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      American Crisis review: Andrew Cuomo on Covid, Trump … and a job with Joe Biden?

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      On Thursday, the US reported 65,000 new cases of Covid-19 and Donald Trump falsely told a television town hall 85% of people who wear masks contract the disease. With more than two weeks to the election and a record-shattering 17 million Americans having already voted, the rhythms and tropes of the past seven months will only intensify between now and 3 November.Early in the pandemic, Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings emerged as must-see television, counter-programming to the campaign commercials that masqueraded as presidential press conferences. The New York governor was forthright and reassuring, even as the body count mounted.Covid-related deaths in the Empire State now exceed 25,000, the highest in the US. New York was both frontline and lab experiment. What happened there foreshadowed national tragedy. Red states were not immune. Right now, the plague rages in the heartland.Cuomo’s new book, subtitled Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic, is his effort to shape perceptions of his own performance amid the pandemic while pointing a damning finger at Trump and Bill de Blasio, New York City’s woefully inept mayor. Like the governor, American Crisis is informative and direct – but not exciting.I believe that this was on a par with the greatest failure to detect an enemy attack since Pearl HarborAndrew CuomoThe book reads like a campaign autobiography except that Cuomo, by his own admission, will never run for president. It contains its share of heroes, villains and family vignettes. Cuomo’s three daughters appear throughout.Like the governor, American Crisis is programmatic, neither poetic nor poignant. Indeed, in a final chapter tritely titled A Blueprint for Going Forward, the governor offers 28 pages of policy proposals.Covid has taken nearly 220,000 American lives. The US suffered 58,000 combat deaths in Vietnam, 116,000 in the first world war. Only the second world war, the civil war and the flu pandemic of 1918-1919 resulted in greater casualties.Not surprisingly, Cuomo saves his harshest words for the Trump administration: “New York was ambushed by Covid. I believe that this was on a par with the greatest failure to detect an enemy attack since Pearl Harbor.”On that score, Cuomo compares Trump to FDR and of course finds him wanting. The administration did deliver early warnings – to members of the financial community and Republican donors. With that in mind, Cuomo’s take is almost mild.Cuomo’s relationship with the president was already fraught. On top of Trump and congressional Republicans capping deductions for state and local taxes, the governor acknowledges fighting with the administration over “immigration policy, environmental policy, you name it”. He adds: “I found his pandering to the far right alternately disingenuous and repugnant.”American Crisis also relays a conversation with the president in which the governor urged the former resident of Queens, a borough of New York City, to invoke the Defense Production Act and mandate private industry to produce tests and personal protective equipment. Trump declined, claiming such a move would smack of “big government” – as opposed to issuing diktats to big tech, directing that companies relocate, unilaterally imposing tariffs on imports and offering private briefings to those favored by the administration.Time has passed. In the 1980s, Governor Mario Cuomo and his son Andrew were Trump allies, of a sort. Back then, Trump retained the services of twentysomething Andrew Cuomo’s law firm, in connection with commercial leases on Manhattan’s West Side. According to Trump, they were “representing us in a very significant transaction”. Not any more.The president is not the only member of the administration to come in for criticism. Mark Meadows, the latest White House chief of staff, receives a large dollop of Cuomo’s wrath. In Cuomo’s telling, Meadows conditioned assistance to New York on it conveying hospital test results for hydroxychloroquine, Trump’s one-time Covid treatment of choice.Cuomo said the state would provide the test data once it was available, not before. Meadows told him the federal government was ready to release hospital funding to states, but “strongly implied” that if the test results did not soon arrive, New York would not “receive any funding”. To Cuomo, that reeked of extortion. More

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      Timeline: what a normal US election looks like and what might happen in 2020

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      Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images

      1. What a normal US election looks like

      Matt Slocum/AP

      The first votes cast
      Before election day, some states start
      early voting and
      mail-in voting. That’s happening in this election, as well.

      Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images

      On election day, everyone else votes
      Americans go to polling places to cast their vote. This is also when mail-in ballots can be counted in most states. Once ballots are tallied, results start being released.

      Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

      Organizations like the
      Associated Press often project a winner on election night based on an analysis of votes already counted, the number of outstanding votes and the margin between the candidates.

      Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

      The losing candidate typically concedes
      This usually happens in the early hours of the next morning. A public concession makes it clear to the American people who has won. It can make everything after this feel like a formality.

      The results are finalized
      Even if it’s clear who won local officials finish counting ballots in the days after the election and send their results to state officials. They approve the results and send them to federal officials.

      Election disputes need to be settled before 8 December
      States need to settle any election disputes and have a winner by this date, known as the “safe harbor deadline.” Otherwise, federal law says Congress can refuse to accept the electoral votes from that state.

      Then states pick ‘electors’ to represent them
      When Americans vote they don’t directly vote for president and vice president. Rather, they vote for their state “electors” who represent their choice.
      For example, if Joe Biden wins Michigan this year, the state’s 16 allotted electors would be Democrats. They represent the state at the
      electoral college meeting on 14 December, where electors meet at their respective state capitols to elect the president and vice-president.

      Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

      The winning candidate is sworn into office
      On 20 January, or 21 January if it’s on a Sunday, the constitution says the presidential term is over and the new president is inaugurated.

      Ron Adar/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock

      2. In 2020, things might be different

      The weeks before election day
      By early October,
      6.6 million Americans had already voted, largely because of a surge in mail-in voting. Trump has said
      mail-in voting is rigged against him, and his allies
      have helped sow doubt in the election.
      Democrats tend to be more likely to vote by mail, according to
      research by election scholars Edward Foley and Charles Stewart. That means Democrats will gain more votes as mail ballots are counted, but it might also mean they are less represented in the in-person voting that happens on election day. More

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      'We don't have any choice': the young activists naming and shaming US politicians

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      It was a Saturday night in September when 160 or so middle and high school students logged on to a Zoom call about how to confront American politicians using tactics inspired by young civil rights activists fighting for the abolition of slavery.The teenagers were online with the Sunrise Movement, a nationwide youth-led climate justice collective, to learn about organizing Wide Awake actions – noisy night-time protests – to force lawmakers accused of ignoring the climate emergency and racial injustice to listen to their demands.It’s a civil disobedience tactic devised by the Wide Awakes – a radical youth abolitionist organization who confronted anti-abolitionists at night by banging pots and pans outside their homes in the run-up to the civil war.Now, in the run-up to one of the most momentous elections in modern history, a new generation of young Americans who say they are tired of asking nicely and being ignored, are naming and shaming US politicians in an effort to get their concerns about the planet, police brutality, inequalities and immigration heard.The first one targeted the Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell after details emerged about the police killing of Breonna Taylor. In the days following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sunrise activists woke up key Republican senators including McConnell and Lindsey Graham, demanding that they delay the vote on Trump’s supreme court nominee until a new president is sworn in.“Even though we can’t vote, we can show up on the streets and wake up politicians. It’s our future on the line not theirs,” said 17-year-old Abby DiNardo, a senior from Delaware county. The high school senior recently coordinated a Wide Awake action outside the home of the Republican senator Pat Toomey, a former Wall Street banker who has repeatedly voted against climate action measures.The Sunrise Movement was founded by a small group of disparate young activists in 2017 and initially focussed on helping elect proponents of clean energy in the 2018 midterms. More

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      Trump is ending the census count early. It's a feat of profound political cynicism | Andrew Gawthorpe

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      A Supreme Court ruling this week allowed the Trump administration to end the 2020 census two weeks early, risking an undercount of members of the population who are difficult to reach – particularly immigrants, transients, and the poor. From the beginning, the administration has attempted to meddle with what is usually a scrupulously non-partisan process in order to advance its goal of disenfranchising and immiserating parts of the country which do not vote Republican. And following this court ruling, it is on track to get away with it.Even by Trump’s own standards of naked partisanship and self-dealing, the weaponization of the census has been cynical and alarming. By deliberately attempting to produce an undercount in certain parts of the country, and by trying to seize control of the process whereby the census is used to allocate seats in the House of Representatives and Electoral College, the administration is leaving behind a tainted legacy.Why does the census even matter? As well as being the basis for distributing political power between and within the states, the data from the census guides the allocation of about $1.5t in federal funding each year. The constitution states that the census has to take place every ten years and be based on an “actual enumeration” of residents, meaning that the Census Bureau is not permitted to use statistical models to make up for an inaccurate count. If the census isn’t accurate, then the country has to live with the consequences until the next one takes place a decade later.The Trump administration’s interference began with its attempt to insert a citizenship question into the census, which was designed to suppress responses from immigrants. After the Supreme Court found that excuses for inserting the question were “contrived”, Trump claimed the right to unilaterally alter the Census Bureau’s count to exclude undocumented immigrants. The administration is now rushing to end the census early in order to ensure that Trump, and not a successor with more respect for the constitution, is still in the White House to transmit the altered figures.The immediate result of this move would be diminished political representation and federal resources for communities with large numbers of such immigrants. But the more long-term result would be the delegitimization of yet another vital institution. In recent years, Republicans have cynically stacked the Supreme Court and undermined confidence in the electoral process through baseless conspiracy theories about mail-in ballots. Now they refuse to carry out the simple act of counting how many people are resident in the country in order to fairly distribute power and resources. With every institution they bring low, they undermine the trust that makes governing a large and diverse democracy possible.The politicization of the census is just as disturbing as these other developments. It is a basic principle of democracy that power and resources be distributed based on population – one person, one vote, one equal share. As Republicans face the reality of a demographic shift away from their ageing white base, they would rather deny the very existence of groups to which they are unfavorable – particularly immigrants – than share power and resources. It wouldn’t be the first time the party has pulled this trick. After the 1920 census showed that city dwellers – many of whom were immigrants – outnumbered rural residents for the first time in American history, the Republican-led House of Representatives refused to reapportion Congressional seats accordingly. It took decades and the intervention of the Supreme Court to restore a semblance of fairness.As they attempt to cope with yet another Republican attack on democracy, Democrats have no clear guidelines on how to respond. This time it is they who control the House of Representatives, but it is unclear what will happen if Democrats simply refuse to accept the incorrect figures transmitted by the Trump White House. The most likely outcome is that no reapportionment will happen at all, freezing the country in an unfair and regressive status quo. And for so long as the filibuster stifles the Senate, legal changes which might ameliorate the negative impacts of a sabotaged count will be hard if not impossible to achieve.But the broader issue raised by the census is how Republican nativism and partisanship exert a death grip on American politics. When one of the two main parties no longer believes in democracy, it forces people to expend time and energy battling for the most basic of principles – even the right to have their existence acknowledged – rather than working to address the country’s very real problems. Removing Republicans from power in November won’t free the nation from this problem. The battle to rejuvenate American democracy will still be long and hard. But it will at least be a victory for the principle that every vote has a right to be counted and every voice has a right to be heard. And from there, a true reckoning with what ails the nation can begin. More