Trump leans into his '180,000 deaths is a statistic' reelection strategy
Philip Bump
In the hours after President Donald Trump accepted the Republican Party's nomination, public attention was largely centered on the president's broadly deceptive speech and the willingness of the administration to violate legal statutes barring the use of the White House for campaigning. So a report from CNN's Jim Acosta flew somewhat under the radar.
Acosta had asked a White House official why there was apparently no effort to implement social distancing measures for the audience at the speech. The official's response?
"Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually," the official reportedly said.
It's a staggering comment, for a variety of reasons. The most obvious is that everyone won't catch the novel coronavirus eventually, ideally; the point of developing a vaccine is to keep that from happening. What's more, even if there were no vaccine, there's a big difference between people catching it now and catching it in a year or two when there might be better therapeutic treatments or potentially a cure. It's like shrugging at people getting infections before the invention of penicillin.
But this was also one comment from one official, and it was not something that we could simply ascribe to the administration overall as a deliberate strategy.
Until Monday morning, when The Washington Post reported that something along these lines is gaining acceptance among White House leadership.
"One of President Trump's top medical advisers is urging the White House to embrace a controversial 'herd immunity' strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, while taking steps to protect those in nursing homes and other vulnerable populations, according to five people familiar with the discussions," The Post's Yasmeen Abutaleb and Josh Dawsey report. "The administration has already begun to implement some policies along these lines, according to current and former officials as well as experts, particularly with regard to testing."
Last week, new guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scaled back the number of tests being completed for the virus, forgoing testing for those who weren't displaying symptoms but had been in contact with someone infected with the virus. One effect of this would be a political benefit for Trump, reducing the number of recorded coronavirus cases. Another effect would be to increase the transmission of the virus, as asymptomatic people can still infect others if not quarantined.
Trump has for some time insisted that the government's time is best spent protecting those in nursing homes and who are otherwise at risk, an approach to the pandemic that allows for more economic activity and - Trump again clearly hopes - fewer negative consequences for his reelection bid.
He's also repeatedly downplayed the risks associated with contracting the virus. At times, he's insisted that 99% of infections are "totally harmless," a claim that both misrepresents the deadliness of the virus and ignores the body of evidence showing that some infections yield long-term health effects and potentially permanent damage.
Over the weekend, he sought to bolster the idea that the virus isn't really as deadly as experts say by retweeting a QAnon supporter's claim that a CDC report showed that 94% of those identified as dying from covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, had other conditions at the time of their deaths. What the report actually showed was that in most cases, covid-19 killed people who were living with other conditions.
As one expert on cancer put it: "600,000 die of cancer each year. 95% likely have comorbidities. Doesn't mean cancer was not cause of their death."
It's obvious that covid-19 is killing Americans when we consider the number of people who've died relative to prior years. Through the middle of May, data from the New York Times showed 88,000 more deaths in 2020 than in the average number of deaths seen from 2014 to 2019. A report earlier this month estimated that about 200,000 more people had died so far this year than would have been expected from prior years.
It's a reminder, too, that the official tally of coronavirus deaths is likely under-, not overstated.
In other words, Trump's halfhearted assurances notwithstanding, a shift in the White House's strategy to allow for more widespread infections would likely mean tens or hundreds of thousands more deaths than would be seen with containment measures.
Precisely how many isn't clear. At this point, the country has been averaging more than 900 deaths per day for more than a month. The number of new cases is hovering at about 41,000 per day, on average. And since early July, the percentage of deaths relative to new cases two weeks prior has been between about 1.5% and 1.8%.
One projection of the death toll from the virus figures that the country will add another 90,000 deaths by Election Day. That assumes a reduction in efforts to contain the virus - which is reportedly what the White House is embracing.
Trump understood the risks of letting the virus spread without containment back in April, when he was defending the administration's decision to endorse a shutdown of economic activity. At a news briefing centered on the virus, Trump was asked about Sweden's decision to embrace a "herd immunity" approach to it, allowing it to spread widely enough that there would be enough people with immunity to slow the spread.
"I think we could have followed that approach," Trump said of Sweden's strategy. "And if we did follow that approach, I think we might have 2 million people dead."
That figure comes from an estimate developed by Imperial College London. When the White House first announced its support of containment measures, it used an upper-end estimate of 2.2 million deaths to describe what could happen if Americans didn't try to contain the virus's spread.
"Sweden," Trump added, "is suffering greatly."
In July, the Times described the country as the world's "cautionary tale," having tried to both continue operating as normal but allowing the virus to spread. The result was a much higher death toll as a function of population than its Scandinavian neighbors without significantly better economic results.
So what changed since April? At the time, there had been only about 21,500 deaths in the country, and the pandemic was seen as an emerging risk. Now, nearly 180,000 people have died, and a steady daily death toll of more than 900 people has become background noise in the national conversation.
It's an example of the saying often incorrectly first attributed to Joseph Stalin, that one death is a tragedy and a million a statistic. In this case, Trump would much rather focus on one death during violent encounters in Portland, Ore., or Kenosha, Wis., than the 12 daily coronavirus deaths that are happening in those states.
One he thinks helps him politically. The other he knows doesn't. So if everyone catches this thing, so be it.
August 31, 2020
Eroding
New Poll: Trump’s Popularity Among the Military Is Eroding
DAN SPINELLI
Donald Trump’s popularity with members of the military is at an all-time low, according to the findings of a Military Times poll released Monday. Nearly 50 percent of troops view him unfavorably and more than 43 percent say they will vote for Joe Biden in November, compared to just 37.4 percent planning to vote for Trump.
The male-dominated military tends to be more politically conservative than the general population, but since Trump took office, his support among active-duty troops and veterans has taken a nosedive. In May 2016, more than 54 percent of troops surveyed by Military Times said they intended to vote for him, but by 2018, his support had taken a dive. That year, Trump sent thousands of troops to the southern border as part of a pre-election stunt to draw attention to the arrival of a migrant caravan, shocked his advisers by announcing an unexpected withdrawal of US forces from Syria, and sparred with James Mattis, the retired Marine Corps general who resigned as secretary of Defense that December.
Despite his clashes with military leaders and numerous attacks on military families like the Khans, Trump had mostly maintained high levels of support among veterans and enlisted service members. Veterans were even credited with helping him win the White House, given their outsized support for him in swing states like North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida. But that support is not as persistent as Trump, or his allies, seem to think.
In recent months, he has frustrated the military with a series of bizarre, politically-motivated orders, from clearing several service members accused of war crimes to requiring West Point cadets to return to campus, at the risk of their own health, so he could give an in-person commencement speech.
His threat to use the military to quell protests in the wake of the killings of George Floyd sent another shock through the military community, leading even the tight-lipped Mattis to step off the sidelines and condemn Trump. Rosalinda Maury, director of applied research at Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families, which conducted the survey in partnership with Military Times, told the news outlet that, despite some commonalities on certain topics, “the military is not a homogenous population.” But what’s clearer than ever is that Trump’s expectation that the military will have his back at the polls, as they did in 2016, is a flawed one.
DAN SPINELLI
Donald Trump’s popularity with members of the military is at an all-time low, according to the findings of a Military Times poll released Monday. Nearly 50 percent of troops view him unfavorably and more than 43 percent say they will vote for Joe Biden in November, compared to just 37.4 percent planning to vote for Trump.
The male-dominated military tends to be more politically conservative than the general population, but since Trump took office, his support among active-duty troops and veterans has taken a nosedive. In May 2016, more than 54 percent of troops surveyed by Military Times said they intended to vote for him, but by 2018, his support had taken a dive. That year, Trump sent thousands of troops to the southern border as part of a pre-election stunt to draw attention to the arrival of a migrant caravan, shocked his advisers by announcing an unexpected withdrawal of US forces from Syria, and sparred with James Mattis, the retired Marine Corps general who resigned as secretary of Defense that December.
Despite his clashes with military leaders and numerous attacks on military families like the Khans, Trump had mostly maintained high levels of support among veterans and enlisted service members. Veterans were even credited with helping him win the White House, given their outsized support for him in swing states like North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida. But that support is not as persistent as Trump, or his allies, seem to think.
In recent months, he has frustrated the military with a series of bizarre, politically-motivated orders, from clearing several service members accused of war crimes to requiring West Point cadets to return to campus, at the risk of their own health, so he could give an in-person commencement speech.
His threat to use the military to quell protests in the wake of the killings of George Floyd sent another shock through the military community, leading even the tight-lipped Mattis to step off the sidelines and condemn Trump. Rosalinda Maury, director of applied research at Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families, which conducted the survey in partnership with Military Times, told the news outlet that, despite some commonalities on certain topics, “the military is not a homogenous population.” But what’s clearer than ever is that Trump’s expectation that the military will have his back at the polls, as they did in 2016, is a flawed one.
Landed with Bad Ratings... Failed at polls...
Trump's still in trouble in first post-convention polling
Analysis by Harry Enten
President Donald Trump wanted a large bounce coming out of the Republican National Convention, and early evidence is that he did not receive one. Trump may have gotten a small bump out of his convention, but he still clearly trails former Vice President Joe Biden.
If later polling data confirms this early evidence, a Trump victory hinges on him becoming the first incumbent in over 70 years to come from behind after trailing following the major party conventions.
The new ABC News/Ipsos poll is especially harsh for Trump. Although it did not poll the horse race, it did poll the candidates' favorability ratings.
Trump's favorable rating stood at 32% in an Ipsos' poll last week. Today, after the Republican National Convention, it stands at 31%.
Biden's favorable rating, meanwhile, was at 45% last week. It's now at 46%.
These movements, of course, are well within any margin of error, though they line-up with the idea that Trump did not receive a large bump out of his convention.
There are no post-convention polls that measure the horse race of Biden vs. Trump that meet CNN standards. The evidence we do have, however, is largely consistent with what Ipsos is hinting at.
The USC Dornsife Presidential Election Poll is a tracking poll taken over a week period. It has both a unique probabilistic voting question as well as the more traditional "who are you voting for" question. With the days added after the Republican convention, the poll shows that Biden's advantage this week is about the same as it was last week.
Indeed, if you were to average all of the national polls taken at least partially after the conventions, there may have been a bump of maybe a point or 2 at most for Trump.
Interestingly, that might make for a slightly larger bounce than Biden received, which was basically nothing. That fits the historical pattern of elected incumbents usually getting the larger bounce from the conventions.
Still, it's not anywhere close to where Trump needed his bounce to be. Remember, Trump trailed by around 9 points heading into the conventions.
The lack of bounces does make sense given that fewer people watched the conventions this year, which is especially the case for the Republican convention.
Now obviously that could change as we get more polling data, which Trump better hope it does.
An examination of polling data since the end of World War II reveals the obvious problem for Trump. Elected incumbents tend not to gain after the conventions.
Looking at elected incumbents, 6 of 8 times the incumbent lost ground when comparing polls immediately following the convention and the final result. One was Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, who was leading by double-digits and went on to win by a slightly wider double-digit margin. The other was George H.W. Bush in 1992 who trailed by single digits and went on to lose by a slightly narrower single-digit margin.
No elected incumbent since World War II has ever picked up more than 4 points when comparing the post-convention polls and the final result. Most incumbents lose ground.
The biggest gains for incumbents come when they weren't elected, such as Harry Truman in 1948 and Gerald Ford in 1976.
The only instance of any incumbent coming back to win at this point in the campaign since World War II was Truman in 1948. And even he needed an additional polling error at the end of the campaign to complete the comeback.
The bottom line is this for Trump: something major needed to change in the post-convention polling. It doesn't look like it did in the first round of evidence. That means unless something shifts, Trump will have to do something quite unusual to earn another term in the White House.
Analysis by Harry Enten
President Donald Trump wanted a large bounce coming out of the Republican National Convention, and early evidence is that he did not receive one. Trump may have gotten a small bump out of his convention, but he still clearly trails former Vice President Joe Biden.
If later polling data confirms this early evidence, a Trump victory hinges on him becoming the first incumbent in over 70 years to come from behind after trailing following the major party conventions.
The new ABC News/Ipsos poll is especially harsh for Trump. Although it did not poll the horse race, it did poll the candidates' favorability ratings.
Trump's favorable rating stood at 32% in an Ipsos' poll last week. Today, after the Republican National Convention, it stands at 31%.
Biden's favorable rating, meanwhile, was at 45% last week. It's now at 46%.
These movements, of course, are well within any margin of error, though they line-up with the idea that Trump did not receive a large bump out of his convention.
There are no post-convention polls that measure the horse race of Biden vs. Trump that meet CNN standards. The evidence we do have, however, is largely consistent with what Ipsos is hinting at.
The USC Dornsife Presidential Election Poll is a tracking poll taken over a week period. It has both a unique probabilistic voting question as well as the more traditional "who are you voting for" question. With the days added after the Republican convention, the poll shows that Biden's advantage this week is about the same as it was last week.
Indeed, if you were to average all of the national polls taken at least partially after the conventions, there may have been a bump of maybe a point or 2 at most for Trump.
Interestingly, that might make for a slightly larger bounce than Biden received, which was basically nothing. That fits the historical pattern of elected incumbents usually getting the larger bounce from the conventions.
Still, it's not anywhere close to where Trump needed his bounce to be. Remember, Trump trailed by around 9 points heading into the conventions.
The lack of bounces does make sense given that fewer people watched the conventions this year, which is especially the case for the Republican convention.
Now obviously that could change as we get more polling data, which Trump better hope it does.
An examination of polling data since the end of World War II reveals the obvious problem for Trump. Elected incumbents tend not to gain after the conventions.
Looking at elected incumbents, 6 of 8 times the incumbent lost ground when comparing polls immediately following the convention and the final result. One was Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, who was leading by double-digits and went on to win by a slightly wider double-digit margin. The other was George H.W. Bush in 1992 who trailed by single digits and went on to lose by a slightly narrower single-digit margin.
No elected incumbent since World War II has ever picked up more than 4 points when comparing the post-convention polls and the final result. Most incumbents lose ground.
The biggest gains for incumbents come when they weren't elected, such as Harry Truman in 1948 and Gerald Ford in 1976.
The only instance of any incumbent coming back to win at this point in the campaign since World War II was Truman in 1948. And even he needed an additional polling error at the end of the campaign to complete the comeback.
The bottom line is this for Trump: something major needed to change in the post-convention polling. It doesn't look like it did in the first round of evidence. That means unless something shifts, Trump will have to do something quite unusual to earn another term in the White House.
Americans are trapped
With Canada and Mexico borders closed, Americans are trapped in their own healthcare system
By Caitlin Hu
"Want to hear the joke about insulin?" goes the bleak gag about America's drug prices. "You have to go to Canada to get it."
But even that's not an option anymore.
Pandemic travel restrictions have made Americans prisoners of their country. Even within North America, Mexico and Canada have closed thousands of miles of border to all but essential travel, roiling plans for vacation, work, and school. For cash-strapped Americans, it has also cut off access to medicines and healthcare services that they can't afford at home -- at a time when money is tighter than ever.
Stephanie Boland's nine-year-old son was diagnosed with diabetes in December. Traveling to Canada to fill his insulin prescription took a half-day's drive from where they live in Brainerd, Minnesota, but it was worth it -- the purchase was a simple, over-the-counter affair. One pack of injection pens, which would last several months, cost less than a hundred dollars, she says, compared to a list price of $530 at home.
As their son's disease began to rewrite the routines of daily life, the Bolands planned to cross into Canada again to restock. Then the pandemic hit.
Boland, a masseuse, was forced to stop working. Her husband, a self-employed financial adviser, found his income hit by pandemic-related turbulence in the markets, too. Then their source for affordable insulin vanished behind a border that had never been closed before in the history of US-Canada relations.
"We were going to make a trip north, one more trip in March, but then they closed the border," she said.
Buying insulin abroad
Only 1.5% of American adults who take prescription medications buy their drugs abroad, according to a June analysis by researchers at the University of Florida Gainesville, based on a 2015-2017 National Health Interview Survey.
But that's still an estimated 2.3 million people.
Many medicines and medical services are cheaper in neighboring Canada and Mexico, thanks to price controls and the power of the US dollar. The difference is great enough that US insurer PEHP, which covers Utah's state employees, offers partially paid trips to Vancouver and Tijuana "to help you save money on your prescriptions." In popular Mexican resort towns like Cabo San Lucas on the West Coast, or Tulum on the East Coast, pharmacies, doctors and dentists targeting US clientele dot the main drag, their prices on bright display. And the difference between those prices and the costs of the same drugs at US pharmacies can mean life or death.
No drug is a better-known example of that calculus than insulin, a vital hormone in the body's metabolism. Seven million American diabetics don't produce it naturally -- or not enough of it -- and need to inject it throughout the day. Without it, dangerous levels of glucose build up in the blood, damaging organs and producing a painful stupor. In a worst case scenario, lack of insulin can kill within three days.
Americans have been going to Canada for insulin since scientists learned how to produce it in labs at the University of Toronto in 1921. One of the first patients to try it was an American: Elizabeth Hughes, the teenage daughter of then-US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes.
"I'm so happy and elated," she wrote in a letter to her mother from Canada, describing her first self-injection and the "enormous" meal she enjoyed afterward. Before crossing the border, the 15-year-old had managed her condition by starving herself -- the only life-prolonging trick available to diabetics before insulin. Five feet tall, she weighed only 45 pounds.
A hundred years later, and after national soul-searching over the soaring cost of insulin, some Americans are still starving themselves. Daniel Carlisle, a Type 1 diabetic in Texas, has sometimes tried not to eat for days at a time, in an attempt to ration insulin. When he was 18 and short on cash, he even contemplated robbing a pharmacy, he says.
"I always do the math about how many days' supply of insulin I have in the refrigerator," the 60-year-old Texan says.
"That's how I know my lifespan at that point. My lifespan is measured in exactly how many days' worth of insulin I have in hand -- plus three days."
Nuevo Progreso
For the past three years, buying insulin in Mexico has brought Carlisle security.
His trips started with a split tooth in 2017. "I went to a dentist near where I live, and he said he could repair it for like $10,000," says Carlisle, who is uninsured. "So I told him, 'Look I can't afford to send my kids to Harvard. Sure can't afford to send yours."
He tried to ignore his aching tooth, but at the urging of his family, eventually drove a few hundred miles south from his home in Houston to the busy Mexican town of Nuevo Progreso.
"As soon as you come across the bridges, hawkers are saying "Need a dentist? Need a pharmacy? It's just constant," he says. First he got his tooth fixed -- a root canal, bridge and crown altogether would end up costing him just $750. "The dentists aren't marble palaces, but they're clean," he says.
Then he dipped into a pharmacy to ask the price of a vial of Humalog insulin, one of two kinds he takes. The answer: US $70. He checked the expiration date on the box, and then offered $20.
"You've got to negotiate!" he says. "I just tell them I'll die without it and then they'll lose a customer. They don't put up a fuss."
A vial of the same insulin in the US has a list price of $274.70.
Since then, that's the only place where he buys insulin, Carlisle says, and he's never had a problem with its quality. But with the borders closed, he doesn't expect be back any time soon.
Pharmacy staff in several drugstores in border towns in both Canada and Mexico tell CNN that they've seen significant drops in foot traffic since their countries' borders with the US closed. Though American scofflaws have been accused of crossing into Mexico for nonessential errands, overall border crossings have plummeted.
One young man working at a pharmacy near Tijuana told CNN that business had fallen about 40% since the border closed. He asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak about the business.
Technically, bringing prescription drugs into the US is illegal. But the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has created a gray area for small amounts: Importation "might" be allowed, according to the agency's website, if the medicine doesn't exceed a three month supply.
Staff at Mark's Marine Pharmacy in Vancouver, Canada, less than an hour's drive from the US border, typically fill hundreds of orders for US customers each day, general manager Jordan Rosenblatt says, and rarely have any problem shipping it. With the borders closed, online ordering has spiked, he adds.
Reviews over the years on their Facebook page compare prices of all kinds of prescription drugs to those in the US, with commenters from as far as New Jersey and Texas. "They sell and send me my asthma inhalers at a price that is non-predatory, unlike here in the U.S. Happiest gal today! Thank you!" reads one.
But ordering online isn't for everyone -- there is always a risk that the medicine will be confiscated or that temperature-sensitive drugs like insulin could go bad waiting at customs or in US Postal Service delays.
And as the frustrations of border closures highlight, foreign health systems make a poor fallback no matter how you access them.
"For any given individual in the short run, going to Canada is a decent solution, but it's not a systemic solution," says Dr. Vikas Saini, a Harvard-trained cardiologist and president of the Lown Institute, a nonpartisan healthcare think tank.
US President Donald Trump has called to allow larger scale importation from Canada, among a raft of recent proposals to reduce the prices of certain US drugs. But that's unlikely to make a dent in the US market, Saini says: "Canada is a country of about 30 million people. It doesn't have enough medication to provide all those prescriptions for the US -- a nation 10 times the size."
Some Canadian health industry groups and patients agree. Since 2019, they've warned that Trump's importation plan could lead to drug shortages for Canadians -- a fear likely sharpened after witnessing global shortages of vital medical equipment in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
A crumbling economy
As the pandemic wears on, the options are dwindling for Americans who can't afford to be sick in the United States -- especially after the cratering economy erased nearly 13 million jobs, taking health insurance options with them.
Even at Canadian prices, some are struggling to pay for their prescriptions. "Recently, we're hearing about all the financial issues of people laid off," says Rosenblatt, the Vancouver pharmacy manager. "We have American customers that have been working with us for years, and under these circumstances, we've sent what they needed and we tell them, 'Pay us when you can.'"
To make insulin more accessible, some US states have pushed for price caps on copays. The three companies which control the US insulin market offer discount plans, including new programs to which Americans who were financially impacted by the pandemic can apply for temporary access to cheaper or free insulin. And Walmart offers cheap insulin over the counter (though this is an older formulation that can make blood sugar management more complicated than newer, prescription versions.)
Yet many are still struggling -- and not just the nearly 28 million Americans who don't have health insurance, a number estimated by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Even Americans with health insurance, who benefit from negotiated prices that are lower than the list prices, sometimes still can't afford all the costs of living with diabetes.
In Dayton, Ohio, Mindi Patterson's family gets health insurance through her job as a Costco clerk. But even then, keeping up with the cost of insulin for both of her teenage sons and her husband is still a tightrope walk. "We have had to dig through the trash for (discarded) reservoirs from insulin pumps, when we haven't had the money to buy the next bit of supplies," she says.
"Right now I have a refill for (my son's) insulin waiting, but I really don't have the funds just yet to pick it up. So they're holding onto it for me until payday," she said.
Sabrina Renaud, a 22-year-old dietary aide in South Carolina, works fulltime at a hospital that offers health insurance to employees -- but she earns about $1,300 per month after taxes, and says she simply can't afford the deductible, premiums, and copays of the company plan and still make rent. "So I thought, I'm just going to have to wiggle through this without health insurance," she says.
Renaud hasn't seen a doctor to renew her insulin prescription in more than a year. Instead, every couple of months, she messages a woman she's never met in real life, with a list of what she needs. So far, the life-saving supplies she needs keep turning up in the mail.
The woman, who asked to remain anonymous because redistributing prescription drugs is illegal, tells CNN that she has shipped insulin to hundreds of people over the years -- an effort that she describes as a "necessary evil." People from the US and abroad send spare vials and injection pens to her, and she says she sends them for free to any American who asks for it.
"I personally do this, gosh, an average of four times per week," she says.
"I could put out a tweet right now that someone needs (insulin brand) Humalog, and I'll probably get 100 responses saying "I have extra," from all over the country," she says. "Folks are willing to pay $50 to overnight it to someone who's in a really bad situation."
She has even received large insulin donations from Canada.
An increasingly busy "black market"
More than a dozen diabetic Americans interviewed for this article said they had participated in such an informal insulin exchange powered by social media, widely referred to as the "black market." Organizers are nodes in the network, using their prominence on platforms like Twitter to connect people who have insulin to those who don't.
"The FDA does not recommend sharing or reselling diabetic supplies, including insulin, due to concerns about the safety and efficacy of such resold or shared products," an agency spokesman told CNN. But defenders of the network say they can't stop, pointing to several deaths of diabetic Americans who rationed their insulin.
"We have been left with no other choice," says emerging Minnesota politician Quinn Nystrom, whose campaign for Congress emphasizes affordable healthcare. A Type 1 diabetic herself, Nystrom helps distribute insulin donations and -- before the pandemic -- organized "caravans" to Canada to purchase insulin.
"Am I willing to break the law to keep American citizens alive? Yes," she says.
Demand for black market insulin has spiked since the pandemic began, said another organizer in Colorado, who asked to remain anonymous due to the illegality of the work. In the last week of July alone, she facilitated $24,000 worth of insulin donations, she estimates.
"Prior to this whole Covid-19 crisis -- let's say just six months ago or eight months ago, I might hear about someone who needed insulin maybe once a month," she says. "Fast-forward to now, when people are losing jobs: In the last seven days, I have heard from 15 different people who are almost out of insulin and have no way to afford their next purchase."
Daniel Carlisle, the Houstonian, has sometimes donated some of his own supply to fellow diabetics in Houston and Dallas. "If someone died because they were lacking and I said I won't share with you, well, I've got a real moral issue with that," he says. "If you were living in Houston and needed some insulin, I would drive over and give you a vial."
But he does have cash flow limits, he adds. And if he can't restock in Nuevo Progreso soon, he'll have to ask for help on the same black market he once gave to.
"Right now I'm looking at February. If I can't make it to Mexico by then -- and have the money to make the trip -- I'll be in trouble," he says.
By Caitlin Hu
"Want to hear the joke about insulin?" goes the bleak gag about America's drug prices. "You have to go to Canada to get it."
But even that's not an option anymore.
Pandemic travel restrictions have made Americans prisoners of their country. Even within North America, Mexico and Canada have closed thousands of miles of border to all but essential travel, roiling plans for vacation, work, and school. For cash-strapped Americans, it has also cut off access to medicines and healthcare services that they can't afford at home -- at a time when money is tighter than ever.
Stephanie Boland's nine-year-old son was diagnosed with diabetes in December. Traveling to Canada to fill his insulin prescription took a half-day's drive from where they live in Brainerd, Minnesota, but it was worth it -- the purchase was a simple, over-the-counter affair. One pack of injection pens, which would last several months, cost less than a hundred dollars, she says, compared to a list price of $530 at home.
As their son's disease began to rewrite the routines of daily life, the Bolands planned to cross into Canada again to restock. Then the pandemic hit.
Boland, a masseuse, was forced to stop working. Her husband, a self-employed financial adviser, found his income hit by pandemic-related turbulence in the markets, too. Then their source for affordable insulin vanished behind a border that had never been closed before in the history of US-Canada relations.
"We were going to make a trip north, one more trip in March, but then they closed the border," she said.
Buying insulin abroad
Only 1.5% of American adults who take prescription medications buy their drugs abroad, according to a June analysis by researchers at the University of Florida Gainesville, based on a 2015-2017 National Health Interview Survey.
But that's still an estimated 2.3 million people.
Many medicines and medical services are cheaper in neighboring Canada and Mexico, thanks to price controls and the power of the US dollar. The difference is great enough that US insurer PEHP, which covers Utah's state employees, offers partially paid trips to Vancouver and Tijuana "to help you save money on your prescriptions." In popular Mexican resort towns like Cabo San Lucas on the West Coast, or Tulum on the East Coast, pharmacies, doctors and dentists targeting US clientele dot the main drag, their prices on bright display. And the difference between those prices and the costs of the same drugs at US pharmacies can mean life or death.
No drug is a better-known example of that calculus than insulin, a vital hormone in the body's metabolism. Seven million American diabetics don't produce it naturally -- or not enough of it -- and need to inject it throughout the day. Without it, dangerous levels of glucose build up in the blood, damaging organs and producing a painful stupor. In a worst case scenario, lack of insulin can kill within three days.
Americans have been going to Canada for insulin since scientists learned how to produce it in labs at the University of Toronto in 1921. One of the first patients to try it was an American: Elizabeth Hughes, the teenage daughter of then-US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes.
"I'm so happy and elated," she wrote in a letter to her mother from Canada, describing her first self-injection and the "enormous" meal she enjoyed afterward. Before crossing the border, the 15-year-old had managed her condition by starving herself -- the only life-prolonging trick available to diabetics before insulin. Five feet tall, she weighed only 45 pounds.
A hundred years later, and after national soul-searching over the soaring cost of insulin, some Americans are still starving themselves. Daniel Carlisle, a Type 1 diabetic in Texas, has sometimes tried not to eat for days at a time, in an attempt to ration insulin. When he was 18 and short on cash, he even contemplated robbing a pharmacy, he says.
"I always do the math about how many days' supply of insulin I have in the refrigerator," the 60-year-old Texan says.
"That's how I know my lifespan at that point. My lifespan is measured in exactly how many days' worth of insulin I have in hand -- plus three days."
Nuevo Progreso
For the past three years, buying insulin in Mexico has brought Carlisle security.
His trips started with a split tooth in 2017. "I went to a dentist near where I live, and he said he could repair it for like $10,000," says Carlisle, who is uninsured. "So I told him, 'Look I can't afford to send my kids to Harvard. Sure can't afford to send yours."
He tried to ignore his aching tooth, but at the urging of his family, eventually drove a few hundred miles south from his home in Houston to the busy Mexican town of Nuevo Progreso.
"As soon as you come across the bridges, hawkers are saying "Need a dentist? Need a pharmacy? It's just constant," he says. First he got his tooth fixed -- a root canal, bridge and crown altogether would end up costing him just $750. "The dentists aren't marble palaces, but they're clean," he says.
Then he dipped into a pharmacy to ask the price of a vial of Humalog insulin, one of two kinds he takes. The answer: US $70. He checked the expiration date on the box, and then offered $20.
"You've got to negotiate!" he says. "I just tell them I'll die without it and then they'll lose a customer. They don't put up a fuss."
A vial of the same insulin in the US has a list price of $274.70.
Since then, that's the only place where he buys insulin, Carlisle says, and he's never had a problem with its quality. But with the borders closed, he doesn't expect be back any time soon.
Pharmacy staff in several drugstores in border towns in both Canada and Mexico tell CNN that they've seen significant drops in foot traffic since their countries' borders with the US closed. Though American scofflaws have been accused of crossing into Mexico for nonessential errands, overall border crossings have plummeted.
One young man working at a pharmacy near Tijuana told CNN that business had fallen about 40% since the border closed. He asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak about the business.
Technically, bringing prescription drugs into the US is illegal. But the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has created a gray area for small amounts: Importation "might" be allowed, according to the agency's website, if the medicine doesn't exceed a three month supply.
Staff at Mark's Marine Pharmacy in Vancouver, Canada, less than an hour's drive from the US border, typically fill hundreds of orders for US customers each day, general manager Jordan Rosenblatt says, and rarely have any problem shipping it. With the borders closed, online ordering has spiked, he adds.
Reviews over the years on their Facebook page compare prices of all kinds of prescription drugs to those in the US, with commenters from as far as New Jersey and Texas. "They sell and send me my asthma inhalers at a price that is non-predatory, unlike here in the U.S. Happiest gal today! Thank you!" reads one.
But ordering online isn't for everyone -- there is always a risk that the medicine will be confiscated or that temperature-sensitive drugs like insulin could go bad waiting at customs or in US Postal Service delays.
And as the frustrations of border closures highlight, foreign health systems make a poor fallback no matter how you access them.
"For any given individual in the short run, going to Canada is a decent solution, but it's not a systemic solution," says Dr. Vikas Saini, a Harvard-trained cardiologist and president of the Lown Institute, a nonpartisan healthcare think tank.
US President Donald Trump has called to allow larger scale importation from Canada, among a raft of recent proposals to reduce the prices of certain US drugs. But that's unlikely to make a dent in the US market, Saini says: "Canada is a country of about 30 million people. It doesn't have enough medication to provide all those prescriptions for the US -- a nation 10 times the size."
Some Canadian health industry groups and patients agree. Since 2019, they've warned that Trump's importation plan could lead to drug shortages for Canadians -- a fear likely sharpened after witnessing global shortages of vital medical equipment in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
A crumbling economy
As the pandemic wears on, the options are dwindling for Americans who can't afford to be sick in the United States -- especially after the cratering economy erased nearly 13 million jobs, taking health insurance options with them.
Even at Canadian prices, some are struggling to pay for their prescriptions. "Recently, we're hearing about all the financial issues of people laid off," says Rosenblatt, the Vancouver pharmacy manager. "We have American customers that have been working with us for years, and under these circumstances, we've sent what they needed and we tell them, 'Pay us when you can.'"
To make insulin more accessible, some US states have pushed for price caps on copays. The three companies which control the US insulin market offer discount plans, including new programs to which Americans who were financially impacted by the pandemic can apply for temporary access to cheaper or free insulin. And Walmart offers cheap insulin over the counter (though this is an older formulation that can make blood sugar management more complicated than newer, prescription versions.)
Yet many are still struggling -- and not just the nearly 28 million Americans who don't have health insurance, a number estimated by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Even Americans with health insurance, who benefit from negotiated prices that are lower than the list prices, sometimes still can't afford all the costs of living with diabetes.
In Dayton, Ohio, Mindi Patterson's family gets health insurance through her job as a Costco clerk. But even then, keeping up with the cost of insulin for both of her teenage sons and her husband is still a tightrope walk. "We have had to dig through the trash for (discarded) reservoirs from insulin pumps, when we haven't had the money to buy the next bit of supplies," she says.
"Right now I have a refill for (my son's) insulin waiting, but I really don't have the funds just yet to pick it up. So they're holding onto it for me until payday," she said.
Sabrina Renaud, a 22-year-old dietary aide in South Carolina, works fulltime at a hospital that offers health insurance to employees -- but she earns about $1,300 per month after taxes, and says she simply can't afford the deductible, premiums, and copays of the company plan and still make rent. "So I thought, I'm just going to have to wiggle through this without health insurance," she says.
Renaud hasn't seen a doctor to renew her insulin prescription in more than a year. Instead, every couple of months, she messages a woman she's never met in real life, with a list of what she needs. So far, the life-saving supplies she needs keep turning up in the mail.
The woman, who asked to remain anonymous because redistributing prescription drugs is illegal, tells CNN that she has shipped insulin to hundreds of people over the years -- an effort that she describes as a "necessary evil." People from the US and abroad send spare vials and injection pens to her, and she says she sends them for free to any American who asks for it.
"I personally do this, gosh, an average of four times per week," she says.
"I could put out a tweet right now that someone needs (insulin brand) Humalog, and I'll probably get 100 responses saying "I have extra," from all over the country," she says. "Folks are willing to pay $50 to overnight it to someone who's in a really bad situation."
She has even received large insulin donations from Canada.
An increasingly busy "black market"
More than a dozen diabetic Americans interviewed for this article said they had participated in such an informal insulin exchange powered by social media, widely referred to as the "black market." Organizers are nodes in the network, using their prominence on platforms like Twitter to connect people who have insulin to those who don't.
"The FDA does not recommend sharing or reselling diabetic supplies, including insulin, due to concerns about the safety and efficacy of such resold or shared products," an agency spokesman told CNN. But defenders of the network say they can't stop, pointing to several deaths of diabetic Americans who rationed their insulin.
"We have been left with no other choice," says emerging Minnesota politician Quinn Nystrom, whose campaign for Congress emphasizes affordable healthcare. A Type 1 diabetic herself, Nystrom helps distribute insulin donations and -- before the pandemic -- organized "caravans" to Canada to purchase insulin.
"Am I willing to break the law to keep American citizens alive? Yes," she says.
Demand for black market insulin has spiked since the pandemic began, said another organizer in Colorado, who asked to remain anonymous due to the illegality of the work. In the last week of July alone, she facilitated $24,000 worth of insulin donations, she estimates.
"Prior to this whole Covid-19 crisis -- let's say just six months ago or eight months ago, I might hear about someone who needed insulin maybe once a month," she says. "Fast-forward to now, when people are losing jobs: In the last seven days, I have heard from 15 different people who are almost out of insulin and have no way to afford their next purchase."
Daniel Carlisle, the Houstonian, has sometimes donated some of his own supply to fellow diabetics in Houston and Dallas. "If someone died because they were lacking and I said I won't share with you, well, I've got a real moral issue with that," he says. "If you were living in Houston and needed some insulin, I would drive over and give you a vial."
But he does have cash flow limits, he adds. And if he can't restock in Nuevo Progreso soon, he'll have to ask for help on the same black market he once gave to.
"Right now I'm looking at February. If I can't make it to Mexico by then -- and have the money to make the trip -- I'll be in trouble," he says.
Aftermath...
In aftermath of Hurricane Laura, residents worry about help
NOMAAN MERCHANT and SUDHIN THANAWALA
In a matter of hours last week, Hurricane Laura tore through the tire shop Layla Winbush's family started just under a year ago, reducing most of it to rubble and scattering hundreds of tires across the lot. The storm also damaged her home, which now reeks of mold.
Federal and state officials are now on the ground to help residents with home repairs and hotel stays. But Winbush said she feels alone, particularly after seeing a video of President Donald Trump, who visited the area Saturday, joking with Gulf Coast officials that they could sell copies of his signature for $10,000.
“We can’t depend on the president. We can’t depend on nobody,” she said. “We’ll just take what we have and get it done.”
As evacuated Lake Charles residents began returning home, many worried that they wouldn’t have enough support from the both the federal and state governments as they face a rebuilding process certain to take several months, if not longer.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards on Sunday warned that residents were in for a long recovery.
“We’re going to be working really, really hard on the power outages, on the water systems, on the housing,” he said at a news conference. "But none of this is going to be easy. It’s not going to happen as quickly as most people would like for sure.”
Crews were starting to take chain saws to fallen trees and patch roofs, but most homes in Lake Charles wrecked by the storm were still untouched. The Category 4 hurricane, which made landfall Thursday just south of Lake Charles near Cameron, Louisiana, before abating nearly 12 hours later, packed 150-mph (240-kph) winds and a storm surge that officials said was as high as 15 feet (4.5 meters) in some areas.
So far 18 deaths in Texas and Louisiana have been attributed to the storm; more than half of those people were killed by carbon monoxide poisoning from the unsafe operation of generators.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency sent hundreds of workers to the region to help with search and rescue and other efforts. As of Sunday, more than 52,500 people had applied for FEMA assistance, and the agency had conducted over 200 home inspections and distributed more than $650,000 in assistance, said Tony Robinson, FEMA's administrator for the region. The Louisiana National Guard, meanwhile, had handed out hundreds of thousands of bottles of water and meals and about 14,000 tarps, the governor said.
But the needs were substantial. In hard-hit Calcasieu Parish, some waited hours in line for tarps, water and other supplies at distribution sites, said parish spokesperson Tom Hoefer. The entire parish had been without power, and in many areas, including the parish seat of Lake Charles that's home to more than 78,000 people, water had not been flowing from taps, he said. Several residents Sunday said the water supply was still intermittent.
Crews will have to rebuild hundreds of transmission towers along with resetting downed power poles and lines, clearing debris and assessing damage, said Scott Aaronson, vice president of security and preparedness for the Edison Electric Institute, the association of investor-owned electric companies in the U.S. The association said roughly 409,000 customers were still without power late Sunday as a result of the storm.
Insured losses to properties in the U.S. will be near $9 billion, according to projections from a Boston-based disaster modeling firm. That includes wind and storm surge damage to residential, commercial and industrial properties and automobiles, Karen Clark & Co. said. There were an estimated $200 million in insured losses in the Caribbean, the company estimates.
In Lake Charles, many people in were still staying outside town. But James Townley said he would remain in his home, as he did during the storm.
The front of his trailer had been blown away, leaving a single toilet exposed to the elements.
Townley lay on a sofa in front of a fan — connected to a neighbor's generator — circulating hot, humid air. The 56-year-old's shirt was off, revealing scars from the open-heart surgery he had several years ago. He said he was out of medication for his heart and kidneys and had requested aid from FEMA — but not heard back.
“I’m just going to sit here and do what I can do,” he said. “Maybe I’ll make it, maybe I won’t.”
One silver pickup truck winding through Lake Charles’ streets carried four generations of a single family — six people inside the cab and three riding on the flatbed along with suitcases and bags filled with belongings. The family was visiting the homes where they each lived for the first time since the storm, assessing what they had lost and what had been spared.
Driving the pickup was 53-year-old Patricia Mingo Lavergne. She was worried about how her home had fared, but also where everyone would sleep Sunday night.
When Lavergne parked outside the house she shares with her husband, a duplex just north of the train tracks bisecting the city, several family members began to pray and wipe away tears.
The pecan tree that long shaded her front yard had cracked and fallen in front of the front door. Insulation had burst through the ceiling and fallen in tufts over one bedroom. In another room, she pulled out two drawers filled with neatly folded clothes saved for her daughter’s child, due in January. She wiped a mix of sweat and tears with her shirt.
Eventually, everyone in the family was able to find a place to stay. They have requested help from FEMA, but Lavergne said she didn't have a checking account in which to receive federal money.
"It’s frustrating," she said. “I’ve already been going through a lot and this is a lot more on my shoulders.”
Winbush, 19, and her family were staying with relatives in Beaumont, Texas, over an hour’s drive away. Her mother, Monique Benjamin, stood with Winbush and two of her siblings in front of what was left of the tire shop.
Benjamin and Winbush stayed cheerful as they described all the services the shop offered and the successes they had building it. The business is insured.
“Even though we may cry in the restroom and wipe our faces later, we got to stay strong,” Benjamin said.
NOMAAN MERCHANT and SUDHIN THANAWALA
In a matter of hours last week, Hurricane Laura tore through the tire shop Layla Winbush's family started just under a year ago, reducing most of it to rubble and scattering hundreds of tires across the lot. The storm also damaged her home, which now reeks of mold.
Federal and state officials are now on the ground to help residents with home repairs and hotel stays. But Winbush said she feels alone, particularly after seeing a video of President Donald Trump, who visited the area Saturday, joking with Gulf Coast officials that they could sell copies of his signature for $10,000.
“We can’t depend on the president. We can’t depend on nobody,” she said. “We’ll just take what we have and get it done.”
As evacuated Lake Charles residents began returning home, many worried that they wouldn’t have enough support from the both the federal and state governments as they face a rebuilding process certain to take several months, if not longer.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards on Sunday warned that residents were in for a long recovery.
“We’re going to be working really, really hard on the power outages, on the water systems, on the housing,” he said at a news conference. "But none of this is going to be easy. It’s not going to happen as quickly as most people would like for sure.”
Crews were starting to take chain saws to fallen trees and patch roofs, but most homes in Lake Charles wrecked by the storm were still untouched. The Category 4 hurricane, which made landfall Thursday just south of Lake Charles near Cameron, Louisiana, before abating nearly 12 hours later, packed 150-mph (240-kph) winds and a storm surge that officials said was as high as 15 feet (4.5 meters) in some areas.
So far 18 deaths in Texas and Louisiana have been attributed to the storm; more than half of those people were killed by carbon monoxide poisoning from the unsafe operation of generators.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency sent hundreds of workers to the region to help with search and rescue and other efforts. As of Sunday, more than 52,500 people had applied for FEMA assistance, and the agency had conducted over 200 home inspections and distributed more than $650,000 in assistance, said Tony Robinson, FEMA's administrator for the region. The Louisiana National Guard, meanwhile, had handed out hundreds of thousands of bottles of water and meals and about 14,000 tarps, the governor said.
But the needs were substantial. In hard-hit Calcasieu Parish, some waited hours in line for tarps, water and other supplies at distribution sites, said parish spokesperson Tom Hoefer. The entire parish had been without power, and in many areas, including the parish seat of Lake Charles that's home to more than 78,000 people, water had not been flowing from taps, he said. Several residents Sunday said the water supply was still intermittent.
Crews will have to rebuild hundreds of transmission towers along with resetting downed power poles and lines, clearing debris and assessing damage, said Scott Aaronson, vice president of security and preparedness for the Edison Electric Institute, the association of investor-owned electric companies in the U.S. The association said roughly 409,000 customers were still without power late Sunday as a result of the storm.
Insured losses to properties in the U.S. will be near $9 billion, according to projections from a Boston-based disaster modeling firm. That includes wind and storm surge damage to residential, commercial and industrial properties and automobiles, Karen Clark & Co. said. There were an estimated $200 million in insured losses in the Caribbean, the company estimates.
In Lake Charles, many people in were still staying outside town. But James Townley said he would remain in his home, as he did during the storm.
The front of his trailer had been blown away, leaving a single toilet exposed to the elements.
Townley lay on a sofa in front of a fan — connected to a neighbor's generator — circulating hot, humid air. The 56-year-old's shirt was off, revealing scars from the open-heart surgery he had several years ago. He said he was out of medication for his heart and kidneys and had requested aid from FEMA — but not heard back.
“I’m just going to sit here and do what I can do,” he said. “Maybe I’ll make it, maybe I won’t.”
One silver pickup truck winding through Lake Charles’ streets carried four generations of a single family — six people inside the cab and three riding on the flatbed along with suitcases and bags filled with belongings. The family was visiting the homes where they each lived for the first time since the storm, assessing what they had lost and what had been spared.
Driving the pickup was 53-year-old Patricia Mingo Lavergne. She was worried about how her home had fared, but also where everyone would sleep Sunday night.
When Lavergne parked outside the house she shares with her husband, a duplex just north of the train tracks bisecting the city, several family members began to pray and wipe away tears.
The pecan tree that long shaded her front yard had cracked and fallen in front of the front door. Insulation had burst through the ceiling and fallen in tufts over one bedroom. In another room, she pulled out two drawers filled with neatly folded clothes saved for her daughter’s child, due in January. She wiped a mix of sweat and tears with her shirt.
Eventually, everyone in the family was able to find a place to stay. They have requested help from FEMA, but Lavergne said she didn't have a checking account in which to receive federal money.
"It’s frustrating," she said. “I’ve already been going through a lot and this is a lot more on my shoulders.”
Winbush, 19, and her family were staying with relatives in Beaumont, Texas, over an hour’s drive away. Her mother, Monique Benjamin, stood with Winbush and two of her siblings in front of what was left of the tire shop.
Benjamin and Winbush stayed cheerful as they described all the services the shop offered and the successes they had building it. The business is insured.
“Even though we may cry in the restroom and wipe our faces later, we got to stay strong,” Benjamin said.
Dissects Disconnect
John Oliver Dissects Disconnect Between Republican Convention Rhetoric and Kenosha Violence
Last Week Tonight host highlights glaring disparities in how authorities treated Jacob Blake and Kyle Rittenhouse
Jon Blistein
John Oliver explored the disconnect between the Republican National Convention’s messaging on race in America and the events in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Last Week Tonight Sunday, August 30th.
Among false and misleading claims about the state of the Covid-19 pandemic and President Donald Trump’s accomplishments in office, Oliver said “the biggest gulf between the RNC and objective reality concerned race.” Throughout the week, Oliver continued, speakers tried to ensure viewers that racism was a thing of the past, but seemed less concerned with winning over black voters than reassuring white ones. For instance, Oliver highlighted Vice President Mike Pence saying “We don’t have to choose between supporting law enforcement and standing with our African-American neighbors,” suggesting a distinction between that “we” and “our African-American neighbors.”
“But I guess that sentiment shouldn’t really be surprising coming from Mike Pence,” Oliver cracked, “A man who permanently looks like he should be living in ‘Ken’s White Flight Dream House.’”
The RNC featured some slightly more incendiary rhetoric, however, which Oliver tied to the events in Kenosha, where protests erupted after the police shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back in front of his children. Oliver specifically examined the way police treated Blake and the way they let 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse walk past police cars, gun in hand, after he’d shot three people.
“If you’re looking for a better visual illustration of the differences between being black and white in America, I don’t think you’re gonna find one,” Oliver said. “Except, maybe, seeing exactly who sits down and who stands up when ‘Cotton Eye Joe’ comes on at a wedding.”
Oliver also touched on the NBA and WNBA strikes that followed Blake’s killing, and a speech delivered by Jacob Blake’s sister, Letetra Widman, that emphasized anger and the need for legitimate change over seeking sympathy. Oliver argued that American history has shown the system doesn’t respond to injustice until it’s forced to and that symbolic protests are too easily co-opted. Even voting Trump out in November will only help to a certain extent.
“Because as much as I, or the RNC, would like to believe that Joe Biden will be an agent of radical change, there’s just no reason to believe that,” Oliver said. “To the extent that real change is possible through the ballot box this year, it will only be if Biden is elected alongside progressive candidates all the way down the ballot, from the Senate to state legislatures to city councils to sheriffs. And even that will be very much a beginning, and not an end — none of this is easy, but it has to begin and now.”
Last Week Tonight host highlights glaring disparities in how authorities treated Jacob Blake and Kyle Rittenhouse
Jon Blistein
John Oliver explored the disconnect between the Republican National Convention’s messaging on race in America and the events in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Last Week Tonight Sunday, August 30th.
Among false and misleading claims about the state of the Covid-19 pandemic and President Donald Trump’s accomplishments in office, Oliver said “the biggest gulf between the RNC and objective reality concerned race.” Throughout the week, Oliver continued, speakers tried to ensure viewers that racism was a thing of the past, but seemed less concerned with winning over black voters than reassuring white ones. For instance, Oliver highlighted Vice President Mike Pence saying “We don’t have to choose between supporting law enforcement and standing with our African-American neighbors,” suggesting a distinction between that “we” and “our African-American neighbors.”
“But I guess that sentiment shouldn’t really be surprising coming from Mike Pence,” Oliver cracked, “A man who permanently looks like he should be living in ‘Ken’s White Flight Dream House.’”
The RNC featured some slightly more incendiary rhetoric, however, which Oliver tied to the events in Kenosha, where protests erupted after the police shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back in front of his children. Oliver specifically examined the way police treated Blake and the way they let 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse walk past police cars, gun in hand, after he’d shot three people.
“If you’re looking for a better visual illustration of the differences between being black and white in America, I don’t think you’re gonna find one,” Oliver said. “Except, maybe, seeing exactly who sits down and who stands up when ‘Cotton Eye Joe’ comes on at a wedding.”
Oliver also touched on the NBA and WNBA strikes that followed Blake’s killing, and a speech delivered by Jacob Blake’s sister, Letetra Widman, that emphasized anger and the need for legitimate change over seeking sympathy. Oliver argued that American history has shown the system doesn’t respond to injustice until it’s forced to and that symbolic protests are too easily co-opted. Even voting Trump out in November will only help to a certain extent.
“Because as much as I, or the RNC, would like to believe that Joe Biden will be an agent of radical change, there’s just no reason to believe that,” Oliver said. “To the extent that real change is possible through the ballot box this year, it will only be if Biden is elected alongside progressive candidates all the way down the ballot, from the Senate to state legislatures to city councils to sheriffs. And even that will be very much a beginning, and not an end — none of this is easy, but it has to begin and now.”
Deadly clashes
Trump praises supporters amid deadly clashes with social justice demonstrators
David Nakamura, Matt Viser and Robert Klemko
President Donald Trump on Sunday amplified his call for federal forces to help subdue protests in American cities, denouncing local Democratic leaders and fanning partisan tensions a day after a deadly clash between his supporters and social justice demonstrators in Portland, Ore., underscored the threat of rising politically motivated violence.
Scenes of Trump supporters firing paint and pellet guns at protesters during a "Trump cruise rally" caravan through downtown Portland - a liberal bastion that has been the site of weeks of street demonstrations - raised the specter that the nation's summer of unrest had entered a new phase in which the president's backers are rallying to defend businesses and fight back against Black Lives Matter and other groups he has labeled "anarchists" and "terrorists."
One man, thought to be a member of a pro-Trump group, was shot and killed Saturday night during the Portland unrest.
In tweeting a video of the caravan on the move, Trump called the participants "GREAT PATRIOTS!" The reaction marked a sharp contrast to his silence during a large and peaceful civil rights march on Friday in Washington that drew thousands to the National Mall, where some speakers denounced his leadership.
In a statement Sunday afternoon, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden "unequivocally" condemned the Portland shooting and accused Trump of "fanning the flames of hate and division in our society and using the politics of fear to whip up his supporters."
"We must not become a country at war with ourselves; a country that accepts the killing of fellow Americans who do not agree with you; a country that vows vengeance toward one another," Biden said. "But that is the America that President Trump wants us to be, the America he believes we are."
The violence has escalated as Trump has seized on the social justice protests as a campaign wedge, attempting to tie Biden to "radical" elements on the left. Eager to shift the political debate from the rising deaths and economic toll of the pandemic, Trump has relentlessly attacked Democratic mayors and governors for failing to quell protests, and he dispatched federal law enforcement authorities into cities to help arrest demonstrators.
This week, Trump and Biden will move to address the protests in a more prominent way. Trump on Tuesday is set to travel to Kenosha, Wis., where the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black resident left paralyzed, provoked street protests that culminated in the shooting deaths of two others. Kyle Rittenhouse, a White 17-year-old who had illegally obtained a rifle, was charged with first-degree intentional homicide in the killings, which came after a fledgling militia group had posted a call to arms on Facebook.
White House aides said Trump will tour property damage and meet with law enforcement officials, but they did not disclose any plans for the president to meet with Blake's family.
Meanwhile, Biden aides said the candidate, who had maintained a lean campaign schedule, will launch a more robust public presence with a speech in southwestern Pennsylvania on Monday to address Trump's handling of the pandemic and his response to the social justice protests.
Trump aides, including White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, asserted recently that the violence and chaos will help his reelection bid.
"The only people to blame for the violence and riots in our streets are liberal politicians and their incompetent policies that have failed to get control of these destructive situations," White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement. "This President has condemned violence in all its forms. Americans want peace in their streets and for their children to grow up in safe neighborhoods, and only President Trump has shown the courage and leadership to achieve law and order and deliver results."
Trump's conservative supporters, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have seized on Rittenhouse as a figure of sympathy, suggesting that he acted legally and in self-defense. The president on Sunday appeared to offer his support by liking a tweet from a self-described former liberal activist who cited Rittenhouse as a reason to vote for Trump.
Conservatives also rallied around the Trump caravan in Portland, where the man who was killed was wearing a hat bearing the words "Patriot Prayer," the name of a far-right group organized in 2016 to bring pro-Trump rallies to liberal strongholds.
In a tweet, Trump referred to Biden as a "puppet" of "crazed leaders" on the left who envision the Portland chaos as emblematic of "Joe Biden's America."
"This is not what our great Country wants," Trump wrote. "They want Safety & Security, and do NOT want to Defund our Police!"
Biden has stated that he does not support efforts of some liberals to drastically cut funding for local police departments and instead has outlined a proposal that would increase funding for community policing programs by $300 million as long as local departments agree to conditions such as adopting new use-of-force standards and increasing diversity among their ranks.
In recent months, Trump has increasingly used official White House events, along with campaign rallies, to vilify protesters as violent and to fan fears along racial lines.
During his renomination acceptance speech, delivered Thursday at the White House for the Republican National Convention, Trump criticized Biden for not condemning "rioters and criminals spreading mayhem in Democrat-run cities." The former vice president had already spoken out against the violence and looting, saying the day before that "violence that endangers lives, violence that guts businesses and shutters businesses that serve the community - that's wrong."
"Trump has been inciting violence for years and with deadly effects," said author Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who studies authoritarian regimes. She pointed to a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, last summer by a gunman who in a manifesto cited anti-immigrant views with echoes of Trump's rhetoric.
In 2018, Cesar Sayoc, a Trump supporter, mailed inoperative pipe bombs to Trump's critics, a crime for which he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. And in 2017, a white nationalist in Charlottesville, Va., drove a car into a crowd, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer as she protested the extremist "Unite the Right" march - a movement the president did not condemn unequivocally.
"Now he's trained his aim on Black Lives Matter protesters and antifa," said Ben-Ghiat, referring the racial justice group and to a loosely connected set of left-wing, anti-fascist groups. "So what is happening now with an escalation of violence is something beneficial to Trump. Strongmen leaders incite crises so they can pose themselves as the law-and-order solution."
Biden, who has sought to make Trump's handling of the novel coronavirus the focus of the election, is facing pressure from some Democrats to speak more forcefully on racial justice issues. While Biden has not outlined a clear course of action for what he would do as president to deal with protests that include violence or looting, he said last month that local authorities should arrest agitators who break the law.
"Joe Biden is not president. These things are happening now," Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said in an interview. Of Trump, Clyburn said: "How are you going to look at what's happening under your tenure and say this is what would happen with Joe Biden as your president? You are the president."
Homeland security experts said the combustible mix of sharply polarized and ideologically minded agitators mixing on the streets in cities where law enforcement authorities are strained and, in some cases, inadequately trained is a recipe for potential violence.
"It's important for government leaders at all levels to calm everyone and keep political rallies peaceful," said Tom Warrick, an Atlantic Council expert who left government service last year after serving as a career official at the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.
"The problem is that things can quickly get out of control and the uncertainty and chaos become weapons in the fight," Warrick said. "Merely the uncertainty that it will take days, or weeks, to sort out something that's happening in itself becomes a tool for division of the country, rather than the unity."
On Sunday morning, officials with binders bearing the presidential insignia joined members of the Secret Service and Kenosha police on a heavily damaged block in the city's Uptown neighborhood. As Secret Service members scouted alleys and various vantage points, White House staffers discussed the feasibility of Trump visiting the burned-out section of 22nd Avenue near 61st Street.
One building the White House advance team was surveying was the home of the Danish Brotherhood, a secular fraternal organization whose meeting place had been reduced to an ashen husk of brick and metal. A 71-year-old member of the organization was assaulted while trying to defend the building with a fire extinguisher on Monday during the protests.
A friend said the man was hospitalized, his jaw broken.
David Nakamura, Matt Viser and Robert Klemko
President Donald Trump on Sunday amplified his call for federal forces to help subdue protests in American cities, denouncing local Democratic leaders and fanning partisan tensions a day after a deadly clash between his supporters and social justice demonstrators in Portland, Ore., underscored the threat of rising politically motivated violence.
Scenes of Trump supporters firing paint and pellet guns at protesters during a "Trump cruise rally" caravan through downtown Portland - a liberal bastion that has been the site of weeks of street demonstrations - raised the specter that the nation's summer of unrest had entered a new phase in which the president's backers are rallying to defend businesses and fight back against Black Lives Matter and other groups he has labeled "anarchists" and "terrorists."
One man, thought to be a member of a pro-Trump group, was shot and killed Saturday night during the Portland unrest.
In tweeting a video of the caravan on the move, Trump called the participants "GREAT PATRIOTS!" The reaction marked a sharp contrast to his silence during a large and peaceful civil rights march on Friday in Washington that drew thousands to the National Mall, where some speakers denounced his leadership.
In a statement Sunday afternoon, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden "unequivocally" condemned the Portland shooting and accused Trump of "fanning the flames of hate and division in our society and using the politics of fear to whip up his supporters."
"We must not become a country at war with ourselves; a country that accepts the killing of fellow Americans who do not agree with you; a country that vows vengeance toward one another," Biden said. "But that is the America that President Trump wants us to be, the America he believes we are."
The violence has escalated as Trump has seized on the social justice protests as a campaign wedge, attempting to tie Biden to "radical" elements on the left. Eager to shift the political debate from the rising deaths and economic toll of the pandemic, Trump has relentlessly attacked Democratic mayors and governors for failing to quell protests, and he dispatched federal law enforcement authorities into cities to help arrest demonstrators.
This week, Trump and Biden will move to address the protests in a more prominent way. Trump on Tuesday is set to travel to Kenosha, Wis., where the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black resident left paralyzed, provoked street protests that culminated in the shooting deaths of two others. Kyle Rittenhouse, a White 17-year-old who had illegally obtained a rifle, was charged with first-degree intentional homicide in the killings, which came after a fledgling militia group had posted a call to arms on Facebook.
White House aides said Trump will tour property damage and meet with law enforcement officials, but they did not disclose any plans for the president to meet with Blake's family.
Meanwhile, Biden aides said the candidate, who had maintained a lean campaign schedule, will launch a more robust public presence with a speech in southwestern Pennsylvania on Monday to address Trump's handling of the pandemic and his response to the social justice protests.
Trump aides, including White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, asserted recently that the violence and chaos will help his reelection bid.
"The only people to blame for the violence and riots in our streets are liberal politicians and their incompetent policies that have failed to get control of these destructive situations," White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement. "This President has condemned violence in all its forms. Americans want peace in their streets and for their children to grow up in safe neighborhoods, and only President Trump has shown the courage and leadership to achieve law and order and deliver results."
Trump's conservative supporters, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have seized on Rittenhouse as a figure of sympathy, suggesting that he acted legally and in self-defense. The president on Sunday appeared to offer his support by liking a tweet from a self-described former liberal activist who cited Rittenhouse as a reason to vote for Trump.
Conservatives also rallied around the Trump caravan in Portland, where the man who was killed was wearing a hat bearing the words "Patriot Prayer," the name of a far-right group organized in 2016 to bring pro-Trump rallies to liberal strongholds.
In a tweet, Trump referred to Biden as a "puppet" of "crazed leaders" on the left who envision the Portland chaos as emblematic of "Joe Biden's America."
"This is not what our great Country wants," Trump wrote. "They want Safety & Security, and do NOT want to Defund our Police!"
Biden has stated that he does not support efforts of some liberals to drastically cut funding for local police departments and instead has outlined a proposal that would increase funding for community policing programs by $300 million as long as local departments agree to conditions such as adopting new use-of-force standards and increasing diversity among their ranks.
In recent months, Trump has increasingly used official White House events, along with campaign rallies, to vilify protesters as violent and to fan fears along racial lines.
During his renomination acceptance speech, delivered Thursday at the White House for the Republican National Convention, Trump criticized Biden for not condemning "rioters and criminals spreading mayhem in Democrat-run cities." The former vice president had already spoken out against the violence and looting, saying the day before that "violence that endangers lives, violence that guts businesses and shutters businesses that serve the community - that's wrong."
"Trump has been inciting violence for years and with deadly effects," said author Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who studies authoritarian regimes. She pointed to a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, last summer by a gunman who in a manifesto cited anti-immigrant views with echoes of Trump's rhetoric.
In 2018, Cesar Sayoc, a Trump supporter, mailed inoperative pipe bombs to Trump's critics, a crime for which he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. And in 2017, a white nationalist in Charlottesville, Va., drove a car into a crowd, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer as she protested the extremist "Unite the Right" march - a movement the president did not condemn unequivocally.
"Now he's trained his aim on Black Lives Matter protesters and antifa," said Ben-Ghiat, referring the racial justice group and to a loosely connected set of left-wing, anti-fascist groups. "So what is happening now with an escalation of violence is something beneficial to Trump. Strongmen leaders incite crises so they can pose themselves as the law-and-order solution."
Biden, who has sought to make Trump's handling of the novel coronavirus the focus of the election, is facing pressure from some Democrats to speak more forcefully on racial justice issues. While Biden has not outlined a clear course of action for what he would do as president to deal with protests that include violence or looting, he said last month that local authorities should arrest agitators who break the law.
"Joe Biden is not president. These things are happening now," Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said in an interview. Of Trump, Clyburn said: "How are you going to look at what's happening under your tenure and say this is what would happen with Joe Biden as your president? You are the president."
Homeland security experts said the combustible mix of sharply polarized and ideologically minded agitators mixing on the streets in cities where law enforcement authorities are strained and, in some cases, inadequately trained is a recipe for potential violence.
"It's important for government leaders at all levels to calm everyone and keep political rallies peaceful," said Tom Warrick, an Atlantic Council expert who left government service last year after serving as a career official at the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.
"The problem is that things can quickly get out of control and the uncertainty and chaos become weapons in the fight," Warrick said. "Merely the uncertainty that it will take days, or weeks, to sort out something that's happening in itself becomes a tool for division of the country, rather than the unity."
On Sunday morning, officials with binders bearing the presidential insignia joined members of the Secret Service and Kenosha police on a heavily damaged block in the city's Uptown neighborhood. As Secret Service members scouted alleys and various vantage points, White House staffers discussed the feasibility of Trump visiting the burned-out section of 22nd Avenue near 61st Street.
One building the White House advance team was surveying was the home of the Danish Brotherhood, a secular fraternal organization whose meeting place had been reduced to an ashen husk of brick and metal. A 71-year-old member of the organization was assaulted while trying to defend the building with a fire extinguisher on Monday during the protests.
A friend said the man was hospitalized, his jaw broken.
Perverted Religios...
‘She was the aggressor’: Former Liberty student alleges sexual encounter with Becki Falwell
A former student at the evangelical university opens up about a 2008 incident with the wife of the school’s president.
By BRANDON AMBROSINO
former Liberty University student says Becki Falwell, the wife of the university’s then-President Jerry Falwell Jr., jumped into bed with him and performed oral sex on him while he stayed over at the Falwell home after a band practice with her eldest son in 2008.
The student was 22 at the time of the encounter, near the start of Liberty’s fall semester. He said she initiated the act, and he went along with it. But despite his rejection of further advances, he said, Falwell continued pursuing him, offering him gifts and engaging in banter through Facebook messages.
“She was the aggressor,” he said.
The messages, screenshots of which were provided by the former student to POLITICO, suggest a flirtatious relationship that went beyond what might be expected of a mother communicating with her son’s bandmate.
One referenced a mutual friend who “said that she wants you to cut [your] bangs when you get your hair cut. I think that you are beautiful just like you are,” Becki Falwell wrote in a message sent in September 2008. “You don’t want to cover up those killer eyes of yours and you know the bandana drives me wild …”
In another, sent in December 2008, after the student says he made clear he did not want any romantic involvement with Falwell, she wrote: “Maybe time will heal whatever wounds that I have caused and your Christian heart will allow you to forgive me.”
In a statement, Jerry and Becki Falwell said of the former student’s allegations, “It is unfortunate that the coverage of our departure has turned into a frenzy of false and fantastic claims about us. These false and mean spirited lies have hurt us and our family greatly and we will respond fully with the truth at an appropriate time. At this time, however, we think it is best to move on and help the Liberty community focus on its very bright future…”
Another member of the former student’s band, who spoke to POLITICO on the condition of anonymity, said the student told him of the oral-sex encounter with Becki Falwell within a month of it occurring. Two former Liberty University employees, also speaking under a condition of anonymity, recalled that the band members practiced at the Falwell Farm in 2008, but did not know of the alleged encounter between Falwell and the former student.
The allegation by the former student casts light on the behavior of Jerry and Becki Falwell, who have been under intense scrutiny for inappropriate relationships and misuse of their positions at the university. On Sunday, Jerry Falwell Jr. acknowledged that Becki had had an affair with Giancarlo Granda, a pool attendant at the Fountainbleau Hotel in Miami Beach with whom they entered a real estate deal. Granda told POLITICO and other outlets that the affair began when he was 20 and continued for seven more years, during which time her husband sometimes watched him and Becki have sex.
Earlier this summer, the couple was vacationing with friends and family aboard a yacht owned by a Liberty University supporter when Jerry posted and quickly deleted a photo of himself with his pants unzipped and arm around Becki’s assistant. POLITICO has also reported that Liberty has given a contract to a company owned by the Falwells’ son and sold property to friends and family without always making proper tax disclosures.
Jerry Falwell Jr. resigned as Liberty president on Tuesday, in exchange for a severance package worth $10.5 million, two days after his acknowledgment of Becki’s affair with Granda.
Granda, however, was not a student. At Liberty University, students aren’t allowed to have sex outside of marriage. Those who violate the rule risk punishment, up to and including expulsion, according to “The Liberty Way,” the school’s honor code for students. The university, like many Christian institutions, regards premarital sex as sinful, a corruption of a Christian’s bodily “temple.”
In a statement provided to POLITICO by Liberty University senior vice president Scott Lamb, the school reiterated that it has “policies against employees having sexual relationships with students, as well as having other inappropriate relationships outside of marriage, whether consensual or not. Becki Falwell was an employee in 2008 and such policies would have fully applied to her as spouse of the then-university Chancellor and President. Liberty University has checked its Human Resources and Title IX records and finds no complaints were ever lodged against Becki Falwell for any inappropriate relationship nor were any investigations of such matters conducted. This is a fresh allegation, as far as we can tell.”
POLITICO first contacted the former student in 2019, after hearing of his alleged sexual encounter with Falwell from former classmates. He confirmed the encounter but didn’t want to go public with it until recent weeks, when the Falwells’ behavior came under scrutiny. POLITICO granted the former student anonymity to describe what he considered inappropriate advances from a woman who was herself a university employee and wife of the university president.
He said he did not feel comfortable discussing the encounter earlier because he suffered from feelings of guilt and depression, feared exposure, and didn’t want to cause harm to the Falwell family.
He said he grew up in a North Carolina home where the Falwell name loomed large. His mother admired Liberty’s founder, the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., and was a true believer in the conservative Christian values that Liberty developed a reputation for cultivating in young people. For the then-student, the incident with Becki Falwell incited a long struggle with both his faith and mental health. He said he did not tell family members of the cause of his distress, and only confided in a few close friends.
“It made [him] feel bad. It was a depressing thing; he struggled with depression [afterwards],” the former bandmate told POLITICO.
“I don’t want to be a homewrecker,” the former student said. “That took a toll on the soul.”
The former student, who is now 34, said he had not heard from Becki Falwell in more than eight years until this week, during which her relationship with Granda came to light. He said she texted him to say hello, and commiserate over the controversy that an engulfed her family. “This is a nightmare. It just keeps getting worse,” Falwell texted him on Monday night, shortly before Jerry Falwell Jr. officially resigned as president.
The former student said he responded the following day by texting that he was praying for her.
***
It was early in the summer of 2008 when a member of his rock band suggested a new guitarist who, he said, knew every Led Zeppelin song and could play like Jimmy Page. He was younger than them by a few years — they were in their early 20s, and he was fresh out of high school. But there was another reason for hesitation: His name was Trey Falwell. He was the eldest son of Jerry and Becki Falwell.
“If we get this kid in the band, we’re gonna have Falwell’s name attached to it,” the former student remembered thinking.
Still, Trey Falwell could play. And his parents were supportive of the band, even offering to let the guys practice in an abandoned church next to their home, which is sometimes referred to as Falwell Farm, in Goode, Virginia.
“They had this old church on their lot, and said, ‘If you guys go in and fix it up, you can play there whenever you want,’” the former student said. “So we went in and put egg crates and lighting everywhere. The lighting was with the help of the Falwells. From the very get-go, they wanted to come across as very warm and compassionate.” The band christened the space the “House of the Holy,” a nod to a 1973 album by Led Zeppelin.
Members of the band recall Becki Falwell’s habit of showing up to their rehearsals. At first, the guys didn’t think much of it — she was friendly and hospitable, and always offered them food and snacks. “It wasn’t just a one-time thing,” the former student said. “It was, ‘Oh hey, guys, I brought you some lemonade.’ And then she’d always stick around.”
“She was like, ‘Hey, I know I’m a mom, but I wanna be friends with everyone,’” recalled the former bandmate. Eventually, it got awkward, he recalls: “It was, like, a ‘Dude, why is somebody’s Mom chilling with us?’ type thing.”
Pretty soon, his bandmates thought they might have an answer.
“I could tell she was giving me looks, but [I] wanted to downplay it,” the former student said. “I would think, ‘Am I reading too much into this?’ She would speak almost … she’d always give little innuendos. Almost like she was speaking in code.”
Still, he figured, he was imagining things. “I’m just seeing this wrong,” he recalled thinking.
Shortly before classes resumed for Liberty’s fall 2008 semester, the then-student and a few friends were clearing boxes out of the rehearsal space on the Falwells’ property. Becki met them in the driveway.
“We were all hot and sweaty. She goes, ‘Hey, can you help me with something?’ I said, ‘Sure, heck yeah, I can help you!’ I figure she needed some heavy lifting. I’ll never forget, she corners me and goes, ‘Have you told your friends?’ I say, ‘Excuse me?’ She goes, ‘Have you told your friends that I think you’re hot?’” the former student recalled. “She’s standing there with her eyes locked on me, waiting to see what I’d say. I probably laughed it off, like, ‘Haha. No, I haven’t told them that one.’”
Still, they showed up because they had gigs to practice for, including one in September at the Campus Artist Series, a showcase of bands comprised of Liberty students and held at the university’s newly opened Tilley Center, which is named after Becki’s father, Tom Tilley, who partially financed the construction of the building.
Often, the band would practice into the evening. Some nights, it would just be the then-student and Trey jamming together. “I was working weird hours at a restaurant, so I wasn’t around when Trey and [the then-student] would chill,” the former bandmate told POLITICO. Trey Falwell and the former student would stay up drinking whiskey and picking out tunes on their guitars until the early morning. If it was really late, or if he’d had too much to drink, the then-student would spend the night, crashing on the bed from a fold-out couch in the guest room next to Trey’s bedroom.
“One night [in August or September], we were up till one or two, and we went back to his room. We had a decent amount of Jack Daniels,” the former student said. He remembered walking into the guest room, just as he’d done many times, closing the door behind him, and preparing the bed.
“I’m laying in the bed and I hear, like, giggling to the side of me on the floor. And, pardon my French, but I was like, ‘What the fuck is that?’ I look over and it’s Becki,” he said. “Just, you know, in my room. I’m like, ‘You can’t be in here. This can’t happen.’”
He was a 22-year-old student at Liberty. She was the wife of the president of the school. The Falwells were, effectively, the First Family of conservative evangelicalism in America.
After some prodding, he coaxed Falwell into leaving. He slept, woke up and acted like things were normal.
A few nights later, he stayed the night again. Again, Falwell came into the guestroom where the then-student was in bed.
This time, she was more aggressive. The former student remembers that Falwell climbed into bed with him, and quickly took down his pants.
“I was like, ‘uh, what are you doing?” the former student said. Falwell then proceeded to give him oral sex.
Over the last year, the former student has recounted this story several times in interviews with POLITICO. He maintained that while some of the details from the 12-year-old encounter are fuzzy, there are others that are clear. He remembers lying on the “right side of the cot.” He remembers thinking the room “looked like an Embassy Suites.” He remembers that Jerry Jr. was away that weekend, and that Wesley, the Falwells’ second son, wasn’t there.
Also clear is the fallout. The encounter, the former student said, “really put a hurt on [me] because I trusted her as a friend.”
In the case of this then-student, these feelings were compounded by Becki Falwell’s position at Liberty University, and in Evangelical Christianity more broadly. He was concerned that word would get out, and that he would in some way be responsible for any injury that would besmear the legacy of Jerry Falwell Sr., who had died a year earlier.
So he kept the sexual encounter secret, save for a few close friends. He said he did not tell Trey Falwell what his mother had done. But the encounter had changed the dynamic between them.
“We started to slowly push Trey out of the band,” the former student said. “From that point forward, it was a weird dynamic. We weren’t as inviting.”
Trey wanted to stay in the band long enough to play an important show with them — a Christmas show Liberty holds every December — and the band agreed. The concert went poorly, the former student said, recalling that their transition from “Carol of the Bells” into a Led Zeppelin song was booed by the audience. The response rattled Trey. Whereas the other members of the band had played gigs at bars with hostile crowds, Trey lacked that experience. It would be the last time the group performed together.
But all through that fall, as the band was slowly separating, the former student said he continued to receive messages and requests from Becki Falwell.
***
When Falwell first contacted the then-student over social media, she posed as a blonde North Carolina woman in her early 20s, he said. “She created a fake account, with a fake picture and a fake name,” he told POLITICO.
At first, he didn’t know who it was. Then he realized something was amiss.
“She was saying stuff a 20 and 21-year-old wouldn’t say,” he said. “[It was] like real Southern charm. Stuff that older people say. And I said [to myself], ‘Hold up, not only is this an old person, it’s Becki.’”
“So I said, ‘I think I have a feeling who this is. Why are you doing this right now on this account?’” the former student recalled. “I think she was embarrassed, because I kinda remember her being defensive about it.”
From then on, Falwell messaged him from her personal Facebook account.
The former student provided POLITICO with screenshots of several of these conversations. The dates of Facebook’s timestamps range from September 2008 to December 2008, which overlaps with the six-month period Trey was in the band. (These messages, with identifying aspects redacted, are pictured here.)
“I love watching you before a show,” she wrote him on Nov. 7, 2008. “I can always tell that you are a little nervous by how you tap your hands on your pants.” He remembers feeling uncomfortable because of how closely she seemed to be watching him.
Her praise of the then-student’s talents became effusive. “What you did at the Battle of the Bands was truly genius, getting everyone to stand up and come near the stage. It was so neat to see people singing along to shady grove (of course through the tears in my eyes … that song always gets to me.).”
“Becki thought [he] wrote that song about her,” the bandmate said.
It wasn’t, the former student said. He recalled Falwell frequently asking him to write a song for her. “I think she just wanted to believe” that “Shady Grove” was about her, he said. “My dear, I love your mess and everything in between,” the song lyrics read. “If we slow down long enough, I can show you what I mean.”
Even as the then-student tried to stay away from Falwell, he said, she continued making advances. “I was getting phone call after phone call after phone call after phone call from her — I’m in class! — leaving me a message, like, the corniest thing you could do, like [singing the James Blunt song] ‘You’re Beautiful,’ leaving it on my [voicemail],” he remembered. “I just said, ‘This can’t happen anymore.’”
But Falwell was persistent. “She got too brash with stuff,” he said. In one instance, Becki approached the then-student in a public place on Liberty’s campus to hand him concert tickets. “She was buying Kings of Leon tickets and showing up and handing [them] to [me in front of] people!”
For the then-student, a line was crossed when Falwell befriended his mother, who had driven to Lynchburg to see one of his band’s shows.
“[Falwell said], ‘Oh, let’s get your mother’s number,’” the former student said. “My poor mother worships the ground Jerry Falwell Sr. walks on, just considering what he did for American Evangelicals. So she was getting the biggest kick out of Becki calling her. I had to tell [Falwell], ‘Hey, please do not contact my family.’”
In December 2008, months after he began trying to distance himself from her, she started to get the point. In one Facebook message provided to POLITICO, Falwell vents frustration that he is not responding to her messages quickly enough. “I’ve got you an incredible ray lamontagne cd. Call me (since your text is dead) and i’ll get the cd to you,” she wrote in one. Six hours later, without receiving a response, Falwell sent another message: “never mind. don’t call. I’ll give the cd to someone who will appreciate it.” Later that night, he replied explaining that he’d been off Facebook because he had a “busy day.”
“It was nice knowing you,” Falwell wrote in another message. The then-student replied, “What in the world are you talking about??”
In another, Falwell wrote, “is anyone there????????? I really need to talk to you please………”
One of the last messages Falwell sent reads simultaneously supportive and apologetic.
“I am so thrilled that you have found a girlfriend!!!! I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone noticed all of the great qualities that you have. I just want you to be happy and it hurts to realize that remaining friends with me must not make you that way. Please just be kind enough to let me know whether or not you have received my texts. I am sorry that 6 months of friendship has ended this way. Maybe time will heal whatever wounds that I have caused and your Christian heart will allow you to forgive me.
Always,
BF”
But for the former student, those words, and what he described as the “insurmountable guilt” they brought to mind, weighed heavily on his conscience.
He contacted Becki Falwell again in June 2011, according to emails provided by a person close to the situation, and referred to his disappointment over his failure to finish his degree. He asked for her help in getting a job to offset his student-loan debt as he returned to classes: “I don't know if i should do the call center, or grounds...what do you think?? I am a hard worker and can learn and adapt very quickly.”
She replied almost a week later, offering to help him and asking after his mother. “Have you put in an application at Liberty? I don't know what jobs are available but I think they list them on the website somewhere.”
He said he returned to Liberty and finished his degree in 2012.
He said he and Falwell have not been in contact for eight years, before this week.
While the former student said he considered coming forward with his story in the past, he was worried about damaging the reputation of the school that Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr. founded. “I respect Jerry Sr. and what he did for the school, for the kids, and I believe the Lord had a mission on his life to do that,” he said. Several times, he expressed his desire to maintain anonymity, saying that he did not want to be treated like former White House intern Monica Lewinsky — his name reduced to a salacious punchline.
In the end, he decided to come forward with his story because of what he now sees as an abuse of power on the part of Becki Falwell. He believes now that that day in the driveway when she asked if he had told his friends that “I think you’re hot,” she was testing him.
“Usually I think about a middle-aged man grooming someone,” the former student said. “It’s funny how it happened with the whole, ‘Me Too’ [movement]. I’m on the other end of the spectrum [from] men harassing women. I found [that] a lot of the traits that these guys had, [Falwell] had as well.”
The former student also believes that Falwell trusted him to keep their secret because “she knew that I cared about her school and the soul-winning aspect. I did not want to corrupt that by any means,” the former student said. “I don’t want that on my back, that I took down the school.”
Over the past year, the former student has described in a variety of ways the conflict that has gone on inside him in the wake of his sexual encounter with Falwell. One is a comparison he makes between himself and a famous biblical character.
“Afterwards, I just felt like Joseph for many years,” the former student said. “I know you get the analogy — from that story of Joseph and his coat of many colors, when that woman tried to seduce him.”
He was referring to a story from the Hebrew Bible, recounted in Genesis 39, when Joseph found himself cornered by a woman who wanted to have sex with him. The woman was married to Potiphar, the politically powerful captain of Pharaoh’s guard. Potiphar’s wife aggressively tried to seduce Joseph, an unwilling recipient of her advances, and stripped off his clothes. Before he could be violated, Joseph fled the scene, establishing himself in Biblical teaching as a symbol of integrity and honor.
The former student brought up the story of Joseph not to compare himself to a Biblical hero, but to emphasize their differences.
“I didn’t run. I stayed,” he said. “I felt that guilt.”
A former student at the evangelical university opens up about a 2008 incident with the wife of the school’s president.
By BRANDON AMBROSINO
former Liberty University student says Becki Falwell, the wife of the university’s then-President Jerry Falwell Jr., jumped into bed with him and performed oral sex on him while he stayed over at the Falwell home after a band practice with her eldest son in 2008.
The student was 22 at the time of the encounter, near the start of Liberty’s fall semester. He said she initiated the act, and he went along with it. But despite his rejection of further advances, he said, Falwell continued pursuing him, offering him gifts and engaging in banter through Facebook messages.
“She was the aggressor,” he said.
The messages, screenshots of which were provided by the former student to POLITICO, suggest a flirtatious relationship that went beyond what might be expected of a mother communicating with her son’s bandmate.
One referenced a mutual friend who “said that she wants you to cut [your] bangs when you get your hair cut. I think that you are beautiful just like you are,” Becki Falwell wrote in a message sent in September 2008. “You don’t want to cover up those killer eyes of yours and you know the bandana drives me wild …”
In another, sent in December 2008, after the student says he made clear he did not want any romantic involvement with Falwell, she wrote: “Maybe time will heal whatever wounds that I have caused and your Christian heart will allow you to forgive me.”
In a statement, Jerry and Becki Falwell said of the former student’s allegations, “It is unfortunate that the coverage of our departure has turned into a frenzy of false and fantastic claims about us. These false and mean spirited lies have hurt us and our family greatly and we will respond fully with the truth at an appropriate time. At this time, however, we think it is best to move on and help the Liberty community focus on its very bright future…”
Another member of the former student’s band, who spoke to POLITICO on the condition of anonymity, said the student told him of the oral-sex encounter with Becki Falwell within a month of it occurring. Two former Liberty University employees, also speaking under a condition of anonymity, recalled that the band members practiced at the Falwell Farm in 2008, but did not know of the alleged encounter between Falwell and the former student.
The allegation by the former student casts light on the behavior of Jerry and Becki Falwell, who have been under intense scrutiny for inappropriate relationships and misuse of their positions at the university. On Sunday, Jerry Falwell Jr. acknowledged that Becki had had an affair with Giancarlo Granda, a pool attendant at the Fountainbleau Hotel in Miami Beach with whom they entered a real estate deal. Granda told POLITICO and other outlets that the affair began when he was 20 and continued for seven more years, during which time her husband sometimes watched him and Becki have sex.
Earlier this summer, the couple was vacationing with friends and family aboard a yacht owned by a Liberty University supporter when Jerry posted and quickly deleted a photo of himself with his pants unzipped and arm around Becki’s assistant. POLITICO has also reported that Liberty has given a contract to a company owned by the Falwells’ son and sold property to friends and family without always making proper tax disclosures.
Jerry Falwell Jr. resigned as Liberty president on Tuesday, in exchange for a severance package worth $10.5 million, two days after his acknowledgment of Becki’s affair with Granda.
Granda, however, was not a student. At Liberty University, students aren’t allowed to have sex outside of marriage. Those who violate the rule risk punishment, up to and including expulsion, according to “The Liberty Way,” the school’s honor code for students. The university, like many Christian institutions, regards premarital sex as sinful, a corruption of a Christian’s bodily “temple.”
In a statement provided to POLITICO by Liberty University senior vice president Scott Lamb, the school reiterated that it has “policies against employees having sexual relationships with students, as well as having other inappropriate relationships outside of marriage, whether consensual or not. Becki Falwell was an employee in 2008 and such policies would have fully applied to her as spouse of the then-university Chancellor and President. Liberty University has checked its Human Resources and Title IX records and finds no complaints were ever lodged against Becki Falwell for any inappropriate relationship nor were any investigations of such matters conducted. This is a fresh allegation, as far as we can tell.”
POLITICO first contacted the former student in 2019, after hearing of his alleged sexual encounter with Falwell from former classmates. He confirmed the encounter but didn’t want to go public with it until recent weeks, when the Falwells’ behavior came under scrutiny. POLITICO granted the former student anonymity to describe what he considered inappropriate advances from a woman who was herself a university employee and wife of the university president.
He said he did not feel comfortable discussing the encounter earlier because he suffered from feelings of guilt and depression, feared exposure, and didn’t want to cause harm to the Falwell family.
He said he grew up in a North Carolina home where the Falwell name loomed large. His mother admired Liberty’s founder, the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., and was a true believer in the conservative Christian values that Liberty developed a reputation for cultivating in young people. For the then-student, the incident with Becki Falwell incited a long struggle with both his faith and mental health. He said he did not tell family members of the cause of his distress, and only confided in a few close friends.
“It made [him] feel bad. It was a depressing thing; he struggled with depression [afterwards],” the former bandmate told POLITICO.
“I don’t want to be a homewrecker,” the former student said. “That took a toll on the soul.”
The former student, who is now 34, said he had not heard from Becki Falwell in more than eight years until this week, during which her relationship with Granda came to light. He said she texted him to say hello, and commiserate over the controversy that an engulfed her family. “This is a nightmare. It just keeps getting worse,” Falwell texted him on Monday night, shortly before Jerry Falwell Jr. officially resigned as president.
The former student said he responded the following day by texting that he was praying for her.
***
It was early in the summer of 2008 when a member of his rock band suggested a new guitarist who, he said, knew every Led Zeppelin song and could play like Jimmy Page. He was younger than them by a few years — they were in their early 20s, and he was fresh out of high school. But there was another reason for hesitation: His name was Trey Falwell. He was the eldest son of Jerry and Becki Falwell.
“If we get this kid in the band, we’re gonna have Falwell’s name attached to it,” the former student remembered thinking.
Still, Trey Falwell could play. And his parents were supportive of the band, even offering to let the guys practice in an abandoned church next to their home, which is sometimes referred to as Falwell Farm, in Goode, Virginia.
“They had this old church on their lot, and said, ‘If you guys go in and fix it up, you can play there whenever you want,’” the former student said. “So we went in and put egg crates and lighting everywhere. The lighting was with the help of the Falwells. From the very get-go, they wanted to come across as very warm and compassionate.” The band christened the space the “House of the Holy,” a nod to a 1973 album by Led Zeppelin.
Members of the band recall Becki Falwell’s habit of showing up to their rehearsals. At first, the guys didn’t think much of it — she was friendly and hospitable, and always offered them food and snacks. “It wasn’t just a one-time thing,” the former student said. “It was, ‘Oh hey, guys, I brought you some lemonade.’ And then she’d always stick around.”
“She was like, ‘Hey, I know I’m a mom, but I wanna be friends with everyone,’” recalled the former bandmate. Eventually, it got awkward, he recalls: “It was, like, a ‘Dude, why is somebody’s Mom chilling with us?’ type thing.”
Pretty soon, his bandmates thought they might have an answer.
“I could tell she was giving me looks, but [I] wanted to downplay it,” the former student said. “I would think, ‘Am I reading too much into this?’ She would speak almost … she’d always give little innuendos. Almost like she was speaking in code.”
Still, he figured, he was imagining things. “I’m just seeing this wrong,” he recalled thinking.
Shortly before classes resumed for Liberty’s fall 2008 semester, the then-student and a few friends were clearing boxes out of the rehearsal space on the Falwells’ property. Becki met them in the driveway.
“We were all hot and sweaty. She goes, ‘Hey, can you help me with something?’ I said, ‘Sure, heck yeah, I can help you!’ I figure she needed some heavy lifting. I’ll never forget, she corners me and goes, ‘Have you told your friends?’ I say, ‘Excuse me?’ She goes, ‘Have you told your friends that I think you’re hot?’” the former student recalled. “She’s standing there with her eyes locked on me, waiting to see what I’d say. I probably laughed it off, like, ‘Haha. No, I haven’t told them that one.’”
Still, they showed up because they had gigs to practice for, including one in September at the Campus Artist Series, a showcase of bands comprised of Liberty students and held at the university’s newly opened Tilley Center, which is named after Becki’s father, Tom Tilley, who partially financed the construction of the building.
Often, the band would practice into the evening. Some nights, it would just be the then-student and Trey jamming together. “I was working weird hours at a restaurant, so I wasn’t around when Trey and [the then-student] would chill,” the former bandmate told POLITICO. Trey Falwell and the former student would stay up drinking whiskey and picking out tunes on their guitars until the early morning. If it was really late, or if he’d had too much to drink, the then-student would spend the night, crashing on the bed from a fold-out couch in the guest room next to Trey’s bedroom.
“One night [in August or September], we were up till one or two, and we went back to his room. We had a decent amount of Jack Daniels,” the former student said. He remembered walking into the guest room, just as he’d done many times, closing the door behind him, and preparing the bed.
“I’m laying in the bed and I hear, like, giggling to the side of me on the floor. And, pardon my French, but I was like, ‘What the fuck is that?’ I look over and it’s Becki,” he said. “Just, you know, in my room. I’m like, ‘You can’t be in here. This can’t happen.’”
He was a 22-year-old student at Liberty. She was the wife of the president of the school. The Falwells were, effectively, the First Family of conservative evangelicalism in America.
After some prodding, he coaxed Falwell into leaving. He slept, woke up and acted like things were normal.
A few nights later, he stayed the night again. Again, Falwell came into the guestroom where the then-student was in bed.
This time, she was more aggressive. The former student remembers that Falwell climbed into bed with him, and quickly took down his pants.
“I was like, ‘uh, what are you doing?” the former student said. Falwell then proceeded to give him oral sex.
Over the last year, the former student has recounted this story several times in interviews with POLITICO. He maintained that while some of the details from the 12-year-old encounter are fuzzy, there are others that are clear. He remembers lying on the “right side of the cot.” He remembers thinking the room “looked like an Embassy Suites.” He remembers that Jerry Jr. was away that weekend, and that Wesley, the Falwells’ second son, wasn’t there.
Also clear is the fallout. The encounter, the former student said, “really put a hurt on [me] because I trusted her as a friend.”
In the case of this then-student, these feelings were compounded by Becki Falwell’s position at Liberty University, and in Evangelical Christianity more broadly. He was concerned that word would get out, and that he would in some way be responsible for any injury that would besmear the legacy of Jerry Falwell Sr., who had died a year earlier.
So he kept the sexual encounter secret, save for a few close friends. He said he did not tell Trey Falwell what his mother had done. But the encounter had changed the dynamic between them.
“We started to slowly push Trey out of the band,” the former student said. “From that point forward, it was a weird dynamic. We weren’t as inviting.”
Trey wanted to stay in the band long enough to play an important show with them — a Christmas show Liberty holds every December — and the band agreed. The concert went poorly, the former student said, recalling that their transition from “Carol of the Bells” into a Led Zeppelin song was booed by the audience. The response rattled Trey. Whereas the other members of the band had played gigs at bars with hostile crowds, Trey lacked that experience. It would be the last time the group performed together.
But all through that fall, as the band was slowly separating, the former student said he continued to receive messages and requests from Becki Falwell.
***
When Falwell first contacted the then-student over social media, she posed as a blonde North Carolina woman in her early 20s, he said. “She created a fake account, with a fake picture and a fake name,” he told POLITICO.
At first, he didn’t know who it was. Then he realized something was amiss.
“She was saying stuff a 20 and 21-year-old wouldn’t say,” he said. “[It was] like real Southern charm. Stuff that older people say. And I said [to myself], ‘Hold up, not only is this an old person, it’s Becki.’”
“So I said, ‘I think I have a feeling who this is. Why are you doing this right now on this account?’” the former student recalled. “I think she was embarrassed, because I kinda remember her being defensive about it.”
From then on, Falwell messaged him from her personal Facebook account.
The former student provided POLITICO with screenshots of several of these conversations. The dates of Facebook’s timestamps range from September 2008 to December 2008, which overlaps with the six-month period Trey was in the band. (These messages, with identifying aspects redacted, are pictured here.)
“I love watching you before a show,” she wrote him on Nov. 7, 2008. “I can always tell that you are a little nervous by how you tap your hands on your pants.” He remembers feeling uncomfortable because of how closely she seemed to be watching him.
Her praise of the then-student’s talents became effusive. “What you did at the Battle of the Bands was truly genius, getting everyone to stand up and come near the stage. It was so neat to see people singing along to shady grove (of course through the tears in my eyes … that song always gets to me.).”
“Becki thought [he] wrote that song about her,” the bandmate said.
It wasn’t, the former student said. He recalled Falwell frequently asking him to write a song for her. “I think she just wanted to believe” that “Shady Grove” was about her, he said. “My dear, I love your mess and everything in between,” the song lyrics read. “If we slow down long enough, I can show you what I mean.”
Even as the then-student tried to stay away from Falwell, he said, she continued making advances. “I was getting phone call after phone call after phone call after phone call from her — I’m in class! — leaving me a message, like, the corniest thing you could do, like [singing the James Blunt song] ‘You’re Beautiful,’ leaving it on my [voicemail],” he remembered. “I just said, ‘This can’t happen anymore.’”
But Falwell was persistent. “She got too brash with stuff,” he said. In one instance, Becki approached the then-student in a public place on Liberty’s campus to hand him concert tickets. “She was buying Kings of Leon tickets and showing up and handing [them] to [me in front of] people!”
For the then-student, a line was crossed when Falwell befriended his mother, who had driven to Lynchburg to see one of his band’s shows.
“[Falwell said], ‘Oh, let’s get your mother’s number,’” the former student said. “My poor mother worships the ground Jerry Falwell Sr. walks on, just considering what he did for American Evangelicals. So she was getting the biggest kick out of Becki calling her. I had to tell [Falwell], ‘Hey, please do not contact my family.’”
In December 2008, months after he began trying to distance himself from her, she started to get the point. In one Facebook message provided to POLITICO, Falwell vents frustration that he is not responding to her messages quickly enough. “I’ve got you an incredible ray lamontagne cd. Call me (since your text is dead) and i’ll get the cd to you,” she wrote in one. Six hours later, without receiving a response, Falwell sent another message: “never mind. don’t call. I’ll give the cd to someone who will appreciate it.” Later that night, he replied explaining that he’d been off Facebook because he had a “busy day.”
“It was nice knowing you,” Falwell wrote in another message. The then-student replied, “What in the world are you talking about??”
In another, Falwell wrote, “is anyone there????????? I really need to talk to you please………”
One of the last messages Falwell sent reads simultaneously supportive and apologetic.
“I am so thrilled that you have found a girlfriend!!!! I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone noticed all of the great qualities that you have. I just want you to be happy and it hurts to realize that remaining friends with me must not make you that way. Please just be kind enough to let me know whether or not you have received my texts. I am sorry that 6 months of friendship has ended this way. Maybe time will heal whatever wounds that I have caused and your Christian heart will allow you to forgive me.
Always,
BF”
But for the former student, those words, and what he described as the “insurmountable guilt” they brought to mind, weighed heavily on his conscience.
He contacted Becki Falwell again in June 2011, according to emails provided by a person close to the situation, and referred to his disappointment over his failure to finish his degree. He asked for her help in getting a job to offset his student-loan debt as he returned to classes: “I don't know if i should do the call center, or grounds...what do you think?? I am a hard worker and can learn and adapt very quickly.”
She replied almost a week later, offering to help him and asking after his mother. “Have you put in an application at Liberty? I don't know what jobs are available but I think they list them on the website somewhere.”
He said he returned to Liberty and finished his degree in 2012.
He said he and Falwell have not been in contact for eight years, before this week.
While the former student said he considered coming forward with his story in the past, he was worried about damaging the reputation of the school that Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr. founded. “I respect Jerry Sr. and what he did for the school, for the kids, and I believe the Lord had a mission on his life to do that,” he said. Several times, he expressed his desire to maintain anonymity, saying that he did not want to be treated like former White House intern Monica Lewinsky — his name reduced to a salacious punchline.
In the end, he decided to come forward with his story because of what he now sees as an abuse of power on the part of Becki Falwell. He believes now that that day in the driveway when she asked if he had told his friends that “I think you’re hot,” she was testing him.
“Usually I think about a middle-aged man grooming someone,” the former student said. “It’s funny how it happened with the whole, ‘Me Too’ [movement]. I’m on the other end of the spectrum [from] men harassing women. I found [that] a lot of the traits that these guys had, [Falwell] had as well.”
The former student also believes that Falwell trusted him to keep their secret because “she knew that I cared about her school and the soul-winning aspect. I did not want to corrupt that by any means,” the former student said. “I don’t want that on my back, that I took down the school.”
Over the past year, the former student has described in a variety of ways the conflict that has gone on inside him in the wake of his sexual encounter with Falwell. One is a comparison he makes between himself and a famous biblical character.
“Afterwards, I just felt like Joseph for many years,” the former student said. “I know you get the analogy — from that story of Joseph and his coat of many colors, when that woman tried to seduce him.”
He was referring to a story from the Hebrew Bible, recounted in Genesis 39, when Joseph found himself cornered by a woman who wanted to have sex with him. The woman was married to Potiphar, the politically powerful captain of Pharaoh’s guard. Potiphar’s wife aggressively tried to seduce Joseph, an unwilling recipient of her advances, and stripped off his clothes. Before he could be violated, Joseph fled the scene, establishing himself in Biblical teaching as a symbol of integrity and honor.
The former student brought up the story of Joseph not to compare himself to a Biblical hero, but to emphasize their differences.
“I didn’t run. I stayed,” he said. “I felt that guilt.”
Pressured CDC
Trump officials pressured CDC to change virus testing guidelines
Public health experts have questioned the scientific basis for the testing change.
By DAVID LIM and ADAM CANCRYN
Top Trump administration officials involved with the White House coronavirus task force ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Protection to stop promoting coronavirus testing for most people who have been exposed to the virus but aren't showing symptoms, according to two people with knowledge of the process.
Federal testing czar Brett Giroir denied those allegations Wednesday, telling reporters that the CDC ultimately decided to narrow the recommendations for who should be tested.
“The new guidelines are a CDC action,” Giroir said. “As always, the guidelines received appropriate attention, consultation and input from Task Force experts, and I mean the medical and scientific experts, including CDC Director [Robert] Redfield.”
The revised testing guidelines, which CDC released late Monday with no public notice, say it is up to state and local public health officials and health providers to decide whether people without symptoms or underlying risk factors need a test after high-risk situations — such as coming into contact with an infected person for more than 15 minutes.
The agency also now says it is up to local public health experts to decide whether testing is needed for people who attend a public or private gathering of more than 10 individuals when masks are not worn and social-distancing guidelines are not followed.
Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious disease expert, said the change could send the wrong message. "I'm worried it will give people the incorrect assumption that asymptomatic spread is not of great concern," Fauci said in a statement read by CNN's Sanjay Gupta on-air Wednesday afternoon. "In fact, it is."
Fauci also told Gupta that he was under anesthesia having vocal cord surgery on Thursday when the task force met to approve the CDC guidance. Giroir told reporters that Fauci had worked on the recommendations, which he said were developed over the past month.
Other public health experts questioned the scientific basis for the testing changes, which they said could make it harder for the United States to contain its outbreak — especially with students heading back to schools and universities across the country in the coming weeks.
Time-honored techniques for stopping infectious disease outbreaks rely on testing to identify people are infected and tracing the people with whom they have come into contact and unwittingly exposed.
Carlos del Rio, executive associate dean at the Emory School of Medicine, told POLITICO the CDC guidelines do not make sense because individuals who have been in close contact with a confirmed case of Covid-19 for at least 15 minutes could potentially be infected and should be tested.
“Asymptomatic people transmit, and if you don’t isolate them and you don’t identify them, transmission will continue,” del Rio said. “I’m worried we are not diagnosing the people that we need to diagnose.”
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo slammed the change as “political propaganda.” Officials in several other states, including California, Connecticut and Washington, said Wednesday that they would not alter their testing approach to match the new CDC guidelines.
“We will not be influenced by that change,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said at a press conference. “We are influenced by those who are experts in the field and feel very differently.”
The CDC update comes as the Trump administration has increasingly shifted its testing focus toward settings like nursing homes and long-term care facilities, which officials argue are key sources of outbreaks and account for a disproportionate number of Covid-19 deaths.
The guidance posted Monday emphasizes the need for more regular testing of those living or working in nursing homes. And on Tuesday, CMS issued new rules that would require testing in nursing homes — though it remains unclear what the parameters will be for that mandate.
One person close to the CDC changes defended them as necessary to prioritize testing for those at higher risk of infection, arguing that demand has been stretched by people seeking out tests when it's unlikely they've been exposed to the virus.
Giroir argued the administration “does not expect” new CDC guidelines to decrease the volume of tests being conducted. With new tests soon coming onto the market, the number of people who can be screened “will go up significantly over the next couple of months.” That increase will come from “strategically done tests, not just tests done for the sake of being tested,” he added.
The testing czar also denied that politics motivated the CDC switch, despite President Donald Trump’s repeated arguments that U.S. case numbers are high because the country conducts many tests.
“There is no direction from President Trump, the Vice President [Mike Pence] or [HHS Secretary Alex Azar] about what we need to do when,” Giroir said. “This is evidence based decisions that are driven by the scientists and physicians, both within the CDC, within my office and the lab task force.”
Eleanor Murray, assistant professor of epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health, pushed back against the idea that different localities should take varying approaches to testing of potentially infected people, saying “the epidemiology isn’t location dependent.”
“The only possible flexibility I could see at the local level on this is whether to just mandate everyone does the full quarantine or allow testing to try to rule out infection,” Murray said. “The new CDC guidelines aren’t replacing testing with quarantine though. They’re just ignoring transmission pre-symptoms.”
American Medical Association President Susan Bailey urged CDC and HHS to provide the scientific justification behind making the change to the testing recommendations.
"Suggesting that people without symptoms, who have known exposure to COVID-positive individuals, do not need testing is a recipe for community spread and more spikes in coronavirus," Bailey said.
The abrupt — and unannounced — changes have already intensified scrutiny of the CDC's independence, and the administration's broader coronavirus response ahead of the November election.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro — who chairs the House appropriations subcommittee overseeing the health department — slammed the new guidelines on Wednesday as "clearly political" and "unfathomable that the CDC is implementing guidelines that completely ignore the data.”
Scientists, not just politicians, are also sounding the alarm about the potential motives behind the CDC’s latest action.
“With all the things that the president has been saying about testing, it’s hard to not be suspicious and say ‘hey, they don’t want to test people because they’re really worried that more people are going to be diagnosed and that impacts the numbers.’ I really don’t know,” del Rio said.
Public health experts have questioned the scientific basis for the testing change.
By DAVID LIM and ADAM CANCRYN
Top Trump administration officials involved with the White House coronavirus task force ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Protection to stop promoting coronavirus testing for most people who have been exposed to the virus but aren't showing symptoms, according to two people with knowledge of the process.
Federal testing czar Brett Giroir denied those allegations Wednesday, telling reporters that the CDC ultimately decided to narrow the recommendations for who should be tested.
“The new guidelines are a CDC action,” Giroir said. “As always, the guidelines received appropriate attention, consultation and input from Task Force experts, and I mean the medical and scientific experts, including CDC Director [Robert] Redfield.”
The revised testing guidelines, which CDC released late Monday with no public notice, say it is up to state and local public health officials and health providers to decide whether people without symptoms or underlying risk factors need a test after high-risk situations — such as coming into contact with an infected person for more than 15 minutes.
The agency also now says it is up to local public health experts to decide whether testing is needed for people who attend a public or private gathering of more than 10 individuals when masks are not worn and social-distancing guidelines are not followed.
Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious disease expert, said the change could send the wrong message. "I'm worried it will give people the incorrect assumption that asymptomatic spread is not of great concern," Fauci said in a statement read by CNN's Sanjay Gupta on-air Wednesday afternoon. "In fact, it is."
Fauci also told Gupta that he was under anesthesia having vocal cord surgery on Thursday when the task force met to approve the CDC guidance. Giroir told reporters that Fauci had worked on the recommendations, which he said were developed over the past month.
Other public health experts questioned the scientific basis for the testing changes, which they said could make it harder for the United States to contain its outbreak — especially with students heading back to schools and universities across the country in the coming weeks.
Time-honored techniques for stopping infectious disease outbreaks rely on testing to identify people are infected and tracing the people with whom they have come into contact and unwittingly exposed.
Carlos del Rio, executive associate dean at the Emory School of Medicine, told POLITICO the CDC guidelines do not make sense because individuals who have been in close contact with a confirmed case of Covid-19 for at least 15 minutes could potentially be infected and should be tested.
“Asymptomatic people transmit, and if you don’t isolate them and you don’t identify them, transmission will continue,” del Rio said. “I’m worried we are not diagnosing the people that we need to diagnose.”
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo slammed the change as “political propaganda.” Officials in several other states, including California, Connecticut and Washington, said Wednesday that they would not alter their testing approach to match the new CDC guidelines.
“We will not be influenced by that change,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said at a press conference. “We are influenced by those who are experts in the field and feel very differently.”
The CDC update comes as the Trump administration has increasingly shifted its testing focus toward settings like nursing homes and long-term care facilities, which officials argue are key sources of outbreaks and account for a disproportionate number of Covid-19 deaths.
The guidance posted Monday emphasizes the need for more regular testing of those living or working in nursing homes. And on Tuesday, CMS issued new rules that would require testing in nursing homes — though it remains unclear what the parameters will be for that mandate.
One person close to the CDC changes defended them as necessary to prioritize testing for those at higher risk of infection, arguing that demand has been stretched by people seeking out tests when it's unlikely they've been exposed to the virus.
Giroir argued the administration “does not expect” new CDC guidelines to decrease the volume of tests being conducted. With new tests soon coming onto the market, the number of people who can be screened “will go up significantly over the next couple of months.” That increase will come from “strategically done tests, not just tests done for the sake of being tested,” he added.
The testing czar also denied that politics motivated the CDC switch, despite President Donald Trump’s repeated arguments that U.S. case numbers are high because the country conducts many tests.
“There is no direction from President Trump, the Vice President [Mike Pence] or [HHS Secretary Alex Azar] about what we need to do when,” Giroir said. “This is evidence based decisions that are driven by the scientists and physicians, both within the CDC, within my office and the lab task force.”
Eleanor Murray, assistant professor of epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health, pushed back against the idea that different localities should take varying approaches to testing of potentially infected people, saying “the epidemiology isn’t location dependent.”
“The only possible flexibility I could see at the local level on this is whether to just mandate everyone does the full quarantine or allow testing to try to rule out infection,” Murray said. “The new CDC guidelines aren’t replacing testing with quarantine though. They’re just ignoring transmission pre-symptoms.”
American Medical Association President Susan Bailey urged CDC and HHS to provide the scientific justification behind making the change to the testing recommendations.
"Suggesting that people without symptoms, who have known exposure to COVID-positive individuals, do not need testing is a recipe for community spread and more spikes in coronavirus," Bailey said.
The abrupt — and unannounced — changes have already intensified scrutiny of the CDC's independence, and the administration's broader coronavirus response ahead of the November election.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro — who chairs the House appropriations subcommittee overseeing the health department — slammed the new guidelines on Wednesday as "clearly political" and "unfathomable that the CDC is implementing guidelines that completely ignore the data.”
Scientists, not just politicians, are also sounding the alarm about the potential motives behind the CDC’s latest action.
“With all the things that the president has been saying about testing, it’s hard to not be suspicious and say ‘hey, they don’t want to test people because they’re really worried that more people are going to be diagnosed and that impacts the numbers.’ I really don’t know,” del Rio said.
Betting he'll lose....
Former top Trump officials are betting he'll lose
An unprecedented number of administration veterans have turned against the president — and even many of those who still back him think he's doomed.
By DANIEL LIPPMAN
President Donald Trump has outraged Democrats and offended ethics lawyers this week by parading a number of his top officials in front of cameras during the Republican National Convention — a possibly illegal breach of historic norms.
But the furor over the precedent-busting encomiums to Trump by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway and others have obscured another way his presidency has broken with the past: just how many of his onetime aides no longer support him.
At least 19 former top Trump administration officials in total have broken publicly with their former boss in one form or another, according to a POLITICO count, and several have already lent their names to various Republicans-for-Biden efforts. Not all of them have said they will vote for Democratic nominee Joe Biden — former national security adviser John Bolton, for instance, says he will pull the lever for an unspecified third person. It amounts to a never-before-seen wave of defections of people who have denounced him or his policies or criticized his character in other ways.
But the potential pool of opposition within the president’s ranks is much larger, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior Trump officials. Anthony Scaramucci, for one — Trump’s short-lived former White House communications director — claimed he has talked to 20 former White House and administration officials who plan to vote for Biden but don’t want to speak publicly to avoid getting hit by Trump on Twitter.
“Anybody of substance is voting for Biden,” he said. “Anybody who has an IQ of over 100 and has worked for Donald Trump, with the exception of Steve Bannon, is not voting for him.” (In early August, Trump tweeted that Scaramucci was “a fool” and “a loser who begged to come back.”)
The interviews revealed a widespread feeling among Trump alums that he will not be re-elected. Some, like Scaramucci, are rooting for the president to lose. Others are critical of a campaign operation they see as flailing. What unites them all is shared skepticism that Trump can overcome the public’s harsh assessment of his management of the pandemic, which has now killed more than 180,000 Americans and has driven millions into poverty and deprivation.
One word that repeatedly came up when Trump alums were asked to describe his reelection prospects: “pessimistic.”
“I think people are starting to worry,” said a former senior administration official. Another Trump administration alum predicts “a total wipeout.”
That pessimism is hardly universal. Some Trump aides are reveling in the lowered expectations because it gives them a chance to replicate their come-from-behind spirit of 2016. They fully expect the race to tighten a few points in the coming weeks, and cast doubt on the polls, arguing that they consistently understate the president’s “silent majority” of supporters who are embarrassed to tell pollsters they’ll vote for Trump. They also believe that Trump counterpunches best when his back is up against the wall.
“All of these anonymous ‘sources’ will be the first to show up at the victory party with a resume in hand, looking for a job in the second term,” said Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh in a statement. “Not one of these people has any idea what’s happening inside the campaign and they don’t see our data. The president is in a stronger position than he was in 2016 and now has a record of achievement to run on.”
“Anyone who underestimates or writes off President Trump does so at their own peril,” said White House spokesman Judd Deere.
But it’s not just the president’s flat poll numbers, which currently place him an average of roughly seven percentage points behind Biden, that factors into the critics’ assessments. The lack of trademark Trump rallies has also put a severe damper on his campaign, which relied on the massive events to drive free and largely unfiltered local media coverage, to stoke Trump’s loyal base of supporters, to inspire them to volunteer and donate — and to siphon up their personal data.
“He’s someone who wants to get out, go to the rallies, see people and now he is stuck in the White House,” said the former senior administration official. “His heart is not about being confined. His heart is about getting out and he needs to find ways to do that, consistent with the realities of Covid.”
Because the June rally in Tulsa, Okla. backfired spectacularly on a number of levels and indefinitely put the president’s signature MAGA rallies on hold, “their biggest asset was left on the sidelines,” said a former White House official. The Trump campaign is trying to adjust by holding mini-MAGA events and doing more retail politics, POLITICO reported this week.
Before the virus hit, the economy was humming, with Vice President Mike Pence saying on Wednesday night in his acceptance speech: “When it came to the economy, President Trump kept his word and then some … to pass the largest tax cut and reform in American history, rolled back more federal red tape than any admin, unleashed American energy and fought for free and fair trade.” With the pandemic having plunged America into recession, Trump and his campaign have promised to “Make America Great Again, Again” and say that the president is uniquely qualified to bring back the economy and get people back to work.
It’s hard to sell that argument to the voters Trump needs to win in November, the critics say.
“The virus has redefined everything, and he has not defined his management of it in a successful way,” said a former senior White House official, who compared the pandemic to a “wet blanket” over Trump. “The numbers are unambiguous. I don’t think he’s going to be able to communicate anything about the economy, about any of these issues effectively, until this isn’t the primary concern of most people. Forget about talking about Joe Biden.”
Former Trump aides are also not happy that the Trump campaign hasn’t done a better job of successfully defining Biden as an elderly puppet of the radical left who will be controlled by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and whose presidency would lead to cities and suburbs being beset by violence.
Asked why the Trump campaign has struggled in its efforts to paint Biden in a negative light, one befuddled former senior White House official simply said: “That I don’t know.”
Some current Trump officials bemoan the president’s lack of an obvious second-term agenda, pointing to his winding response on the matter to Fox News host Sean Hannity. One said he was “horrified” at that answer, which he called “pretty embarrassing … The campaign needs to do a better job of identifying what he’s going to do in a second term.”
A senior White House official pushed back on the notion that Trumpworld isn’t optimistic about winning in November.
“We feel like the pendulum has swung and we feel really strong where we’re at,” said the official. “This convention week has been a great three nights for us and tonight’s going to cap us off and the president’s going to deliver a strong speech. I don’t think this week could have gone better with the convention and our programming. … A lot of people in the White House and among senior staff are feeling really good about where we’re at.”
Trump veterans on the outside, though, worry that if the election’s dominant question is whether to keep the president in office, he will likely lose. They would feel much more comfortable if the campaign had successfully reframed the election as a choice between Trump’s vision of rebuilding the economy after a pandemic and Biden’s message of restoring “the soul of America.”
“Right now the focus is all on whether to retain [Trump],” said the former senior administration official. “I’d love to see the president go out and make it into a choice rather than a retention election.”
Trump alums are also worried about how their former boss might fare in the upcoming debates against Biden, notwithstanding the campaign’s bravado about the 77-year-old Democrat’s supposedly declining mental fitness.
“Seventy-five percent of the questions are going to be, ‘Hey, Mr. President, many thousands of Americans have died from a virus that you’ve downplayed, you haven’t gotten a supply chain working, you haven’t reassured the public, you haven’t given clear guidance to wear a mask, you haven’t done all these things on your watch in the last 6 months well enough,’” said a former senior White House official, who said his former colleagues understand that they had underestimated the coronavirus.
“If the virus and the handling of it is the core set of questions when it comes to the debates, he’s not going to be talking about trade, about defeating ISIS, or cutting regulations or energy policy or the lowest unemployment rate among African-Americans. All those talking points and accomplishments have been kind of lit on fire,” the person added.
A former senior White House official said he also knows of one or two former colleagues who have told him they’re going to vote for Biden. “I know more who have said they would have a tough time pulling the lever for Trump but they also can’t vote for Biden so they may write somebody in,” this person said.
“I believe there is far less percent support among those that used to work for President Trump than there is in the general population,” said another former senior administration official. “I know almost no one that supports him that used to work for him. You will see more and more people coming out against him in the coming months.”
Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, said he didn’t know how the pandemic will affect turnout in November, but feels confident that Trump will lose.
“What we do know is that the sentiment of the American people is clear: They’re fed up with Trump and the tumult -- and they’re desperate for sanity in the White House,” said Taylor, who is recruiting current and former Trump officials to join an anti-Trump group he recently started. “He’s proven himself thoroughly unqualified to keep doing the job. So I suspect voters are going to deliver to Trump the same verdict that made him famous: ‘You’re fired.’”
An unprecedented number of administration veterans have turned against the president — and even many of those who still back him think he's doomed.
By DANIEL LIPPMAN
President Donald Trump has outraged Democrats and offended ethics lawyers this week by parading a number of his top officials in front of cameras during the Republican National Convention — a possibly illegal breach of historic norms.
But the furor over the precedent-busting encomiums to Trump by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway and others have obscured another way his presidency has broken with the past: just how many of his onetime aides no longer support him.
At least 19 former top Trump administration officials in total have broken publicly with their former boss in one form or another, according to a POLITICO count, and several have already lent their names to various Republicans-for-Biden efforts. Not all of them have said they will vote for Democratic nominee Joe Biden — former national security adviser John Bolton, for instance, says he will pull the lever for an unspecified third person. It amounts to a never-before-seen wave of defections of people who have denounced him or his policies or criticized his character in other ways.
But the potential pool of opposition within the president’s ranks is much larger, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior Trump officials. Anthony Scaramucci, for one — Trump’s short-lived former White House communications director — claimed he has talked to 20 former White House and administration officials who plan to vote for Biden but don’t want to speak publicly to avoid getting hit by Trump on Twitter.
“Anybody of substance is voting for Biden,” he said. “Anybody who has an IQ of over 100 and has worked for Donald Trump, with the exception of Steve Bannon, is not voting for him.” (In early August, Trump tweeted that Scaramucci was “a fool” and “a loser who begged to come back.”)
The interviews revealed a widespread feeling among Trump alums that he will not be re-elected. Some, like Scaramucci, are rooting for the president to lose. Others are critical of a campaign operation they see as flailing. What unites them all is shared skepticism that Trump can overcome the public’s harsh assessment of his management of the pandemic, which has now killed more than 180,000 Americans and has driven millions into poverty and deprivation.
One word that repeatedly came up when Trump alums were asked to describe his reelection prospects: “pessimistic.”
“I think people are starting to worry,” said a former senior administration official. Another Trump administration alum predicts “a total wipeout.”
That pessimism is hardly universal. Some Trump aides are reveling in the lowered expectations because it gives them a chance to replicate their come-from-behind spirit of 2016. They fully expect the race to tighten a few points in the coming weeks, and cast doubt on the polls, arguing that they consistently understate the president’s “silent majority” of supporters who are embarrassed to tell pollsters they’ll vote for Trump. They also believe that Trump counterpunches best when his back is up against the wall.
“All of these anonymous ‘sources’ will be the first to show up at the victory party with a resume in hand, looking for a job in the second term,” said Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh in a statement. “Not one of these people has any idea what’s happening inside the campaign and they don’t see our data. The president is in a stronger position than he was in 2016 and now has a record of achievement to run on.”
“Anyone who underestimates or writes off President Trump does so at their own peril,” said White House spokesman Judd Deere.
But it’s not just the president’s flat poll numbers, which currently place him an average of roughly seven percentage points behind Biden, that factors into the critics’ assessments. The lack of trademark Trump rallies has also put a severe damper on his campaign, which relied on the massive events to drive free and largely unfiltered local media coverage, to stoke Trump’s loyal base of supporters, to inspire them to volunteer and donate — and to siphon up their personal data.
“He’s someone who wants to get out, go to the rallies, see people and now he is stuck in the White House,” said the former senior administration official. “His heart is not about being confined. His heart is about getting out and he needs to find ways to do that, consistent with the realities of Covid.”
Because the June rally in Tulsa, Okla. backfired spectacularly on a number of levels and indefinitely put the president’s signature MAGA rallies on hold, “their biggest asset was left on the sidelines,” said a former White House official. The Trump campaign is trying to adjust by holding mini-MAGA events and doing more retail politics, POLITICO reported this week.
Before the virus hit, the economy was humming, with Vice President Mike Pence saying on Wednesday night in his acceptance speech: “When it came to the economy, President Trump kept his word and then some … to pass the largest tax cut and reform in American history, rolled back more federal red tape than any admin, unleashed American energy and fought for free and fair trade.” With the pandemic having plunged America into recession, Trump and his campaign have promised to “Make America Great Again, Again” and say that the president is uniquely qualified to bring back the economy and get people back to work.
It’s hard to sell that argument to the voters Trump needs to win in November, the critics say.
“The virus has redefined everything, and he has not defined his management of it in a successful way,” said a former senior White House official, who compared the pandemic to a “wet blanket” over Trump. “The numbers are unambiguous. I don’t think he’s going to be able to communicate anything about the economy, about any of these issues effectively, until this isn’t the primary concern of most people. Forget about talking about Joe Biden.”
Former Trump aides are also not happy that the Trump campaign hasn’t done a better job of successfully defining Biden as an elderly puppet of the radical left who will be controlled by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and whose presidency would lead to cities and suburbs being beset by violence.
Asked why the Trump campaign has struggled in its efforts to paint Biden in a negative light, one befuddled former senior White House official simply said: “That I don’t know.”
Some current Trump officials bemoan the president’s lack of an obvious second-term agenda, pointing to his winding response on the matter to Fox News host Sean Hannity. One said he was “horrified” at that answer, which he called “pretty embarrassing … The campaign needs to do a better job of identifying what he’s going to do in a second term.”
A senior White House official pushed back on the notion that Trumpworld isn’t optimistic about winning in November.
“We feel like the pendulum has swung and we feel really strong where we’re at,” said the official. “This convention week has been a great three nights for us and tonight’s going to cap us off and the president’s going to deliver a strong speech. I don’t think this week could have gone better with the convention and our programming. … A lot of people in the White House and among senior staff are feeling really good about where we’re at.”
Trump veterans on the outside, though, worry that if the election’s dominant question is whether to keep the president in office, he will likely lose. They would feel much more comfortable if the campaign had successfully reframed the election as a choice between Trump’s vision of rebuilding the economy after a pandemic and Biden’s message of restoring “the soul of America.”
“Right now the focus is all on whether to retain [Trump],” said the former senior administration official. “I’d love to see the president go out and make it into a choice rather than a retention election.”
Trump alums are also worried about how their former boss might fare in the upcoming debates against Biden, notwithstanding the campaign’s bravado about the 77-year-old Democrat’s supposedly declining mental fitness.
“Seventy-five percent of the questions are going to be, ‘Hey, Mr. President, many thousands of Americans have died from a virus that you’ve downplayed, you haven’t gotten a supply chain working, you haven’t reassured the public, you haven’t given clear guidance to wear a mask, you haven’t done all these things on your watch in the last 6 months well enough,’” said a former senior White House official, who said his former colleagues understand that they had underestimated the coronavirus.
“If the virus and the handling of it is the core set of questions when it comes to the debates, he’s not going to be talking about trade, about defeating ISIS, or cutting regulations or energy policy or the lowest unemployment rate among African-Americans. All those talking points and accomplishments have been kind of lit on fire,” the person added.
A former senior White House official said he also knows of one or two former colleagues who have told him they’re going to vote for Biden. “I know more who have said they would have a tough time pulling the lever for Trump but they also can’t vote for Biden so they may write somebody in,” this person said.
“I believe there is far less percent support among those that used to work for President Trump than there is in the general population,” said another former senior administration official. “I know almost no one that supports him that used to work for him. You will see more and more people coming out against him in the coming months.”
Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, said he didn’t know how the pandemic will affect turnout in November, but feels confident that Trump will lose.
“What we do know is that the sentiment of the American people is clear: They’re fed up with Trump and the tumult -- and they’re desperate for sanity in the White House,” said Taylor, who is recruiting current and former Trump officials to join an anti-Trump group he recently started. “He’s proven himself thoroughly unqualified to keep doing the job. So I suspect voters are going to deliver to Trump the same verdict that made him famous: ‘You’re fired.’”
Not the Time
Take It From Eastern Europe: Now Is Not the Time to Go Soft on Russia
Vladimir Putin continues to undermine liberal democracy in Europe and beyond. America should not turn its back on that threat.
By SŁAWOMIR DĘBSKI, JAMES SHERR and JAKUB JANDA
The following open letter was signed by 40 foreign-policy experts and current and former officials whose names and affiliations appear below.
We read with considerable interest the recent open letter published in Politico Magazine by 103 signatories who called for a “rethinking” of U.S. policy toward Russia. The U.S. presidential campaign is a good time to rethink America’s foreign policy, and in doing so, the United States reminds other countries of the importance of open, inclusive debate. All of the letter’s signatories are people of distinction; many of them are personal friends.
But we believe that this debate will be deficient if it does not incorporate the perspective of U.S. allies in Central and East-Central Europe. We read the rebuke to the letter that POLITICO published, authored by David J. Kramer and signed by 32 others. While we share many of their concerns, we also feel compelled to present our own perspective.
Maintaining the legal and normative foundations of post-Cold War Europe has been a fundamental U.S. national interest for almost 30 years and, for NATO allies, an article of faith. The Paris Charter of 1990, the Budapest Document of 1994 and the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997 enshrined respect for sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and freedom of choice as the hallmarks of a “new era.” It was the acceptance of these principles—first by the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, then by the Russian Federation under Boris Yeltsin—that ended the Cold War. These arrangements have brought security, stability and prosperity to most of the continent.
But Russia’s attack on Georgia in 2008 and, with greater brazenness, on Ukraine six years later constituted a frontal assault on these principles and the European security order. In 2014, President Vladimir Putin pronounced that order “deformed.” The hybrid war that Russia has imposed on Ukraine is now complemented by a full spectrum of other measures—from disinformation to financial corruption—that are designed to undermine liberal democracy and weaken transatlantic cohesion. These are matters of the utmost seriousness.
It is not clear whether the authors of the original open letter agree with this assessment. They rightly call for better ways to “deal effectively” with Russian hacking, electoral interference and disinformation, but they do so without drawing the necessary conclusion that these are the actions of a hostile power. They call for neither the abandonment nor the intensification of sanctions; instead they argue, counterintuitively, that the “steady accumulation” of sanctions “reduces any incentive Moscow might have to change course.” The writers support a “fair” and “acceptable” outcome in Ukraine without telling us whether this presupposes the restoration of the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
The authors underscore “the imperative to restore U.S.-Russian leadership in managing a nuclear world.” But they do not note that this leadership was a feature of the Cold War and that its prudent management withstood very serious challenges in that era. We share the authors’ concerns about the erosion of the arms control regime painstakingly constructed during several decades of superpower rivalry. But the United States did not consider the nuclear danger a reason to change course during a time of Cold War confrontation, and we do not see a case for doing so now.
The authors also underscore the “imperative to make safer and more stable the military standoff that cuts across Europe’s most unstable regions, from the Baltic to the Black Sea.” Here we most certainly agree. But we are puzzled that deterrence does not feature among the “existing constraints” that the authors would “preserve.” In 2014, NATO’s Newport summit restored deterrence as a key component of NATO policy; its importance has been reiterated in every summit declaration since. Yet the authors’ sole mention of deterrence couples it with the word “détente.”
What’s more, we do not agree that, as the letter says, America’s “foreign-policy arsenal [has been] reduced mainly to reactions, sanctions, public shaming and congressional resolutions.” In fiscal year 2017, the U.S. European Command budget was increased by 40 percent. That step—along with measures agreed to at recent NATO summits and the increasingly robust Western sanctions regime—have done much to defuse the dangerous dynamic unleashed by Russia’s war in Ukraine and its provocative military conduct in the Black Sea and Nordic-Baltic region. Ukraine bore the brunt of defeating Russia’s Novorossiya project—its effort to rejoin to Russia the lands in eastern and southern Ukraine originally conquered by Catherine the Great. But allied training and advisory assistance, along with International Monetary Fund and European Union support, have also reduced the threats to Ukraine’s integrity and survival. Russia remains an existential threat in Ukraine and a potential threat to East-Central Europe, but the immediate danger is attenuated. For this, Western (including U.S.) policy deserves a large share of credit.
The authors suggest the necessity for “a serious and sustained strategic dialogue that addresses the deeper sources of mistrust and hostility” between Moscow and Washington. But we fail to see the contradiction between such dialogue—of which there has been a considerable amount since 2014—and the defense of well-articulated and established interests. The same holds true for the maintenance of professional relations and effective communication channels between Western and Russian military, security and diplomatic establishments. We support these measures, along with any reasonable efforts that would establish meaningful cooperation against the current pandemic and climate change. But we fail to see why there must be a trade-off between these goals and core Western policies, and we will not accept one.
Finally, we have always maintained that “we must deal with Russia as it is,” as the open letter advocates. But we should have no illusions about what that means. As the letter all but states, Russia has revived the orthodoxies of the pre-1914 world: defense perimeters, spheres of influence, client states and “civilizational zones,” irrespective of the wishes of the people who inhabit them. This outlook stands in opposition to that of Western democracies. Our challenge is to manage this antagonism in ways that minimize miscalculation, preserve elements of cooperation, and make progress and compromise possible. Russia is a country that knows its interests and pursues them. We will improve neither the relationship nor our own security if we fail to do the same.
What, then, should the priorities of the West—the United States, NATO and the EU—be toward Russia?
• First, to maintain the defense and security of the Euro-Atlantic area, in close consultation and cooperation with allies. This commitment is the bedrock of the NATO alliance. It does not depend on Russia’s consent and is not diminished by the challenge China poses.
• Second, to restore the political integrity of the Euro-Atlantic area, which has been damaged by the causes of “America First” and “European strategic autonomy.” The menu of common challenges Europe and America face regarding China creates a further potential for U.S. cooperation with Europe, whereas we regard cooperation with Russia over China as a diversion and a fantasy.
• Third, to uphold the post-Cold War settlement and constrain those who would reverse it. Our cause in NATO partner and Eastern Partnership countries is not to export liberal democracy. It is to defend sovereignty and freedom of choice, and also provide meaningful but conditional support to those pursuing the goals of European and Euro-Atlantic integration. Additionally, NATO, the United States and the EU should be prepared to support these partners by all prudent means short of war, should they find themselves threatened or attacked. Finally, we should state without equivocation that the future of Belarus must be determined by its people, not its leaders, its security services or foreign powers.
• Fourth, to undertake a concerted effort to engage Russia in a restoration of the much-eroded arms control regime. That will not be accomplished by adhering to agreements that have outlived their utility. To be effective, arms control must keep pace with military-technical reality and, of course, be verifiable.
• Fifth, to strengthen the resilience and defense-mindedness of liberal democracies subjected to malign Russian activity in Western politics and business. Such activity would be significantly less toxic if Western political and business circles were not so complicit in it. The United States and the EU need to invest in joint platforms to address Russia’s alliance with corrupt entities in our own countries and develop joint mechanisms to combat it.
• Sixth, to engage in vigorous, well-substantiated dialogue with Russia—and the full spectrum of Russians. Let there be no doubt that it is Russia’s authorities who have limited the scope of dialogue.
For all of our differences with the authors of the open letter, we hope that these recommendations provide enough common ground to sustain the debate that our American friends have started. We look forward to the day when a similar debate emerges in Russia. The approaches articulated in the open letter will be much more realistic at that point than they are today.
Vladimir Putin continues to undermine liberal democracy in Europe and beyond. America should not turn its back on that threat.
By SŁAWOMIR DĘBSKI, JAMES SHERR and JAKUB JANDA
The following open letter was signed by 40 foreign-policy experts and current and former officials whose names and affiliations appear below.
We read with considerable interest the recent open letter published in Politico Magazine by 103 signatories who called for a “rethinking” of U.S. policy toward Russia. The U.S. presidential campaign is a good time to rethink America’s foreign policy, and in doing so, the United States reminds other countries of the importance of open, inclusive debate. All of the letter’s signatories are people of distinction; many of them are personal friends.
But we believe that this debate will be deficient if it does not incorporate the perspective of U.S. allies in Central and East-Central Europe. We read the rebuke to the letter that POLITICO published, authored by David J. Kramer and signed by 32 others. While we share many of their concerns, we also feel compelled to present our own perspective.
Maintaining the legal and normative foundations of post-Cold War Europe has been a fundamental U.S. national interest for almost 30 years and, for NATO allies, an article of faith. The Paris Charter of 1990, the Budapest Document of 1994 and the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997 enshrined respect for sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and freedom of choice as the hallmarks of a “new era.” It was the acceptance of these principles—first by the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, then by the Russian Federation under Boris Yeltsin—that ended the Cold War. These arrangements have brought security, stability and prosperity to most of the continent.
But Russia’s attack on Georgia in 2008 and, with greater brazenness, on Ukraine six years later constituted a frontal assault on these principles and the European security order. In 2014, President Vladimir Putin pronounced that order “deformed.” The hybrid war that Russia has imposed on Ukraine is now complemented by a full spectrum of other measures—from disinformation to financial corruption—that are designed to undermine liberal democracy and weaken transatlantic cohesion. These are matters of the utmost seriousness.
It is not clear whether the authors of the original open letter agree with this assessment. They rightly call for better ways to “deal effectively” with Russian hacking, electoral interference and disinformation, but they do so without drawing the necessary conclusion that these are the actions of a hostile power. They call for neither the abandonment nor the intensification of sanctions; instead they argue, counterintuitively, that the “steady accumulation” of sanctions “reduces any incentive Moscow might have to change course.” The writers support a “fair” and “acceptable” outcome in Ukraine without telling us whether this presupposes the restoration of the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
The authors underscore “the imperative to restore U.S.-Russian leadership in managing a nuclear world.” But they do not note that this leadership was a feature of the Cold War and that its prudent management withstood very serious challenges in that era. We share the authors’ concerns about the erosion of the arms control regime painstakingly constructed during several decades of superpower rivalry. But the United States did not consider the nuclear danger a reason to change course during a time of Cold War confrontation, and we do not see a case for doing so now.
The authors also underscore the “imperative to make safer and more stable the military standoff that cuts across Europe’s most unstable regions, from the Baltic to the Black Sea.” Here we most certainly agree. But we are puzzled that deterrence does not feature among the “existing constraints” that the authors would “preserve.” In 2014, NATO’s Newport summit restored deterrence as a key component of NATO policy; its importance has been reiterated in every summit declaration since. Yet the authors’ sole mention of deterrence couples it with the word “détente.”
What’s more, we do not agree that, as the letter says, America’s “foreign-policy arsenal [has been] reduced mainly to reactions, sanctions, public shaming and congressional resolutions.” In fiscal year 2017, the U.S. European Command budget was increased by 40 percent. That step—along with measures agreed to at recent NATO summits and the increasingly robust Western sanctions regime—have done much to defuse the dangerous dynamic unleashed by Russia’s war in Ukraine and its provocative military conduct in the Black Sea and Nordic-Baltic region. Ukraine bore the brunt of defeating Russia’s Novorossiya project—its effort to rejoin to Russia the lands in eastern and southern Ukraine originally conquered by Catherine the Great. But allied training and advisory assistance, along with International Monetary Fund and European Union support, have also reduced the threats to Ukraine’s integrity and survival. Russia remains an existential threat in Ukraine and a potential threat to East-Central Europe, but the immediate danger is attenuated. For this, Western (including U.S.) policy deserves a large share of credit.
The authors suggest the necessity for “a serious and sustained strategic dialogue that addresses the deeper sources of mistrust and hostility” between Moscow and Washington. But we fail to see the contradiction between such dialogue—of which there has been a considerable amount since 2014—and the defense of well-articulated and established interests. The same holds true for the maintenance of professional relations and effective communication channels between Western and Russian military, security and diplomatic establishments. We support these measures, along with any reasonable efforts that would establish meaningful cooperation against the current pandemic and climate change. But we fail to see why there must be a trade-off between these goals and core Western policies, and we will not accept one.
Finally, we have always maintained that “we must deal with Russia as it is,” as the open letter advocates. But we should have no illusions about what that means. As the letter all but states, Russia has revived the orthodoxies of the pre-1914 world: defense perimeters, spheres of influence, client states and “civilizational zones,” irrespective of the wishes of the people who inhabit them. This outlook stands in opposition to that of Western democracies. Our challenge is to manage this antagonism in ways that minimize miscalculation, preserve elements of cooperation, and make progress and compromise possible. Russia is a country that knows its interests and pursues them. We will improve neither the relationship nor our own security if we fail to do the same.
What, then, should the priorities of the West—the United States, NATO and the EU—be toward Russia?
• First, to maintain the defense and security of the Euro-Atlantic area, in close consultation and cooperation with allies. This commitment is the bedrock of the NATO alliance. It does not depend on Russia’s consent and is not diminished by the challenge China poses.
• Second, to restore the political integrity of the Euro-Atlantic area, which has been damaged by the causes of “America First” and “European strategic autonomy.” The menu of common challenges Europe and America face regarding China creates a further potential for U.S. cooperation with Europe, whereas we regard cooperation with Russia over China as a diversion and a fantasy.
• Third, to uphold the post-Cold War settlement and constrain those who would reverse it. Our cause in NATO partner and Eastern Partnership countries is not to export liberal democracy. It is to defend sovereignty and freedom of choice, and also provide meaningful but conditional support to those pursuing the goals of European and Euro-Atlantic integration. Additionally, NATO, the United States and the EU should be prepared to support these partners by all prudent means short of war, should they find themselves threatened or attacked. Finally, we should state without equivocation that the future of Belarus must be determined by its people, not its leaders, its security services or foreign powers.
• Fourth, to undertake a concerted effort to engage Russia in a restoration of the much-eroded arms control regime. That will not be accomplished by adhering to agreements that have outlived their utility. To be effective, arms control must keep pace with military-technical reality and, of course, be verifiable.
• Fifth, to strengthen the resilience and defense-mindedness of liberal democracies subjected to malign Russian activity in Western politics and business. Such activity would be significantly less toxic if Western political and business circles were not so complicit in it. The United States and the EU need to invest in joint platforms to address Russia’s alliance with corrupt entities in our own countries and develop joint mechanisms to combat it.
• Sixth, to engage in vigorous, well-substantiated dialogue with Russia—and the full spectrum of Russians. Let there be no doubt that it is Russia’s authorities who have limited the scope of dialogue.
For all of our differences with the authors of the open letter, we hope that these recommendations provide enough common ground to sustain the debate that our American friends have started. We look forward to the day when a similar debate emerges in Russia. The approaches articulated in the open letter will be much more realistic at that point than they are today.
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