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      'Failure is not an option': Biden's Covid taskforce ready to step up

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      President-elect Joe Biden has set up a 13-member coronavirus advisory board will play a high-profile role in helping the Biden-Harris administration contain the coronavirus pandemic in the US as it enters its deadliest phase so far.
      “Failure is not an option here,” Dr Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota and a member of the advisory board, told the Guardian. “We have to do whatever we can to reduce the impact of the virus on our society.”
      The high-powered board, which includes a former US surgeon general, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, leading virologists and experts in bio-defense and the health of marginalized populations, is an about-face from the Trump administration.
      Trump routinely muzzled scientists, pushed misinformation, sought to change scientific guidance for political purposes and shunted much of the Covid-19 response to states.
      “The work has been going on for months,” said Dr Celine Gounder, a clinical assistant professor of infectious diseases at NYU Langone Health’s department of medicine, and a member of the advisory board. “The role of the advisory board is sort of bigger picture, to have a second set of eyes on these plans to provide feedback and to be thinking big ideas.”
      The coming weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic will be among the most challenging, as the US shatters records for new coronavirus cases and hospitalizations, with deaths sure to follow, and economic fallout likely.
      The disease has killed 242,000 people and is claiming more than 1,000 lives a day. The rate of Americans hospitalized has more than doubled over two weeks, and the coming holidays threaten to make the pandemic exponentially worse.
      “It’s important to understand virtually the entire US is becoming a hotspot, which means nothing really is a hotspot any more – everything is,” said Osterholm.
      The Biden campaign laid out a multi-pronged plan for dealing with the virus, including:
      shared guidance on reopening from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention;
      an enormous expansion of testing and production of protective equipment;
      an expansion of health insurance benefits;
      a multi-pronged, logistically challenging, vaccination campaign to provide free shots;
      hiring 100,000 new public health workers;
      and lobbying for coronavirus economic relief.

      The scientists and researchers tapped by the Biden-Harris administration will work with that blueprint, as well as look broadly at how to address public trust, rampant viral spread, vaccine distribution and even novel solutions such as screening entire towns for Covid-19, according to Gounder.
      “Really scaling up testing is a big priority, because you can’t really understand how the virus is spreading if you don’t have that kind of data,” said Gounder. Importantly, there is disagreement on the board – not everyone agrees on how to approach the pandemic response, and this is by design.
      President-elect Joe Biden has made a stark departure from the strategy of his predecessor, and assembled a group of 13 of the nation’s foremost scientists to lead a federal response to the pandemic.
      The group’s very appointment is a stark departure from Trump’s administration, which has still refused to concede or aid in a transition. Biden has also signaled he would turn much of the federal government to face the Covid-19 challenge. He announced a 52-member Covid-19 transition team to coordinate across federal agencies.
      Trump’s intransigence has consequences – the most ambitious plans of this group will probably have to wait until 20 January when Biden takes office. Still, as a nationwide surge of infections grips the country, the group can address perhaps its most important challenge – getting buy-in from the American people.
      “[Biden’s] single biggest challenge is going to be re-establishing trust,” said Dr Leana Wen, an emergency doctor and public health professor at George Washington University, who is not involved in the advisory board. She previously served as Baltimore’s health commissioner. “We won’t be able to stop the surges and infections if half of the country does not follow his guidance.”
      Overwhelmingly, those who rated the economy as their top issue voted for the now outgoing President Trump. But those people must be brought on board to participate in public health measures such as mask-wearing and social distancing to stem the tide of infection.
      “If I could change one thing right now, I wish everyone in this country could spend just one hour in an intensive care unit,” said Osterholm, as a way to convince the American public of the severity of the disease. “That’s been one of the challenges – is the fact that people still think this is not real.” More

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      Trump comes close to admitting defeat but stops short of formal concession

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      Donald Trump has come closer than ever to admitting that he lost the US presidential election, suggesting “time will tell” but stopping short of a formal concession to president-elect Joe Biden.
      In his first public remarks since his defeat was announced, Trump appeared to catch himself making a slip of the tongue as he discussed the possibility of a Biden administration imposing a national lockdown to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
      “Ideally we won’t go to a lockdown,” the president told reporters in the White House Rose Garden. “I will not go – this administration will not be going to a lockdown. Hopefully the – whatever happens in the future, who knows which administration will be.”
      Trump added: “I guess time will tell. But I can tell you this administration will not go to a lockdown.”
      Biden was proclaimed the winner of the election last Saturday, a result Trump has refused to acknowledge while launching legal challenges based on unsubstantiated claims of fraud. The homeland security department on Thursday declared it the most secure election in US history with no evidence of votes being compromised or altered.
      The president had issued dozens tweets and retweets but had not been seen in public except for a Veterans’ Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. It was the longest spell the American people had gone without hearing him speak since he took office.
      Finally, on Friday, Trump held a press conference at the White House to provide an update on Operation Warp Speed, the effort to create a vaccine for Covid-19. The event, attended by Vice-President Mike Pence and coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Birx, took place one day after the US set a single-day record of more than 160,000 new cases.
      Trump said he expects a vaccine to be available for the entire population as soon as April and an emergency use authorisation for Pfizer’s vaccine “extremely soon”. Pfizer has said it expects to report required safety data next week and can then apply for an emergency use authorisation.
      Although he appeared deflated, his hair grey instead of its customary blond, Trump still dived into familiar territory, boasting about economic recovery and settling scores with one of his political foes, New York governor Andrew Cuomo.
      The government would not deliver a coronavirus vaccine to New York state if and when it becomes available, Trump said, because the state has promised to do its own review to ensure their safety.
      Cuomo “doesn’t trust where the vaccine is coming from”, Trump complained. “These are coming from the greatest companies anywhere in the world, greatest labs in the world, but he doesn’t trust the fact that it’s this White House, this administration, so we won’t be delivering it to New York until we have authorisation to do so and that pains me to say that.”
      Cuomo dismissed the attack. In an interview on MSNBC, the governor said: “None of what he said is true, surprise surprise. We’re all excited about the possibilities about a vaccine. It’s not that people don’t trust the vaccine companies, the pharmaceutical companies. Pfizer’s a great New York company, Regeneron is a great New York company.
      “But an overwhelming percentage of Americans are worried about political interference in the vaccination process, in the approval process, by the president. The American people trust the drug company more than they trust the president.”
      Criticism of the administration’s response to the virus, which has killed more than 243,000 in the US, became a central argument for Biden ahead of the 3 November election. There have been more than 100,000 new confirmed cases reported daily for more than a week. The secret service is experiencing a significant number, many believed to be linked to Trump’s rallies in the closing days of the campaign.
      Biden has devoted most of his public remarks to encouraging Americans to wear a mask and view the coronavirus as a threat with no regard for political allegiance. He has not endorsed a nationwide shutdown but appealed for Trump to take “urgent action”.
      “The crisis does not respect dates on the calendar. It is accelerating right now,” he said in a statement on Friday.
      Public health experts have warned that Trump’s refusal to take aggressive action or to coordinate with the Biden team will only worsen the effects of the virus and hinder the nation’s ability to swiftly distribute a vaccine next year.
      Yet Trump continues to stall the presidential transition. When an interviewer on Fox Business suggested that it would look sad if Trump does not attend the inauguration on 20 January, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany replied: “I think the president will attend his own inauguration. He would have to be there, in fact.”
      There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the election. Officials from both political parties have stated publicly that the election went well, and international observers confirmed there were no serious irregularities. Trump’s legal team continues to pursue election lawsuits that have gained little traction in the courts. More

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      Trumpism will persist until we rekindle faith in people’s ability to reshape the world | Jeff Sparrow

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      About 70% of Republicans apparently believe the 2020 presidential election to have been neither free nor fair.That’s a big chunk of voters rejecting, on entirely bogus grounds, the legitimacy of the new president.And it’s not the first time either.From 2011, Donald Trump engendered support for his own tilt at the White House by questioning the legality of the Obama presidency. He built his political career upon the embrace of “birtherism”, a racist conspiracy that emerged during the election of 2008.Back then, rightwing blogs and talk radio shows claimed Obama was not a “natural-born citizen of the US”, and thus ineligible for office under Article Two of the constitution.A Harris Poll in 2010 found an astonishing 25% of respondents questioned Obama’s right to serve, as the birthers tried to persuade electoral college voters, the supreme court and members of the college to block his certification.More than any other figure, Trump brought that rejection of Obama’s legitimacy into the mainstream.“If he wasn’t born in this country, which is a real possibility …” he told NBC’s Today Show in 2011, “then he has pulled one of the great cons in the history of politics.”For the Tea Party movement and the Republican fringe, birtherism underpinned a rightwing conviction that Obama’s presidency represented a kind of coup.You don’t need to cry fraud to explain recent presidential electionsMind you, after the 2016 election, a significant proportion of Democrats thought the same about Trump’s victory.As David Greenberg notes, Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter and John Lewis were among those who publicly labelled Trump “illegitimate”, elected only as the result of Russian meddling. Some Democrats blamed Vladimir Putin for the WikiLeaks release of the Podesta emails or suggested Russian social bots fixed the outcome; others falsely claimed that voting booths had been rigged or that Trump was in fact a “Manchurian candidate” employed in Putin’s service.For such people, Trump wasn’t merely an odious, rightwing demagogue. He was also an impostor, whose presence in the Oval Office signified systemic institutional failure.The refusal by Trump’s supporters to accept the 2020 result as genuine didn’t then come entirely from nowhere. Indeed, it’s been a long time since partisans of a defeated presidential candidate haven’t denounced the process that allowed their opponent to win.Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.For years, surveys have revealed a massive and ongoing decline in trust in basic institutions, including those associated with democracy.In early 2020, for instance, the communications firm Edelman polled 34,000 people in 28 countries for its Trust Barometer report. It found a tremendous decrease in the public’s respect for institutions, with almost everywhere “government and media … perceived as both incompetent and unethical”.Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed believed the media to be “contaminated with untrustworthy information” and 66% did not expect government leaders “to successfully address our country’s challenges”.Even in Australia, one of the wealthiest and most secure nations in the world, more than half of people polled saw the system as failing them, and a large majority no longer possessed confidence in the media.We might think this cynicism would favour progressives, given the left’s longstanding critique of institutional power.But it’s not as simple as that.Obama won office because George W Bush had plunged America into permanent, unpopular wars. Trump triumphed in 2016 because he faced a weak opponent; he lost in 2020 when his response to Covid-19 revealed his utter ineptitude.In other words, you don’t need to cry fraud to explain recent presidential elections. You can understand the outcomes easily enough in terms of decisions by voters.But only if you acknowledge voters’ ability to make such decisions.Conspiracy theories proceed on an entirely different basis. They present ordinary people as gulls, the perpetual dupes of power; they suggest events unfold, always and everywhere, according to the will of hidden string pullers.Rather than asking why their candidate didn’t appeal to electors, the conspiracist looks for external manipulation – implicitly accepting that only the elite can make history.In different circumstances, a widespread cynicism about the existing institutions might propel a movement to deepen and widen participation in political affairs. Right now, however, it seems to be linked to a prevailing pessimism about democratic agency, one that can all too easily provide openings for authoritarian demagogues.Joe Biden takes office as the embodiment of American business-as-usual. Despite polling far more votes than Trump, he remains the ultimate insider, associated with many of the most consistently hated policies in recent years (from the Iraq war, which he championed, to mass incarceration, which he helped initiate).Not surprisingly, if you survey rightwing social media, you can see the new argument cohering at a frightening speed, with more and more accounts claiming that Biden was illegitimately foisted on honest Americans by a nefarious elite. Far-right agitators, many of whom had long since given up on Trump, have embraced the #stopthesteal campaign with enthusiasm, with the upcoming Million Maga march potentially bringing together motley white nationalist and fascist groups in what looks very much like an attempted reprise of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.Just as Trump’s rise inspired imitators elsewhere, we should expect the right’s narrative to spread internationally. Already, baseless allegations of electoral fraud have been echoed by Australian politicians – and it’s still early days yet.Trump might be gone but, until we can rekindle faith in ordinary people’s ability to reshape the world, Trumpism will remain very much with us. More

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      The Guardian view on Dominic Cummings: voting to leave | Editorial

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      Boris Johnson should have asked his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, to resign months ago when he broke the first coronavirus lockdown and showed no regret afterwards. Perhaps Mr Johnson thought he could not do without the architect of his election victory and his ally in pursuing a hardline Brexit. But the damage was done. Public confidence in the government’s handling of coronavirus fell and has not stopping falling since.Mr Cummings walked out of Downing Street, in an act of theatrical defiance, on Friday. It is a mark of the tragicomic nature of Mr Johnson’s government that a week of infighting within No 10 dominates the news at a time of national emergency when hundreds are dying every day from a dangerous disease. Mr Cummings gets to walk away while Britain is stuck with the damage he has wrought.He won the Brexit referendum by spreading lies, unconcerned about damaging public trust. He has snubbed parliament, weaponised populist sentiment against state institutions and played fast and loose with the constitution. He may say that unconventional times needed unconventional ideas. But he seemed to enjoy his war too much. He picked, and lost, too many fights for his own good. A swirling cast of characters was drawn in. Even Carrie Symonds, Mr Johnson’s fiancee, got involved.Mr Cummings was edged out of power before he could flounce out. This tawdry episode demonstrates two things. One is Mr Johnson’s palpable lack of leadership in a crisis. He encouraged his chief adviser to embrace his inner Leninism — where the end justifies the means. Second is the government’s well-deserved reputation for incompetence. The prime minister over-centralised Downing Street and let Mr Cummings ride roughshod over a weak cabinet that he had hand-picked but which lacked the confidence or foresight to predict problems.Mr Cummings’ plans have gone awry thanks to the unpredictability of politics. After the US election his ideas for a hard Brexit were going nowhere. A Biden White House would have little time for the UK if it turned its back on Europe. Mr Cummings’ departure is a clear indication that the prime minister is ready to make the compromises needed to strike a deal with the EU.Coronavirus required bigger government. Fiscal conservatives like the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and many other Tory MPs worried that once voters understood that big spending would not bankrupt the economy they might get a taste for decent public services. Mr Sunak wanted to balance the books, Mr Cummings wanted to blow them up. He agitated for the un-Tory idea that state power could turbocharge the economy, making powerful enemies in No 11.Resentments have built like sediment on the river bed of Conservatism and threatened to choke the flow of government. Backbench MPs see Mr Cummings’ contempt for them as symptomatic of a high-handed Downing Street and have rebelled in such numbers that it threatens the stability of a government that, paradoxically, won a landslide largely thanks to Mr Cummings.Mr Johnson might think that, without his adviser, his ungovernable party becomes governable. But he might find that elections become unwinnable. Some of this is more about style than substance. Mr Johnson still has to make good on his promise to “level up” Britain, especially since north-south divisions have been dramatically exposed by coronavirus. The prime minister needs to up his game. Once gained, a reputation for incompetence is hard to shift. Too often with Mr Johnson the buck stops somewhere else and blame is dumped on someone else. With Mr Cummings out, there is no hiding place for Mr Johnson. More

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      How will Joe Biden's presidency affect arts and culture in America?

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      Four years ago, as Donald Trump prepared to be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, his incoming administration faced a serious hurdle: booking any big-name artist to perform at his inauguration. Several artists declined or pulled out of the event; whereas Barack Obama had Beyoncé, the Trump team eventually secured country artists Lee Greenwood and Toby Keith, whose rah-rah patriotism and jingoistic lyrics fit the bill for an agenda the New Yorker writer Andrea K Scott called “America First, Art Last”. The performances drew middling crowds (ones flatly denied by then White House press secretary Sean Spicer) dwarfed the following day by the Women’s March, which drew a bevy of A-list stars to protest the Maga president.The combative, mutually bitter relationship between Trump and most artists and creative organizations has only deepened since. Though the Trump administration – called a “worst-case scenario” for arts groups – has largely failed to dismantle the federal arts programs it promised to defund, the Trump White House has been largely hostile to the arts, from Hollywood stars to political comedy down to local arts programs in cities, towns and rural areas across the country. Support of the arts, broadly construed, has understandably not been at the forefront of a rancorous and bruising 2020 election, as the economic crisis and ongoing pandemic imperil everything. But with Joe Biden’s election win, however unacknowledged by the current president, it’s worth looking ahead: what would a Biden administration mean for the arts?First and foremost, handling the coronavirus pandemic which has grounded most live performances to a halt, shuttered Broadway and theaters across the country, and tipped millions into unemployment. The Covid recession is the most unequal in modern American history, ensnaring society’s most vulnerable – including all but the biggest name artists – in prolonged, stagnating financial hardship. Without coronavirus under control, most efforts to resuscitate art economies are for nil.Once in office, Biden will undoubtedly call a cease-fire on executive attempts to destroy the cornerstones of federal arts programs: the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), long a target of the conservative culture wars since the late 1980s, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which supply funds to programs and institutions ranging from the Met, to regional theaters, to art classes for rural preschools. More

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      Officials condemn Trump's false claims and say election 'most secure in US history'

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      The presidential election was the “most secure in American history” with no evidence that votes were compromised or altered, a coalition of federal and state officials has said, offering the clearest repudiation yet of Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud.The statement backed repeated assurances by experts and state officials that, despite the coronavirus pandemic and record numbers of voters, the election went smoothly without irregularities.Yet almost a week after Democrat Joe Biden was declared the winner, Trump continues to refuse to accept defeat and to hamper an orderly transition of power. In a newspaper interview on Friday, he insisted without evidence that the election was stolen from him and that his quixotic legal challenges will succeed.The latest blow to his case from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which led federal election protection efforts. “While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too,” it said.“When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections.”The statement was tweeted by Chris Krebs, the agency’s director, who just hours earlier had been the subject of a media report that said he had told associates he expects to be fired by Trump.Krebs has been vocal on Twitter in repeatedly reassuring Americans that the election was secure and that their votes would be counted. “America, we have confidence in the security of your vote, you should, too,” he wrote.The officials who signed the statement said they had no evidence that any voting system had deleted or lost votes, had changed votes, or was in any way compromised.They said all the states with close results have paper records, which allows for the recounting of each ballot, if necessary, and for “the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors”.“The election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalising the result,” the statement added.The message delivers a fresh blow to the credibility of Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of fraud and widespread problems that he insists could yet tip the election in his favour.His campaign have seized on issues that are typical in every election: problems with signatures, secrecy envelopes and postmarks on mail-in ballots, as well as the potential for a small number of ballots miscast or lost. With Biden leading Trump by wide margins in battleground states, none of these would have any impact on the outcome.Trump’s campaign has also launched legal challenges complaining that their poll watchers were unable to scrutinise the voting process. Many of those challenges have been thrown out by judges, some within hours of being filed. Again, none of the complaints showed any evidence that the outcome of the election was affected.In a further sign that Trump’s “legal strategy” is unravelling, the law firm Porter Wright Morris & Arthur withdrew from a case in Pennsylvania that challenged nearly 2.65m votes that were cast by mail, the majority by Democrats. It said in a memo: “Plaintiffs and Porter Wright have reached a mutual agreement that plaintiffs will be best served if Porter Wright withdraws,” but did not offer further explanation. More

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      This is no conventional coup. Trump is paving the way for a 'virtual Confederacy' | Jonathan Freedland

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      Not for the first time, Donald Trump’s unhinged behaviour prompts an uncomfortable question: should we be laughing in derision or trembling with fear? Is he playing out his last days as nothing more than a sore loser pathetically kidding himself that he might yet score the winning run, even after the crowd’s gone home and the stadium is empty – or is his insistence that last week’s election was stolen an attempt to cling on to power, to stage a coup against his democratically elected successor?The case for laughter is strong, as Trump’s allegations crumble to dust. On Thursday, a wing of the department of homeland security – part of the government that Trump still heads – declared that last week’s election “was the most secure in American history”, and that there was “no evidence” of any malpractice, still less of the mass-scale fraud that Trump has groundlessly alleged.The result is that Trump’s lawyers have been all but laughed out of court, forced by impatient judges to admit that they don’t have any evidence, let alone proof. His courtiers continue to pretend that the emperor is fully clothed, of course, but even they are winking at the crowd. Surely Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was joking when he promised with a smile: “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”The inner circle are happy to let Trump, who has appeared only once in public since election day, remain hunkered down in his White House bunker, “feverishly tweeting, watching television and telephoning allies”, as the Los Angeles Times reports. They carry on telling him what he wants to hear, but they know his cause is doomed. Tellingly, even Trump’s own son-in-law, Jared Kushner, made his excuses for Saturday’s supposed council of war, sending “aides” in his place.All that should prompt derision rather than fear. We can take the lead set by the president-elect himself, relax and let the process play out until Joe Biden is sworn in on 20 January. That’s certainly appealing, and most of the time I manage it. But every now and then, fear intrudes.Why, for example, has Trump fired the civilian leadership of the defence department, including the defence secretary, Mark Esper, filling their posts and others in intelligence with ultra-loyalists? Esper stood up to Trump over the summer, when the president wanted to deploy the military to crush peaceful protests. Does Trump have something similar in mind, a move that would require a yes man to nod it through? Is it possible that Pompeo was not, after all, joking?For now, I can accept that a full, tanks-in-the-streets coup is not on the cards. One Capitol Hill Republican tells me he suspects Trump sacked Esper mainly to “make him feel better”, and “to get even with the people who thwarted him”, rather than because he wants a Pentagon boss who will agree to send in the troops. Equally possible, says my source, is that Trump plans to go out with a bang, and wants pliant people in post. What kind of bang? Some talk of a total withdrawal from Afghanistan. Conversely, there’s chatter about a possible attack on Iran.That would be huge – and Trump likes huge – but it’s not a coup. On this reading, Trump is rejecting the election result less in order to keep power than to instil in his base the sense of grievance that will bind them to him for his next act – whether that be a new media company, Trump TV, to challenge Fox News or another run for the White House in 2024.But if that’s true, it’s hardly grounds for relief. That Trump’s attempt to defy a democratic election is comically inept or cynically motivated doesn’t alter the fact that he’s making it. No less alarming, all but a handful of Republicans have backed him. Fearing both his wrath and the hold he continues to exercise over the Republican electorate – highly relevant, given that two Senate seats are up for grabs in Georgiain January – the party’s most senior figures have acquiesced in Trump’s evidence-free claim that the Democrats rigged the election.That matters. Most directly, it will impair the incoming president as he tries to get to grips with a pandemic that on Thursday saw a record number of new cases in the US – 159,000 in a single day – about which Trump is doing and saying precisely nothing. How can Biden lead if half the country has been primed to believe he is not the rightful president? The Republican rebuttal – that Democrats hardly welcomed Trump in 2016 – trips on one simple fact: Hillary Clinton conceded defeat right away. That is the only way a democratic system can work, with the consent of the loser.The fear is that Trump and his followers will never give way, that he will remain the head of a “Trumpian government in exile”, as the historian Sean Wilentz puts it, antagonistic to the legitimate, elected government, armed with allies in Congress, sustained via social media and nourished by grievance and the romance of a lost cause: a new, virtual Confederacy.The word is not wholly hyperbolic because, inevitably in America, so much of this turns on race. When Trump’s cheerleaders locate the supposed voter fraud in Philadelphia or Detroit, their listeners get the message: it’s that black cities are corrupt and, at root, that black people shouldn’t be allowed to decide who gets to be president of the United States. As Barack Obama writes in his upcoming memoir, these are “dark spirits” that have “long been lurking on the edge of the Republican party – xenophobia … paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks”.So no, this won’t be a coup like we’ve seen in the movies. But nor can we just laugh it off. Trump is often ridiculous, but he’s no joke. More