Month: November 2020

“I was nowhere around no murder. … That’s not me,” he said. “I was a football player myself. I wouldn’t do that to nobody. … I never shot a person a day in my life.”

What the paper did have — in increasing numbers in fact — was a growing cohort of people who came to the paper with a different set of values. They were younger, which produced some of the division. A reporter who identified as “young Gen X” warned me about “toxic millennial workplace values,” while a millennial complained about the masthead’s tortured relationship to social media by arguing that “boomer is a mind-set.”

When Donald Trump came out to speak just before 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday, votes were still being counted in enough states—notably Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—to make it impossible to say whether he or Joe Biden had won the Presidency. But, whichever of them does, what Trump said in his brief remarks was a reminder of why he does not deserve the office. Trump, standing in front of a phalanx of flags, claimed that the vote count had been “called off” because he won; that is not true on either count. He said that his lead in those swing states was insurmountable, which is also false, and that when “they”—he didn’t really identify “they,” except as “a very sad group of people”—realized that he was winning, they had swooped in to perpetrate “a fraud on the American public.” In saying this, he was lying to the American public. And when he told the country that there was a conspiracy afoot to “disenfranchise” people who voted for him—adding, “We won’t stand for it”—he seemed to be willfully prodding his supporters toward violence. Trump’s statement was squalid; if the country is lucky, it is just a last indignity before he is defeated. But, in those few minutes, he caused America’s troubles to multiply.

There have been many times, over the past four years, that covering Trump’s Washington felt like a foreign assignment to me, never more so than while driving around the capital these past few days and seeing boarded-up storefronts and streets cordoned off for blocks around the White House, in anticipation of unprecedented post-election violence. I have seen such scenes before, in places like Azerbaijan and Russia. This is Trump’s America. It is not the America I have known.

An hour after the rally, I could not stop thinking about the most remarkable moment from it: Trump accusing U.S. doctors of artificially inflating the number of covid deaths in order to somehow collect money. “You know, our doctors get more money if somebody dies from covid,” he claimed. “You know that, right?” He even joked about it, imagining himself, I guess, as a doctor pulling off this scam: “With us, ‘when in doubt, choose covid.’ . . . You get, like, two thousand dollars more. It’s true.” I cannot think of a better illustration of Trump’s cynical world view: everything is a scam, corrupt, not on the level. “It’s true,” he said, over and over—which, of course, was one of many tells that it was not.

Trump and his allies had set a publicly disparaging tone against health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert. On April 18th—a particularly dire moment in the pandemic—the President’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, had bragged to Bob Woodward, “Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors.” In Colorado, nearly seventy per cent of local public-health officials reported receiving threats, and some resigned. In Washington State, one county official had to install a security system after making a simple phone call to remind a quarantining family to stay home: “Accusations started flying that we were spying, that we had put them under house arrest,” the official told NPR. In Nebraska, a former TV meteorologist and mayoral spokesman anonymously sent Adi Pour, head of the Douglas County health department, at least fifteen threatening e-mails, including one that read, “There was a lynching outside the Douglas County Courthouse a century and one year ago. You’re next, bitch”; in another, he wrote, “Maybe I will just slit your throat instead. That will get you to shut the fuck up.” (The meteorologist, Ronald Penzkowski, pleaded no contest to third-degree assault and stalking.) Fauci, after receiving death threats, was assigned a federal security detail.

In Borough Park, Tischler has become the leader of this movement. He has posted hundreds of videos on social media, in which you’ll find him using bolt cutters to break into a locked playground or harassing local health inspectors. In each video, he also plugs his weekly radio program, “The Just Enough Heshy Show,” where he reflects on topics such as whether he should apologize for calling a young Muslim girl a terrorist (initially yes; later no), and the intellectual capacity of women (“not as smart as men”). The other day, on the air, he challenged the Mayor to a fight on his deck, “man to man, because I think he’s not a man.”

Across Oregon, 911 calls inquiring about Antifa arsonists flooded dispatch services, and checkpoints manned by armed citizens slowed evacuation efforts. During a public Zoom conference, a captain in the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office related accounts of “suspected Antifa” members felling telephone poles “in the hopes of starting further fires.” The sheriff soon repudiated these reports, but not before a Clackamas County deputy was captured on video telling a local resident, “Antifa motherfuckers are out causing hell.” In a separate video, the deputy warned people that if they killed miscreants they could be charged with murder; however, he advised, if “you throw a fucking knife in their hand after you shoot them, that’s on you.” (The deputy was placed on leave and is under investigation.) Several law-enforcement agencies, including the F.B.I., beseeched citizens to stop spreading the false Antifa stories. But at a rally Trump insisted, “They have to pay a price for the damage and the horror that they’ve caused.” Some critics noted that, in 2018, Trump pardoned Dwight and Steven Hammond—Oregon ranchers who had been convicted of igniting fires on federally managed land.

Shipping logs show that every month in the years after World War II, thousands of barrels of acid sludge laced with this synthetic chemical were boated out to a site near Catalina and dumped into the deep ocean — so vast that, according to common wisdom at the time, it would dilute even the most dangerous poisons.

No American President has ever been charged with a criminal offense. But, as Donald Trump fights to hold on to the White House, he and those around him surely know that if he loses—an outcome that nobody should count on—the presumption of immunity that attends the Presidency will vanish. Given that more than a dozen investigations and civil suits involving Trump are currently under way, he could be looking at an endgame even more perilous than the one confronted by Nixon. The Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said of Trump, “If he loses, you have a situation that’s not dissimilar to that of Nixon when he resigned. Nixon spoke of the cell door clanging shut.” Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. Few people have evaded consequences more cunningly. That run of good luck may well end, perhaps brutally, if he loses to Joe Biden. Even if Trump wins, grave legal and financial threats will loom over his second term.