James.galbraith

There was no need to do this before 7 — but Trump gave cops a test, and they passed.

Monday evening’s images of peaceful protesters in Washington, DC’s Lafayette Square being attacked and gassed by federal law enforcement officers were chilling.

Reflecting on them, what’s even more alarming is the context. The officers began their assault just after 6:30 pm — less than half an hour before a 7 pm curfew that had already been ordered by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser was set to take effect. Legally speaking, the crowd should have dispersed then and there would have been no problem with the president strolling across the park to do his photo op at St John’s Church. Realistically, the odds are good that the crowd would not have dispersed. But starting at 7 pm, a group of officers forcibly expelling protesters from the park would have been enforcing the law.

Doing it at 6:36 pm or so served no real purpose except to make the law enforcement action flagrantly abusive. And that itself sends a powerful message.

Trump is frequently testing people

One of the most telling moments of the Trump administration was its very first controversy — White House press secretary Sean Spicer going out in front of the cameras to blatantly lie about the relative size of the crowds at the Trump inauguration and the Obama inauguration.

The lie was absurd — the facts were plain to see in photographs. It was also an absurd thing to be so sensitive about. It’s no secret that Washington, DC, and its suburbs are heavily Democratic areas and thus a Democratic president would be far more likely to get a stronger turnout. Trump could likely draw a bigger crowd than Obama in the Texas Panhandle; it’s just one of those things.

The lie was not persuasive nor intended to persuade, nor was it about anything important. The significance of it was simply in the fact that it happened. Spicer was asked to humiliate himself on Trump’s behalf, to violate the rules of polite society and being a decent spokesperson because Trump wanted him to. And so he did.

Trump’s politics are full of these little dominance rituals. To verbalize agreement with Trump because you genuinely agree with what he says proves nothing — it’s willingness to say things that neither you nor anyone else believes that truly proves your devotion.

Monday night’s use of force was similar in structure but more alarming in practice. Would law enforcement officials fire tear gas at an unarmed crowd that wasn’t breaking the rules? That federal agents were deployed instead of DC police officers is perhaps a sign that there were some doubts. Regardless, one can never know for sure what kind of orders will be followed until they are given. A 7:01 pm dispersal wouldn’t prove anything, whereas a 6:36 pm dispersal proved a great deal.

There are no limits with the Trump GOP

Trump is a limited man in many ways, and oftentimes appears too scattered, impulsive, or inattentive to be a real authoritarian.

But as my colleague Ezra Klein wrote years ago, he does have the reality television superpower of shamelessness. He’s not here to make friends, and he’s always testing different kinds of boundaries. Sometimes he gets pushback, as when he tries to force American trade policy too hard in a direction that American business and the congressional GOP are uncomfortable with. On vast areas of public policy that he cares less about than trade, he so far doesn’t even bother to push.

What we’ve seen, however, is that on questions of process, there is seemingly no line he won’t cross. Whether he’s asking to block a merger to punish CNN, bankrupting the Post Office to punish the Washington Post, or issuing an executive order to threaten Twitter for fact-checking his tweets, he does not accept a distinction between the legitimate uses of the regulatory state and his personal political interests. And while so far those three media companies have stood strong, Facebook now has a lifelong GOP political operative running its public policy shop and making sure the company’s editorial policies accord with Republicans’ desires. Comcast (which is one of the investors in Vox’s parent company) is considering a plan to turn prime time CNBC into conservative talk TV programming as “an olive branch to Trump and his avid supporters.”

If you’d asked congressional Republicans a year ago if they thought it was a good idea to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless the Ukrainian government agreed to cook up a bogus investigation into Joe Biden, they’d all almost certainly have said no. But Trump was accused of doing just that, and then they all defended it. And now the Ukrainian government is doing the investigation.

These kinds of abuses of state authority are the soft touch of systemic corruption that destroys the character of a democratic form of government.

Security forces taking unprovoked shots at protesters is the hard hand. Tonight, Trump tested that new hard limit. Would they follow the order? Would there be any consequences if they did? The answers are “yes” and “no.”

As if the man is truly on a quest to be the most malevolent sack of crap in America, it turns out Donald Trump’s gaudy “walk” to a burned church next to the White House didn’t just come with the White House ordering the tear gassing of peaceful protesters to clear a path for the bone-spur-having fascist: Trump was trespassing on church property for the photo-op. He didn’t have permission to be there, says the Episcopal bishop responsible for St. John’s Church!

In a CNN appearance, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde blasted Trump for the grotesque stunt.

“Let me be clear: The president just used a Bible, the most sacred text of the Judeo-Christian tradition, at one of the churches of my diocese, without permission, as the backdrop to a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and everything that our churches stand for.”

“I am outraged,” she fumed. “The president did not pray when he came to St. John’s nor did he acknowledge the agony of our country right now.”

So Trump was trespassing on church grounds after tear gassing the crowd that had peacefully assembled there.

So where did Trump get the Bible, anyway? Did he loot it from the church?

The bishop also spoke to a Washington Post reporter. “I am the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and was not given even a courtesy call, that they would be clearing [the area] with tear gas so they could use one of our churches as a prop.”

Twitter on Monday added a warning label to a tweet by Rep. Matt Gaetz that called for members of the radical activist group antifa to be hunted down like “terrorists” for violating the company’s policies against glorifying violence — the social network’s latest enforcement action against a prominent GOP official.

The Florida Republican, one of President Donald Trump’s fiercest allies on Capitol Hill, ratcheted up his rhetoric against the left-wing group in a missive earlier Monday, writing, “Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?”

The remarks come on the heels of Trump’s announcement that he plans to designate the activist group known as antifa, short for “anti-fascist,” as a terrorist organization.

“We have placed a public interest notice on this Tweet from @mattgaetz. The Tweet is in violation of our glorification of violence policy,” a Twitter spokesperson told POLITICO in an email. “As is standard with this notice, engagements with the Tweet will be limited. People will be able to Retweet with Comment, but will not be able to Like, Reply or Retweet it.”

In response, Gaetz called the warning his "badge of honor" and vowed not to relent on his rhetoric.

"Antifa is a terrorist organization, encouraging riots that hurt Americans," he tweeted. "Our government should hunt them down. Twitter should stop enabling them. I’ll keep saying it."

The social network has faced a firestorm of criticism from Trump and his allies, including Gaetz, for taking the same action against a recent Trump tweet that appeared to urge the shooting of looters in Minnesota.

Gaetz’s tweet sparked outcry from advocates for stricter gun restrictions, who said his post could incite violence.

“Take the Gaetz tweet down right now @twitter. RIGHT NOW,” tweeted Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), whose state was the site of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. “The survivors of mass shootings are lighting up my phone. They are scared to death this will inspire someone to start shooting into a crowd tonight. They are right.”

David Hogg, an advocate for tighter gun regulations and a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Fla., also took umbrage at Gaetz's comment. "Imagine saying you love your country but embracing the extrajudicial killing of your fellow citizens," he tweeted in response to Gaetz.

Gaetz took exception with Murphy’s remarks. “Spare me your woke virtue signaling,” he tweeted in response.

“Governments go after terrorists. Individuals don’t," he added. "We — the government — should continue to do so. And Antifa is rightly on the list!”

After Twitter's ruling Monday, Gaetz also tweeted in support of Trump's call to revoke the online industry's legal immunity over user content, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The 1996 law has come under fire from conservatives who accuse Silicon Valley of suppressing their voices.

There's no evidence of systemic political bias by Twitter and other social media companies, but rolling back Section 230 has become a rallying for Trump and his allies who allege there is.

President Donald Trump’s pitch to re-invite Russia to the G-7 got a swift thumbs-down from fellow world leaders on Monday.

The U.S. president, who is hosting the next gathering of leaders from major industrial nations, suggested Saturday the group ought to expand to include Russia, India, Australia and South Korea. The current members include Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy and Canada. “I don’t feel that as a G-7 it properly represents what’s going on in the world,” Trump said.

The G-7 nations agreed to suspend Russia's membership in what was then the G-8 after Moscow annexed the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine in 2014. Readmission would require unanimous support among members of the current group.

Trump spoke by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin Monday. According to a readout from the White House, “the two leaders discussed progress toward convening the G7,” among other subjects.

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has occasionally been an ally of Trump’s, but his spokesperson told journalists on Monday that he would veto any plan to readmit Russia.

The U.K. could only change its view if Russia "ceases aggressive and destabilizing activity that threatens the safety of U.K. citizens and the collective security of our allies," the spokesperson said.

Johnson "is unlikely to be pushed around by anyone on this," a senior British diplomat told POLITICO. The U.K. has taken a tougher stance against Moscow since blaming Russia for the 2018 nerve agent poisoning of a former Russian double agent in Salisbury, England.

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau also told reporters Monday that Russia should not be welcomed back. "Its continued disrespect and flaunting of international rules and norms is why it remains outside of the G-7 and it will continue to remain out," said Trudeau.

This is the third time Trump has urged that Putin be allowed back in the forum. Ahead of the 2018 G-7 summit, hosted by Trudeau in Canada, Trump called for Russia’s reinstatement into the group. He repeated that call in 2019, when only Italy supported the idea of extending an invitation to Putin.

Trump’s suggestion to expand the group piggybacks on a British proposal to form a “D-10” alliance of democracies to coordinate policy in the face of global concerns about China, from the role of Huawei in 5G networks to China’s handling of the coronavirus.

An Australian government spokesperson said Sunday that "Australia would welcome an official invitation" the group. "Strengthening international cooperation among like-minded countries is valued at a time of unprecedented global challenges."

India has not responded to the suggestion that it join the G-7, but its leader attended the G-8 summit in 2005, at the request of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

European officials have expressed concern to POLITICO that under Trump, there has been very little of the traditional preparation that precedes the annual G-7 summit, including detailed discussion about the agenda and often intensive negotiation over the drafting of formal conclusions. Those negotiations are expected to be particularly tough given Trump's divergence from the others on a number of issues, especially trade and climate change.

Charlie Cooper and Andy Blatchford contributed reporting

It’s unlikely anyone could stop him from using it, too.

President Donald Trump on Monday threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act — a centuries-old law that gives the president the authority to send the US military into US cities and towns to quash domestic unrest — if state governors don’t take sufficient action to quell the ongoing protests and unrest happening in cities across the country.

“If a city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy United States military and quickly solve the problem for them,” Trump said in a short speech delivered from the White House Rose Garden.

As he spoke, loud booms could be sporadically heard in the background as law enforcement officers fired tear gas and rubber bullets at peaceful protesters who had gathered near the White House.

Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

For the past three days, Trump has flirted with sending troops into cities around the country to put down the protests and unrest sparked by the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who was killed last week when a Minneapolis police officer used his knee to pin Floyd’s neck to the ground for several minutes while he was handcuffed.

On Saturday, Trump tweeted, “Liberal Governors and Mayors must get MUCH tougher or the Federal Government will step in and do what has to be done, and that includes using the unlimited power of our Military and many arrests.”

Two days later, he tweeted that Republican Sen. Tom Cotton was “100% Correct” for suggesting violent activists would cower before a US Army presence.

As of Monday, 23 states and the District of Columbia had mobilized thousands of National Guard members to support police officers and firefighters with trying to control the demonstrations and unrest.

Trump, however, is unsatisfied with those efforts. In a private call with governors on Monday, he told them, “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time,” adding that “we have a wonderful military.” Hours later, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the president would soon send “federal assets” around the nation, and mentioned the Insurrection Act as a possibility.

“The Insurrection Act, it’s one of the tools available, whether the president decides to pursue that, that’s his prerogative,“ she said.

However, Trump did say US military police, many of whom have spent part of the past two decades in the Middle East, will deploy to Washington, DC. Importantly, they still don’t have the authority to perform law enforcement duties.

But if Trump were to go through with invoking the Insurrection Act, experts say it would be one of the most dramatic law enforcement escalations in decades, certain to inflame tensions between the demonstrators and their government instead of lower them.

An active-duty US Air Force officer who flew warplanes in Afghanistan told me such a decision isn’t wise. “These protests aren’t combat and shouldn’t be viewed through the same prism,” the officer said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about a sensitive issue. “Expecting a military response is myopic on the part of the administration, tone-deaf in light of yet another intolerable and unacceptable killing, and a misuse of the military.”

But Trump hasn’t heeded that advice. Instead, he’s leaning away from it.

The Insurrection Act, briefly explained

Trump absolutely can send American troops to any part of the United States to deal with the protests. He is the commander in chief, after all. But if he wants them to be able to search, seize assets, and arrest protesters and people who are looting, there are a few legalistic hoops he’ll have to jump through first.

You might have heard of “posse comitatus,” a longstanding law that bars the US military in most cases from being used to enforce domestic law. However, there is actually a way for federal troops to perform law enforcement functions. Simply put, they have to get special, statutory authorization to allow them to do those duties.

By far the most important of those authorizations — and the one most likely to come into play in this situation — is the Insurrection Act.

“This is the legal key that unlocks the door to use federal military forces ... to quell civil unrest,” Mark Nevitt, a military law expert at the US Naval Academy, wrote for the Just Security website last Friday.

Nevitt noted two main ways the Insurrection Act could be invoked for the protests. It’s worth going through each in turn.

1) Local leaders could ask the president for US military assistance

A state’s legislature or its governor could directly request US military support. This actually happened in 1992: California Gov. Pete Wilson sought assistance from President George H.W. Bush during the Los Angeles protests that erupted after a jury acquitted police officers charged with arresting and beating Rodney King. In response, Bush put California National Guard members under federal command and sent in soldiers and Marines already based in the state.

It’s unclear if any governor would actually make such a request of Trump right now. Experts told me governors typically shy away from taking this step because of how controversial it is. Plus, they have National Guard members already under their command who, when authorized, can perform law enforcement functions.

Reports, however, indicate that active-duty troops stationed around the country are on high alert to deploy within 24 hours. “We have our military ready, willing and able, if they ever want to call our military,” Trump told reporters on Saturday. “And we can have troops on the ground very quickly if they ever want our military.”

2) The president could send in US troops to protect federal property or enforce federal law

Trump could invoke the law to send troops even without a state legislature’s or governor’s consent — but there’s a catch.

Trump can only deploy troops within the US “for certain purposes,” Lindsay Cohn, a US military expert at the Naval War College, told me. “Technically and legally, he can send them to protect federal property or enforce federal law.”

Past presidents used this authority to defend civil rights in the 1950s and ’60s.

In 1957, then-Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus refused to follow federal integration laws after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling three years earlier. As a result, President Dwight Eisenhower sent soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock to escort nine black high school students into the all-white Central High School despite protests against them.

Five years later, President John F. Kennedy sent Army soldiers into Oxford, Mississippi, after the state’s governor tried to block a black student from attending the University of Mississippi in Oxford (often referred to as Ole Miss). This allowed the student, James Meredith, to register safely even though a mob tried to stop him.

In both the Eisenhower and Kennedy cases, the president used federal troops to enforce federal laws. That’s important, Cohn told me, because the key is that those and other deployments by presidents were to suppress insurrections against US federal laws — not laws of the individual states.

Reading the provision in full helps drive this vital point home:

Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages or rebellion against authority of United States makes it impracticable to enforce the law of the United States in any State or territory by judicial proceedings, the President may call into Federal service the militia of any State and use the Federal military to enforce the laws or suppress the rebellion.

Importantly, to invoke the act, Trump must first — with the attorney general’s help — issue a “proclamation to disperse.” Basically, he has to give the people working against federal law a bit of time to stop their actions. If they don’t, the president is free to send in the US military.

If Trump were to do this, it would be guaranteed to anger a lot of people, and many would likely contend that Trump is behaving in an authoritarian manner, using the might of the US military to crack down on protesters. But while the impulse behind it may seem undemocratic, that doesn’t necessarily mean it wouldn’t be legal.

“It’s not implausible to argue that these statutes could apply now,” Steve Vladeck, a national security law expert at the University of Texas Austin, tweeted on Saturday. “And it’s hard to imagine courts second-guessing factual determinations by the President that circumstances warrant use of the military to restore order.”

This makes the future of the protests Trump’s responsibility

If Trump wants soldiers and Marines to go into American cities and start shooting, he’ll be wildly disappointed.

As Nevitt explained, there are clear and severe restraints on active-duty troops using force while performing policing duties at home, even under the Insurrection Act:

[F]orce is to be used only as a last resort, and the force used should be the minimum necessary. Further, deadly force is to be used only when all lesser means have failed or cannot be reasonably employed.

Of course, the rules for the use of force do not limit the inherent right of self-defense of people. It also authorizes force—to include deadly force—to protect three specified assets: (1) assets vital to national security (such as nuclear command and control facilities); (2) inherently dangerous property (such as missiles, rockets, and explosives); and (3) national critical infrastructure (such as designated public utilities).

To be clear, that could apply in some instances, but obviously not in the majority of them. Which means that the US military will serve mainly as more manpower.

The move isn’t without some risk for Trump, either. As Vladeck tweeted, is that sending in American troops puts the onus for ending the protests on Trump.

“If Trump invokes these statutes, he’d own all that follows,” he wrote on Saturday.

Mayors and governors, then, wouldn’t take the credit or the blame for whatever happened next — Trump would.

On a cold March afternoon in 1949, Wolfgang Leonhard slipped out of the East German Communist Party Secretariat, hurried home, packed what few warm clothes he could fit into a small briefcase, and then walked to a telephone box to call his mother. “My article will be finished this evening,” he told her. That was the code they had agreed on in advance. It meant that he was escaping the country, at great risk to his life.

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Though only 28 years old at the time, Leonhard stood at the pinnacle of the new East German elite. The son of German Communists, he had been educated in the Soviet Union, trained in special schools during the war, and brought back to Berlin from Moscow in May 1945, on the same airplane that carried Walter Ulbricht, the leader of what would soon become the East German Communist Party. Leonhard was put on a team charged with re‑creating Berlin’s city government.

He had one central task: to ensure that any local leaders who emerged from the postwar chaos were assigned deputies loyal to the party. “It’s got to look democratic,” Ulbricht told him, “but we must have everything in our control.”

Leonhard had lived through a great deal by that time. While he was still a teenager in Moscow, his mother had been arrested as an “enemy of the people” and sent to Vorkuta, a labor camp in the far north. He had witnessed the terrible poverty and inequality of the Soviet Union, he had despaired of the Soviet alliance with Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1941, and he knew about the Red Army’s mass rapes of women following the occupation. Yet he and his ideologically committed friends “instinctively recoiled from the thought” that any of these events were “in diametrical opposition to our Socialist ideals.” Steadfastly, he clung to the belief system he had grown up with.

[Anne Applebaum: Resist the urge to simplify the story]

The turning point, when it came, was trivial. While walking down the hall of the Central Committee building, he was stopped by a “pleasant-looking middle-aged man,” a comrade recently arrived from the West, who asked where to find the dining room. Leonhard told him that the answer depended on what sort of meal ticket he had—different ranks of officials had access to different dining rooms. The comrade was astonished: “But … aren’t they all members of the Party?”

Leonhard walked away and entered his own, top-category dining room, where white cloths covered the tables and high-ranking functionaries received three-course meals. He felt ashamed. “Curious, I thought, that this had never struck me before!” That was when he began to have the doubts that inexorably led him to plot his escape.

At exactly that same moment, in exactly the same city, another high-ranking East German was coming to precisely the opposite set of conclusions. Markus Wolf was also the son of a prominent German Communist family. He also spent his childhood in the Soviet Union, attending the same elite schools for children of foreign Communists as Leonhard did, as well as the same wartime training camp; the two had shared a bedroom there, solemnly calling each other by their aliases—these were the rules of deep conspiracy—although they knew each other’s real names perfectly well. Wolf also witnessed the mass arrests, the purges, and the poverty of the Soviet Union—and he also kept faith with the cause. He arrived in Berlin just a few days after Leonhard, on another plane full of trusted comrades, and immediately began hosting a program on the new Soviet-backed radio station. For many months he ran the popular You Ask, We Answer. He gave on-air answers to listeners’ letters, often concluding with some form of “These difficulties are being overcome with the help of the Red Army.”

[Read: James Mattis denounces President Trump, describes him as a threat to the constitution]

In August 1947, the two men met up at Wolf’s “luxurious five-roomed apartment,” not far from what was then the headquarters of the radio station. They drove out to Wolf’s house, “a fine villa in the neighborhood of Lake Glienicke.” They took a walk around the lake, and Wolf warned Leonhard that changes were coming. He told him to give up hoping that German Communism would be allowed to develop differently from the Soviet version: That idea, long the goal of many German party members, was about to be dropped. When Leonhard argued that this could not be true—he was personally in charge of ideology, and no one had told him anything about a change in direction—Wolf laughed at him. “There are higher authorities than your Central Secretariat,” he said. Wolf made clear that he had better contacts, more important friends. At the age of 24, he was an insider. And Leonhard understood, finally, that he was a functionary in an occupied country where the Soviet Communist Party, not the German Communist Party, had the last word.

Famously, or perhaps infamously, Markus Wolf’s career continued to flourish after that. Not only did he stay in East Germany, he rose through the ranks of its nomenklatura to become the country’s top spy. He was the second-ranked official at the Ministry of State Security, better known as the Stasi; he was often described as the model for the Karla character in John le Carré ’s spy novels. In the course of his career, his Directorate for Reconnaissance recruited agents in the offices of the West German chancellor and just about every other department of the government, as well as at NATO.

Leonhard, meanwhile, became a prominent critic of the regime. He wrote and lectured in West Berlin, at Oxford, at Columbia. Eventually he wound up at Yale, where his lecture course left an impression on several generations of students. Among them was a future U.S. president, George W. Bush, who described Leonhard’s course as “an introduction to the struggle between tyranny and freedom.” When I was at Yale in the 1980s, Leonhard’s course on Soviet history was the most popular on campus.

Separately, each man’s story makes sense. But when examined together, they require some deeper explanation. Until March 1949, Leonhard’s and Wolf’s biographies were strikingly similar. Both grew up inside the Soviet system. Both were educated in Communist ideology, and both had the same values. Both knew that the party was undermining those values. Both knew that the system, allegedly built to promote equality, was deeply unequal, profoundly unfair, and very cruel. Like their counterparts in so many other times and places, both men could plainly see the gap between propaganda and reality. Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator, while the other could not bear the betrayal of his ideals. Why?

In English, the word collaborator has a double meaning. A colleague can be described as a collaborator in a neutral or positive sense. But the other definition of collaborator, relevant here, is different: someone who works with the enemy, with the occupying power, with the dictatorial regime. In this negative sense, collaborator is closely related to another set of words: collusion, complicity, connivance. This negative meaning gained currency during the Second World War, when it was widely used to describe Europeans who cooperated with Nazi occupiers. At base, the ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason: betrayal of one’s nation, of one’s ideology, of one’s morality, of one’s values.

[Mike Mullen: I cannot remain silent]

Since the Second World War, historians and political scientists have tried to explain why some people in extreme circumstances become collaborators and others do not. The late Harvard scholar Stanley Hoffmann had firsthand knowledge of the subject—as a child, he and his mother hid from the Nazis in Lamalou-les-Bains, a village in the south of France. But he was modest about his own conclusions, noting that “a careful historian would have—almost—to write a huge series of case histories; for there seem to have been almost as many collaborationisms as there were proponents or practitioners of collaboration.” Still, Hoffmann made a stab at classification, beginning with a division of collaborators into “voluntary” and “involuntary.” Many people in the latter group had no choice. Forced into a “reluctant recognition of necessity,” they could not avoid dealing with the Nazi occupiers who were running their country.

Hoffmann further sorted the more enthusiastic “voluntary” collaborators into two additional categories. In the first were those who worked with the enemy in the name of “national interest,” rationalizing collaboration as something necessary for the preservation of the French economy, or French culture—though of course many people who made these arguments had other professional or economic motives, too. In the second were the truly active ideological collaborators: people who believed that prewar republican France had been weak or corrupt and hoped that the Nazis would strengthen it, people who admired fascism, and people who admired Hitler.

Hoffmann observed that many of those who became ideological collaborators were landowners and aristocrats, “the cream of the top of the civil service, of the armed forces, of the business community,” people who perceived themselves as part of a natural ruling class that had been unfairly deprived of power under the left-wing governments of France in the 1930s. Equally motivated to collaborate were their polar opposites, the “social misfits and political deviants” who would, in the normal course of events, never have made successful careers of any kind. What brought these groups together was a common conclusion that, whatever they had thought about Germany before June 1940, their political and personal futures would now be improved by aligning themselves with the occupiers.

[Franklin Foer: The Trump regime is beginning to topple]

Like Hoffmann, Czesław Miłosz, a Nobel Prize–winning Polish poet, wrote about collaboration from personal experience. An active member of the anti-Nazi resistance during the war, he nevertheless wound up after the war as a cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Washington, serving his country’s Communist government. Only in 1951 did he defect, denounce the regime, and dissect his experience. In a famous essay, The Captive Mind, he sketched several lightly disguised portraits of real people, all writers and intellectuals, each of whom had come up with different ways of justifying collaboration with the party. Many were careerists, but Miłosz understood that careerism could not provide a complete explanation. To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses,” to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers. For tormented intellectuals, collaboration also offered a kind of relief, almost a sense of peace: It meant that they were no longer constantly at war with the state, no longer in turmoil. Once the intellectual has accepted that there is no other way, Miłosz wrote, “he eats with relish, his movements take on vigor, his color returns. He sits down and writes a ‘positive’ article, marveling at the ease with which he writes it.” Miłosz is one of the few writers to acknowledge the pleasure of conformity, the lightness of heart that it grants, the way that it solves so many personal and professional dilemmas.

We all feel the urge to conform; it is the most normal of human desires. I was reminded of this recently when I visited Marianne Birthler in her light-filled apartment in Berlin. During the 1980s, Birthler was one of a very small number of active dissidents in East Germany; later, in reunified Germany, she spent more than a decade running the Stasi archive, the collection of former East German secret-police files. I asked her whether she could identify among her cohort a set of circumstances that had inclined some people to collaborate with the Stasi.

She was put off by the question. Collaboration wasn’t interesting, Birthler told me. Almost everyone was a collaborator; 99 percent of East Germans collaborated. If they weren’t working with the Stasi, then they were working with the party, or with the system more generally. Much more interesting—and far harder to explain—was the genuinely mysterious question of “why people went against the regime.” The puzzle is not why Markus Wolf remained in East Germany, in other words, but why Wolfgang Leonhard did not.

Here is another pair of stories, one that will be more familiar to American readers. Let’s begin this one in the 1980s, when a young Lindsey Graham first served with the Judge Advocate General’s Corps—the military legal service—in the U.S. Air Force. During some of that time, Graham was based in what was then West Germany, on the cutting edge of America’s Cold War efforts. Graham, born and raised in a small town in South Carolina, was devoted to the military: After both of his parents died when he was in his 20s, he got himself and his younger sister through college with the help of an ROTC stipend and then an Air Force salary. He stayed in the Reserves for two decades, even while in the Senate, sometimes journeying to Iraq or Afghanistan to serve as a short-term reserve officer. “The Air Force has been one of the best things that has ever happened to me,” he said in 2015. “It gave me a purpose bigger than myself. It put me in the company of patriots.” Through most of his years in the Senate, Graham, alongside his close friend John McCain, was a spokesperson for a strong military, and for a vision of America as a democratic leader abroad. He also supported a vigorous notion of democracy at home. In his 2014 reelection campaign, he ran as a maverick and a centrist, telling The Atlantic that jousting with the Tea Party was “more fun than any time I’ve been in politics.”

[Read: How Lindsey Graham stomped the Tea Party]

While Graham was doing his tour in West Germany, Mitt Romney became a co-founder and then the president of Bain Capital, a private-equity investment firm. Born in Michigan, Romney worked in Massachusetts during his years at Bain, but he also kept, thanks to his Mormon faith, close ties to Utah. While Graham was a military lawyer, drawing military pay, Romney was acquiring companies, restructuring them, and then selling them. This was a job he excelled at—in 1990, he was asked to run the parent firm, Bain & Company—and in the course of doing so he became very rich. Still, Romney dreamed of a political career, and in 1994 he ran for the Senate in Massachusetts, after changing his political affiliation from independent to Republican. He lost, but in 2002 he ran for governor of Massachusetts as a nonpartisan moderate, and won. In 2007—after a gubernatorial term during which he successfully brought in a form of near-universal health care that became a model for Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act—he staged his first run for president. After losing the 2008 Republican primary, he won the party’s nomination in 2012, and then lost the general election.

Both Graham and Romney had presidential ambitions; Graham staged his own short-lived presidential campaign in 2015 (justified on the grounds that “the world is falling apart”). Both men were loyal members of the Republican Party, skeptical of the party’s radical and conspiratorial fringe. Both men reacted to the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump with real anger, and no wonder: In different ways, Trump’s values undermined their own. Graham had dedicated his career to an idea of U.S. leadership around the world—whereas Trump was offering an “America First” doctrine that would turn out to mean “me and my friends first.” Romney was an excellent businessman with a strong record as a public servant—whereas Trump inherited wealth, went bankrupt more than once, created nothing of value, and had no governing record at all. Both Graham and Romney were devoted to America’s democratic traditions and to the ideals of honesty, accountability, and transparency in public life—all of which Trump scorned.

Both were vocal in their disapproval of Trump. Before the election, Graham called him a “jackass,” a “nutjob,” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” He seemed unhappy, even depressed, by the election: I happened to see him at a conference in Europe in the spring of 2016, and he spoke in monosyllables, if at all.

[David Frum: No empathy, only anger]

Romney went further. “Let me put it very plainly,” he said in March 2016, in a speech criticizing Trump: “If we Republicans choose Donald Trump as our nominee, the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished.” Romney spoke of “the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics.” He called Trump a “con man” and a “fraud.” Even after Trump won the nomination, Romney refused to endorse him. On his presidential ballot, Romney said, he wrote in his wife. Graham said he voted for the independent candidate Evan McMullin.

But Trump did become president, and so the two men’s convictions were put to the test.

A glance at their biographies would not have led many to predict what happened next. On paper, Graham would have seemed, in 2016, like the man with deeper ties to the military, to the rule of law, and to an old-fashioned idea of American patriotism and American responsibility in the world. Romney, by contrast, with his shifts between the center and the right, with his multiple careers in business and politics, would have seemed less deeply attached to those same old-fashioned patriotic ideals. Most of us register soldiers as loyal patriots, and management consultants as self-interested. We assume people from small towns in South Carolina are more likely to resist political pressure than people who have lived in many places. Intuitively, we think that loyalty to a particular place implies loyalty to a set of values.

But in this case the clichés were wrong. It was Graham who made excuses for Trump’s abuse of power. It was Graham—a JAG Corps lawyer—who downplayed the evidence that the president had attempted to manipulate foreign courts and blackmail a foreign leader into launching a phony investigation into a political rival. It was Graham who abandoned his own stated support for bipartisanship and instead pushed for a hyperpartisan Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden’s son. It was Graham who played golf with Trump, who made excuses for him on television, who supported the president even as he slowly destroyed the American alliances—with Europeans, with the Kurds—that Graham had defended all his life. By contrast, it was Romney who, in February, became the only Republican senator to break ranks with his colleagues, voting to impeach the president. “Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office,” he said, is “perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.”

[Read: How Mitt Romney decided Trump is guilty]

One man proved willing to betray ideas and ideals that he had once stood for. The other refused. Why?

To the American reader, references to Vichy France, East Germany, fascists, and Communists may seem over-the-top, even ludicrous. But dig a little deeper, and the analogy makes sense. The point is not to compare Trump to Hitler or Stalin; the point is to compare the experiences of high-ranking members of the American Republican Party, especially those who work most closely with the White House, to the experiences of Frenchmen in 1940, or of East Germans in 1945, or of Czesław Miłosz in 1947. These are experiences of people who are forced to accept an alien ideology or a set of values that are in sharp conflict with their own.

Not even Trump’s supporters can contest this analogy, because the imposition of an alien ideology is precisely what he was calling for all along. Trump’s first statement as president, his inaugural address, was an unprecedented assault on American democracy and American values. Remember: He described America’s capital city, America’s government, America’s congressmen and senators—all democratically elected and chosen by Americans, according to America’s 227-year-old Constitution—as an “establishment” that had profited at the expense of “the people.” “Their victories have not been your victories,” he said. “Their triumphs have not been your triumphs.” Trump was stating, as clearly as he possibly could, that a new set of values was now replacing the old, though of course the nature of those new values was not yet clear.

[Read: ‘American Carnage’: The Trump era begins]

Almost as soon as he stopped speaking, Trump launched his first assault on fact-based reality, a long-undervalued component of the American political system. We are not a theocracy or a monarchy that accepts the word of the leader or the priesthood as law. We are a democracy that debates facts, seeks to understand problems, and then legislates solutions, all in accordance with a set of rules. Trump’s insistence—against the evidence of photographs, television footage, and the lived experience of thousands of people—that the attendance at his inauguration was higher than at Barack Obama’s first inauguration represented a sharp break with that American political tradition. Like the authoritarian leaders of other times and places, Trump effectively ordered not just his supporters but also apolitical members of the government bureaucracy to adhere to a blatantly false, manipulated reality. American politicians, like politicians everywhere, have always covered up mistakes, held back information, and made promises they could not keep. But until Trump was president, none of them induced the National Park Service to produce doctored photographs or compelled the White House press secretary to lie about the size of a crowd—or encouraged him to do so in front of a press corps that knew he knew he was lying.

The lie was petty, even ridiculous; that was partly why it was so dangerous. In the 1950s, when an insect known as the Colorado potato beetle appeared in Eastern European potato fields, Soviet-backed governments in the region triumphantly claimed that it had been dropped from the sky by American pilots, as a deliberate form of biological sabotage. Posters featuring vicious red-white-and-blue beetles went up all across Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia. No one really believed the charge, including the people making it, as archives have subsequently shown. But that didn’t matter. The point of the posters was not to convince people of a falsehood. The point was to demonstrate the party’s power to proclaim and promulgate a falsehood. Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie—it’s to make people fear the liar.

These kinds of lies also have a way of building on one another. It takes time to persuade people to abandon their existing value systems. The process usually begins slowly, with small changes. Social scientists who have studied the erosion of values and the growth of corruption inside companies have found, for example, that “people are more likely to accept the unethical behavior of others if the behavior develops gradually (along a slippery slope) rather than occurring abruptly,” according to a 2009 article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. This happens, in part, because most people have a built-in vision of themselves as moral and honest, and that self-image is resistant to change. Once certain behaviors become “normal,” then people stop seeing them as wrong.

This process happens in politics, too. In 1947, the Soviet military administrators in East Germany passed a regulation governing the activity of publishing houses and printers. The decree did not nationalize the printing presses; it merely demanded that their owners apply for licenses, and that they confine their work to books and pamphlets ordered by central planners. Imagine how a law like this—which did not speak of arrests, let alone torture or the Gulag—affected the owner of a printing press in Dresden, a responsible family man with two teenage children and a sickly wife. Following its passage, he had to make a series of seemingly insignificant choices. Would he apply for a license? Of course—he needed it to earn money for his family. Would he agree to confine his business to material ordered by the central planners? Yes to that too—what else was there to print?

[William J. Burns: Polarized politics has infected American diplomacy]

After that, other compromises follow. Though he dislikes the Communists—he just wants to stay out of politics—he agrees to print the collected works of Stalin, because if he doesn’t do it, others will. When he is asked by some disaffected friends to print a pamphlet critical of the regime, however, he refuses. Though he wouldn’t go to jail for printing it, his children might not be admitted to university, and his wife might not get her medication; he has to think about their welfare. Meanwhile, all across East Germany, other owners of other printing presses are making similar decisions. And after a while—without anyone being shot or arrested, without anyone feeling any particular pangs of conscience—the only books left to read are the ones approved by the regime.

The built-in vision of themselves as American patriots, or as competent administrators, or as loyal party members, also created a cognitive distortion that blinded many Republicans and Trump-administration officials to the precise nature of the president’s alternative value system. After all, the early incidents were so trivial. They overlooked the lie about the inauguration because it was silly. They ignored Trump’s appointment of the wealthiest Cabinet in history, and his decision to stuff his administration with former lobbyists, because that’s business as usual. They made excuses for Ivanka Trump’s use of a private email account, and for Jared Kushner’s conflicts of interest, because that’s just family stuff.

One step at a time, Trumpism fooled many of its most enthusiastic adherents. Recall that some of the original intellectual supporters of Trump—people like Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, and the advocates of “national conservatism,” an ideology invented, post hoc, to rationalize the president’s behavior—advertised their movement as a recognizable form of populism: an anti–Wall Street, anti-foreign-wars, anti-immigration alternative to the small-government libertarianism of the establishment Republican Party. Their “Drain the swamp” slogan implied that Trump would clean up the rotten world of lobbyists and campaign finance that distorts American politics, that he would make public debate more honest and legislation more fair. Had this actually been Trump’s ruling philosophy, it might well have posed difficulties for the Republican Party leadership in 2016, given that most of them had quite different values. But it would not necessarily have damaged the Constitution, and it would not necessarily have posed fundamental moral challenges to people in public life.

In practice, Trump has governed according to a set of principles very different from those articulated by his original intellectual supporters. Although some of his speeches have continued to use that populist language, he has built a Cabinet and an administration that serve neither the public nor his voters but rather his own psychological needs and the interests of his own friends on Wall Street and in business and, of course, his own family. His tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthy, not the working class. His shallow economic boom, engineered to ensure his reelection, was made possible by a vast budget deficit, on a scale Republicans once claimed to abhor, an enormous burden for future generations. He worked to dismantle the existing health-care system without offering anything better, as he’d promised to do, so that the number of uninsured people rose. All the while he fanned and encouraged xenophobia and racism, both because he found them politically useful and because they are part of his personal worldview.

More important, he has governed in defiance—and in ignorance—of the American Constitution, notably declaring, well into his third year in office, that he had “total” authority over the states. His administration is not merely corrupt, it is also hostile to checks, balances, and the rule of law. He has built a proto-authoritarian personality cult, firing or sidelining officials who have contradicted him with facts and evidence—with tragic consequences for public health and the economy. He threatened to fire a top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, Nancy Messonnier, in late February, after her too-blunt warnings about the coronavirus; Rick Bright, a top Health and Human Services official, says he was demoted after refusing to direct money to promote the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine. Trump has attacked America’s military, calling his generals “a bunch of dopes and babies,” and America’s intelligence services and law-enforcement officers, whom he has denigrated as the “deep state” and whose advice he has ignored. He has appointed weak and inexperienced “acting” officials to run America’s most important security institutions. He has systematically wrecked America’s alliances.

[Adam Serwer: Trump gave police permission to be brutal]

His foreign policy has never served any U.S. interests of any kind. Although some of Trump’s Cabinet ministers and media followers have tried to portray him as an anti-Chinese nationalist—and although foreign-policy commentators from all points on the political spectrum have, amazingly, accepted this fiction without questioning it—Trump’s true instinct, always, has been to side with foreign dictators, including Chinese President Xi Jinping. One former administration official who has seen Trump interact with Xi as well as with Russian President Vladimir Putin told me that it was like watching a lesser celebrity encounter a more famous one. Trump did not speak to them as the representative of the American people; he simply wanted their aura—of absolute power, of cruelty, of fame—to rub off on him and enhance his own image. This, too, has had fatal consequences. In January, Trump took Xi’s word when he said that COVID‑19 was “under control,” just as he had believed North Korea’s Kim Jong Un when he signed a deal on nuclear weapons. Trump’s fawning attitude toward dictators is his ideology at its purest: He meets his own psychological needs first; he thinks about the country last. The true nature of the ideology that Trump brought to Washington was not “America First,” but rather “Trump First.”

Maybe it isn’t surprising that the implications of “Trump First” were not immediately understood. After all, the Communist parties of Eastern Europe—or, if you want a more recent example, the Chavistas in Venezuela—all advertised themselves as advocates of equality and prosperity even though, in practice, they created inequality and poverty. But just as the truth about Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution slowly dawned on people, it also became clear, eventually, that Trump did not have the interests of the American public at heart. And as they came to realize that the president was not a patriot, Republican politicians and senior civil servants began to equivocate, just like people living under an alien regime.

In retrospect, this dawning realization explains why the funeral of John McCain, in September 2018, looked, and by all accounts felt, so strange. Two previous presidents, one Republican and one Democrat—representatives of the old, patriotic political class—made speeches; the sitting president’s name was never mentioned. The songs and symbols of the old order were visible too: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”; American flags; two of McCain’s sons in their officer’s uniforms, so very different from the sons of Trump. Writing in The New Yorker, Susan Glasser described the funeral as “a meeting of the Resistance, under vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows.” In truth, it bore an uncanny resemblance to the 1956 funeral of László Rajk, a Hungarian Communist and secret-police boss who had been purged and murdered by his comrades in 1949. Rajk’s wife had become an outspoken critic of the regime, and the funeral turned into a de facto political rally, helping to set off Hungary’s anti-Communist revolution a couple of weeks later.

Nothing quite so dramatic happened after McCain’s funeral. But it did clarify the situation. A year and a half into the Trump administration, it marked a turning point, the moment at which many Americans in public life began to adopt the strategies, tactics, and self-justifications that the inhabitants of occupied countries have used in the past—doing so even though the personal stakes were, relatively speaking, so low. Poles like Miłosz wound up in exile in the 1950s; dissidents in East Germany lost the right to work and study. In harsher regimes like that of Stalin’s Russia, public protest could lead to many years in a concentration camp; disobedient Wehrmacht officers were executed by slow strangulation.

[Anne Applebaum: Creeping authoritarianism has finally prevailed]

By contrast, a Republican senator who dares to question whether Trump is acting in the interests of the country is in danger of—what, exactly? Losing his seat and winding up with a seven-figure lobbying job or a fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School? He might meet the terrible fate of Jeff Flake, the former Arizona senator, who has been hired as a contributor by CBS News. He might suffer like Romney, who was tragically not invited to the Conservative Political Action Conference, which this year turned out to be a reservoir of COVID‑19.

Nevertheless, 20 months into the Trump administration, senators and other serious-minded Republicans in public life who should have known better began to tell themselves stories that sound very much like those in Miłosz’s The Captive Mind. Some of these stories overlap with one another; some of them are just thin cloaks to cover self-interest. But all of them are familiar justifications of collaboration, recognizable from the past. Here are the most popular.

We can use this moment to achieve great things. In the spring of 2019, a Trump-supporting friend put me in touch with an administration official I will call “Mark,” whom I eventually met for a drink. I won’t give details, because we spoke informally, but in any case Mark did not leak information or criticize the White House. On the contrary, he described himself as a patriot and a true believer. He supported the language of “America First,” and was confident that it could be made real.

Several months later, I met Mark a second time. The impeachment hearings had begun, and the story of the firing of the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, was then in the news. The true nature of the administration’s ideology—Trump First, not America First—was becoming more obvious. The president’s abuse of military aid to Ukraine and his attacks on civil servants suggested not a patriotic White House, but a president focused on his own interests. Mark did not apologize for the president, though. Instead, he changed the subject: It was all worth it, he told me, because of the Uighurs.

[George Packer: Shouting into the institutional void]

I thought I had misheard. The Uighurs? Why the Uighurs? I was unaware of anything that the administration had done to aid the oppressed Muslim minority in Xinjiang, China. Mark assured me that letters had been written, statements had been made, the president himself had been persuaded to say something at the United Nations. I doubted very much that the Uighurs had benefited from these empty words: China hadn’t altered its behavior, and the concentration camps built for the Uighurs were still standing. Nevertheless, Mark’s conscience was clear. Yes, Trump was destroying America’s reputation in the world, and yes, Trump was ruining America’s alliances, but Mark was so important to the cause of the Uighurs that people like him could, in good conscience, keep working for the administration.

Mark made me think of the story of Wanda Telakowska, a Polish cultural activist who in 1945 felt much the same as he did. Telakowska had collected and promoted folk art before the war; after the war she made the momentous decision to join the Polish Ministry of Culture. The Communist leadership was arresting and murdering its opponents; the nature of the regime was becoming clear. Telakowska nevertheless thought she could use her position inside the Communist establishment to help Polish artists and designers, to promote their work and get Polish companies to mass-produce their designs. But Polish factories, newly nationalized, were not interested in the designs she commissioned. Communist politicians, skeptical of her loyalty, made Telakowska write articles filled with Marxist gibberish. Eventually she resigned, having achieved nothing she set out to do. A later generation of artists condemned her as a Stalinist and forgot about her.

We can protect the country from the president. That, of course, was the argument used by “Anonymous,” the author of an unsigned New York Times op-ed published in September 2018. For those who have forgotten—a lot has happened since then—that article described the president’s “erratic behavior,” his inability to concentrate, his ignorance, and above all his lack of “affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people.” The “root of the problem,” Anonymous concluded, was “the president’s amorality.” In essence, the article described the true nature of the alternative value system brought into the White House by Trump, at a moment when not everybody in Washington understood it. But even as they came to understand that the Trump presidency was guided by the president’s narcissism, Anonymous did not quit, protest, make noise, or campaign against the president and his party.

[Read: The saddest part of the anonymous ‘New York Times’ op-ed]

Instead, Anonymous concluded that remaining inside the system, where they could cleverly distract and restrain the president, was the right course for public servants like them. Anonymous was not alone. Gary Cohn, at the time the White House economic adviser, told Bob Woodward that he’d removed papers from the president’s desk to prevent him from pulling out of a trade agreement with South Korea. James Mattis, Trump’s original secretary of defense, stayed in office because he thought he could educate the president about the value of America’s alliances, or at least protect some of them from destruction.

This kind of behavior has echoes in other countries and other times. A few months ago, in Venezuela, I spoke with Víctor Álvarez, a minister in one of Hugo Chávez’s governments and a high-ranking official before that. Álvarez explained to me the arguments he had made in favor of protecting some private industry, and his opposition to mass nationalization. Álvarez was in government from the late 1990s through 2006, a time when Chávez was stepping up the use of police against peaceful demonstrators and undermining democratic institutions. Still, Álvarez remained, hoping to curb Chávez’s worst economic instincts. Ultimately, he did quit, after concluding that Chávez had created a loyalty cult around himself—Álvarez called it a “subclimate” of obedience—and was no longer listening to anyone who disagreed.

[Anne Applebaum: Venezuela is the eerie endgame of modern politics]

In authoritarian regimes, many insiders eventually conclude that their presence simply does not matter. Cohn, after publicly agonizing when the president said there had been “fine people on both sides” at the deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, finally quit when the president made the ruinous decision to put tariffs on steel and aluminum, a decision that harmed American businesses. Mattis reached his breaking point when the president abandoned the Kurds, America’s longtime allies in the war against the Islamic State.

But although both resigned, neither Cohn nor Mattis has spoken out in any notable way. Their presence inside the White House helped build Trump’s credibility among traditional Republican voters; their silence now continues to serve the president’s purposes. As for Anonymous, we don’t know whether he or she remains inside the administration. For the record, I note that Álvarez lives in Venezuela, an actual police state, and yet is willing to speak out against the system he helped create. Cohn, Mattis, and Anonymous, all living freely in the United States of America, have not been nearly so brave.

I, personally, will benefit. These, of course, are words that few people ever say out loud. Perhaps some do quietly acknowledge to themselves that they have not resigned or protested because it would cost them money or status. But no one wants a reputation as a careerist or a turncoat. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, even Markus Wolf sought to portray himself as an idealist. He had truly believed in Marxist-Leninist ideals, this infamously cynical man told an interviewer in 1996, and “I still believe in them.”

Many people in and around the Trump administration are seeking personal benefits. Many of them are doing so with a degree of openness that is startling and unusual in contemporary American politics, at least at this level. As an ideology, “Trump First” suits these people, because it gives them license to put themselves first. To pick a random example: Sonny Perdue, the secretary of agriculture, is a former Georgia governor and a businessman who, like Trump, famously refused to put his agricultural companies into a blind trust when he entered the governor’s office. Perdue has never even pretended to separate his political and personal interests. Since joining the Cabinet he has, with almost no oversight, distributed billions of dollars of “compensation” to farms damaged by Trump’s trade policies. He has stuffed his department with former lobbyists who are now in charge of regulating their own industries: Deputy Secretary Stephen Censky was for 21 years the CEO of the American Soybean Association; Brooke Appleton was a lobbyist for the National Corn Growers Association before becoming Censky’s chief of staff, and has since returned to that group; Kailee Tkacz, a member of a nutritional advisory panel, is a former lobbyist for the Snack Food Association. The list goes on and on, as would lists of similarly compromised people in the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and elsewhere.

[David W. Blight: One week to save democracy]

Perdue’s department also employs an extraordinary range of people with no experience in agriculture whatsoever. These modern apparatchiks, hired for their loyalty rather than their competence, include a long-haul truck driver, a country-club cabana attendant, the owner of a scented-candle company, and an intern at the Republican National Committee. The long-haul truck driver was paid $80,000 a year to expand markets for American agriculture abroad. Why was he qualified? He had a background in “hauling and shipping agricultural commodities.”

I must remain close to power. Another sort of benefit, harder to measure, has kept many people who object to Trump’s policies or behavior from speaking out: the intoxicating experience of power, and the belief that proximity to a powerful person bestows higher status. This, too, is nothing new. In a 1968 article for The Atlantic, James Thomson, an American East Asia specialist, brilliantly explained how power functioned inside the U.S. bureaucracy in the Vietnam era. When the war in Vietnam was going badly, many people did not resign or speak out in public, because preserving their “effectiveness”—“a mysterious combination of training, style, and connections,” as Thomson defined it—was an all-consuming concern. He called this “the effectiveness trap”:

The inclination to remain silent or to acquiesce in the presence of the great men—to live to fight another day, to give on this issue so that you can be “effective” on later issues—is overwhelming. Nor is it the tendency of youth alone; some of our most senior officials, men of wealth and fame, whose place in history is secure, have remained silent lest their connection with power be terminated.

In any organization, private or public, the boss will of course sometimes make decisions that his underlings dislike. But when basic principles are constantly violated, and people constantly defer resignation—“I can always fall on my sword next time”—then misguided policies go fatally unchallenged.

In other countries, the effectiveness trap has other names. In his recent book on Putinism, Between Two Fires, Joshua Yaffa describes the Russian version of this syndrome. The Russian language, he notes, has a word—prisposoblenets—that means “a person skilled in the act of compromise and adaptation, who intuitively understands what is expected of him and adjusts his beliefs and conduct accordingly.” In Putin’s Russia, anyone who wants to stay in the game—to remain close to power, to retain influence, to inspire respect—knows the necessity of making constant small changes to one’s language and behavior, of being careful about what one says and to whom one says it, of understanding what criticism is acceptable and what constitutes a violation of the unwritten rules. Those who violate these rules will not, for the most part, suffer prison—Putin’s Russia is not Stalin’s Russia—but they will experience a painful ejection from the inner circle.

For those who have never experienced it, the mystical pull of that connection to power, that feeling of being an insider, is difficult to explain. Nevertheless, it is real, and strong enough to affect even the highest-ranking, best-known, most influential people in America. John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, named his still-unpublished book The Room Where It Happened, because, of course, that’s where he has always wanted to be. A friend who regularly runs into Lindsey Graham in Washington told me that each time they meet, “he brags about having just met with Trump” while exhibiting “high school” levels of excitement, as if “a popular quarterback has just bestowed some attention on a nerdy debate-club leader—the powerful big kid likes me! ” That kind of intense pleasure is hard to relinquish and even harder to live without.

LOL nothing matters. Cynicism, nihilism, relativism, amorality, irony, sarcasm, boredom, amusement—these are all reasons to collaborate, and always have been. Marko Martin, a novelist and travel writer who grew up in East Germany, told me that in the 1980s some of the East German bohemia, influenced by then-fashionable French intellectuals, argued that there was no such thing as morality or immorality, no such thing as good or evil, no such thing as right or wrong—“so you might as well collaborate.”

This instinct has an American variation. Politicians here who have spent their lives following rules and watching their words, calibrating their language, giving pious speeches about morality and governance, may feel a sneaking admiration for someone like Trump, who breaks all the rules and gets away with it. He lies; he cheats; he extorts; he refuses to show compassion, sympathy, or empathy; he does not pretend to believe in anything or to abide by any moral code. He simulates patriotism, with flags and gestures, but he does not behave like a patriot; his campaign scrambled to get help from Russia in 2016 (“If it’s what you say, I love it,” replied Donald Trump Jr., when offered Russian “dirt” on Hillary Clinton), and Trump himself called on Russia to hack his opponent. And for some of those at the top of his administration, and of his party, these character traits might have a deep, unacknowledged appeal: If there is no such thing as moral and immoral, then everyone is implicitly released from the need to obey any rules. If the president doesn’t respect the Constitution, then why should I? If the president can cheat in elections, then why can’t I? If the president can sleep with porn stars, then why shouldn’t I?

This, of course, was the insight of the “alt-right,” which understood the dark allure of amorality, open racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny long before many others in the Republican Party. Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher and literary critic, recognized the lure of the forbidden a century ago, writing about the deep appeal of the carnival, a space where everything banned is suddenly allowed, where eccentricity is permitted, where profanity defeats piety. The Trump administration is like that: Nothing means anything, rules don’t matter, and the president is the carnival king.

My side might be flawed, but the political opposition is much worse. When Marshal Philippe Pétain, the leader of collaborationist France, took over the Vichy government, he did so in the name of the restoration of a France that he believed had been lost. Pétain had been a fierce critic of the French Republic, and once he was in control, he replaced its famous creed—Liberté, égalité, fraternité, or “Liberty, equality, fraternity”—with a different slogan: Travail, famille, patrie, or “Work, family, fatherland.” Instead of the “false idea of the natural equality of man,” he proposed bringing back “social hierarchy”—order, tradition, and religion. Instead of accepting modernity, Pétain sought to turn back the clock.

By Pétain’s reckoning, collaboration with the Germans was not merely an embarrassing necessity. It was crucial, because it gave patriots the ability to fight the real enemy: the French parliamentarians, socialists, anarchists, Jews, and other assorted leftists and democrats who, he believed, were undermining the nation, robbing it of its vitality, destroying its essence. “Rather Hitler than Blum,” the saying went—Blum having been France’s socialist (and Jewish) prime minister in the late 1930s. One Vichy minister, Pierre Laval, famously declared that he hoped Germany would conquer all of Europe. Otherwise, he asserted, “Bolshevism would tomorrow establish itself everywhere.”

[From the October 2001 issue: France’s downfall]

To Americans, this kind of justification should sound very familiar; we have been hearing versions of it since 2016. The existential nature of the threat from “the left” has been spelled out many times. “Our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature,” wrote Michael Anton, in “The Flight 93 Election.” The Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham has warned that “massive demographic changes” threaten us too: “In some parts of the country it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore.” This is the Vichy logic: The nation is dead or dying—so anything you can do to restore it is justified. Whatever criticisms might be made of Trump, whatever harm he has done to democracy and the rule of law, whatever corrupt deals he might make while in the White House—all of these shrink in comparison to the horrific alternative: the liberalism, socialism, moral decadence, demographic change, and cultural degradation that would have been the inevitable result of Hillary Clinton’s presidency.

The Republican senators who are willing to express their disgust with Trump off the record but voted in February for him to remain in office all indulge a variation of this sentiment. (Trump enables them to get the judges they want, and those judges will help create the America they want.) So do the evangelical pastors who ought to be disgusted by Trump’s personal behavior but argue, instead, that the current situation has scriptural precedents. Like King David in the Bible, the president is a sinner, a flawed vessel, but he nevertheless offers a path to salvation for a fallen nation.

The three most important members of Trump’s Cabinet—Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William Barr—are all profoundly shaped by Vichyite apocalyptic thinking. All three are clever enough to understand what Trumpism really means, that it has nothing to do with God or faith, that it is self-serving, greedy, and unpatriotic. Nevertheless, a former member of the administration (one of the few who did decide to resign) told me that both Pence and Pompeo “have convinced themselves that they are in a biblical moment.” All of the things they care about—outlawing abortion and same-sex marriage, and (though this is never said out loud) maintaining a white majority in America—are under threat. Time is growing short. They believe that “we are approaching the Rapture, and this is a moment of deep religious significance.” Barr, in a speech at Notre Dame, has also described his belief that “militant secularists” are destroying America, that “irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith.” Whatever evil Trump does, whatever he damages or destroys, at least he enables Barr, Pence, and Pompeo to save America from a far worse fate. If you are convinced we are living in the End Times, then anything the president does can be forgiven.

I am afraid to speak out. Fear, of course, is the most important reason any inhabitant of an authoritarian or totalitarian society does not protest or resign, even when the leader commits crimes, violates his official ideology, or forces people to do things that they know to be wrong. In extreme dictatorships like Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia, people fear for their lives. In softer dictatorships, like East Germany after 1950 and Putin’s Russia today, people fear losing their jobs or their apartments. Fear works as a motivation even when violence is a memory rather than a reality. When I was a student in Leningrad in the 1980s, some people still stepped back in horror when I asked for directions on the street, in my accented Russian: No one was going to be arrested for speaking to a foreigner in 1984, but 30 years earlier they might have been, and the cultural memory remained.

In the United States of America, it is hard to imagine how fear could be a motivation for anybody. There are no mass murders of the regime’s political enemies, and there never have been. Political opposition is legal; free press and free speech are guaranteed in the Constitution. And yet even in one of the world’s oldest and most stable democracies, fear is a motive. The same former administration official who observed the importance of apocalyptic Christianity in Trump’s Washington also told me, with grim disgust, that “they are all scared.”

They are scared not of prison, the official said, but of being attacked by Trump on Twitter. They are scared he will make up a nickname for them. They are scared that they will be mocked, or embarrassed, like Mitt Romney has been. They are scared of losing their social circles, of being disinvited to parties. They are scared that their friends and supporters, and especially their donors, will desert them. John Bolton has his own super PAC and a lot of plans for how he wants to use it; no wonder he resisted testifying against Trump. Former Speaker Paul Ryan is among the dozens of House Republicans who have left Congress since the beginning of this administration, in one of the most striking personnel turnovers in congressional history. They left because they hated what Trump was doing to their party—and the country. Yet even after they left, they did not speak out.

They are scared, and yet they don’t seem to know that this fear has precedents, or that it could have consequences. They don’t know that similar waves of fear have helped transform other democracies into dictatorships. They don’t seem to realize that the American Senate really could become the Russian Duma, or the Hungarian Parliament, a group of exalted men and women who sit in an elegant building, with no influence and no power. Indeed, we are already much closer to that reality than many could ever have imagined.

In February, many members of the Republican Party leadership, Republican senators, and people inside the administration used various versions of these rationales to justify their opposition to impeachment. All of them had seen the evidence that Trump had stepped over the line in his dealings with the president of Ukraine. All of them knew that he had tried to use American foreign-policy tools, including military funding, to force a foreign leader into investigating a domestic political opponent. Yet Republican senators, led by Mitch McConnell, never took the charges seriously. They mocked the Democratic House leaders who had presented the charges. They decided against hearing evidence. With the single exception of Romney, they voted in favor of ending the investigation. They did not use the opportunity to rid the country of a president whose operative value system—built around corruption, nascent authoritarianism, self-regard, and his family’s business interests—runs counter to everything that most of them claim to believe in.

Just a month later, in March, the consequences of that decision became suddenly clear. After the U.S. and the world were plunged into crisis by a coronavirus that had no cure, the damage done by the president’s self-focused, self-dealing narcissism—his one true “ideology”—was finally visible. He led a federal response to the virus that was historically chaotic. The disappearance of the federal government was not a carefully planned transfer of power to the states, as some tried to claim, or a thoughtful decision to use the talents of private companies. This was the inevitable result of a three-year assault on professionalism, loyalty, competence, and patriotism. Tens of thousands of people have died, and the economy has been ruined.

[Anne Applebaum: The rest of the world is laughing at Trump]

This utter disaster was avoidable. If the Senate had removed the president by impeachment a month earlier; if the Cabinet had invoked the Twenty-Fifth Amendment as soon as Trump’s unfitness became clear; if the anonymous and off-the-record officials who knew of Trump’s incompetence had jointly warned the public; if they had not, instead, been so concerned about maintaining their proximity to power; if senators had not been scared of their donors; if Pence, Pompeo, and Barr had not believed that God had chosen them to play special roles in this “biblical moment”—if any of these things had gone differently, then thousands of deaths and a historic economic collapse might have been avoided.

The price of collaboration in America has already turned out to be extraordinarily high. And yet, the movement down the slippery slope continues, just as it did in so many occupied countries in the past. First Trump’s enablers accepted lies about the inauguration; now they accept terrible tragedy and the loss of American leadership in the world. Worse could follow. Come November, will they tolerate—even abet—an assault on the electoral system: open efforts to prevent postal voting, to shut polling stations, to scare people away from voting? Will they countenance violence, as the president’s social-media fans incite demonstrators to launch physical attacks on state and city officials?

Each violation of our Constitution and our civic peace gets absorbed, rationalized, and accepted by people who once upon a time knew better. If, following what is almost certain to be one of the ugliest elections in American history, Trump wins a second term, these people may well accept even worse. Unless, of course, they decide not to.

When I visited Marianne Birthler, she didn’t think it was interesting to talk about collaboration in East Germany, because everybody collaborated in East Germany. So I asked her about dissidence instead: When all of your friends, all of your teachers, and all of your employers are firmly behind the system, how do you find the courage to oppose it? In her answer, Birthler resisted the use of the word courage; just as people can adapt to corruption or immorality, she told me, they can slowly learn to object as well. The choice to become a dissident can easily be the result of “a number of small decisions that you take”—to absent yourself from the May Day parade, for example, or not to sing the words of the party hymn. And then, one day, you find yourself irrevocably on the other side. Often, this process involves role models. You see people whom you admire, and you want to be like them. It can even be “selfish.” “You want to do something for yourself,” Birthler said, “to respect yourself.”

For some people, the struggle is made easier by their upbringing. Marko Martin’s parents hated the East German regime, and so did he. His father was a conscientious objector, and so was he. As far back as the Weimar Republic, his great-grandparents had been part of the “anarcho-syndicalist” anti-Communist left; he had access to their books. In the 1980s, he refused to join the Free German Youth, the Communist youth organization, and as a result he could not go to university. He instead embarked on a vocational course, to train to be an electrician (after refusing to become a butcher). In his electrician-training classes, one of the other students pulled him aside and warned him, subtly, that the Stasi was collecting information on him: “It’s not necessary that you tell me all the things you have in mind.” He was eventually allowed to emigrate, in May 1989, just a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In America we also have our Marianne Birthlers, our Marko Martins: people whose families taught them respect for the Constitution, who have faith in the rule of law, who believe in the importance of disinterested public service, who have values and role models from outside the world of the Trump administration. Over the past year, many such people have found the courage to stand up for what they believe. A few have been thrust into the limelight. Fiona Hill—an immigrant success story and a true believer in the American Constitution—was not afraid to testify at the House’s impeachment hearings, nor was she afraid to speak out against Republicans who were promulgating a false story of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves,” she said in her congressional testimony. “The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016.”

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman—another immigrant success story and another true believer in the American Constitution—also found the courage, first to report on the president’s improper telephone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, which Vindman had heard as a member of the National Security Council, and then to speak publicly about it. In his testimony, he made explicit reference to the values of the American political system, so different from those in the place where he was born. “In Russia,” he said, “offering public testimony involving the president would surely cost me my life.” But as “an American citizen and public servant … I can live free of fear for mine and my family’s safety.” A few days after the Senate impeachment vote, Vindman was physically escorted out of the White House by representatives of a vengeful president who did not appreciate Vindman’s hymn to American patriotism—although retired Marine Corps General John Kelly, the president’s former chief of staff, apparently did. Vindman’s behavior, Kelly said in a speech a few days later, was “exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave. He went and told his boss what he just heard.”

[Read: John Kelly finally lets loose on Trump]

But both Hill and Vindman had some important advantages. Neither had to answer to voters, or to donors. Neither had prominent status in the Republican Party. What would it take, by contrast, for Pence or Pompeo to conclude that the president bears responsibility for a catastrophic health and economic crisis? What would it take for Republican senators to admit to themselves that Trump’s loyalty cult is destroying the country they claim to love? What would it take for their aides and subordinates to come to the same conclusion, to resign, and to campaign against the president? What would it take, in other words, for someone like Lindsey Graham to behave like Wolfgang Leonhard?

If, as Stanley Hoffmann wrote, the honest historian would have to speak of “collaborationisms,” because the phenomenon comes in so many variations, the same is true of dissidence, which should probably be described as “dissidences.” People can suddenly change their minds because of spontaneous intellectual revelations like the one Wolfgang Leonhard had when walking into his fancy nomenklatura dining room, with its white tablecloths and three-course meals. They can also be persuaded by outside events: rapid political changes, for example. Awareness that the regime had lost its legitimacy is part of what made Harald Jaeger, an obscure and until that moment completely loyal East German border guard, decide on the night of November 9, 1989, to lift the gates and let his fellow citizens walk through the Berlin Wall—a decision that led, over the next days and months, to the end of East Germany itself. Jaeger’s decision was not planned; it was a spontaneous response to the fearlessness of the crowd. “Their will was so great,” he said years later, of those demanding to cross into West Berlin, “there was no other alternative than to open the border.”

But these things are all intertwined, and not easy to disentangle. The personal, the political, the intellectual, and the historical combine differently within every human brain, and the outcomes can be unpredictable. Leonhard’s “sudden” revelation may have been building for years, perhaps since his mother’s arrest. Jaeger was moved by the grandeur of the historical moment on that night in November, but he also had more petty concerns: He was annoyed at his boss, who had not given him clear instructions about what to do.

Could some similar combination of the petty and the political ever convince Lindsey Graham that he has helped lead his country down a blind alley? Perhaps a personal experience could move him, a prod from someone who represents his former value system—an old Air Force buddy, say, whose life has been damaged by Trump’s reckless behavior, or a friend from his hometown. Perhaps it requires a mass political event: When the voters begin to turn, maybe Graham will turn with them, arguing, as Jaeger did, that “their will was so great … there was no other alternative.” At some point, after all, the calculus of conformism will begin to shift. It will become awkward and uncomfortable to continue supporting “Trump First,” especially as Americans suffer from the worst recession in living memory and die from the coronavirus in numbers higher than in much of the rest of the world.

[Anne Applebaum: A study in leadership]

Or perhaps the only antidote is time. In due course, historians will write the story of our era and draw lessons from it, just as we write the history of the 1930s, or of the 1940s. The Miłoszes and the Hoffmanns of the future will make their judgments with the clarity of hindsight. They will see, more clearly than we can, the path that led the U.S. into a historic loss of international influence, into economic catastrophe, into political chaos of a kind we haven’t experienced since the years leading up to the Civil War. Then maybe Graham—along with Pence, Pompeo, McConnell, and a whole host of lesser figures—will understand what he has enabled.

In the meantime, I leave anyone who has the bad luck to be in public life at this moment with a final thought from Władysław Bartoszewski, who was a member of the wartime Polish underground, a prisoner of both the Nazis and the Stalinists, and then, finally, the foreign minister in two Polish democratic governments. Late in his life—he lived to be 93—he summed up the philosophy that had guided him through all of these tumultuous political changes. It was not idealism that drove him, or big ideas, he said. It was this: Warto być przyzwoitym—“Just try to be decent.” Whether you were decent—that’s what will be remembered.

This article appears in the July/August 2020 print edition with the headline “The Collaborators.”

Police violence preceded Trump’s first speech on the nationwide protests against police violence.

President Trump gave his first televised statement on the George Floyd protests Monday, emphasizing the need for “law and order” and threatening to send in the US military to violently disperse “mobs” across the country.

Just before he spoke, federal police violently broke up a peaceful protest just outside the White House, tear-gassing a group of about 1,000 demonstrators and then firing rubber bullets at them so Trump could have an uninterrupted photo op at a nearby church damaged in the weekend’s upheaval.

The speech began on a seemingly sympathetic note, declaring that “all Americans were rightly sickened and revolted by the brutal death of George Floyd” and praising “the righteous cries of peaceful protesters.” But after those opening lines, it immediately turned into an authoritarian-sounding denunciation of the protests raging across the country.

Declaring that “I am your president of law and order,” Trump warned that “our nation has been gripped by professional anarchists.” He ordered mayors and governors to “dominate” the street, warning that “if a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.” Those who crossed Trump on this “will be detained and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

It was unclear, during the speech, precisely what any of this meant. It is illegal for the president to deploy the military in the fashion he’s describing unless he invokes a law called the Insurrection Act, passed in 1807, which he has yet to do.

But the true message of Trump’s address could be seen near the White House. On H Street, one of the closest publicly accessible streets to the White House, a crowd had gathered to demonstrate against police violence. Without warning or provocation, the police shot tear gas into the crowd and fired rubber bullets. Mounted police rode into the crowd, herding the entirely peaceful and legitimate demonstrators away from their location.

The reason for their move soon became clear. Trump had planned a visit to St. John’s Church, on the same block as the demonstration. St. John’s had been damaged during last night’s upheaval and had become a cause célèbre for conservatives angry about the unrest. The protest was in the way.

People gathering to demonstrate against police violence were attacked by the police so the president could have a photo op. Trump’s claim to respect “peaceful protesters,” and only want to forcefully break up the violent ones, was almost immediately shown to be hollow.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

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The COVID-19 crisis can't be separated from the civil unrest that has erupted across the nation following the extrajudicial killing by cops of another unarmed Black man. Because that pain, that horror, that outrage has been layered on top of the COVID-19 crisis which is so disproportionately hitting Black and brown people. While 23% of white, non-Hispanic people say that they are having trouble affording food, housing, living expenses and health care in this crisis, nearly half of Black people—48%—say they can't afford to live. Likewise, 46% of Hispanic people report extreme financial distress.

Half of Black and brown people in this nation don't know how they'll continue to afford to live AND once again have been shown how little their lives matter to the powers that be. Right now, that includes Congress, where a fight over unemployment insurance is shaping up to be a major obstacle. Because Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans are reusing to support an extension of the enhanced payments that were passed in the CARES Act in March. Republicans say that the extra $600 a week in benefits—which in some states hasn't even reached everyone who's applied yet—is a disincentive for people to risk their lives by returning to their jobs. "What I thought was a mistake was the bonus we added that small businesses all over the country are saying make it more lucrative to not work than to work. That’s exactly the opposite of what we want to do," McConnell, in all his whiteness, intoned last week.

Democrats are pushing back. "They've said that they don't want workers to get this money that they need to pay rent and groceries," said Sen. Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who negotiated the unemployment provisions in the CARES Act. "It expires July 31. And we'll see if they want all those workers hurting all summer long."

Then there's Republican Sen. Susan Collins, of Maine. "Future coronavirus relief legislation must provide a better system to help make people whole, but not receive more through unemployment compensation than they were previously earning," she says. Because you can't let all those minimum wage workers get a taste of how much more sustainable life is on a livable wage. And because the solution is adding another layer of bureaucracy for already overstretched state systems, making them determine what level of benefits they should be paying out.

Meanwhile, they're all pretending that the nation isn't broken and that the pandemic has not been contained and that we don't have adequate testing and that we're months and months away from a vaccine. "We need policies that encourage those individuals that can to return to the workplace to help get our economy going again," Ohio Republican Rob Portman said in a statement. His idea is to send workers back into potentially deadly workplaces with a $450 weekly bonus. Not $500, but $450. $1,800 a month in exchange possibly for you life, or that of a loved one's back at home.

Some Senate Democrats, including Virginia's Mark Warner with the support of Chuck Schumer, want to "dramatically expand the employee retention tax credit." Which is just not the kind of immediate and direct and big stuff that needs to be done. What needs to happen, what's been needing to happen from the very beginning of this crisis is what progressives in the House and activists have been calling for—government funds to subsidize businesses' payrolls. Don't do it through cumbersome processes involving banks and loans and tax credits and the rest. That or $2,000 payments a month to everybody. Hell, both. That would be an adequate response.

That would help ease some of the pain, some of the terror Black and brown communities in particular are feeling right now, in this immense crisis.

It seems hard to imagine that it is possible to watch the videos of the events that have unfolded over the past few days and not think that substantial reform of American policing is desperately needed. Of course, this is not a new development. But one hopes that greater public and political consensus can emerge out of the present situation on the need for change.

The George Floyd incident that set current events in motion was itself illuminating. The video stripped away the common uncertainties and doubts that surround particular cases of alleged police abuse. There were no decisions that had to be made in a blink of an eye. There were no conflicting witness statements or complicating context. There were no mitigating dangers faced by a lone officer. There was just a deliberate and drawn out excessive use of force that cost a man his life. It is somewhat heartening, therefore, that the vast majority of the American public reacted with alarm to what happened to George Floyd. It is an encouraging sign that police unions and police chiefs and conservative commentators were unusually vocal in denouncing the police conduct that the video showed.

The subsequent public protests could have built on that momentum, and they still can. But there is certainly a risk that the initial consensus that something had gone wrong in the Floyd case and that it exposed the need for further action could be lost in the civil unrest that has followed. Riots and uncontrolled looting understandably drive a public and political desire to do what is necessary to restore order. Those who would wish to empower the strong arm of the state can win favor when the alternative is rampant lawlessness. Protests have raised public consciousness.  The opportunistic criminal activity that has followed those protests threaten to do something else.

But if the video evidence of the past few days has shown that there are those who would like to hijack this moment for their own anarchic ends, it has also shown that the problems in America's police departments are not limited to the four officers in Minneapolis who assaulted George Floyd. Over the course of the past few days there have been far too many examples of officers violently assaulting the very citizens that they are sworn to protect, deliberating attacking members of the media, recklessly lashing out in ways that escalate rather than deescalate tensions, and unnecessarily initiating conflicts.

Having lost control of many urban spaces, law enforcement is now in a difficult position in trying to restore a sense of order. There have also been moving examples of heroic protesters attempting to reclaim the streets from those who hope to instigate chaos. The increasingly bold factions on the political extremes who have spent the past few years encouraging street violence are genuine problems that need to be addressed.

But the faults that can be found elsewhere cannot be used to conceal the need for better training, more careful management, and more accountability in police departments across the country. There are, to be sure, some bad apples, but rooting out a few bad apples will not be sufficient.

Are you tired of winning yet? I know I am.

It’s not just the riots and the festering racial animus stoked by President Trump. It’s the malign neglect of the coronavirus response (or lack thereof), the divisiveness, the ongoing culture war and relentless scapegoating of all Trump’s perceived enemies. This country has serious issues and they are all exacerbated by the cancer in the White House. 

Also, here is a big update on the Redbubble story I posted a couple weeks ago. The Guardian ran a story about it last week that rose to the top of the most-read stories on their site for 24 hours. 

A little more detail: After Redbubble initially removed my work, I appealed their decision. Eight days later, they again refused reinstate my work on their site, and said it was "removed from Redbubble.com in response to complaints from Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. and in accordance with Redbubble’s IP/PublicityRights Policy, in regards to the Donald J. Trump for President campaign." 

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) saw the original post on the Daily Kos, contacted me and offered to help. They wrote a very strong, well-researched letter to Redbubble. To their credit, Redbubble quickly apologized and reinstated the work. I do believe that Redbubble sincerely recognizes that this decision was an error. They have been very apologetic. 

As always, you can support my work on my Patreon Page for as little as $1, a month or on KoFi. You can also pick up some swag like T-shirts with my cartoons on them here, including the now-famous Trump Cult cartoon (which is perfect for a mask), as well as today’s cartoon. 

Recent weeks have provided another powerful, tragic reminder that U.S. police departments are not about providing any kind of equal justice or keeping people safe—at least, not if they’re Black. But under Donald Trump and his attorneys general, the Justice Department has not been interested in doing the first thing to fix that.

The Department of Justice has the power to investigate entire police departments for patterns of unconstitutional policing practices. But while there were 12 such investigations during George W. Bush’s first term in the White House and 15 during Barack Obama’s first term, there has been just one during Trump’s. 

“It's an abdication of their responsibility,” former Obama Justice Department official Emily Gunston told CNN. Then again, abdication of responsibility is a top activity for the Trump administration, and doubly or triply so when civil rights for anyone but evangelical business owners are involved.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) should “examine the Minneapolis Police Department from top to bottom, every detail, every practice, every policy, every record of abuse of its power to use force, every complaint that has ever been launched against it," another former DOJ prosecutor said. “But it isn't going to do that.”

What will happen instead of a broad investigation into the practices and patterns of the Minneapolis or Louisville police departments following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor—or that of Glynn County, Georgia, after its failure to prosecute the killers of Ahmaud Arbery until public outrage forced the issue—is that Trump’s DOJ will investigate much more narrowly, looking to assign responsibility to individuals, if at all, rather than to the systems and structures that tell individual officers they can get away with racist violence.

Minneapolis police have used the same tactic that killed George Floyd 44 times in five years to the point where they rendered people unconscious—60% of them Black. That’s the kind of pattern a Justice Department that cared about justice might want to look into, at least after it resulted in a high-profile killing. But under Trump, not only have such investigations not happened—his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, put into place a policy that makes it more difficult for prosecutors to exercise oversight over police departments through the use of consent decrees, and current Attorney General William Barr has continued the policy. Sessions even called off a consent decree agreed to during the Obama administration by the DOJ and Chicago following the police killing of Laquan McDonald. (The Illinois attorney general did ultimately get a consent decree against Chicago despite Sessions’ objections.)

Donald Trump is not interested in any of that. This is a man who's repeatedly encouraged law enforcement to act with more brutality. His Justice Department is only replicating that contempt for Black lives.

The county medical examiner’s report is at odds with a new, independent autopsy.

A new autopsy report, commissioned by the family of George Floyd, finds that Floyd died of asphyxiation, conflicting with an official report from the Hennepin County medical examiner.

The medical examiner’s preliminary conclusion was that Floyd did not die of “traumatic asphyxia or strangulation” after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pinned Floyd by the neck with his knee for nearly nine minutes. Rather, the official report suggested that Floyd’s “underlying health conditions including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease” played a role in his death, as well as the fact that Floyd may have been intoxicated.

But the new report reaches a different conclusion, finding that Floyd did die of asphyxiation as Chauvin compressed Floyd’s neck and back. The new report was conducted by two forensic pathologists, one of whom, Michael Baden, previously served as chief medical examiner for New York City.

Chauvin has been charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter in Floyd’s death, and the official report does not excuse Chauvin’s behavior. Rather, it suggests that “the combined effects of Mr. Floyd being restrained by the police, his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system likely contributed to his death.”

But the question of how Floyd died could matter a great deal at Chauvin’s trial. Minnesota’s third-degree murder statute applies to anyone who “causes the death of another by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life.” A key word here is “causes.”

That is, to convict Chauvin of murder, prosecutors have to do more than simply show that Chauvin behaved brutally, or that Floyd died during or shortly after his encounter with Chauvin. Prosecutors must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Chauvin’s actions were the cause of Floyd’s death.

A death can have several causes. So if Chauvin’s actions exacerbated Floyd’s preexisting health conditions and that’s what caused his death, Chauvin can still be convicted of murder — the fact that a healthier individual may have survived the encounter is not a defense.

But it is also not easy to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt. So if Floyd’s death was related to his underlying medical conditions, defense attorneys could argue that those conditions, and not Chauvin, was the real cause of death.

If Floyd died of asphyxiation, by contrast, it will be very hard for Chauvin’s lawyers to argue that the death resulted from something other than Chauvin’s knee.

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Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Some law enforcement officers are treating America like a battlefield.

By now, millions of Americans have seen the videos.

Police officers surrounding protesters, beating them with batons. An officer apparently spraying mace at a little girl. Police cars plowing into a crowd of people, knocking them to the ground.

To many watching, the lesson of such images was clear. As New York Times Magazine writer Carvell Wallace put it, at the protests around the country after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, police aren’t a neutral party. They’re counterprotesters.

As protests spread in the past few days, police have flocked to affected neighborhoods, often wearing riot gear and sometimes arriving hours before protesters. Their stated goal is to keep the peace. But it’s become abundantly clear that many are far from neutral — instead, they are treating protesters like the enemy, lashing out violently, using disproportionate force, and attacking people who pose no threat to them.

“The tone that we felt from the police is: This is their rally,” Dae Shik Kim Jr. told the New York Times. Kim had shared a video of his friend in Seattle who was repeatedly punched while being detained. “They are going to control it from the beginning. They are going to dictate what happens. It’s a very offensive type of approach.”

The thousands of protesters around the country are rising up against police violence as a whole — not just the death of an individual. In response, police appear to be taking the protests personally, and it could lead to a disproportionate amount of violence from officers determined to maintain the status quo.

Around the country, police officers have repeatedly attacked protesters

Since the protests began in response to Floyd’s killing last week, police officers have again and again been captured on video attacking protesters. These videos — many of them graphic and disturbing — often show police seeming to treat protesters like an opposing army, rather than like citizens they’re sworn to protect.

It starts even before the protests do, many say, and continues after they’ve broken up. Police at Barclays Center in Brooklyn showed up well before protesters to surround the facility and create an adversarial image from the very beginning. The officers lined up like soldiers, an intimidating scene that, for many, connoted anything but safety.

In Columbus, Ohio, WOSU reporter Paige Southwick Pfleger spotted armed officers on the roof of a courthouse and blocking a street, even though protesters had already dispersed. “It seems like they are waiting for curfew to take effect,” Pfleger wrote.

And once protests began, police again and again used excessive force against the protesters. In Brooklyn, groups of officers teamed up against individuals and chased them down. Even when it became obvious that a protester was cornered and helpless, officers continued to attack the individual with their batons, making them look “like a literal mob,” wrote journalist Zeeshan Aleem.

Just blocks away, the night before, a police SUV rammed into a crowd of protesters:

Excessive force was also on display in Seattle, where a police officer pinned a protester down with his knee, much the same way an officer killed George Floyd. Bystanders yelled, “Get your knee off his neck,” and his partner ultimately had to push the knee off.

Officials are investigating another incident in Seattle, in which an officer appears to mace a 9-year-old girl — who is clearly not a threat. In a video posted on Twitter, the girl is in distress as other protesters splash her face with milk and water to ease the pain.

Then there are instances of police aggravating the crowd by disrupting peaceful protests, as seen in this video from Dallas:

The violence of police officers at protests reveals their true role

The job of law enforcement officers, according to the authorities who have called on them in recent days, is to keep the public safe. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, for example, said in a press conference on Sunday that officers are “here to protect people and property.”

But the police, in many situations, have appeared to actively work against public safety. It’s hard to imagine how macing a child, or driving a car into a crowd of people, could possibly be intended to keep anyone safe.

Instead, the police seem clearly to be treating protesters — members of the public — as adversaries. As Mara Gay writes at the New York Times, “an army of public servants entrusted to protect Americans treated them as an enemy instead.”

This seems to be happening not despite the fact that the protests are about police brutality, but because of it. Previous research shows that police are more likely to use force against protesters when the subject of the protest is police violence, Shaila Dewan and Mike Baker report at the Times. Police are also more likely to use violence against protesters of color than against white demonstrators.

Now “there’s deep resentment on the part of the police that so many people are angry at them, and they’re lashing out,” Alex Vitale, a sociologist at Brooklyn College, told the Times. “Look at what we saw — people sitting on their own stoops getting hit with pepper balls. Anyone who looks at them funny, they’re attacking them.”

That’s why Wallace, the Times Magazine writer, and others have argued that in protests against police brutality, the police should be seen as counterprotesters. Their interests are fundamentally at odds with those of the protesters, who want to see them stripped of their power to harass, assault, and even kill people with impunity. And it’s clear from the events of recent days that police are willing to use more violence to defend that power.

Many have also compared the violent response to the current protests with police behavior during anti-lockdown protests by conservative groups this spring. At those protests, officers were largely peaceful and respectful toward the (mostly white) crowds. One image from Lansing, Michigan, in particular, went viral: officers stoically standing by as an unmasked white man screamed inches from their faces. Contrast that with the images we’ve seen from recent days, of police swarming and beating protesters or running them down from the safety of their vehicles.

At the time of the Michigan protests, Melanye Price, a political science professor at Prairie View A&M University, told Vox that the police response would be very different if the stay-at-home protesters were black. “Imagine 10 black men and rifles walking up to any state capitol in the United States,” Price said. “They would be shot before they ever made it up the steps.”

The protesters attacked on camera by police in recent days have been unarmed. They certainly haven’t been carrying rifles up the capitol steps. Yet the police have treated them not just like a threat but like an opponent.

It’s clear that for many officers around the country, what’s happening in the streets right now isn’t an effort to protect public safety. It’s war.

Correction, June 2: An earlier version of this story misstated the context for a photo of law enforcement officers in Columbus, Ohio. The officers were standing in a street after a crowd of protesters had dispersed, and before curfew began.

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USA Today reports that Donald Trump's furiously loyal attorney general, William Barr, "has deployed" riot police from the federal Bureau of Prisons to tamp down the protests against police violence across the nation.

Trump's team is sending prison guards to break up Black American protests. They’re sending prison guards.

The details of Barr’s deployment are still unclear. USA Today reports that a "federal prison riot team arrived Sunday in Miami," but also that Miami Assistant Police Chief Manny Morales said he "wasn't aware" that a team had been deployed there, which suggests the administration’s move was as hasty and incompetently planned as everything else they have ever done.

In Trump's unhinged, hour-long froth-fest at state governors, Barr parroted Trump's own call for governors to "dominate" the streets. The same "dominate" call was echoed by Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper—who for some reason was included in the call with governors.

"We need to dominate the battlespace," Esper told the governors.

"I think the sooner that you mass and dominate the battlespace, the quicker this dissipates and we can get back to the right normal."

It is evident that the Trump administration’s plan is to meet Black Americans daring to object to police murders with a show of overwhelming military force, including prison riot police, the National Guard, and whatever else Mark Esper believes will help "dissipate" protests and return to "the right normal."

Yet again, it makes the very point against which the protesters are protesting. White Americans wearing body armor and carrying assault rifles can storm a state capitol building demanding the state's bars and restaurants reopen and be met with a "president" telling the state's governor that the protesters have a point. Unarmed Black Americans hold protests objecting to the cold-blooded murder of a man at the hands of the police, and state governors are told by the Defense Department that they must "dominate the battlespace."

Meanwhile, thoroughly sociopathic Republican senators are going on television to demand protests be met with “the 101st Airborne” or other military combat forces, giving “no quarter.”

There are no words left. It seems impossible to imagine any scenario in which Trump and his team do not make things exponentially worse, and quickly. Prison guards. "Battlespace."

"The right normal."

As protesters demonstrate against police violence, here are eight ideas for reforming law enforcement in the US.

When former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pinned down George Floyd by kneeling on his neck, not letting up as the black man yelled that he couldn’t breathe, Floyd, who died, and Chauvin, who was charged with his murder, became part of a much bigger and tragic American story.

It’s a story that’s been going on for centuries in the US. After the founding of the country, police enforced explicitly racist laws on slavery and segregation. In more recent decades, law enforcement has been at the forefront of enforcing policies in the war on crime and drugs that have culminated in massive racial disparities — in police stops, use of force, arrests, incarceration, the death penalty, and just about every other aspect of the criminal justice system.

Jim Vondruska/NurPhoto via Getty Images

It’s this story that led the US Department of Justice under President Barack Obama to investigate police practices in Baltimore; Cleveland; New Orleans; Ferguson, Missouri; Chicago; and several other American cities, consistently finding massive problems. As the department wrote in its Baltimore report, racial disparities were “present at every stage of BPD’s enforcement actions, from the initial decision to stop individuals on Baltimore streets to searches, arrests, and uses of force” and that the disparities “erode the community trust that is critical to effective policing.”

It’s this story that has led black people to trust police at half the rate of their white counterparts.

It’s this story, too, that’s kept black communities less safe, suffering disproportionately not just from police violence but also crime that goes underpoliced. As Council on Criminal Justice senior fellow Thomas Abt previously told me, “In addition to all of these burdens that we’re placing on African-American communities in terms of aggressive policing, we’re fundamentally failing them at keeping them safe.”

It’s this story that, over the past week, has led thousands of Americans to protest in the streets against police violence and systemic racism.

But how, exactly, can America reform policing?

I interviewed nine criminal justice experts about this topic in 2016. In a testament to how little things have changed, all eight of their recommendations stand up today — and none have been implemented at a national scale.

The proposals focus on repairing the damage done by centuries of abusive policing practices in minority communities, from addressing racial biases to limiting use of force to holding police accountable. And in working to rebuild trust in police, the ideas could actually help cops do their jobs — enabling them to help keep minority communities safe, instead of terrorizing these communities.

President Donald Trump’s administration seems to have little appetite for such reforms, but that doesn’t have to be a huge roadblock: Almost all policing is done at the local and state, not federal, level; out of the nearly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the US, a dozen or so are federal. It’s at the local and state level, then, where reforms can and should happen.

Here are those ideas. They aren’t in any specific order, but experts consistently said that nothing else will work if the first step isn’t fully embraced by law enforcement across the country.

1) Police need to apologize for centuries of abuse

Time and time again, I heard the same thing from several experts: Until police take responsibility for how they’re viewed in minority communities, they won’t be able to effectively police those communities.

Some police officers might feel many of the criticisms are unfair. Some might hear about the history of police being used on slave patrols, and feel that they are wrongly blamed for things long before they were born. Some might feel that they are good cops, and it’s only a few officers who are bad.

Harry Benson/Express/Getty Images

But that doesn’t matter. The reality is minority communities distrust police. That sentiment is based on a long history of flat-out racist policing in America, even if it doesn’t apply to every single officer or department today. Until the police acknowledge that, they will be perceived by many people as trying to cover up a long history of oppression.

David Kennedy, a criminologist at John Jay College, argued in 2016 that there will always be distrust between police and black communities until cops own up to historical abuses, mimicking what a police chief might say to a community: “We recognize these facts — whether we were there or not, whether we were around during slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, attacks on the civil rights movement, or whether it’s more recent things that we have done that you have found disrespectful and untoward, like zero-tolerance policing and high levels of stop and frisk.”

So how can police repair this? For one, experts said police need to undertake a big effort — through community meetings, going door to door, their daily patrols, and TV appearances — to get their communities aligned with how policing should be done.

“In order to overcome lack of trust and confidence, the police have to make contact — door-to-door, face-to-face contact — with members of their community,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, in 2016. “The police will be rebuffed on occasion, but that’s the only way I see to, in the long run, rebuild trust or, really, build it for the first time in the police in members of these communities.”

Walter Katz, now the vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures, likened the potential process in 2016 to South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Throughout those hearings, investigators spoke candidly with the victims and enforcers of apartheid about what happened. Much of the hearings were televised. In doing this, people not only got to air their grievances and see their concerns heard, but plans were also set in place — including reparations — to help undo the damage that had been done.

Above all, the point is to let communities know that police hear them, are taking what they say seriously, and are planning further steps to address their complaints.

2) Police should be trained to address their racial biases

Out of all the complaints leveled against the police, the biggest one in recent years — echoed by the Black Lives Matter movement — is that police are racially biased.

Sometimes the cause is explicit racism — such as in North Miami Beach, Florida, where police officers used mug shots of black people as target practice. But other times, such biases may occur at the implicit level, where people’s subconscious biases guide their choices even when they’re not fully aware of it (though there’s some criticism toward this line of research).

Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Josh Correll, a University of Colorado Boulder psychology professor, tested police for racial biases through a shooting simulation. His initial findings showed officers generally did a good job of avoiding shooting unarmed targets of all races. But when shooting was warranted, officers pulled the trigger more quickly against black suspects than white ones. This suggests that officers exhibit some racial bias in shooting.

In the real world, this could lead police to shoot black people at disproportionate rates. Real policing situations, after all, are often much more complicated: Factors — such as a real threat to the officer’s life and the chance that a bullet will miss and accidentally hit a passerby — can make the situation much more confusing to officers.

“In the very situation in which [officers] most need their training,” Correll previously told me, “we have some reason to believe that their training will be most likely to fail them.”

That’s one of the reasons there are racial disparities in police use of force: According to the Guardian’s “The Counted” project, as of 2016 black people were more than twice as likely to be killed by police than white people, at a respective rate of 6.66 per 1 million people versus 2.9 per 1 million people.

It’s not just individual biases driving the disparities, but structural problems as well. As a result of years and years of racial segregation, economic and educational inequality among people of different races, concentrated poverty in minority communities, and the criminal justice system’s neglect of crimes against minorities, there tends to be much more crime in black neighborhoods. So police are deployed more often in these areas, where they’re then more likely to shoot and kill someone.

But higher crime in minority communities doesn’t fully explain the disparities. A 2015 study by researcher Cody Ross found “there is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates).” That suggests something else — such as, potentially, racial bias — is at work.

Phillip Atiba Goff, now the CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, told me in 2016 that this isn’t about whether officers are all evil racists. Instead, this is a bias that has been found time and time again in just about everyone. If you are a human being, chances are you have some level of bias — based on race, gender, religion, and so on. But American media and culture, with their constant depictions of black people as criminals, have shaped Americans’ biases into consistently associating black people with criminality.

“The issue of police bias starts with the thing law enforcement is hiring, which is that they hire humans,” Goff said. “They end up being at least as biased as the rest of the population. And in some instances, I suspect, it may be even slightly more in terms of racial bias.”

For police, the bias can be particularly bad: They are constantly put in situations where they have to think quickly. And that makes it much more likely that their biases will take over. As Goff told me, “If I could put you in the right situation, I could get that particular association to lend itself to certain kinds of behaviors.”

Officers can be trained to help combat their biases. Lorie Fridell, a University of South Florida criminologist who works with police to help them resist their biases, previously explained that they can be taught to force themselves to focus on factors that aren’t skin color — such as body language and what a person is holding.

Unfortunately, that training is rarely emphasized by police departments.

A 2006 report from the Justice Department found that police officers typically receive about 111 hours on firearms skill and self-defense — but just 11 on cultural diversity and human relations, eight on community policing strategies, and eight on mediation and conflict management.

This doesn’t speak just to how little police are trained to handle racial biases, but also all sorts of other situations they take part in — mental health crises, interactions with the LGBTQ community, and domestic and sexual abuse cases, as a few examples. Police just aren’t well-trained to handle a wide variety of sensitive, difficult areas.

If police want to renew community trust, this needs to change. It likely wouldn’t solve all problems — racial bias, for one, is likely to be present to some degree no matter how well cops are trained. But it would help.

3) Police should avoid situations that lead them to use force

Often, the error that leads to an unnecessary shooting — and perhaps bias as a driving factor of the excessive force — comes long before an officer pulls out his or her gun. It can happen when an officer decides to approach a scene in a certain way.

Think of the final moments before a Cleveland police officer shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014. In that tragedy, officers suspected that Rice, who was black, had an actual firearm, when he was in fact playing with a toy gun. And officers drove right into the park where Rice was playing, shooting the boy within two seconds of getting out of their squad car.

Angelo Merendino/Corbis via Getty Images

What if officers had, instead of driving into the scene, parked further away, surveyed the area, and walked into the park more slowly, while giving warnings to Rice? It’s of course impossible to say what the outcome would be — but it certainly seems much more likely that Rice would be alive today.

“We talk about the split-second decisions that have to be made when deadly force is used, and it’s a red herring,” Goff said. “Most of the time, [police] are not ambushed in a corner and then they have to figure out what to do. Most of the time, what happens is there are a number of tactical decisions you’ve made up until that point that have compromised your safety.”

So if officers have racial biases, and you put them in an intense situation in which they have little to call on but their own biases, those biases are going to guide their actions. “We have to be able to acknowledge and identify the set of situations that are most likely to facilitate biased behavior,” Goff said. “And we want to be able to disarm or interrupt them.”

Goff gave an example from research work he did in Las Vegas. There, police established a foot pursuit policy that said the officer who was giving chase should not be the first person to put their hands on the suspect, with coordinated backup instead arriving on the scene and taking on that role. The idea is that foot pursuits often ended in excessive use of force — after all, they are high-adrenaline chases in which the officer and the suspect can get really angry, really fast. So by limiting, when possible, chasing officers from putting their hands on the suspect, Goff figured you could limit use of force.

The change appeared to work. There was a 23 percent reduction in total use of force and an 11 percent reduction in officer injury over several years, on top of reducing racial disparities, according to Goff. “Safer for the officer, safer for the suspects,” he said.

“I didn’t have to talk about race to reduce a disparity that has racial components to it,” he added. “I had to change the fundamental situation where police are chronically engaging with suspects. And that’s the kind of example that I’m talking about how you interrupt the biases of life.”

This is just one example. More broadly, police need to stop being deployed in a way that is particularly aggressive against minority communities — such as when cops in New York City effectively targeted people of color and their whole communities through “stop and frisk.” As Jonathan Blanks, a research associate focused on policing issues at the Cato Institute, told me in 2016, “So long as you have [racially disparate policing strategies], you can have all these ideas about how we’re going to measure how many black people we stop and reduce bias there, but I don’t think it’s really going to work.”

4) Officers must be held accountable in a very transparent way

With the above steps, police can avoid more unnecessary uses of force. But there’s another problem: When police do use excessive force or engage in other types of misconduct, there needs to be more transparency and accountability in the aftermath.

The lack of accountability is reflected in the statistics. The National Police Misconduct Reporting Project analyzed 3,238 criminal cases against police officers from April 2009 through December 2010. They found that only 33 percent were convicted, and 36 percent of officers who were convicted ended up serving prison sentences. Both of those are about half the rate at which members of the public are convicted or incarcerated.

Some of this is a result of laws and courts making it difficult to hold police accountable for excessive use of force. Some activists have called for the legal standards to be lowered, so cops can be held accountable for deadly force at a level closer to that of a civilian.

But part of it also has to do with public attitudes, which can drive juries to take a more sympathetic view toward police.

To that end, another accountability approach is to equip police with body cameras. The idea is that video footage can help eliminate the doubt for both police and civilians as to what happened in a shooting and whether use of force was warranted.

Take the 2015 police shooting of Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina. An officer, Michael Slager, claimed that Scott had tried to take his stun gun and use it on him before fleeing. Video footage from a civilian at the scene, however, revealed that Scott had not tried to grab Slager’s stun gun, and Slager had shot at Scott’s back as the 50-year-old black man attempted to flee. After the shooting, Slager planted the stun gun near Scott’s dead body — presumably to give his story credibility.

If the cellphone video from the passerby didn’t exist, would Slager have been charged with murder and civil rights violations? Would he have been fired? Would he have gotten away with a totally unjustified shooting? After all, without video, witness testimony may have been limited to Slager’s own account.

Similarly, with Floyd’s death, the recorded actions of the officers involved have inspired widespread revulsion — even among other police officers. That’s possible thanks to the video.

Beyond video, police records could also be made more transparent — making it easier to, for example, find out if a police officer has been disciplined in the past. That could show if an officer has a history of complaints or other problems, potentially making it easier to hold bad cops accountable.

But police records are often mired in secrecy. In a 2015 investigation, Robert Lewis, Noah Veltman, and Xander Landen of the New York public radio station WNYC talked to attorneys and experts in all 50 states and Washington, DC, and reviewed laws and court cases to find out which states restrict police disciplinary records. They found that 23 states and DC make the records confidential. And 15 other states limit access to records by, for example, only letting the public see examples of severe discipline, such as suspension or termination. The remaining 12 states generally open police disciplinary records to the public.

This secrecy is also reflected in police culture. The “blue wall of silence” tells cops to stay quiet about other officers’ misconduct. This code is enforced both formally and informally. In Baltimore, for example, the Justice Department found a black sergeant was told to “stay in your lane” when he tried to flag misconduct within the police:

In 2014, a BPD lieutenant placed several signs next to the desk of an African-American sergeant with a reputation for speaking out about alleged misconduct in the Department. Among the signs were warnings to “stay in your lane,” “worry about yourself,” “mind your own business!!” and “don’t spread rumors!!!” After the sergeant filed a complaint about the signs, the lieutenant admitted to creating them and placing them next to the sergeant’s desk. Yet BPD took no meaningful corrective action. Though the complaint was sustained, the lieutenant received no suspension, fine, or loss of benefits.

To fix this, some experts argue that a fundamental shift in leadership is needed.

“The work that needs to be done certainly involves progressive leadership,” said Thomas Nolan, now a criminologist at Emmanuel College and a former Boston police lieutenant, in 2016. “We’ve seen, unfortunately, too little of that. We seem to see the same types of people — and there are exceptions — being put in chief executive positions in police departments across the country.”

Policing in America, particularly at the leadership level, tends to be quite insular. For example, William Bratton served as the police commissioner in Boston in the early 1990s, commissioner in New York City in the mid-1990s, chief in Los Angeles in the 2000s, and finally as commissioner again in New York City from 2014 to 2016. Anthony Batts similarly served as police chief in Oakland and Long Beach, California, before moving to the Baltimore Police Department from 2012 to 2015. There are many more similar examples in big and medium-size cities’ police departments.

Nolan’s argument is simple: If the same people tend to be in charge of police agencies, how can we expect them to change to be more accountable and transparent?

5) On-the-job incentives for police officers need to change

As part of changing the culture of transparency and accountability, several experts also argued that the incentives many police departments across the country impose on their officers need to change.

The most commonly cited example comes from Ferguson, Missouri — where Michael Brown’s death by police in 2014 effectively launched the modern Black Lives Matter protests.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

The Justice Department investigated the Ferguson Police Department as a result of the protests. It found that police were encouraged to ticket as many people as possible with the explicit goal of raising as much revenue as possible from fines and fees. But to do this, police targeted the most vulnerable — mainly, black residents — with frivolous charges.

The Justice Department cited one example:

Officers frequently arrest individuals under Section 29-16(1) on facts that do not meet the provision’s elements. Section 29-16(1) makes it unlawful to “[f]ail to comply with the lawful order or request of a police officer in the discharge of the officer’s official duties where such failure interfered with, obstructed or hindered the officer in the performance of such duties.” Many cases initiated under this provision begin with an officer ordering an individual to stop despite lacking objective indicia that the individual is engaged in wrongdoing. The order to stop is not a “lawful order” under those circumstances because the officer lacks reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot. … Nonetheless, when individuals do not stop in those situations, FPD officers treat that conduct as a failure to comply with a lawful order, and make arrests.

This is not exclusive to Ferguson. In New York City, a group of police officers tried to sue the city and police department over a “quota” to stop and arrest as many people as possible. Some officers acknowledged that officers met this incentive by targeting low-income black neighborhoods with little political power.

“When you put any type of numbers on a police officer to perform, we are going to go to the most vulnerable,” Adhyl Polanco, one of the New York City police officers, told WNBC. “We’re going to [the] LGBT community, we’re going to the black community, we’re going to go to those people that have no boat, that have no power.”

Experts said that police can still be incentivized for productivity, but that can be done without focusing so much on specific numbers of arrests or traffic tickets. It can be done in a more subjective manner through direct supervision. It can also be coupled with other types of data, such as the number of complaints leveled at an officer and how many times a particular cop used force.

But the bottom line is police need to be aware of how strict quotas and incentives can lead officers astray — and take steps to correct any of those unwanted side effects.

6) We need higher standards — and better pay — for police

Who becomes a police officer likely needs to change, as well — by setting a higher bar for who can qualify for the job.

There are no federal standards for police officers. Federal lawmakers could establish such guidelines, allowing states to treat them as the bare minimum or even expand on them.

States could also individually up their licensing requirements for police. For example, barbers in Florida as of 2016 were required under state law to have more training than police: Barbers need to log 1,200 hours, while cops need 770. It’s just one state, but it exemplifies how poor the standards can be for police licensing across the US.

Then there are other considerations, such as whether cities and states should require a college degree for police — something that isn’t required in much of the country right now.

But generally, experts say there should be strong requirements in place that can check for the skills and characteristics we expect of police before they’re put in a live situation.

“We want to recruit people who have the capacity for emotional regulation — so they don’t get angry, they don’t see authority challenges as personal challenges, they don’t fall on use of force as the first response to a challenge to their authority,” said Jeffrey Fagan, a criminologist at Columbia University, in 2016. “We want people who are good at planning and thinking ahead. We want people who have a capacity to reflect on their own work and update their own work — in other words, learn from their mistakes.”

But, Fagan added, “In order to do that, we need to think seriously about paying these guys better.”

This is the rub: Higher standards will almost certainly lead to a need to pay police more. Otherwise, why would someone with, say, a college degree take a job as a police officer when he or she can get far more pay at a private security firm?

John Roman, a criminal justice expert at NORC at the University of Chicago, agreed: “I think we should have higher standards. And if you’re going to have higher standards, you’re going to have to pay them better to attract better-quality people. That’s just the way the free market works.”

7) Police need to focus on the few people in communities causing chaos and violence

Along with all these changes, police can also take steps that explicitly go after crime while limiting who’s impacted by policing actions.

The vast majority of crime in communities is perpetrated by just a few people in a few specific parts of the city. As Abt wrote for Vox, “In most cities across the nation, 3 to 5 percent of city blocks account for 50 to 75 percent of all shootings and killings, with 1 percent of a city’s population responsible for 50 to 60 percent of all homicides.”

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

If police focus on just these few blocks and, specifically, individuals — through policing strategies known as “hot-spot policing” and “focused deterrence” — they can stop and deter a lot of crimes in their cities.

Focused deterrence in particular has been hugely successful: Study after study backs it up, and the method got much of the credit for the “Boston miracle” that saw the city’s violent crime rate drop by 79 percent in the 1990s. Abt covered the success of this strategy in his 2019 book Bleeding Out — highlighting the evidence in a call to take urban violence more seriously as a policy problem.

Rosenfeld explained the two prongs of focused deterrence: “We clearly know who you are, where you live, and we’re going to do everything we can to stop the violence in this community — and if that means that we arrest and charge you with a serious violent crime, we’re going to do that. If you want out of this life, then, secondly, here are services and support that you might find useful to set a different direction of your life.”

The social services can be costly, but they’re needed for the strategy to work. For one, they offer a way out to someone caught in a bad place in life — people often get trapped in violent situations due to desperate economic situations. And when cops offer these services, they also signal that they’re not just there to enforce the law, but also to try to help people out of dire circumstances.

“That lends a certain legitimacy to the police,” Rosenfeld said. “They’re not there to just serve warrants or warn people about what’s going to happen to them if they commit another crime, but also conveys a certain degree of concern for those individuals and their lives.”

So these strategies can limit who’s directly impacted by policing — by targeting a few people in a few areas, instead of sweeping whole neighborhoods with aggressive stops. They can also signal to the community that the police get it: Most people in these communities are innocent, and police are going to focus only on those who aren’t.

As Abt told me, “If you get very specific, you are better at fighting crime and reducing violence. But you also improve legitimacy by showing the community that you’re not occupying them like a military, but that you’re serving them by trying to help them address a small number of people in places that really are hurting the community.”

One big hurdle to these strategies is that they can involve a big initial investment — and police departments, used to fighting crime in a certain way, may be resistant to new ideas, especially if they cost more money upfront. And their implementation can be difficult — requiring actors all across government, from the mayor to police to social workers, to come together in a single strategy and stick to it through ups and downs.

But if these strategies work to save and improve lives, there’s a moral imperative for all levels of government to take them more seriously.

8) We need better data to evaluate police and crime

As it stands, the federal government does a terrible job collecting data on crime and police actions. Nationwide crime reports tend to come out with a lag period of a year or more. And virtually every expert agreed this data very likely undercounts crime, since it misses crimes that aren’t reported to the police.

“We know virtually nothing about crime in America other than murder, kidnapping, and arson,” Roman said. “Rape, robbery, assault, motor vehicle theft, gangs, drugs — we don’t report data back to the federal government that allows the federal government to tell law enforcement how to behave more efficiently or helps researchers understand how crime is created and evolves.”

But more comprehensive, current data could be very useful for fighting crime, several experts argued.

“You need that comparative information so you can determine whether that problem you’re experiencing in your own community is relatively distinctive or specific to local community conditions or it’s a common problem in many, many other communities,” Rosenfeld said. “If it’s the latter, you want to consult with those other communities to see how they’re addressing it. If it’s the former, then you know you have to devise strategies that respond to the specifics of the problems in your own community.”

It’s not just crime. Goff pointed out that there’s little to no data on what police do — stops, arrests, use of force, and so on. A 2015 study found that the federal agencies’ police killing data misses as many as half of all people killed by police in America. And the federal government doesn’t try to track more typical police actions, from stops to arrests.

As long as the US fails to collect this data, it’s going to be impossible to evaluate what works to address virtually any of the issues people have with police, from racial bias to crime-fighting. It may cost more money to collect this data properly, but every expert I talked to brought it up as a major issue that needs to be addressed.

If police get this right, they can boost faith in cops and their legitimacy in crime-fighting

There’s an underlying point in all these strategies: More effective and transparent policing really can solve the two big problems — racial bias and higher crime — pegged to police in America today.

Whenever another police shooting of a black person hits the news, opponents of Black Lives Matter tend to fall back on a question: “But what about black-on-black crime?” The suggestion is that far more black people are murdered by black civilians, so that’s really what someone worried about black lives should worry about.

What these critics miss is that distrust in the police — the key driver behind Black Lives Matter — is also a key driver of crime in minority neighborhoods. “When communities don’t trust the police and are afraid of the police, then they will not and cannot work with police and within the law around issues in their own community,” Kennedy said. “Then those issues within the community become issues the community needs to deal with on their own — and that leads to violence.”

Ben Hendren/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

A 2016 study was especially illuminating to this end. The study, from sociologists Matthew Desmond of Harvard, Andrew Papachristos of Yale, and David Kirk of Oxford, looked at the effects of 911 calls in Milwaukee after incidents of police violence hit the news.

They found that after the 2004 police beating of Frank Jude, 17 percent (22,200) fewer 911 calls were made in the following year compared with the number of calls that would have been made had the Jude beating never happened. More than half of the effect came from fewer calls in black neighborhoods. And the effect persisted for more than a year, even after the officers involved in the beating were punished. Researchers found similar impacts on local 911 calls after other high-profile incidents of police violence.

But crime was still happening in these neighborhoods. Indeed, as 911 calls dropped, researchers also found a rise in homicides. They note that “the spring and summer that followed Jude’s story were the deadliest in the seven years observed in our study.”

That suggests that people were simply dealing with crime themselves. And although the researchers couldn’t definitively prove it, that might mean civilians took to their own — sometimes violent — means to protect themselves when they couldn’t trust police to stop crime and violence.

“An important implication of this finding is that publicized cases of police violence not only threaten the legitimacy and reputation of law enforcement,” the researchers write, “they also — by driving down 911 calls — thwart the suppression of law breaking, obstruct the application of justice, and ultimately make cities as a whole, and the black community in particular, less safe.”

Better policing can’t stop all crime. There are many other issues, from jobs to housing, that also have an impact. But police, if they are trusted by the community, can have a sizable effect.

To some degree, this should be common sense. Journalist Jill Leovy captured it well in her brilliant book Ghettoside: Noting that homicides are much less likely to be solved in black neighborhoods, she argued that some people in black communities have concluded that police don’t value black lives — and so they need to settle interpersonal conflicts on their own.

“Take a bunch of teenage boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened. Signal that no one cares, and fail to solve murders. Limit their options for escape. Then see what happens,” Leovy wrote.

That’s why transparency, accountability, and community cooperation, described as part of the “procedural justice” model of policing, are all so important: They signal that the justice system does care. And if the police do it right — by stopping overly aggressive practices and preventing crime and violence in black neighborhoods — they can signal that black lives really do matter to them.

Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Sen. Tom Cotton likes war stuff. His status as a military veteran seems to be the only thing he has in the plus column, considering how terrible he is at everything else. But Cotton knows that the best way to get his personal agenda of self-aggrandizement and white supremacy through to the current president is to go on Fox News and hope the orange idiot is watching. It serves two purposes for Cotton: The first purpose is to ingratiate himself to the president by promoting ludicrous conspiracy theories that align with Trump’s need to excuse his awful handling of our public health and economy, and the second is to try and push Trump toward the authoritarian forms of government people like Tom Cotton espouse.

On Fox News, Monday morning, Cotton was on with the Fox & Friends crew to give his solution to the national unrest in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. After saying the video of Floyd’s death was disturbing, Brian Kilmeade asked Sen. Cotton what could be done, as the many national curfews established in the past couple of days has not exactly ended the country’s sense of racial injustice. Cotton launched into a terrifying explanation of how he wants to wield federal power to bring Americans to heel.

SEN. TOM COTTON: What the president can do is say that justice will be done in accordance with law for George Floyd. And we will always respect the right of peaceful protests, as many of these cities saw in the daytime, but the rioting, the anarchy, and the looting ends tonight. If local law enforcement is overwhelmed, if local politicians will not do their most basic job to protect our citizens, let's see how these anarchists respond when the 101st Airborne is on the other side of the street.

Sen. Cotton coupled this appearance with social media statements like, “Anarchy, rioting, and looting needs to end tonight. If local law enforcement is overwhelmed and needs backup, let's see how tough these antifa terrorists are when they're facing off with the 101st Airborne Division. We need to have zero tolerance for this destruction.” What does five months younger Sen. Tom Cotton think?

Cotton’s insistence on throwing around the 101st Airborne Division’s name in his campaign to become some fascistic leader is ironic, considering that the 101st Airborne Division has a long, storied history of fighting fascists.

Cotton also added this no quarter order. “No quarter” means to show no mercy … you know, like killing people.

Donald Trump hasn't addressed the country as it burns with anger because he literally doesn't have anything to say. Trump spent part of his weekend hiding in a bunker that's intended for use in case of terrorist attacks. Poor Trump, who is pouring gasoline on the fire with his rage tweets, is reportedly afraid for his physical safety.

So Trump hopped on a call with the nation's governors and unloaded: criticizing their leadership, chastising them to quell the protests, and encouraging them to use force to “dominate” the unrest. It was nothing short of "unhinged," and some people listening in were alarmed, according to Washington Post's Robert Acosta and CBS News’ Ed O'Keefe.

Keep in mind that Trump reportedly spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin Monday morning. 

Here are some choice Trump quotes from the call (CBS reportedly has the audio): 

• "You have to dominate, if you don’t dominate you’re wasting your time They’re going to run over you, you’re going to look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate."
• "You’ve got to arrest people, you have to track people, you have to put them in jail for 10 years and you’ll never see this stuff again."
• "You’re making a mistake because you're making yourselves look like fools. And some have done a great job. But a lot of you, it’s not – it’s not a great day for our country."
• "You know when other countries watch this, they’re watching this, the next day wow, they’re really a push over. And we can’t be a push over. And we have all the resources – it’s not like we don’t have the resources. So, I don’t know what you’re doing."
• "Washington was under very good control, but we’re going to have it under much more control. We’re going to pull in thousands of people." 

 Trump also encouraged the governors to use U.S. military force on the call. And finally ...

Enlarge / Screenshots of the iWatch Dallas iPhone app from the Apple App Store. (credit: City of Dallas)

With protests against police brutality and racism happening in many major US cities, the Dallas Police Department on Sunday asked the public to submit videos of "illegal activity from the protests" through the city's smartphone app. It didn't go well, as the app was reportedly inundated with unrelated content, such as K-pop videos, and within less than a day, the app had stopped working due to "technical difficulties."

"In response to the tweeted request from Dallas Police, hundreds of K-pop fans replied with photos and videos of their favorite artists," BuzzFeed News wrote. "Many people also claimed to have submitted videos of the police harming protesters, as well as fan edits of K-pop artists, to the iWatch Dallas app."

The department made its request for video of protesters at 12:48am CT Sunday. "If you have video of illegal activity from the protests and are trying to share it with @DallasPD, you can download it to our iWatch Dallas app. You can remain anonymous," the tweet said.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

America’s institutional racism explains both Covid-19’s toll and police violence.

The protests against police brutality over the weekend are not only a story about state-sanctioned violence against black Americans. They are also a health care story that reveals the nation’s structural racism, in two important ways.

First, police violence is a public health risk. In almost any way you measure it, the US criminal justice system is prejudiced against black Americans, and black people are much more likely to be subjected to state violence in the US compared to white Americans.

Researchers from Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, and Washington University in St. Louis tried to quantify the risk to black lives from law enforcement in a recent study. Their findings were stunning: Black men, by far the most at-risk group, face 1 in 1,000 odds of being killed by the police over the course of their lives.

This chart succinctly summarizes the researchers’ findings of the risk across different races and genders:

PNAS

Racial discrimination in America’s criminal justice system manifests in every step from arrest to trial to conviction and incarceration. Radley Balko covered the relevant research in a column for the Washington Post. Sadly, none of it will come as much of a surprise: Black people are more likely to be stopped by police, they are less likely to get a fair trial, and their sentences are longer than those of white people convicted of the same crimes.

And those systemic injustices have their own health consequences, beyond the most extreme form of a law enforcement officer taking the life of a citizen. A pair of Harvard professors ran through some of them in this piece published in The Conversation:

• “Suicide is the leading cause of mortality in U.S. jails, accounting for 34 percent of all deaths. Again, the vast majority of these individuals have not been convicted of any crime. Suicide rates among incarcerated individuals are three to four times higher than the general public.”
• “The food — which tends to be high-calorie and high-fat — often has poor nutritional value. This, combined with restrictions on physical movement and the stress of incarceration and overcrowding, can have adverse effects on both mental and physical health.”
• “Incarceration also puts individuals at risk for physical and sexual assault.”
• “An estimated 2.7 million U.S. children have an incarcerated parent. Having a parent incarcerated is considered to be an ‘adverse childhood experience.’ This is linked to multiple negative health outcomes throughout life, including poor mental health, substance abuse, disease, disability and even early death.”
• “A recent survey of 8,300 correctional officers found that 10 percent have seriously considered or attempted suicide. That’s three times the rate of the general population. Correctional workers also experience higher levels of hypertension from elevated stress levels and higher levels of obesity than the national average.”

These disparities, the result of the structural racism that puts black people disproportionately at risk of police violence and incarceration, is what people have come out to protest.

And they are doing so in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic that has also taken a disproportionate toll on black Americans.

Black people are more likely to work in jobs considered “essential,” exposing them more to the virus. America’s failure to build an equitable health system means its black residents have high rates of preexisting conditions that make them more vulnerable to Covid-19. They also live in places more exposed to air pollution and have less reliable access to clean water. America’s structural racism infects every part of the lives of its marginalized citizens.

And those disparities have manifested in the coronavirus pandemic, as this data from New York City, the outbreak’s American epicenter, demonstrates:

NYC Health

And after three months of unprecedented nationwide lockdowns, the sight of thousands of people gathered close together to march in the streets has been a little surreal. It has also raised fears that these protests could become superspreading events that only exacerbate the disparities described above.

It’s too soon to say what exactly the effect, if any, will be. But Roni Caryn Rabin covered some of the reasons for concern in the New York Times:

Dr. Howard Markel, a medical historian who studies pandemics, likened the protest crowds to the bond parades held in American cities like Philadelphia and Detroit in the midst of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which were often followed by spikes in influenza cases.

“Yes, the protests are outside, but they are all really close to each other, and in those cases, being outside doesn’t protect you nearly as much,” Dr. Markel said. “Public gatherings are public gatherings — it doesn’t matter what you’re protesting or cheering. That’s one reason we’re not having large baseball games and may not have college football this fall.”

Though many protesters were wearing masks, others were not. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the Covid-19 disease, is mainly transmitted through respiratory droplets spread when people talk, cough or sneeze; screaming and shouting slogans during a protest can accelerate the spread, Dr. Markel said.

With that in mind, and no sign of the protests ending anytime soon, I would urge anybody considering joining the protests to read this piece from Vox’s Eliza Barclay. She covers some of the precautions people can take to protest more safely.

Be safe, everyone, and be good to each other.

This story appears in VoxCare, a newsletter from Vox on the latest twists and turns in America’s health care debate. Sign up to get VoxCare in your inbox along with more health care stats and news.

Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Some conservatives want Trump to speak on the protests. They should be careful what they wish for.

The United States has for days been engulfed in protests and violence, in large cities and even small towns across the country, following the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In response, the president of the United States tweeted.

He tweeted a legally questionable declaration that he’d designate antifa a terrorist organization, tweeted about his polling, tweeted simply “FAKE NEWS” and “LAW AND ORDER,” and tweeted the summation of an episode of Fox & Friends. He tweeted about the media and the “vicious dogs” of the Secret Service, and he tweeted advice at state governors and city mayors. He also shared a QAnon conspiracy theorist’s tweet, but later deleted it. After speaking about Floyd’s killing following a NASA launch on Saturday, Trump spent the rest of the weekend at the White House, speaking to the nation only on a platform he’d threatened to shut down just days earlier and largely in the manner of a person observing his own presidency from afar.

People on both sides of the aisle noticed Trump’s absence from the national stage, including many on the right who consider themselves among his biggest allies. They haven’t specified an exact course of action but want Trump to take a far more prominent role in calming tensions.

But Trump’s press secretary told reporters on Monday, “A national Oval Office address is not going to stop Antifa.” And while some outlets report that the president is interested in doing a “listening tour” with law enforcement and pastors and community leaders, there are no firm plans.

Back in 2016, during his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Trump decried violence aimed at police officers and then said, “I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police: when I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order our country.”

Four years later, Trump sits in the midst of a crisis of law and a breakdown of order as a result. And it turns out, he alone can’t fix it.

“We are led by a buffoon who does nothing but sit on his backside and tweet”

Conservative writer Rod Dreher at the American Conservative wrote this past weekend that Trump and the “political class” were completely inept at handling the compounding crises of unrest and a pandemic, saying Trump is “as useless in this crisis as teats on a boar”:

The fact is, we have a massive national crisis underway, a crisis on top of two other crises — pandemic and economic collapse — and we are led by a buffoon who does nothing but sit on his backside and tweet. It’s infuriating!

The pro-Trump meme creator Carpe Donktum — who attended the White House’s summit on social media last July — tweeted that he would also like to see Trump speak publicly, to “ease public concern and plot a course to peace.”

Other right-leaning observers online have agreed. Caleb Hull, a conservative videographer who works with political campaigns and influencers, said on Twitter that Trump should spend less time tweeting and more time taking “decisive action.”

And Ann Coulter, once one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders before breaking with him over his perceived softness on immigration, tweeted that he was likely spending his time delving deeper into conspiracy theories about an MSNBC host.

This was not the moment Trump was made for

But in his piece, Dreher made the point that perhaps many of us are thinking: Does anyone really want Donald Trump — the real person, not the idea of Donald Trump often constructed in the imaginations of the media always ready for him to “pivot” — to opine on current events?

And you know, we should probably count our blessings. If he went on TV to address the nation, Trump would probably make things worse. There he sits in the White House, impotent, an angry old man who doesn’t know what to do, and who, being utterly despised by half the country — but not feared! — cannot possibly gain control of the situation.

When I emailed Dreher and asked what he wanted Trump to do, he said that while he wanted Trump to “issue clear, unambiguous statements that civil disorder will not be tolerated” and do everything in his power to show that he is taking the moment seriously, “Trump being Trump, it’s hard to know what he could possibly do that wouldn’t make things worse.”

As my colleague Ezra Klein noted over the weekend, “When we elected Donald Trump, we elected a political arsonist.” The point of Trump, the purpose of Trump, was never to ease tensions or unite a nation (one that, arguably, has always been divided, particularly over matters of race). More often, he has held up a mirror to national divisions while using them for his own political purposes.

Donald Trump is a blunt instrument aimed like a cudgel at institutions — political and cultural, domestic and foreign — that some of his voters believed ignored millions of Americans at best and hurt them at worst. Trump was made to threaten social media platforms that boosted his candidacy with regulations and potential closure. He was made to scream at cable news networks during a time of relative peace. He was not made to bring a nation reeling from death and disease back from the brink.

In response to a request for comment from the New York Times about what he planned to do to address the nation over the weekend, Trump said, “I’m going to win the election easily. The economy is going to start to get good and then great, better than ever before.”

Trump wasn’t elected for this moment of crisis. It’s no wonder, then, that he has no idea how to respond to it. As Dreher told me, “Some critics have said all along that Trump only wanted to be president so he could make sure all eyes were on him constantly. Now that has been proven true.”

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Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Protesting during a pandemic is a risk. But so is the status quo of police violence.

America’s crises are boiling over, one into another. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, masses of people are taking to the streets to protest police brutality after the death of George Floyd in Minnesota and other victims of racial violence.

These two stories are linked. They are both public health stories. The link is systemic racism.

“The same broad-sweeping structural racism that enables police brutality against black Americans is also responsible for higher mortality among black Americans with Covid-19,” Maimuna Majumder, a Harvard epidemiologist working on the Covid-19 response, tells Vox.

“One in every 1,000 black men and boys can expect to be killed by police in this country,” she says. “To me, this clearly illustrates why police brutality is a public health problem; anything that causes mortality at such a scale is a public health problem.”

PNAS

As the Covid-19 crisis continues, it’s also become clear that black communities, and other communities of color, have suffered a disproportionate burden. Law professors Ruqaiijah Yearby and Seema Mohapatra recently explained this in detail in the Journal of Law and Bioscience:

African Americans make up just 12% of the population in Washtenaw County, Michigan but have suffered a staggering 46% of COVID-19 infections. In Chicago, Illinois, African Americans account for 29% of population, but have suffered 70% of COVID-19 related deaths of those whose ethnicity is known. In Washington, Latinos represent 13% of the population, but account for 31% of the COVID-19 cases, while in Iowa Latinos comprise are 6% of the population but 20% of COVID-19 infections.

The African American COVID-19 death rates are higher than their percentage of the population in racially segregated cities and states including Milwaukee, Wisconsin (66% of deaths, 41% of population), Illinois (43% of deaths, 28% of infections, 15% of population), and Louisiana (46% of deaths, 36% of population).

These racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 infections and deaths are a result of historical and current practices of racism that cause disparities in exposure, susceptibility and treatment.

Many racial and ethnic minorities, Yearby and Mohapatra write, have been classified as “essential workers,” and are unable to work from home, leave their job, or access paid sick leave. They live in denser housing and more often polluted communities than whites — a result of years of racist housing policy that puts them at greater risk during a pandemic. And when they do get sick, their access to health care is often limited (as is their ability to pay for it).

Can the mass protests alleviate the Covid-19 burden on these communities? Not immediately. And there is a real risk of making it worse. “The ongoing protests will increase risk of transmission,” Majumder says. But even so, she and many other health experts argue the protests are necessary. (There are ways to reduce the risk of spreading Covid-19 at a protest. Read about them here.)

Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

Apu Gomes/AFP via Getty Images

“We can’t compare these two tragedies directly — but they both are public health crises that are operating at immense scales,” she says. “And in the case of black Americans, they’re interrelated, too. To me, these protests are about structural racism.” And that racism allows police brutality to persist, as it allows disease to spread.

Many other epidemiologists, doctors, and infectious disease researchers have also defended the current protests, highlighting the inextricable link between the heavy toll of Covid-19 on black communities and the history of racism:

“What is the greater harm to society? Current and intergenerational trauma, which stems from police violence, or risk related to Covid-19?” Jaime Slaughter-Acey, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, says. “The fact that people are out there protesting, despite the risks of Covid-19, tells you that the fear of police brutality, racism, is much more terrifying.” That said, Slaughter-Acey does worry about Covid-19 spreading at protests, and that it “would disproportionately affect the black community again.”

The forces that put many minority communities at risk during a pandemic have also put them at risk of police violence. Years of diminished economic opportunity, of marginalization, of structural racism, have led to both.

“In almost any way you measure it, the American criminal justice system is prejudiced against black Americans, and black people are much more likely to be subjected to state-sanctioned violence in the US compared to white Americans,” Vox’s Dylan Scott writes. Similarly, by almost every measure, black Americans face much larger risks when it comes to public health. They suffer heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and obesity in disproportionate numbers, too.

Systemic racism has also made the outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic worse, too, because it creates mistrust in public institutions. ProPublica recently investigated the first 100 Covid-19 deaths in Chicago. Seventy of the deaths were African Americans, and ProPublica spoke to the families of 20 of them.

“Even though many of these victims had medical conditions that made them particularly susceptible to the virus, they didn’t always get clear or appropriate guidance about seeking treatment,” ProPublica writes in summary. “They lived near hospitals that they didn’t trust and that weren’t adequately prepared to treat COVID-19 cases.”

These people did not go to their community hospitals “because they did not feel that they were going to be treated,” Slaughter-Acey says. “And that is the same thing with police violence. Black Americans are less likely to call the police, even in a situation where police may be needed, because of fear that they might experience discrimination or be perceived as a perpetrator.”

Right now, the news is filled with images of mass gatherings at a time when social distancing should still be exercised. And more Covid-19 infections may come out of it. This is rightfully concerning. But that concern can exist alongside the concern of violence and death that black communities face, pandemic or not.

Confronting the racism that puts black Americans at higher risk of dying at the hands of police means confronting the racism that puts black Americans at higher risk of dying from Covid-19. There are policies and ideas that can be implemented to help reduce police violence. There are also policies and ideas that can ease the coronavirus burden on black and minority communities (Yearby and Mohapatra discuss more in their paper, which you can read here).

But, at least for now, the goal of the protests is the same goal as the response to the pandemic: saving lives.

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Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

In a video teleconference with the nation’s governors on Monday, Donald Trump attacked them for not doing enough to “dominate” protesters as unrest over the murder of unarmed black man George Floyd gripped the nation.

CBS News obtained audio of the call, Ed O’Keefe reported.

Said Trump: “You have to dominate, if you don’t dominate you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run over you, you’re going to look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate. … Washington was under very good control, but we’re going to have it under much more control. We’re going to pull in thousands of people. … You’ve got to arrest people, you have to track people, you have to put them in jail for 10 years and you’ll never see this stuff again. … You’re making a mistake because you’re making yourselves look like fools. And some have done a great job. But a lot of you, it’s not – it’s not a great day for our country. You know when other countries watch this, they’re watching this, the next day wow, they’re really a push over. And we can’t be a push over. And we have all the resources – it’s not like we don’t have the resources. So, I don’t know what you’re doing.”

The post Trump Tells Governors They’ll Look Like ‘Jerks’ and ‘Fools’, Says He’ll Arrest ‘Thousands of People’, Suggests Jailing Protesters for 10 Years: ‘You Have to Dominate’ appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

John Oliver blasted Tucker Carlson on Last Week Tonight Sunday night after the FOX News host said that protests against the murder of unarmed black man George Floyd were worse than police brutality.

Said Carlson: “Rioting is the one thing you don’t want. Ugly opinions, police brutality, officious birdwatchers, rude entitled ladies walking their dogs in big-city parks — all of that is bad. But none of it is nearly as bad as what you just saw.”

Replied Oliver: “First, f**k you, Tucker. That’s just a general point. … But look, for the larger point here, people like Tucker love to venerate order at moments like this, and that’s easy to do when order in its current form is designed to benefit and protect you. But it’s hard to overstate how clearly we’ve been reminded lately of the hostility of our existing ‘order’ toward black people, who have been killed by police in the streets, killed by police in their own home, killed by ‘wannabe’ police in the streets and threatened with state violence while literally birding. And collectively, that’s got to be some sort of brutality BINGO right there.”

Oliver also did a segment on mail-in voting amid the coronavirus pandemic which included more idiotic remarks from Carlson.

Said the FOX News host: “Why haven’t we had mail-in ballots for the last 230 years? Maybe the reason is mail-in ballots are an invitation to widespread fraud and manipulation. And if you want to rattle people’s faith in the system that we’ve had for centuries, maybe you would do that.”

Replied Oliver: “Your premise that voting by mail is a new idea that would shatter democracy is in fact completely wrong and deeply stupid. That’s not a reflection on you though, is it? You just engaged in a dialogue in good faith, so thank you. Unless you weren’t doing that, in which case go f**k yourself, you human boat shoe.”

The post John Oliver Rips ‘Human Boat Shoe’ Tucker Carlson for Calling ‘Black Lives Matter’ Protests Worse Than Police Brutality: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

An especially timely ad from The Lincoln Project, that asks why racists who carry the Confederate flag are supporters of Donald Trump, and why Trump refuses to denounce them.

Of course we all know the answer to those questions. 

David McAtee’s death came amid violence by police at protests around the country.

A man was shot and killed in Louisville, Kentucky, on Sunday night after police officers and National Guard troops began firing into a crowd.

Residents have taken to the streets of Louisville, like thousands of Americans around the country, to protest the killings of black people at the hands of police — specifically, George Floyd, who died after being pinned by the neck by a Minneapolis police officer, and Breonna Taylor, who was shot in her Louisville apartment in March by officers who were looking for someone else. At many protests across America, police have attacked protesters, beating them with batons, shooting them with rubber bullets, and driving cars into crowds.

In downtown Louisville on Sunday night, police and the National Guard were sent to break up a crowd that had gathered in a parking lot, Louisville Metro Police Chief Steve Conrad said in a statement, according to NBC.

Officers “were shot at,” Conrad said, and they “returned fire.” Now, a man is dead.

On Monday, his family publicly identified him as David McAtee, the owner of a local restaurant. “He left a great legend behind,” his mother, Odessa Riley, told the Louisville Courier-Journal. “He was a good person.”

Officials have not yet confirmed who fired the fatal shot. McAtee’s family has called for body camera footage from the incident to be released, but on Monday, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer announced that officers at the scene had their body cameras turned off, according to WFPL. The mayor also announced that Conrad had been fired from his position as police chief.

While investigations are ongoing, here is what we know about the incident on Sunday that ended in McAtee’s death.

What we know

• Police and the National Guard were sent to a parking lot at 26th and Broadway in Louisville on Sunday at about 12:15 am, according to NBC. Like many cities around the country in recent days, Louisville has imposed a curfew, which began at 9 pm.
• Police say they began shooting after being fired on by the crowd. “Officers and soldiers began to clear the lot and at some point were shot at,” Conrad said in his statement. “Both LMPD and national guard members returned fire.”
• David McAtee, 53, was fatally shot. McAtee owned a barbecue restaurant on the corner where the crowd had gathered. Riley, his mother, says he was a “community pillar,” known for giving free meals to police officers. “All he did on that barbecue corner is try to make a dollar for himself and his family,” she told the Courier-Journal. “And they come along and they killed my son.”
• Several sources say the crowd in the parking lot was not actually protesting when police arrived. One bystander told reporters they were not engaged in protest and were merely out past the city’s curfew. And McAtee’s sister told WAVE 3 News that McAtee and others meet in the area every Sunday night for food and music, and that her brother was serving food.

What we don’t know

• According to NBC, Conrad did not specify who shot the man. However, the Louisville news station WLKY is reporting that he was shot by law enforcement.
• Police say they are collecting video and investigating the killing.
• Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has ordered an independent investigation by state police. “Given the seriousness of the situation, I have authorized the Kentucky State Police to independently investigate the event,” he said in a statement Monday.

What we know about the protests and police violence in Louisville and around the country

• Louisville residents have been rising up in recent days against police violence around the country and in their hometown. On March 13, Breonna Taylor, an EMT who was providing health care during the coronavirus pandemic, was shot and killed in her apartment at night by police looking for someone who didn’t live there.
• The FBI recently opened an investigation into Taylor’s killing. As public attention to Taylor’s death grew in May, Conrad, the police chief, announced his upcoming retirement. He was originally slated to retire in June.
• Seven people were shot at a protest in Louisville on Thursday night. However, the mayor said at the time that police were not responsible for the shooting.
• On Friday night, police shot two journalists at local station WAVE 3 News with pepper balls as they were reporting on the protests. “The two had been following police instructions, were standing behind the police line when they were fired upon, and were not disrupting or otherwise interfering with law enforcement,” WAVE 3 News general manager Ken Selvaggi said in a statement.
• Across the nation, police officers have repeatedly been captured on camera in recent days attacking protesters, beating them with batons, ramming them with cars, and even spraying mace at a child.
• McAtee’s family has called for officers’ body camera footage of the shooting to be released and for the National Guard to be pulled out of Louisville. “All of that,” family members told the Courier-Journal. “We want all of that.”
• But on Monday, Mayor Fischer announced that the officers had not recorded any footage. He also announced the firing of Conrad from his role as police chief. Assistant Chief Robert Schroeder will take command of the city’s police force, according to WFPL.

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In another outrageous case of police overreach, out CNN commentator and journalist Keith Boykin was arrested on the westside of Manhattan over the weekend while covering the NYC protests over the murder of unarmed black man George Floyd.

Boykin told Don Lemon he was arrested “for doing nothing, for exercising my first amendment rights to be on the street” and covering the protests.

Boykin said he was ahead of a group of peaceful protesters on the West Side Highway taking photos when the police met them from the opposite direction.

Boykin said he told the police he was with the press and they walked by him, and then turned back around and came for him.

Boykin asked why he was being arrested and they said ‘well, you’re blocking the highway’ which Boykin said he clearly wasn’t doing.

Explained Boykin: “They took me, they put me in a zip tie, they put my hands behind my back, they put me in a hot van for an hour, in a hot police bus for an hour, then they took me down to 1 Police Plaza where they held me in a jail cell with about 35 other prisoners from [the] protest, and I was there for 4 hours, 6 hours overall in total custody, and they never charged me with any felony. It was just a summons to appear in court in September for blocking the highway. A six hour ordeal. When they could have just said, ‘you need to move off the highway you’re going to be arrested’ they didn’t bother to do that. They just arrested me. The police have too much power.”

Boykin said “so often, the police make matters worse and that’s what people are protesting about.”

Boykin also told Don Lemon he was in Houston this week for a wake for his stepfather who died from coronavirus.

Lemon asked Boykin about any measures taken by the police for social distancing during his time in custody. Boykin said there were none.

“There’s no opportunity for social distancing when you’re in a cell with 35 people,” said Boykin.

Watch Boykin’s infuriating story:

More from Boykin’s Twitter feed:

The post NYPD Arrested CNN Journalist Keith Boykin as He Covered Protest, Held Him for 6 Hours with 35 Others ‘for Doing Nothing’ — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

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Donald Trump and his family were whisked to an underground bunker not used since Dick Cheney took shelter there during 9/11 as unrest sparked by the murder of unarmed black man George Floyd raged outside over the weekend. The White House itself went dark.

The New York Times reports: “Nervous for his safety, Secret Service agents abruptly rushed the president to the underground bunker used in the past during terrorist attacks. … Mr. Trump and his family have been rattled by protests near the Executive Mansion that turned violent for a third night on Sunday.”

RELATED: Police Inflame Protesters as Unrest Over Unarmed Black Man’s Death Rocks 75+ U.S. Cities for 5th Night: VIDEOS

The paper adds: “It was not clear what specifically prompted the Secret Service to whisk Mr. Trump to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, as the underground bunker is known, but the agency has protocols for protecting the president when the building is threatened. … Vice President Dick Cheney was brought to the bunker on Sept. 11, 2001, when the authorities feared one of the planes hijacked by Al Qaeda was heading toward the White House. President George W. Bush, who was out of town until that evening, was rushed there later that night after a false alarm of another plane threat.”

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