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    Watchdogs Appointed by Trump Pose Dilemma for Biden

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWatchdogs Appointed by Trump Pose Dilemma for BidenRemoving inspectors general installed by the former president under a political cloud could have the consequence of further eroding good-government norms.Only one Democrat in the Senate voted to confirm Brian D. Miller, who had been a White House lawyer for President Donald J. Trump, as an inspector general hunting for abuses in pandemic spending.Credit…Pool photo by Salwan GeorgesFeb. 1, 2021Updated 8:08 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Even as the Biden administration has moved aggressively to undo Donald J. Trump’s policies and dislodge his loyalists from positions on boards and civil-service jobs, it has hesitated on a related choice: whether to remove two inspectors general appointed by Mr. Trump under a storm of partisan controversy.At issue is whether the new administration will keep Eric Soskin, who was confirmed as the Transportation Department’s inspector general in December, and Brian D. Miller, a former Trump White House lawyer who was named earlier in 2020 to hunt for abuses in pandemic spending.Both were confirmed over intense Democratic opposition after Mr. Trump fired or demoted a number of inspectors general last year, saying he had been treated “very unfairly” by them.By ousting or sidelining inspectors general who were seen as investigating his administration aggressively, Mr. Trump set off a partisan backlash that undercut a tradition under which nearly all inspectors general since Congress created the independent anti-corruption watchdog positions in 1978 were confirmed unanimously or by voice vote without recorded opposition.The Biden team wants to repair what it sees as damage to the government wrought by Mr. Trump through his many violations of norms. It also wants to restore and reinforce those norms, according to people briefed on its internal deliberations about inspectors general dating back to the campaign and transition.But in the case of inspectors general like Mr. Soskin, those two goals are seen as conflicting, those people said. To remove him would itself be another violation of the norm of respecting such officials’ independence and not firing them without a specific cause, like misconduct.“It’s very possible — and it would be a real mistake — for the Biden people to remove those I.G.’s because they were appointed by Trump,” said Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a government watchdog group. “That would be essentially exacerbating the problems he created in the first place.”Ms. Brian in December was one of the few outside observers to call attention to a little-noticed push by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, then the majority leader, to get Mr. Soskin confirmed as the Transportation Department inspector general. The 48-to-47 vote to confirm Mr. Soskin made him the first such official to take office on a purely party-line clash.The office Mr. Soskin now controls has been investigating whether Mr. Trump’s Transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, improperly steered grants to Kentucky as her husband, Mr. McConnell, was seeking re-election there. During the lame-duck session, Mr. McConnell used his power to prioritize getting Mr. Soskin confirmed over four other inspector general nominees who had been waiting for floor votes longer, raising the question of why he was trying to ensure that a Republican appointee would control that post even after Mr. Biden took office.“Hmm why would Majority Leader McConnell be pushing this nomination for Dept of Transportation IG today?” Ms. Brian wrote on Twitter on Dec. 18, a day after he filed a so-called cloture motion to end debate and hold an up-or-down vote on Mr. Soskin. “Perhaps it has something to do with the allegation of wrongdoing that office is reportedly handling against his wife, the Sec of Transportation?”Elaine Chao, then the transportation secretary, and her husband, Senator Mitch McConnell, in the Capitol last month.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMr. McConnell had on the same day also filed a cloture motion for a second inspector nominee, but not enough Republicans were in town when the clotures votes were held on Dec. 19 to constitute a majority, and both votes to end debate failed. He then successfully tried again for Mr. Soskin on Dec. 21 and got him confirmed, while abandoning the other nominee without explanation.Earlier in the year, only one Democrat voted to confirm Mr. Miller, who had worked in the Trump White House, with others rejecting him on the grounds that he was seen as too close to the Trump administration to aggressively hunt for waste or fraud in pandemic spending during an election year.Amid competing priorities, the Biden team appears not to have reached any decision about what, if anything, to do about Mr. Soskin and Mr. Miller. In a statement, a White House spokesman, Michael Gwin, extolled the general virtue of keeping politics away from such positions.“President Biden believes strongly in the role of inspectors general in keeping government honest and protecting taxpayer dollars, and he’s committed to protecting their independent role in his administration,” Mr. Gwin said in a statement. “Any politicization of the inspector general community is highly inappropriate and has no place in government.”Scrutiny of Mr. Miller has stemmed partially from the fact that he produced scant public sign of activity in his first eight months on the job.But his office delivered a report to Congress on Monday describing some investigative work, including developing 69 leads about suspected fraud that were referred to law-enforcement partners and opening five new preliminary investigations. A person familiar with his office said he had hired 34 staff members by the end of January.“I try to be bipartisan and nonpartisan — certainly as an inspector general and in everything that I do,” Mr. Miller said in an interview.During Mr. Soskin’s confirmation hearing last summer, he also pledged to do his job impartially. Through a spokesman, he declined to comment about the status of the Chao-McConnell investigation.A spokesman for Mr. McConnell, while not directly responding to a question about whether he prioritized Mr. Soskin because of that inquiry, pointed to a 2019 statement in which Mr. McConnell had made no apology for using his position “to advance Kentucky’s priorities” after Politico reported on arrangements under Ms. Chao favoring grants to Kentucky.At a time when the Senate is narrowly divided and the Biden team is trying to get major legislation passed, ousting Mr. Soskin would most likely anger other Republicans as well — particularly Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, a champion of inspectors general.Mr. Grassley scolded Mr. Trump last year over his failure to articulate a concrete reason for his removal of one such official, Michael Atkinson, who had sought to bring to Congress’s attention the whistle-blower complaint that led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. He also chastised President Barack Obama in 2009 for initially giving little explanation for removing the AmeriCorps inspector general.“It’s hard to imagine how President Biden could have a good reason to fire an I.G. who’s only been on the job less than a month,” Mr. Grassley said in a statement. “If he chooses to fire any I.G., he’d better have a darn good reason to do it, and he’d better notify Congress well in advance, as the law requires. If he doesn’t, he’ll get the same earful from me that Presidents Obama and Trump got.”Mr. Trump nominated Mr. Soskin in May, around the time he was moving against numerous independent inspectors general. The purge included firing some Senate-confirmed officials on the vague basis that he purportedly lacked confidence in them. He also appointed outsiders to serve as new acting heads of offices whose top positions were vacant — layering over the career deputy inspectors general who had been temporarily in control.Mr. Biden sharply criticized the purge at the time during a Yahoo News town hall and pledged to act differently.Some of the targeted officials had attracted Mr. Trump’s personal ire, such as Mr. Atkinson. Others were leading investigations that threatened Trump allies and other Republicans; he removed Steve A. Linick as the State Department’s watchdog, for example, at the request of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was facing several potentially damaging investigations. (A subordinate to Mr. Pompeo later did accuse Mr. Linick of specific misconduct, but an inspector general council investigated and found that the evidence refuted his accusations.)Filling the Transportation Department inspector general post last year had political sensitivities for both Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell, then the two most powerful Republicans in Washington. In 2019, Politico reported that the department’s longtime inspector general, Calvin L. Scovel III, was overseeing an investigation into whether the department under Ms. Chao was improperly favoring grants to Kentucky as her husband sought re-election there.In January 2020, Mr. Scovel retired for health reasons, and his deputy, Mitch Behm, took over as acting head. But in May, Mr. Trump installed a different acting head: Howard Elliott, a political appointee known as Skip who, in an unorthodox arrangement, remained subordinate to Ms. Chao. Mr. Trump also nominated Mr. Soskin, then a Justice Department lawyer, for the role.Under Mr. Elliott’s tenure, the election came and went, and the office issued no report about grants to Kentucky. Mr. McConnell won re-election, but Mr. Trump lost, meaning political appointees like Mr. Elliott were set to leave by the inauguration. Had Mr. McConnell not pushed Mr. Soskin through, the office would have reverted to Mr. Behm’s control until Mr. Biden nominated and the Senate confirmed a new inspector general.Still, Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who co-wrote a book proposing post-Trump reforms to government, said that no matter how well Mr. Biden might couch a justification to remove such an inspector general, it would further damage the notion that presidents ought not remove them without cause.“If Biden refrains from firing Senate-confirmed but disfavored inspectors general, that will buck up the norm of independence,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “The ostensible norm is not an actual norm if it doesn’t constrain the president in painful ways.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Fact-Checking Biden’s First Week in Office

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The New WashingtonliveLatest UpdatesExpanding Health CoverageBiden’s CabinetPandemic ResponseAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFact CheckFact-Checking Biden’s First Week in OfficeAll but three of 20 claims the president made were accurate, demonstrating his regard for basic facts and his proclivity to err when speaking off the cuff.In the past week, President Biden used the presidential podium mostly to promote his policy priorities.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesJan. 30, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETPresident Biden, in his first week in office, typically stuck to vetted scripts and verified facts — a departure from his predecessor’s freewheeling and fact-free rhetorical style.Over all, Mr. Biden used the presidential podium to promote his policy priorities. His remarks were aspirational and light on empirical assertions. Of 20 factual claims The New York Times analyzed from Jan. 20 to Jan. 26, all but three were largely if not completely accurate. One claim was an overly optimistic projection, another falsely criticized former President Donald J. Trump and a third Mr. Biden corrected almost immediately.Here’s a review.The president got basic facts right on the toll and racial disparities of the pandemic.Mr. Biden most often used statistics from government agencies and think tanks to emphasize the severity of the coronavirus pandemic.His assertions that 900,000 Americans filed for unemployment the week before his inauguration, and that almost 16 million continued to claim unemployment benefits, that almost 10 percent of Black Americans and just over 9 percent of Hispanic Americans are unemployed, and that 600,000 workers in local education have lost their jobs are all backed by the latest Labor Department reports.His claims that one in seven households and more than one in five Black and Latino households “don’t have enough food to eat” come from a Census Bureau survey from December. (A day after Mr. Biden made those assertions while signing executive orders meant to promote racial equity, the Census Bureau released a more recent survey showing that the situation had improved slightly in January; one in 10 households and one in six Black and Latino households reported food insecurity.)He was also right that Black and Latino Americans are dying from and being hospitalized because of the coronavirus at rates almost three times that of white Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Research from the left-leaning think tanks the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Center for Economic and Policy Research buttress Mr. Biden’s claims that 14 million people are behind on rent and 40 percent of frontline workers are Black and Latino.And it was true, as he first claimed during his inauguration, that more Americans have died from the coronavirus (406,194 on Jan. 20) than in all of World War II (405,399, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs). He often accurately cited positive analyses of his plans, and sometimes omitted the less flattering.When promoting his policy priorities, Mr. Biden was armed with favorable citations.He accurately quoted Kevin Hassett, a former top economic adviser to Mr. Trump, as “absolutely” in favor of the Biden administration’s proposed $1.9 trillion fiscal rescue package.It would lift 12 million Americans out of poverty, Mr. Biden said, referring to a study by Columbia University. And he referred to estimates from Moody’s Analytics that the package would create 7.5 million jobs this year, and that his broader economic plan would create about 18.6 million over four years if enacted in full.Mr. Biden, unsurprisingly, did not mention other analyses of his economic plan that projected a smaller effect on employment. The research institution Oxford Economics, which is based in England, estimated that it would create two million more jobs in four years. Nor did the president cite Mr. Hassett’s October paper, written with another economist for the conservative Hoover Institution, estimating that it would result in 4.9 million fewer jobs over a decade.The plan’s call for a $15 minimum wage, Mr. Biden said, would lift people out of poverty. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2019 that a $15 minimum wage would bring 1.3 million people above the poverty line — and also put 1.3 million people out of work.The president also repeatedly urged masking up, twice claiming that “wearing masks from just now until April would save 50,000 lives.” That is in line with a study that found about 130,000 lives could be saved if 95 percent of people wore masks in the 160 days from Sept. 22, 2020, to Feb. 28, 2021, equivalent to about 52,000 lives saved in 70 days.The New WashingtonLive UpdatesUpdated Jan. 29, 2021, 9:45 p.m. ETThe retired general in charge of the Air Force Academy alumni association refuses to condemn Jan. 6 riot, angering its members.Brian Sicknick, the Capitol Police officer who died from injuries at the Capitol riot, will lie in honor in the Rotunda.Biden intelligence briefings to be led by veteran C.I.A. officer, who previously briefed George W. Bush.He strayed from the facts when selling his own policies and critiquing his predecessor.During the 2020 Democratic primary and general election races, Mr. Biden was more prone to factual errors when speaking off the cuff, particularly in attacks on political opponents or as he defended or embellished his own record. The three inaccurate claims of his first week in office demonstrated those tendencies.While signing an executive order on strengthening domestic manufacturing, Mr. Biden suggested on Monday that his predecessor paid only lip service to supporting American businesses but “didn’t take it seriously enough.”“Under the previous administration, the federal government contracts awarded directly to foreign companies went up 30 percent,” Mr. Biden said.That was false. A White House spokesman said that Mr. Biden was referring to contract obligations that rose from 2017 to 2019. But a database of government contracts shows that the value awarded to foreign companies rose from about $11.9 million in the 2017 fiscal year to about $13.2 million in the 2019 fiscal year (an increase of 11 percent) and to about $12.9 million in the 2020 fiscal year (an increase of about 8.4 percent).Moreover, raw dollars do not take into account increased government spending or inflation. The same database shows that the share of foreign contracts actually decreased under Mr. Trump to 1.9 percent of all contracts in the 2020 fiscal year from about 2.3 percent in the 2017 fiscal year.At that same event, Mr. Biden overhyped the effect of one of his clean energy policies when he claimed that replacing all of the cars and trucks owned by the federal government with electric vehicles would create “a million autoworker jobs in clean energy.”It is dubious that electrifying the federal fleet of 645,000 cars and trucks would create one million auto jobs, even by the rosiest projections. After all, the entire auto sector employs just under three million people in manufacturing and dealership jobs, while 15 million to 20 million cars are sold a year.Existing research also shows a far more moderate influence on employment than Mr. Biden claims. For example, a 2010 study estimated 1.9 million jobs created if 123 million vehicles are powered by electricity, while a 2009 paper projected 129,000 to 351,000 jobs added if two-thirds of vehicles sold by 2030 are electric.The president also took aim at some critics of his goal to deliver 100 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine in 100 days.“I found it fascinating — yesterday the press asked the question: Is, you know, 100 million enough? A week before, they were saying, ‘Biden, are you crazy? You can’t do 100 million in a hundred days,’” he said last week. “Well, we’re going to, God willing, not only do 100 million, we’re going to do more than that.”Mr. Biden has a point that some were skeptical that the administration could meet that benchmark when he first made the pledge in early December, a few days before the Food and Drug Administration approved the Pfizer vaccine. Experts told The Times at the time that the goal was achievable, but optimistic. Mr. Biden himself noted in late December — when the country was administering about 200,000 vaccine doses daily — that it would take the United States years to adequately vaccinate the public.But by the week before he took office, the number of shots administered daily reached almost one million. That is the pace required to reach the 100 million doses goal, leading to some criticism that such a goal is now no longer ambitious enough.The president acknowledged in remarks this week that the 100 million number was a floor, not a ceiling.“I’m quite confident that we will be in a position, within the next three weeks or so, to be vaccinating people at the range of a million a day or in excess of that,” he said. “I think we may be able to get that to 1.5 million a day, rather than one million a day. But we have to meet that goal of a million a day.”After a reporter pointed out that the country had already crossed the threshold of one million, Mr. Biden readily corrected himself, using two words his predecessor virtually never uttered: “I misspoke.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    The First Post-Reagan Presidency

    Credit…Timo LenzenSkip to contentSkip to site indexOpinionThe First Post-Reagan PresidencySo far, Joe Biden has been surprisingly progressive.Credit…Timo LenzenSupported byContinue reading the main storyOpinion ColumnistJan. 28, 2021, 8:50 p.m. ETDuring Donald Trump’s presidency, I sometimes took comfort in the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s concept of “political time.”In Skowronek’s formulation, presidential history moves in 40- to 60-year cycles, or “regimes.” Each is inaugurated by transformative, “reconstructive” leaders who define the boundaries of political possibility for their successors.Franklin Delano Roosevelt was such a figure. For decades following his presidency, Republicans and Democrats alike accepted many of the basic assumptions of the New Deal. Ronald Reagan was another. After him, even Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama feared deficit spending, inflation and anything that smacked of “big government.”I found Skowronek’s schema reassuring because of where Trump seemed to fit into it. Skowronek thought Trump was a “late regime affiliate” — a category that includes Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover. Such figures, he’s written, are outsiders from the party of a dominant but decrepit regime.They use the “internal disarray and festering weakness of the establishment” to “seize the initiative.” Promising to save a faltering political order, they end up imploding and bringing the old regime down with them. No such leader, he wrote, has ever been re-elected.During Trump’s reign, Skowronek’s ideas gained some popular currency, offering a way to make sense of a presidency that seemed anomalous and bizarre. “We are still in the middle of Trump’s rendition of the type,” he wrote in an updated edition of his book “Presidential Leadership in Political Time,” “but we have seen this movie before, and it has always ended the same way.”Skowronek doesn’t present his theory as a skeleton key to history. It’s a way of understanding historical dynamics, not predicting the future. Still, if Trump represented the last gasps of Reaganism instead of the birth of something new, then after him, Skowronek suggests, a fresh regime could begin.When Joe Biden became the Democratic nominee, it seemed that the coming of a new era had been delayed. Reconstructive leaders, in Skowronek’s formulation, repudiate the doctrines of an establishment that no longer has answers for the existential challenges the country faces. Biden, Skowronek told me, is “a guy who’s made his way up through establishment Democratic politics.” Nothing about him seemed trailblazing.Yet as Biden’s administration begins, there are signs that a new politics is coalescing. When, in his inauguration speech, Biden touted “unity,” he framed it as a national rejection of the dark forces unleashed by his discredited predecessor, not stale Gang of Eight bipartisanship. He takes power at a time when what was once conventional wisdom about deficits, inflation and the proper size of government has fallen apart. That means Biden, who has been in national office since before Reagan’s presidency, has the potential to be our first truly post-Reagan president.“Biden has a huge opportunity to finally get our nation past the Reagan narrative that has still lingered,” said Representative Ro Khanna, who was a national co-chair of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. “And the opportunity is to show that government, by getting the shots in every person’s arm of the vaccines, and building infrastructure, and helping working families, is going to be a force for good.” More

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    Giuseppe Conte to Resign as Italian Prime Minister

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesVaccine InformationTimelineWuhan, One Year LaterAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyItaly’s Prime Minister to Quit, Adding Political Chaos to PandemicPrime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s government is likely to collapse, leaving Italy in an uncertain political situation with Covid-19 infections still very high.Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy, center, addressing the Senate in Rome on Tuesday.Credit…Alessandro Di Meo/EPA, via ShutterstockJason Horowitz, Gaia Pianigiani and Jan. 25, 2021Updated 5:15 p.m. ETPrime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy will offer his resignation on Tuesday, his office said on Monday evening, likely leading to the collapse of Italy’s teetering government and plunging the country deeper into political chaos as it faces a still serious coronavirus epidemic and a halting vaccine rollout.Mr. Conte’s resignation will put Italy back in the familiar situation of government instability, but in extraordinary times, with tens of millions of Italians struggling to stay healthy and get by under pandemic restrictions and a deep, global recession. The coronavirus has killed more than 85,000 Italians, one of the world’s highest death tolls. The government, which was making slow but steady progress in vaccinating public health workers, has hit a speed bump and threatened to sue Pfizer for a shortfall in vaccine doses.What will happen after Mr. Conte offers his resignation to President Sergio Mattarella remains unclear. Mr. Conte could remain in charge, heading a new governing coalition with a different lineup of parties, but the possibilities also include a more thorough reorganization under a different prime minister, or even elections to choose a new Parliament.Mr. Conte, who is serving his second consecutive stint as Prime Minister — first as the head of an alliance of right-wing nationalists and populists, and then as the leader of a coalition of populists and the center-left establishment — desperately wants to stay in power.But last week, Matteo Renzi, a wily former prime minister and critic of Mr. Conte, unexpectedly pulled his small center-left party out of the government, depriving it of majority support in the Senate. Mr. Conte, who leads a coalition of the populist Five Star Movement and the center-left Democratic Party, has been unable to attract enough new support in Parliament to replace the votes Mr. Renzi took away.Mr. Renzi said he withdrew from the coalition to protest Mr. Conte’s management of the epidemic, his lack of vision in deciding where to allocate hundreds of billions of euros in recovery funds that Italy is set to receive from the European Union, and his undemocratic methods in icing out Parliament by relying on unelected task forces.A food distribution site in Milan earlier this month. The pandemic has devastated Italy’s economy.Credit…Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesBut many here instead saw Mr. Renzi as performing a complicated political maneuver designed to take revenge on his enemies and gain more influence in the government, perhaps even in a third consecutive government led by Mr. Conte.Mr. Mattarella, the Italian president, is imbued with extraordinary powers during a government crisis and has several options for resolving the crisis.He could, in theory, ask the current coalition to continue, but it is seen as all but certain that he will accept that the government has collapsed. He could task Mr. Conte with forming a new government, which would essentially require the support, and appeasement, of Mr. Renzi’s party, with or without him. That would lead to what was in essence a glorified cabinet reshuffle.On Monday night, a third Conte government seemed, at least publicly, to be the governing coalition’s first choice.Nicola Zingaretti, the leader of the Democratic Party, which Mr. Renzi once led, said in a Twitter post Monday evening that he was “with Conte for a new government.” The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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    Biden Denounces Storming of Capitol as a ‘Dark Moment’ in Nation’s History

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    Georgia Runoff Updates

    Warnock and Ossoff Win

    Full Results

    Live Forecast

    Electoral College Votes

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    Justice Dept. Asks Judge to Toss Election Lawsuit Against Pence

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    Electoral College Results

    Election Disinformation

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    The Year in Charts

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Year in ChartsA tour of the major trends, from Covid-19 spread to political polarization, that affected Americans this year.Mr. Rattner served as counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration. Lalena Fisher is a graphics editor for The Times.Dec. 31, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Daniel Roland/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIf 2019 was the Year of Trump, then 2020 was the Year of Covid-19 and Trump. Only the most devastating pandemic in a century could have bumped our loudmouthed president into second place. That is, until Joe Biden also took him down a peg, in a free and fair election with an unambiguous result — except in the world of Trump. And oh yes, all of this occurred during the biggest recession since the Great Depression.Not all of this year’s ugliness can be charted. In particular, the death of George Floyd certainly should be high on the list of what made 2020 so awful, and so should how President Trump abetted the tensions that have divided America. But that still leaves plenty of material for this, my ninth annual year in charts.As early as January, experts at the World Health Organization told us the virus was coming. That was followed in March by eruptions in Italy, Spain and elsewhere. Yet we did little under the leadership of a president who kept telling us it would “go away.” Even after the coronavirus nearly brought the New York City area to its knees, the Trump administration responded feebly. Many parts of the country — particularly places where Mr. Trump remained popular — refused to take simple precautions like wearing masks.By fall, the greatest country on earth led the developed world in total cases. More than 340,000 Americans have died, more than the number killed in combat in World War II. More