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      in US Politics

      US Covid cases, hospitalisations and deaths rise amid Thanksgiving rush

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      The US reported 181,490 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, a third daily rise in a row, as hospitalisations hit a record for a 16th day in succession, at 89,959.
      There were 2,297 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University, the largest single-day rise since May, bringing the pandemic toll to 262,065 out of nearly 12.8m cases. The death rate is still lower than in the spring.
      The alarming numbers were reported as millions of Americans defied official advice against travel and gatherings for Thanksgiving.
      In an address to the nation on Wednesday, Joe Biden appealed for resilience and sympathised with those contemplating a holiday without loved ones.
      “I know this time of year can be especially difficult,” said the president-elect, whose wife and daughter were killed in a car crash in December 1972. “Believe me, I know. I remember that first Thanksgiving. The empty chair, silence that takes your breath away. It’s really hard to care. It’s hard to give thanks … It’s so hard to hope, to understand.
      “I’ll be thinking and praying for each and every one of you this Thanksgiving.”
      Biden’s transition team were unable to coordinate with federal authorities for two weeks after the election was called, as Donald Trump refused to concede. The president still has not taken that step, but has allowed transition funds to be released.
      Biden heralded the approach of apparently effective vaccines. The US was “on track for the first immunisations to begin by late December, early January”, he said.
      “We’ll need to put in place a distribution plan to get the entire country immunised as soon as possible, which we will do. It’s going to take time. And hopefully the news of the vaccine will serve as incentive to every American to take simple steps to get control of the virus.”
      Biden listed such steps, including wearing a mask, social distancing and more, which the Trump administration has been loath to seek to enforce, even at its own events. Trump, members of his family, aides and senior Republicans have fallen sick.
      “There’s real hope,” Biden insisted. “Tangible hope.”
      Later, in Washington, the newly 6-3 conservative supreme court sided with religious communities who sued to block New York state Covid restrictions on attendance at houses of worship. Amy Coney Barrett, the devout Catholic justice who replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg last month, sided with other conservatives on the ruling.
      Avi Schick, an attorney for Agudath Israel of America, told the Associated Press: “This is an historic victory. This landmark decision will ensure that religious practices and religious institutions will be protected from government edicts that do not treat religion with the respect demanded by the constitution.”
      On Wednesday, New York saw more than 6,000 daily Covid cases for the first time since late April. Pennsylvania recorded more than 7,000 cases, its second-highest total since the pandemic began. Massachusetts and Nevada saw record case numbers.
      In Wyoming, the Republican governor, Mark Gordon, has opposed a mask mandate. On Wednesday, it was announced that he had tested positive.
      US airports saw around 900,000 to 1 million people a day pass through checkpoints from Friday to Tuesday, down around 60% from last year but some of the biggest crowds seen since the pandemic took hold. Typically, more Americans drive for Thanksgiving than fly.
      Officials – among them New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo – have been forced to cancel their own Thanksgiving plans in order to set an example. One who did not, Denver’s mayor, Michael Hancock, issued an apology on Wednesday.
      Having asked city staff and residents to avoid holiday travel, Hancock flew to Mississippi to spend the holiday with his wife and youngest daughter.
      “I made my decision as a husband and father,” he said, “and for those who are angry and disappointed, I humbly ask you to forgive decisions that are born of my heart and not my head.” More

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      Will New York's elite give Ivanka and Jared a warm welcome or the cold shoulder?

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      In the purgatory of Donald Trump’s unacknowledged election defeat, the knives are out for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump who, like dozens of other lesser-placed Trump acolytes, may be looking to return to New York, a city that the lame-duck president calls an “anarchic jurisdiction”.
      The reception they will receive, judging from the city’s press commentary, could be brutal.
      “They are the Faustian poster couple of the Trump presidency, the king and queen of the principle-torching prom at which so many danced alongside them, although in less exquisitely tailored attire,” wrote Frank Bruni in the New York Times this week.
      Posing a question broadly to what he called “the whole shockingly populous court of collaborators”, Bruno addressed the couple directly: “Tell me, Jared. Be honest, Ivanka. Was it worth it?”
      The answer, of course, is one for the couple alone to answer. But that hasn’t stopped others from offering their thoughts. “I see them as Glenn Close at the end of Dangerous Liaisons, with the entire opera house jeering,” says Jill Kargman, creator and star of Odd Mom Out, a highly praised TV comedy that skewered the Ivanka-style perfectionism of Upper East Side mothers.
      Andrea Bernstein, a WNYC investigative reporter and author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power, says it’s not clear that they plan to return to New York, since the Kushner family real estate empire is now focused in the mid-Atlantic states and his wife no longer runs a fashion accessories business.
      Moreover, Bernstein points out, twin New York city and state investigations into Ivanka’s $780,000 in Azerbaijani consulting fees, the on-the-record skewering by former Manhattan friends and increased politicization (she joined the rightwing chat site Parler this week) suggest Democratic New York may not be an optimal place to relocate.
      “I don’t see any indication they are coming back or would be welcome back here,” Bernstein says. “The investigations are a symbol of the problems the family could face back in New York, while the article in Vanity Fair was interesting not for what it said, but that the author said it so publicly.”
      If they do return, they will probably arrive in New York during another period of Covid restrictions. Restaurants are limited to 25% capacity and four per table, the charity and museum gala circuit upon which New York society revolves is on pause, and so opportunities to express the chill of social ostracism may be limited.
      “They’ll have to come back to Republican New York because they won’t be welcomed in liberal quarters,” says New York Times styles writer David Colman.
      “The interesting part is: will organisations that are essentially apolitical, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art – already sitting on pots of money from the Koch brothers – the Frick Collection or the Audubon Society, accept their donation and put them on a table?”
      The Kushners, Colman predicts, will give money to hospitals, medical charities and do something with sick children – “things people can’t get mad at” – and spend time in the Hamptons, the expensive getaway for the rich and powerful. “And she’ll distance herself from her father because he’s going to stay his crazy, fulminating self on Twitter.”
      Top New York hairdresser John Barrett says Ivanka will face no trouble if she chooses to return. “America is all about second acts, and there’s always somebody trying to advance a position or cause. Obviously, some people have been burnt by the administration, but it’ll take very little time for them to buy their way back pretty and rule a certain roost.”
      Not all are so accommodating. One former friend told Vanity Fair’s Emily Jane Fox: “They’ll be welcomed back by people who know the Trumps are as close as they’ll get to power. But everyone with self-respect, a career, morals, respect for democracy, or who doesn’t want their friends to shame them both in private and public will steer clear.” More

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      Covid rampages across US, unifying a splintered nation as cases surge

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      The Disunited States of America are united once more. After a brutal election that exacerbated bitter partisan divisions and left the country feeling as though it had been torn in two, it has at last been thrown back together.For all the wrong reasons.The great leveler is coronavirus. Covid-19 is rampaging across the US as though it were on a personal mission to unify the splintered nation in an unfolding catastrophe. Of the 50 states of the Union, all but one – isolated Hawaii – is seeing alarming surges in new cases. The virus is on the rise so uniformly across the vast landmass of the US, that records are being shattered daily.Almost 12m cases have been recorded. In just one day the US notched up 184,000 new cases – six times the total number of infections in South Korea since the pandemic began.Almost 80,000 Americans are currently in hospital fighting for their lives, and the death rate is soaring inexorably towards 2,000 a day – close to the peak reached in April.This week the country passed the grimmest landmark so far: 250,000 dead Americans. And already the total has gone up significantly beyond that tragic milestone.As Michael Osterholm, a member of the coronavirus advisory team assembled by Joe Biden, put it: “We are in the most dangerous public health period since 1918.”The result of this terrifying march of untrammeled disease is that panic has begun to set in at state level. Governors and mayors from coast to coast have been scrambling to batten down the hatches, from New York City where the country’s largest public schools system was closed on Thursday barely two months after it reopened, to California where governor Gavin Newsom announced he was “pulling the emergency brake”.It is in the heartland states that the true horror of the current crisis is unfolding. Here Donald Trump’s historic mishandling of the pandemic is coming home to roost.Across the midwest, Trump’s playbook towards Covid-19 has been avidly embraced by Republican governors, from Kristi Noem in South Dakota, to Pete Ricketts in Nebraska, Kim Reynolds in Iowa, and Mike Parson in Missouri. They have mimicked the president’s relentless downplaying of the virus, lying about the pandemic being under control, and spurning of mask wearing.The results are now plain to see – runaway infection levels, staggering positivity rates and hospitals at breaking point.Only now, when the virus is pummeling the midwest like a tornado, have some of the Republican governors begrudgingly begun to change tack. Take Reynolds, the pro-Trump governor of Iowa. More

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      in Elections

      Ivanka Trump calls New York fraud inquiries 'harassment'

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      Authorities conducting fraud investigations into Donald Trump and his businesses are reportedly looking at consulting fees that may have gone to his daughter Ivanka Trump, prompting her to accuse them of “harassment”.The New York Times said there were twin New York investigations, one criminal and one civil.The criminal inquiry, led by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr, and a civil investigation by the state attorney general, Letitia James, are just some of many legal challenges that will probably face the president and his family business when he returns to being a private citizen. The report provoked a sharp response from Trump’s eldest daughter, who is a senior presidential adviser.“This is harassment pure and simple,” Ivanka Trump said on Twitter, linking to the report in the New York Times. “This ‘inquiry’ by NYC democrats is 100% motivated by politics, publicity and rage. They know very well that there’s nothing here and that there was no tax benefit whatsoever. These politicians are simply ruthless.”The Times, which said the two investigations have subpoenaed the Trump Organization in recent weeks, follows publication of Trump’s long-sought tax records and revelations that he personally guaranteed debt running into the hundreds of millions that could soon be called in or come due.Trump’s financial and legal stresses appear to be mounting. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Trump’s main lender, Deutsche Bank, is looking for ways to end its relationship with the president.Deutsche Bank has about $340m in loans outstanding to the Trump Organization, the president’s umbrella group that is currently overseen by his two sons. The loans, which are against Trump properties and start coming due in two years, are current on payments and personally guaranteed by the president, according Reuters.Among the latest revelations is that he reduced his tax exposure by deducting about $26m in fees to unidentified consultants as a business expense on several projects in the past decade.Some of those fees, the Times said, appear to have been paid to Ivanka Trump, including a payment of $747,622 from a consulting company that exactly matched consulting fees claimed as tax deductions by the Trump Organization.Trump Organization counsel Alan Garten described the development as “just the latest fishing expedition in an ongoing attempt to harass the company”.Details of the twin investigations have been scarce. The Manhattan DA’s inquiry was originally focused on Trump Organization payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the Trump’s 2016 election victory but has since expanded to include insurance and bank-related fraud, tax evasion and grand larceny.The civil investigation began earlier this year after Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen told Congress that the president had boosted the value of his assets to secure bank loans and reduced them for tax purposes.In a TV interview this month, James, the New York attorney general, said the outcome of this month’s election was irrelevant to the investigations. She said: “We will just follow the facts and the evidence, wherever they lead us.”But Trump has dismissed the investigations as “the greatest witch-hunt in history”. More

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      'I don't care what you think': Cuomo lashes out at reporters at Covid briefing

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      [embedded content]
      Watching Andrew Cuomo’s coronavirus press briefings was once a household ritual for many in the US and around the world. But on Wednesday, the New York governor lost his cool.
      Things turned tense when Cuomo was pressed by a reporter about news that the New York City public school system – the largest in the US – would likely close on Thursday due to rising infections.
      Cuomo, who seemed unaware of the news, berated the reporter, who asked him to clarify whether or not New York parents should expect to send their kids to class on Thursday. “Let’s try not to be obnoxious and offensive in your tone,” he told the Wall Street Journal reporter Jimmy Vielkind.
      Covid-19 cases are spiking across the US, with deaths surpassing a quarter-million on Wednesday and hospitals throughout the country once again overwhelmed by patients.
      Cuomo declined to clarify whether the state would override city orders shutting down classrooms, and when the New York Times’ Jesse McKinley, who followed up, said “I think Jimmy’s correct in asking that question. I don’t think it’s obnoxious at all,” Cuomo retorted: “Well, I don’t really care what you think.”
      In March and April, when coronavirus cases first exploded across New York, Cuomo earned a reputation for delivering daily briefings that included not just updates on the latest case numbers, but also musings about how crisis can bring out the best in humanity, worries about how his ageing mother would fare through the pandemic and stern lectures to youngsters thinking about flouting the rules.
      Cuomo’s lively, empathetic delivery earned him fans. The comedian Chelsea Handler declared, “I’m officially attracted to Andrew Cuomo” and officials across the political spectrum praised his leadership.
      But on Wednesday, the governor’s outburst earned him no admirers. “Cuomo is offering a really embarrassing and condescending answer to a totally legitimate question about what’s happening” with schools, tweeted the Chalkbeat NY reporter Alex Zimmerman.
      “Parents are confused. Reporters are confused. Workers are confused. Kids are confused!” said Jessica Ramos, a Democratic state senator. “Cuomo? Not confused. Also, doesn’t recognize or care that you’re confused.”
      The governor’s performance also drew comparisons to Al Pacino and Martin Scorsese film characters.

      Scott Wolf
      (@scottwolf)
      Pacino is a lock for next years Oscars. His Cuomo is UNCANNY. 🙌🏻🎭 https://t.co/FqKuVtPEdx

      November 18, 2020

      Others lamented the logic of allowing bars, restaurants and gyms to remain operational while shuttering schools.

      Jessica Winter
      (@winterjessica)
      Can the kids go to school in restaurants

      November 18, 2020

      “Thinking tonight of all the New York City parents who just found out today that schools are closed starting tomorrow, even though schools have proven to be quite safe and bars and restaurants are still open,” said Dr Colleen M Farrell, a pulmonary and critical care fellow Weill Cornell Medicine. “This burden will, yet again, fall largely on women.”
      Cuomo, who has a history of clashing with Bill de Blasio, New York City’s mayor, had suggested schools could be kept open as the state ramps up testing capacity. But city officials announced school closures after New York surpassed a 3% Covid test positivity rate. Adding to the confusion: per the state’s calculations, which often diverge from the city’s numbers, the positive tests in New York City were at 2.5%.
      The hostile Wednesday press briefing came after Cuomo, who earned praise for leading New York through an initial surge of infections, published a book titled American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic.
      “Cuomo is being incredibly condescending and rude for someone who wrote a book about how well he managed the pandemic before it was over,’” wrote BuzzFeed’s David Mack. More

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      New research sheds light on Alexander Hamilton's ties to slavery

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      Far from being the “uncompromising abolitionist” of Ron Chernow’s hit biography and the Broadway musical it inspired, Alexander Hamilton not only owned enslaved people himself “but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally”, new research claims.
      “When we say Hamilton didn’t enslave people, we’re erasing them from the story,” Jessie Serfilippi, a historical interpreter at the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in Albany, New York, told the New York Times. “The most important thing is they were here. We need to acknowledge them.”
      One leading historian of founders and slavery, Annette Gordon-Reed, said that in showing Hamilton “as an enslaver”, Serfilippi had “broadened the discussion”.
      Among other achievements, Hamilton, the founder of the US banking system, is generally held to be one of the revolutionary generation less marked by the stain of slavery than, for instance, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the first and third presidents who both owned enslaved people.
      Serfilippi’s research has therefore caused a stir.
      “In the 21st century,” she writes, “Alexander Hamilton is almost universally depicted as an abolitionist. From Ron Chernow’s Hamilton to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: an American Musical, there is little room in modern discourse for questioning the founder’s thoughts and feelings on slavery.
      “ … However, some of Hamilton’s writings often believed to express abolitionist sympathies or the evolution of such feelings are more in line with his politics than his morals.”
      Hamilton has long been thought to have had an antipathy to slavery instilled by a childhood among the brutal sugar plantations of the British Caribbean. Serfilippi, however, writes that “to date, no primary sources have been found to corroborate” the idea.
      Hamilton married into the Schuyler family, a powerful force in New York, then, like the rest of the United States, a state where slavery was legal although it was in local decline. Recent research on the Schuylers’ ownership of enslaved people has turned up skeletons as well as plentiful evidence.
      Biographers including Chernow have long noted that Hamilton may have owned enslaved people. Serfilippi cites evidence from his account books which suggests that he did, for example a payment of $250 to his father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, for “[two] Negro servants purchased by him for me”.
      Chernow told the Times that though Serfilippi had done “a terrific research job that broadens our sense of Hamilton’s involvement in slavery in a number of ways”, she had not sufficiently considered his anti-slavery activities.
      But Gordon-Reed, a Harvard professor and the author of The Hemingses of Monticello, about those enslaved by Jefferson, called Serfilippi’s work “fascinating”.
      In a year marked by protests against police brutality and racial injustice, most statues and public monuments defaced or removed across the US have been of leaders or soldiers of the Confederacy, the rebel state which fought and lost the civil war between 1861 and 1865 in an attempt to maintain slavery.
      But the reputations of the founders and other American leaders – even Abraham Lincoln, the president who abolished slavery and won the civil war, and Ulysses S Grant, the general who fought it – have also come under renewed scrutiny.
      This summer, Miranda responded to criticism of his musical for not engaging with the realties of slavery and Hamilton’s relationship to it.
      “All the criticisms are valid,” he wrote. “The sheer tonnage of complexities and failings of these people I couldn’t get. Or wrestled with but cut. I took six years and fit as much as I could in a two-and-a-half-hour musical. Did my best. It’s all fair game.”
      Regarding Serfilippi’s research, Gordon-Reed wrote on Twitter that it “reminds of the ubiquitous nature of slavery in the colonial period and the early American republic.
      “Alexander Hamilton as an enslaver broadens the discussion.” More

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      'You're fired!': New York, Trump's home town, celebrates his election defeat

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      The celebrations that broke out on the streets of the president’s home town of New York City sent a loud message to the former star of The Apprentice: “You’re fired.”Some shouted his old catchphrase from the show as hundreds gathered spontaneously outside the Trump Tower skyscraper on the glittering island of Manhattan.This was where the brash real estate mogul had ruled a roost of sorts, as the chippy property scion from the outer borough of Queens who inherited, borrowed and bullied his way to fame and fortune – with a reputation for stiffing contractors, courting the media like a celebrity, and swaggering around like a mob boss.Trump Tower was also where he had descended, riding his ostentatious golden escalator, to announce his 2016 bid to become president.And it was also where he boasted during that campaign that he could literally shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and he wouldn’t lose any votes – but his luck had run out on Saturday as news broke he would be a one-term president. More

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      in Elections

      Trump's deep narcissism acted as a distorted mirror for millions of voters | Hadley Freeman

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      There are plenty of stories about how Donald Trump’s mind works. Here’s mine. In 1990, the president of a well-known French retailer asked my father to help him open a branch in Manhattan. So my father contacted Trump, and named the retailer. Trump replied, “Great, I love their neckties.”
      Acting as translator, my father took the retailer to Trump Tower, gave Trump the man’s business card with his shop’s name on it and explained to Trump that he wanted to lease space in the tower. Trump was delighted. He met the Frenchman’s lawyers, looked over the lease and signed it. Then, my father got a phone call. “What is this junk you’ve put in my building?” Trump raged, using a less newspaper-friendly word than “junk”. Confused, my father said it was the French store, as they’d arranged. “Where’s Hermès?” he shouted. Trump had met the president, seen his business card and signed the contracts. But because he wanted the luxury brand Hermès in his building, he believed he was getting it.

      Narcissists see what they want to see. What makes Trump more unusual is that an astonishing number of people see what they want to see when they look at him. Let us take a brief journey back to the early days of what I guess we can describe as Trump’s emergence on to the political scene, like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man emerged on to New York City in Ghostbusters. How eager some people were then to reassure us that all was fine, because they wanted it to be. “It would be a mistake to think that [Trump] is all instinct and impulse. He wants to bring to governing the same calculating business style that he has brought to communicating,” Michael Gove somehow managed to write in the Times, while simultaneously giving Trump a proctology examination with his tongue. “The Donald I know,” another British commentator wrote at the time, “is a smart, streetwise, charming (yes seriously!) guy who runs his businesses by putting good people into top jobs and letting them get on with it.” All those “my friend, Donald” takes: how sweetly they have aged. Like cottage cheese left for four years next to an orange boiler.
      It’s strangely apt that such a raging narcissist should function as a distorted mirror to so many, one in which they see their own fantasies reflected back at them. Whether he actually is a billionaire or not has never been important: since the 1980s he has presented himself as the cartoon image of one – Daddy Warbucks crossed with a particularly rubbish Bond villain – and people see what they want to see. His white working-class supporters saw in him their own aggrievement at not being accepted by elites who rigged the game; the elites saw a fellow plutocrat who would protect their fortunes. Before this election I often heard people talk anxiously about how, even if Trump lost, “Trumpism” wouldn’t go away.
      But what even is Trumpism? The man has never had any moral code beyond closing the deal, and these days barely seems capable of maintaining a thought to the end of a sentence: the idea that he has the desire let alone the wherewithal to construct an ideology is like assuming that monkey on the typewriter is writing Hamlet. Read any thinkpiece and “Trumpism” is boiled down to nativism, showmanship and lying, all of which can be more accurately summed up as “being a racist grifter”. In Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and his Followers, John W Dean and Bob Altemeyer rightly say that Trumpism is not about Trump at all, but about his followers and their own psychological predispositions. They look at him and see what they want to see: themselves.
      The final election result may not be known for days, and yet even before the sun had risen on Wednesday the takes were coming. Joe Biden was too centrist and the Democrats should have embraced a more far-left candidate, was one popular theory advanced by people who a) had apparently never heard of Florida, where some Cuban and Venezuelan-Americans reportedly rejected Biden because of what they perceived as his “socialism” and b) believed Bernie Sanders had been blocked from the nomination by Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic National Committee as opposed to actual Democrat voters, twice, and therefore is possibly not the great unifying candidate some wish.
      “Today it is clearer than ever that moving to the political centre is not a winning strategy,” crowed a Momentum press release, with the kind of confidence you might not expect from a group whose far-left UK candidate was trounced in elections, about a US candidate winning by a decisive margin in the popular vote. The left – in the US but also the UK – has always been wilfully resistant to the possibility that a lot of Americans just really, really like Trump, and their vote has nothing to do with the Democrats (or even the Republicans) at all. But as with Trump himself, people look at this election and see what they want to see.
      The US-based journalist Andrew Sullivan, who has frequently expressed scepticism about identity politics, declared on Wednesday, “I found the left’s relentless identity politics increasingly repellent. I wasn’t alone.” Others have argued that Biden didn’t use identity politics enough. And yet, given the sheer number of votes Biden got, and that more African-Americans, Latinos and Asians voted for Trump this year than in 2016, and his LGBT vote doubled, the picture is clearly too complicated to bend into anyone’s pet theory. Meanwhile, his Jewish vote shrank, disabusing those who theorised that his pro-Israel policies would woo the Jews, except in Florida where it may have played a part. Isn’t it annoying when people are inconsistent?
      Captain Hindsights always insist that whatever just happened in an election was both totally foreseeable and proves their theory. But this election is not proving any theory, other than that the US electoral system is, yet again, not fit for purpose, when a candidate can win millions more votes and still not necessarily win. Biden got the numbers, but not necessarily in the expected demographics, and Trump didn’t win, but he didn’t lose in the way many predicted either. Anyone who sums all this up in one grand principle is attempting to wrench a lot of very disparate groups with wildly differing concerns into a self-serving whole. Trump is a true narcissist, but as his popularity and now his possible final downfall have shown, he is not the only one.
      • Hadley Freeman is a Guardian columnist and features writer More