SUNDAY, MARCH 6 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A29
F
loundering in his attempts to
wield political power while lack-
ing a political office, Donald
Trump looks increasingly like a
stray orange hair to be flicked off the
nation’s sleeve. His residual power,
which he must use or lose, is to influence
his party’s selection of candidates for
state and federal offices. This is, howev-
er, perilous because he has the power of
influence only if he is perceived to have
it. That perception will dissipate if his
interventions in Republican primaries
continue to be unimpressive.
So, Trump must try to emulate the
protagonist of “A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur’s Court.” In Mark Twain’s
novel, a 19th-century American is trans-
ported back in time to Britain in the year- He gets in trouble, is condemned to
death, but remembers that a solar
eclipse occurred on the date of his
scheduled execution. He saves himself
by vowing to extinguish the sun but
promising to let it shine again if his
demands are met.
Trump is faltering at the business of
commanding outcomes that are, like
Twain’s eclipse, independent of his inter-
ventions. Consider the dilemma of David
Perdue.
He is a former Republican senator
because Trump, harping on the cosmic
injustice of his November loss in 2020,
confused and demoralized Georgia Re-
publicans enough to cause Perdue’s
defeat by 1.2 percentage points in the
January 2021 runoff. Nevertheless,
Trump talked Perdue into running in
this year’s gubernatorial primary
against Georgia’s Republican incum-
bent, Brian Kemp, whom Trump loathes
because Kemp spurned Trump’s demand
that Georgia’s presidential vote be dele-
gitimized. In a February poll, Kemp led
Perdue by 10 points.
Trump failed in his attempt to boost
his preferred Senate candidate in North
Carolina, Rep. Ted Budd, by pressuring a
rival out of the race. As of mid-January,
Budd was trailing in the polls. Trump
reportedly might endorse a second Sen-
ate candidate in Alabama, his first
endorsement, of Rep. Mo Brooks, having
been less than earthshaking. Trump has
endorsed Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice
McGeachin in the gubernatorial pri-
mary against Gov. Brad Little. A poll
published in January: Little 59 percent,
McGeachin 18 percent. During Trump’s
presidency, a majority of Republicans
said they were more supporters of
Trump than of the GOP. That has now
reversed.
Trump is an open book who has been
reading himself to the nation for
40 years. In that time, he has changed
just one important word in his torrent of
talk: He has replaced “Japan” with
“China” in assigning blame for our
nation’s supposed anemia. He is an
entertainer whose repertoire is stale.
A European war is unhelpful for
Trump because it reminds voters that
Longfellow was right: Life is real, life is
earnest. Trump’s strut through presiden-
tial politics was made possible by an
American reverie; war in Europe has
reminded people that politics is serious.
From Capitol Hill to city halls, Demo-
crats have presided over surges of debt,
inflation, crime, pandemic authoritari-
anism and educational intolerance. Pub-
lic schools, a point of friction between
citizens and government, are hostages of
Democratic-aligned teachers unions
that have positioned K-12 education in
an increasingly adversarial relationship
with parents. The most lethal threat to
Democrats, however, is the message
Americans are hearing from the party’s
media-magnified progressive minority:
You should be ashamed of your country.
Trump’s message is similar. He says
this country is saturated with corrup-
tion, from the top, where dimwits repre-
sent the evidently dimwitted voters who
elected them, down to municipalities
that conduct rigged elections. Progres-
sives say the nation’s past is squalid and
not really past; Trump says the nation’s
present is a disgrace.
Speaking of embarrassments: We are
the sum of our choices, and Vladimir
Putin has provoked some Trump poodles
to make illuminating ones. Their limit-
less capacity for canine loyalty now
encompasses the Kremlin war criminal.
(The first count against Nazi defendants
at Nuremberg: “Planning, preparation,
initiation and waging of wars of aggres-
sion.”) For example, the vaudevillian-
a s-journalist Tucker Carlson, who never
lapses into logic, speaks like an arrested-
development adolescent: Putin has nev-
er called me a racist, so there.
J.D. Vance, groveling for Trump’s
benediction (Vance covets Ohio’s Repub-
lican Senate nomination), two weeks ago
said: “I don’t really care what happens to
Ukraine.” Apparently upon discovering
that Ohio has 43,000 Ukrainian Ameri-
cans, Vance underwent a conviction
transplant, saying, “Russia’s assault on
Ukraine is unquestionably a tragedy,”
and emitting clouds of idolatry for
Trump’s supposedly Metternichian di-
plomacy regarding Putin.
For Trump, the suppurating wound on
American life, and for those who share
his curdled venom, war is a h ellacious
distraction from their self-absorption.
Fortunately, their ability to be major
distractions is waning.
GEORGE F. WILLA stray orange
hair to be
flicked off the
nation’s sleeve
NEAR THE UKRAINE BORDERJ
avelin antitank missiles, the
A merican-made weapons that can
destroy Russian tanks, are stacked
in steel racks awaiting quick ship-
ment into Ukraine. A giant C-17
transport is parked on a n earby runway.
This is what American and NATO
support for Ukraine looks like. Every day,
14 widebody jets are landing here to
deliver Javelins, Stinger antiaircraft mis-
siles and other weapons for the Ukraini-
ans. A half-dozen of these daily arrivals
are American planes.
Watching the Javelins move toward
the battlefield Friday is the clearest dem-
onstration of the delicate balance that
the United States and its allies are trying
to strike in the Ukraine war. They are
rushing deliveries of weapons to help
Ukraine defend itself against Russian
attackers. But U.S. and NATO troops are
staying safely across the border, deter-
mined to avoid a direct military confron-
tation with Russia that could turn this
into a cataclysmic world war.
Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited this
w eapons-transfer facility Friday as part
of his visit to Europe to bolster Ameri-
can support for Ukraine and NATO. At
every stop, he’s walking the same tight-
rope: Support Ukraine’s war against
Russia — but contain that war within
Ukraine’s borders.
Milley embraced this second theme of
deterring any attack on NATO in a
separate visit Friday with soldiers from
the 82nd Airborne Division, who have
been in Poland for the past month to
bolster Polish forces and deter any Rus-
sian attempt to expand the war into
NATO territory.
During a briefing at the division’s
operational headquarters in Rzeszow in
southeast Poland, Milley heard a grim
update on what might be ahead in
Ukraine as Russia accelerates its inva-
sion. One analyst assessed that Kyiv
could be isolated in four to six days. The
battle for Kyiv would then become a
desperate street-to-street battle as Ukrai-
nians fought to save their capital. Polish
border police attending the meeting
shared their breakdown of border cross-
ings: In the previous 12 hours,
53,000 people had crossed from Ukraine;
for days, crossings have been at that
surge level, as Ukrainians flee the war.
It’s a measure of the Pentagon’s con-
cern about bolstering Poland that the
82nd Airborne was dispatched there
nearly a month ago. The 82nd is the
Pentagon’s quickest rapid-deployment
force. It was sent to Kabul last August to
manage the evacuation from
A fghanistan.
To prepare for a possible similar emer-
gency rescue of American citizens leav-
ing Ukraine, the division rented a big
indoor arena in Rzeszow that could
accommodate 2,500 people. Bunks there
are arrayed in neat rows, but they’re
nearly all empty. So far, only 29 Ameri-
cans have used the facility. But shelter is
ready if needed for the wider refugee
crisis.
Milley flew by Blackhawk helicopter to
a Polish base in Nowa Deba, where
American troops are helping train Polish
forces. As Polish tanks rumbled in the
distance, Maj. Gen Christopher T. Dona-
hue, the division commander, explained
the mission to me and two other journal-
ists traveling with Milley: “We’re out here
to assure and deter,” he said. He stressed
the growing ability of Polish and Ameri-
can forces to operate jointly, sharing
radar and other data.
Talking with some of the division’s
4,700 soldiers deployed here, you get an
immediate, flesh-and-blood sense of
NATO’s presence at the eastern flank of
NATO. The soldiers talk about mundane
concerns such as their dealing with
worried families and encountering Pol-
ish food, but they know they’re in Poland
to embody the United States’ Article 5
commitment to treat an attack on a
NATO member as if it were an attack on
America.
As Milley was leaving the 82nd Air-
borne’s headquarters in Rzeszow, he gave
a brief gung-ho speech similar to the one
he has delivered at most stops on this
tour. He talked, as he often does, of the
precious value of the rules-based order
that was created after the horror of World
War II. “Now you have an invasion of one
country by another. The Russians just
broke the rules in a big way.”
As he departed, Milley told the Ameri-
can troops, “You are sitting at the for-
ward edge of freedom.” Those sounded
like fighting words, but in the next
breath, Milley said: “We want to keep the
confrontation contained in Ukraine.”
That’s the paradox of America’s com-
mitment to Ukraine: Stop the Russians
without fighting them. Check Putin’s
aggression, but give him a way out before
the situation gets any more dangerous.
A step in the right direction was
establishing a “deconfliction” hotline be-
tween U.S. and Russian forces. The Amer-
ican connection will be in Stuttgart,
Germany, the headquarters of U.S. forces
in Europe, which Milley visited Thurs-
day. The line will be tested twice a day,
officials say, to make sure it’s working.
Now they need to start talking about
ending this conflict. As Milley told the
troops in Rzeszow, “Big things are at
stake here.”DAVID IGNATIUSAt Ukraine’s
border, ‘ the
forward edge
of freedom’
T
he day my mother called to
tell me she had tested posi-
tive, I realized that, for me,
covid was over.
Practically speaking, of course, it
was not. This was late January, when
cases were up in Albany County, N.Y. —
double the January before — and we
were operating under an emergency
mask mandate. Augusta County, Va.,
where my parents live, was weathering
a similar surge: twice as many cases as
the same time last year.
If I’d heard last January that my
mother had covid-19, I would have
been terrified. Since the spring of
2020, when the nation first learned the
term “comorbidity,” my 74-year-old
mother, with her history of asthma,
had been among my chief concerns.
Nothing scared me more in that first
scary year than the specter of her on a
ventilator struggling to breathe.
Yet now, when Mom reported that
her sore throat and mild fever were
caused by covid, I replied, “Well, well.
Congratulations.”
I still love my mom! And I knew the
virus was no laughing matter — it had
killed so many and was killing still. But
the ubiquitous omicron variant had
changed something for me. After cir-
cling for about a year and a half, the
virus had finally breached my social
circle. My aunt got it, as did my
sister-in-law, two nephews and one
son. All careful, all vaccinated, all fine
in the end. It was as if a long-feared
enemy had at last invaded but had no
strength left for the fight.
Or that’s how I imagined it: like
Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Russia.
“War and Peace” featured in one of my
first essays about covid, in which I
expressed a longing in May 2020 forthe pandemic to be history already, as
the events of 1812 were for Tolstoy’s
narrator. I wondered, worried, where
in the pandemic era we might be: “The
middle? The beginning? Oh, God — the
prologue?”
It turns out I achieved a kind of
prescience through rhetorical flourish:
We were indeed in the prologue, or
close to it. I didn’t know yet that the
sense of intense early camaraderie I f elt
with my fellow Americans — the all-
i n-this-together feeling — was no
match for the right-wing polarization
machine, which turned public health
measures into political dividers. I
didn’t know yet that, incredibly (thanks
to science), we’d get vaccines by the end
of the year, but that a year later,
incredibly (thanks to politics), a large
portion of Americans would still be
declining them, opening us to contin-
ued attacks. I didn’t know yet that
nearly 1 million Americans would die of
covid. I didn’t know yet that my f amily
would be vaccinated, boosted and safe.
I went on to write about living in a
perpetual state of uncertainty; missing
strangers during Halloween; wishing
someone would give us clearer rules;
enjoying a break from caring about my
body image; wondering how the coun-
try might have responded if covid had
killed more children; proposing we
publish vaccinated vs. unvaccinated
death tolls; bemoaning the scarcity of
coronavirus tests; and decrying the
defiance of mask mandates.
I swear I wasn’t hired to be The Post’s
covid commentator. But I was hired to
write about politics and culture in the
context of life as I was living it, and for a
while, covid was the context of every-
thing: my work, my children’s educa-
tion, my far-flung family, my reading,my thinking, my country.
For many, it still is. People are still
living in fear — because their young
children can’t get vaccinated or their
loved ones won’t, because their im-
mune systems are compromised or
they work with the sick and dying. To
them, the notion of covid being “over”
might seem cruel.
That disjunction isn’t new. Since the
beginning, we’ve been experiencing
the same global event in vastly differ-
ent ways. One person’s pandemic
mea nt canceled plans and extra take-
out. Another’s meant the intensive
care unit and isolated mourning.
Now it seems our pandemic eras
will end not just in different ways but
also at different times.
I might not be afraid anymore, but I
understand that others are and should
be. For them, I g ladly wear a mask and
flash my vaccination card; for them, I
worry that Britain is ending its covid
restrictions too soon. But the fact that
the British government announced the
change one day after it was announced
that Queen Elizabeth II had tested
positive for the coronavirus made some
sense to me. A terrible possibility — the
beloved queen getting sick — had
finally happened and... was not so
terrible after all. She is still performing
“light” duties. Mom is fine.
In “War and Peace,” the epilogue
takes place seven years after the war.
When we meet Natasha and Pierre
again, the dead are long buried and the
living have new preoccupations.
Maybe it will take seven years for all
of us to get there post-covid, but I can
see it now: the moment a friend of
mine told me she longs for, when we
find a mask in a coat pocket and think,
“Wow, remember that?”KATE COHENCovid isn’t over,
but it’s over for me
ELLEN WEINSTEIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTFarmer and PIH insist that those who
suffer are not different. Societies are struc-
tured in ways that thwart them, and if the
structure is changed, they will flourish. To
treat physical diseases without attempt-
ing to restructure society in liberating
ways is insufficient, even inhumane.
A Catholic, Farmer was deeply influ-
enced by Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiér-
rez, a leading proponent of “liberation
theology,” a movement introduced in the
1960s. By the time Farmer encountered
the movement, in the 1980s, conserva-
tives in government and the church
largely scorned it. But liberation theol-
ogy spoke to the way Farmer practiced
medicine.
In this view of God’s creation, the poor
are not an afterthought. They come first.
To borrow the language of the movement,
there is “a preferential option for the
poor.” Liberating those who suffer from
structural oppression is God’s first —
preferred — choice: “The last shall be
first,” as Jesus explains in the Gospel of
Matthew.
A preference for the poor meant, in
practical terms, that Farmer did more for
his patients than he might have done
were he treating the students and faculty
at Harvard, say. In poor communities, itT
o the long list of Vladimir Putin’s
offenses, add this footnote: His
unprovoked and lawless invasion
of Ukraine riveted the world’s
attention when it might have been given
to the magnificent life and untimely
death of a saint, scourge and beacon, Paul
Farmer.
Uncounted thousands of human be-
ings are dead because of Putin, in graves
from Chechnya to Syria to Kyiv. Uncount-
ed millions are alive thanks to Farmer, in
homes from Haiti to Liberia to the Ameri-
can Southwest — even to Russia.
Farmer was a beacon in the sense that
he pointed the way — but from a distance,
up ahead. He was brighter than most of
us. Raised by an eccentric father who
housed his family, at various times, in a
converted school bus and on a boat
anchored in a bayou, he earned a full
scholarship to Duke University. He be-
came a University Professor at Harvard,
the highest honor given to faculty mem-
bers there, and received honorary de-
grees from many of the most venerable
universities of North America.
What is more important is the use to
which Farmer put his gift of intelligence.
Moved by the experience of befriending
and working alongside Haitian migrants
during his unconventional youth and his
undergraduate years, Farmer trained as a
doctor and opened a clinic on Haiti’s
cent ral plateau. With colleagues, he
founded Partners in Health (PIH), a
transformational organization that puts
the humanity of the poor at the center of
its work.
Pause a moment over that, please. One
way humans cope with suffering is to put
psychic space between ourselves and the
afflicted. We might say people are poor
because they are deficient in some way,
lacking initiative, or creativity, or good
parents — or they are just short on luck.
We might say people are sick because
they lack discipline or hygiene — or,
again, they lack luck.is not enough to open a clinic and wait for
patients to come through the door. Medi-
cal providers must break down the struc-
tures that prevent impoverished people
from accessing care.
As PIH explains itself: “A mother can-
not undergo cancer care and lose work
without receiving economic support. A
tuberculosis patient cannot endure
strong medications on an empty stom-
ach. And a patient showing symptoms of
covid-19 cannot take public transporta-
tion to her local testing site.” A patient
might need food, money, child care and a
car ride before medicine or surgery can
be of any value.
Farmer’s work produced tangible re-
sults that he documented in scores of
peer-reviewed articles in leading medical
journals. Partners in Health grew rapidly,
adapting its programs to the specific
needs of communities. For example, in
the Navajo Nation, which covers parts of
New Mexico, Utah and Arizona, PIH
identified poor diet as a major health
problem. The economic structure of the
region needed to be changed to create
access to more nutritious foods.
The solution: Clinics in the Navajo
Nation now write “prescriptions” for
fresh fruits and vegetables. When gro-
cery stores and trading posts “fill” the
prescriptions, they are reimbursed by
Partners in Health — just as pharmacies
are reimbursed for pills. Community
health workers offer the same recipes
and encouragement that wealthy fami-
lies receive from their neighborhood
juice bars, personal trainers and sub-
scriptions to cooking magazines.
A principle of liberation theology is
that the shepherd lives among the flock.
So it was that Paul Farmer was not in
Cambridge, Mass., but at a d istrict hospi-
tal in Rwanda when his vast and de-
manding heart gave out on Feb. 21. He
was just 62 years old but far ahead of the
pack. There he remains, up ahead, beck-
oning the world to follow.DAVID VON DREHLESeeing the humanity of the poor
JOHN RA/PARTNERS IN HEALTH
Paul Farmer in Kono, Sierra Leone.