The Washington Post - USA (2020-10-20)

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A25

R

ead the room, Mr. President.

After nearly four years in office,

President Trump appears to be do-

ing almost exactly the reverse of

what most Americans want. On nearly every

major policy issue, he has pushed the coun-

try to the left — or, at least, in the opposite

direction of whatever his own stance is.

Sure, in some ways, he has reshaped the

presidency and the populace in his image.

He has normalized overt bigotry, for exam-

ple. And he has expanded the bounds for

what counts as acceptable behavior from

the leader of the free world to include

bullying, pathological lying and possible

self-dealing.

On matters of policy, though, the reverse

is true. Trump has driven Americans, in-

cluding many Republicans, away from his

positions. Even — perhaps especially —

when it comes to the issues most central to

his agenda.

Take immigration. Through xenophobic

rhetoric and more than 400 executive ac-

tions, his administration has made govern-

ment more anti-immigrant. But those same

choices seem to have helped to make the

public more pro-immigrant.

Nearly eight in 10 Americans (77 percent)

now think immigration is good for the coun-

try, the highest share since Gallup began

asking this question two decades ago.

Additionally, the share of Americans who

say they want increased immigration ex-

ceeds those who want it reduced — the first

time this has been true since Gallup began

asking in the 1960s.

Polling from Pew Research Center has

found that Americans have become more

likely to say that immigration strengthens

rather than burdens the country, even as

Trump blockades immigrants on the

grounds that they drain the economy and

corrupt our culture. Americans have like-

wise become more pro-refugee since Trump

took office, even as he ratchets down refugee

admissions. And they’ve become more likely

to say that immigrants mostly fill jobs that

U.S. citizens don’t want.

These increasingly xenophilic views have

risen among Republicans as well as Demo-

crats.

Or consider health care. Trump has re-

lentlessly attacked the Affordable Care Act,

and in the process, vastly improved the

law’s popularity. A clear majority now favor

the law, according to Kaiser Family Founda-

tion polling.

Rising shares of Americans also oppose

having the Supreme Court strike down the

law’s protections for those with preexisting

conditions; in fact, a majority of Republi-

cans say they don’t want these protections

overturned, though a lawsuit filed by 20 red

states and supported by Trump seeks to do

just that.

Perhaps even more striking, since Trump

took office, Americans have become more

likely to say that the federal government is

responsible for making sure all Americans

have health-care coverage, according to Pew

Research Center. They’ve also become more

likely to say that this should be done through

a single-payer system. Here, too, Republi-

cans have become more supportive of these

positions.

The same pattern exists with trade. As

Trump has clamped down on the free flow of

goods and services, Americans have become

more likely to say that free-trade agreements

have been good for the United States.

Again, multiple surveys show this pat-

tern cutting across party affiliation.

The Great Dealmaker, in other words,

has repeatedly convinced Americans that

his positions are a bad deal.

To be sure, a policy’s popularity, or lack

thereof, does not necessarily translate to

merit. Over the years, the public has backed

plenty of policies that are morally abhor-

rent, constitutionally problematic, eco-

nomically damaging or logistically flawed.

And a politician might adopt positions at

odds with his constituents because he be-

lieves they are wrong.

But Trump does not appear to be deliber-

ately, courageously flouting the popular will

as a matter of principle; rather, he has tried

to pander but appears to have misjudged

what the popular will actually is. He mistak-

enly believes that the rabidly anti-immi-

grant, anti-trade, anti-government fringe

that shows up at his rallies represents

America writ large — when in truth those

pro-Trump crowds are not even representa-

tive of all Republicans.

Additionally, on some issues, Americans

may have supported Trump’s stances ini-

tially, before being exposed to what they’d

mean in practice. In the abstract, levying

tariffs, rejecting refugees and repealing

Obamacare might sound like good ideas.

Not so much, now that Trump has offered

proof of concept.

Rather than using public feedback to

reshape his agenda, Trump instead pays lip

services to views that are the opposite of his

actions.

Such is the case for his tax overhaul

(which he falsely claimed would raise taxes

on the rich, in accordance with public wish-

es); his treatment of “dreamers” (the unau-

thorized immigrants brought to the United

States as children, whose popular protec-

tions Trump has been working to dismantle

since 2017); the financing of Social Security

(which he promises to safeguard, even as he

tries to eliminate its dedicated funding

stream); and pledges to “drain the swamp”

(see: his lobbyist appointments and many

regulatory rollbacks crafted by corporate

donors).

When he can’t defend his record on the

merits or the politics, Trump simply imag-

ines it away. If only the rest of us had that

option.

[email protected]

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Trump drives

people away

from his views

T

he coronavirus pandemic in

the United States is rapidly

climbing toward a third peak,

and President Trump is doing

more to boost the infection rate than

reduce it.

It’s hard to believe, but Trump

doesn’t even seem to be trying to slow

the spread of the deadly virus that has

killed nearly 220,000 Americans, rav-

aged the economy and seriously dam-

aged his chances of winning a second

term. With the election just two

weeks away and polls heavily favoring

Democratic nominee Joe Biden,

Trump has been spending his days

frantically jetting around the country

to campaign rallies that look like

potential superspreader events — big,

tightly packed, noisy gatherings

where most people are not wearing

masks.

Trump’s own residence and work-

place — the super-secure White House

complex — became a covid-19 hot

zone. Some who fell ill were chastened,

including former New Jersey governor

Chris Christie, who said Friday that

“within 24 hours I went from feeling

absolutely fine to being in the inten-

sive care unit” of the Morristown Med-

ical Center.

“I was wrong to not wear a mask at

the Amy Coney Barrett announcement

and I was wrong not to wear a mask at

my multiple debate prep sessions with

the President and the rest of the team,”

Christie said in a statement. “I hope

that my experience shows my fellow

citizens that you should follow [Cen-

ters for Disease Control and Preven-

tion] guidelines in public no matter

where you are and wear a mask to

protect yourself and others.”

Trump’s own bout with covid-19,

however, appears to have taught him a

very different lesson.

“They say I’m immune, I feel so

powerful,” Trump said at a rally in

Florida last week. “I’ll walk in there

and kiss everyone in that audience. I’ll

kiss the guys and the beautiful women

and — everyone. I’ll just give you a big

fat kiss.”

No kissing ensued, fortunately.

Whatever Trump wants to believe, sci-

entists say that those who recover from

covid-19 do have some immunity, but it

is unclear how long the protection

might last. There have been a few docu-

mented cases of reinfection; those cas-

es are not yet well understood.

At almost every rally, Trump tells his

supporters that the nation is “round-

ing the turn” on covid-19. Those who

say otherwise, Trump told one crowd

last week, are “cynics and angry parti-

sans and professional pessimists.”

T he numbers disagree. At the end of

last week, new U.S. coronavirus infec-

tions were being reported at rates of

more than 60,000 per day — levels not

seen since August. Hospitalizations,

which lag behind infections, have also

begun to increase sharply; deaths,

which trail hospitalizations, are ex-

pected to follow the same trajectory.

The first U.S. wave of covid-19 crest-

ed in April and was centered in New

York and the Northeast. The second

wave, which had its biggest impact in

the Sunbelt, peaked in July. We are

now experiencing a third wave that

seems worst in the Upper Midwest but

is distressingly widespread, with cases

rising again in places — including

parts of New York — that had hoped

the crisis was past.

Reality does not fit Trump’s pre-

ferred “rounding the turn” narrative,

however, so he lashes out at experts —

such as Anthony S. Fauci, director of

the National Institute of Allergy and

Infectious Diseases — who stress the

need for universal mask-wearing,

hand-washing and social distancing.

“People are tired of covid.... People

are saying, ‘Whatever — just leave us

alone,’ ” Trump said Monday in a call

with campaign staff. “People are tired

of hearing Fauci and all these idiots.

... Fauci is a nice guy. He’s been here
for 500 years.... Fauci — if we listened
to him, we’d have 700,000 [or]
800,000 deaths.”
Trump no longer cares to listen to
Fauci or the nation’s leading epidemi-
ologists — whatever tolerance he had
for the bad news they deliver is gone.
Instead, he listens to a neuroradiolo-
gist, Scott Atlas, a darling of conserva-
tive media who advocates letting the
coronavirus infect enough Americans
so that the population achieves “herd
immunity.” Experts say this is madness
and would needlessly cost hundreds of
thousands of lives. But it’s clearly the
closest Trump can get to what he
wants to hear.
Two of Trump’s personality traits,
his impatience and his narcissism,
stand between the nation and success
against covid-19. He is obviously sick
of dealing with the pandemic, which
hurts him politically. And since he
beat the disease — with the help of
experimental treatments not avail-
able to the rest of us — he figures
everybody else should be able to beat
it, too.
With cold weather coming and
most Americans having to spend more
time indoors, this third wave of covid-
19 could be truly horrific. Trump’s trag-
ic legacy will be that he met a crisis —
and instead of making it better, he
made it worse.
Twitter: @Eugene_Robinson

EUGENE ROBINSON

The superspreader in chief

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

President Trump in Ocala, Fla., on Friday.

O

ther issues created more contro-

versy during her confirmation

hearings, but one of the insuffi-

ciently appreciated effects of

Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s elevation to

the Supreme Court could be to fortify

existing high court doctrine on physician-

assisted suicide and euthanasia, specifi-

cally a 23-year-old precedent denying that

terminally ill patients have a constitu-

tional right to either one.

The public appears increasingly sym-

pathetic to such laws, but Barrett would

join Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett

M. Kavanaugh as Trump appointees who,

as of the time they were nominated, had

given implicit but clear indicia that they

would vote no on a “right to die,” just as all

nine justices did in the 1997 case of Wash-

ington v. Glucksberg.

Gorsuch published a book in 2006

questioning European euthanasia laws

and defending then-existing state laws in

the United States prohibiting doctor-as-

sisted suicide. Kavanaugh served as a top

official in the Bush administration as it

tried to block physicians from prescrib-

ing lethal dosages under Oregon’s

a ssisted-suicide law.

And Barrett co-wrote a 1998 law review

article in which she distinguished the

dilemmas Catholic judges might face in

following church teachings against capi-

tal punishment, as well as what she called

a more “absolute” doctrine banning abor-

tion and euthanasia, which “take away

innocent life.”

Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett

would join three conservatives, John

G. Roberts Jr., Samuel A. Alito Jr. and

Clarence Thomas, whose records imply

support for Glucksberg. Its essential hold-

ing was that the emerging norms of auton-

omy and dignity embodied in the right-to-

die movement were not “deeply rooted in

this Nation’s history and tradition” and

could not d efine a fundamental right.

A court staffed by Hillary Clinton

might have viewed that precedent differ-

ently, especially since the holding in

Glucksberg is not necessarily popular:

Though physician-assisted suicide and

euthanasia are controversial and op-

posed on principle by devout Catholics

(of which Barrett is one), polls show that

most Americans support legalizing

them.

The Supreme Court has reversed itself

on social issues — state bans against

consensual intimacy between same-sex

partners being a good example — before.

And in 2015, Canada’s Supreme Court

ruled that that country’s Charter of

Rights and Freedoms mandated not only

physician-assisted suicide but also

d octor-provided euthanasia — even

though the same court had reached the

opposite conclusion 22 years earlier.

Stare decisis, the legal principle that

past rulings should usually be left to

stand, is “not a straitjacket that condemns

the law to stasis,” the Canadian court

noted, and a new “matrix of legislative

and social facts” had to be considered.

On the whole, though, Americans, in-

cluding proponents of a right to die, are

probably better off leaving Glucksberg as

settled law.

That’s because, while not required to

allow physician-assisted suicide, the states

are also not forbidden to legalize it, per a

2006 ruling, Gonzales v. Oregon, in which

the Supreme Court rebuffed the Bush ad-

ministration’s attempt to treat that state’s

doctors who prescribed lethal doses under

state assisted-suicide law as violators of

the federal Controlled Substances Act.

Eight of the 50 states and D.C. have

permitted physician-assisted suicide, by

statute or referendum. (In one, Montana,

the state Supreme Court decreed it as a

matter of state law, and legislators have

tried, unsuccessfully so far, to overturn

that ruling.)

The combined effect of the Glucksberg

and Gonzales cases is this: If there is to be

a right to die in the United States, demo-

cratic processes in the states and, possi-

bly, Congress will establish its contours,

not the lapidary phrases of a Supreme

Court opinion.

The resulting body of law will enjoy

greater legitimacy by virtue of its having

been arrived at by politically account-

able lawmakers through open debate —

and its being subject to amendment or

repeal should experience reveal unantic-

ipated new challenges or unintended

consequences.

Surely the history of Roe v. Wade and

its repercussions — political and legal —

shows the risks of shifting the discussion

of all such nuances into the federal judici-

ary, especially when the underlying issue

involves sensitive questions surrounding

the beginning, and end, of life.

Support Barrett or oppose her, she had

a point when she wrote, in a 2013 law

review article on stare decisis: “The pub-

lic response to controversial cases like Roe

reflects public rejection of the proposi-

tion that stare decisis can declare a per-

manent victor in a divisive constitutional

struggle.”

Barrett’s mentor, the late Justice An-

tonin Scalia, dissented in Gonzales, on the

grounds that federal controlled-substance

law requires barbiturates be used for a

“legitimate medical purpose,” which, in

his view, could not possibly include

p hysician-assisted suicide. (Roberts and

Thomas joined Scalia’s opinion.)

For the court to adopt Scalia’s view — to

overrule Gonzales while retaining

Glucksberg — would tilt the current legal

balance against physician-assisted sui-

cide and euthanasia, another reason to

focus on Barrett’s assertion, at the hear-

ing, that “no one should assume” she will

always do what Scalia would have.

[email protected]

CHARLES LANE

Barrett would be no friend of right-to-die laws

O

ne of the most symbolic mo-

ments of campaign 2020 was

when the apparatus of the

Republican Party strained and

groaned to produce a platform read-

ing, “RESOLVED, That the Republican

National Convention will adjourn

without adopting a new platform until

the 2024 Republican National Conven-

tion.”

It was, in its own content-free,

witless way, an assertion of power. The

party that had produced a platform

every four years since 1856 had be-

come, well, anything President Trump

wished at the moment. It was a decla-

ration and recognition of personal

rule.

After nearly four years, it is fair to

ask: With the GOP as putty in Trump’s

hand, what form has it taken? What are

the large, organizing commitments of

the GOP during the Trump captivity?

One would have to be voter suppres-

sion. What began, for some, as an effort

to ensure ballot security has become a

campaign to control the content of the

electorate by limiting its size.

Not long ago, I would have regarded

this as conspiracy thinking. At some

point, however, a pattern becomes a

plot. There have been Republican ef-

forts to make voting more difficult in

Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ne-

vada, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Texas,

Iowa and Oklahoma. These have in-

cluded: complicated absentee ballot

processes, strict voter ID rules, obsta-

cles for voters returning from prison,

objections to the broad distribution of

ballots and logistical obstacles to early

voting. The Republican governor of

Texas, Greg Abbott, set the example of

shamelessness by limiting vast coun-

ties to a single ballot drop box. The

president has attempted to destroy

trust in the whole electoral enterprise

in preparation for legal challenges to

mail-in votes.

Again and again, Republicans have

used, or attempted to use, the power

they gained from voters to undermine

democracy. This has a political inten-

tion but (for some) it also has an

ideological explanation. It is the logical

electoral implication of nativism. If too

much diversity is the cause of our

national problems, it can be fought by

restricting immigration or by restrict-

ing the democratic participation of

minorities. In either case, these are

actions motivated by Republican fears

of being swamped by people they can’t

relate to and voted into obsolescence.

So the GOP seems to expend more

energy and creativity on discouraging

minority voting than it does on doing

minority outreach.

The second characteristic of the new

GOP is denial of a pandemic in the

midst of a surging pandemic. Trump

and many other Republicans think

they can win only if American voters

forget about more than 219,000 deaths

from covid-19 and the utterly incompe-

tent federal response to the crisis. It is

hard to recall any American presiden-

tial campaign that depended so direct-

ly on the outbreak of mass amnesia.

Trump’s recent campaign visit to

Wisconsin was remarkable for its bra-

zenness. On a day Wisconsin saw its

highest level of new infections during

the pandemic, Trump told a crowd that

had to be screened for coughs and

fevers that the country was “rounding

the corner” on covid-19 and that their

state was insufficiently open. This is

denial pressed to the point of lunacy. It

is the elephant urging people to ignore

the elephant in the room.

The third organizing commitment of

the GOP under Trump is loyalty to his

person. At the beginning of his term,

there was a Republican attempt to

understand the populism that elected

Trump and draw its policy implica-

tions. That ended quickly. The presi-

dent made clear that the only thing

that really mattered about populism

was its end product: himself.

Populist causes — such as discredit-

ing the media and “owning the libs” —

are instruments to protect Trump from

attack and project his own power. His

whole term has been the chaotic and

brutish attempt to find the people who

would take his whims as law. And

elected Republicans (except the admi-

rable Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah) have

been ruled by the fear of Trump’s

tweeted tantrums. As Trump seems

headed toward electoral failure, a few

Republicans are recovering their own

voices. But it won’t be easy to escape

this taint. Years of complicity with

Trump’s assault on American institu-

tions is less like a bad haircut than an

infected tattoo.

Some would add a conservative

judiciary to this list of GOP commit-

ments, and there is a case to be made.

But this is no longer advocated in the

context of moral conservatism, as it

was in the Reagan era. The goal now is

to secure conservative judges from a

morally anarchic administration. A

cause has been reduced to a transac-

tion.

What should we make of this GOP

agenda: voter suppression, disease de-

nial and a personality cult dedicated to

a con man? It is the weakest appeal to

the public of any modern presidential

candidate. The Republican Party may

win or lose. But it deserves to lose.

[email protected]

MICHAEL GERSON

The three

planks of

Trump’s GOP