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President Trump’s abrupt exit from a White House news conference Monday afternoon felt instantly familiar. It was, after all, hardly the first time he had gone after a female reporter. Nor was it Trump’s first go at targeting a woman of color with racist rhetoric.
The president seemed set off by a question from CBS reporter Weijia Jiang—”Why are you saying that to me, especially?”—that she lodged seconds after Trump suggested Jiang, an Asian American, ask China about his compulsion to frame coronavirus tests as some kind of global competition.
“I’m saying that to anybody who would ask a nasty question like that,” Trump shot back.
But his grim facial expression—and subsequent refusal to take another question from Jiang’s White House press corps colleague, CNN reporter Kaitlin Collins—appeared to belie that very explanation. For just a few moments, Trump seemed to recognize that he had, once again, done an oopsie dog whistle.
Still, Trump couldn’t let a very public tantrum be the last word. Hours after walking out of the news conference, he dashed off to his mental safe space and declared conspiracy:
The Lamestream Media is truly out of control. Look how they work (conspire!) together. They are the Enemy of the People, but don’t worry, we will WIN in November! https://t.co/3YOSChXP9M
By the next morning, Trump was retweeting praise for his behavior, and claiming, without evidence, that Asian Americans shared his fury with China’s actions in the coronavirus pandemic.
This whole timeline reads like a nightmare, but we shouldn’t ignore the president baselessly accusing female reporters of taking part in a political plot to tank his reelection after getting called out for racism. Trump’s meltdown came at the same time he relaunched a conspiracy-fueled campaign claiming Barack Obama has committed “the biggest political crime in American history,” a wildly absurd accusation that came after Trump reportedly was angered at the former president calling his coronavirus response “an absolute chaotic nightmare” during a private phone call. Taken together, the attacks capture our thin-skinned president turning back to the greatest hits of his political career—racism, misogyny, conspiracy theories—to distract attention and responsibility from a public health crisis that crossed 80,000 deaths over the weekend.
This afternoon, President Donald Trump held a briefing in the White House Rose Garden to trumpet the expansion of the United States’ coronavirus testing capacity—and to double down on the inaccurate claim that anyone who wants to get a coronavirus test can get one. “If people want to get tested, they get tested,” Trump said. “But for the most part they shouldn’t want to get tested.” He then added that only people experiencing symptoms of COVID-19 should want to get a test.
“We have met the moment and we have prevailed,” Trump announced, flanked by banners declaring “America leads the world in testing.” He tried again to spin the total numbers of tests done as the best measure of the country’s ability to track the coronavirus. Pressed on whether it is true that tests are available to any American who wants one, he said, “It is a true statement already. We have more testing than anyone by far.”
The United States has completed more than 9 million tests and more than 300,000 people are currently being tested daily. Experts think that anywhere from 500,000 to 20 million daily tests are needed to safely reopen the economy.
Even the basic numbers offered at today’s briefing were murky. Trump said the country is currently doing tests at a rate of around 2.1 million per week, which reflects the best available data. But Admiral Brett Giroir, the administration’s top testing official, later claimed that more than 3 million tests per week are being performed, enough that “everybody who needs a test can get a test in America, with the numbers we have.” He said that includes including people with COVID-19 symptoms as well as those who require contact tracing and some asymptomatic people who need to be monitored. He predicted that the United States will be doing 9 million tests per month in a few weeks. That’s the equivalent of around 300,000 tests per day—where we’re at right now.
Both Trump and Giroir repeatedly emphasized that the United States is now doing more testing per capita than South Korea, which recorded its first case of COVID-19 on the same day as the United States. While South Korea rapidly ramped up testing efforts, allowing it to tamp down its outbreak, the United States took months to exceed its same testing capacity.
Amid multiple questions from reporters over how widely available testing truly is, Trump repeatedly returned to his talking point that the United States is doing more testing than any other country. “We have developed a testing capacity unmatched and unrivaled anywhere in the world,” he said. While the United States has in fact done the highest raw number of coronavirus tests of any country, its per capita testing rate is still behind several other countries’:
As reporters continued to challenge his claims, the president grew increasingly testy and ended the briefing with a racist meltdown. When CBS News correspondent Weijia Jiang asked Trump why he framed testing capacity as “a global competition,” he snapped, “Maybe that’s a question you should ask China. Don’t ask me. Why don’t you ask China that question, OK?” As Jiang, who is Chinese-American, asked Trump why he had put that question to her, he accused her of asking a “nasty question,” refused to answer a question from CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, and abruptly stormed out of the Rose Garden.
.@weijia: Why is this a global competition to you when Americans are losing their lives every day?
TRUMP: Maybe that’s a question you should ask China.
WEIJA: Why are you saying that to me, specifically?
A personal assistant to Ivanka Trump tested positive for COVID-19, CNN reported Friday, the third revelation this week of a White House staffer having tested positive.
On Thursday news broke that one of President Trump’s personal valets had tested positive, and then on Friday Trump announced that Katie Miller—press secretary for Vice President Mike Pence and the wife of Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller—had also tested positive.
Ivanka Trump’s personal assistant has been teleworking and not around her in several weeks, a source told CNN.
Trump has repeatedly downplayed the importance of testing, even as he was reportedly angry about his valet’s diagnosis and as the president has said White House staff will now be tested daily.
After Trump’s valet tested positive he said the situation “shows you the fallacy—what I’ve been saying, testing is not a perfect art. No matter what you do, testing is not a perfect art.” The New York Times notes that neither Trump nor Pence regularly wears a mask, and neither do most of their aides. As part of her job, Miller regularly interacts with senior White House officials and members of the press. The day before her diagnosis became public a photo showed her talking with reporters without a mask.
Trump aides told the Times the president doesn’t need to wear a mask because he’s regularly tested, but “privately they acknowledge that he has expressed concern that it would make him look bad.”
Protesters denounce Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's stay-home order and business restrictions at State Capitol in Lansing, Mich., on April 30. In Michigan, Black people account for 14 percent of state population and 43 percent of COVID deaths. Paul Sancya/AP
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has insisted on reopening the state’s economy even in the face of a spike in confirmed COVID cases, not to mention criticism from President Donald Trump, later reversed. Kemp took a sweeping approach to loosening shelter-in-place restrictions starting April 24 by letting nonessential businesses open up. On Tamron Hall’s TV show that day, Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, criticized Kemp’s reopening effort as one “driven purely by economics.”
Three days later, as the nation was fixated on small but raucous right-wing protests defying shelter-in-place orders, a group of protesters in Atlanta, organized by the Georgia Coalition 2 Save Lives, rode in cars and a dozen hearses from a funeral home to the state Capitol and held a mock funeral. The coalition, made up of lawyers, faith leaders, and civil rights groups, wanted to draw attention to what public health experts see as a likely consequence of moving too quickly: a deadly surge in COVID cases.
When Hall asked whether Bottoms was “surprised by those who have decided it is worth the risk to reopen,” the mayor told the talk show host: “It is so surprising to me that people have such a disregard for the science and the data, especially when you look at the African American community, where there is a barbershop and hair salon on every single corner.”
Bottoms was evoking one of the central juxtapositions of the pandemic in the United States: White people are demanding their lives back while Black people are losing theirs altogether. According to a recent poll by Civis Analytics, just under 70 percent of Americans who oppose lockdowns are white workers who have not lost a job in the pandemic. The New York Times recently characterized the question of reopening as a dilemma between “job or health,” but the pairing begs the question at either end: Whose jobs? Whose health?
In fact, a closer look at the data suggests the dubious freedom to work and shop in a plague is being won in places where Black people are most vulnerable. Of the 15 states with the widest disparities between the Black share of the population and the Black share of COVID deaths, nine have reopened or are reopening soon: Missouri, Kansas, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and North Carolina. Of those, seven are run by Republican governors. Just one state with a Republican governor, Maryland, has refused to reopen.
By now the disproportionate effects of the coronavirus on Black people have been well-documented. Recently, in a snapshot of 14 states, the CDC found that Black people accounted for 18 percent of the sample’s population but 33 percent of hospitalizations for COVID-19. In Georgia, where 34 percent of people are Black, the CDC found that Black people made up 83 percent of hospitalizations for COVID-19. State data shows that they also account for half the deaths, though the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reported that Georgia might be undercounting its deaths.
The reopenings are proceeding on top of these asymmetries. (For this analysis, we used data collected from The COVID Racial Data Tracker, as well as from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) In Missouri, where Black people account for 12 percent of the state’s population but 39 percent of COVID fatalities, Republican Gov. Mike Parsons let the stay-at-home order expire this week. He visited businesses that reopened without a mask, saying simply that he “chose not to” wear one.
In Alabama, Gov. Kay Ivey transitioned to a “safer at home'” model that allowed, in the first phase, beaches and some businesses with capacity restrictions to reopen. At the same time, some sheriffs in Alabama refused to enforce the stay-at-home order in a state where Black folks account for 27 percent of the state’s population and 46 percent of COVID fatalities.
In South Carolina, where Black people also account for 27 percent of the population but 48 percent of COVID deaths, Gov. Henry McMaster insisted on rolling back restrictions on businesses, noting that the goal “was to cause the most damage possible to the virus while doing the least possible damage…to our businesses.”
In Mississippi, where Black people account for 38 percent of the population but 54 percent of COVID deaths, Gov. Tate Reeves limited reopenings to retail stores but held off on letting more businesses open after the state saw its highest single-day spike in COVID infections and deaths last Friday. (In Louisiana, where Black people account for 32 percent of the population but 58 percent of COVID deaths, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards extended the stay-at-home order until mid-May while Republican state lawmakers have tried to force a more piecemeal reopening approach for each parish.)
In nine reopening states, “freedom” is being built on the back of Black vulnerability. On Tuesday, President Trump, touring a Honeywell mask manufacturing facility in Arizona without a mask, acknowledged that some people would be hurt by the unfreezing of their state economies. “Will some people be affected badly? Yes,” Trump said. “But we have to get our country open and we have to get it open soon.” Whether Trump knows or cares, there is no great mystery who those “some people” will be. As the president continued his tour, fate seemed to acknowledge the shrugging ghoulishness of his comment. From somewhere in the plant, speakers bellowed the gravelly sounds of “Live and Let Die.”
As the coronavirus ravages the country’s vast meatpacking facilities, infecting and killing workers and slowing production, US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has floated his interpretation of the catastrophe: It’s the workers’ fault.
On an April 28 call, Azar “told a bipartisan group that he believed infected employees were bringing the virus into processing plants where a rash of cases have killed at least 20 workers and forced nearly two-dozen plants to close,” Politicoreported on May 7. (On May 8, the US Department of Agriculture announced that 14 of those plants would re-open, as a result of President Trump’s recent executive order invoking the Defense Production Act for meat production). Politico added:
Those infections, he said, were linked more to the “home and social” aspects of workers’ lives rather than the conditions inside the facilities, alarming some on the call who interpreted his remarks as faulting workers for the outbreaks.
The Politico article arrived on the heels of other eye-popping remarks from powerful politicians. During oral arguments before her court on May 5, Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Patience Roggensack downplayed an outbreak in Brown County, declaring that it involved meatpacking workers and not “the regular folks” of the area.
In a Fox News interview back in April, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem explained a massive outbreak at a Smithfield pork-packing facility like this: “We believe that 99 percent of what’s going on today wasn’t happening inside the facility. It was more at home where these employees were going home and spreading some of the virus because a lot of these folks that work at this plant live in the same community, the same building, sometimes in the same apartment.” In an interview with Buzzfeed, a Smithfield spokesperson expanded on this theory. Citing the plant’s “large immigrant population,” she explained that “living circumstances in certain cultures are different than they are with your traditional American family,” she explained
As the death and illness counts rise—nationwide, nearly 12,000 meat-packing and food-processing workers have tested positive for the illness, and 48 have died—expect such blame-the-victim rhetoric to continue. That’s because the 330,000 men and women who process the nearly 10 billion chickens, hogs, and cattle raised each year in the United States represent some of the most vulnerable segments of the population, and the very groups routinely stigmatized by the Trump-era GOP: people of color and immigrants.
In a 2019 report condemning working conditions in the meatpacking industry, Human Rights Watch documented just how much the industry relies on workers not seen as “regular folks” by common GOP wisdom. HRW noted that as much as a quarter of meatpacking workers are undocumented immigrants, and another quarter are African-Americans. The workforce also includes a substantial number of incarcerated people and refugees. In short, the report shows, the industry “recruits the most vulnerable workers as a business model and reaps the profits.”
The business model also gets a boost from light workplace safety regulation enforcement by federal authorities. The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration has “been unable to effectively exercise its statutory powers to investigate workplace conditions and issue penalties and orders for businesses that have not ensured a workplace that is free from recognized hazards that cause, or are likely to cause, death or serious physical harm,” the report found.
As a result, Human Rights Watch investigators found “alarmingly high rates of serious injury and chronic illness among workers at chicken, hog, and cattle slaughtering and processing plants, as well as business practices that endanger workers and obscure the reality of workplace hazards.” They concluded that for decades, “the US government has failed to implement domestic workplace safety and health standards that would regulate practices in the industry to the benefit of workers’ health and safety”—and that the situation had gotten worse under President Donald Trump.
When I spoke to poultry workers in Texas and Arkansas for an article last month, they expressed fear and anxiety over being exposed to the coronavirus at their crowded workplaces and bringing it home to their families. For a blockbuster article Mother Jones and FERN published last week, Esther Honig and Ted Genoways talked to workers in a beefpacking plant in Greeley, Colo., who described being “repeatedly pressured to just keep working, even if they were feeling ill or had been exposed to people who were.”
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has focused its efforts on keeping the kill lines moving. On April 29, the president issued an executive order declaring that the US Department of Agriculture “shall take all appropriate action” under the Defense Production Act “to ensure that meat and poultry processors continue operations.” In remarks to the press earlier that day, Trump explained the move as a push to protect large meatpacking firms from “liability”—a remark widely interpreted as meaning liability for failing to protect workers from coronavirus exposure. Instead, as Azar has made clear, it appears the administration will try its best to kick that liability back over to the people already dying at record rates from the virus: those with the least amount of power.
After spending nearly 20 minutes lashing out at familiar targets related to the Russia investigation, President Donald Trump used his appearance on Fox & Friends Friday morning to play down the significance of the newest jobs report, which revealed the US economy lost a staggering 20.5 million jobs in April, the highest level of unemployment since the Great Depression.
“It’s fully expected, there’s no surprise,” Trump said just as the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the grim numbers. “Everybody knows that.” He did not offer any messages of support or concern for the millions of Americans now unemployed.
“Somebody said, ‘Oh, look at this, even the Democrats aren’t blaming me for that,'” he continued. In fact, Democrats, as well as anti-Trump conservatives, have laid the blame for the tanked economy directly on his doorstep, arguing that a more aggressive and systematic approach to containing the spread of the novel coronavirus would have lessened the current economic catastrophe. It was just the latest example of the increasing disconnect between the stark reality of Trump’s botched coronavirus response and the magical thinking required to buoy the president’s campaign to present a rosy view of his administration’s performance amid the ongoing crisis.
Moreover, Trump’s insistence that Friday’s jobs report had been fully anticipated fails to square with his previous predictions that the crisis would “disappear” like a “miracle.” Nor do they track with top economic adviser Larry Kudlow’s forecast back in February that the US would avoid an “economy tragedy.”
“Those jobs will all be back and they’ll be back very soon,” Trump insisted, again ignoring warnings from economists that a recovery is nowhere close. “People are ready to go, we’ve got to get it open.
While there have been reports over the last few months as the coronavirus exploded around the world of state-sponsored hackers targeting various Chinese interests, a new report out today from a cybersecurity services firm claims to have uncovered a years-long online Chinese espionage operation targeting governments across the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia.
Check Point Software Technologies detailed the operations of a known hacking group called “Naikon” in research released Thursday. The Chinese group, first written about by security researchers in 2015, slipped off the radar over the last few years, but according to the firm’s new report, has been active for much of this time. Using documents emailed to government targets, the hackers gained access to government networks, looking for confidential documents, stealing data, taking screenshots, and installing key-loggers to gather passwords. The hackers sometimes used compromised systems to host and launch further attacks.
The researchers say targeted countries include Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, and Brunei. While the pattern Check Point focuses on in its new report dates back several years, the pandemic’s orgins in China seems to have touched off state-sponsored cyber attacks targeting the country’s interests. In early April, ZDNet reported that a hacking group thought to be operating out of east Asia targeted Chinese government agencies and their employees, both in China and in Chinese government buildings around the world. Reuters reported in late March that the same group, known as “DarkHotel,” are thought to have attempted to hack into the World Health Organization. Bloomberg reported that Vietnamese hackers have also targeted Chinese government officials in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus is thought to have originated.
Detainees in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Tacoma, Washington. AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File
Update May 7, 1:30 p.m.: ICE confirmed the death of a 57-year-old detainee in its custody who had tested positive for COVID-19. The man was originally from El Salvador and had entered the United States in 1980.
For weeks, the cases of COVID-19 among Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees have been rising. Now, ICE has had its first COVID-19-related death in its custody. Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia, a man from El Salvador, had been hospitalized for over a week and died Wednesday at a San Diego area hospital, according to multiple reports.
The death was first reported Wednesday afternoon by the San Diego Tribune‘s Kate Morrissey, who spoke with Escobar Mejia’s family. ICE has not said anything publicly and did not respond to multiple requests from Mother Jones for confirmation.
I can confirm that an ICE detainee from Otay Mesa Detention Center has died from #COVID19. Story coming.
BuzzFeed News reports that Escobar Mejia “had hypertension and self-reported diabetes” and that he “had been denied a bond to be released from custody on April 15 by an immigration judge.” He was taken to a nearby hospital on April 24 after showing symptoms related with the virus. According to BuzzFeed, he was placed on a ventilator three days later.
“This is a terrible tragedy and it was entirely predictable and preventable,” said Andrea Flores, deputy director of immigration policy at the American Civil Liberties Union, in the email Wednesday afternoon. “Unless ICE acts quickly to release far more people from detention, they will keep getting sick and many more will die.”
Nationwide, ICE reported Wednesday that there have been 705 confirmed cases among detainees and 39 cases among employees at detention facilities. Otay Mesa, where the deceased detainee was in custody, has the highest number of coronavirus cases of any ICE detention center in the country; as of Wednesday, at least 132 people have tested positive for COVID-19 there. Otay Mesa is run by the private prison giant Core Civic.
ICE detains immigrants and asylum seekers in facilities across the country, usually keeping dozens of people in close quarters. Public health experts and immigrant rights groups have been warning for months that if the coronavirus entered these facilities, it could be deadly for detainees and for staff. Last week, two guards at an ICE detention center in Louisiana died after testing positive for COVID-19. A doctor recently told me and my colleague Noah Lanard that ICE’s response to the pandemic was a form of “torture.”
The ACLU is one of many organizations asking for the release of immigrants who are not a threat to public safety, especially those who could be medically vulnerable. In late March, the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center sued the Trump administration to force their release. Members of Congress have also started to echo their call: Earlier this week, Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) wrote a letter, along with 17 other members, urging ICE’s Acting Director Matthew Albence to “halt the spread of this deadly disease.”
At a Fox News Town Hall in front of the Lincoln Memorial on May 3, President Donald Trump revised the US coronavirus death toll, citing a number significantly higher than what he’d been predicting just a few weeks ago. “I used to say 65,000, and now I’m saying 80 or 90, and it goes up and it goes up rapidly,” said the president.
Confused about what to make of this? Us too. And with new data and studies about the coronavirus coming out every day, understanding how science and statistics work has never felt more essential—and, let’s admit it, overwhelming.
That’s why we brought two people onto the Mother Jones Podcast this week who can help sort through it all, providing tips and tricks for identifying reliable data. Sinduja Rangarajan, a senior data journalist at Mother Jones, has been analyzing data to show how COVID-19 is infecting Black communities at alarming rates, to highlight which communities are the least prepared for the coronavirus, and to forecast when states will run out of hospital beds. “It’s not always clear what kind of data sources are trustworthy or not,” Rangarajan tells host Jamilah King on the Mother Jones Podcast. “When I’m reporting on these topics, I tend to be skeptical of everything, no matter where that data’s coming from, whether it’s from a city or a state or from universities or nonprofits or think tanks or private companies.”
King also talks to Jackie Flynn Mogensen, an assistant editor at Mother Jones, who has been reporting on the medical science of the pandemic, answering key questions on immunity and antibodies and helping us make sense of all those terrifying death projections. Her recent reporting takes a step back and reveals just how complicated all this science actually is—and how, in the frantic rush to get more and more information about the new virus, it can sometimes be untrustworthy or riddled with conflicts of interest. “Science isn’t about being right. It’s the process of becoming less wrong,” Mogensen explains on the podcast. “What the experts have told me is that making a mistake now, like in the case of ibuprofen, can cost lives.”
The New York Times reported Tuesday that the Trump administration was considering winding down its coronavirus task force, according to Olivia Troye, an adviser to Vice President Mike Pence. In a flurry of confusion that underscores the approach to messaging that has defined the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic, Pence confirmed the reports, but Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the administration’s most trusted voice on the coronavirus pandemic, denied them.
The coronavirus task force often has been the key vehicle for the nation’s top infectious disease experts, including Drs. Fauci and Deborah Birx, who is the White House coronavirus response coordinator, to inform both the Trump administration and the general public on the science behind the novel coronavirus spread, containment, and prevention. The clarity and success of their efforts have been stymied by internal divisions.
In February, Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar was ousted as the group’s leader and replaced by Pence. In March, the doctors on the task force reportedly began meeting privately almost every day because they were so concerned about the “voodoo” espoused by other task force members, according to the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Fauci, whom President Trump has retweeted posts about wanting to fire, has expressed cautious dismay at Trump’s habit of commandeering task force press briefings to ramble for hours about his own accomplishments and traffic in misinformation about treatments and cures.
The turmoil in the task force comes as coronavirus case counts in the United States rise precipitously and two days after Trump said he expected the total death toll in the United States to reach 100,000. Nonetheless, several states are reopening their economies with vocal support from President Trump despite public health officials cautioning that doing so too soon could spark a resurgence in cases and deaths.
Amid an era-defining pandemic, the coronavirus task force—especially the calm authority of Dr. Fauci—has been the closest thing many Americans have had to a clear, reliable source of information and direction from the federal government. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which normally leads public health messaging during disease outbreaks, has largely stayed quiet in the past few months. And, absent any visible public health leadership, the “shadow task force” operated by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, could gain still more power. What could go wrong?
A photo of Astoria Park contributed to Queens Memory.Megan Green
I almost started this post with the words “Studs Terkel.” And then I wanted to punch myself in the face. Studs Terkel—the irreverent, leftist, legendary oral historian—may be well-known and beloved, but the idea that there’s a “great man” of oral history is totally antithetical to the entire concept of populist history that he supposedly represents. In fact, there are hundreds of people, many using she/her pronouns, who are working feverishly to collect audio recordings, videos, photographs, and written accounts about what people’s lives look like during this pandemic.
One of them is Meral Agish, the community coordinator for Queens Memory, a community archiving partnership between Queens Public Library and Queens College CUNY.
On March 16, the Queens Public Library closed all 65 its branches to slow down the spread of the coronavirus. Within the next two weeks, central Queens emerged as the epicenter within the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, with more than 7,260 cases recorded within a 7-square-mile radius. “It felt like we need to do whatever we can to record what life is like in Queens right now,” Agish told me.
Queens Memory has been collecting oral histories, photographs, and home videos from Queens residents since 2010. On the day the library closed, Agish and the Queens Memory team discussed creating a large crowdsourced campaign, the likes of which they’d never done before, to collect the stories of daily life in Queens during the pandemic. I was familiar with the work of Queens Memory, and I gave them some tips on a workflow for the first season of their podcast. But I haven’t been involved in their oral history collection.
As COVID-19 rages around the world, archivists, librarians, oral historians, and activists have spun up oral history projects to document their communities’ everyday experiences during an extraordinary social, political, cultural, and historical moment. Documenting the Now, for example, an initiative born out of documenting Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement, has collated a crowdsourced Google document of #doccovid19 projects. So far there are 103 such initiatives on the list, ranging from community archiving projects at public libraries to the coronavirus subreddit.
“Our whole goal is to empower people who aren’t necessarily professional historians to identify stories that should be in their public library’s local history collections,” said Natalie Milbrodt, director of the Queens Memory Project at Queens Public Library. “They work with us to capture those stories and digitize photos and give future researchers a really accurate depiction of life in contemporary Queens, New York City.”
Two weeks after the Queens Memory team started talking about a COVID-19 project, they launched it. An online submissions page and toll-free number went live on April 9, thanks to fast work from the Urban Archive team and a broad coalition of Queens Memory staff and volunteers. As of this week, they’ve received about 200 submissions, ranging from highly edited videos to short audio clips to written accounts. “We are living through history right now, and you wonder, how are we going to look back at this time?” said Agish.
While everyone is susceptible to a virus, the coronavirus has not in fact been the “great equalizer.” An investigation by my colleagues Edwin Rios and Sinduja Rangarajan showed that black and brown communities have disproportionately higher rates of infection and fatality. In the neighborhoods in Queens hardest hit by the coronavirus, 38 percent of the working population are employed in the service sector, such as food delivery, child care services, and janitorial services, compared to 18 percent citywide according to Center for an Urban Future, a nonpartisan policy organization focusing on economic mobility and inequality. These numbers partly explain how this borough became the epicenter. But they don’t tell the whole story. “It’s just coming across as statistics, but we knew that for every healthcare worker, every delivery person, it was having a real human impact that was not necessarily being recorded very well,” said Milbrodt.
By capturing a broad swath of stories from the borough of Queens, Agish hopes to document how the pandemic has been affecting the community in uneven ways.
“This pandemic experience is casting such a harsh light on how unequal our life in our borough is,” said Agish. “There’s a tendency to think about the pandemic’s effect in numbers, percentages, rates, these abstract measures that of course tell a particular story about the pandemic, but they completely lose the human aspect of what this experience is like.”
In a time of crisis, chronicling the truth can feel like a form of resistance. As any dictator will tell you, destroyingthearchives and a common history has been one of many reliable techniques for subjugating a population. There’s a large overlap between the community archiving techniques deployed at Queens Memory and the work of organizations like WITNESS, which crowdsources the documentation of human rights violations. At a time when the escapism of celebrity culture feels a little less benign, it’s comforting to know that the lives of the rich and famous aren’t the only ones that will endure when future historians reflect on the pandemic of 2020.
“We find that people coming into our local history collections are very interested in daily lives of people who lived 100 years ago,” said Milbrodt. “We want to make sure that we’re capturing the stories of people who don’t necessarily think of themselves as important historical players. We do a lot of convincing people that their stories are important.”
In a chronicle of “desperation and dysfunction,” the Washington Post ran a story describing the tensions and events inside the White House between March 29 and last week, as Trump remained “fixated on the economy” while others in the administration attempted to contain the public health catastrophe of the coronavirus pandemic.
34 days of pandemic: Inside Trump’s desperate attempts to reopen America https://t.co/BQjF8RiZ6d
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 3, 2020
Over the critical month, when the US had already lost time in imposing measures that could lessen the impact of the illness, two rival groups emerged: doctors and scientists who understood the importance of imposing aggressive public health measures, and “the economic and political aides with longer standing relationships with the president.” Naturally, that group includes his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and also senior economic adviser Kevin Hassett, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, who pushed optimistic models predicting no more than 60,000 deaths, a number that has already been exceeded.
These two groups seemed to have fought about nearly everything: the seriousness of the epidemic, the need for tests, the available equipment, the economic toll the crisis would exact. Meanwhile, invaluable time was lost and the president’s impulses and demands dominated everything.
The result?
So determined was Trump to extinguish the deadly virus that he repeatedly embraced fantasy cure-alls and tuned out both the reality that the first wave has yet to significantly recede and the possibility of a potentially worse second wave in the fall…And though Trump was fixated on reopening the economy, he and his administration fell far short of making that a reality. The factors that health and business leaders say are critical to a speedy and effective reopening—widespread testing, contact tracing and coordinated efforts between Washington and the states—remain lacking.
Trump’s insistence on reopening the country quickly, even as businesses shut down and jobless claims reached unprecedented levels, led to his eagerness to find a silver bullet that would fix everything. First was hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that has been proven to show no effectiveness in treating the symptoms of COVID-19. To that bullet, the president added azythromycin, which he described as “one of the biggest game-changers in the history of medicine.” And let’s not forget a bullet that backfired: the wonders of disinfectant, “where it knocks [the virus] out in a minute—one minute—and is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside, or almost a cleaning.”
What the Post’s interviews with “82 administration officials, outside advisers and experts with detailed knowledge of the White Houses’s handling of the pandemic” makes clear, yet again, is that Trump’s major fixation through all this was not the mounting deaths, the scale of human tragedy from illness and economic hardship, or the pleas of health workers for some essential supplies, but his reelection bid.
And after you read the Post, take at how those 34 days fit in the first 100 days of the response from the “very stable genius” in chief.
Former President George W. Bush, in a rare message for the Call for Unity campaign, is urging Americans across the political spectrum to come together in order to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
“In the final analysis, we are not partisan combatants,” Bush said in a video that premiered Saturday, as somber images of healthcare workers, immigrant families, and loved ones practicing social distancing measures were played. “We are human beings, equally vulnerable, and equally wonderful in the sight of God. We rise or fall together—and we are determined to rise.”
— George W. Bush Presidential Center (@TheBushCenter) May 2, 2020
Don’t count on the current commander-in-chief to share the sentiment, much less respond with respect. Instead, the appeal for unity appears to have only fueled Donald Trump’s trademark divisiveness, not to mention his penchant for typos. Here he is this morning:
.@PeteHegseth “Oh bye the way, I appreciate the message from former President Bush, but where was he during Impeachment calling for putting partisanship aside.” @foxandfriends He was nowhere to be found in speaking up against the greatest Hoax in American history!
Trump seizing on a message to put aside political differences only to complain about his impeachment trial—by nature, a deeply partisan scenario—during a public health crisis that has already killed more Americans than the death toll from the Vietnam War is no longer surprising. But such grotesque behavior is still worth tracking as a reminder, yet again, that none of this is acceptable.
White House coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Birx called the scenes of angry protesters swarming Michigan’s State Capitol building last week “devastatingly worrisome.” She warned that protesters—some of whom were seen openly carrying firearms and showing off swastikas and confederate flags—risked infecting loved ones by failing to adhere to social distancing measures.
“It’s devastatingly worrisome to me, personally, because if they go home and infect their grandmother or their grandfather who has a co-morbid condition and they have a serious or very unfortunate outcome, they will feel guilty for the rest of their lives,” Birx said during an appearance on Fox News Sunday. “We need to protect each other at the same time we’re voicing our discontent.”
Birx’s comments on Sunday came in sharp contrast to President Donald Trump’s ongoing support for the lockdown protests, as he continues to target Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and openly encourage states to rebel against stay-at-home orders. Birx also rejected the White House’s previous projections that the pandemic could result in 60,000 deaths—a milestone the United States surpassed on Tuesday—saying that the task force’s projections have always been between 100,000 and 240,000 “with full mitigation.”
Also hitting the Sunday morning news circuit, Whitmer insisted that the protests on Thursday were not representative of the views of most Michigan residents.
“We know that people are not all happy about having to take this state at home posture, and you know what, I’m not either,” she told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “But the fact of the matter is that we have to listen to the epidemiologist and health experts, and displays like the one we saw at our capitol is not representative of who we are.”
A fund Congress created to help rescue small businesses initially struggled to deliver relief to hurting firms. Now that it’s been replenished, the strict rules and confusing guidance surrounding the fund’s loans has stopped many recipient businesses from spending them, according to a new story from the New York Times.
For weeks, small businesses expressed outrage over the Paycheck Protection Program, which grants forgivable loans to businesses with fewer than 500 employees facing dire economic straits in a pandemic-induced depression. The initial $350 billion Congress set aside for the program—which covers two month’s worth of payroll, rent, and utility expenses—ran out in just two days as bigger, well-connected firms, such as Ruth’s Chris Steak House and Potbelly’s, hustled to secure large sums. Many larger businesses, such as Shake Shack and the Los Angeles Lakers, returned their loans amidst the backlash.
Congress added an additional $310 billion the program last month, but, as the Times details, the loans haven’t been enough to keep businesses solvent and employees on the job. George Evageliou, who owns a woodworking company in Brooklyn, told the Times that the federal government made the program “so hard to use,” and that it’s “start[ing] to feel like a lose-lose situation.” Much of that stems from terms of the loan: It can be forgiven only if a firm hires back three-quarters of its employees and spends the whole sum within eight weeks of receiving it. With a sluggish economy with few signs of recovery and some states pushing their shelter-in-place orders into June, many employers suspect they’ll just have to lay off their employees again after the two months run out.
Business owners are also afraid of not clearly following the rules of the program, which are “complicated, ambiguous, and evolving,” says the Times. The Small Business Association, which administers the loans, has been continuous updating loan guidance beyond the terms laid out in the CARES Act, the legislation that created the program. “I don’t accidentally want to commit bank fraud,” Jodi Burns, the owner of a donut shop in Guilford, Conn., told the Times.
The result, the Times concludes, is that “many of the small businesses that did get loans are sitting on the money, unsure about whether and how to spend it,” and, in turn, “compromising the effectiveness of a program meant to help stabilize the country’s reeling economy.”
In the piece, business owners say they wish the program allowed them more flexibility to use the money on protective equipment for their workers, tweak their business model to make it more pandemic friendly, or spend the sum closer to the expected reopening dates in their states.
President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting about the coronavirus response with Gov. Phil Murphy, D-N.J., in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, April 30, 2020, in Washington. Associated Press
On Saturday morning, President Trump tweeted there would be plenty of coronavirus tests for the US senators set to return to Washington next week. His statements contradict multiple reports that there isn’t enough capacity.
The president tweeted at Dr. Brian P. Monahan, the Capitol’s attending physician. “There is tremendous CoronaVirus testing capacity in Washington for the Senators returning to Capital [sic] Hill on Monday,” Trump tweeted. Trump tagged his new chief of staff, former Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), to “inform Dr. Brian P. Monahan,” the Capitol’s attending physician.
There is tremendous CoronaVirus testing capacity in Washington for the Senators returning to Capital Hill on Monday. Likewise the House, which should return but isn’t because of Crazy Nancy P. The 5 minute Abbott Test will be used. Please inform Dr. Brian P. Monahan. @MarkMeadows
The tweet is a response to multiplereports that Monahan had told top Republican officials he lacked the capacity to proactively test all 100 senators, who are coming to Washington on Monday for the first time since late March. Monahan said his office had enough supplies to test senators and staffers who appear ill—but not the rest. Though Trump said that Monahan could use the “5 minute Abbott Test,” the rapid-results kit used at the White House, Monahan says he doesn’t have the equipment necessary to perform that test. Any tests he conducts won’t have results for two days.
The Capitol’s meager capacity stands in stark contrast to the resources reportedly available at the White House. Both Trump and vice president Mike Pence are tested frequently, as are the aides who work closely with them; tests are also available to anyone who meets with either Trump or Pence.
In his tweet, Trump suggested that the Capitol also had enough tests for the 435 members of the House, “which should return but isn’t because of Crazy [House Speaker] Nancy P[elosi (D-Calif.)],” he wrote. The House had initially been scheduled to return to work on Monday, as well, but a swift bipartisan backlash against traveling as pandemic conditions remain at peak pushed Pelosi to reverse course. Neither the House nor the Senate can vote on legislation remotely.
The country’s limited testing capacity has been the subject of intense criticism. Experts say that widespread testing is necessary to determine a population’s rate of exposure to the virus and whether people can safely resume normal activities. Other countries, such as Singapore and South Korea, have implemented comprehensive testing programs that have allowed them to isolate the sick and reopen their economies.
Tina NguyenMother Jones illustration; Photo courtesy of Tina Nguyen
Like many reporters in the coronavirus era, I find myself constantly dialing in to press conferences and joining video Q&A sessions to scout leads and meet new sources. But on a recent call with immigrant rights groups and the Service Employees International Union One, there was one speaker—a Vietnamese American home care worker named Tina Nguyen—whose prepared statement about her experience of the pandemic really stuck with me, because it centered around fear: of the virus, of racism, of violence.
So several days later I called her at home in San Jose, California. The 69-year-old Nguyen, who moved to the United States from Vietnam almost 30 years ago and currently serves as a vice president for her local SEIU chapter, was quick to apologize for her perfectly fine English. After some small talk, I asked her to elaborate on something she’d said during the press conference, about how she’d changed her routine when she leaves the house these days.
“First,” she told me, “I have to check for safety, for security, because maybe there’s someone in this crisis that needs money and could rob me or attack me.” Second, “I look around to make sure I’m keeping the social distance correctly,” and that other people are, too. If they aren’t, Nguyen said, she quickly reminds them to stay six feet away. “The third one is serious,” she said, slowing down a bit as she spoke. “I have to look around to see the attitude of people around, to look in their eyes to see if they may attack me because I am an Asian.”
Her fears of being targeted are real. When coronavirus cases started to spread across the United States, so did incidents of racist acts against Asian Americans. In response to the “alarming escalation in xenophobia and bigotry,” civil rights groups established a reporting center to capture firsthand accounts of harassment, violence, and discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. In a four-week period, Stop AAPI Hate received more than 1,400 incident reports: everything from rideshare drivers refusing service and speeding off to strangers coughing and spitting while yelling things like “fucking Chinese disease.” All of this has added an extra layer of stress to pandemic life for many Asian American communities. What’s happening right now “makes me more scared, and it makes me have to be more careful,” Nguyen told me. “Racism happened sometimes,” she told me, but “in this pandemic it’s worse.”
While Nguyen herself hasn’t faced any overt racism during this crisis—perhaps, she told me, it’s because she barely leaves her house—people close to her have been harassed, and she has gotten a few “looks” from people who are not Asian. She said a friend, who is also Vietnamese, told her about getting harassed when she was in line at the bank, causing her to leave without taking out the money she needed. Nguyen said her daughter-in-law came home a couple of weeks ago and shared that a man standing in front of her at the grocery store had turned around to give her a look. “He didn’t yell, but the way he looked at her…like, ‘You Asian!'” Plus, Nguyen was affected by a story she saw on the news of an Asian man assaulted in San Francisco by a man who yelled, “I hate Asians.”
“Asian people cannot be treated like that,” Nguyen said. “If we do something wrong, that’s maybe okay, we get yelled at. But we didn’t do anything wrong. We’re innocent people. We should not be treated that way.”
Nguyen and her family have been sharing stories about xenophobia at the dinner table, and she’s been reminding them that they need to be constantly alert—but not to panic. She told me that even as an older, quite short woman, she has learned what to do if she anticipates being attacked. She even has learned some moves from watching Vietnamese self-defense videos on Facebook and has run through scenarios in her mind for when it’d be a good time to run or fight back.
Nguyen also has been talking frequently with other union members to keep occupied and tries to not let the current situation get her too down. She said that she’s constantly reading the news and looking at the national and global death counts, so I asked her what she does when she needs to disconnect from reality for a moment. “When I don’t feel so good, I listen to music,” she said, adding that she’s even been sending her friends YouTube links to some of her favorite performances. (I’ll admit that I was a bit surprised that the links she later shared with me were of an older, heavily bearded man singing covers of ‘80s power ballads.)
Before we ended our call, Nguyen said she wanted to encourage other Asian Americans to report any racism or violence they experienced to the authorities: ‘They should raise their voice so we can raise our voice—and help get it stopped, so they don’t suffer by themselves only.'”
A group of protesters on the steps of the Michigan state Capital on April 15, 2020.Daniel Mears/TNS via ZUMA
As local lawmakers in Michigan gathered at the state Capitol building in Lansing on Thursday, they were met by hundreds of demonstrators—many carrying firearms—who forced their way into the statehouse in heated protest of the state’s stay-at-home orders. Since March 24, Michigan, like most other states around the country, has been under a strict stay-at-home order, imposed by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, to help stop the spread of the novel coronavirus. But many Michigan residents are demanding Whitmer reopen the state, echoing President Donald Trump’s push to reopen the country and restart the economy—even if costs lives.
Multiple armed gunmen storm Michigan’s State House, State police are protecting @GovWhitmer and blocking the gunmen from gaining access to the house floor.
This chaotic scene comes on the heels of several similar ones earlier this month in Michigan, followed by more in state capitols all over the country: Angry protesters—many donning pro-Trump gear, MAGA hats, and Confederate flags—demanding that their governors reopen their states. (It’s important to note that while the president has tweeted his support for these protests, the actual number of people showing up to these demonstrations in violation of states’ stay-at-home orders seems to be only a vocal minority.)
Thursday’s protest in Lansing, called the “American Patriot Rally,” was organized by the group Michigan United for Liberty to call for businesses to be reopened, NBC News reports. The group also organized the first protest in Michigan, on April 7, and has since unsuccessfully sued Whitmer to reopen the state. But this demonstration, unlike previous ones in the state and elsewhere, escalated to an unprecedented point of tension, with protesters forcing their way into the Capitol building after hours protesting outside in the rain. Videos from the scene show the demonstrators gathered outside the legislative chambers, blocked by police officers, chanting “Let us in!” and “You cannot lock us out!”
The state’s legislature assembled on Thursday to debate an extension of Whitmer’s coronavirus emergency response orders, which mandated a suspension on all activities “not necessary to sustain or protect life.” Michigan has been particularly hard-hit by the coronavirus; as of publication, it had over 41,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 3,700 deaths as a result of the disease. Over the past few weeks, Democratic governors have been one of Trump’s favorite targets in shifting blame for the economic fallout of the pandemic, with Whitmer bearing the brunt of his tantrums. His tirades against Whitmer have only fanned the flames of the ongoing protests there. According to one Michigan state senator, some local lawmakers even wore bullet proof vests to the legislative session:
Directly above me, men with rifles yelling at us. Some of my colleagues who own bullet proof vests are wearing them. I have never appreciated our Sergeants-at-Arms more than today. #milegpic.twitter.com/voOZpPYWOs
— Senator Dayna Polehanki (@SenPolehanki) April 30, 2020
Currently, Whitmer’s stay-at-home orders are in place until May 15, though earlier this week she announced a phased plan to reopen the state, beginning with allowing constructions workers to go back to work in the next week or two.
Yesterday, Mother Jonespublished a timeline tracking 100 days since officials confirmed the first case of the coronavirus in the United States. In the weeks since, more than 1 million Americans have fallen ill and more than 57,000 have died. President Donald Trump’s record of failure, self-congratulation, and deflection snaps into focus the moment you start scrolling.
Over at the Mother Jones Podcast, we took the opportunity to examine what bearing these first 100 days could have for Trump’s 2020 reelection prospects—and the strategies he’s using to misinform and point the finger elsewhere. Host Jamilah King asked Mother Jones DC Bureau Chief David Corn to analyze the ways in which Trump has, or hasn’t, taken responsibility for the United States’ pandemic, uncovering an all-too familiar pattern. “He is trying to blame foreign power for what it did wrong so that we don’t look at what he did wrong,” Corn says.
Jamilah King also spoke with senior reporter Tim Murphy about his reporting on how candidates are adjusting to long-distance campaigning. Murphy paints a picture of a new style of digital-only campaigning, made up of livestreams, podcasts, and social media, that has profoundly affected the campaign of presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden. “The campaign shut down just as he was on the cusp of making history,” Murphy said. “You can’t do the big wine cave fundraisers anymore.”
Listen to the full story on the podcast:
And while you’re here, check out our video chronicling Trump’s 100 days of denial:
At an industry roundtable on Wednesday, Trump set out to assure Americans that soon the country will reopen, the coronavirus will disappear, and things will be just as they were three months ago.
And then he took questions.
“Without a vaccine, sir, why do you think the the virus is going to be gone?” asked CBS News reporter Ben Tracy.
“It’s gonna go,” Trump responded. “It’s gonna leave. It’s gonna be gone. It’s gonna be eradicated. It might take longer, it might be in smaller sections. It won’t be what we had.” He went on, “If you have a flare-up in a certain area—I call them burning embers—boom, we put it out. We know how to put it out now.”
.@benstracy asks Pres. Trump how he expects coronavirus to be "gone" without a vaccine
Trump: "It's gonna go, it's gonna leave, it's gonna be gone, it's gonna be eradicated. It might take longer, it might be in smaller sections. It won't be what we had." https://t.co/9T8aUPjUrspic.twitter.com/mc1TqQCPMH
It perhaps goes without saying that we are a long way from “knowing how to put it out.” Yesterday, the American death toll from the coronavirus surpassed that of the Vietnam War. More than a million Americans have tested positive for the virus; less than 2 percent of Americans have been tested.
Perhaps exchanges like these are why, per the Washington Post, officials have advised Trump to stop answering questions from reporters.
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