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Trump repeatedly claimed that thanks to the state’s Democratic governor, “You can’t go to church.” Thousands of churchgoing Pennsylvanians know that this simply isn’t true.

Wait, it gets worse. In last week’s debate, Trump declared that New York is a “ghost town.” Eight million people can see with their naked eyes that it isn’t.

Trump’s now-standard claims that we’re “rounding the corner” on the coronavirus and declared that one of the administration’s major achievements was “ending the Covid-19 pandemic.”Who was that supposed to convince, when almost everyone is aware not only that the pandemic continues, but that coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are surging? All it did was make Trump look even more out of touch.

On Wednesday, campaigning in Arizona, Trump went on a rant about California, where “you have a special mask. You cannot under any circumstances take it off. You have to eat through the mask. Right, right, Charlie? It’s a very complex mechanism.” As 39 million California residents can tell you, nothing remotely like that exists.

That’s a bad question, because he doesn’t accept that there is such a thing as objective truth. There are things he wants to believe, and so he does; there are other things he doesn’t want to believe, so he doesn’t.

What’s scary about all this isn’t just the possibility that Trump may yet win — or steal — a second term. It’s the fact that almost his entire party, and tens of millions of voters, seem perfectly willing to follow him into the abyss.

Indeed, current Republican strategy is almost entirely based on trying to scare voters about bad things that aren’t happening —

Throughout Lincoln’s rise in 1860, the South watched in horror as this unlikely candidate grew in stature. He gave no serious speeches after his nomination, but he did not need to, as the Buchanan administration began to collapse under the weight of its incompetence and greed. It was not simply that a rising number of Americans were tired of propping up slavery, as the Democratic Party had been doing for decades.

Lincoln rejected that pay-to-play culture. He lived abstemiously and spoke modestly, rarely using the first person. He opposed the expansion of slavery and disapproved of plans to seize Cuba and Northern Mexico to groom pro-Southern states. He was sympathetic to immigrants and to the idea that America should stand for a set of principles, as a kind of beacon in an amoral world. He admired the Declaration of Independence, with its promise of equal rights for all.

For all of these reasons, Lincoln posed a lethal threat to the status quo.

That all would change if Lincoln were elected, as Southern leaders understood. Accordingly, they devoted their considerable resources to gaming the system, through a campaign of false personal attacks, physical intimidation and ballot manipulation

Racial innuendo was a constant in these ugly attacks. Readers were breathlessly informed that Lincoln and his running mate, Hannibal Hamlin, were secretly mulatto, and The New York Herald promised that if Lincoln won, “hundreds of thousands” of slaves would invade the North, to consummate “African amalgamation with the fair daughters of the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Teutonic races.”

As the campaign wore on, the South realized that other means of persuasion were required. In Baltimore and Washington, mobs broke up Republican offices, shot off guns and desecrated images of Lincoln. His name was not even permitted on the ballot in 10 Southern states — a fact that was held against him, as if he were a “sectional” candidate. In border states, as well, voters were intimidated: In the state of his birth, Kentucky, Lincoln received only 1,364 votes.

But violence was no laughing matter, and Lincoln’s life was in danger from the moment he was nominated. A Virginia congressman, Roger Pryor, was quoted in The New York Herald as saying that “if Lincoln is elected we will go to Washington and assassinate him before his inauguration.”

Many were beginning to understand that the South’s ideas about democracy were as peculiar as its institutions. South Carolina still did not allow its citizens to vote for president, and in 1864 Jefferson Davis confirmed in an interview in this newspaper, “We seceded to rid ourselves of the rule of the majority.”

On Nov. 6, Lincoln was duly elected. But his percentage of the popular vote was very small (39.8 percent)

That led to a new kind of challenge, to build legitimacy, as Washington seethed over the result and pro-slavery thugs promised to prevent Lincoln’s arrival. Some threatened to turn the Capitol into “a heap of ashes.” In Southern cities, gun-toting militias quickly formed, some parading under the Gadsden Flag and its motto, “Don’t Tread on Me.”

It still took some doing to launch the Lincoln administration, and the president-elect had to survive a serious assassination conspiracy on his way to Washington.

Lincoln will remain our greatest president, for his own reasons — the bold actions and the calming words. But he also sits atop our pantheon because this champion of democracy came along at the exact moment when it was most endangered and reminded Americans that a higher standard was possible.

One trend that exacerbated that challenge: colleagues in media treating the expression of allegedly problematic ideas as if they were a human-resources issue. Earlier this year, for instance, after Yglesias signed a group letter published in Harper’s magazine objecting to cancel culture, one of his colleagues, Emily VanDerWerff, told Vox editors that his signature made her feel “less safe at Vox.”

I asked Yglesias if that matter in any way motivated his departure. “Something we’ve seen in a lot of organizations is increasing sensitivity about language and what people say,” he told me. “It’s a damaging trend in the media in particular because it is an industry that’s about ideas, and if you treat disagreement as a source of harm or personal safety, then it’s very challenging to do good work.”

an experiment that the Harvard social scientist Cass Sunstein conducted in two different communities in Colorado: left-leaning Boulder and right-leaning Colorado Springs. Residents in each community were gathered into small groups to discuss their views on three controversial topics: climate change, same-sex marriage, and affirmative action. Afterward, participants were asked to report on the opinions of their discussion group as well as their own views on the subjects. In both communities, gathering into groups composed of mostly like-minded people to discuss controversial subjects made individuals more settled and extreme in their views.

“Liberals, in Boulder, became distinctly more liberal on all three issues. Conservatives, in Colorado Springs, become distinctly more conservative on all three issues,” Sunstein wrote of his experiment. “Deliberation much decreased diversity among liberals; it also much decreased diversity among conservatives. After deliberation, members of nearly all groups showed, in their post-deliberation statements, far more uniformity than they did before deliberation.”

Compelling evidence points to a big cost associated with ideological bubbles, I argued: They make us more confident that we know everything, more set and extreme in our views, more prone to groupthink, more vulnerable to fallacies, and less circumspect.

The New York Times, New York, The Intercept, Vox, Slate, The New Republic, and other outlets are today less ideologically diverse in their staff and less tolerant of contentious challenges to the dominant viewpoint of college-educated progressives than they have been in the recent past. I fear that in the short term, Americans will encounter less rigorous and more polarizing journalism. In the long term, a dearth of ideological diversity risks consequences we cannot fully anticipate.

Dozens of election security experts on Monday released a letter saying claims of major hacks were unsubstantiated and absurd on their face.

Krebs headed the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) from its inception two years ago.He angered the White House over a website run by CISA dubbed “Rumor Control,” which debunks misinformation about the election, according to the three people familiar with the matter.

CISA Executive Director Brandon Wales is expected to take over

Wales has served in multiple positions within the DHS under the Trump administration and is not seen as a partisan figure, said a former colleague.

“Honored to serve. We did it right. Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow.”

White House officials had previously complained about CISA content that pushed back against false claims about the election, including that Democrats were behind a mass election fraud scheme. CISA officials declined to delete accurate information.

Among other things, one associate of Krebs said the White House was angry about a post rejecting a conspiracy theory that falsely claimed an intelligence agency supercomputer and program, purportedly named Hammer and Scorecard, could have flipped votes nationally. No such system exists, according to Krebs, election security experts and former U.S. officials.

“Chris Krebs should be commended for his service in protecting our elections, not fired for telling the truth.”

“His firing is very disappointing and appears to be an attempt to undermine the great work he and others at DHS/CISA have been doing.”

“The CISA and Director Krebs have worked diligently to safeguard our elections, provide vital support to state and local election officials, and inform the American people about what was true and what was not.”

Independent Senator Angus King said Trump was “firing Mr Krebs for simply doing his job.”

“Chris Krebs did a really good job — as state election officials all across the nation will tell you — and he obviously should not be fired,”

Senator Ben Sasse, who has been a Trump critic, was among the first Republicans to push back against the decision.

But he suggested that a statewide mask mandate would not help halt the surge, adding that it is nearly impossible to participate in the Arizona economy without wearing a mask due to various local restrictions.

She said cases were increasing in many states with mandates, adding that communities were free to establish local regulations. 

The U.S. has reported more than 11.5 million cases and more than 250,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data. The global totals: 56.4 million cases and 1.35 million deaths.

As state officials and lawmakers urged the shutdown of a Tyson Foods pork processing plant in Iowa, managers at the plant reportedly placed bets on how many would end up getting sick.

As COVID-19 cases pile up at a staggering rate, Republicans and Democrats remain in stark disagreement over the threat of the virus and the steps necessary to mitigate its spread.

That has surprised political scientists and public health experts who thought that, if the pandemic worsened, the partisan gap would begin to close

European officials announced a modest gain in the continent's battle against the virus.

Still, an average of 4500 lives are lost to COVID-19 in Europe every day, Kluge said.

He described further lockdowns as a last resort and said that if mask use reached 95%, lockdowns would not be needed.

Almost 100,000 long-term care U.S. residents have died in the coronavirus pandemic, and advocates for the elderly say tens of thousands more are succumbing to neglect by overwhelmed staffs and slow declines from isolation imposed as protection from COVID.

Although the COVID-19 outbreak is looking worse than ever, news from vaccine makers is fueling optimism

That means we can begin inoculating health care and other essential workers even before we’re done with the Thanksgiving leftovers,

The vaccine being developed Oxford researchers and U.K.-based AstraZeneca appears to trigger a "robust immune response" in healthy adults, including those aged 56 and older, the university said in a release.

The U.S. has become the first country to have 250,000 people die from COVID-19, nearly 19% of the global total of 1.35 million fatalities.

The death toll the virus has inflicted among Americans is more than twice as large as the number of U.S. service members who died in World War I.

Colleges are scrambling to prevent a massive spread, with some urging or requiring students to quarantine or receive a negative coronavirus test before traveling home. Without those precautions, college leaders say, students should consider abstaining from their holiday plans and instead opt for a celebration closer to campus.

Boston University's recommendation is that students either stay in Boston for the holiday or go home and not come back. Kenneth Elmore, dean of students, says the school is urging students to think of the greater good. 

As Arizona's COVID-19 trends spike, the state is giving hospitals $25 million to bolster staffing, but Gov. Doug Ducey said Wednesday that he won't impose a statewide mask mandate.

Ducey suggested that a statewide mask mandate would not effectively curb the spread of the virus, and emphasized that about 90% of the state is under a local mask mandate. He also said it is nearly impossible to participate in the Arizona economy without wearing a mask.

More than 90,000 students in the state's largest school district will return to virtual learning starting Nov. 30 through the end of the semester.

The district reported about 13 cases per week when it first opened early childhood education centers. Cases have now surpassed 300 per week.

There are some reasons for this. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, acknowledging the nation's pandemic-related rodent problem, points out restaurants have reduced service, which means fewer food scraps are ending up in the dumpsters on which rats and mice often feed.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is urging Americans to "think twice" about traveling and having indoor gatherings for the holidays.

"As we get into the colder weather, we should really think twice about these kind of dinner parties where you're not sure of whether the people that are in your bubble (are safe)," he said. "Then you're going to start seeing these unanticipated infections related to innocent home gatherings, particularly as we head into the holiday season."

In 2008, rumors again circulated online that a candidate was being fed answers during a debate. Ann Althouse, a law professor and conservative blogger, wrote that close-up TV stills showed that Barack Obama “was wearing an earpiece” during a debate with John McCain.

2000, when Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio host, accused then-candidate Al Gore of getting answers fed to him through an earpiece during a “Meet the Press” appearance.

Four years later, during the 2004 presidential debates, rumors circulated among left-wing bloggers that George W. Bush was getting help from a surreptitiously placed earpiece.

In 2016, the rumor appeared again, this time attached to Hillary Clinton, who was accused by right-wing websites of wearing a secret earpiece. (One such story, which appeared on the conspiracy theory website Infowars, was shared by Donald Trump Jr. and other pro-Trump influencers.)

Foreign politicians, including Emmanuel Macron of France, have also been baselessly accused of wearing earpieces during debates.

But the idea of a hidden helper giving one side an unfair debate advantage has proved seductive to campaign operatives trying to explain away a lopsided debate, or sow doubts about cheating on the other side.

People’s decreasing willingness to respond to polls

Some types of voters seem less willing to respond to polls than others, perhaps because they are less trusting of institutions, and these voters seem to lean Republican.

A much-hyped theory that Trump supporters lie to pollsters appears to be wrong or insignificant. Polls did not underestimate his support more in liberal areas, where supporting Mr. Trump can be less socially acceptable, than in conservative areas.

Although Literary Digest’s sample of 2.4 million respondents was enormous, it was not representative. The magazine’s circulation skewed toward affluent Americans, who were more hostile to Roosevelt and the New Deal than most voters. A less prominent pollster that year, George Gallup, had surveyed many fewer people — about 50,000 — but he had been careful to ensure they matched the country’s demographic mix. Mr. Gallup correctly predicted a Roosevelt win.

In 1948, the pollsters’ luck ran out. They continued to overestimate the Republican vote share, reporting throughout the campaign that President Harry Truman trailed his Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey. This time, the election was close enough that the polls pointed to the wrong winner, contributing to perhaps the most famous error in modern journalism, The Chicago Tribune’s banner headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

Nearly every poll showed Hillary Clinton to be leading Mr. Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The leads were big enough that her campaign paid relatively little attention to those states. But she lost all three narrowly, giving Mr. Trump a stunning victory.

One factor was largely unsolvable: Late-deciding voters, accurately identified as undecided in polls, broke strongly for Mr. Trump.

They seek refuge in “a man-made pattern of relative consistency” that bears little relation to reality

his followers abandoned common sense and found their guide to the world in him. Defeat won’t change that.

Trump damaged the rest of us, too. He got as far as he did by appealing to the perennial hostility of popular masses toward elites.

Monopoly of public policy by experts—trade negotiators, government bureaucrats, think tankers, professors, journalists—helped create the populist backlash that empowered Trump

His reign of lies drove educated Americans to place their faith, and even their identity, all the more certainly in experts, who didn’t always deserve i

The war between populists and experts relieved both sides of the democratic imperative to persuade. The standoff turned them into caricatures.

Trump’s legacy includes an extremist Republican Party that tries to hold on to power by flagrantly undemocratic means, and an opposition pushed toward its own version of extremism.

Many of his policies can be reversed or mitigated. It will be much harder to clear our minds of his lies and restore the shared understanding of reality—the agreement, however inconvenient, that A is A and not B—on which a democracy depends.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit Tuesday. The President on Wednesday filed a motion to intervene -- basically a request to join the lawsuit

Trump has suggested publicly that he hopes his nominees -- Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch -- will side with him on any election dispute.

since Republican delegations outnumber Democratic delegations, Trump would win.

"In a nutshell the President is asking the Supreme Court to exercise its rarest form of jurisdiction to effectively overturn the entire presidential election," said Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and University of Texas Law School professor.

The court has thus far shown no desire to intervene in the presidential election.

On Tuesday, it rejected the plea from Pennsylvania Republicans to invalidate the state's presidential tallies. It issued one sentence and noted zero dissents. (Justices don't always have to make their votes public.)

"Our Country is deeply divided in ways that it arguably has not been seen since the election of 1860," Trump's motion to intervene states. "There is a high level of distrust between the opposing sides, compounded by the fact that, in the election just held, election officials in key swing states, for apparently partisan advantage, failed to conduct their state elections in compliance with state election law."

First the court would have to allow Paxton to file the suit. Then the court would have to block certification of the Electoral College vote, determine that the four states had allowed massive amounts of "illegal" votes, have the states revisit their vote counts and then resubmit the numbers.

If the court refuses to take up the lawsuit, it's another nail in the coffin for Trump's hopes to reverse his election loss.

If it acts in the other direction, it will be another dramatic and unprecedented turn in the 2020 election, guaranteeing the President will continue to challenge Biden's victory.

"There's nothing unique about Texas' claims here, most of which have already been brought in other suits against the same four states," said Vladeck, noting that if Trump and other states are joining in, it could weaken the suggestion the Texas case is unique.

The GOP "used to be a party for states' rights," Ginsberg said. "I can't imagine something that is less faithful to the principle of states' rights than a Texas attorney general trying to tell other states how to run their elections."

Sen. John Cornyn, the senior Texas Republican, told CNN that "I frankly struggle to understand the legal theory of it. Number one, why would a state, even such a great state as Texas, have a say-so on how other states administer their elections?

"Using the Covid-19 pandemic as a justification," Paxton wrote, officials in the battleground states "usurped their legislatures' authority and unconstitutionally revised their state's election statutes." He said they had done so through "executive fiat." He pointed specifically to mail-in ballots, which he said were placed "in drop boxes" with "little or no chain of custody," which weakened signature verification and witness requirements, which he called "the strongest security measures protecting the integrity of the vote."

The court could act after those filings arrive or wait until Texas files a brief replying to the arguments made by the battleground states. The justices acted quickly in rejecting the Pennsylvania lawsuit on Tuesday, but they could bide their time as they have in other election-related cases.

The President's campaign has been represented by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and attorney Jenna Ellis. In the current motion, however, Trump is being represented by John Eastman.

Trump has also asked GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas -- the former solicitor general of the state -- to represent him at the Supreme Court in the unlikely event it hears oral arguments.

The electors cast their ballots for president and vice president via paper ballot. Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia legally require their electors to choose whoever won the state’s popular vote, so there should be no surprises there. The other 17 states don’t “bind” their electors, meaning they can vote for whomever they choose.

After the electors cast their ballots, the votes are counted and the electors sign certificates showing the results. These are paired with certificates from the governor’s office showing the state’s vote totals.

Congress officially counts the votes in a joint session held in the House chamber on Jan. 6, with Mr. Pence presiding. Mr. Pence opens the certificates

The session cannot be ended until the count is complete and the result publicly declared. At this point, the election is officially decided. The only remaining task is the inauguration on Jan. 20.

Democrats will hold control of the House. And Republicans will control the Senate, regardless of the results of the Georgia runoff elections on Jan. 5, because Mr. Pence will still be in office to act as the tiebreaking vote if the chamber is split 50 to 50.

Any objection to a state’s results must be made in writing and be signed by at least one senator and one member of the House. The two chambers would then separate to debate the objection.

Stopping Mr. Biden from assuming office remains a long-shot strategy for Republicans.For an objection to stand, it must pass both houses of Congress by a simple majority. If the vote followed party lines, Republicans could not block Mr. Biden’s victory.

With some Trump allies already planning objections, the congressional session is likely to make for good political theater. But the process has little chance of changing the outcome of the election.

Mr. Biden expressed optimism about how Republicans would respond to him as president, and said he had already heard from seven Republican senators “saying they want to work with me.”

A small group of Republican senators had congratulated Mr. Biden almost immediately in November. But a majority had gone to great rhetorical lengths to avoid enraging a president who could turn their own voters against them — even as they privately conceded he had lost.

a sign of a growing rift within the party between those willing to accept reality and those — a loyal core in the Senate and the vast majority in the House — who appear ready to follow him wherever he leads.

But the effect has been that the most powerful Republican on Capitol Hill has, by intention or inaction, left unchecked insidious claims by Mr. Trump and those backing him undermining faith in the democratic process and Mr. Biden’s legitimacy as president.

“I think he is president-elect, subject to whatever additional litigation is ongoing,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the former second-ranking Republican

“The presidential election is over,” said Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a close ally of Mr. McConnell’s. “States have certified the votes. Courts have resolved disputes. The electors have voted. I hope that President Trump will put the country first.”

“It is unacceptable for political candidates to treat our election system as though we are a third-world nation and incite distrust of something so basic as the sanctity of our vote,”

The talks are continuing, though Pelosi and McConnell say they are committed to completing a bill before the end of the year. Leaders plan to attach the coronavirus measure to an omnibus spending bill. Doing so may require them to pass an additional short-term funding stopgap to allow committees to write legislative language for the COVID-19 provisions. The federal government is scheduled to run out of money on Dec. 18 so a temporary bill would avoid any brief shutdown as both chambers process the package.

The proposal is expected to include more money for the Paycheck Protection Program and for vaccine distribution.

But he noted that the package was a "down payment" and that Congress would need to pass another bill in the early part of 2021.

Instead, a bipartisan group of more moderate lawmakers from both parties launched their own working group to craft a workable agreement. Groups like these frequently emerge, but it is rare that leaders fully embrace their proposals.

The biggest change to the legislation produced by the bipartisan group is the addition of a new round of stimulus checks. Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., have demanded that checks be included in the package and have considered blocking any legislation that does not include the funds.

We can’t rule out, however, that Xi sincerely believes in the course he’s taking. (Indeed, the two explanations are not mutually exclusive.) It’s easy to discount the CCP’s Marxist pronouncements as a necessary but rhetorical cover for the country’s raging capitalism, but Xi regularly reminds the nation that it is socialist, and praises the successes of China’s version of the ideology.

this current movement could follow those of the Communist past, which had “a pattern of first cracking down on whomever is identified as the corrupt, and then cracking down on whomever is identified as the impure, and then widening the lens to a more broad mass movement.”

Xi and his propaganda machine are presenting China’s authoritarian governance as a more appropriate model for the world than democratic capitalism, better able to create a more harmonious, just, and prosperous society, and more capable of achieving great tasks, such as conquering the coronavirus pandemic, than a dysfunctional, decadent, and declining America.

Xi “may believe the recent wave of crackdowns is necessary to bring about socialism at home to differentiate from capitalism as practiced in the West.”

That raises the ugly prospect of the competition between the U.S. and China becoming more like the Cold War—a battle between ideologically opposed political, economic, and social systems.

That is, if Xi’s new China succeeds. By attacking the wealthy, constraining private enterprise, and strangling education, Xi could discourage entrepreneurship and independent thinking, the magic ingredients for technological breakthroughs and innovative products. Starting a company is already a risky business. Why attempt it if you’ll end up in trouble? By experimenting with Chinese society, Xi is gambling that his bid for social control won’t smother the incentives and initiative that the economy requires to excel.

The West is convinced that political and social freedoms and economic progress are inseparable. Xi and his Communist cadres do not agree, and, in their minds, they have China’s four-decade record of triumphs to prove their point. China’s leader appears to believe that greater top-down control will ensure his country’s continued ascent, not derail it.

Attempting to ease tensions with China to make cooperation on global public health possible won’t work, partly because Beijing cannot credibly commit to being more transparent and cooperative in the future.

For China’s leaders, the pandemic revealed the inexorable decline of the West, confirmed Beijing’s power and capabilities, and created more latitude for the CCP to do as it wished.

But in case cooperation fails, it must have a backup plan to rally allies and partners to provide a much greater share of global public goods, even if that means shouldering more of the costs.

as a number of U.S. embassy officials told the foreign policy analyst Colin Kahl and me for our book Aftershocks, this team’s cooperation with the Chinese government became more challenging as U.S.-Chinese rivalry intensified, largely because of China’s actions.

When COVID-19 hit, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maintained near-absolute secrecy. All channels of communication between Beijing and Washington went silent, as they did between Beijing and other governments. Chinese leaders sought to conceal vital information about the emerging epidemic in China from the rest of the world, even attempting to prevent Chinese scientists from sharing the genetic sequence of the virus with scientists in other countries.

It is impossible to say for certain why the Chinese government behaved the way it did, but secrecy and control make sense in light of what the vast majority of China experts believe to be Xi’s top priority: regime survival.

Xi did not want to facilitate an international response to COVID-19 that could have attributed blame to China or isolated it through travel restrictions, either of which might have damaged the regime’s domestic legitimacy. Instead, Xi leveraged the pandemic to his advantage: China’s suppression of the virus became a matter of national pride, held up by Beijing in sharp contrast to the experience of the United States.

according to the UN, the pandemic could force a total of 490 million people into poverty—defined as the loss of access to clean water, adequate food, or shelter—pushing the global poverty rate to around seven percent by 2030, compared with the pre-pandemic target of three percent. 

Contrary to popular belief, some senior Trump administration officials grasped the national security threat posed by the virus faster than their European counterparts did. Top officials in the National Security Council began focusing on the pandemic in early January, just days after news of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, became public.

ven though Pottinger and other NSC officials were wise to the danger, they ultimately failed to persuade Trump to make the necessary preparations to deal with the pandemic when it inevitably reached the United States. 

As the administration began to formulate its response, those who favored a more comprehensive public health approach both at home and abroad were excluded or marginalized at crucial moments. The result was that the Trump administration focused more on holding China responsible for the outbreak and reducing U.S. reliance on Beijing than on the minutiae of global public health policy or the hard work of rallying the world to tackle the pandemic.

the pandemic and China’s response to it helped unify the administration behind a more comprehensive strategy to push back against Beijing. Between March 2020 and the end of the year, the senior official said, the United States put in place more containment measures than it had in the previous three years, including restrictions on Chinese technology firms, sanctions on Chinese officials, looser regulations on diplomatic contacts with Taiwan, and recognition of the repression in Xinjiang as a genocide. In this sense, the pandemic was a pivotal moment in the U.S.-Chinese rivalry. 

Competition between the two countries overwhelmed everything else, including U.S. cooperation with allies on the pandemic, leaving a global leadership vacuum that no one could fill.

The EU tried to step up by increasing funding for the WHO and for COVAX, the global initiative to share vaccines, but it never came close to organizing a global response. China’s assertive foreign policy, and its attempts to use pandemic assistance to advance its interests, aggravated European leaders and convinced them to harden their positions toward China throughout the course of 2020. 

During this period, there was hardly any international cooperation on vaccine development or distribution, no coordination on travel restrictions or the distribution of medical supplies, and limited cooperation on achieving a cessation of hostilities in conflict zones

The United States needs a strategy to address transnational threats under the conditions of great-power competition. It must aim to cooperate with rivals, especially China, to prepare for future pandemics and to tackle climate change

The economic disruption caused by COVID-19 devastated low-income countries, which received little in the way of international assistance. Especially hard hit were countries, such as Bangladesh, that had made significant development gains in the last two decades and were propelling themselves into the lower tier of middle-income economies.

Pandemics are not the only transnational threat that promises to intensify great-power rivalry and diminish the prospects for much-needed cooperation. Climate change could do the same.

the real challenge is determining what to do when cooperation with China and other rivals falls short of what is required. The United States needs a backup plan to tackle shared challenges through coalitions of the willing.

Countries that aggressively decarbonize could place sanctions and other trade restrictions on countries that do not, leading to counterresponses and new trade wars.

the impediments to cooperation between Europe and China on climate change “are becoming higher” and warn that “decision-makers must not underestimate the highly competitive aspects of how China is changing its energy production and consumption.” 

The United States and Europe will both compete with China for access to raw materials and in developing the technology needed to make their economies carbon neutral: magnets, batteries, high-performance ceramics, and light-emitting diodes, among other things

even if the U.S. government remains broadly aligned with Europe on climate policy, the Europeans could still become disaffected if Congress blocks meaningful climate action, such as commitments to cut carbon emissions or invest in clean technology. This, in turn, could diminish Europe’s willingness to help uphold the U.S.-led international order.

If, on the one hand, they mean softening U.S. rhetoric without conceding much of substance to China, they would do well to look to Europe, where governments were much more inclined than the Trump administration to cooperate with China, but China did not take them up on the offer.

If, on the other hand, they mean unilaterally making major geopolitical concessions to China—on its territorial acquisitions in the South China Sea, for instance, or the status of Taiwan—the United States would not only pay an extremely high price but also likely embolden Beijing further without actually securing cooperation on pandemics or climate change beyond what Beijing has already offered.

There is no getting around strategic competition with Beijing: it is deeply embedded in the international order, mainly because China seeks to expand its sphere of influence in Asia at the expense of the United States and its allies, which are in turn committed to thwarting Beijing’s plans.

The United States and China are also engaged in what Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, recently called “a competition of models.” China is seeking to make the world safe for the CCP and to demonstrate the effectiveness of its system. This entails pushing back against what it sees as pressure from liberal democratic countries that could thwart its objectives. For its part, the United States worries about the negative externalities of Chinese authoritarianism, such as censorship of international criticism of Beijing or the export of its tools of repression to other countries.

The United States also worries about what would happen to the military balance of power if China secured an enduring advantage in key technologies.

Even in diplomacy, friction will be endemic to the U.S.-Chinese relationship and will affect the broader international order for the foreseeable future. Outright confrontation can be avoided—but competition cannot. 

This competition places real limits on cooperation. Take the arena of global public health: many studies on how to improve pandemic preparedness call on world leaders to dramatically strengthen the WHO, including by giving it the same power to enforce international health regulations as the International Atomic Energy Agency enjoys with nuclear nonproliferation rules

The problem is getting every government to agree to a universally applicable mechanism for sanctions or some other enforcement mechanism. China will not agree to any reform that would involve intrusive inspections of its scientific research facilities.

The need for cooperation on transnational threats must change how the United States competes with China—not whether it competes.

U.S. officials should not give up on China entirely; instead, they should make a good-faith effort to work with Beijing, both bilaterally and in multilateral settings. Recognizing that there are strict limits on U.S.-Chinese cooperation is not the same as saying that no cooperation is possible.

Rather than unite the world around a common purpose, climate change is likely to deepen competition between major powers, especially as the transition away from fossil fuels creates economic winners and losers.

When it comes to pandemic preparedness, this means fully supporting the WHO (including by pressing for needed reforms) but also forging a coalition of like-minded states: a global alliance for pandemic preparedness that would regularly convene at the head-of-state level and work alongside nongovernmental organizations and the private sector.

Crucially, whenever the WHO declared an international public health emergency, alliance members would coordinate on travel and trade restrictions, as well as on public messaging and financial penalties and sanctions. Those penalties and sanctions would be aimed at those states that failed to provide sufficient access to or fully cooperate with the WHO. The alliance would support, not supplant, the WHO.

Sustained, managed competition with China could potentially help the United States build bipartisan support for investments in clean technology that would prevent Beijing from gaining an enduring advantage in this area.

ut the United States and the European Union will also need to build coalitions of the willing to deal with the international security consequences of accelerated climate change, such as extreme weather events that threaten large numbers of people, and to address the foreign policy dimensions of climate action, including managing the risk that a shift away from fossil fuels could destabilize countries and regions that are dependent on oil exports.

Cooperation across this divide should always be the first choice in times of shared crisis, but as the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, the U.S.-led constellation must always have a backup plan. It did not have one in 2020. It needs one for the next crisis

the one of which the commission is most skeptical is adding seats to the Court. The risks of expansion are “considerable,” the document says, and could “undermine the very goal of some of its proponents of restoring the court’s legitimacy.”

Term limits are presented not as a tired manifestation of cynical partisan maneuvering, but as an opportunity to advance “our Constitution’s commitments to checks and balances and popular sovereignty.”

But for voters of color in Arizona who just watched six Republican-appointed justices hollow out the Voting Rights Act at the Republican Party’s request, for example, expansion would not “politicize” the Court, because the Court’s relentless assault on the right to participate in democracy has been going on for decades. As usual, the people wringing their hands over the Court’s political nature are those who are less likely to be meaningfully affected by the Court’s political choices.

because capping the length of judicial service at some point in the future does nothing to address the crisis that this 6-3 conservative supermajority faces right now.

The commission took care to note its skepticism that Congress can institute term limits by statute, as opposed to the herculean task of enacting them via constitutional amendment

this public trepidation paves the way for savvy Republicans to frame term limits proposals—again, the option that supposedly enjoys “widespread and bipartisan support”—as just another illegitimate Democratic power grab.

which increased significantly in the aftermath of Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s warp-speed pre-election confirmation. Delegating that task to an ad hoc collection of law review enthusiasts who met over Zoom every few weeks was perhaps the least efficacious method of accomplishing that result, short of doing literally nothing.

tasked with writing down lots of big words about this country’s broken legal system while simultaneously saying nothing of consequence.

Mr. Raslan’s guilty verdict, they say, bolsters the ability of European courts to pursue similar cases while sending a message to war criminals around the world that they could one day face consequences.

This sends a clear message to the world that certain crimes will not go unpunished.

After more than a decade of war, Mr. al-Assad remains in power, and there appears little chance that he or his senior advisers or military commanders will stand trial soon.

Other potential avenues for justice have also been blocked. Syria is not party to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and Russia and China have used their vetoes on the United Nations Security Council to prevent Syria from being referred to the court.

Germany is among a few European countries that have sought to try former Syrian officials for war crimes based on universal jurisdiction,

German prosecutors argued that his position gave him oversight of torture that included beating, kicking, electric shocks and sexual assault. Witnesses in the trial said they were fed inedible food, denied medical care and kept in overcrowded cells.

He entered Germany on a visa in 2014 and lived there legally until the German authorities arrested him in 2019.

But his past caught up with him in Germany, where he was tried for crimes against humanity.

When the Syrian conflict broke out in 2011 with protests seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad, Mr. Raslan was the head of interrogation at a security office in the capital, Damascus.

Beatings were common, the food was inedible, the cells were so crowded that some prisoners had to stand so others could lie down. German prosecutors said at least 4,000 people were tortured and nearly 60 killed under his authority there.

The verdict marks a watershed moment for an international network of lawyers, human rights activists and Syrian war survivors who have struggled for years to bring officials who sanctioned or participated in the violence to justice.

He was arrested in 2019, and his trial began the next year. On Thursday, Mr. Raslan was found guilty of crimes against humanity and was sentenced to life in prison.

When Mahran Aoiun heard that a former Syrian intelligence officer had been sentenced on Thursday to life in prison for overseeing torture at a detention center, it brought back the joy he felt years ago when he was released from a brutal Syrian jail.

The verdict handed down by a court in Koblenz, Germany, against the former officer, Ansar Raslan, stirred complicated feelings among Syrians who were abused in Syrian prisons — some at the hands of Mr. Raslan himself.

Others hoped that Mr. Raslan’s conviction would draw attention to the many more crimes committed during the Syrian war that have not been prosecuted, and to the officials who committed them who are still free.

“Those who are torturing prisoners will think twice after the trial,” he said. “This is an achievement.”

New York Times photographers have covered Syria’s civil war and the humanitarian crisis it has unleashed since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began nearly 11 years ago.

A Syrian doctor accused of torturing a detainee in a secret military prison will soon go on trial in Germany on charges of crimes against humanity and causing grievous bodily harm. The doctor, Alaa Mousa, was living in Germany as a refugee when he was arrested in 2020.

German prosecutors built their case with the help of hundreds of Syrian witnesses in Germany and beyond. They indicted Mr. Raslan using “universal jurisdiction,” a legal principle stipulating that in the case of crimes against humanity and genocide, normal territorial restraints on prosecutions do not apply.

The principle is not new. Israel used it during the 1960s trial of the former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, as did Spain in 1998 when demanding that Britain arrest Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator. Previous universal jurisdiction cases in Germany have dealt with crimes committed in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and, more recently, with the genocide of Yazidis in Iraq by former members of the Islamic State.

Germany has the legal basis to prosecute such crimes under the German Code of Crimes Against International Law, which came into effect in 2002, and it has been using it.

“For Germany, it’s also historically the continuation of what we learned from the Nazi period and what we learned about the importance of the Nuremberg trials and the Auschwitz trials for the way we dealt with our past and ultimately for who we are today,”

The Nuremberg trials went after the leading members of the Nazi regime, but also a range of individuals who played a role in Nazi repression, including doctors, business leaders, bureaucrats and propagandists, said Wolfgang Kaleck, a founder of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, which is representing victims in Mr. Raslan’s trial.

Raslan is the first ranking Syrian official to be convicted of war crimes, but he may not be the last.

But several other cases have already been tried or are pending.

Owing partly to its own history in World War II, Germany has become something of a go-to venue for prosecuting crimes against humanity, even if committed outside its own borders. It is also home to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, putting it at the center of efforts to hold the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria accountable for war crimes.

Human rights lawyers concede that so far, the trials have targeted low- and middle-ranking Syrian officials or soldiers.

“If you don’t start now, then in 10 years, you cannot get Assad or his chief of intelligence because you have no evidence,” Mr. Kaleck said. “These cases are a way of building a stock of documents, witness statements, of understanding interconnections and gathering knowledge on which you can build future cases.”

Since the Syrian uprising in 2011, Syrian victims, human rights activists and others have filed more than 20 legal complaints against Syrian regime officials for war crimes and other violations of international law, according to Mr. Kaleck’s center.

This body of evidence, which has been growing for over a decade, could be used in different cases.“More has to come, that is clear,” Mr. Kaleck said. “But this is an important step.”

But the decade-long conflict has left the country shattered, killing hundreds of thousands of people, forcing half of the population from their homes and reducing major cities to rubble. Most of those who remain have been left to live in poverty.

The rebellion that began in 2011 as an uprising against Syria’s autocratic president, Bashar al-Assad, escalated into a civil war, but the splinted rebel movement failed to topple the government.

But the war was gruesome. The government employed poison gas, barrel bombs and suffocating sieges on rebellious communities, and waged a ruthless assault on civilian opponents, throwing hundreds of thousands into filthy prisons where many were tortured and killed.

Some Arab countries have begun restoring ties with the government in an effort to move past the war, although strict sanctions by the United States and other Western countries have blocked most investment.

The United States initially provided covert military support to the rebels, but as the war splintered into multiple overlapping conflicts, America shifted its focus to fight the jihadists of the Islamic State, who at their peak controlled nearly a third of eastern Syria.

For Syrian civilians, there is less daily violence now than during the war’s earlier years, but the economy has been destroyed.

More than half of Syria’s prewar population fled their homes during the fighting, and most have not returned, including the 5.6 million refugees who largely live in destitution in neighboring Arab countries.

“Justice has not been fully accomplished,” he said. “This is a small slice of what we are talking about.”

the numbers also suggest a more fundamental flaw:

There are obvious answers, including inflation, Afghanistan, supply chain problems, rising crime, problems at the border, the ongoing pandemic, wokeness, and a certain tone deafness towards the public’s concerns. All of them have contributed in a material way to Joe Biden’s fall from grace.

Democrats need to ask themselves an urgent question: Why can’t we beat these f*%#ers?

Between the Democratic Party’s weaknesses, Biden’s age and the unimpressiveness of his possible successors, Republicans could very easily be competitive in 2024 while renominating Trump and campaigning on a purely negative agenda.

if there’s anything we’ve learned over the past 15 years, it’s that the chance to enjoy a little bit of power without any real responsibility is impossible for Republicans to resist.

While a lack of transparency by the Bukele government makes it hard to assess the credibility of official crime data, experts say there is little doubt that there has been a notable reduction in violence since the start of the emergency decree.

“This crackdown has been unprecedented,” said Tiziano Breda, Central America analyst at the International Crisis Group, an independent research organization. “Without a doubt this has weakened the gangs.”

if criminal groups have been crippled, so too have many of El Salvador’s civil liberties.

“Similar policies of mass incarceration and an iron fist in El Salvador and the rest of the region have shown that in the long term they don’t achieve sustainable results and bring back surges of violence,”

Mr. Bukele’s approval ratings, according to polls, have remained above 80 percent, suggesting that many Salvadorans crave greater safety, even if it means a more repressive system.

“They were so desperate because of the levels of violence and the control of the gangs,” said José Miguel Cruz, an expert on El Salvador’s gang violence at Florida International University, “that they will accept that sort of deal with the devil.”

Since March, the Legislative Assembly, controlled by Mr. Bukele’s party, has approved legislation allowing judges to imprison children as young as 12, limiting freedom of expression, expanding the use of pretrial detention and permitting prosecutors and judges to try people in absentia.

And indiscriminately imprisoning young men who may have done nothing wrong alongside gang members could result in a large population of disaffected youth who might make easier recruits for gangs.

even if there is less violence in El Salvador, such a dip is likely to be temporary without addressing the root causes, including grinding poverty and corruption, some analysts warn.

The state of emergency has been used as a blunt instrument, according to the Human Rights Watch report, with police commanders establishing a quota system requiring officers to arrest a certain number of people every day.

The prison system is at a breaking point, with close to 100,000 people behind bars as of November, more than three times the capacity of the country’s penal system

At least 90 people have died in custody since the state of emergency began

The crackdown has swept up not just gang members, but also children, women and the physically and mentally disabled. Some residents in poor neighborhoods who once feared gang members, say they are more fearful of the Salvadoran police.

“The government can do many worse things to you,”

Ms. Solórzano’s younger brother Adrián, 30, was arrested in April and accused of terrorism. “It was a shock when the police arrived and said that they had to take him away,” she said, adding that her brother had done nothing wrong.

Then on July 5, representatives from a funeral home came to the family’s home and gave them the news: Adrián was dead, strangled to death while in custody. It was unclear how he was killed or by whom.

with those often-invisible systems that we take for granted until they fail, such as the electrical grid or medical implants, pharmaceuticals and the blood supply.

It’s possible to see a future in which we are dependent on the perfect, continuous performance of air conditioning the way many people are dependent on lifesaving drugs, planes are dependent on air traffic control, and a colony on the moon or Mars would be dependent on perpetual sources of oxygen and water.

AC’s basic trajectory has been from a curiosity and luxury to an amenity to a necessity. It has changed how we live and where we live, and reconfigured our cities, houses, politics and identity. And now it is bound up with our hope for survival as a species.

Where would we be without it? Much of the South would be poorer than it is now, and isolated, with high mortality rates and lower educational achievement. There would be no skyscrapers in Atlanta, no high-rise apartment buildings in Dallas and Houston. In our hottest states, including the Sun Belt, public institutions, including universities, libraries and entertainment venues, would be fewer and more minimally developed.

Entertainment would still be seasonal. City theaters would close as temperatures rise, and music, drama and the movies would migrate outdoors. Many of the products we take for granted, including textiles and foodstuffs that rely on atmospheric controls or refrigeration, would be of far inferior quality and much more expensive.

Architecture would look very different, at least for those who could afford such niceties as higher ceilings, wider eaves and more sharply pitched roofs (all of which can passively cool a house). The picture window — a source not just of light but also of heat, and which can’t be opened for ventilation — would not be a key element of suburban design.

The ranch house, with thin walls and low ceilings, laid out in relentless grids across the Sun Belt since the 1950s and immortalized in the haunting photographs of Robert Adams, wouldn’t define the vernacular architecture of America.

The net migration from the South, which continued from the Civil War until around 1964 (when air conditioning was well established in the country’s hottest states), would be ongoing.

air conditioning increased political polarization, with an influx of Northern Republicans into the South, and a resorting of the Democrats into a northern, more progressive, urban party without a conservative Dixiecrat wing.

It may have also changed the way women conceive of feminism and liberation from patriarchy, from a model based on independence and working outside the home in the early 20th century to one structured around the supposed leisure offered by the modern, air-conditioned tract home in the middle of the century.

Less tangible are the poetic details of life before AC that are embedded in art and literature. Staying cool in hot weather was often a social experience, a collective lethargy that brought one closer to family and community

Throughout the history of mechanical ventilation and “comfort cooling,” there was resistance to innovation, with a vocal and determined “open air” movement that opposed mechanical ventilation in public schools.