the site. On a wall above a filthy toilet, someone had scrawled, “Lyokha [Alexei], you were right!”

The banner headline of Navalny’s leadership was his insistence that opponents of Putin’s regime must not be afraid. If Navalny himself could deny the regime his fear, as their persecution of him relentlessly escalated, then surely no one else should lend the regime their fear either. But the core of Navalny’s work against Putin was exposing his thievery from the Russian people.

Dictators and demagogues are thieves—here, there, always, and everywhere.

If history is allowed a word in this moment, let it be informed by the visionary antifascist and anti-authoritarian leaders of our time, but also by our own squalid experience with this kind of guy, the guy we’ve just put back in the White House. He starts the new gig while being legally barred from serving as an officer or a director in any New York corporation or from taking out loans with New York banks, and while the longtime C.F.O. of his company, convicted of tax fraud and perjury, is still adjusting to life outside jail. Here is a man who took time out of his Presidential campaign to launch not only a line of watches and sneakers and commemorative coins but also a new cryptocurrency scheme in which his partners are the self-proclaimed “dirtbag of the internet” and the entrepreneur behind Date Hotter Girls, L.L.C.

Let’s not be surprised about where this is heading.

We’ll shout down our own fear, yes. But we’ll also expose and humiliate thieves. History is here to help. Historians may or may not have the ear of the electorate, but the history of this era, at least, will be told. And, if past is prologue, it’s likely to be lurid. ♦

Published in the print edition of the November 18, 2024, issue, with the headline “Too Many Crooks.”

Spiro Agnew (1918-1996)

*My personal experience with Spiro Angew.  As a native Marylander who lived in Baltimore city and in Baltimore County, where the former Vice-President was once the county commissioner, before he became the state's governor. My mother was a widow who was trying to raise three children as a single parent.  She wanted to be a school crossing guard because the job allowed her to be home when her children were not in school.  At that time, in the 1960s, the school crossing guards were like an extenstion of the police department and they were selected based on recommendations and other good character qualifications.  But, when Spiro Agnew became the Baltimore County Commissioner, he fired my mother because she was a registered Democrat!  Fortunately, the undertaker, the man who buried my father, was a Maryland Republican.  He personally took my mother's petition to keep her job directly to Agnew, explaining how our family depended on my mother being able to care for us at home while working to earn more money.  At the time, me and my two siblings were too young to work.  Indeed, Mr. Brooks Bradley prevailed and Agnew revoked his decision so my mother kept her job.  But Agnew's horrible decision to fire my mother solely because she was a registered Democrat created nearly as much grief as experiencing the untimely death or my mother's husband and our father.  

Incompetence is running rampant in Trump's insane cabinet "junk drawer" appointments

Echo opinion by The New York Times editorial board:

Trump’s Reckless Choices for National Leadership

Donald Trump has demonstrated his lack of fitness (as if Democrats needed any more evidence 😖) for the presidency in countless ways, but one of the clearest is in the company he keeps, surrounding himself with fringe figures, conspiracy theorists and sycophants who put fealty to him above all else. This week, a series of cabinet nominations by Mr. Trump showed the potential dangers posed by his reliance on his inner circle in the starkest way possible.

For three of the nation’s highest-ranking and most vital positions, Mr. Trump said he would appoint loyalists with no discernible qualifications for their jobs, people manifestly inappropriate for crucial positions of leadership in law enforcement and national security.

The most irresponsible was his choice for attorney general. To fill the post of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, the president-elect said he would nominate Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida.

Yes, that Matt Gaetz.

The one who called for the abolishment of the F.B.I. and the entire Justice Department if they didn’t stop investigating Mr. Trump. The one who was among the loudest congressional voices in denying the results of the 2020 election, who said he was “proud of the work” that he and other deniers did on Jan. 6, 2021, and who praised the Capitol rioters as “patriotic Americans” who had no intention of committing violence. The one whose move to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2023, paralyzed his own party’s leadership of the House for nearly a month.

Donald Trump with his junk drawer cabinet

Mr. Gaetz, who submitted his letter of resignation from Congress on Wednesday after his nomination was announced, was the target of a yearslong federal sex-trafficking investigation that led to an 11-year prison term for one of his associates, though he denied any involvement. The Justice Department closed that investigation, but the House Ethics Committee is still looking into allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, improper acceptance of gifts and obstruction of government investigations of his conduct. Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, blamed Mr. Gaetz for his ouster, on the grounds that Mr. Gaetz “wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old.”

This is the man Mr. Trump has selected to lead the 115,000-person agency that he has called the most important in the federal government, a position whose enforcement role could cause the most trouble for any president with corrupt intent. Even for Mr. Trump, it was a stunning demonstration of his disregard for basic competence and government experience, and of his duty to lead the executive branch in a sober and patriotic way. It will now be up to the Senate to say he has gone too far and reject this nomination.

Mr. Trump’s list of appointments is just getting started but already includes two other unqualified nominations that he announced this week: former Representative Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense.

Ms. Gabbard, who previously represented Hawaii in the House and regularly appears on Fox News, is not only devoid of intelligence experience but has repeatedly taken positions in direct opposition to American foreign policy and national security interests. She has appeared on several occasions to side with strongmen like President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Mr. Hegseth, a co-host of “Fox & Friends,” is perhaps even more unqualified, given the gravity — not to mention the budget — of the post he would assume. He enjoys some support from enlisted service members and veterans, but outside of serving two tours as an Army infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as time at Guantánamo Bay, Mr. Hegseth has no experience in government or national defense.

“He’s never run a big institution, much less one of the largest and most hidebound on the planet,” the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal wrote Wednesday. “He has no experience in government outside the military, and no small risk is that the bureaucracy will eat him alive.” The board went on to call Mr. Hegseth a “culture warrior” at a time when there are much bigger security issues for the Pentagon to be focused on.

It’s far from certain Mr. Hegseth could even obtain the security clearances required for the job. He has said he was one of a dozen National Guard members removed from service at President Biden’s inauguration in 2021 because of concerns that he was an extremist — possibly because of a tattoo he wears that is popular among white supremacists.

These are some of the most consequential roles in government, protecting the country from military and terrorist threats, investigating domestic criminal conspiracies, and prosecuting thousands of federal crimes every year. Yet to fill them Mr. Trump has resorted to people whose only eligibility for office is an apparent willingness to say yes to his every demand.

Mr. Gaetz in particular has joined Mr. Trump in expressing a commitment to exacting vengeance against anyone they believe has done them wrong. Mr. Trump began his campaign by saying “I am your retribution,” and Mr. Gaetz broadcasts nothing so much as that. He has no business leading an agency with the role of combating crime, fraud, violations of civil rights and threats to national security, among many other things.

In Mr. Trump’s first term, the department was protected by career prosecutors and other civil servants who understood that their primary obligation was to the dictates of the Constitution, not to the whims of the president. But Mr. Trump has promised to purge people like that from his second administration.

The possibility of extreme appointments like these was the reason the Constitution gives the Senate the right to refuse its consent to a president’s wishes. Last week, Republicans won control of the chamber. Now they will be confronted with an immediate test: Will they stand up for the legislative branch and for the American system of checks and balances? Two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, have already expressed strong skepticism of Mr. Gaetz’s nomination, and others have declined to express their support.

Mr. Trump clearly expects the Senate to simply roll over and ignore its responsibilities. He wants to turn the leaders of major important agencies into his deputies, remaking the federal government into a Trump Inc. organization chart entirely subordinate to him. He recently demanded that the Senate give him the ability to make recess appointments, a way of bypassing the Senate’s consent process when the chamber is adjourned for 10 days or more.

Even Republican senators refused to consent to that demand during his first term, to preserve their constitutional role, and on Wednesday Senate Republicans voted to reject as their leader Rick Scott of Florida, who said he would have no problem allowing recess appointments. Instead they chose John Thune of South Dakota, who is far more likely to uphold his chamber’s right to refuse consent of president nominations.

In Mr. Trump’s second term, senators will immediately be confronted with an extreme set of appointments even worse than those of the first term. That makes it all the more important that they preserve the ability to say no.

Experience hope over fear as Democrats plan about how to repair Trumpzism's incompetent leadership

Echo opinion letter to the editor of The New York Times: I am a first-generation American. My parents were Holocaust survivors.

My mother was born in Vilna (now Vilnius) in 1930. Her deportation* to Siberia at age 10, saved her life, and the lives of her parents.

Reading Tolstoy and other great works of literature, and never losing hope, were among the beacons that helped her to survive during the five years she spent in Siberia. 

Similarly, many of the (all too few) survivors of the Vilna Ghetto found ways to cope by retreating into reading and writing fiction, making art, composing and performing music.

Meanwhile, my father, a pianist studying at the Vienna Academy, escaped at age 16 in 1938, on a music scholarship to Palestine. Music saved his life.

I firmly believe that the arts can help us survive the Donald Trump era. It has been proven to help people to survive and flourish in the face of war, cruelty, racism, sexism, fascism and all other threats to human dignity.

From Deborah Hautzig,  New York
The writer is the author of dozens of children’s books and two novels.

A group of Lithuanian deportees in Ziminsky District, Irkutsk Oblast in Russia.

*Soviet deportations from Lithuania were a series of 35 mass deportations carried out in Lithuania, a country that was occupied as a constituent socialist republic of the Soviet Union, in 1941, and 1945–1952. At least 130,000 people, 70% of them women and children, were forcibly transported to labor camps and other forced settlements in remote parts of the Soviet Union.  Among the deportees were about 4,500 Poles.