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400,000: The invisible deaths of covid-19

InternationalJan 18. 2021Cardiologist Yee Se Choa Ong, who worked at CCOM Medical Group in Muskogee, decided to practice in Oklahoma in part because of its high rate of heart disease. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Shane Bevel

By The Washington Post · Marc Fisher, Lori Rozsa, Mark Kreidler, Annie Gowen

In a Connecticut hospital room, a woman less than 48 hours from death posted on Facebook: “It is now just a matter of trying to keep me comfortable till I pass.”

A few days before Christmas, less than a week before he died at home, a California man texted his daughter: “Vaccines on the way. Gettin kinda close.”

Four hundred thousand Americans have now died of covid-19. It took 12 weeks for the death toll to rise from 200,000 to 300,000. The death toll has leaped from 300,000 to 400,000 in less than five weeks.

The numbers are huge and the coronavirus pandemic has dramatically changed daily life, from work to play to the most basic of human relationships. Yet these are, by and large, invisible deaths: Coronavirus victims who die in the hospital often spend their final days cut off from family and friends, their only human contact coming from medical personnel hidden behind layers of protective gear. Even those who die at home often decline in quarantine, keeping a lonely vigil over their body’s fight.

Beyond death, covid’s casualties suffer further indignities: Storage in refrigerator trucks parked outside overwhelmed funeral homes, funerals that must be closed to mourners, lonely burials, cremations delayed by weeks or months because of the backlog.

The pace of death has never been faster, despite all efforts by scientists, public health officials and politicians. The historically swift development of effective vaccines, improved treatment of the most severe cases and a stronger consensus around mask-wearing have failed so far against the shortcomings of an overwhelmed health-care system, a painfully slow start to the vaccination campaign, and a continuing political divide over how serious the virus is and how hard to try to contain it.

Just three months ago, Anthony Fauci, the nation’s infectious-disease chief, imagined that “if we don’t do what we need to in the fall and winter, we could have 300,000 to 400,000 covid-19 deaths.”

Now, with more than 1 of every 1,000 Americans dead from the virus, a University of Washington model that predicted the current totals forecasts 567,000 U.S. deaths by April 1, a number that could jump above 700,000 if mask mandates are eased in the interim.

In the middle of a grim winter marked by mass death, seemingly uncontrolled illness and the most unnerving threat to U.S. democracy in more than 160 years, amid the rapid acceleration of coronavirus cases and deaths, an increasing portion of Americans are ready to take the vaccine – 60 percent, according to an Axios-Ipsos survey this month, up from 48 percent a month earlier. In addition, a majority remain worried about catching the virus (77 percent in a Quinnipiac poll last month.)

Each death from covid-19 is at once a number and a unique tragedy, and each is a strangely distant demise – so many invisible deaths in lonely places.

– – –

“Dear friends, I’ve been in the hospital for over a week with Covid,” Earla Dawn Dimitriadis wrote on Facebook on Dec. 1. She explained that paramedics had found her at home, “lethargic and barely hanging on … Unfortunately they are unable to keep my levels up. There was damage done to my lungs and pneumonia set in. I’m unable to talk on the phone, due to lack of oxygen. But now that I have my phone I can post some. Please pray “

Her friends replied with 205 prayers, hugs and crosses.

They were friends from the after-school program in Stamford, Conn., where Dimitriadis, 66, had spent more than 25 years, teaching art and running operations. They were customers of the business she’d created to sell jewelry she made at home. They knew her as a woman who posted online not about politics but about the beauty of a blue moon, the importance of finding one’s true path and the sweetness of her cat, Chatty Cathy.

Later that day, from the ICU at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport, she posted again: “When I was a little girl, I would grab the Sears catalogue and circle my ‘wishes.’ I usually never received any of the items, but it always would make me feel good inside. … So during my time here in the hospital, (I’m) putting together a wish list of things I love, and make me smile. It helps to get me through these days in isolation ICU and focus on beauty instead of all these machines and monitors.”

Beneath that message, she posted photos of bejeweled dragonflies, their wings spread wide, their direction strong and clear.

Dimitriadis grew up in New York’s Hudson Valley and didn’t get past junior high school. But as an adult in Connecticut, she had three children, went back to school, earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in psychology, wrote plays, developed her art and launched her business.

On Dec. 3, she posted: “I’m losing the battle with Covid … I’m ready to go and not be in pain anymore. I love you all … This will probably be my last post. Be kind to each other. I love you “

The comments poured in: “Keep fighting!” many said. People prayed for her. A woman apologized “that I was not so open to your help.”

“I can’t lose you,” a grandson wrote.

On the phone, Dimitriadis told her two daughters to be strong, that this loss would make them stronger, recalled Jennifer Ritz Sullivan, 36, the younger daughter.

“She was fine with everything in life,” Sullivan said. “She told us she would always be with us.”

Dimitriadis, who declined to be put on a ventilator, was struggling to breathe through an oxygen tube. She couldn’t talk after that last call, but she posted on Facebook a few songs that comforted her, songs of faith by Josh Groban and Alan Jackson, and Gerry and the Pacemakers’ version of “You’ll Never Walk Alone:”

“At the end of the storm, there’s a golden sky, and the sweet silver song of a lark …”

On Dec. 4, Sullivan received a brief text from her mother: “They’ll be moving me into hospice soon.”

A nurse told Sullivan they would turn down Dimitriadis’s oxygen “and it was just a matter of time.” Sullivan stayed up all night, waiting.

At 10 a.m. on Dec. 5, Sullivan sent her mother one last text:

“Mom, I don’t want to bother you. I know you can’t read this but I want you to know. I’m sitting outside and it is snowing. I am talking to you out loud hoping that you can hear me. I’m thinking about all the good times that we had. Thinking about the way your hands were always the softest, your skin was always warm and soft, and smelt like tea rose …”

“I am so proud to be your daughter,” Sullivan texted. “I love you to the moon and back. I look forward to seeing you again.”

There would be no reply.

A few hours later, while her daughters were on the phone with each other sharing stories and photos, they got the call.

Dimitriadis had posted the details of her decline even though “she’d tried to shield people from pain all her life,” Sullivan said. “But in her final days, dying by herself, she wanted to share with folks that this is possible for anyone to get. She told her story for a reason.”

– – –

When the coronavirus first hit South Florida, Steven Neher, a nurse practitioner, and his longtime partner, Christian Riddell, who works in customer service for Air Canada, decided they needed to be strict about following the guidelines.

Neher worked at the Hillsborough County Falkenburg Road Jail in Tampa, a place, like any enclosed community, where viruses spread easily. But for months, the facility seemed clear of the coronavirus.

“For the longest time, we never knew anybody who got it,” Riddell said. “We hardly went anywhere, and we’d wear masks if we did.”

Neher, 49, and Riddell, 48, figured that as relatively young men with no health problems, “even if we did end up getting it, it might be like a bad flu and we’d just get over it,” Riddell said.

Then, the week before Thanksgiving, a worker at the jail tested positive. Two days later, Neher felt fatigued.

“In the 10 years I’ve known him, he’s never gotten sick to the point where he spent the day in bed, or even a half-day,” Riddell said. They’d met on the dating site Match.com and six months later, “he knew I was his forever.”

The couple ran a home-based business called Tipsy Candles, and their candle-making studio, filled with five-pound jugs of each fragrance, produced a powerful aroma when they cooked.

Suddenly, Neher couldn’t smell a thing. He lost his sense of taste. He went to a clinic for a coronavirus test. Positive.

He “asked for what he called the Trump cocktail, all the medications he thought he needed,” Riddell said. He got vitamins, antibiotics, steroids and an inhaler.

Neher “was like, ‘I have this, and I’m going to get rid of it,'” Riddell recalled.

The couple had a small Thanksgiving at home, and Neher started feeling better. But in early December, he started having trouble breathing.

On Dec. 4, he got a portable oxygen unit. They stacked pillows in their bed to prop Neher up as he slept. Riddell tucked their two dachshunds – Reese and Truffles – into Neher’s arms, and Riddell slept on the floor next to the oxygen machine.

The next day, Neher knew he had to be hospitalized. He couldn’t make it to his front door and needed an ambulance.

“It was hard for him to move, it was hard for him to breathe,” said Denise Bruscino, a critical-care nurse and longtime friend who texted with Neher throughout the days. “He was very anxious because he felt like he couldn’t breathe. He wanted anxiety medication so he could sleep, but they needed to keep him awake and upright to help his breathing.”

Neher’s friends wanted to decorate his room with poster-size photos of his family, friends and dachshunds, but the hospital wouldn’t allow it.

“Covid patients are very alone,” Bruscino said. “The only contact they have is with the staff, who are dressed head to toe in gear with face shields and masks and gowns and gloves and booties. You just barely see our eyes. It’s a very scary time for them.”

Neher was put on a ventilator, and could no longer call.

After a week in the hospital, things were looking up, Riddell said. They texted often.

But on Dec. 27, Riddell texted and nothing came back.

Neher spent his days mostly unconscious, sedated because of the tube in his throat. He’d be awakened only for doctors to check his neurological functions – a squeeze of a nurse’s hand, a blink. Then he’d be put back to sleep, Bruscino said.

“He knew what was going on the whole time, right up to the end,” Riddell said. “When doctors said they were going to intubate him, he gave the thumbs-up. They kept telling us, sometimes it takes 30 days, or 60 or 80, for people to get better. They kept saying that, even the night before he passed away.”

On Dec. 29, Neher’s heart stopped. Doctors restarted it. It didn’t work.

“It all happened so quickly,” Riddell said. When he went to pick up his partner’s backpack, a nurse told Riddell that Neher had “told her that he was scared. And I couldn’t be there with him.”

– – –

Yee Se Choa Ong, 76, worked long hours as a cardiologist in Muskogee, Okla., where he had settled with his wife, Ann, after medical school.

Growing up in the Philippines, Ong knew about the medical needs of rural areas, and Oklahoma, which ranks near the top in the United States for rates of heart and lung disease, seemed a place where he could help.

For more than four decades, Ong and his wife – a Kentucky native with a master’s in child mental health – devoted themselves to their clinic, their children hanging out in a play area as Ong finished his rounds.

As the coronavirus hit the area hard – Muskogee County has lost 58 residents – and the town’s small hospital was overwhelmed, Ong’s hours got longer.

“He had patients in the hospital who were dying their last breath on this earth and they said, ‘This can’t be covid, you must be mistaken, covid is a hoax to make Trump look bad,'” said Ong’s daughter, Jasmine Ong, 43, a veterinary student in Colorado.

On a Thanksgiving Zoom call, Ong told Jasmine that the hospital was full. A couple of days later, around midnight on Nov. 28, Ong collapsed – probably from exhaustion – at the hospital while taking care of covid patients. He hit his head and suffered a traumatic brain injury.

Hospitalized in Tulsa, he seemed to be recovering, and kept asking nurses to let him have his cellphone and clothes so he could get back to work. He even tried to recruit one of his nurses to come work for him in Muskogee.

On their video chats, Ong told his daughter he wanted to take a long road trip to see her in Colorado, then drive to see her brother Emil in the Bay Area. Ong also wanted to go back to his home city of Cabanatuan in the Philippines, which he had not visited since 1972, to see his siblings again and help poor patients there. Jasmine could be his medical assistant, he said.

“He kept making plans for the future,” Jasmine said.

But on Dec. 16, he began to have trouble breathing. Both he and Ann – who had been at his bedside the whole time – tested positive for the coronavirus. His conditioned worsened rapidly, he was quickly put on a ventilator, and he died Dec. 21, with Ann holding his hand.

Earlier that night, she had held the phone to his ear so Jasmine and her brother could say their goodbyes.

“I just said all the things you say to your father when you know he’s going to die,” Jasmine said, “that you love him and you’re very proud of him and thanks for being my dad and doing everything you’ve done for me.”

Jasmine blames the loss – to her family and to Muskogee – on Oklahoma’s leaders, chief among them Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican and Trump acolyte who has resisted a mask mandate as the virus has ravaged the state.

“You have blood on your hands – make no mistake,” she wrote on Facebook. “You have deprived an entire community of one of its greatest champions and hardest workers.”

– – –

On his last day, Jim Matzorkis told his daughter he was feeling a little better – but he didn’t want to jinx it. There was too much good stuff just ahead. It was five days until Christmas, a week and a half before he would retire as executive director of the Port of Richmond in Northern California’s East Bay. Matzorkis had plans.

His covid case had been relatively mild, at least in comparison with stories he’d heard. Matzorkis, 68, awoke on Thanksgiving morning feeling like he had a cold, or perhaps the flu. He tested positive for the coronavirus a couple of days later but never developed respiratory problems. Then again, he told his family, he never felt “quite right” after that.

He never saw a doctor in person.

“They didn’t want him to come in, because he wasn’t experiencing any of the major symptoms that people are being hospitalized for,” said Ileana Matzorkis, 32, the younger of two daughters born to Jim and his wife, Beverly, his high school sweetheart. “They just did a few e-visits.”

Jim ensconced himself downstairs in their bluff-side home in Montclair, a wooded neighborhood along the Oakland Hills in the Bay Area, quarantining for 10 days while his wife stayed upstairs. Then his doctor told him he was no longer contagious and could resume activities. Matzorkis had plenty of them in mind.

Born to a Greek family, a man of outsized enthusiasm, Matzorkis and his wife had moved to San Francisco for college and taken jobs with Bill Graham Presents, the legendary concert promoter. The job led to an unfortunate brush with fame: In 1977, at the Oakland Coliseum, he was savagely beaten by members of Led Zeppelin’s management and road crew. Matzorkis sued for $2 million and won.

He left the music business and immersed himself in family and his Greek roots, taking his daughters, Melanie and Ileana, to Crete several times – a tradition he asked them to continue even if he were not around.

As Christmas 2020 neared, Matzorkis kept telling his daughters he didn’t feel fully himself. He got fatigued, lacked appetite. Friends checked on him constantly.

He was a person of meticulous routines, and on the night of Dec. 20 he was performing one of them, checking every lock in the house before going to bed. About 11 p.m., “he was coming back from locking an upstairs door, and he yelled out for my mom, and he collapsed in the hallway,” Ileana said. “He knocked down the railing on the stairs when he fell. His heart just stopped.”

Beverly called 911 and tried to perform CPR. Paramedics arrived and did the same, but Matzorkis was gone before his daughters arrived from their nearby homes.

In the wake of his death, and absent an autopsy, his family traced the possibilities. Matzorkis had been on medication for high blood pressure, and several years earlier he had dealt with blood clots.

He’d been in fine health recently, but his past clots made him an almost textbook example of a person vulnerable to covid’s ravages.

“I’m not blaming anyone, but I wish he could have seen a doctor in person,” Ileana said. “Maybe, with his history, someone would have thought about the effects of covid on his heart.”

Matzorkis had been especially keen to resume travel – to Greece, of course, but also to Mexico, where he planned to add to his massive collection of top-shelf tequilas. Instead, his daughters cleaned out his desk at the port, arranged for burial in his family’s plot in Cleveland and helped their mother adjust.

They’ll have a memorial service when conditions allow. “But when will that be – and what will have happened between now and then?” Ileana said. “That’s the scary part.”

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Republicans call for unity but won’t acknowledge Biden won fairly

InternationalJan 18. 2021

By The Washington Post · Amy B Wang

The call for unity came from one of President Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters in Congress, nearly a week after a pro-Trump mob rampaged the U.S. Capitol in a riot that left five people dead.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/9cedc556-4662-4e5b-aff1-046b5a6e41af?ptvads=block&playthrough=false

“What happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was as wrong as wrong can be,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told colleagues during a virtual committee meeting about Democrats’ demands that Trump be removed from office. Now was the time for “healing,” and in Jordan’s opinion, that meant allowing the president to finish out his term.

The committee chairman, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., pressed him on one point. Hadn’t Jordan and more than 140 other Republicans given oxygen to the false conspiracy theory pushed by Trump that motivated the Capitol rioters – that the election had somehow been stolen – when they had voted to object to certifying the electoral college results?

“We all want healing. But in order to get to healing, we need truth, and we need accountability,” McGovern said, adding: “So my question for you is: Will you admit that Joe Biden won fair and square, and the election was not rigged or stolen?”

McGovern’s question was met with 17 seconds of silence before Jordan said Biden would indeed be inaugurated president – a clear dodge of the question about the nature of Biden’s victory.

As Biden prepares to be sworn into office surrounded by more than 20,000 National Guard troops protecting the inauguration from one of the gravest domestic terrorism threats in U.S. history, Democrats and other Trump critics are pushing Republicans to renounce the party’s embrace of the falsehood that inspired the Capitol attack and is motivating many of the Trump supporters vowing to take up arms again.

So far, the efforts have been largely fruitless. Even as much of corporate America threatens to withhold donations from lawmakers who objected to the election results, and social media companies cancel accounts – including Trump’s – spreading the false conspiracy theories, the bulk of elected Republicans continue to follow Trump’s lead in refusing to acknowledge that Biden’s win was legitimate and fair.

“Donald Trump incited the violent part of his base to harm people because he made them believe the Big Lie, that he won by a landslide,” Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., a House impeachment manager, tweeted Saturday. “All Trump has to do to prevent further political violence is say one sentence: ‘the election was not stolen.’ “

But so far, Trump and his allies have refused to do that. In their comments about the election, congressional Republicans have hedged, equivocated and accused Democratsof being divisive – even as they continue to promote a falsehood linked to ongoing violence.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, one of the most outspoken supporters of Trump’s fraud claims, issued a joint statement with a half-dozen other GOP senators on Jan. 2 alleging “unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities.” On Jan. 6, hours after an insurrection forced lawmakers to flee, Cruz voted against certifying the results – then argued it was time for unity the following day.

“We must stand side-by-side as Americans,” Cruz said, even as he continued to defend his objection as “the right thing to do” and called for an electoral commission, implying there was wrongdoing in the 2020 election.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., another Trump ally, acknowledged Biden’s victory but also couched his statement with a proposal for a commission, lending credence to the false notion that there was election fraud that needs to be investigated.

“I really do believe that you pushing (impeachment) is going to further divide our country, further the unrest and possibly incite more violence,” Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz., who voted against certifying the election results, said on Tuesday. “Please, let’s just move on and heal the country.”

The allegation of widespread election fraud has been debunked over and over again. Trump’s lawyers have lost or had tossed out dozens of court cases challenging the results of the election. Dozens of state and local election officials from both parties have affirmed the integrity of their voting processes.

Attorney General William Barr said there was no evidence of widespread fraud. (He has since stepped down.) And on Friday, the Justice Department ended its investigation of the Pennsylvania election – more specifically, into nine ballots found thrown away in the state – saying there was “insufficient evidence to prove criminal intent on the part of the person who discarded the ballots.”

Still, some Trump allies have shifted their message on voter fraud after pressure from outside forces. Dominion Voting Systems, whose voting machines have been at the center of some of the wildest election-related conspiracy theories, has filed several lawsuits against Trump’s lawyers and right-wing media outlets.

When threatened with legal action, a number of Trump’s media allies have apologized for perpetuating the president’s false claims of voter fraud. The conservative magazine American Thinker issued an unprecedented statement of contrition on Friday, retracting several pieces that had falsely accused Dominion of conspiring to steal the election from Trump. Thomas Lifson, the magazine’s editor and publisher, acknowledged those pieces had relied on “discredited sources who have peddled debunked theories” that had “no basis in fact.”

“Industry experts and public officials alike have confirmed that Dominion conducted itself appropriately and that there is simply no evidence to support these claims,” Lifson said in the statement. “It was wrong for us to publish these false statements. We apologize to Dominion for all of the harm this caused them and their employees. We also apologize to our readers for abandoning 9 journalistic principles and misrepresenting Dominion’s track record and its limited role in tabulating votes for the November 2020 election. We regret this grave error.”

Right-leaning news channels Fox News and Newsmax have also aired similar segments walking back prior suggestions of wrongdoing by voting machines manufacturers when faced with possible legal action.

While Republican lawmakers have not faced the same legal liabilities, those who have doubled down on their support for Trump’s claims of election fraud have faced fallout in other ways. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., led efforts to object to Biden’s win and still voted against certifying the electoral college votes even after the Capitol siege. He has since lost a book deal and was condemned by some of his longtime GOP allies and constituents.

On Saturday, Axios reported that the communications director for Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., had quit after the congresswoman’s unapologetic support for QAnon and Trump’s conspiracy theories. Cruz’s communications director left her job this week for similar reasons. Elected officials from Mississippi, Kansas and Missouri who voted against certification have faced growing pressure to state that the election was not stolen or resign.

“Mississippi and the nation must hold U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Reps. Trent Kelly, Steven Palazzo and Michael Guest accountable for their complicity in the lies that Donald Trump has used to foment fear, doubt and, ultimately, insurrection,” stated a Jackson Free-Press editorial this week.

Ten House Republicans ultimately voted with Democrats to impeach Trump on an article of “incitement of insurrection,” and a handful of GOP senators have voiced support for or left open the possibility of voting to convict him.

One of them, Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., has not held back in excoriating Trump for pushing lies and conspiracy theories about the election, and has said the Republican Party is at a crossroads moving forward.

“The violence that Americans witnessed – and that might recur in the coming days – is not a protest gone awry or the work of ‘a few bad apples.’ It is the blossoming of a rotten seed that took root in the Republican Party some time ago and has been nourished by treachery, poor political judgment, and cowardice,” Sasse wrote in a fiery essay published by the Atlantic on Saturday. “… Until last week, many party leaders and consultants thought they could preach the Constitution while winking at QAnon. They can’t. The GOP must reject conspiracy theories or be consumed by them. Now is the time to decide what this party is about.”

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Pence is helping Biden make the transition more normal – but their cooperation has risks for each

InternationalJan 18. 2021Vice President Mike Pence, presiding over Congress’s affirmation of the election results on Jan. 6, passes a document to a staffer. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Bill O’Leary

By The Washington Post · Annie Linskey

When Vice President Mike Pence takes his seat near Joe Biden at the inauguration on Wednesday, he will be symbolically turning his back on President Donald Trump’s baseless assertion of a stolen election and creating the powerful image of a peaceful transfer of power – an image his boss has sought to upend.

That comes after Pence last Thursday called Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to congratulate her, offering her Air Force Two to travel to the inauguration, a courtesy Biden extended to Pence four years ago. Most dramatically, Pence on Jan. 6 rejected efforts to disrupt Congress’s certification of the election results, making him the target of a violent mob as he formalized Biden’s win.

At a time when big factions of each party view the other as contemptible, Biden and Pence are haltingly cooperating to shore up the traditional exchange of power. It’s a dynamic helpful to both, as Biden works to enhance his legitimacy with Republicans and Pence seeks to regain credibility after the Trump years.

William Kristol, who was Vice President Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, said cooperating with Biden lets Pence shape his post-Trump political brand. “Is there a market for ‘civilized Trump acquiescence but not totally crazy’ conservatism? Probably,” Kristol said. “Playing that middle ground – civilized Trumpism with a civil face – isn’t a bad place for him to be, really.”

And for Biden, the Pence link lets him argue that he’s not naive to embrace bipartisanship. “He wants to say that Trump is an aberration both for the country and for the Republican Party,” Kristol said. “From the point of view of his governance, it is good for making that case.”

If the dynamic is helpful to both figures for the moment, it is also fraught. Many Democrats still despise Pence for enabling Trump’s destructiveness for four years and do not want Biden to help rehabilitate him. Pence, meanwhile, hopes to curry favor among the GOP base and potentially challenge Biden in 2024, so working with him now could carry a cost.

The two leaders have never been personally close. But as Trump refuses to acknowledge his election loss, their relationship has quietly become critical – and may be even more so in the coming months if Trump continues to rile up his followers by declaring that he was cheated.

Despite faithfully backing even Trump’s most dubious actions for four years, Pence in recent days has taken on the traditional role, eschewed by Trump, of representing an outgoing administration, for example traveling to California and New York this weekend to bid farewell to military troops.

Four years ago it was Biden who was the outgoing vice president, welcoming Pence as he took office. He offered Pence help settling into the vice-presidential residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory, and he continued calling regularly to check on Pence, aides to both men said, until he ran into trouble with liberals for calling Pence “a decent guy” in early 2019.

They already knew each other by then, having overlapped in Congress for eight years before Biden became vice president. During the Obama administration, Pence joined the GOP House leadership and then became governor of Indiana.

The differences between the two men are evident. They’re separated in age by 17 years – Pence is 61, Biden 78. In Congress, they served in different chambers and different parties, battling on everything from the Iraq War to gay rights, putting them in the same newspaper articles but rarely in the same room.

But they shared courtesies over the years, stemming from a mutual respect for institutions, allies of both men said. During the departure of a president determined to shatter norms, that commonality is suddenly crucial.

“Pence is a gentleman, and he takes the office and the decorum seriously,” said Olivia Troye, a former aide to Pence who left the Trump administration over concerns about its handling of the pandemic and later appeared in an ad endorsing Biden. “At the inauguration, I have no doubt that he will be respectful. That is just the kind of man Pence is. He is not the kind of man who throws tantrums.”

Trump, in contrast, plans to skip the ceremony, making him the first outgoing president to boycott his successor’s inauguration since Andrew Johnson declined to attend President Ulysses Grant’s swearing-in in 1869. Instead, Trump is expected to fly to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Wednesday morning.

Allies of both men now wonder whether Pence will step into the role traditionally occupied by former presidents, especially if Trump is a pariah in his post-presidency or actively works to undermine the Biden administration. That could mean, for example, joining with former presidents to support Biden in moments of national crises.

“I would love to see him fulfill that role, because I think he’s great at it,” said one former Pence aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a former boss. “It’s something that the country needs.”

One person close to Biden, who has not spoken to the president-elect about Pence, said the next few days will further clarify Trump’s standing. Any additional violence from pro-Trump agitators, for example, would make it even more attractive to lean on Pence, the person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

Jen Psaki, Biden’s incoming White House press secretary, said Biden and Pence have not spoken in recent days. Devin O’Malley, a spokesman for Pence, declined to comment for this story.

Many Democrats are loath to give Pence credit after what they consider years of sycophancy to Trump.

“He can’t shed four years of intimate Trumpism by 30 seconds of doing some of the right things,” said Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-N. J, who contracted covid-19 after sheltering in the Capitol with Republican lawmakers refusing to wear masks. Citing Trump’s policies on race, coronavirus and other issues, she said of Pence, “He earned every bit of our skepticism and reluctance to trust him on any level.”

Transportation Secretary-designate Pete Buttigieg memorably summed up Democrats’ scorn for Pence when he was running for the Democratic nomination, calling him “a cheerleader for the porn star presidency.”

Amy Walter, national editor of the Cook Political Report, said the recent assault on the Capitol changed the landscape for the vice president. “When you have people running through the Capitol saying, ‘Hang Mike Pence,’ you don’t have a lot to lose in saying, ‘I’m going to work with the incoming administration,’ ” Walter said.

In presiding over the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress that certified the 2020 election, Pence reprised a role that Biden himself played four years ago. Biden had also faced a party with raw emotions, though not violent ones. As presiding officer, Biden swatted aside several objections and instructed the sergeant-at-arms to remove protesters from the gallery.

Democrats did not challenge the election results in 2016 as forcefully as many Republicans did this time, but they repeatedly noted that Trump had lost the popular vote and received help from Russia. In that tense atmosphere, Biden met with Pence multiple times, hosting Pence and his wife at a lunch in the Naval Observatory just one week after Hillary Clinton conceded.

Biden’s office issued a statement at the time saying the two had discussed their work in Congress and “their friendship dating back many years,” according to a newspaper account. (A Biden transition aide said the suggestion of a long friendship seemed overstated, though it had come from Biden’s vice-presidential office.)

One Biden aide recalled creating binders and briefing top Pence staffers in a “dutiful” attempt to ease the transition. A former Pence aide agreed, saying, “I do think Biden and his team did what they could to make a smooth transition for us.”

After Pence took office in January 2017, Biden regularly reached out, according to two people familiar with their conversations. “Biden did make a habit of staying in touch with Pence until, of course, primary politics made that untenable,” said a Pence confidant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal talks.

The break came, according to this person, in early 2019 as Biden, then considering a presidential run, faced criticism from Democratic activists for calling Pence “a decent guy.” Biden made the comment during a speech at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where he recounted how foreign leaders reacted poorly to a Pence speech because of their dislike for Trump.

Biden described Pence as “a guy who’s a decent guy – our vice president – who stood before this group of allies and leaders and said, ‘I’m here on behalf of President Trump,’ and there was dead silence. Dead silence,” Biden said.

Many Democrats were upset that Biden would characterize Pence as “decent,” given his hostility to gay rights and abortion. Biden had to soften the comment, saying, “There is nothing decent about being anti-LGBTQ rights, and that includes the vice president.”

Wednesday’s inauguration won’t be the first time that Pence has attended a ceremony celebrating Biden’s ascent. In 2009, Pence had just been elected to chair the House Republican Conference – making him the third-ranking House Republican – and he dined on seafood, pheasant and duck at a lunch at the Capitol following the swearing-in ceremony for President Barack Obama and Biden.

By the time Pence came to the House in 2001, Biden had already been a senator for nearly three decades. If Biden is gregarious, Pence is courtly; while Biden’s political persona is that of a friendly neighbor, Pence projects a courteous schoolteacher.

In late 2008, Pence described himself as leading a “cheerful opposition” to the Obama administration. That played out in budget battles, including a hard-fought showdown in 2011. Biden, negotiating with Congress on behalf of the Obama administration, made a proposal to cut about $33 billion in spending, but Pence opposed it as too small-bore.

“By picking a fight and winning this one small step toward fiscal discipline, the American people will see … that we can fight and we can win,” Pence told a tea party rally outside the Capitol.

Pence also criticized the Obama-Biden stance toward Iraq, which in 2010 included withdrawing troops. “To make their point, Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden even voted to deny necessary funding for our troops,” Pence charged in an op-ed in The Washington Times.

But especially by the standards of today’s rhetoric, Pence was not nasty or personal. In June 2010, he chastised fellow Republican Rep. Joe Barton of Texas for accusing the Obama administration of a “shakedown” of BP over the Gulf oil spill, saying in a statement with other Republican leaders that Barton’s comments were “wrong.”

And Pence was gracious in November 2010 when Biden traveled to Indiana. “Obviously, every Hoosier should welcome our president and vice president to the Hoosier state,” Pence said. “The more Indiana and our communities and our economy can be in the forefront of the thinking of this administration, we welcome it.”

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Tipsters, tech-savvy kids, pharmacy hopping: How Americans are landing coronavirus vaccines

InternationalJan 17. 2021Ramona Cohen, 75, waits in line at a Giant grocery store in Washington, D.C. in the hope of getting a leftover dose of the coronavirus vaccine on Jan. 15, 2021. MUST CREDIT: photo for The Washington Post by Amanda Andrade-Rhoades.

By The Washington Post · Fenit Nirappil, Karin Brulliard, Sarah Fowler

Four days into her coronavirus vaccine hunt, Ramona Cohen struck out again.

The Safeway in her Washington, D.C., neighborhood had no doses left after its last Thursday appointment. She still had four pharmacies left to try to a tip from her mail carrier that a grocery store a few miles away was giving away leftover vaccine.

It was another frustrating day in a quest that started Monday, when the city opened registration to those 65 and older. Cohen spent 12 hours that day making futile attempts to book appointments by phone and online, only to be foiled by messages saying no appointments were available or interminable waits on hold. When a health department employee who eventually did pick up suggested she call back the next day, Cohen jokingly vented that she doesn’t even buy green bananas.

“You don’t know what tomorrow brings. We don’t have much time left,” Cohen, 75, said. “I consider myself old as it is, and I want to keep going.”

Millions of American seniors are engaged in similarly frantic hunts for the coronavirus vaccine they qualify to receive – but only if they can get their hands on it.

The expanded availability of the two authorized coronavirus vaccines has unleashed a free-for-all among pandemic-weary Americans clamoring for lifesaving protection and a return to some type of normalcy.

Those searching for a shot face a decentralized system of vaccine distribution operated by cash-strapped public health departments and a disparate network of clinics and medical providers, all crushed by unprecedented demand for a shield against the virus decimating American life.

While many Americans have had no problem getting shots, others like Cohen have spent hours trying to get vaccinated, to no avail. The challenges in vaccinating people mirror the botched rollout of coronavirus testing as a mix of government and private providers navigate unfamiliar terrain while communicating with the public in different ways.

Some vaccine appointment websites crashed almost as soon as they launched. Older Americans are enlisting their kids and grandchildren to stay on the phone and keep refreshing websites until they land an appointment. Tiny intelligence networks are forming around the country to scour for morsels of information on how to get a leg up on the vaccine search.

Claire Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers, said these struggles are unavoidable as the federal government defers distribution to localities without the resources to create a centralized sign-up for vaccines or to hold mass inoculation drives.

“In any way you slice it, the supply is just so limited right now and the number of seniors is so large that there’s no perfect way to do it,” Hannan said in an interview. “It’s going to take time for everyone to get vaccinated, and it’s impossible to schedule everybody at once.”

Ramona Cohen, 75, speaks to an employee at a Safeway grocery store pharmacy in Washington D.C. on Jan. 15, 2021. MUST CREDIT: photo for The Washington Post by Amanda Andrade-Rhoades.

At least 11 million people have received a dose of a coronavirus vaccine so far, according to Washington Post data. The Trump administration has urged states to start vaccinating everyone 65 and older as the pace of injections lag far behind targets. But some experts and health authorities warn the attempt to speed up distribution could lead to false hope and an even more overburdened public health system.

“Ultimately, what we’re concerned about is there’s just not that strong of a supply of vaccine right now,” said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “People have been led to believe there’s vaccine out there, and we’re going to open up the priority scheme. As a result, you now have a lot of people who have been led to believe that the vaccine is available, who are going out and getting in all these lines.”

Some have uncovered creative paths to success in their quests for vaccination.

A 72-year-old Atlanta woman secured coveted vaccinations for herself, her husband and her sister after refreshing her iPhone, iPad and laptop simultaneously until the online appointment page finally loaded.

A 69-year-old retired special education teacher expecting to wait for months lucked out when a central California coast hospital offered extra doses to former volunteers and their loved ones.

A healthy Arkansas man in his mid-30s cut ahead of senior citizens thanks to a family friend who was a pharmacist running a clinic with more doses than patients.

“Personal contacts are unfortunately filling the information void. That has helped me rationalize jumping ahead because I don’t really want to wait for my state to figure out how to be efficient with administering the vaccines,” said the man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid social repercussions. “I am a wealthy White man, so I do feel guilt that my privilege is definitely giving me another advantage in this world, but at the end of the day, I’m making a decision that I think will keep my family safe.”

The start of vaccinations for senior citizens and some essential workers was an early stress-test of mass inoculation drives for the general public. They were quickly overwhelmed.

Maricopa County, the largest in Arizona, upgraded its servers before launching an online portal that promptly crashed. Some Florida counties turned to Eventbrite, a website usually used to find bar crawls and book clubs, to organize vaccination drives. Macomb County in Michigan reported 100,000 hits in the first five minutes of its online system, which was set up to schedule 4,200 appointments.

“Unfortunately, there is not a system in the world that could accommodate that type of volume,” county executive Mark A. Hackel wrote in an email to residents.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plans to encourage people to use VaccineFinder as a national resource for finding shots, but a public search function has not launched while supplies are still limited.

In the meantime, some jurisdictions allow people to leave their name on a waiting list, allowing them to avoid the nonstop flurry of calls and emails dominating vaccine searches elsewhere. But others are banking on being able to break through the logjam with persistence.

Bryce Covert, a New York City writer, has been waking up at dawn daily to help her 67-year-old mother on Long Island secure an appointment since Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced senior citizens would be eligible for vaccines.

But the task is not as simple as booking a flight. The state website directed her to several small medical facilities offering the vaccines, but their online appointment system had error messages and their listed phone numbers led to recordings saying they were out of supply. Covert has spent hours waiting on hold on a state hotline but has yet to speak to a person. By Friday, the small sites were no longer listed and the website for a newly added university hospital hasn’t functioned all morning.

“It feels like I’m trying to get a Beyoncé ticket,” Covert said. “It feels like I’m fighting bots on TicketMaster.”

Ramona Cohen hugs pharmacy manager Kathy Hershey after Hershey gave her a vaccine against covid-19 on Jan. 15, 2021 in Washington D.C. MUST CREDIT: photo for The Washington Post by Amanda Andrade-Rhoades.

The stakes are higher for Covert’s mother than watching a concert. She wants to reunite with her 95-year-old mother who lives in Colorado and has a rapidly deteriorating memory. They called off their last visit in March when the first wave of coronavirus shutdowns started.

After six hours of intermittent refreshing Friday afternoon, Covert secured her mother a Feb. 3 vaccination slot. Covert is hoping for an easier time booking the second shot, allowing her mother to celebrate her grandmother’s 96th birthday in late March.

Those who prevailed in their online appointment hunts said an early start was key to success.

Courtney McAlexander, 35, was working from home in Clarksdale, Miss., on Tuesday afternoon when she picked up a call from her mother. Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves had just announced that senior citizens and those with underlying medical conditions, like McAlexander, who has Type 1 diabetes, now qualify for the vaccine.

That launched a seven-hour blitz for McAlexander and her husband, Kevin Lewellyn, 37, to claim the precious appointments.

“Our millennial skills kicked in and the years of when we were younger trying to get concert tickets from Ticketmaster,” said Alexander. “The website would go down, the website would come back up, and we were just essentially clicking anything we could click to try to get appointments, and we slowly but surely got appointments for myself, my mother and both of his parents.”

They were the lucky ones. The next day, Mississippi announced it had run out of vaccines and could no longer book appointments. The state signed up 52,000 people for shots over the next two weeks.

Reeves told The Post that the high volume was a good sign of widespread interest in the vaccine.

“Even though we certainly had short term challenges, people were willing to do everything they could to either get an appointment online or get through to the call center,” said Reeves, who ordered National Guard staffed drive-through vaccination sites to speed up distribution. “When you flood any system, it’s going to lead to challenges, challenges that we recognize and are now fixing.”

Instead of enduring crashing websites and hold music, other vaccine hunters opted to get offline and take their hunt into the real world.

Glee Noble of Bloomington, Ind., who turns 79 this month, figured she had no chance of getting a shot since the state is prioritizing those older than 80. She would periodically check the state website hoping they would lower the age threshold.

But her 72-year-old asthmatic boyfriend decided to stop waiting and walked two blocks to a county vaccination site at a medical office. He came back vaccinated and urged her to try, too. She lucked out as one of six to receive leftover doses at the end of the day.

“I’m a – knock on wood – fairly healthy almost 79-year-old, and there were people there who were with walkers and wheelchairs and I thought, ‘Oh, I’m a healthy person. I shouldn’t be getting this. People who are frail should be getting this,’ ” Noble recalled.

But she feels less guilty when she remembers hearing nurses fret they wouldn’t vaccinate enough people and would have to keep caring for a crush of covid-19 patients.

Hannan, of the immunization managers group, said the stories of leftover doses suggests broad vaccine networks are hampering, rather than helping, distribution.

“We are seeing the more we spread out the doses to different private sector providers, the less opportunity we have to have large scale vaccination and make sure every dose is used,” Hannan said.

Joel Alpert, a Michigan attorney, tried getting his vaccine appointment by checking daily on a government website. His eyes lit up when he finally saw an available slot at 9:20 a.m. Except the facility was 20 miles away, and his clock read 9:14 a.m.

He turned to a network of friends, relatives and fellow Jewish senior citizens in the Detroit suburbs who would text and email each other tips. Acting on one, Alpert drove 35 minutes to a hospital he heard was processing in-person applications and found an employee holding hundreds of forms. He got a callback offering a Sunday appointment the next day.

“I don’t think that getting a vaccination should be based upon luck or ploys or schemes,” Alpert, 68, said. “I assumed our federal government had some sort of plan, a plan that had been in existence all along. I figured it would be like a military war game that they would be ready for this eventuality.”

In the District, Cohen was determined to find a vaccine – somewhere, anywhere. She has a cousin who has cancer, and she would like to visit her. She has a family function in Arizona in April, but she doesn’t want to get on a plane until she’s been vaccinated.

She misses going to her synagogue. She misses hugs. So Cohen, who works at a law firm, continued to plot new strategies.

On Friday afternoon, she hit a downtown Giant supermarket, where an employee told her they had tossed three unused vials the night before. Cohen took her spot behind one person also hoping for leftovers, and soon the queue grew to about 20.

After the last appointment, the pharmacy had two doses left – and finally, on day five of her quest, Cohen got her shot.

“I’m so relieved. It overcame any of the despair and the frustration,” she said shortly after. “But I feel bad for everybody else who can’t get it.”

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The GOP’s looming choice: whether to make sure former President Trump remains former President Trump

InternationalJan 17. 2021

By The Washington Post · Aaron Blake

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump will not be removed from office before President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated Wednesday.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/0cbea2ec-55e4-46d7-9988-6e652913dd27?ptvads=block&playthrough=false

As the House impeached Trump for a second time last week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., sent word that the Senate wouldn’t begin an impeachment trial immediately. And as The Washington Post’s Seung Min Kim reports, there is a real question about just how quickly it might proceed – especially given the need to confirm members of Biden’s Cabinet and to consider Biden’s new proposal for a $1.9 trillion coronavirus package.

But what’s evident is that we’re headed for an impeachment trial not for a president – but for a former president. And there’s reason to believe that could change the political calculus for Republicans, even Trump’s conviction might remain unlikely. That’s because it could provide them cover to do what many of them really want to do, which is to try to rid themselves of Trump moving forward.

Republican pushback on impeachment has often been focused – as was the pushback on he Russia investigation – on the idea that it was an attempt to overturn the 2016 election. That’s now off the table. Trump will complete his term. Any punishment will have no bearing on the ability of the man who was elected for four years to serve those four years.

But there is a clear and obvious motivation for Republicans who might not have done so previously to consider convicting Trump, even as it will remain politically difficult.

For weeks after the 2020 election, those around Trump sent word that he might run again in 2024. It was an odd thing to be talking about at a time in which they were saying he had actually won and that evidence would soon be presented to that effect (that evidence is still nonexistent). But at its basest political level, it seemed to send a message to Republican officeholders who might go wobbly that he intended to stick around and that they had better stick up for him.

Most of that was before Trump supporters tried to hijack the seat of American government last week, though. Since then, all of it has been cast in a new light. Even many of those who entertained or fomented Trump’s conspiracy theories about the election have gotten a reality check about the true cost of supporting an effort that alleged a stolen election. And even if they don’t think Trump’s conduct was impeachable or worthy of removal, they have a very good idea of just how things can spiral out of control if he’s still around.

A historic number of Trump’s fellow Republicans in the House did vote to impeach, even as that historic number only amounted to 10. But others who opposed impeachment faulted Trump, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.,, and fewer actually spent any time truly defending him. Perhaps most notably, McConnell sent a significant signal that he might vote to convict Trump in the Senate.

To convict Trump in the Senate, there would need to be more GOP votes against him (about 17) than in the House – despite the much smaller chamber. But Senate Republicans have generally expressed more concern about Trump’s actions than have their House colleagues. They also, unlike their House colleagues, won’t be voting on a president who sits in office at that time.

According to The Washington Post’s latest whip count, at least 12 Republicans have suggested they would be open to conviction.

There would be plenty of repercussions involved, but with Trump’s removal now off the table, the big political impact would be on his disqualification. This would require a separate vote, but it’s extremely difficult to see GOP senators convicting him without taking that extra step. How would you let a guy who you would be saying incited an insurrection – as the impeachment article charges – return to the office from which he allegedly did just that? It would seem a formality at that point. In addition, it might require only a simple majority vote rather than 67, though that’s somewhat of an open legal question.

And all the details aside, this could also be the most immediate potential benefit for the GOP. While they’ve frequently given Trump the fealty he demands over his four years in office, it has generally been a matter of his leverage and their desire to use his presidency to accomplish things. They’ve now lost that power. The GOP’s losses in Trump’s reelection bid, combined with the House and the Senate, mark the first time a party has lost all three in four years since 1932. This is reportedly a factor for McConnell, and it could given the party the extra incentive to try to turn the page.

Trump looming over 2024 makes turning that page difficult. Even if he doesn’t actually plan to run, he has plenty of incentive to venture in that direction to keep himself relevant and give himself a platform. And a potential nightmare scenario for the GOP – which too few have considered at this point – is if, in light of the relatively mild rebukes he’s received from his party and if the party were to flirt with nominating another candidate, he were to go the third-party route. Trump repeatedly threatened to do this in 2016, but it would be potentially catastrophic for the party in 2024, given how much of a base he’s built, even if that base were even significantly diminished. (See: Theodore Roosevelt, Bull Moose.)

Thus far, the base is diminished, with a Pew Research Center poll released Friday showing just 60 percent of Republicans approve of him – a marked decline from any previous point in his presidency. But it’s still a majority.

The choice ahead for Republicans is whether they feel he should be held accountable for what happened last week, yes. But just as politics have colored their previous decisions about him, so, too, will they color this one. To the extent it’s a political calculation, it will be about whether preventing Trump from storming the party again in 2024 will be worth the immediate pain of banishing him from doing so.

That political calculation has been rather simple for the GOP for four years, but it changes once he’s out of office. And allowing him to skate on this is extremely fraught for them, as well.

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Man who shot video of fatal Capitol shooting is arrested, remains focus of political storm

InternationalJan 17. 2021John Earle Sullivan, 26, after his arrest Saturday in Utah on charges of participating in the attack on the U.S. Capitol. MUST CREDIT: TCSO/Tooele County Sheriff’s Office.

By The Washington Post · Tom Jackman, Marissa J. Lang, Jon Swaine

WASHINGTON – He’s a speed skater. He organizes protests, alienating activists on both ends of the political spectrum. He drove an Uber. And his 40-minute video following rioters through the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, capturing the fatal shooting of a Trump supporter, has placed John Earle Sullivan – “Activist John” – at the center of a conservative campaign to blame liberal groups for the Capitol siege.

The video also landed him in jail. Federal authorities tracking down Capitol trespassers watched Sullivan’s video, interviewed him and then obtained warrants Thursday charging him with causing a civil disorder, trespassing and disorderly conduct. Sullivan repeatedly exhorted rioters to enter the building and overwhelm police, and seemed to convince Capitol Police officers to walk away from the glass door entry to the House Speaker’s Lobby, his video shows. Moments later, with Sullivan screaming warnings about a gun, rioter Ashli Babbitt is shot and killed on the video by a Capitol Police officer.

Sullivan later claimed he was there to document – not participate – in the event.

His video attracted the attention of right wing leaders, including President Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who said it showed that antifa was the true organizer of the attack; and Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala), who called Sullivan a “BLM & fascist #ANTIFA supporter arrested for role in Capitol assaults.”

But Sullivan is hardly the darling of the left. He began organizing protests in Utah last year, and at one of the first, one of the protesters shot a motorist, said Lex Scott, a racial justice organizer who founded Black Lives Matter Utah more than seven years ago.

“He came in to chase clout and get those media headlines,” Scott said of Sullivan. “Now, it’s not my place to ever tell anyone how to be an activist or what their goals should be . . . but the fact is that Black Lives Matter Utah has never had one arrest in seven years. We’ve never caused any violence, any destruction of property and this man comes in here and taints our reputation in a day.”

Activists in Utah have spent months condemning Sullivan, who has at turns identified himself as a racial justice protester and leftist documentarian, and warned others to be leery of his motives and any events he sponsored.

“John Sullivan has exploited Black people, profited off of our pain and hurt the movement,” said Tyeise Bellamy, the founder of Black Lives for Humanity Movement, a Salt Lake City group that works with the homeless. “We’ve been telling people this for months. So now, to see him up there as this poster child for folks to say, ‘look, look, look, look, it was Black Lives Matter all along – or antifa all along,’ we will not allow you to say he is part of our movement to justify the destruction, insecurity and racism of the right.”

Sullivan is one of four sons of Jack and Lisa Sullivan who grew up in Stafford, Va., about 45 miles from Washington. A friend, who requested anonymity to discuss Sullivan’s personal history, said the boys were adopted and raised in the Mormon faith and had an isolated, conservative upbringing. His brother James is a conservative activist. His parents, who now live in Utah, did not return calls Friday seeking comment.

The boys enjoyed inline skating, and John Sullivan and one of his brothers later switched to the ice and began speed skating. There is a 400-meter speed-skating rink in Kearns, Utah, near Salt Lake City, where Olympic-caliber skaters train, and Sullivan moved there to train, then tried to qualify for the 2018 Winter Olympics. He did not make the U.S. team. He also began driving an Uber, and the company used him in a blog and television commercial.

The first time racial justice activists in Utah had heard of Sullivan, he was leading marches last year through the streets of Provo – the home city of Brigham Young University, which according to the U.S. Census Bureau has a Black population of less than 1 percent.

He organized rallies under a group he formed and dubbed Insurgence USA, which activists said Sullivan used to fundraise and solicit donations from individuals who felt compelled to support racial justice movements in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. His website sells “Rise Against the Norm” T-shirts, “Insurgence USA” face masks and other merchandise.

As near daily protests exploded in cities around the country, Sullivan’s demonstrations attracted large crowds despite his dubious history as an organizer, Black Lives Matter Utah organizer Scott said.

He held rallies featuring Black organizers. But attendees said one demonstration also featured members of the Proud Boys, an all-male extremist group with ties to white nationalism. The Proud Boys who attended, organizers said, told the crowd they wished to make peace with Black activists.

In a different demonstration on June 29, Sullivan led crowds through the heavily trafficked streets of Provo. Authorities later said the group did not secure a permit, KSL- TV reported. Cars zipped past, some nearly hitting protesters who marched on the asphalt, said Bellamy, who was there.

As night fell, the crowd began to thin. Just after 8:30 p.m., a large, white SUV sped toward the group, knocking several protesters out of the way. Police said a man fired at the driver, who suffered non-life threatening wounds and later drove himself to the hospital. The alleged shooter was arrested on charges of attempted aggravated murder, aggravated assault, rioting and threatening the use of a weapon in a fight and Sullivan was charged with rioting. The case is pending.

Black Lives Matter organizers say the fallout stemming from that protest has been broad and far-reaching, sullying the reputation of Black Lives Matter Utah, an organization that had previously held meetings with officials including Sen. Mitt Romney, Gov. Gary Herbert and Sen. Mike Lee – all Republicans – and conducted peaceful marches and vigils throughout the state. Racial justice protests in Salt Lake City, Provo and other parts of the state have since been dogged by armed counterdemonstrators who often show up in tactical gear.

Then later in the summer, Sullivan helped organize a pro-gun rights rally and marched with self-styled militia members at the Utah Capitol, KSL-TV reported, further infuriating Black activists.

Sullivan’s reputation as an agitator and bad actor has followed him into other protest circles. In encrypted chats among left-leaning activists, organizers routinely flag posts by Sullivan to new members, saying “don’t trust that guy” and, pointing to his past ties with the Proud Boys, “he’s a double agent.”

Sullivan visited Washington in December to observe his brother James speak at the Million MAGA march. At one point Sullivan was surrounded and frisked by Proud Boys who suspected he was antifa, said his friend, who saw the incident. The friend said that episode led him to try to blend in with those around him on Jan 6. “I’m sure that that experience in a large way affected his behavior at the Capitol.”

Sullivan’s 40-minute video begins with him already on a terrace of the Capitol, looking out at the roiling mob. Then, he follows rioters as they confront police at various points and enter the Capitol, and can be heard shouting, “We accomplished this s—. We did this together…We are all a part of this history” and “Let’s burn this s— down.”

Sullivan wanders the halls of the Capitol, always recording, refusing officers’ commands to leave, the video shows. Eventually, he joins a group pressing up against the glass doors to the Speaker’s Lobby, and implores the officers there to leave for their own safety. “I don’t want you to get hurt,” Sullivan can be heard saying. “We will make a path.” The officers then leave, and seconds later Babbitt is killed as she tries to climb into the lobby.

Sullivan has called himself a “video journalist,” but admitted to the FBI that he has no connections to any media outlet. The Washington Post licensed a portion of his video for a story on the shooting.

As conservative media outlets began pointing to him as evidence of liberal involvement in the riot, Sullivan posted a video on YouTube on Jan. 9 explaining his actions. “I was there just to document the events and to be a part of history,” Sullivan said in the video. He said he was not a member of Black Lives Matter, but did support the black community.

“I’m not here to assert myself or my beliefs on other people,” Sullivan said. “I just want to give people the footage, the video.”

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine on Monday, Sullivan explained his seemingly boisterous support of the rioters. He said he needed to blend in, since he was dressed in black with no red hat or MAGA gear. “I was worried about people recognizing me and thinking that I was antifa or, like, BLM or whatever,” Sullivan said. “I had to relate to these people, and build trust in the short amount of time I had there to get where I need to go: To the front of the crowd to see the dynamic between the police and the protesters.”

Sullivan was accompanied for some of his time in the Capitol by Jade Sacker, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker who has been making a documentary about Sullivan and his brother James since last year.

Sacker, a freelancer who has worked for publications including Foreign Policy and Atlas Obscura, said that she did not witness the Babbitt shooting and that she had urged Sullivan at one point not to cause any damage.

“I was just there to document what was going on,” said Sacker. “I don’t think that John is violent. And I certainly don’t think that it was ever his intention to hurt anyone.”

Sullivan was taken into custody in Tooele County, Utah, on Thursday after the FBI obtained a warrant for his arrest in Washington. He made his first appearance in federal court in Salt Lake City on Friday afternoon, and was ordered released pending a detention hearing next week. Sullivan’s lawyer, Mary Corporon, said Friday evening that she had no comment.

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Pompeo’s last-minute actions on foreign policy will complicate Biden’s plans

InternationalJan 17. 2021WILMINGTON, DE ‐ January 15, 2021: President- elect Joe Biden in Wilmington, Del., on Jan. 15, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman.

By The Washington Post · Karen DeYoung

WASHINGTON – While President Donald Trump and many of his top aides seem to have left the nation’s business behind, largely disappearing from view in the days since Joe Biden’s election was formalized and Trump-inspired violence erupted, one corner of the administration has moved into overdrive.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made near-daily announcements of major foreign policy actions, many of which appear designed to cement Trump priorities and create roadblocks to new directions already charted by the incoming Biden team.

Among the barriers put in place are the relisting of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, the designation of Yemen’s Houthi rebels as terrorists, the removal of long-standing restrictions on contacts between senior U.S. officials and their Taiwanese counterparts, the recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the long-contested Western Sahara, the fast-track approval of controversial arms sales and a slew of new sanctions against Iran.

All of those changes can be undone. But each complicates the challenges Biden will face in putting his own stamp on policy.

Biden officials express little doubt that most, if not all, of them are motivated by domestic politics. But they have not spoken out against them, in part because of the “one president at a time” tradition regarding U.S. national security interests overseas.

“We’ve taken note of these last-minute maneuvers,” said a senior Biden transition official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity before the inauguration. Each is being reviewed, the official said, “and the incoming administration will render a verdict based exclusively on one criterion: the national interest.”

A White House official cited differing rationales for several of the recent moves, saying that some of them had been under consideration for some time. “It’s not like one size fits all,” the official said.

Trump adviser Jared Kushner pushed for recent decisions on matters such as Morocco and arms sales to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia as part of the payoff for Arab countries that agreed to normalize relations with Israel. Much of the rest, including actions on Cuba and Taiwan, “Pompeo just kind of did on his own,” the official said.

“I wouldn’t dispute that there were a lot of domestic political incentives for Pompeo to give a final push on Cuba, Iran and Taiwan,” said another person with direct knowledge of the policy process. Officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

While Biden has remained silent, lawmakers have spoken out against some of the actions. Both Republicans and Democrats have criticized the Houthi designation – announced Jan. 10, to take effect the day before Biden’s inauguration – as have numerous humanitarian organizations working to keep millions of Yemenis from starving.

U.S. involvement in the Yemen war has long been controversial. Saudi Arabia is accused of causing thousands of civilian deaths in its fight against the Iranian-backed Houthis who control much of the country.

Bipartisan majorities, with no sympathy for Iran or the Houthis, have cited human rights concerns in repeated efforts to block Yemen-used military assistance to the Saudis, and their partner in the war, the United Arab Emirates, with measures that Trump has vetoed or otherwise circumvented.

Objections to the terrorist designation center primarily on what Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman James Risch, R-Idaho, and House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking Republican Michael McCaul of Texas said would be “devastating humanitarian impacts.”

Yemen, with more than 24 million people who rely on outside assistance for survival, imports about 90 percent of its food. Under the designation, aid organizations helping starving Yemenis in Houthi areas could be charged with criminal acts. “Good intentions must not be eclipsed by significant unintended consequences,” Risch and McCaul said in a statement Monday following Pompeo’s announcement.

Treasury officials, including Secretary Steven Mnuchin, opposed the designation, arguing that the action was so rushed that sanctions waivers to ensure the steady flow of food and other supplies to civilians were not ready to be implemented.

Others objected internally based on concerns that it would undermine ongoing diplomatic efforts to resolve the war and accomplish little. “The reason there was dissent . . . was the question: What do we get from this? What leverage does it give us” in pushing a diplomatic solution, the person familiar with the process said. “The feeling from a lot of us was that it doesn’t give us much.”

Biden has said that he intends to cut back on arms sales to the Saudis and push for more diplomacy and humanitarian assistance for Yemen. But reversing the Houthi designation cannot be done with the stroke of a pen. Under statute, it requires an act of Congress, or an administration review, after which the secretary of state finds that changed circumstances on the ground of U.S. national security warrant a reversal.

Pompeo’s main motivation appeared to be another opportunity to cast Iran as the primary generator of problems in the Middle East and to place additional obstacles in Biden’s path. The administration emphatically opposes his plans to reenter the international nuclear deal with Tehran that Trump exited in 2018.

Both Biden and the Iranians have said they are willing to trade “compliance for compliance,” with each side reversing the steps they have taken outside the parameters of the agreement since the U.S. withdrawal. For Iran, that means reversing the activation of additional uranium-enriching centrifuges, and a return to sharp limits on the quantity and quality of enriched material.

For the United States, it means lifting of all nuclear-related sanctions, as agreed in the deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). But most U.S. sanctions – charging terrorism support, ballistic missile development and other types of activity – remain, and Pompeo has piled on even more measures in recent days.

Iran is expected to demand that those sanctions – which have been secondarily applied to other nations doing business in Iran, including in Europe – also be eased. But any effort by Biden to negotiate over them will probably be time-consuming and run into congressional objections. In an additional land mine laid this past week, Pompeo declared, in a Wednesday announcement that puzzled intelligence and counterterrorism experts who saw no substantive evidence, that Iran is the now the “new home base” and “operational headquarters” for al-Qaida.

Biden’s argument is that once the nuclear issue is back on track – with Iran’s breakout time for production of enough fissile material to build a weapon put back from two or three months to at least one year, where it was when Trump quit the deal – he will build international and domestic support and push for additional agreements.

But time is short to unravel and analyze the tangle of new measures that the current administration has put in place, and tempers are high all around. In Iran, where the economy is foundering, parliament has decreed that sanctions must be lifted by early February or Iran itself will leave the JCPOA. Iran is also about to enter into a heated political season, with presidential elections scheduled for early summer.

Pompeo has spent much of the past year berating China and arguing that the Trump administration’s hard-line policies are one of the many areas in which the president “flipped the script” on traditional appeasement. Biden has said he shares concerns about Chinese territorial and trade aggression, but he wants to review the situation and join with like-minded democracies, particularly in Europe, in confronting Beijing.

China experts see the most volatile part of the relationship as Taiwan, where the administration has softened restrictions on arms sales and diplomatic relations that were enshrined decades ago in laws governing U.S.-China relations.

Most recently, Pompeo announced Jan. 9 that he was removing all “self-imposed restrictions” on interactions between high-level U.S. officials, including in the military, with their Taiwanese counterparts. The United States, he said, would no longer “appease the Communist regime in Beijing.”

The State Department scheduled a visit to Taipei this past week by Kelly Craft, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, following precedent-shattering trips there last summer by senior American delegations. The trip did not take place, however, after Pompeo abruptly canceled all scheduled diplomatic travel – including his own – on Tuesday, citing the need to assist in the change of administrations here.

Like many of the other last-minute administration actions, Biden could simply reverse the new Taiwan policies if he chooses. But Pompeo has put him in a difficult position, requiring an overt act that could be seen as pro-China at a time when he is still developing and implementing his own strategic posture toward Beijing.

“Why are they doing these things?” asked a former senior U.S. diplomat, speculating as to Pompeo’s additional motivation. “The fact is that a substantial number of extreme right-wing representatives [in Congress] have never bought the idea of normalization with China. And the embers of ‘two Chinas’ never fully died out.

“I’m inclined to believe this is heavily Pompeo-driven, as opposed to Trump thinking things up. I believe Pompeo is laying down these markers as a campaign platform for 2024,” the former diplomat said.

Biden has also said he intends to return to the diplomatic normalization with Cuba established under the Obama administration, a task made more difficult this past week by Pompeo’s re-designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism.

The move was widely seen as a gift to what future Republican presidential candidates see as an important domestic constituency – Cuban American voters in southern Florida – with little credible policy basis. Reversing it will be important to Biden’s plans, but it will be time-consuming.

U.S. law outlines two paths to reverse the designation. In the first, the president must certify to Congress that there has been “a fundamental change in the leadership and policies of the government of the country concerned,” that “government is not supporting acts of international terrorism” and that it will not in the future.

For the second, the president must notify Congress, 45 days before a recission takes place, that the government in question has not provided support for acts of international terrorism over the previous six months, and that it promises it will not.

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A lab in Italy reported a cluster of the U.K. coronavirus variant. But that wasn’t enough to stop the spread.

InternationalJan 17. 2021Photo by: Federica Valabrega — For the Washington Post

By The Washington Post · Chico Harlan, Stefano Pitrelli

TERAMO, Italy – The virus hunter saw the apparent pattern come into view over several hours in late December, as he studied genetic sequences from positive coronavirus tests in his region. He found four cases involving the new, highly infectious British variant, in the same hilltop town.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/08388dcf-ca8b-405e-95d1-9fd5f6671cca?ptvads=block&playthrough=false

“A cluster,” said Alessio Lorusso, the virologist.

His findings were a rare, initial insight into the mutated forms of the virus reaching new parts of the world. Most countries, including the United States and across Europe, do not perform enough genomic surveillance to adequately track the virus’s changes – to the alarm of disease control agencies, which warn that governments could be blind to dangerous mutations.

But the scenario in Italy’s mountainous center shows how even when a worrisome variant is detected early, governments can miss the narrow window to mount a rapid response and limit the spread. Containment measures come too late, in the wait for more substantial evidence. And the virus races ahead.

Lorusso’s director quickly notified the affected region of the four cases. But it took more than two weeks for any official confirmation to reach the town of Guardiagrele and its population of 9,000. During that time, overall coronavirus cases there tripled, from 35 on Dec. 28 to more than 100 by mid-January. Of those, 29 have been confirmed to involve the British variant, compared with the 76 cases identified in the entire United States, where surveillance is highly lacking.

No targeted restrictions have been imposed on Guardiagrele or the surrounding region of Abruzzo, though there is a plan to soon perform widespread testing.

In Britain, the variant – known officially as B.1.1.7 – has forced a national lockdown, after the mutation defied regional measures that had curbed less transmissible strains. Though the variant appears responsive to vaccines and is not thought to be more deadly, it has spread so widely, and so overwhelmed hospitals, that it is causing the death toll to skyrocket, as well. In recent days, Britain has seen more per capita deaths than any other populous country, including the United States.

Scientists worry a similar escalation could follow elsewhere. On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned the variant could become dominant in the United States by March. The timeline could be even shorter for some countries in Europe.

“If you don’t act now, in two months, in all of Europe, we’ll have the British variant taking the place of the current ones,” said Walter Ricciardi, a World Health Organization adviser to Italy’s Health Ministry.

He said that if a highly transmissible variant is detected in a particular place, it is important to act quickly, with widespread testing and restrictions on movement.

“You have to immediately lock down the area,” Ricciardi said.

Virologist Alessio Lorusso oversees genetic analysis of coronavirus samples in Teramo, Italy. MUST CREDIT: photo for The Washington Post by Federica Valabrega.

To the extent that Italy has an early warning system, it depends on scientists such as Lorusso, 39, a bearded man who could pass for a retired wrestler outside the confines of his white-walled lab. He says he “likes viruses.” He has spent much of the past year working 14-hour days, squinting at genomic code, watching SARS-CoV-2 evolve. The lab where he works, the Experimental Zooprophylactic Institute of Teramo, has now identified more than 50 instances of the British variant in the Abruzzo region. But the British variant is far from the dominant strain in the area.

“The variant with the greatest fitness will replace the others,” he said. “It’s just a fact.”

For Lorusso and his lab, the British variant is fairly easy to hunt down. That’s because it leaves a telltale: One of the most commonly used coronavirus testing machines, produced by the company Thermo Fisher, checks for the presence of three genes. In the British variant, one of those genes is missing. For somebody with the B.1.1.7 strain, the test result looks puzzling: positive-negative-positive.

Such a readout is hardly a definitive indication of B.1.1.7; some less concerning variants can yield a similar result. But it provides a starting point, and Lorusso’s lab can then select swabs for deeper analysis.

Walking through the lab this past week, Lorusso stopped at the area where the swabs were being processed – 96 at a time, several thousand per day. In the room with the Thermo Fisher machine, he took a look at some recent test results – each corresponding to a person, who had been awaiting news of the outcome. In one batch of 96, nobody had the positive-negative-positive pattern. But in the next batch, 12 did.

Lorusso sat down at a computer, logging on to a system that tracks the personal information of everyone swabbed.

He checked for the home address of the one person who’d tested positive-negative-positive.

Guardiagrele.

He checked another.

Guardiagrele.

“Same neighborhood,” he said.

He’d still have to sequence the code to know if it was B.1.1.7. But already, there was a growing number of newly arrived swabs revealing that same pattern.

– – –

Italy reported its first detected case involving the British variant on Dec. 20, in a traveler who had arrived from Britain. The government in Rome stopped flights from the United Kingdom the same day.

But even by then, the variant was apparently already circulating in Italy.

Lorusso spotted the initial four cases from Guardiagrele – three within one family – on Dec. 26, and by Dec. 30, according to a document, the lab had informed regional government officials.

Regional officials, in turn, said they needed national government confirmation of the lab results. Into mid-January, the region was insisting there was still no “definitive proof” of a variant that might be spreading differently.

“The region never said to me, ‘Dear mayor, there is a cluster in your town of the most infectious variant, so you’d better put a stop to everything,’ ” said Guardiagrele’s mayor, Donatello Di Prinzio. “Had that been the case, I would have taken all the required actions.”

Instead, after the end of a national holiday lockdown, all of Abruzzo – including his town – landed back in the lightest tier of Italian restrictions, with shops and hair salons open, and restaurants allowed to offered dine-in service until 6 p.m.

Meanwhile, coronavirus infections in the town were rising rapidly, reaching a point far exceeding anything from earlier waves. A local media report pointed to the variant, and there was speculation about it on Facebook. But without official word, the mayor said he didn’t want to be alarmist.

“I only talk when there is data on my hand and official information,” he said.

While he waited, Di Prinzio asked the region to send civil protection officers, who could supplement a depleted local police unit and help enforce basic distancing measures.

Then, on Tuesday, he was invited to a video conference with a provincial official and mayors from seven other towns that were seeing significant case increases. The authorities agreed to launch a mass-testing campaign in those towns, starting in Guardiagrele. It would kick off Jan. 23 – more than three weeks after Lorusso’s initial findings.

One of the provincial officials involved with the health response, Giuseppe Torzi, said “measures need to be stricter” in places with the variant, but the crux of the response would be the same: try to isolate the positive cases and reduce contacts.

“I could list situations where there’s no English variant and yet there’s been a monstrous increase,” Torzi said. “So it’s not as if the other virus is some joke.”

– – –

On Friday, Guardiagrele received definitive word of the variant’s arrival, but not because of a national confirmation. Instead, Lorusso’s lab notified the region, as well as a provincial health director, of updated, more extensive findings. Torzi called the mayor, feeling this time no further research was needed.

The province of Chieti, one portion of Abruzzo, had 51 cases of the variant.

Twenty-nine of those were in Guardiagrele.

That news coincided with a national government order that a large part of the country, including the Abruzzo region, would on the basis of infection rates be classified in the middle tier of coronavirus restrictions, which includes the closure of restaurants for in-person dining. Nonessential travel between regions will be banned through mid-February. But there has been no indication that Guardiagrele would be sealed off, as has happened in numerous hot spot Italian towns throughout the past year.

Speaking to The Washington Post by phone on Friday, Di Prinzio said he would redouble his request for residents to wear masks and keep their distance. He’d already closed a market. Nothing else would change. Even if he wanted to impose a lockdown, he said there was little point; other towns might well have the same problem, and it would have to be a coordinated effort.

Another lab doing genomic sequencing, at the University of Chieti, said it had traced a case in one town, San Giovanni Teatino, back to Guardiagrele, carried by a woman who works there.

“For such reason,” the university wrote to the region, “it is possible to hypothesize that in these cases we are witnessing a progressive expansion of such a variant across the territory.”

Lorusso, who said he had not been monitoring the policy response in the wake of his findings, said he realized people around the world were suddenly scrambling to understand the implications of this variant and others. He emphasized that even the most infectious strain could be curbed with rigorous distancing, mask-wearing and a reduction in social contact. Over the course of a day at the lab, he mentioned it so many times that he came to seem almost protective of the virus. The changes in SARS-CoV-2 were logical, not alarming, he said. The spread of the British variant, and any other highly infectious strains, depended on the behavior and decisions of humans.

“Viruses search for a host,” he said. “It’s human habits that make the pandemic.”

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Trump to flee Washington and seek rehabilitation in a MAGA oasis: Florida

InternationalJan 17. 2021President Donald Trump greets visitors and staff members as he walks to board Marine One and depart from the South Lawn at the White House on Tuesday, Jan 12, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford

By The Washington Post · Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump will leave Washington this week politically wounded, silenced on social media and essentially unwelcome in his lifelong hometown of New York.

By migrating instead to Palm Beach, Fla., Trump plans to inhabit an alternate reality of adoration and affirmation. The defeated president will take up residence at his gilded Mar-a-Lago Club, where dues-paying members applaud him whenever he eats meals or mingles on the deck. He is sure to take in the same celebratory fervor whenever he plays golf at one of the two Trump-branded courses nearby.

In Florida – one of only two top battleground states Trump won last November – Trump will be living in a veritable MAGA oasis, to use the acronym for his “Make American Great Again” campaign slogan. South Florida has fast become a hub of right-wing power brokers and media characters, and some of Trump’s adult children are making plans to move to the area.

Even as Trump broods privately over his second impeachment last week and the election he continues to falsely insist he won, his aides are at work to establish a Trump fiefdom in the Sunshine State aimed at maintaining his influence over Republican politics, according to allies and advisers, some of whom requested anonymity to reveal internal discussions.

Some of Trump’s associates are buzzing about a possible presidential library and museum – likely located, yes, in Florida – and about the birth of a family dynasty, should his children, Donald Jr. or Ivanka, someday run for political office. Florida is seen as a better launchpad for the Trumps than New York, given the outgoing president’s popularity in the former. Some in Trump’s orbit are talking up the idea of Ivanka possibly running for Senate in 2022, when the term of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., will be up.

Trump has become something of a pariah in the nation’s capital of Washington and its financial center of New York in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol that he incited, but Florida offers him a place to try to rehabilitate himself.

Newsmax chief executive Christopher Ruddy, a longtime Trump friend and Mar-a-Lago member, predicted that the president would remain a powerful force in politics and the media regardless of his current woes.

“We don’t know what legal issues are going to arise, but discounting those, I think he’s going to remain a global force,” Ruddy said. “I think he’s going to like being post-president more than he liked being president, because you have a lot of the perks without as many of the restrictions.”

Trump may have imagined a mischief-making, mega-rally farewell – complete with a tease about reclaiming the White House in 2024 – to draw attention from President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration and to remind fellow Republicans that he still rules the roost.

But there will be no such grand departure in the wake of the Capitol insurrection.

Trump instead is winding down his presidency largely out of public view, though he still intends to take some actions in his four days remaining as president. There remain sharp disputes among the president and his advisers about a final round of pardons he may issue, including for members of the Trump family, according to people familiar with the discussions. The president continues to talk about wanting to pardon himself, they said.

The White House is a fortress guarded by armed military ahead of Wednesday’s inauguration and now practically deserted. “It looks like a war zone around here,” one official said.

Aides spent last week boxing up their offices and desks – White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ wife, Debbie, was spotted packing a taxidermy bird into an SUV. Aides posed for goodbye photos; snared oversized framed snapshots of Trump’s presidency from West Wing walls; and scavenged for challenge coins and other mementos.

Staffers stood on West Executive Drive for a big send-off Thursday for Larry Kudlow, the National Economic Council director and one of the most well-liked figures in the West Wing.

Four years of roaring commotion are ending in a whimper. An aggrieved Trump has told aides he is uninterested in doing ceremonial events, a senior administration official said.

Other than flying last Tuesday to Texas to autograph a piece of the soaring steel border wall his administration constructed, Trump has demurred on suggestions from advisers to spend his final days touting his achievements and attempting to burnish his legacy.

Rather, Trump has been consumed with anger over his impeachment Wednesday by the House for inciting the Capitol riot, advisers said. He is also upset by the silence from many of his most vigorous defenders, and is nursing feelings of betrayal from Republican congressional leaders, they said.

As aides visited with him to say goodbye and take farewell pictures, Trump complained bitterly about Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and other Republicans who voted to impeach him. “They’ll have primaries, all of them,” one aide recalled Trump saying on Thursday.

Homing in on Rep. Tom Rice, R-S.C., who voted for impeachment, the president referred to himself in the third person and remarked, “You can’t vote against Trump in South Carolina,” according to the aide, who like some others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations.

Some aides have tried to explain to Trump that these and many other members of Congress are angry about the attack and scared for their lives, but the president has often returned to his popularity among Republican voters in their districts and has shown no remorse for his role in the riot, two officials said.

Aides said Trump has occasionally brought up the Georgia Senate races unprompted with them, arguing that he is not to blame for the two Republican incumbents, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, losing both seats in the Jan. 5 runoff elections – and why the candidates, particularly Loeffler, were bad.

Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer, said the president’s state of victimhood fits the narrative he has concocted for his entire life.

“This is the end that he would have scripted for himself, actually,” D’Antonio said. “He has always imagined himself as an embattled person. He’s talked about life itself being a constant struggle for survival and how he’s surrounded by enemies . . . that the world conspires against him and that he is a lonely hero who is underappreciated and besieged.”

One of Trump’s final Oval Office visitors was Mike Lindell, the My Pillow founder and television pitchman, who showed up Friday afternoon brandishing notes that he said were from a lawyer, whom he would not identify, advising to institute “martial law” and install Trump loyalist Kash Patel in the CIA leadership.

Lindell, a vociferous supporter of the president, spent the afternoon at the White House but said in an interview that he left unsatisfied. “I had to make an appointment like everyone else,” he said. “People were lined up to see him.”

Lindell claimed ignorance about the contents of the memo, which was partially captured by a Washington Post photographer as Lindell waited to enter the White House.

“I didn’t know what was in it,” he said. “I didn’t know who some of the people even were.” He explained that the unnamed lawyer asked him, “If you get a meeting, can you drop this off?”

Lindell said he presented his information to the president for about five minutes before Trump referred him to White House Counsel’s Office. He also argued that China and Russia hacked the election, bringing a false article from The American Report, a conspiracy-theory right-wing website, as his evidence.

Lindell said he has been working with a large team to try to prove widespread voter fraud and falsely argued that Trump had won by 11 million votes. “I have spent a lot of money and gone down every rabbit hole in this country,” he said.

But Lindell said Trump was noncommittal on what he’d do with the information and told him to talk to the lawyers, who were dismissive and argued with him.

“They were skeptical,” Lindell said. “They were disinterested, very disinterested. They are giving the president the wrong advice.”

He said the lawyers did not allow him to see Trump again.

With Trump cocooned in the White House, Vice President Mike Pence has looked more like the commander in chief. He visited the Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters last week for a briefing on inauguration security preparations and visited with National Guard soldiers stationed at the Capitol.

On Saturday, Pence departed on a two-day trip to Naval Air Station Lemoore in California and Fort Drum in New York to personally thank service members and to tout the administration’s foreign policy achievements.

Trump is leaving office with his popularity at one of the lowest points of his presidency. Just 38% of Americans approve of his job performance and 60% disapprove, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted after the Capitol attack and released on Friday. The survey found that 15% said Trump would be remembered by history as an “outstanding” president, while 48% said he would be remembered as “poor” and 11% as “below average.”

Trump, who has refused to participate in traditional transfer-of-power rituals, plans to leave Washington on Wednesday morning, just before Biden is inaugurated. Trump instead will stage his own departure ceremony at Joint Base Andrews before his final trip aboard Air Force One. A military ceremony is being planned similar to the receptions visiting dignitaries receive for state visits.

In New York, residents have long shunned him and Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, last week announced the city was terminating its contracts with the Trump Organization because of the Capitol insurrection.

But in Florida, Trump looks to be surrounded by supporters, including some of his adult children.

Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, are shopping for a house in Jupiter, Fla., about 15 miles from Palm Beach, according to a person familiar with their plans, confirming a New York Post report. Trump Jr.’s ex-wife, Vanessa, and their five children moved to the area last year, this person said.

Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner, both White House senior advisers, recently purchased land owned by pop star Julio Iglesias in Indian Creek, a gated private island near Miami that is home to wealthy celebrities, business figures and professional athletes, including Jay-Z, Beyoncé and football star Tom Brady.

Daughter Tiffany Trump also is shopping for property in Miami, according to Page Six.

Trump will have a small post-presidential staff working for him in Florida, including a trio of White House aides – Cassidy Hutchinson, Nick Luna and Molly Michael – according to an administration official, who confirmed a Bloomberg report.

South Florida is home to talk-radio stars Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, conservative commentator Ann Coulter and several Fox personalities, including Geraldo Rivera and Dan Bongino. And at least two of Trump’s Cabinet members – Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson – have homes in South Florida.

Broward and Palm Beach counties also are home to a growing number of Republican direct-mail firms as well as server farms and other companies that handle back-end processing for conservative digital operations.

And Newsmax – whose cable channel has seen a surge in viewers in recent months as Trump, angry over Fox News Channel’s coverage of the election and its aftermath, has urged his fans to migrate – is headquartered in West Palm Beach.

“It’s sort of like his home state, in a way,” Ruddy said. “There’s a lot of New Yorkers there, a lot of personal friends he has that live down there. It’s a New York environment.”

In addition, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski, whose show Trump regularly watches and attacks despite their sharply critical assessments of him, spend time in South Florida and sometimes broadcast their show from there.

Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican strategist in Florida who is a senior adviser to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, explained the state’s appeal to Trump – including that Florida’s Republican base is especially “Trumpy.”

“It fits in with Florida’s overall character of being the magnet for all insanity in the universe,” Wilson said. “We are what we are in the great state of Florida, and that is a state of lives restarting and second-chances and reboots and low property taxes and liberal bankruptcy laws and a fairly casual approach to public ethics. Florida, in some freakish, horrible way, is the Trumpiest of states. This is the logical place for them to come.”

Trump has floated a 2024 bid and his campaign and the Republican Party raised more than $200 million after the election with fundraising bids to help overturn it. Much of that money will go to Save America, a leadership PAC Trump set up after the election that will allow him to support candidates and maintain political influence after leaving office.

Speculation is also coursing through Trump World about a possible presidential library and museum. No announcements have been made, but two people familiar with internal discussions said it is likely to be located in Florida and run by Dan Scavino, one of Trump’s longest-serving and most loyal aides who advises him on social media and most recently served as deputy White House chief of staff.

One of these people, who was a top fundraiser on Trump’s campaign, said the president has told supporters he wants to raise $2 billion for the library – a far greater sum than has been raised for past presidential libraries – and thinks he can collect it in small-dollar donations from his grass-roots supporters.

“I thought to myself, what is this alternative fantasy life you’re living?” this fundraiser said. “I have no clue where they think they’ll get this money raised. Anyone who gives to him will be radioactive.”

Asked about raising money for the library, another former top Trump fundraiser wrote in a text message: “Insane.” This person noted that, “except for the wackos, everybody’s running for the hills.”

The mood in the West Wing has been generally dour, aides said, with many deeply upset over the president’s actions on Jan. 6 and frantically searching to find a job.

Aides said Trump has been working only sporadically in the Oval Office, spending a lot of time lately in the residence. He also has been bouncing around the West Wing taking pictures with departing staffers.

One senior administration official who visited with the president last week described his mood as decent. But when asked whether it seemed like he had made peace with the fact that his presidency was coming to an end, this official said, “I doubt it. It’s probably just like a moment there.”

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Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., pillar of Maryland’s state capital for decades, dies at 78

InternationalJan 16. 2021Thomas V. Mike Miller in 2018. Washington Post photo by Marvin Joseph.

By The Washington Post, Paul Schwartzman

For decades, he was the man to see in Maryland’s state capital, a country-boy Democrat who rose to the heights of power in the General Assembly and used his commanding influence to direct politics and policy across the state.

Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., the nation’s longest-serving president of a state Senate and a pillar of Maryland government for nearly a half-century, died Jan. 15 at his home in Chesapeake Beach, Md. He was 78. The cause was complications from prostate cancer, said family spokesman Jake Weissmann.

A thick-shouldered pragmatist who had no use for ideologues, Miller led the campaign to legalize casino gambling in Maryland and, despite his centrist views, facilitated the passage of progressive laws including legalization of same-sex marriage and the repeal of the death penalty.

Nearly two years after he announced his cancer diagnosis, Miller’s passing unleashed a wave of grief in Annapolis and further sealed a complete leadership transformation at the State House he presided over for 33 years. Because of his illness, Miller relinquished the Senate presidency in October 2019 but retained his seat as a rank-and-file member until Dec. 23, when he resigned.

A shrewd tactician, Miller controlled the Senate under six governors and endured as opponents derided him as an autocrat, as demographics in his home base of Prince George’s County shifted, and as Maryland’s political culture drifted left.

“Mike Miller was the cornerstone for all the progress that has occurred in the state over the past three decades,” said Timothy F. Maloney, a prominent trial lawyer and former Democratic state delegate representing Prince George’s. “There has been no major initiative that has occurred without Mike’s leadership. He saw everything from a historical context and tried to get ahead of history to see where things were going.”

A backslapping raconteur, Miller was a singular presence as he ruled the Senate. His mane of white hair and chiseled features invited reminders of the Founding Fathers, at least in appearance – comparisons that Miller rarely discouraged.

Mr. Miller sometimes got himself into trouble for his freewheeling banter. In 1989, as he was emerging as a statewide political force, he used a profanity to describe Baltimore, a blunder that quashed whatever hope had to run for governor.

As the Senate’s leader, Miller was unafraid to lacerate rivals, accusing Democratic Gov. William Donald Schaefer of hiring “eunuchs and sycophants” and comparing Democrat Parris Glendening, then Prince George’s County executive, to a “baboon.” In the heat of one election season, he promised Democrats would “bury” Republicans “six feet deep, faces up.”

Miller clung to his grudges as if they were prized treasures. Those who “crossed the boss,” as one colleague described betraying Miller, could find their legislative proposals – and their political careers – extinguished. After then-Del. Patricia Billings, D-Montgomery, opposed legislation he supported, Miller sent her a Christmas card. “I haven’t forgotten your vote,” he wrote.

“Working for Mike was like working in the Mafia – you go out feet first,” said Gerard Evans, a lobbyist and longtime friend. “You’re either in the organization or – if you p—-d him off – you were dead politically and functionally.”

Miller could offer foes a second chance, but only if it served a larger political purpose. “If he needed you, he brought you back,” said former state senator Gloria Lawlah, D-Prince George’s, who mended fences with Miller after a falling-out. “He was the master of power and control.”

Miller waved off suggestions he commanded the Senate with a heavy hand, saying he sought to delegate power and promote fellow senators.

Grudges? Not him, he insisted.

“I forgive and forget,” he said during an interview for this obituary. “Honestly and truly.”

Asked who, if anyone, intimidated him over the years in Annapolis, Miller, without hesitation, said, “I was never afraid of anyone.”

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Thomas Vincent Mike Miller Jr. was born Dec. 3, 1942, in Clinton, Md., where his grandfather founded B.K. Miller’s, a general store that Miller’s father eventually took over. At the intersection of Old Branch Avenue and Woodyard Road, the store was a center of Prince George’s life, a few yards from the church where the Miller family attended services and down the street from the modest brick building where Miller eventually opened a law office.

As the oldest of 10 children, Miller navigated family squabbles – often instigated by his volatile father – and developed skills that helped him later maneuver in Annapolis. From boyhood through early adulthood, Miller worked at his family’s store and learned lessons that would stay with him as a politician.

“You were taught the customer was always right. And so when I ran, I treated my constituents like they were my customers,” Miller said in the interview. “It gave me huge exposure to people, their issues and their problems.”

His parents’ politics spanned the Democratic spectrum, with his father a conservative and his mother a New Dealer who encouraged her son to go to law school. “She was determined that I was not going to work in the store,” he once told The Washington Post.

He got his introduction to politics in 1962 as a driver for Frank Small Jr., a Republican gubernatorial candidate who lived next door to the Millers. Miller befriended Small’s press consultant, Lawrence J. Hogan Sr., who would become a U.S. congressman and Prince George’s County executive. Hogan’s son, Larry, for whom Miller babysat, became Maryland governor during the last years of Miller’s reign in Annapolis.

“He had more political contacts at 18 years old than I’ve ever had any time I’ve been alive,” Thomas Farrington, who worked alongside Miller in the Young Democrats in the 1970s, once told The Washington Post.

Miller graduated from the University of Maryland in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a law degree in 1967. In 1965, he married Patricia Given, a college classmate. In addition to his wife, survivors include five children – Melissa Miller of Chesapeake Beach, Michelle Miller Fink and Melanie Miller, both of Annapolis, Tommy Miller Jr. of West River, Md., and Amanda Miller Stokely of Sunderland, Md. – as well as three brothers, five sisters and 15 grandchildren.

In 1970, with the backing of the Prince George’s Democratic machine, Miller won his first political race, capturing a House of Delegates seat. Four years later, he was elected to the state Senate as a conservative Democrat.

As an intern in Miller’s office in 1977, Evans learned that his boss could be “unreasonably” demanding. At Miller’s urging, Evans suggested legislative ideas, including a bill allowing victims of domestic abuse to seek compensation.

“Don’t ever suggest another bill!” Miller yelled, according to Evans. Miller, he said, was afraid of seeming too liberal in a conservative district. “It was nothing more basic than getting reelected,” Evans said. “His core was delivering as a retail politician.”

Miller’s early years in the state legislature and his reign as a boss of the Prince George’s Democratic organization coincided with the county’s transition from majority White to majority Black. Miller adapted by forging alliances with a number of rising Black leaders.

Nonetheless, some African Americans chafed at what they regarded as Miller’s dictatorial control over local politics. “He appears to be with you,” former state senator Tommie Broadwater Jr., D-Prince George’s, once told The Post. “If you don’t know him, you’ll think he’s the best of buddies. But he will stab you in the back.”

Miller, when asked about Broadwater’s description, replied: “That’s not a bad analysis.”

In Annapolis, Miller’s influence was growing. Melvin Steinberg, then the Senate’s leader, described Miller as his “enforcer” and appointed him chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee.

Blair Lee IV, then Montgomery County’s chief lobbyist, learned the consequence of opposing legislation Miller supported one day as he walked along a State House corridor. “All of a sudden I saw this curly-haired guy coming around the corner. He sees me and puts both hands on my lapels and backed me against the wall,” Lee once told The Post. “He has got an Irish temper and an Irish humor, but you never know which one he’ll be in at that minute.”

In 1986, as Schaefer became governor, the state’s 47 senators elected Miller Steinberg’s successor. At 44, Miller assumed the Senate’s throne, fueling chatter that he was on a glide path to becoming governor. Three years later, Miller hosted a swanky fundraiser in Baltimore, an event that many regarded as his statewide coming-out party.

A few hours before the fundraiser, Miller agreed to an interview with a local television reporter, who asked why he was hosting the affair far from his legislative district. “It helps educate my constituents as to why Baltimore needs the economic help,” Miller said. “I mean Baltimore is a g—– ghetto. It’s worse than inner-city Washington, D.C. It is s—.”

“I hope you’re not going to play this on tape,” Miller said, laughing nervously before adding that Baltimore “is a war zone. I mean, it’s crack. I mean, it’s these dime bags of PCP. . . . Fifty percent of the kids that start out in school don’t graduate. So looking at things from a statewide perspective, we really have to do things to help.”

The station aired Miller’s comments, causing a furor that dogged him for decades. Miller cited the incident as his sole political regret.

But Miller also said he did not regret that the incident may have ended his statewide potential. As it turned out, he served another three decades as Senate president, his influence uninterrupted at the State House while moving trucks pulled up to the governor’s mansion across the way every four or eight years.

– – –

Of all the governors who presided during his reign, Miller said his favorite was Democrat Marvin Mandel because he knew how to build support for legislation “and would reward you for working with him.” The worst governor, he said, was Schaefer, because “he didn’t understand governance. He wanted to spend money that we didn’t have to spend. He thought he could print money in the basement of the State House.”

By his own account, Miller’s crowning achievement was the legalization of casino gambling and the subsequent launch of gaming in Prince George’s, despite fierce opposition from church leaders and civic groups. In a show of political gamesmanship, Miller forced two special sessions of the Assembly, after which the fate of what became the MGM Casino at National Harbor was left to voters to decide in a 2012 referendum. It passed by 100,000 votes.

“Everybody wants to take credit for MGM,” Lawlah said. “It was Mike Miller’s baby. He never took his eye off of it.”

Miller survived various threats to his power, including a failed attempt to oust him in 2000 led by state Sen. Thomas Bromwell, D-Baltimore. Two years later, the legislature’s ethics panel rebuked Miller for yelling at two appeals court judges about a pending dispute over redistricting maps. He also faced scrutiny from federal prosecutors investigating contributions to a campaign fund he oversaw. No charges were filed.

Miller often attributed his political endurance to his ability to “see what’s going to happen before it happens.” Despite his own reservations, he facilitated the abolition of the death penalty in Maryland in 2013 after polls showed the public supported the ban. Even as he voted no, he allowed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage to move forward in 2012, a shift he attributed not only to political pragmatism but to his friendships with people who were gay.

“He didn’t live in a world where he would substitute his core beliefs for what he saw as the larger consensus,” said Todd Eberly, a St. Mary’s College of Maryland political scientist. “He’s a good representative of what it used to be like when two sides were able to compromise.”

For all his adaptability, Miller was stubborn when it came to history. In 2017, he was widely criticized for opposing the removal from the state capitol grounds of a statue of Roger Taney, the Maryland-born Supreme Court chief justice who supported the 1857 Dred Scott decision that Blacks in free or slave states could not be citizens.

Miller, who regarded himself as the curator of State House history, hung portraits on his office walls of past Maryland governors, including segregationists. He also had a rendering of the trial of Mary Surratt, a Clinton native and a co-conspirator in President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

“Somebody could walk into my office and say, ‘Why is that picture on your wall?’ ” Miller said in the interview for this obituary. “Because of my love of history, I’m not politically correct. But, you know, they were products of their times. They’re products of history.”

As 2019 began, Miller divulged that he had cancer but kept showing up in Annapolis, eager to demonstrate his vigor even as he was undergoing chemotherapy. “I’m in the game, I’m on top of it, I’m right there,” he told reporters one afternoon before unleashing a string of invectives, as if to prove his point.

Ever the pragmatist, he had reached out months before to four newly elected senators, progressives who had defeated his more moderate lieutenants in the 2018 Democratic primary. He understood that his style of politics – dealmaking and consensus-building – had become an antiquated art form in an era dominated by President Trump and extreme rhetoric.

As much as anything, he yearned for a return to the political center.

“It’s really time for me to get out of politics,” he said in the interview. “Our democracy is the oldest in the history of the world, but it’s on very shaky legs. I see the Democrats going further to the left, and the Republicans going further to the right, until something absolutely horrible happens and people realize they’ve made a terrible mistake.”

Whatever happens, Miller said, it would no longer be his problem.

His time, he said, had come and gone.