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      Corporate America won’t stop Trump’s tariffs. Here’s why | Alex Bronzini-Vender

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      Few historical analogies exist for Donald Trump’s newly announced tariffs. The investment bank Evercore estimates that the so-called “liberation day” announcement has raised the weighted average US tariff to 29% – its highest rate since 1900. To call it a generational action would be an understatement; my grandmother was born in 1939.These tariffs, if they remain in place, will raise prices, eliminate jobs and shrink retirements. No one will pay for them more dearly than American workers. Yet a shock to capitalism inevitably raises the question of whether, and how, capitalists will respond. Faced with Trump’s tariffs, what will the US’s business class do?Some commentators have hoped that, once the effects of Trump’s economic misrule become apparent, executives will finally turn on the Maga movement. But the answer, as during Trump’s previous tariff scares, is likely to disappoint. The Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, and International Dairy Foods Association have each issued strongly worded statements against Trump’s trade action. Others are likely forthcoming. But those words are unlikely to become meaningful action, for it is simply not in the business lobby’s nature to fight the Republican party.Unlike much of the developed world, the US lacks a single, representative organization for big business. Barring extraordinary initiative by political actors, or moments of deep and protracted crisis, unified and cross-sectoral corporate lobbies rarely appear in American history. The National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce began as initiatives of presidents William McKinley and William Howard Taft, respectively; the Business Roundtable, founded through a merger of two union-busting business groups in 1972, stands as a rare business lobby organized by business itself.If these organizations have a difficult time coming together, they have an even harder time sticking together. The roundtable and the chamber experienced their greatest momentum during the economic turbulence of the 1970s: at last, their managers were able to unite the otherwise fractious American business community under the banner of fighting organized labor and its New-Dealer allies within the Democratic party. But by the middle of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, those enemies had been vanquished – and the chamber and roundtable hemorrhaged membership in turn.Business organizations never regained the command of American capitalism they had won in the late 70s and early 80s. The Chamber of Commerce has maintained stature only by becoming, essentially, an all-purposes lobbying firm. Its primary function is to receive contributions from industries attempting to obscure their hand in pushing politically unpopular causes: tobacco seeking to shield itself from liability, the auto industry seeking to relax safety standards, the health insurance sector seeking to stall healthcare reform, etc.Though the chamber and roundtable briefly stepped into more activist roles during the disruptions of the Tea Party, their success was, at best, mixed. At once, they found themselves dueling against the oil, gas and utilities sectors, each of whom fervently backed rightwing insurgents. By 2014, they had largely eliminated the Tea Party’s beachhead in Congress. Even so, they failed to repel the advance of Trump during the 2016 primaries; nor did they manage to sap the influence of the Freedom Caucus, today a king-making group among House Republicans.Though business organizations managed to significantly shape Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, they notably failed to shape his administration’s 2018 trade war. Rather than mount a united front against Trump’s tariff regime, nearly 4,000 firms attempted to individually lobby the office of Robert Lighthizer for individual exemptions for their imports of interest. This, the political scientist Jack Zhang explains, had the ironic effect of overwhelming the United States trade representative’s office, and crowding out most lobbyists: few ultimately received exemptions, while the rest continued paying the cost of high tariffs.That period’s patterns are telling: American business, given the weakness of its coordinating institutions, is essentially incapable of coordinating significant challenges to the Republican party’s governance. A previous generation of corporate leadership might have met a shock of Wednesday’s magnitude with a coordinated response felt at all levels of American society – whether through lobbying efforts in Washington or advertisements in local newspapers. But American business is too disunited to mount similar campaigns today. “The pursuit of individual self-interests,” as Zhang noted in 2020, “left none to defend the public goods associated with a free and open market between the US and China.”That phenomenon is a persistent feature of the Trump era. The chamber’s boycott of campaign contributions to the Republican party after the January 6 insurrection lasted little more than two months. And the agricultural lobby, once a powerful pro-immigration voice on Capitol Hill, has all but abandoned its public advocacy for immigrants: organizing on the issue, where it exists, is done through quiet lobbying behind closed doors. If history is any guide, then, there will be no meaningful corporate break with the Republican party.“We are living through the nightmare edition of ‘Great Men Make History’,” wrote the leftwing theorist Mike Davis shortly before his death in 2022. “Unlike the high Cold war when politburos, parliaments, presidential cabinets and general staffs to some extent countervailed megalomania at the top, there are few safety switches between today’s maximum leaders and Armageddon.”Our moment, as Davis observed, is the apogee of a long-brewing structural crisis of American liberalism, where even the mechanisms that once aligned state policy with corporate interests have fundamentally broken down. Whether among executives, lobbyists or university trustees, an elite-led backlash to the Trump administration – on trade, immigration, the rule of law or anything else – is not forthcoming. Only an organized working class, then, can resist Trump.

      Alex Bronzini-Vender is a writer living in New York More

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      Abigail Disney: ‘Every billionaire who can’t live on $999m is kind of a sociopath’

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      My conversation with Abigail Disney opens with the kind of bog-standard line that starts most chats. But because she is a left-leaning American, with a record of righteous criticism of the man now once again in charge of her country, I suspect it might invite a very long answer indeed.Still, out it comes: “How are you?”“It’s a good question,” she says, “because we’re all struggling with it.”A deep breath. “I spend a lot of time trying to think of reasons to be optimistic, because I don’t know how to function without that. And I want to find the energy and the grit for a really long fight. This isn’t just four years … you know, there’s a whole civilisation-level reset to be done. I mean, I heard the other night when Trump spoke, he mentioned that we would get Greenland one way or another. And then there was laughter. Laughter! I just thought, ‘Oh, we have sunk so low.’”The film-maker (and the grand-niece of Walt Disney) is speaking to me on video call from her home in Manhattan. She talks with a mixture of speed, eloquence and certainty – partly because her view of Donald Trump and his allies is all about something with which she is well acquainted: wealth, and what it does to people.“Trump is an inheritor,” Disney tells me. “He never acknowledges it, but he wouldn’t have been able to do any of the things he did without an inheritance. He absorbed the lessons of inheriting money almost unfiltered: ‘You have this money because you’re special.’ If you read about his childhood, it’s like the textbook worst way to raise a person – you know, he was violent, he was a bully and he was rewarded for that, even as a very small child. And the more money he had, the more he exhibited these bad qualities, and the more people told him he was wonderful.”I then mention something she well knows: that Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk is also from a very wealthy background, having started his first business ventures with money provided by his father, and then becoming rich beyond the dreams of avarice. This, she tells me, partly explains the frazzled morals of someone who has just imposed all those cuts to overseas aid, with apparently no regard for the consequences.Among the schemes Musk has frozen, Disney points out, was the Pepfar programme, AKA the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, which is estimated to have saved 25 million lives by supplying medicine to people with HIV and Aids around the world. “There are people suffering and dying today because of that cut,” she says. “There are children who have HIV who shouldn’t because of Elon Musk. Now. As we sit here and talk.”She exhales. “That natural human proclivity to say, ‘Hmm, that doesn’t feel right’ – he doesn’t have it. Trump doesn’t have it. They’re spending no time in shame, and shame is a righteous emotion. It’s not an emotion you want to live in, but it’s an emotion you want as a motivator sometimes. And where is it? Where’s the shame?”View image in fullscreenWhat makes Abigail Disney fascinating is that she is also an inheritor. To quote from a speech she recently made – at the Vatican, where she took part in an event focused on making wealthy people around the world pay more tax, and the idea that large concentrations of wealth now threaten democracies – she acknowledges that she is rich “only because of some quirks in the tax system, some good luck, and some very loving grandparents. But nothing else.”Now a 65-year-old mother of four, she is the granddaughter of Roy O Disney, who, with his brother Walt, founded the Walt Disney company in 1923. In her early 20s, she resolved to start giving away large chunks of her inheritance. By 2021, she had donated approximately $70m to causes centred on women living with HIV, women in prison and women affected by domestic violence. She has long been a member of the Patriotic Millionaires, an American organisation focused on changing the system so that people as rich as its members – and those who have even more money – pay more of their income in tax.“I am of the belief that every billionaire who can’t live on $999m is kind of a sociopath,” she says. “Like, why? You know, over a billion dollars makes money so fast that it’s almost impossible to get rid of. And so by just sitting on your hands, you become more of a billionaire until you’re a double billionaire. It’s a strange way to live when you have objectively more money than a person can spend.”She has also campaigned – successfully – to improve wages and conditions for workers in the theme parks that bear her family name (she still owns shares in Disney, though not, she says, enough to give her substantial clout). As an active Democrat, she was among the big political donors who, in the summer of 2024, said they would withhold money from the party until Joe Biden stepped down as its candidate in the presidential election.View image in fullscreenBut aside from all that work and her advocacy on wealth and tax, Disney is chiefly known as a film producer and director, some of whose work has presciently looked ahead to the polarised, angry country the US seems to have become.In 2015, for example, she made The Armor of Light, an acclaimed and very sobering documentary about Rob Schenck, an evangelical pastor based in Washington DC who was long associated with the American hard right, with views on abortion to match. The film portrays him trying to find the courage to speak out about the scourge of American gun violence and pull his followers out of their love affair with firearms; after it was released, he and Disney began to regularly make their case to gatherings of rightwing Christians.But as Trump began his march towards the White House, they started to get a sharp sense of what his politics were going to do to American society. “When I first started asking about Trump, the people we met were like, ‘Are you kidding? No way – he’s a joker, he’s nothing.’ And then, halfway through the summer of 2016, it was like the iron curtain came down, and we stopped getting invitations. And when Trump was elected, we never got another request to speak.”For Schenck, things were about to get very ugly indeed. Over decades, he had been involved in the campaign to nullify Roe v Wade, the US supreme court judgment that established women’s constitutional right to abortion – which, in 2022, was overturned. But three years before that watershed decision, he wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times announcing that he had changed his mind. At that point, Disney tells me, former allies who were now staunch Trump supporters turned on him.“Death threats and all kinds of things came in,” she says. “He was told he was going to hell by people he had been friends with for 40 years. It’s horrible what he’s been through.”That kind of belligerent nastiness is arguably the defining feature of the mindset of the president and his followers, but Disney is adamant that the roots of his politics lie in wealth and privilege, and how Americans view those things. As she sees it, Trump and Trumpism are not some sudden bolt from the blue: his rise to power, she says, highlights a cultural shift that began in the 1980s, when the US really started to venerate the wealthy.“Our magazine covers did not used to be littered with CEOs,” she says. “They used to have pictures of Martin Luther King on them, or a war hero, or the woman who founded the Girl Scouts. Just look at the magazine covers and you’ll see the way this country has lost its way.”Soon enough, along came reality TV, the frenzied worship of a new kind of celebrity, and social media. Trump, clearly, has skilfully used them all. “We all laughed and said he was stupid, but obviously he’s not,” she says. “In the 19th century he would have sold a lot of snake oil. He came along right at the correct moment. And he played his role brilliantly. You’ve got to give it to him.”View image in fullscreenOne question hangs over the whole of our conversation: what is to be done?For now, Disney tells me, pursuing political activism via film-making probably isn’t an option. She is understandably worried about what Trump and Musk might have planned for such outlets as the non-profit Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which might once have played a key role in holding them to account. The fact that the TV and movie industries are in crisis – thanks to recent writers’ strikes, and the impossible economics of streaming – makes things even more difficult. “I’m thinking of maybe pivoting to short videos – just talking at the camera, and doing that low-maintenance kind of thing,” she says. “I feel like I’m missing an opportunity if I don’t go on social media and try to be present as a public voice.”As the Trump revolution gathers pace, I tell her, I often wonder when massed opposition will materialise. Put another way, why aren’t millions of people already in the streets?She sighs. “We could all show up on the streets. But what would be the uniting message? The chaos is deliberate: it’s meant to give us too much to handle. Do we go out there about the environment? Do we go out there about DEI [diversity, equality and inclusion policies]? Do we go out there about gay rights, about women’s rights?“You know, the difficulty of being progressive is that it’s difficult to unite everybody around a single issue. So most of the progressives I know are trying to figure that out. And even if we did go out [on the streets], what is our leverage? We have none.”What does she mean by leverage?“Well, we [Democrats] have a minority in the House and the Senate. We have a cabinet that is so radical, and they are lining the government with people who are beyond radical and there is no place where we can exercise visible dissent … We’re being shut out. And the way of communicating has completely changed. An op-ed in the New York Times isn’t going to change things.”View image in fullscreenDisney is at pains to talk about the necessity of slow and arduous work: building opposition from the grassroots up – which will be helped, she says, by the fact that Trump and his cronies will sooner or later hit no end of problems.“I really don’t think it will take very much time for a lot of the people who voted for him to regret it, especially on the economy,” she says. “We’re going to have so much inflation: the tariffs are terrible. I think that there’s going to be some turning, and in the meantime we have to really work on building institutions. Black associations, neighbourhood associations, PTAs – we need to do the work of rebuilding those spaces. We need the basis of a really vibrant progressive society. We let it die.”When I mention the progressive flag-bearers Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who have recently been organising Fight Oligarchy events across the US, Disney speaks with an urgency that sounds almost optimistic.“We need Bernie barnstorming,” she says. “We need AOC barnstorming. We need, you know, the people we have that are greeted as authentic in the real world, not focus groups, to go out and be authentic with their passion and their smarts about where to go from here.”She mentions a handful of impressive young Democratic politicians such as Maxwell Frost, the 28-year-old congressman from Florida who had a key role in the pro-gun-control movement March for Our Lives. “There’s a bunch of people,” she says. “And what we need to do is put together a coordinated campaign. But you’ve got to build the infrastructure to do it.”We end as we began, with Donald Trump, and how awful he has made so many Americans feel. “He has a critical mass of 35% to 40% of the American public – which is far too many people – who are completely on board with the cruelty and the derision and the trolling,” Disney says. “But that leaves everybody who’s either too tired, or too alienated or estranged from the process.”She suddenly brightens. “They’re ours,” she says. “But we have to do the work.” More

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      Senior Trump officials give conflicting lines on tariffs after markets turmoil

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      Senior officials within Donald Trump’s administration gave conflicting messages on Sunday about the US president’s global tariffs that have caused a meltdown in stock markets, prompted warnings of a world recession and provoked rare expressions of dissent from within his Republican party.Cabinet members fanned out across Sunday’s political talk shows armed with talking points on Trump’s 10% across-the-board tariff on almost all US imports, with higher rates targeted at about 60 countries. If the intention was to calm nerves with a clear statement of intent, then it backfired as top officials gave starkly contrasting signals.Howard Lutnick, the billionaire commerce secretary, struck an aggressive note on CBS News’s Face the Nation in which he portrayed the tariffs as here to stay. Asked whether there was a chance that tariffs would be postponed to allow countries to negotiate a deal with Washington, he replied: “There is no postponing – they are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks, that is sort of obvious.”Lutnick added that Trump intended to “reset global trade”.“The president has made it crystal, crystal clear,” he said.However, two other cabinet members gave the opposite take, suggesting that negotiations with individual countries were very much on the cards. Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, told Meet the Press on NBC News that Trump had “created maximum leverage for himself, and more than 50 countries have approached the administration about lowering their non-tariff trade barriers, lowering their tariffs, stopping currency manipulation”.The agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, echoed Bessent by flagging up possible talks. “We’ve got 50 countries that are burning the phone lines into the White House,” she told CNN’s State of the Union.The scale of Trump’s tariffs have sent shockwaves around the world, catching US investors as well as top Republican politicians by surprise. In just two days last week, more than $6tn was wiped off Wall Street’s market value.Trump told US consumers in a post on his Truth Social network to “hang tough, it won’t be easy, but the end result will be historic”. Yet as he spent the weekend golfing at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, his unprecedented tax increase goaded senior Republicans to speak out, in a vanishingly rare display of criticism of their leader.Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, denounced the tariffs as the “largest peacetime tax hike in US history”. Thom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina, said: “Anyone who says there may be a little bit of pain before we get things right needs to talk to farmers who are one crop away from bankruptcy.”Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, warned of a “bloodbath” for Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections should the tariffs force the US into recession.Democrats are detecting opportunity in such unusual challenges to Trump from within his own party. Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator from California, floated on Meet the Press what sounded like a draft campaign strategy for the midterms.“If we head into a recession, it will be the Trump recession,” he said. Of Trump, Schiff also said: “He’s wrecking our economy.”Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota who ran as the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate in last November’s defeat to Trump, called the tariffs “really, really terrifying” on State of the Union. He warned that if you punish dependable trading partners like Mexico and Canada, “they don’t come back overnight.”As the tariffs kick in, analysts are increasingly pointing to the chances of a recession, which is normally assessed as being two consecutive quarters of falling GDP. The head of economic research at JP Morgan, Bruce Kasman, has raised the probability of global recession to 60%, a figure that he included in a memo titled There Will Be Blood.Larry Summers, the US treasury secretary during Bill Clinton’s presidency, called the tariffs the “biggest self-inflicted wound we’ve put on our economy in history”. Speaking on ABC News’s This Week, he gave his own estimate of the total loss to US consumers at $30tn – equivalent to doubling petrol prices at the pump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s cabinet members attempted to use rhetorical devices as a way of assuaging rattled investors and consumers. Rollins said the markets weren’t crashing – they were “adjusting”.Asked what he would say to Americans close to retirement who had just watched their lifetime savings drop significantly in recent days, Bessent called that a “false narrative”.“Americans who want to retire right now, they don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening,” Bessent said.Bessent’s answer was coloured, perhaps, by his own net worth, which has been put at more than $521m.There were moments of the surreal in the exchanges between Trump’s top officials and the political show hosts. Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper why 10% tariffs had been placed on Heard Island and McDonald Islands, which are populated by penguins near Antarctica but no humans, Rollins said: “I mean, come on, whatever. Listen, the people that are leading this are serious, intentional, patriotic – the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.”Tapper then pushed back on the agriculture secretary’s justification for the 20% “reciprocal” tariffs that have been imposed on EU goods sold to the US. Rollins said that Honduras bought more pork from the US than the entire European Union.Tapper pointed out that the EU had tight restrictions on hormone use in livestock production. The EU banned use of synthetic hormones in 1981, and blocked imports of animals that had been treated in that way.Rollins then accused the EU of using “fake science” to prohibit US products. “That’s just absolute bull,” she said. “We produce the safest, the most secure, the best food in the world.” More

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      Who will win bigly from Trump tariffs? | Brief letters

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      After Donald Trump raised a range of tariffs, the US stock market tanked (Report, 4 April). If Trump rescinded these, within weeks the stock market would bounce back. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know in advance when that was going to happen? Somebody could make a great deal of money.John KinderRomsey, Hampshire In the past, we referred to the ABC of the cost of living crisis: Austerity, Brexit, Covid. Now, it seems, we have to add D for Donald and E for Elon. I don’t want to think about what F might stand for.Ruth EversleyPaulton, Somerset Re your article (‘She treats everyone with a deep growl’: can you train an angry cat to be more sociable?, 30 March), sometimes it just requires patience: in his 20th year my adopted feral cat Twix finally gave up being antisocial and climbed on to my lap for a cuddle, and there he remains at every opportunity, living his best life.Rosemary JacksonLondon Re your report (Birmingham declares major incident over bin strike as piles of waste grow, 31 March), we can now acknowledge that, like medical staff, binmen are essential frontline workers, without whom public health collapses? The solution to the impasse? Attlee got it right. Stuff their mouths with gold.Jenny MittonSutton Coldfield, West Midlands I hadn’t noticed seat heights on Mastermind (Letters, 1 April) but I comment every week to my wife about the amount of manspreading, to the extent that when we board a bus or train, we often say quietly to each other: “A few potential Mastermind contestants here.”Ray JenkinCardiff More

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      American corporations didn’t want to diversify, anyway

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      View image in fullscreenAt Ford Motor Company, the moral stock-taking began with a letter.“This is an extraordinary moment in our history,” Bill Ford, the company’s executive chair, and Jim Hackett, its CEO, wrote to employees on 1 June 2020. It had been three months of upheaval since the coronavirus pandemic began and the company first suspended production at its manufacturing sites. By mid-May, more than 87,000 people in the United States had died from the virus. Then, on 25 May, the video of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, ultimately killing him, was seared into Americans’ consciousness.Even in the midst of a global pandemic, as systemic inequities around healthcare and wealth and education were thrown into sharp relief, the world saw how deadly everyday injustices remained. “All at once, we are grappling with a public health crisis that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, an economic shock that has forced us to adapt on the fly, and social upheaval that has challenging all of us to think and act differently,” Ford and Hackett wrote. Globally, people wanted to do something, but they did not know exactly what. There were online gestures: Black squares on Instagram, direct messages of apology to Black friends, well-designed slides with digestible facts about systemic racism. But, as the video spread, millions flooded the streets as well. They rallied in Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland and Washington DC; and they protested overseas in London and Sydney and the Canary Islands. The actions were bolstered by calls to finally address the disparities that made the nation so inequitable.C-suites and boardrooms and universities couldn’t look the other way. Colleges and hospitals began renaming buildings; activists toppled statues and busts of traitors and racists, politicians took down others; and across the country, institutions were pushed to evaluate how their policies had locked certain people out of the American dream. But now, as the Trump administration has brought back to the White House its war against a diversifying workforce, the federal infrastructure and a critical history of the US, corporations are dropping diversity and equity programs as quickly as they created them.How did we get here? Why were so many companies – from Walmart to Paramount to Victoria’s Secret – willing to roll over on their diversity goals after the promises they made in 2020 to uproot systemic racism and transform the nation? Were they all just paying lip service? In many ways, the programs were never intended to radically change the workplace in the first place – they were intended to appease workers and dampen discontent. What we’ve seen since 2020 is not new. It’s a reversal rooted in the policies the US created decades ago, when it cast aside the goal of addressing a legacy of discrimination for the vague idea of diversity – an idea that was always destined to fail, and an idea many corporations never truly believed in.Superficial actionsFor employees at Ford, which was founded in Detroit, where nearly three-quarters of the city’s residents are Black, there was nothing academic about the issues highlighted in 2020. The pandemic hit the city as the plague of racism had left it economically distraught for decades; healing the disease systemic discrimination had left would require effort and intention. “There are no easy answers. We are not interested in superficial actions. This is our moment to lead from the front and fully commit to creating the fair, just and inclusive culture that our employees deserve,” Ford and Hackett wrote.Ford’s first step to healing was a series of conversations with staff to better understand how they felt. They would launch employee resource groups to ensure workers believed they could be their whole selves at the office. “We know that systemic racism still exists despite the progress that has been made,” the Ford executives wrote. “We cannot turn a blind eye to it or accept some sense of ‘order’ that’s based on oppression.”If that sounds familiar, it’s because offices across the country were undergoing similar soul-searching efforts. Within a year of Floyd’s murder, companies had pledged at least $50bn to support racial justice and advance equity and by 2023 that number had jumped to more than $340bn, according to a report by the McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility. Companies such as Apple, Facebook and Pfizer committed to spending externally. Bank of America pledged $15bn to expanding low- and middle-income homeownership; Netflix, PayPal and Nike deposited millions in Black-owned banks; and other companies gave to organizations such as the Equal Justice Initiative. Corporations committed to internal changes, too: they set diversity goals and launched initiatives to try to meet them; they hired chief diversity officers; they held mandatory – if sometimes clumsy – anti-discrimination trainings. Most of these tools had existed in some form before, but amid public outcry, they were pushed to the foreground.The problem was that even when companies actually wanted to help, they often launched their efforts haphazardly. When companies jump to solutions before understanding the desired outcomes, they make rushed decisions, said Eddy Ng, a business professor at Queen’s University in Canada. “Without a clear plan, we go buy more training. People don’t like that,” Ng said. Company leaders had little idea how to fix the structural issues baked into their DNA, so they went with the things that sounded good. “It’s like you go grocery shopping with 100 bucks, but you don’t have a shopping list. You’re going to buy chips and cookies,” Ng told me.Chips and cookies can make a person feel full, they can hold someone over, but eventually there’s a crash – and that person will be left wondering why they have not actually had a full meal; why they are not satisfied. Within weeks, it seemed, companies had built out their diversity, equity and inclusion plans. But not everyone was convinced by them. “Someone like me might say, ‘let’s wait and see if they mean it,’” said Cedric Dawkins, an associate professor of management at York University who studies business ethics. Marginalized communities have felt the sting of America’s empty promises before.Progress in the US is always met with pushback. During Reconstruction, the so-called “Redeemers” – who sought a return of white supremacy – argued that federal support for recently enslaved African Americans was a threat to their liberty. The civil rights movement was immediately met with lawsuits that would limit its desired effects on voting, education and labor. In that context, the only real measure of an organization’s commitment to justice is whether they keep pushing forward with their reforms in spite of any backlash.When corporations launched their plans, they felt like drastic measures, Ng said: “Instead of actually having clear guidelines and goals and outcomes in terms of what they wanted to achieve over the five-year period.” Now, as we come to the end of the five-year period – and companies begin to roll back their diversity efforts, vindicating those who were waiting for the other shoe to drop – one question remains: what was it all for?The backlash beginsOn 6 March 1961, then president John F Kennedy signed executive order 10925 – which created the president’s committee on equal opportunity. “Americans who are members of minority groups have often been unjustly denied the opportunity to work for the government or for government contractors,” Kennedy wrote in his signing statement. He directed the committee to launch a study of government employment practices that would examine the “status of members of minority groups in every department, agency and office of the federal government”. The report would lay down a marker, Kennedy hoped, by which Americans could measure future progress. “I have no doubt that the vigorous enforcement of this order will mean the end of such discrimination.”View image in fullscreenTypically, Kennedy’s order is where histories of affirmative action or race-conscious employment practices begin – after all, it’s the first time the idea of affirmative action as we understand it today emerged. But federal action to address discrimination in the workforce actually stretches back to at least Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, and one New Deal policy in particular: the 1935 Labor Relations Act. The act protected the rights of employees at private companies to better working conditions. If a company engaged in unfair labor practices, employees were “entitled to affirmative action as a remedy to make the employee whole”, said D Caleb Smith, a labor historian at Mount Holyoke College. Those remedies could look like job reinstatement or back-pay. Essentially, the provision was a general remedy to employment discrimination.But the Labor Relations Act was also a mixed bag. The National Urban League and NAACP opposed the legislation because it provided for closed-shop provisions that allowed unions and employers to exclude workers from union membership and apprenticeship programs. Union race discrimination had historically limited Black participation in the workforce: in 1930, for instance, just 3% of the 3,392,800 trade union workers in the US were Black.Still, it was a starting point, and over time, additional protections were added. In May 1943, executive order 9346 reconstituted the fair employment practices committee, which processed 8,000 discrimination complaints in its three years of existence. And in 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act prohibited the closed-shop provision from the New Deal policy. By 1960, however, affirmative action still did not have a formal definition. “It is implied that it’s the intent to improve working conditions to create opportunity for underrepresented minority groups,” Smith said. Kennedy helped provide some unity of definition.Kennedy’s order created one of the earliest affirmative action programs, the Plans for Progress Program, which encouraged companies to develop plans that addressed discrimination and underrepresentation of minorities. Within the first few months, the committee on equal opportunity reported that the program was in full swing. Agencies had begun designating compliance officers and developing training seminars; they had studied best practices for compliance reporting; and they had launched outreach to contractors and the general public. But “the Plans for Progress Program is largely seen as a performative publicity endeavor,” Smith said. It was done in good faith, he added, but it was hampered by the same problems other compliance agencies had: it was understaffed, underfinanced and could not exercise its full authority. For its imperfections, though, “some historians will point to it as a positive that provides companies a model for desegregation and implementing equal employment opportunity,” Smith said.By January 1964, after Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson took over the reins and carried out Kennedy’s vision. In a speech to new corporate members of the Plans for Progress program, Johnson announced that it had largely been a success. More than 100 major corporations – representing 6 million workers – had bought into the program, he told those assembled. The ratio of white salaried employees to non-white salaried employees at 91 companies had dipped from 65 to one to 60 to one. “Most significant is the fact that these jobs are not all at the lowest level – Negroes and other minority group Americans are being placed and promoted to positions of responsibility,” Johnson gushed. “This was not accomplished by displacing other workers – rather it was the result of conscious adjustments in personnel practices making merit and ability the only real tests – practices that strengthened the individual companies, and, as a result, strengthen our entire economy.”But some companies and federal contractors began creating measures to subvert the new federal rules, Smith told me. They implemented new tests for employees and had segregated seniority lines – white people occupied positions of power; contrary to the pronouncement, Black people were still often consigned to the lower rungs of industry. After Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act – and executive order 11246 a year later, which created the office of federal contract compliance to ensure contractors and subcontractors were complying with requirements to “safeguard equal employment” through affirmative action programs – the backlash was almost immediate.White people began claiming the programs were reverse discrimination and sued in federal court over college admissions, hiring and promotion practices. The supreme court upheld certain provisions of affirmative action programs – such as diversity as a compelling interest – but argued that quota systems designed to account for a legacy of discrimination in the US were a bridge too far. The Reagan administration sought to eliminate affirmative action altogether, and was surprised when corporations fought back. Companies such as Merck had begun to believe in their affirmative action policies – a new crop of workers brought new ideas and introduced products to new markets. It was great development philosophically – for those who cared about addressing a legacy of discrimination – and financially, for those who were more ambivalent. As Julian Mark noted in the Washington Post, a survey of 128 Fortune 500 companies revealed that an overwhelming majority, 95%, would keep their affirmative action policies regardless of Reagan’s policy.Reagan was ultimately unsuccessful – in part because he was largely alone in his efforts, even among Republicans. Still, his push to eliminate affirmative action programs led many corporations to settle for policies aimed at promoting a diverse workforce rather than addressing injustice. Such policies, they believed, had less legal exposure. The result was a new crop of watered-down programs that were a far cry from those that preceded them.Some conservatives agreed with Reagan, and as the decade wore on, became a loud contingent of the Republican party. Through the 1980s and the 90s, Republicans began using judicial appointments to transform the federal bench and pursue litigation to reshape civil rights law – warping its meaning. They argued that even watered down affirmative action programs and civil rights measures had gone too far; they wanted them eliminated altogether. Conservatives lionized the leaders of California’s Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action in public education and employment in 1996. The California Civil Rights Initiative “is the beginning of the new civil rights revolution in America; a revolution that promises to unite all America under a banner of hope and freedom”, Gay Hart Gaines, the former president of GOPAC, the Republican donor group, said at the time. Philanthropic organizations such as the Bradley Foundation, Scaife Foundations and Searle Freedom Trust bankrolled challenges to race-conscious admissions at universities and efforts that ultimately gutted the Voting Rights Act. Reagan lost his initial battle, but conservatives saw it as the first shot fired in a longer war – a war they believe, in 2025, is paying off.The capitulationLess than two months after Hackett, the Ford CEO, sent the letter lambasting systemic racism to the company’s employees, he stepped down from his position. Jim Farley, an executive from within, replaced him. In August 2024, ahead of the election, Farley wrote a letter of his own to the staff about diversity, equity and inclusion.“As we work to build an even brighter future, we are mindful that our employees and customers hold a wide range of beliefs, and the external and legal environment related to political and social issues continues to evolve,” Farley wrote. It was a very elaborate way of telling staff that they would be walking back diversity policies because the political winds had shifted. George Floyd’s murder had receded from the national consciousness. The Republican party had seized upon the language of DEI and turned it into a catch-all symbol for the ways the US was diversifying and becoming less tolerant to sexism, racism, ableism and homophobia.The company would no longer comment on “polarizing issues”. Its philanthropic arm’s mission changed from “[providing] access to resources and opportunities that build equity and empower underserved and underrepresented communities to reach their highest potential” to “[partnering] with communities to move people forward and upward”. And Ford would stop contributing to external culture surveys such as the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. The fresh look at Ford’s policies said nothing – save for vague allusions to the benefits of diversity – about systemic racism. Hackett’s earlier declaration that Ford would not “turn a blind eye” to systemic racism seemed but a memory.Within days of taking office, Donald Trump signed an executive order that would eliminate Johnson’s civil rights order. The order directed the office of federal contract compliance to stop “promoting diversity” and holding contractors responsible for “affirmative action”. To Smith, the administration’s early actions amount to “a blatant effort in order to not only uphold the white power structure, but to remove any government responsibility to uphold the rights of individuals of color, specifically Black people”. It is the fruit of a conservative movement that has been trying to reverse course ever since the government began taking seriously efforts to protect the rights of Americans regardless of race, sex, religion or national origin.In 2020, hundreds of private companies pledged to change their culture – to use their power and influence and, most importantly, money, to re-shape American society toward more just ends. Now, the three largest employers in the nation – Walmart, Amazon and the federal government – have all rolled those policies back. Dozens of other corporations have turned back the clock on even pretending to care about equality in the workplace as well.To businesses’ credit, they had a difficult task ahead of them in 2020. “They’re faced with putting a policy in place quickly that’s responsive and doesn’t sound like lip service to frustrated people,” Dawkins said. But in doing so, they made an admission: they had not been taking diversity seriously before – and the capitulation to the administration’s demands since has betrayed that truth. And they made clear their efforts were always lip service.When corporations pushed back against Ronald Reagan in the 80s, they had the public on their side – and even a significant chunk of the Republican caucus – for at least the valence of effort. Most of the pressure was coming from Reagan himself. But when they felt the united political pressure from conservatives this time around, in the absence of near-universal public support, they had a choice to make.For companies whose values course through everything they do, the choice was easy. As Dawkins, of York University, explained: “A company like Patagonia – which challenged the first Trump administration over environmental regulations – or Ben and Jerry’s, they’ve been in this for the long haul so it doesn’t change as much.” But organizations who opted for expediency – programs to pacify rather than any transformational interrogation of institutional culture and values – capitulated.Values are only as good as their durability under pressure; and many of America’s largest companies proved an equitable, inclusive workplace was never one of their core values to begin with. More

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      Trump’s third term trial balloon: how extremist ideas become mainstream

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      It is noon on 20 January 2029. In the biting cold of Washington DC, thousands of people are gathered on the national mall to witness the swearing in of a new US president or, more accurately, an old US president: Donald Trump, aged 82, starting his third term in office.The scene is the realm of fantasy or, for millions of Americans, the stuff of nightmares. But in the president’s own mind it is apparently not so far-fetched at all. Last weekend he told an interviewer that he is “not joking” about another run and there are “methods” to circumvent the constitution, which limits presidents to two terms.For longtime Trump watchers it smacked of a familiar playbook of the American right and the Maga movement. Float a trial balloon, no matter how wacky or extreme. Let far-right media figures such as Steve Bannon make the case it’s not so outlandish because, after all, Democrats are worse. Stand by as Republicans in Congress avoid then equivocate then actively endorse. Watch a fringe idea slowly but surely normalised.“One of the most important lessons of the last decade is the way that ideas have migrated from the fever swamp into the mainstream,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster. “How Steve Bannon will say some crazy thing only to see it become Republican orthodoxy a few years later. We’ve seen that migration of ideas that seem absurd and are perhaps dismissed but develop a constituency.”This one is a long shot. The constitution’s 22nd amendment, ratified in 1951, clearly states: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” Legal experts and constitutional scholars firmly reject any credible legal basis for a third term.Yet for months Trump, who began his first term in 2017 and his second in 2025, has been testing the water by suggesting that he could run again anyway. Initially treated by some as jokes or political manoeuvering, the comments have recently moved beyond veiled suggestions to become more explicit.Asked whether he wanted another term, Trump told NBC News: “I like working. I’m not joking. But I’m not – it is far too early to think about it.” Pressed on whether he has seen plans to enable him to seek a third term, the president replied: “There are methods which you could do it.”None of these “methods” is straightforward. Trump could try to whip up political support to repeal the 22nd amendment. But the procedural and political difficulties of amending the constitution make this extremely unlikely. Democratic-led states could also refuse to put Trump on the ballot.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island: “The technical hurdle is very high. Given the political configuration now, and the control of state legislatures now, it would be impossible not only to repeal the 22nd amendment but to get him on the ballot in all 50 states.”Some argue that a constitutional loophole allows JD Vance to run for president with Trump as vice-president. Once elected, Vance would hand over power, much as Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev handed back the keys to the Kremlin to Vladimir Putin. But experts say this would violate the 12th amendment’s requirement that the vice-president be constitutionally eligible for president.Alternatively and most simply, Trump could run for president again and gamble that the supreme court, which contains six conservatives including three Trump appointees, would not stop him. Time and again over the past decade, he has crashed through barriers through brute willpower.None of it seems likely, but then nor did a reality TV star with no political or military experience winning election, nor did the instigator of the January 6 insurrection maintaining his grip on the Republican party, and nor did a man with 34 felony counts of falsified business records returning to the White House.Sykes, the author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, commented: “My instinct is to to regard it as a distraction but that’s a mistake because the opposition has suffered from a lack of imagination on occasion of what Donald Trump is capable of doing and what he intends to do. Clearly he’s putting this out to soften the ground.”Once unthinkable ideas have a habit of becoming very unthinkable in the Trump era. In the immediate aftermath of the US Capitol riot, Republican leaders moved to distance themselves from Trump and his “big lie” of a stolen election. Senator Lindsey Graham declared: “All I can say is count me out, enough is enough.”But Bannon and other rightwing influencers worked tirelessly to promote Trump’s false claims of voter fraud. Before long Republicans were rallying around Trump again, suggesting that he was right to raise concerns over election integrity and dismissing a congressional panel that investigated January 6 as a witch hunt. Last year a CNN poll found that 69% of Republicans sayJoe Biden’s win was not legitimate.Sykes noted another recent example: presidential ally Elon Musk suggesting that federal judges who rule against the Trump administration be impeached. Now opinion polls suggest that a majority of Republican voters are in favour of the move.Sykes added: “If Donald Trump keeps putting this idea out there, there’s no reason to believe that he can’t get Maga [the Make America great again movement] behind him and then the question is whether the courts would go along with it. What happens if the court says, no, you can’t serve another term, but enough states put him on the ballot anyway? Who’s going to stop him?”View image in fullscreenTrump’s third-term talk may also be a strategy to maintain political relevance and influence, wrongfooting opponents by keeping them guessing. It prevents him from being seen as a “lame duck” president and keeps the spotlight on him rather than his potential successors.The comments could also serve to deflect attention from other controversies. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Trump mused about a third term in the same week that his administration had been rocked by a scandal over senior officials accidentally inviting a journalist into a Signal group chat about military attack plans.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSome Republicans are downplaying Trump’s remarks as jokes or simply an effort to “get people talking”. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, stated: “It’s not really something we’re thinking about. He has four years. There’s a lot of work to do.”But the issue is gaining traction on the right. Just three days after Trump was sworn in on 20 January, Republican representative Andy Ogles proposed a House of Representatives joint resolution to amend the constitution so that a president can serve up to three terms – provided that they did not serve two consecutive terms before running for a third (this would continue to bar Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama from running again).At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, Bannon proclaimed, “We want Trump in 28,” and argued forcefully for a constitutional change. The case was also put by Third Term Project, a thinktank exploring presidential term limits, with a logo portraying Trump as Julius Caesar.Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump, has seen this movie before. “It starts out as ha-ha, Trump is trolling the libs, and then it’s well, Trump is trolling the libs but he’s got a good point. Well, he’s got a good point and the Democrats are so evil we should set aside any restraint to pursue this idea. Then it’s why aren’t you getting in line with this idea, every Republican?”Wilson added: “That arc is a known pattern now with Trump. Remember January 6. Every Republican – almost – came out and condemned that the day it happened and the idea became less and less defensible the more we knew about Trump’s role in it. But they became less and less willing to speak the truth. They became less and less willing to to resist and so I think that pattern is real, it exists, it’s been visible to us for a long time.”Democrats are moving to counter Trump’s remarks and Ogles’ proposed resolution. Congressman Dan Goldman has introduced resolutions reaffirming support for the 22nd amendment.He told the MSNBC network: “I’ve unfortunately been spending enough time studying Donald Trump to know that he’s not a comedian. He doesn’t joke and he has a very set MO, which is to float a crazy idea, claim that he’s joking, have some sycophantic Republicans start to run with it, like in this case, Representative Ogles, and then all of a sudden it becomes normalized and socialised.”The two-term standard began when America’s first president, George Washington, voluntarily stepped down. Four of the next six presidents won a second term but passed on a third. In 1940 Franklin Roosevelt became the only president to successfully win a third election, couching his decision as one of necessity, not ambition, during the second world war. Roosevelt won again in 1944 but died the following year.Not long after, Congress began discussion of what became the 22nd amendment, limiting presidents to two elections, and ratified it in 1951. There has been occasional talk of repealing it since. Ronald Reagan, another two-term president, publicly supported repeal, telling an interviewer that he “wouldn’t do that for myself, but for presidents from here on”.Trump, however, has shown no qualms about grabbing power for himself, claiming that the public demands it because he has the highest poll numbers of any Republican for the past 100 years. Asked this week about a hypothetical showdown with Obama in 2028, he replied: “I’d love that, boy, I’d love that.”Some observers note that Trump’s approval rating is already on the slide. Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, insisted: “This is not a serious effort. This is an effort to make Donald Trump into the most powerful politician that ever happened. The guy is not God. He will fall to the normal rhythms of politics. He’ll lose the midterms in 2026 and then people will be sick of the guy.”Others, however, warn that Trump has been written off to easily before. Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, said: “This is no joke and no distraction. It needs to be taken seriously. Trump just saying, ‘Fuck it I’m running’ and daring people, the party, the media, the military, the courts, to stop him – I don’t know that he could be stopped.“It’s been an utter failure of imagination to be prepared for how far this guy will go. People never thought January 6 will happen; we never thought a president would try to overthrow an election. A guy who would do that, if he wanted to, would try to do anything to stay in office and run again.” More

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      Ted Cruz warns of midterm ‘bloodbath’ if Trump tariffs cause a recession

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      Ted Cruz, the US senator from Texas, has warned that his fellow Republicans risk a “bloodbath” in the 2026 midterm elections if Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs cause a recession.Cruz also warned that the president’s tariffs, if they stay in place for long and are met by global retaliation on American goods, could trigger a full-blown trade war that “would destroy jobs here at home, and do real damage to the US economy”.“A hundred years ago, the US economy didn’t have the leverage to have the kind of impact we do now. But I worry, there are voices within the administration that want to see these tariffs continue for ever and ever,” he added.The Texan’s comments, made on his Verdict podcast on Friday, were a further sign that the imposition of global “reciprocal” duties on imported goods is causing unease among Republicans.The Republican US senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa introduced bipartisan legislation on Thursday to grant Congress more power over placing tariffs on US trading nations. The bill, co-sponsored by the Democratic senator Maria Cantwell, would “reaffirm” the role of Congress in setting and approving trade policy.The Republican senators Lisa Murkowski, Mitch McConnell, Jerry Moran and Thom Tillis have since signed on as co-sponsors. Though the legislation is considered largely symbolic, it telegraphs anxiety over the $5.4tn loss of stock market capitalization over two days and signs of an electoral backlash to Trump administration policies in the form of a defeat at the ballot box by a Wisconsin supreme court race candidate backed by Trump’s billionaire business adviser Elon Musk.In two Florida congressional races, the Republican winners also underperformed.On his podcast, Cruz warned that tariffs and trade retaliation over the long term could push the US into “a recession, particularly a bad recession – 2026 in all likelihood politically would be a bloodbath”.“You would face a Democrat House, and you might even face a Democrat Senate,” Cruz said.“If we’re in the middle of a recession and people are hurting badly, they punish the party in power,” Cruz warned, adding he did not share the White House’s position that the tariffs would usher in “a booming economy”.But if “every other country on Earth” hits the US with retaliatory tariffs and Trump’s so-called reciprocal levies remain in place, “that is a terrible outcome” that “would destroy jobs here at home, and do real damage to the US economy”.Cruz, nonetheless, held out an olive branch to the administration.“Look, I want this to succeed … but my definition of succeed may be different than the White House’s,” he said, adding that his definition of success “is dramatically lower tariffs abroad and result in dramatically lowering tariffs here”.“That’s success for the American workers, American businesses, American growth, American prosperity,” he continued. “That’s a great outcome.” More

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      ‘A case study in groupthink’: were liberals wrong about the pandemic?

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      Were conservatives right to question Covid lockdowns? Were the liberals who defended them less grounded in science than they believed? And did liberal dismissiveness of the other side come at a cost that Americans will continue to pay for many years?A new book by two political scientists argues yes to all three questions, making the case that the aggressive policies that the US and other countries adopted to fight Covid – including school shutdowns, business closures, mask mandates and social distancing – were in some cases misguided and in many cases deserved more rigorous public debate.In their peer-reviewed book, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee argue that public health authorities, the mainstream media, and progressive elites often pushed pandemic measures without weighing their costs and benefits, and ostracized people who expressed good-faith disagreement.View image in fullscreen“Policy learning seemed to be short-circuited during the pandemic,” Lee said. “It became so moralized, like: ‘We’re not interested in looking at how other people are [responding to the pandemic], because only bad people would do it a different way from the way we’re doing’.”She and Macedo spoke to the Guardian by video call. The Princeton University professors both consider themselves left-leaning, and the book grew out of research Macedo was doing on the ways progressive discourse gets handicapped by a refusal to engage with conservative or outside arguments. “Covid is an amazing case study in groupthink and the effects of partisan bias,” he said.Many Covid stances presented as public health consensus were not as grounded in empirical evidence as many Americans may have believed, Macedo and Lee argue. At times, scientific and health authorities acted less like neutral experts and more like self-interested actors, engaging in PR efforts to downplay uncertainty, missteps or conflicts of interest.It’s a controversial argument. Covid-19 killed more than a million Americans, according to US government estimates. The early days of the pandemic left hospitals overwhelmed, morgues overflowing, and scientists scrambling to understand the new disease and how to contain it.Still, Macedo and Lee say, it is unclear why shutdowns and closures went on so long, particularly in Democratic states. The book argues that in the US the pandemic became more politically polarized over time, after, initially, “only modest policy differences between Republican- and Democratic-leaning states”.After April 2020, however, red and blue America diverged. Donald Trump contributed to that polarization by downplaying the severity of the virus. Significant policy differences also emerged. Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, moved to re-open physical schools quickly, which progressives characterized as irresponsible.Yet in the end there was “no meaningful difference” in Covid mortality rates between Democratic and Republican states in the pre-vaccine period, according to CDC data cited in the book, despite Republican states’ more lenient policies. Macedo and Lee also favorably compare Sweden, which controversially avoided mass lockdowns but ultimately had a lower mortality rate than many other European countries.The shutdowns had foreseeable and quantifiable costs, they say, many of which we are still paying. Learning loss and school absenteeism soared. Inflation went through the roof thanks in part to lockdown spending and stimulus payments. Small businesses defaulted; other medical treatments like cancer screenings and mental health care suffered; and rates of loneliness and crime increased. The economic strain on poor and minority Americans was particularly severe.Covid policies escalated into culture wars, amplifying tensions around other social issues. Teachers’ unions, which are often bastions of Democratic support, painted school re-openings as “rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny” and “a recipe for … structural racism”, the book notes, despite the fact that minority and poor students were most disadvantaged by remote learning.These measures also had a literal price. “In inflation-adjusted terms,” Macedo and Lee write, “the United States spent more on pandemic aid in 2020 than it spent on the 2009 stimulus package and the New Deal combined” – or about what the US spent on war production in 1943.View image in fullscreenYet of the $5tn that the US Congress authorized in 2020 and 2021 for Covid expenditure, only about 10% went to direct medical expenses such as hospitals or vaccine distribution, according to the book; most of the spending was on economic relief to people and businesses affected by shutdowns. Ten per cent of that relief was stolen by fraud, according to the AP.The pandemic was an emergency with no modern precedent, of course, and hindsight is easy. But In Covid’s Wake tries to take into account what information was known at the time – including earlier pandemic preparedness studies. Reports by Johns Hopkins (2019), the World Health Organization (2019), the state of Illinois (2014) and the British government (2011) had all expressed ambivalence or caution about the kind of quarantine measures that were soon taken.“We take a look at the state of the evidence as it was in early 2020,” Lee said. “It was clear at the time that the evidence was quite unsettled around all of this, and if policymakers had been more honest with the public about these uncertainties, I think they would have maintained public trust better.”The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a wargaming exercise in October 2019, shortly before the pandemic began, to simulate a deadly coronavirus pandemic; the findings explicitly urged that “[t]ravel and trade … be maintained even in the face of a pandemic”. Similarly, a WHO paper in 2019 said that some measures – such as border closures and contact tracing – were “not recommended in any circumstances”.“And yet we did all of that in short order,” Macedo said, “and without people referring back to these plans.”He and Lee also believe there was a strong element of class bias, with a left-leaning “laptop class” that could easily work from home touting anti-Covid measures that were much easier for some Americans to adopt than others. Many relatively affluent Americans became even wealthier during the pandemic, in part due to rising housing values.At the same time, the laptop class was only able to socially isolate at home in part because other people risked exposure to provide groceries. Stay-at-home measures were partly intended to protect “essential workers”, but policymakers living in crisis-stricken major metropolitan areas such as New York or Washington DC did not reckon with why social distancing and other measures might be less important in rural parts of the country where Covid rates were lower.Lockdowns were intended to slow Covid’s spread, yet previous pandemic recommendations had suggested they only be used very early in an outbreak and even then do not buy much time, Macedo said.View image in fullscreenPolicymakers and experts often embraced stringent measures for reasons that are more political than medical, Macedo and Lee argue; in a pandemic, authorities are keen to assure anxious publics that they are “in charge” and “doing something”.In strange contrast, policymakers and journalists in the US and elsewhere seemed to take China as a model, the book argues, despite the fact that China is an authoritarian state and had concealed the scale of the outbreak during the crucial early days of the pandemic. Its regime had obvious incentives to mislead foreign observers, and used draconian quarantine measures such as physically welding people into their homes.When the WHO organized a joint China field mission with the Chinese government, in February 2020, non-Chinese researchers found it difficult to converse with their Chinese counterparts away from government handlers. Yet the WHO’s report was “effusive in its praise” of China’s approach, the book notes.“My view is that there was just a great deal of wishful thinking on the part of technocrats of all kinds,” Lee said. “They wanted there to be an answer – that if we do X and Y, we can prevent this disaster. And so they’re kind of grasping at straws. The Chinese example gave them hope.” She noted that Covid policymakers might have been better served if there had been people assigned to act as devil’s advocates in internal deliberations.Lee and Macedo are not natural scientists or public health professionals, they emphasize, and their book is about failures in public deliberation over Covid-19, rather than a prescription for managing pandemics.But they do wade into the debate about Covid-19’s origin, arguing that the “lab leak” hypothesis – that Covid-19 accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than spontaneously leaping from animals to humans – was unfairly dismissed.The Wuhan Institute studied coronaviruses similar to the one responsible for Covid-19, had a documented history of safety breaches, was located near the outbreak, and is known to have experimented on viruses using controversial “gain-of-function” methods funded by the US, which involve mutating pathogens to see what they might look like in a more advanced or dangerous form.Perhaps because Trump had fanned racial paranoia by calling Covid-19 the “China virus” and rightwing influencers were spreading the notion that it had been deliberately engineered and unleashed on the world by China, many scientists, public health experts and journalists reacted by framing the idea of a lab leak – even an accidental one – as an offensive conspiracy theory. Dr Anthony Fauci and other top public health figures were evasive or in some cases dishonest about the possibility of a lab leak, Macedo and Lee say, as well as the fact that a US non-profit funded by the National Institutes of Health allegedly funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute.Since then, though, the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have cautiously endorsed the lab leak theory, and the discourse around Covid has softened somewhat. The economist Emily Oster sparked immense backlash by arguing against school closures in 2020. Now publications such as New York Magazine and the New York Times have acknowledged the plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis, for example, and there is growing consensus that school closures hurt many children.The reception to In Covid’s Wake has been more positive than Macedo and Lee expected – perhaps a sign that some of their arguments have penetrated the mainstream, if not that we’ve gotten better as a society at talking about difficult things. “The reception of the book has been much less controversial [and] contentious than we expected,” Macedo said.Yet the wounds fester and debates continue. Some readers of the New York Times were furious when The Daily, the newspaper’s flagship podcast, recently interviewed them, with subscribers arguing that the episode was not sufficiently critical of their stance. And some coverage of the book has criticized it for underplaying the danger of the disease.Macedo and Lee said that a few of their colleagues have expressed concern that their critique could fuel political attacks on science – a worry that crossed their minds too. “Our response is that the best way to refute criticisms that science and universities have been politicized is to be open to criticism and willing to engage in self-criticism,” Macedo said.“We need to make sure these institutions are in the best possible working order to face the challenges ahead. And we think that’s by being honest, not by covering over mistakes or being unwilling to face up to hard questions.” More