The real Russia hoax, CNN.com

The real Russia hoax

Opinion by Peter Bergen

Updated 8:56 PM ET, Thu July 2, 2020

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.”

(CNN)President Donald Trump has termed the richly reported stories that the Russians paid Afghan militants bounties to kill US soldiers based in Afghanistan a “hoax.”

But the real hoax is how White House officials are covering up for Trump’s incompetence as commander in chief who is responsible for the welfare of the US military and who has consistently maintained a bizarre bromance with a former KGB officer, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

On Monday White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said of the intelligence surrounding the Russian bounties, “there were dissenting opinions within the intelligence community, and it would not be elevated to the president until it was verified.” Robert O’ Brien, Trump’s national security adviser, similarly tweeted that because the intelligence hadn’t been “verified” the president wasn’t briefed.

But this explanation makes no sense at all. Presidents get plenty of unverified information. Intelligence is not like mathematics where 2+2 can always be “verified” to make 4.

Think of the operation during which Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs in Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2011.

There was no “verified” intelligence that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. It was an entirely circumstantial case that he might be there, and former President Barack Obama had to make the call to dispatch the SEALs on a potentially quite dangerous mission despite the fact there was significant dissent within the intelligence community about the likelihood that bin Laden was there.

As I found when I was reporting my book “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad,” in the weeks before Obama ordered the bin Laden raid, a small intelligence “Red Team” was tasked to examine the intelligence that bin Laden might be in Abbottabad. The team came back with a range of estimates that al Qaeda’s leader was in Abbottabad varying from 40% to 60% confidence. When Obama ordered the risky bin Laden operation he did so knowing that there was likely only a 50/50 chance that he was in Abbottabad.

And that gets to the nature of intelligence. When the US intelligence agencies examine an issue of particular importance to US policymakers they often will issue a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). The word “estimate” is telling. US opponents cloak their actions in secrecy and so the American intelligence community tries to break through this veil of secrecy typically with some combination of human sources, signals intelligence and satellite imagery. This doesn’t typically produce a “verified” truth but rather an estimate that often comes with varying levels of “confidence” from “high” to “low.” Here, for instance, is a declassified NIE from 2007 about the history of the Iranian nuclear program

According to his national security adviser, O’Brien, Trump wasn’t personally briefed about the Russian bounties. If this is true, the real reason for this seems likely not because that intelligence wasn’t important, but that Trump simply doesn’t want to hear anything bad about his buddy Putin and so US intelligence officials have consistently downplayed to Trump anything that might make Putin look bad, according to The Madman Theory, a forthcoming book by CNN’s Jim Sciutto.

And the fact that the Russian bounty intelligence was put in the Presidential Daily Brief earlier this year means little since Trump hardly ever reads these briefings, according to the Washington Post and the New York Times, shirking his responsibilities as commander in chief to spend untold hours hate-watching cable news and tweeting about all sort of trivia and grudges instead of doing the hard work of getting informed to protect the American people and its military.

It’s not a secret, or even news that Russia has been supporting the Taliban. In March 2018, the top US commander in Afghanistan, General John “Mick” Nicholson, told the BBC that Russian weapons were smuggled to the Taliban and that they “provide some degree of support to the Taliban.” So, some version of the facts of Russian support to the Taliban has been public for more than two years.

The real question White House officials haven’t begun to address — so eager are they to say that the President wasn’t informed about plots to kill US troops in Afghanistan — is: What will the Trump administration do about this? After all, Trump personally ordered the killing in January of General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iranian military operations in the Middle East, for supposedly planning attacks on US targets in the region.
Would Trump order some kind of retaliatory action against the Russians based on the intelligence about their bounties for the lives of US soldiers? The question answers itself.

The problem Trump’s West Point speech can’t fix, CNN.com

The problem Trump’s West Point speech can’t fix
Peter Bergen

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.”

(CNN)On Saturday, President Trump delivered a commencement speech at the US Military Academy at West Point, New York, honoring the graduating cadets for their service while touting the “colossal rebuilding” of the armed forces under his presidency.

“To the 1,107 who today become the newest officers in the most exceptional Army ever to take the field of battle, I am here to offer America’s salute. Thank you for answering your nation’s call,” he said.
What wasn’t immediately apparent from his speech — which Trump delivered with the help of a teleprompter — was the growing disconnect between the President and the US military.

Not since President John F. Kennedy ignored his top military officers’ advice to invade Cuba and deploy nuclear weapons against the Soviets during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis has there been such a split between an American president and the Pentagon.

Consider that Trump’s top military adviser General Mark Milley publicly said it was a “mistake” for him to have appeared in an infamous photo op with the President after a walk from the Rose Garden at the White House.
The photo op, which culminated in Trump holding up a bible outside St. John’s Church, was made possible by first violently dispersing peaceful protesters outside the White House two weeks ago. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued the apology in a video commencement address to the National Defense University on Thursday and said, “I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”

Trump’s Defense Secretary Mark Esper also tried to distance himself from that photo op. The former US Army officer publicly broke with the President and said he did not support Trump’s calls to invoke the Insurrection Act and use active duty troops to quell the protests that had broken out after George Floyd’s killing. CNN reported that Esper’s statement went over “poorly at the White House, where his standing was already viewed to be tenuous.”

Around the same time, Esper’s predecessor, retired General Jim Mattis, broke his long silence and launched a personal attack on the President he served for two years. He said, “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.”

To top it off, four former chairmen of the joint chiefs, going back to the administration of President George H. W. Bush, all took the extraordinary step of publicly breaking with the President to condemn the use of violence against peaceful protestors. For good measure one of those former chairmen, retired General Colin Powell, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Trump lies “all the time.”

Many other retired four-star generals and admirals have spoken out against Trump.

There is a widespread perception that Trump is quite popular within the US military. But many active duty personnel have soured on him, and Trump’s chairman of the joint chiefs and his defense secretary have publicly distanced themselves from the President — as have some of the nation’s most revered retired generals and admirals.

President Trump has long thrilled to the power of the US military, which he celebrated in Saturday’s West Point speech. But he is now in the unusual position of being the Commander in Chief of a military that is turning away from him.

This article was updated to clarify the scope of the President’s photo op, which began at the White House and culminated outside St. John’s Church.

Bolton’s memoir oozes with contempt for his former boss, CNN.com

Bolton book oozes with contempt for his old boss
Peter Bergen
Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

(CNN)There is simply no precedent for a former top administration official publishing a book about a sitting president that is as damning as John Bolton’s.

To even come close, you have to go back three and half decades to David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, and his 1986 book, “The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed,” which painted a deeply unflattering portrait of Reagan and his senior White House advisers.
But Bolton’s book “The Room Where It Happened” makes Stockman’s look like one of the so-called “love letters” that the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has routinely sent to the easily-flattered and bottomlessly narcissistic President Donald Trump.

Bolton’s portrayal of Trump is devastating. And it will be hard for Trump supporters to paint him as some pinko liberal since he volunteered as a teenager to work for the Barry Goldwater campaign, then interned for Spiro Agnew and went on to work in Republican administrations going back to Reagan. Bolton was also a frequent and bellicose presence on Fox News before he joined the Trump administration. It’s not hard to understand why Trump has sought to block the book’s publication and has branded it a pack of lies.
Some Trump allies have suggested that Bolton, who received a reported $2 million book advance, is larding up his memoir with untruths to sell books.

This seems unlikely. Bolton is already quite well off, according to his 2018 financial disclosures, earning more than half a million dollars a year from Fox News alone before he joined the Trump administration and possessing many millions of dollars in stocks and other property.

There may be a simpler explanation for why Bolton wrote his tell-all book, which is being published Tuesday. Unlike Trump who was born with a platinum spoon in his mouth, Bolton is the son of a Baltimore firefighter who by dint of smarts and hard work went to Yale University and then Yale Law School. Subsequently, Bolton mastered the arcana of policymaking working at ever-higher levels in four Republican administrations.
Whatever you think of his views, he had spent a long career studying the issues facing those at the highest levels of the national security apparatus, in contrast to Trump who had done absolutely no serious preparation for the decisions he would have to make as president.

A blistering takedown

Bolton’s personal contempt for Trump oozes from almost every page. In the 500-plus page memoir it’s hard to find any moment where Trump is portrayed in any kind of positive light.

Indeed, Trump took an action which Bolton wholeheartedly approved of — ordering the killing in early January of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, who ran Iran’s military operations around the Middle East — yet it goes unmentioned in Bolton’s memoir. (In the immediate aftermath of the event, Bolton tweeted, “Congratulations to all involved in eliminating Qassem Soleimani. Long in the making, this was a decisive blow against Iran’s malign Quds Force activities worldwide. Hope this is the first step to regime change in Tehran.)
There would have been plenty of time for Bolton to include praise for the killing of Soleimani in his manuscript since it occurred many weeks before the full emergence of the coronavirus crisis in the US, a subject the former national security adviser covers devastatingly. When the crisis hit, according to Bolton’s book, “the chair behind the Resolute desk was empty,” referring to the president’s desk in the Oval Office.
On one level, “The Room Where It Happened” is a blistering, bitter takedown of the president who Bolton describes as ignorant of such basic facts as that the United Kingdom is a nuclear power; a commander in chief who blathered through many of his own intelligence briefings and who changed his mind on a dime — “we made a weathervane look like the Rock of Gibraltar” — and who filtered all his decisions through an electoral lens, even to the extent of encouraging Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him get reelected by purchasing more goods from American farmers. Bolton observes, “I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations.”

At another level, “The Room Where It Happened” is also a searing indictment of the Trump administration’s incoherent foreign policy in which, of course, Bolton played a starring role in as Trump’s National Security Adviser even as he often privately thought that much of Trump’s foreign policy was going off the rails.
Bolton describes Trump’s foreign policy thusly: “Trump was not following any international grand strategy, or even a consistent trajectory. His thinking was like an archipelago of dots (like individual real estate deals) leaving the rest of us to discern-or create-policy.”
Trump got played

Take all those love letters from “Chairman Kim” as Trump has often referred to the North Korean dictator in his frequent tweets about him. Bolton, who has spent a good chunk of his professional life working on arms control issues, wrote in his 2007 memoir “Surrender is Not an Option” that North Korea will “never give up its nuclear weapons voluntarily” and that any promises to do so were simply to lift sanctions against it. North Korea, Bolton wrote, “has followed this game plan many times, and it has every reason to believe it will succeed in the future.”
Quite so. As Bolton’s new memoir amply documents, Chairman Kim played Trump like a Stradivarius, showing up for meetings with Trump in Singapore in 2018 and the following year at the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea that were no more than great photo ops. Yet the North Koreans have done absolutely nothing to denuclearize, which for decades has been the bedrock aim of US policy on North Korea.

At the Singapore meeting, Bolton describes Trump unilaterally giving away concessions to Kim — such as canceling joint US-South Korea military exercises, a longtime cornerstone of containing the nuclear-armed North Korean rogue state — and getting nothing in return. Bolton says Trump didn’t consult any members of his cabinet when he told Kim the exercises would be canceled, blindsiding both the Pentagon and Bolton.

Trump told Kim that North Korea was doing the US a big favor because cancelling the exercises “saved the United States a lot of money.” Bolton writes that when Trump made this remark, “Kim was smiling broadly, laughing from time to time.” The jovial dictator had correctly pegged Trump as an easy mark.
Ditto for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who Trump infamously defended over his own intelligence community when he stood by Putin at a press conference in Helsinki in July 2018 and said that he believed the former KGB officer’s assurances that Russia hadn’t interfered in the 2016 US presidential election. Bolton describes how he and Trump’s chief of staff John Kelly were “almost frozen in our seats” when Trump made this “self-inflicted wound” that led to “catastrophic” media coverage.

If Trump loves kowtowing to dictators, he also enjoys dumping on close allies. Trump’s first Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has described NATO as the most successful alliance in modern history, but rather than seeing NATO as a mutual self defense alliance that serves American interests very well, Trump sees it as a constellation of countries that are ripping off the United States.

Trump often told Bolton and other key advisers that he planned to pull out of NATO, which makes about as much sense as closing down the Federal Reserve, another favorite Trump target.
NATO countries have committed to spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense spending by 2024. For Trump, countries such as Germany that haven’t yet met this 2% target “owe us a tremendous amount of money” as he said publicly when visiting NATO headquarters in Brussels in July 2018. In fact, the US is not “owed” any of this money. In Brussels, Trump added for good measure that “Germany is totally controlled by Russia,” a bizarre statement since the Soviets had indeed once controlled East Germany during the Cold War but hadn’t done so since the Berlin Wall had fallen.
What the United States gains by Trump’s alienation of close American allies such as Germany and cozying up to longtime US enemies like Putin has never been clear, and Bolton doesn’t explore in his book what longer term damage Trump may have done to America’s alliances. Nor does Bolton engage in any self-reflection about why he chose to serve and ultimately to enable someone as chaotic and incompetent as Trump.

The Iran standoff

Bolton, who has publicly advocated for regime change in Iran, was of course delighted that Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal a few weeks after Bolton was appointed National Security Adviser in March 2018.
Bolton was far less happy when a $130 million US drone was shot down by the Iranians in June 2019 and Trump called back at the very last-minute a Pentagon-planned retaliatory attack against Iranian military facilities. The President told Bolton that there would be “too many body bags.” Bolton fumes that it was “the most irrational thing I ever witnessed a President do.”
In fact, Trump likely showed some good judgment here as the US drone was, of course, unmanned, and killing Iranian soldiers on the ground in response likely would have provoked some kind of escalatory reaction by the Iranian regime.

On Afghanistan, Bolton describes Trump “constantly” confusing the former Afghan president Hamid Karzai and the current Afghan president Ashraf Ghani while pursuing an incoherent policy of simultaneously having the State Department negotiate with the Taliban to draw down all US troops to zero, while the Pentagon and Bolton were planning to keep thousands of American troops in Afghanistan to pursue counterterrorism missions against al Qaeda and ISIS. This incoherent policy continues to this day.
Settling scores

There is a fair amount of score settling in the book. Trump’s former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley is described to Bolton by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as “light as a feather.” Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is taken to task for his fantasy of bringing peace to the Middle East “where the likes of Kissinger had failed.” Both former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and current Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin are portrayed as weak. The media is invariably described as a “press mob.”
Meanwhile, Bolton always positions himself as the smartest guy in “the room where it happened.” One episode that doesn’t suggest that this was always the case was the key role that Bolton played in trying to eject from power the Cuba-backed leader of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro in favor of the opposition leader Juan Guaidó. The whole effort fizzled, and Maduro is still in power today.

On Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, which led to his impeachment trial, Bolton says the president was convinced by the crazy conspiracy theory that “Ukraine was actually responsible for carrying out Moscow’s efforts to hack US elections.” Part of that conspiracy theory involves the barmy idea that the Democratic National Committee server that was hacked by the Russians can be found in Ukraine. Trump tells members of his cabinet including Bolton, “I want that f—–g server.” Americans now have a president who lives in serious tin foil hat land.
Bolton told ABC News that he wrote his book to tell a “complete picture” of what he saw during the Trump administration and let readers “make up their own decisions” about what it all means.
In five months, many of those readers, who have already made Bolton’s memoir the top non-fiction Amazon bestseller of 2020, will have an opportunity to do just that.

Who’s right on schools, Fauci or Trump? CNN.com

Who’s right on schools, Fauci or Trump?

CNN Wire
May 15, 2020 Friday 1:26 PM GMT

Copyright 2020 Cable News Network All Rights Reserved

Length: 854 words

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Editor’s note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of the new book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

(CNN) — President Donald Trump has publicly disputed Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony on Tuesday before a US Senate committee about the dangers of reopening the United States prematurely — and in particular, Dr. Fauci’s warning about starting up schools too early. Fauci said that schools in certain localities might have to remain closed into the fall.

Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday, “I was surprised by his answer actually, because, you know, it’s just to me — it’s not an acceptable answer, especially when it comes to schools.” He was implying, if not stating outright, that opening the economy can’t be done without reopening schools. Trump added that Fauci wanted “to play all sides of the equation.” It’s not clear what the president meant by this observation, but it sure doesn’t sound like a compliment.

It’s important to note that Fauci didn’t categorically oppose opening schools but urged caution at every step of reopening. When asked by Sen. Lamar Alexander whether he was saying students shouldn’t return to school at all until there is a vaccine, Fauci replied, “Absolutely not.”

So, is Trump or Fauci right when it comes to the risks of having kids go back to school in the fall?

This is gonna come as a shocker: The nation’s top infectious disease official has science on his side while the I-always-trust-my-gut president doesn’t. Since 1984, Fauci has served as the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for presidents going back to former President Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile, Trump has consistently presented quarter-baked notions about the pandemic, from saying it will all clear up with warmer weather to claiming months ago that cases will go down to zero to musing about taking disinfectants to ward off the virus (remarks he later tried to claim were a joke).

While Trump deemed Fauci’s answer “not acceptable,” he failed to offer any plan or explanation of his own about how Americans might be able to send their kids back to school safely any time soon. It’s not just that some 150 children (mostly in New York but some elsewhere, with a recent cluster also reported in Paris) have coronavirus-related multisystem inflammatory syndrome that can affect key organs such as the heart and kidneys.

The deeper issue is that children may carry the same viral load as adults even if they generally don’t come down with serious illnesses. That means that kids returning to schools could spread the coronavirus back into homes and communities filled with their teachers, school staff, family and friends who could be put in peril.

Science Magazine examined cases in China and found that “children were about a third as susceptible to coronavirus infection as adults were. But when schools were open…children had about three times as many contacts as adults, and three times as many opportunities to become infected…” The study found that keeping schools closed may reduce the surge in cases by 40 to 60%.

A study in Germany screened nearly 60,000 patients for Covid-19, of whom nearly 4,000 tested positive, and included patients between the ages of one to 100 years old. The study found that the levels of infection were similar across all ages. The lead researcher on the German study, Dr. Christian Drosten, said he posted his study on his lab’s website before a peer review because of the urgent questions around the opening of schools in Germany. Dr. Drosten said to the New York Times about the prospect of even considering reopening schools in the United States, “I think it’s way too early.”

Of course, keeping children out of school for long periods comes with its own costs such as forcing parents to stay at home so preventing many of them from working. This is especially difficult if they are living paycheck to paycheck in service sector jobs that require them to be in situ at their jobs. Then add to that the psychological effects on kids of being away from their school and friends for long periods of time.

President Trump’s objection to Fauci’s comments is one that many Americans might sympathize with — they are in an unsolvable bind and are truly suffering. But a real president would do more than just dispute or dismiss Fauci — he would try to alleviate some of that suffering while keeping as many Americans as possible safe. He might even work to publicize and endorse the much more detailed guidelines for what it would take to open up schools and other institutions in a prudent manner that were prepared by his own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, instead of letting his administration bury them in favor of the series of brief checklists (“decision trees”) the CDC released on Thursday.

FBI delivers to America a chilling reminder about al Qaeda, CNN.com

FBI delivers to America a chilling reminder about al Qaeda

CNN Wire
May 19, 2020 Tuesday 1:23 AM GMT

Copyright 2020 Cable News Network All Rights Reserved

Length: 642 words

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Editor’s note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of the new book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

(CNN) — Did al Qaeda strike a blow to the United States at the end of last year? FBI Director Christopher Wray told a press conference on Monday that Mohammed Alshamrani, a member of the Royal Saudi Air Force who killed three US sailors at the Pensacola Naval Air Station last December, was a terrorist associated with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, an al Qaeda affiliate based in Yemen.

This means that the FBI may have determined that, unlike other recent acts of terrorism perpetrated by self-radicalized domestic terrorists, the Pensacola attack may be the first time since 9/11 that a foreign terrorist organization was able to strike successfully in the United States. (Though, as CNN noted, the officials “stopped short of saying that Alshamrani had been directed by the terror group.”)

It is also a reminder that the Trump administration’s travel ban, which primarily targets Muslim-majority countries, is likely not the shield the president says it is. Saudi citizens like Alshamrani are not subject to the ban and the Trump administration continues to enjoy warm relations with the Saudi royal family.

AQAP had claimed responsibility for the Pensacola attack in February, but such boasts are not always genuine. Wray said evidence gathered from Alshamrani’s two iPhones showed that he had been coordinating “planning and tactics” with AQAP.

Wray and Attorney General William Barr, who also spoke at Monday’s press conference, had harsh words for Apple, which manufactured Alshamrani’s phones, saying that the company had not helped to unlock them. Barr said it was only the FBI’s own computer experts who were able to find the encrypted information that tied Alshamrani to AQAP.

Apple said in January that it had already helped the FBI by giving it access to the data from Alshamrani two phones that was stored in cloud storage, but that it was unable to help with the encryption on the devices that was essential to protect its customers from hackers and criminals.

No doubt Alshamrani’s case will be cited often in the future by the FBI and Department of Justice to argue that they need to be able to break into encrypted phones when they have a lawful search warrant, as they did in Alshamrani’s case. And Apple will continue to assert that the encryption they place on the phone is a necessary part of their business model to assure their consumers that their data is safe and that installing any kind of “back door” on their phones could be exploited by all sorts of bad actors.

In a 2016 letter to customers, Apple said that the issue was so important that even Apple can’t unlock its own phones saying, “We have even put that data out of our own reach, because we believe the contents of your iPhone are none of our business.”

The letter from Apple was issued after the FBI said Apple had to bypass the encryption on one of their iPhones after two ISIS-inspired terrorists killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California, in 2015. Despite a court order, Apple refused to hack into the terrorists’ phone, and eventually the FBI found a technical solution on its own.

Aside from highlighting the ineffectualness of the administration’s travel ban, the Pensacola attack is also a reminder that although al Qaeda and its affiliates have been greatly damaged by US drone strikes and other counterterrorism measures, they still remain focused on attacking American targets and very occasionally they may succeed.

The Trump crew’s Covid quackery CNN.com

The Trump crew’s Covid quackery

CNN Wire
May 19, 2020 Tuesday 9:50 PM GMT

Copyright 2020 Cable News Network All Rights Reserved

Length: 890 words

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Editor’s note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of the new book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

(CNN) — President Donald Trump said at a White House roundtable event on Monday: “I’m taking it, hydroxychloroquine. Right now, yeah. Couple of weeks ago, I started taking it. Cause I think it’s good, I’ve heard a lot of good stories.”

This admission about his use of hydroxychloroquine makes Trump’s previous musings about using disinfectant to treat the coronavirus look sage. The President can call on the best scientists and doctors in the world for medical advice, and he comes up with this? Trump’s own FDA in late April warned of the dangers of taking hydroxychloroquine outside of a hospital or a clinical study setting “due to risk of heart rhythm problems.”

Even Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto warned his viewers not to follow the President’s example, saying, “If you are in a risky population here, and you are taking this as a preventative treatment to ward off the virus or in a worst-case scenario, you are dealing with the virus, and you are in this vulnerable population, it will kill you.” (Trump swiftly slapped Cavuto down on Twitter.)

The President has made any number of other non-scientific claims about the coronavirus, including that warm weather will take care of the virus (don’t count on it, says his own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), or that the US had coronavirus “totally under control,” (see today’s death toll of more than 91,000) or that we are “very close to a vaccine” (not likely, medical scientists say).

It’s Trump’s disregard for science that prompted the leading medical journal The Lancet to publish an unusual editorial over the weekend saying that “Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.”

But he is not the only Trump to play fast and loose with the reality of this contagion: The apple falleth not far from the tree. A day before his father’s stunning hydroxychloroquine admission, Eric Trump told Fox News that Democrats are milking the pandemic for political gain and trying to prevent his father from holding campaign rallies. And he predicted that after the presidential election on November 3 the “coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen.”

In fact, as the number of dead inches, day by day, toward 100,000, there is widespread agreement among scientists, including Trump’s CDC Director, Robert Redfield, that a second wave of the pandemic will likely hit the US later this year. Redfield explained last month, “There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through…We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time.”

Not to be outdone, Donald Trump Jr. recently defended remarks he’d made on air before Fox News’ large audience in February, when he suggested that “for Democrats to try to take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here and kills millions of people so that they could end Donald Trump’s streak of winning is a new level of sickness.” He told Axios earlier this month that he was “entitled to speak with such hyperbole.”

Meanwhile, a week ago presidential son-in-law, senior adviser and savior of worlds Jared Kushner mused to a Time reporter that he couldn’t “commit one way or the other” about the possibility of postponing the presidential election (neither he nor the President are legally empowered to do this).

And at the end of April, Kushner touted to Fox News the “great success” of the Trump administration in fighting the coronavirus. Kushner told the network that he hopes the US will be “really rocking again” by July. The official death toll for Americans is already the worst in the world. A month and a half out, we’re not rocking.

Jared’s wife Ivanka, another senior adviser to the President, who is her father, also took one for the team by disregarding federal guidelines on not taking discretionary travel during the pandemic when she traveled from DC to her family golf club in New Jersey in mid-April.

First Lady Melania Trump? She has been strangely absent throughout this crisis despite her “Be Best” campaign that is focused on the well-being of American children — and at a time when many children are living through what might be the most difficult experience of their lives.

Trump has cast the battle with coronavirus as a war and ordinary Americans as “warriors.” But if the President is the general, he is leading his troops into battle armed with misinformation. Presumably, he is trying to control the narrative as he charges on toward the election — and by doing so he appears more concerned with winning the election battle rather than beating the coronavirus.

What an unbearable sadness for Americans to have such incompetence at the helm during the worst crisis in eight decades.

America the Pitiable.

Is Rick Bright’s apocalyptic warning right? CNN.com

Is Rick Bright’s apocalyptic warning right?

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of the new book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.”

(CNN)In prepared testimony for his appearance before the US House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Health on Thursday, Rick Bright said he was removed as the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority because he was raising the alarm about the coronavirus early this year and also resisting pressure from the Trump administration to promote an “unproven drug, hydroxychloroquine, to the American people without transparent information on the potential health risks.”
Leaving aside the question of why exactly Bright was removed from his post at BARDA, he has certainly proven to be right about the antimalarial drug that President Donald Trump consistently promoted as a “game changer” and that also was touted by Fox News hosts and close Trump allies such as Rudy Giuliani.
Rick Bright will warn Congress of 'darkest winter in modern history' without ramped up coronavirus response
Rick Bright will warn Congress of ‘darkest winter in modern history’ without ramped up coronavirus response
On Monday, a study of more than 1,400 COVID-19 patients in New York was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the largest such examination to date, which found that hydroxychloroquine gave no benefits to COVID-19 patients and instead significantly increased their risk of cardiac arrest.
Monday’s JAMA study followed a New England Journal of Medicine study that was published last week that concluded hydroxychloroquine neither helped nor harmed 1,376 patients who were admitted to New York-Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Center between March 7 to April 8.

As a result of these studies, Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert said, “The nail has virtually been put in the coffin of hydroxychloroquine.”
In the advance version of his testimony for Thursday, Bright also made some dire predictions about what may lie ahead for the United States, testifying that, “If we fail to develop a national coordinated response, based in science, I fear the pandemic will get far worse and be prolonged, causing unprecedented illness and fatalities …Without clear planning and implementation of the steps that I and other experts have outlined, 2020 will be darkest winter in modern history.”
That’s a very gloomy prediction as it seems to suggest that more Americans could die of Covid-19 than the 675,000 who died during the 1918 flu pandemic.

Is Bright right? Maybe. A leading infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota estimates that there could be as many as 800,000 Covid-19 deaths in the United States over the next 18 months.
There are many reasons for believing that such a large death toll is a strong possibility, including the likelihood that the US will experience a “second wave” of Covid later in the year.
Testing for the coronavirus in the US is also still far from where it should be. So far there have been almost 10 million tests conducted in the States, but that’s only for around 3% of the population.
A study from Harvard co-authored by New America CEO, my colleague Anne-Marie Slaughter, suggests we need 20 million tests a day by mid-summer to really safely open up the United States and re-mobilize the American economy.
Meanwhile, the US has an anemic contact tracing effort unlike South Korea, which has had only 260 deaths.
The US has a population more than six times larger than South Korea so, adjusted for population size, if the United States had a plan in place like South Korea’s we might have on the order of around 1,700 Covid-19 deaths. Instead, the US has had over 84,000 deaths, the most in the world.
Also, most American states that are now opening up are not adhering to federal guidelines about when that is sensible to do.
And, so far, there is no effective treatment for Covid-19 except for remdesivir, which shortened recovery times by four days for seriously ill patients in a clinical trial compared to those who received a placebo, but the drug is in short supply.

Meanwhile, accurate antibody tests are still a ways off and developing a widely available vaccine could take years.
Bright is making some dire predictions, but in his prepared testimony he says he was right when he warned earlier this year that the coronavirus was likely to be a big problem and unless we have a coherent national response he may be right again about the winter of discontent that we may enter at the end of this year.

How the ‘hinge event’ of Covid will change everything, CNN.com

How the ‘hinge event’ of Covid will change everything

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst and Daniel Rothenberg

Updated 5:05 PM ET, Thu May 7, 2020

“This is the first in a series of CNN Opinion pieces on the future. Tune into CNN Sunday at 10 a.m. ET to watch Fareed Zakaria’s latest special report: “The Post-Covid-19 World.” Fareed will hear from experts and leading thinkers on what kind of new normal awaits us after the pandemic — how the virus could permanently change geopolitics, the economy, and our everyday lives. Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of the new book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” Daniel Rothenberg is professor of practice at Arizona State University and a senior fellow at New America. The opinions expressed in this commentary are their own. View more opinion on CNN. ”

(CNN)We all have a general sense of what “national security” means and what threatens it. But we need to rethink and update the term, now that our way of life is facing a dangerous threat, not from a foreign army, spy network or terrorist organization, but from a microscopic virus that has, quite suddenly, changed everything.

The American diplomat George Kennan, in 1948, defined national security as “the continued ability of the country to pursue the development of its internal life without serious interference, or threat of interference, from foreign powers.”

Today, we need to adjust this definition, with national security as “the continued ability of the country to pursue the development of its internal life without serious interference, or threat of interference, from foreign powers or other diverse threats,” a formulation that covers the challenges posed by non-state actors, such as al Qaeda’s attack on 9/11– and the coronavirus today.

This pandemic has profoundly interfered with the life of our nation and we must treat it as one of the most significant threats to our national security in decades. At this writing, more than 70,000 people have died from the coronavirus in the US, and the number of known cases is doubling about every four weeks; currently there are more than 1.2 million.

America’s economy has shed more than 30 million jobs. Indeed, the coronavirus crisis is shaping up to be a “hinge event” in American history, like the Great Depression or 9/11.

It is reshaping the world, politically, socially and economically and it is also revealing major structural weaknesses in American society and undermining already fraying trust in the capacity of the US government to respond effectively to core security challenges.

Already, in these early stages of the crisis, we have seen how quickly a pandemic can transform our daily lives. How many of us realized, at the start of this year — only four months ago — that entire industries would be brought to their knees, that unemployment would reach levels not seen in more than 80 years. Who knew that the most basic social activities — going to work, attending school, visiting friends and family — could be so utterly upended?

Hinge events change the way people understand their world– and their concept of what leaders and institutions should do to keep their country secure. In the US, out of the vast suffering of the Great Depression, for example, came the reforms of the New Deal, including Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, banking reforms, rural electrification and crop insurance, all of which remade the nation.

Globally, that economic collapse also played a key role in the rise of fascism and the Nazi Party, whose aggressive political vision led to World War II and the death of an estimated 60 million people.
Yet, out of the ashes of that devastating conflict arose the “rules-based international order” and the creation of new organizations, such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and NATO, a new alliance of mutual protection.

These all played a role in reducing interstate war and created the “long peace.” They ushered in a period in history that, however flawed, allowed hundreds of millions of people to benefit from a vast global reduction in poverty and unprecedented improvements in health and education.
Now we face what is likely a new hinge event. We can define it as: Before the Coronavirus, or BC, and After the Coronavirus, or AC.

Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff to President Barack Obama (and former Chicago mayor), once famously counseled. “Never allow a good crisis go to waste. It’s an opportunity to do the things you once thought were impossible.” In other words, for all the dislocation, uncertainty, stress and suffering they bring, crises are also opportunities for reimagining and rebuilding our social order.

WHAT THE FUTURE SHOULD BRING

Reframing how we think about and pay for “national security”

As we rethink the meaning of national security, the US must change the way it manages its resources and money. Already Covid-19 has killed 20 times more Americans than the 9/11 hijackers. The pandemic is the greatest threat to our collective security since World War II.

But our national security apparatus is ill-equipped to respond effectively. The Trump administration is asking for a defense budget of around $750 billion, $150 billion more than annual defense budgets under President Barack Obama, yet in 2020 the government sought only $6.5 billion to fund the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Our priorities need serious rebalancing.

Investigating how the government responded

There is a pressing need for a bipartisan Coronavirus Commission, modeled on the 9/11 Commission, which not only examined the attacks and their aftermath but also made solid recommendations, such as the creation of the National Counterterrorism Center, which has helped deter future 9/11s.

New futures of work

In the AC-era, we will likely see huge increases in distance working and distance services, such as telemedicine, in nearly every field, from basic health care to psychiatry.

The death of the office

Quite rapidly, the pandemic has forced us to conduct a giant experiment about how the office can play a far less significant role in our lives. Jes Staley, the CEO of Barclays, which has about 70,000 employees around the world now working from home, told reporters recently, “The notion of putting 7,000 people in the building may be a thing of the past.”

The commercial real estate sector will likely suffer badly as companies look to save money on leases and office workers reject long commutes.

Many of those who work outside of the service sector can work from anywhere. This in turn will also affect real estate — particularly in densely packed cities like New York. It’s hard to imagine that there will be a great demand in the AC-era for the chance to live in crowded apartment buildings with cramped elevators.

Paid family leave as a right and Medicare for those who want to opt into it

Ideally, the crisis will improve basic labor and health rights and deepen formal protections for lower-wage workers, who are essential to the service economy, agriculture, and home health care and have become the “essential” frontline forces in the battle against the pandemic.

A better Internet

For all the suffering, stress and dislocation created for society by the coronavirus, our ability to manage it without the Internet is almost unimaginable.

The AC-era, then, will highlight, with even greater clarity, our fundamental dependence — in nearly every facet of life — on an effective and highly functional Internet. So, the pandemic will ideally yield affordable broadband for all and will be based on cloud-based platforms that are connected to 5G networks.

Redefinition of higher education

Before the pandemic, the US faced key structural problems regarding higher education, such as ballooning student debt and inequality.

Add to these, now, one of the most striking, rapid changes brought on by the pandemic: the shift from in-person higher education to online courses. In the AC-era, it is likely, if not inevitable, that a significant amount of college instruction will move to permanent online or semi-online offerings.
This has many advantages — allowing students to pursue degrees while working full or part time and raising families, for example. Yet, American institutions of higher learning face a profound challenge: how to massively increase online education while maintaining a commitment to high-quality teaching, student mentorship and academic integrity — all while providing some semblance of a traditional college experience.

Addressing climate change

The coronavirus has demonstrated that profound risks to our safety and well-being are often fundamentally global. Ideally, the AC-era will reframe the debate about climate change and inspire states around the world to clarify global commitments to reduce human-produced global warming through agreements and mechanisms that have clear, enforceable provisions. And ideally this effort would be led by the US, China and other powerful nations.

The process will surely be tentative and imperfect, but the scope of the climate crisis will become even more apparent and in need of a serious response in the wake of the coronavirus.

Interestingly, the pandemic has also revealed the immediate benefits of reducing carbon emissions. Think of New Delhi, the most polluted capital city in the world, a city so dangerous that children were literally choking on the air there. As a result of the virus, Indian Prime Minister Modi ordered a weekslong lockdown across the country. For the first time in decades, the 19 million inhabitants of Delhi can now see blue skies on a routine basis.

Indians and others around the world — including people in Los Angeles who have watched the smog suddenly lift from their city during lockdown — can see for themselves some of the immediate value of reducing pollution and may thereby imagine the far more profound benefits of seriously addressing climate change.

Conjuring the political will to reshape the climate change debate could happen not only in India, but also in many other countries, including the United States.

New infrastructure.

Not since the Eisenhower-era of highway building has there been such an opportunity and urgency to expand and repair US infrastructure, an area of common agreement between Republicans and Democrats. Infrastructure initiatives could get many Americans back to work and stimulate the economy in a manner that would support long-term productivity.

Infrastructure means the digital as well as the physical kinds — such as bridges, roads, waste treatment, energy production, schools — many of them necessary to efforts to insulate Americans from the next predictable big crisis, such as the effects of climate change in places like Lower Manhattan, Norfolk, Virginia and southern Florida.

WHAT THE FUTURE WILL LIKELY BRING

Having considered all the changes that should happen in the After Coronavirus era, we now turn our attention to the likely effects and challenges of this new period — changes that are more dystopian, and some already underway — whether we like them or not.

Surveillance technologies will become ever more embedded in societies

The coronavirus has demonstrated many of the benefits of mass tracking and remote data collection and analysis, as health officials have tried to contain the disease’s spread. Yet, it is already evident that these same technologies can be used in ways that are dangerous for civil liberties.

While China has been able to require citizens to use digital bar codes on mobile apps that gauge their contagion risk during the pandemic, its related efforts in recent years to create “social credit” scores for all its citizens — potentially to track and steer behavior — and to monitor minority groups, such as the Uighurs, are dangerous precedents.

Google and Apple are working together on a smartphone app that would use Bluetooth technology to “sense” nearby smartphones and alert users if they have had a brush with someone with the coronavirus. Such an app could be very useful in enabling a return to a more normal life, but it also raises significant privacy concerns, and when polled a majority of Americans say they wouldn’t use it — because of those concerns or because they don’t have a smartphone.

As it navigates a new coronavirus reality, the United States will need to clarify how to manage and regulate the power and scope of mass data collection and analysis — by both state and private entities –to create enforceable protections against the lure of surveillance rule.

The US relationship with China will worsen

The pandemic has demonstrated the vulnerability of global supply chains and may achieve what President Donald Trump could not do, which is to pull significant elements of American manufacturing from China and elsewhere back to the states, especially in industries such as pharmaceuticals.

Trade conflicts and business competition are manageable. What’s more dangerous is the likelihood of ever-more aggressive political posturing between China and the United States, both of which have blamed the other for the spread of the virus.

Last Sunday, on ABC’s “This Week,” for instance, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said there was “enormous evidence” that the virus emerged in a Chinese lab. The Global Times, a state-owned Chinese newspaper, said Pompeo had “stunned the world with groundless accusations.”

These tensions could not come at a worse moment, when managing the consequences of the coming global recession requires coordination between the world’s two largest economies.

Populism, nationalism and authoritarianism will grow

Authoritarian leaders are using the pandemic to grab more power. In Hungary, once viewed as among the most successful post-authoritarian democracies, compliant lawmakers gave Viktor Orban, the elected prime minister, the authority to rule by decree indefinitely.

More than 80 countries have declared states of emergency, and authoritarian states like China have used the cover of the crisis to arrest leaders of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, the democratically elected Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro earlier this month came out in public at a protest supporting the military dictators who ruled Brazil from 1964-1985. “I am here because I believe in you. You are here because you believe in Brazil,” Bolsonaro, a former army captain told the protesters.

Truth faces new challenges

The pandemic has produced a deluge of disinformation and misinformation, ranging from conspiracy theories, propagated by the Iranian and Chinese government, that the US government manufactured the virus, to multiple internet scams for coronavirus cures.

The risk here does not lie only in the presentation of false tales, but the broader impact of eroding trust in experts and science.

There is also a paradox: Even as the pandemic reveals the benefits that decades of research and public health expertise have brought to tackling diseases like this, the rampant false claims that undermine support for scientific consensus make it difficult to ensure that the public, in the US and elsewhere, has a clear, informed understanding of actual risks and productive policy responses.

The only way to improve this situation is to create and nurture trusted sources of information whose legitimacy and commitment to objective and non-politicized information is repeatedly and publicly presented as widely respected. Not an easy goal at a time of great social and political division.

The era of small government is over

Former President Bill Clinton famously said, “The era of big government is over.” We can now reverse that and say, “The era of small government is over.” Americans whose jobs and businesses have disappeared because of the pandemic will be looking for much more from their government going forward.

The initial $2 trillion-stimulus package passed by Congress in March was just the first step. The US Federal Reserve is now supporting businesses and states in unprecedented ways. According to the Wall Street Journal’s calculations, the Fed’s portfolio is expected to grow from $4 trillion last year to between $8 to $11 trillion dollars, which means that it is taking a larger role in the economy than was the case during the Great Depression or World War II.

Hinging into the future

The speed and scope of the transformations we are living through are proof of both our vulnerability and our capacity to respond to serious challenges. To the degree the pandemic is a hinge event, it will likely inspire both the best and worst impulses of leaders, states and peoples.
What is needed now, more than ever, is vision, resilience and a willingness to learn the core lesson of this disease: we are all deeply connected at a time of great danger.

This could be Trump’s worst mistake ever, CNN.com

This could be Trump’s worst mistake ever

Opinion by Peter Bergen

Updated 10:56 PM ET, Tue May 5, 2020

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of the new book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.”

(CNN)The Trump administration has made any number of mistakes as it has grappled with the worst crisis since World War II; if it goes through with its plans to wind down its coronavirus task force around Memorial Day that decision will surely rank among the worst.

It’s as if in 1942, three years before Germany was defeated, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had said, “Gee, it’s well past time to wrap up this tiresome war against the Nazis.”
The coronavirus task force has provided much-needed scientific and public health expertise to President Donald Trump, who generally places great store on the findings of his own gut rather than on the findings of experts. Trump, understandably, wants to change the narrative from fighting the virus to opening up the economy, but biology won’t be so easily corralled.

Consider first the carnage yet to come caused by the virus. An internal Trump administration model suggests that there could be 3,000 deaths a day by June. Put another way, in a couple of months from now we may see the equivalent toll of a 9/11 attack every day in the United States. Michael Osterholm, a leading American infectious disease expert, estimates there could be 800,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States over the next 18 months. That is Osterholm’s low-end estimate.

Consider also that there are swarms of unanswered questions about how to deal with the coronavirus, which won’t be wished away by wrapping up the task force.
As has been widely observed, there is a dearth of testing for the virus, despite President Trump’s incessant claims to the contrary. According to the COVID Tracking Project there have been more than 7 million tests performed, which is only around 2% of the American population.
For normal life to return, a Harvard study recommends 5 million tests per day in the United States by early June and 20 million tests per day by mid-summer. The US isn’t anywhere remotely close to that goal.

There is also a great deal of uncertainty about the efficacy of available antibody tests, which if they were reliable, could at least theoretically allow those who are shown to have antibodies to the coronavirus to return to workplaces and to socialize normally.

Meanwhile, it’s not at all clear what “immunity” to the coronavirus actually confers. Last month the World Health Organization warned that antibody tests showing that you have been exposed to the virus don’t necessarily mean you can’t be re-infected.
And there is widespread agreement among scientists that there will be a “second wave” of infections in the fall.

Trump’s own Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield angered the President when he told the Washington Post last month that this second wave could possibly “be even more difficult than the one we just went through.” In Washington DC, a gaffe is sometimes defined as telling the truth in public. When Redfield was summoned to the White House to clear up his “misquote” in front of President Trump, Redfield instead doubled down and said that the second wave “was going to be more difficult and potentially complicated.”

Then, what to make of supposed success stories such as the efficient authoritarian city state of Singapore? Singapore was held up as a model of how to deal with the coronavirus in March, but last month clusters of cases appeared in dormitories for migrant workers and Singapore now has the most cases in Southeast Asia.

Finally, while it’s “on paper” possible that there will be a vaccine available by January — as Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, told Fox News on Sunday — it’s also “on paper” possible that Trump will finally get his fervent wish and be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his gone-nowhere diplomacy with North Korea.

Don’t bet the farm on either eventuality. England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty said publicly last month there is an “incredibly small” chance of having an effective vaccine for coronavirus by early 2021.

It’s these kinds of numerous unsettled issues about how to deal with the coronavirus that the Trump administration needs continuous expert scientific advice about. Trump has said Birx and others will continue to provide scientific guidance to him. But formally dissolving the coronavirus task force signals a lack of seriousness about the threat posed by Covid-19. Don’t do it.

Thank You For Your Service, Jared CNN.com

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of the new book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.”

(CNN) What is most galling as the nation faces its worse crisis since World War II is how the Trump family keeps demanding recognition for their brilliant work and also our thanks for the catastrophic mess they have helped land us all in.

Case in point is Jared Kushner, who has fallen upwards throughout his life, inheriting a vast real estate empire and then making one of the worst purchases in the history of Manhattan, which was buying the office building at 666 Fifth Avenue for a then-record $1.8 billion in 2007, a lemon which was only finally taken off his hands after his father-in-law became president.

So, perhaps it was only fitting that he was awarded the job of shadow secretary of state at the beginning of the Trump administration.

Kushner was in charge of managing the US-China portfolio, a responsibility that drew criticism, given Kushner’s own business interests with China.

He also destroyed any vestige of American leadership in the Middle East with his promotion of the reckless Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his sabotage of the two-state solution in Israel.

According to officials cited by The New York Times, early on in the Covid-19 crisis, Kushner privately agreed with his father-in-law that this whole coronavirus thing was being overblown by the lamestream media.

Kushner then championed a new Google site where you could go and get your virus symptoms tested. His father-in-law touted 1,700 Google engineers who were working on the site at a White House news conference in March. If that sounds like a fantasy, it was.

And now, Kushner comes to Fox News, the Pravda of the Trump administration, to marvel on Wednesday that the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus is “a great success story,” claiming that “we have all the testing we need to start opening the country” and state his hope that “by July, the country’s really rocking again.”

This is as more than 60,000 Americans lie dead — more than the death toll of the Vietnam War — and more than 1 million have been confirmed to have been infected with the virus, with no end in sight. There is widespread agreement among experts that we don’t have the testing capabilities to return to any semblance of normal life, and also that a second wave of infections could hit the country badly later in the year.

During World War II, the United States had Franklin Delano Roosevelt and George Marshall to navigate us through a crisis that saw the US spend more than a third of its GDP, and during which more than 12 million Americans donned military uniforms.

Today, we have a completely unreliable President — anyone can get a coronavirus test, the virus will disappear when the warm weather comes, the list of Trump’s whoppers goes on and on and on and on — and his feckless son-in-law as coronavirus czar prattling on about bringing more private sector efficiency to government. Meanwhile, Trump demands thanks from governors when he is just barely doing his job as president.

This is the kind of thing we expect in a banana republic: the nepotistic incompetence and the demands from the public to lavish praise on the brilliant ruling family.

It would be laughable if there weren’t so many lives lost already and so many more in our future.

So, Jared Kushner, we, the American public, want to thank you for your service.