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As Trump departs, scholars seek to understand his reign – and what it says about American democracy

InternationalJan 18. 2021Thousands of Trump supporters violently storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to support President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that he won the election. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael Robinson Chavez

By The Washington Post · David Nakamura · NATIONAL 

WASHINGTON – More than 30,000 falsehoods and lies. Nearly 400,000 coronavirus deaths. Rising white nationalism. Financial self-dealing. A social media ban. Two impeachments. A deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol.

President Donald Trump’s four years in office come to a close Wednesday after a reign defined by constant chaos, corruption and scandal, a tenure that numerous scholars predict is destined to rank him among America’s worst presidents.

Trump’s claims of policy victories – including a raft of conservative judges and steps toward Middle East peace – will be vastly overshadowed by his mismanagement of the pandemic and his unprecedented assault on the U.S. election results, they said.

“You never want to be ranked below William Henry Harrison, who was only president for one month. If you rank below him, it means you’ve harmed the country,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley of Rice University said. “Now you’re getting into James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson territory. Trump will automatically be in that category.”

Yet as Trump departs the White House – and the daily controversies and social media warfare he provoked begin to subside – the historians preparing to reckon with his legacy said it’s not just Trump who will be examined under the harsh reflection of history’s mirror, but also American society and the nation’s commitment to democracy.

Trump’s relentless attacks on civic institutions, provoking of racial and social divisions, trampling of political norms, broadsides against the free press and impugning of America’s international allies have raised profound questions about the nature of American governance and the endurance of the values the United States has long professed to cherish, scholars said.

“Trump and Trumpism have brought those flaws into sharp relief,” said Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “The fact that 74 million people could vote for someone who is a conspiracy theorist and a perpetual liar and encouraged violence and the Proud Boys and white supremacy – in that sense, the Trump presidency will be important for those reckoning with ‘What does it mean to be an American?’ And also what does it mean to live in what a lot of people thought was the world’s greatest experiment in democracy, when it turns out that experiment is incredibly fragile?”

The Trump years have been something of a boon for political historians and scholars who were vaulted into slots as cable television analysts and newspaper pundits to assess his presidency in real time. Now, the more traditional work begins, as they gain distance from the day-to-day political combat and wade through historical records of the past four years to make broader judgments about his place in history.

It is here that some raised concerns over the volume and reliability of the records that can help guide them. Before his Twitter account was shutdown in the wake of the U.S. Capitol siege on Jan. 6, Trump had posted nearly 60,000 tweets and retweets to more than 88 million followers – offering a moment-to-moment reflection of his mind-set.

Yet scholars said other records, such as memos and interviews with aides, are more tenuous. Some worried that Trump and his associates will destroy documents despite laws meant to preserve them, while others voiced concerns that White House aides, who like their boss have a record of misleading the public, will be unreliable narrators of his presidency.

“I wonder if there will be the same documentation of Trump’s own decision-making and processes that we have with other presidents,” said Joseph Crespino, a history professor at Emory University in Atlanta. “He’s not a reader or a note taker or a memo writer. That will be a challenge.”

In many ways, Trump’s presidency was so aberrant – a real estate promoter and reality television star with no political or military experience winning the highest elected office with a minority share of the popular vote – that it is difficult to place him within the continuum of his peers, historians said.

Yet they also emphasized that Trump did not come out of nowhere – that his rise to political prominence behind a false birther conspiracy seeking to delegitimize his predecessor, President Barack Obama, is rooted in the Republican Party’s history of racial grievance politics and its leaders’ increasing willingness to embrace the far-right wing.

Likewise, they said, Trump’s use of new social media tools to spread disinformation was made possible by rapidly changing technologies, but the rhetoric he employed to radicalize his base is steeped in language of American demagogues – from Joseph McCarthy to Father Charles E. Coughlin to George Wallace.

Historians “will think less in terms of analogy [to past presidents] and think more in terms of puncturing the mythic past that both Trump and the people opposed to him alight on – that America had a pure form of democracy that we either lost because of Trump or that Trump brought back,” said Nicole Hemmer, a historian who specializes in conservative media and is working on the Obama Presidency Oral History at Columbia University.

“There’s a lot more continuity here than we might think,” Hemmer said. “We might not be able to pluck one person out of the past and say that is what Donald Trump is like. But we can understand that throughout American history there has been racism and fascism and anti-democratic forces and say he is drawing from those powerful influences.”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University historian who studies fascism, said Trump is best understood in comparison to authoritarian-leaning figures abroad who have employed similar tactics of sowing division and chaos – which she called “crisis politics” – to wield power.

In her view, Trump’s critics missed an important point when they mocked Trump for being lazy by spending so much time golfing and tweeting. Like other autocrats, she said, Trump focused on using his presidency to enrich himself – in Trump’s case by constantly promoting his private resorts and golf courses.

And the president deployed his social media accounts to delegitimize criticism and maintain allegiance from his followers, fostering a “personality cult that is way out of proportion to any other president, including Ronald Reagan,” Ben-Ghiat said.

“I don’t think we can use the same frame of reference as with other presidents because Trump never intended to govern in a recognizable presidential manner,” she emphasized. “His aims and goals were totally different.”

Republicans have called such criticism of Trump’s presidency overblown and faulted his critics for fanning the divisive political partisan and cultural divides that led to mass social justice protests last summer and violent clashes between Trump supporters and counterprotesters since the election.

Trump’s GOP allies also have pointed to successes in the party’s conservative agenda – including three conservative Supreme Court justices, a Republican-backed tax cut, broad environmental and business deregulation – as evidence of the president’s achievements. And they noted that Trump won 74 million votes in 2020, the second-most ever in a presidential election to Biden’s 81 million, reflecting his deep support among the public.

Yet historians said Trump’s tenure is virtually certain to be defined by the tumultuous events of the past year, during which he has actively sought to play down the risks of the global pandemic, used government force to clear protesters from a park just beyond the White House gates last June, falsely claimed victory over President-elect Joe Biden and helped incite a pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol, resulting in the deaths of five people.

To Leah Wright-Rigueur, associate professor of American history at Brandeis University, Trump’s presidency has been a case study in the “naked, unadulterated pursuit of power and self-interest, at the cost of 400,000 lives and at the cost of the American union.”

She added that Trump’s four years have dramatically exposed what racial minorities and other marginalized Americans have long understood – that the nation’s democracy has always been “brutal, exclusionary and flawed” for many citizens.

The storming of the Capitol “will be the moment everybody remembers about Trump’s presidency,” Wright-Rigueur said. “It tells the story about the failures of American democracy – not just about Trump, but also the centuries-old lies we tell ourselves about who we are.”

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Trump administration bailed out prominent anti-vaccine groups with more than $800,000 in loans during pandemic

InternationalJan 18. 2021

By The Washington Post · Elizabeth Dwoskin, Aaron Gregg · NATIONAL, HEALTH, HEALTH-NEWS 

WASHINGTON – Five prominent anti-vaccine organizations that have been known to spread misleading information about the coronavirus received more than $850,000 in loans from the federal Paycheck Protection Program, raising questions about why the government is giving money to groups actively opposing its agenda and seeking to undermine public health during a critical period.

The groups that received the loans are The National Vaccine Information Center, Mercola Com Health Resources LLC, Informed Consent Action Network, Children’s Health Defense Co., and the Tenpenny Integrative Medical Center, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a U.K.-based advocacy group that fights misinformation, which conducted the research using public documents. The group relied on data released in early December by the Small Business Administration in response to a lawsuit from The Washington Post and other news organizations.

Several of the Facebook pages of these organizations have by penalized by the social network, including being prohibited from buying advertising, for pushing misinformation about covid-19.

Vaccines are largely considered safe and effective, and clinical trials for both Moderna and Pfizer vaccines did not raise serious safety concerns. But many Americans hold skeptical attitudes about vaccination, attitudes public health experts have said are attributable in part to misinformation. Nearly 40% of Americans say they definitely or probably would not get the vaccine, according to a December survey by Pew Research Center. Certain groups, including Republicans and Black Americans, are even more skeptical, Pew found.

Public health officials, including WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, have called vaccine misinformation “a major threat to global health that could reverse decades of progress made in tackling preventable diseases,” and last year the organization partnered with Facebook to help counter misinformation on its platform with content from authoritative sources.

The smallest loan of $72,000 went to the Tenpenny organization, which is run by Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, an osteopathic physician and social media figure who actively uses online forums to promote alternative health and argue against child and other forms of vaccination. A popular page run by Tenpenny was banned from Facebook in December for spreading misinformation, though she still has tens of thousands of followers on Instagram.

The largest loan of $335,000 went to Mercola, an organization affiliated with the well-known anti-vaccine activist and businessman Dr. Joseph Mercola. One of Mercola’s groups on Facebook was deemed by the left-leaning human rights group Avaaz to be one of the leading “superspreaders” of misinformation about the coronavirus. His Facebook pages in English and Spanish together have more than 2.7 million followers.

The Children’s Health Defense Co., founded by Robert Kennedy Jr., says it does not oppose vaccines, but is dedicated to raising questions about their safety. The group has questioned whether the coronavirus vaccines that have received emergency approval from the FDA are safe, along with questioning whether children should be vaccinated.

The group has posted on its social media channels about the “great reset” conspiracy theory, which holds that “global elites” such as Bill Gates will use the pandemic to advance their interests and push forward a globalist or Marxist plot to destroy American sovereignty and prosperity and control the population. In a CNBC interview last October, Gates said it was “unfortunate” that both he and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Dr. Anthony Fauci had been targeted by conspiracy theorists, and worried that falsehoods and misleading information about the virus was undermining the country’s ability to respond to the pandemic.

Organizations tied to Kennedy were responsible for the majority of Facebook advertising critical of vaccinations, until Facebook restricted the group’s ability to advertise in 2019 on the grounds that it spread misinformation, according to a study in the journal Vaccine. Facebook has also removed the group from its recommendation algorithms so that it is not suggested to other users as a potential interest, and has demoted it in its news feed so that it shows up on people’s Facebook pages less frequently, and has blocked the ability of users to “like” the page.

In 2020, the group sued Facebook and its fact-checking partners for the ad ban and for debunking the group’s posts with fact-checking labels, costing the group 95% of its website traffic from Facebook, according to the lawsuit.

In an interview, Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and a nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, said his organization is “scrupulous about obeying the law” and questioned whether there is any law or regulation that would prevent his organization from receiving federal help.

“I’ve never heard anybody say that a loan is only available to people who don’t question the government,” Kennedy said.

The other four PPP recipients described in this story did not respond to requests for comment.

The anti-vaccine groups are ramping up their tactics and messaging at a moment when more and more Americans are searching for accurate information about the coronavirus vaccine. Encouraging the safe use of vaccines is considered a vital component of the government’s efforts to alleviate the public health crisis.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate previously exposed a conference in which anti-vaccination activists planned to seize upon people’s doubts and fears to undermine confidence in the coronavirus vaccine.

“Lending money to these organizations so they can prosper is a sickening use of taxpayer money. These groups are actively working to undermine the national covid vaccination drive, which will create long-term health problems that are felt most acutely in minority communities and low-income neighborhoods,” said Imran Ahmed, Chief Executive of Center for Countering Digital Hate.

While it’s unclear whether the anti-vaccine groups broke any rules, their receipt of public assistance is in many ways a consequence of the scattershot way in which the Paycheck Protection Program delivered hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy with few guardrails or preconditions.

The program was built around a controversial decision to allow businesses to self-certify their own eligibility for a taxpayer-backed loan. The SBA does not hand out the loans itself; rather, it empowers a network of approved lenders to quickly process them on its behalf.

Although the SBA reserves the right to audit specific PPP loans, the government performed almost no vetting of specific loan recipients beyond a basic check to determine whether the applicant had already received a loan.

The self-certification policy allowed the government to quickly pump money into a struggling business community during the chaotic months of April and May, by cutting much of the red tape typically associated with loan approvals.

But the broad eligibility criteria and lack of vetting meant numerous questionably-deserving organizations were among the millions of loan recipients. Massive restaurant and hotel chains such as Shake Shack and Sonic benefited handsomely from loans to their affiliates. Debt-collectors and high-interest lenders pocketed more than $500 million. A defense contractor with billions in sales received one.

In some cases the government has tried to claw back money after press coverage highlighted certain recipients. In April it asked publicly traded companies to return funds, and it later accused local Planned Parenthood affiliates of improperly accessing PPP loans.

It’s unclear whether the SBA will take issue with anti-vaccination groups receiving PPP funds.

SBA spokeswoman Carol Wilkerson declined to comment on whether the anti-vaccine organizations were legally eligible for the loans they received. She added that the agency is reviewing loan forgiveness applications to ensure compliance with the rules, and that the next round of PPP funding include more vetting on the front-end before an organization gets a loan.

She suggested that they probably did meet the requirements; the PPP program was open to a wide range of businesses and nonprofits.

“In general, if PPP applicants [or] borrowers met the requirements, they got a loan,” Wilkerson said.

The SBA has previously said in informational materials that a business appearing in its PPP loan database “doesn’t mean that SBA has made an affirmative declaration that a borrower is eligible.”

Misinformation about covid-19 spread widely across social media throughout the pandemic, shared by everyday people as well as anti-vaccine activists and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Now some of those groups have turned their attention to the vaccine, making baseless arguments, for example, that the U.S. government will force people to take it, that it contains microchips, and the people will be compelled to wear some biological marker to prove that they had the vaccine.

The social media pages of the anti-vaccine groups point to articles and research highlighting stories of adverse impacts from the coronavirus vaccine, or warning against forced vaccinations and passports, or the dangers of masks. Many of the posts are factual, but use fearmongering or present a distorted picture of the dangers of vaccines.

Facebook has banned misinformation about the coronavirus and the coronavirus vaccines, and has cracked down on large Facebook groups that oppose or question vaccination, including four of the five groups that received the PPP loans, said spokeswoman Dani Lever.

In recent months, the company also suspended two major groups, including the 100,000-plus-member Stop Mandatory Vaccination, as well as pages belonging to several of the movement’s leading figures. The National Vaccine Information Center is also prohibited from advertising, and the Informed Consent Action Network’s page has been labeled with a link to the World Health Organization and is not being recommended to users by the company’s algorithms, Lever said.

The company did not ban the groups for misinformation, but for what it said was abusive behavior, such as using paid troll farms in North Macedonia and the Philippines to spread messages.

Despite Facebook’s actions, major anti-vaccine accounts on social media platforms have gained more than 10 million new followers since 2019, including 4 million additional followers on Instagram and 1 million on Facebook, according to CCDH.

“These organizations have been sowing the seeds of doubt about vaccines and public health for years,” said Erica Dewald, advocacy director at a pro-vaccine nonprofit called Vaccinate Your Family.

“Now, in the middle of a pandemic, they are accepting funds for the chaos they’ve helped to create,” she said.

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WHO chief warns of ‘catastrophic moral failure’ as rich countries dominate vaccine supplies

InternationalJan 18. 2021

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanonom Ghebreysus

By The Washington Post · Paul Schemm, Jennifer Hassan · NATIONAL, WORLD, HEALTH, HEALTH-NEWS 

The head of the World Health Organization warned Monday that the world is on the brink of a “catastrophic moral failure” if wealthier nations don’t ensure the equitable distribution of vaccines to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanonom Ghebreysus, who repeatedly has warned richer countries against excluding poorer ones by cutting bilateral deals with vaccine suppliers, took his rhetoric up a notch in his opening remarks at an executive board session.

“I need to be blunt: The world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure – and the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries,” he said, noting that while 39 million doses have been administered in more than 40 higher-income countries, one poor country has so far just given out 25 doses.

While Tedros hailed the vaccine rollout as a great scientific achievement, he noted that there were lessons to be learned from past global pandemics when vaccines took a long time to reach developing countries. The current crisis was a chance to “rewrite history,” by ensuring that vaccines are distributed fairly between countries and to those who need them the most.

WHO has partnered with several vaccine makers to provide 2 billion doses to a consortium of low-income countries in an initiative dubbed Covax, but Tedros said there are concerns the vaccines won’t be delivered.

“Even as they speak the language of equitable access, some countries and companies continue to prioritize bilateral deals, going around Covax, driving up prices and attempting to jump to the front of the queue,” he said.

He called on wealthier countries to hold off on vaccinating their young and healthier adults so that older people and front-line health workers in developing countries could receive their doses of the vaccine.

His warning came as wealthier nations such as Britain scramble to vaccinate the vulnerable amid a fresh outbreak of the virus which experts say was triggered by a new and highly contagious variant that his since been identified in many other countries.

The British government has vowed to vaccinate its four priority groups – which include National Health Service workers and care home residents by Feb. 15.

England’s Department of Health and Social Care said Sunday that an estimated 45 percent of people over the age of 80 have now been vaccinated and that over 1 million people within the age group had been invited to book their vaccine appointments.

In Europe, several countries including Sweden and Finland have expressed concern and anger that shipments of the Pfizer vaccine have been delayed, calling the setback – which the U.S. firm called a temporary delay – “unacceptable.”

The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said last week that Pfizer had agreed to supply the EU with 600 million doses this year.

Those in Africa face a much longer wait for help, with the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimating the a distribution program may not begin until April.

Ahmed Ogwell Ouma, deputy director of the Africa CDC, said last month that those in African nations were “often holding the short end of the stick.”

India, which has the second-highest coronavirus caseload in the world, is also beginning mass vaccination efforts and hopes to immunize around 300 million people by summer – despite concerns that one of the vaccines may not work.

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FBI screens U.S. troops for possible insider threats ahead of inauguration

InternationalJan 18. 2021National Guard troops march through the downtown area of Washington on Sunday, Jan. 17, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Astrid Riecken Photo by: Astrid Riecken — For The Washington Post

By The Washington Post · Paul Sonne, Dan Lamothe, Missy Ryan 

WASHINGTON – U.S. defense officials say the federal government is screening the 25,000 National Guard troops who have begun flowing into the nation’s capital to secure the inauguration because concerns about extremism in the ranks are intensifying.

The screening comes after a number of pro-Trump rioters involved in storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 were found to have military ties, raising questions about extremist sentiment within the armed forces. Dozens of people on a terrorist watch list were in Washington as the deadly riot unfolded.

A U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive preparations, said the Army is working with the FBI to vet all service members supporting the inauguration. The Army maintains awareness of threats but does not collect domestic intelligence itself, the official said. It was not immediately clear how extensive the FBI vetting of the military personnel would be.

The screening comes as thousands of troops in camouflage uniforms patrol the streets of the nation’s capital, which has turned into a fortress of security barriers and fences in the lead-up to the inauguration. Many of the guardsmen are armed, but they often do not have magazines loaded in their rifles.

Maj. Gen. William Walker, commanding general of the District of Columbia Guard, said in an interview with Defense One that the screening represented an “extra layer” of security for this deployment on top of the continuous monitoring that the U.S. military does of its service members.

“For this deployment everybody is screened additionally, but it’s more of a reassurance, because we do everything we can do (to) know our guardsmen, our soldiers and airmen,” Walker said.

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, who is overseeing the D.C. Guard and the military’s preparations for the inauguration, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the vetting process has not flagged any potential problems with the troops coming to help protect the inauguration.

“We’re continually going through the process, and taking second, third looks at every one of the individuals assigned to this operation,” McCarthy told the AP, which reported that the screening is being carried out by the FBI and is scheduled to be completed by Inauguration Day – Wednesday.

McCarthy told the AP that he has told commanders to keep an eye out for any problems within their units.

Because D.C. is not a state, its Guard answers to the president, but his authority is traditionally delegated to the defense secretary and the Army secretary, who assume operational control on the president’s behalf.

The extra screening of the forces flowing into the city from states demonstrates the high level of concern U.S. officials have heading into the week. President Donald Trump is set to be the first outgoing president since 1869 to skip his successor’s inauguration.

A second defense official said the Pentagon received 143 notifications of extremism-related probes last year from the FBI, 68 of which were related to suspected domestic extremism among current and former service members – a category that includes White nationalism, anti-fascist, antiabortion and anti-government beliefs. Most of the cases were related to veterans, the official said.

In a statement, the Army said it is working with the Secret Service to determine which service members supporting the inauguration require additional background screening.

All service members go through an annual program that requires them to report information regarding known or suspected extremist behavior in the ranks, the Army said. The Army also noted that the D.C. Guard is providing additional training as service members arrive in the city, instructing them to report anything they see or hear that seems inappropriate to the chain of command.

“There is no place for extremism in the military and we will investigate each report individually and take appropriate action,” the Army said in the statement. “The Army is committed to working closely with the FBI as they identify people who participated in the violent attack on the Capitol to determine if the individuals have any connection to the Army.”

To enter any branch of the U.S. military and receive a security clearance, all personnel undergo background checks, the Army added.

In a statement, Capt. Chelsi Johnson, a spokeswoman for the National Guard, said all members coming to Washington for the deployment “go through a credentialing process.”

“That information is shared with the requesting federal agencies and added to their database,” Johnson said. “We cannot speak for those agencies and how they use the information.”