Stephan: The docileness of Americans as their country is taken apart due to the incompetence, corruption, and criminality of the Trump Administration, I believe, is how history will explain what is going on in the United States.
Volunteers help load food as vehicles arrive to pick up food supplies and essential items during a Feeding South Florida drive-through food distribution at Miramar Regional Park on November 19, 2020, in Miramar, Florida. Johnny Louis / Getty
More than half of households in the United States are not “very confident” that they can afford to put food on the table as the holidays approach, according to federal Census data. Meanwhile, what remains of federal pandemic relief programs is set to expire before the end of year.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has so far refused to take up a $2.2 trillion economic relief package passed by Democrats months ago, even after Democrats attempted to compromise with Republicans and lowered the price tag by $1.2 trillion. If Congress fails to act, an estimated 12 million workers will lose federal emergency unemployment benefits when they expire on December 26 — on top of the 4.6 million who will have exhausted their benefits before then, according to the Century Foundation.
The COVID-19 pandemic has entered a terrifying phase in recent weeks, forcing some state and local […]
Stephan: At the end of this dark period I think it is necessary to study not so much Trump, but the population of America. This four-year period has revealed who we are, and what we care about. What values matter to us. It is not a pretty picture but I hope, it is an instructive one. Here is a first take.
Illustration by Eiko Ojala
The world has spent the past four years obsessing over President Donald Trump: his biography, his ideology, his speech, his tweets, his moods, his health, his hair. But what did the Trump era teach us about ourselves, and the country he was elected to lead?
Trump’s presidency has been a four-year war on many people’s assumptions about what was and wasn’t “American”—what a leader can call people in public, which institutions really matter, whether power lies with elites or masses. And it has forced serious arguments about what information, and what version of our history, we can even agree on.
With four years of Trump nearly behind us, Politico Magazine asked a group of smart political and cultural observers to tell us what big, new insight this era has given them about America—and what that insight means for the country’s future.
Many were alarmed to discover that our political institutions and norms are more fragile than they thought. Others pointed out the blind spots that members of the political and cultural elite have for the deep sense of […]
Stephan: What amazes me about the Trumpers is that they seem incapable of recognizing that the misery the nation is currently experiencing is entirely the result of Trump and his orcs. Yes, Covid-19 was not created by Trump, but the country's reaction to it, from the lack of national planning, the politicization over wearing masks, the economic policies, such as described in this article, the employment crisis, the destruction of our democracy and on and on are all the result of the incompetence, corruption, and criminality of Trump and those who serve him. And yet it has no effect on the worldview of the Trumpers.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Credit: Gustavo Garello / AP
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Thursday that key pandemic lending programs at the Federal Reserve would expire on Dec. 31, putting the outgoing Trump administration at odds with the central bank and potentially adding stress to the economy as President-elect Joe Biden organizes his administration.
In a letter to Fed Chair Jerome Powell, Mnuchin said the $455 billion allocated to Treasury under the CARES Act last spring, much of it set aside to support Fed lending to businesses, nonprofits and local governments, should be instead available for Congress to reallocate.
The decision comes as data shows the early fast recovery from a historic plunge in the economy is fading, with more than 10 million who had jobs in January still out of work
“I am requesting that the Federal Reserve return the unused funds to the Treasury,” Mnuchin said in a letter to Powell, declining to extend programs the central bank has said were critical to assuring credit flowed to all parts of […]
Stephan: While America reels from Trump's attack on our democracy, the Republican Senators make it clear they care nothing for democracy, but everything for power. And they act accordingly.
McConnell and Graham
Senate Republicans have bucked a century-old tradition to continue to confirm President Donald Trump’s judges in spite of his election loss.
The Senate has confirmed six district court nominees since the election, including a 33-year-old attorney with little trial experience who was rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association (ABA). The move broke a “123-year tradition against voting on judicial nominees of an outgoing president of the defeated party during a lame duck session,” according to Bloomberg Law.
Judicial nominees of presidents who lost their re-election or whose party was defeated have not been confirmed after an election since 1897, Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies judicial appointments, told the outlet. The lone exception was when the Senate confirmed future Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who was then the chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, to a circuit court in 1980.
Stephan: The incompetence of Trump and his administration to deal with the pandemic is destroying America's already fragile illness profit system. Even worse it is destroying the wellbeing of the men and women who labor every day to keep the rest of us well. All of this was so unnecessary.
The reports have come in from all across the country: Hospitals are filling up, especially in the Midwest, and they are running out of the staff they need to take care of patients.
Last week, the United States broke its record from April for the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients, blowing past 60,000 all the way to 73,000, according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic.
Now new data released by the Department of Health and Human Services quantify the crisis in America’s hospitals in closer detail. At The Atlantic’s request, HHS provided data on the number of hospitals experiencing staffing shortages. From November 4 to November 11, 958 hospitals—19 percent of American hospitals—faced a staffing shortage. This week, 1,109 hospitals reported that they expect to face a staffing shortage. That’s 22 percent of all American hospitals.
In eight states, the situation is even more dire. More than 35 percent of hospitals in Arkansas, Missouri, North Dakota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin are anticipating a staffing shortage this week. COVID-19 puts pressure on hospitals in two ways. […]
