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Larry Kramer was that rare thing, the real thing, a leader. I suspect that in death he will be as he was in life – acknowledged, but underappreciated and undervalued.

These are four essays I posted about him, in succession in July 2015.

Larry Kramer Leader – His Pen

Larry Kramer Leader – His Voice

Larry Kramer Leader – His Anger

Larry Kramer Leader – His Moment

Years ago, I began posting pieces on the struggle over the future of Hong Kong. The struggle between Hong Kongers on the one side, and the Chinese authorities on the other.

This essay is, then, an update. A systemic update that posits leadership is a system consisting of three parts: 1) leaders; 2) followers; and 3) contexts. Each is of equal importance. Each is independent of the other. Each is dependent on the other. And each is necessary to understanding what is happening in Hong Kong and why.    

Context

Apart from a brief period of Japanese occupation, Hong Kong was a British colony for well over a century, from 1841 to 1997. Though it was situated in the East, the many decades during which Hong Kong was governed by the West left their mark. In part for this reason, when Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, China’s top leader, at the time Deng Xiaoping, guaranteed that Hong Kong would remain essentially in tact, autonomous, separate from the mainland, for another fifty years. Deng was, in other words, the architect of what came to be known as “one country, two systems.” While Hong Kong would from then on belong to China, it would be permitted for the next half century to govern itself. This meant was that for the next half century Hong Kong would be more democratic than autocratic, and more capitalist than socialist, not to speak of communist.

This was not mere magnanimity on Deng’s part. While the people of Hong Kong would benefit from being allowed to self-determine, China had its own reasons for keeping hands off. Under British rule Hong Kong had achieved a high level not only of autonomy, but of prosperity. Thus, this bastion of capitalism on the doorstep of the communist mainland was regarded, rightly, as important to China’s future economic development. This during a time when China remained largely undeveloped and desperately poor.

But within approximately one year after Xi Jinping came to power – he became President of the People’s Republic of China in 2013 – China’s attitude toward Hong Kong became notably more assertive. China began gradually to erode the liberties that Hong Kong’s 7.5 million people had previously enjoyed, and so, in 2014, they started to protest under the banner, “Umbrella Revolution.” The Umbrella Revolution – so-called because the peaceful protesters carried umbrellas – consisted of large numbers of pro-democracy demonstrators taking to the streets to vent their growing suspicion of Beijing.

Between approximately 2014 and 2019 was something of a standoff between the people of Hong Kong and the government of China. But because of Xi’s increasingly heavy hand, in 2019 Hong Kong’s anti-government protests – anti the Chinese government and anti their proxies in Hong Kong – escalated. They increased greatly in size and in the level of their anger, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators taking repeatedly to the streets, sometimes in response to something specific, sometimes just to register their outrage at the eroding of their autonomy. Notwithstanding the constant provocations, during this entire time the authorities in China mostly kept their powder dry. While there were sporadic efforts at clamping down, Xi was not prepared, then, to provoke a showdown. During all of last year he mostly refrained from intervening in Hong Kong with a heavy hand.     

But, in 2020, things changed. The context changed – the context now was a virus crisis. Unlike Americans, Hong Kongers were familiar with this sort of threat; in 2003 they went through the SARS epidemic. But Covid-19 required that they no longer hold the enormous mass gatherings that just a few months earlier had characterized their political protests.  

Xi seized the day. Last month, Beijing effectively dismantled decades of legal precedence by declaring it had full authority to intervene in Hong Kong. Last month, Beijing’s Hong Kong proxies arrested 15 veteran leaders of the protest movements. And, last month, Hong Kong’s government – which is allied with China – issued a series of statements condemning every member of the opposition. As Mary Hui put it Quartz, in the month of April, “the rules of engagement between Beijing and Hong Kong – ostensibly a city with a high degree of autonomy over its own affairs – were completely rewritten.” In May the battle lines were drawn still further. Though their numbers now were significantly smaller, members of Hong Kong’s opposition movement again took to the streets. This time the police promptly clamped downed – their had less patience and used more increased force. Hong Kong’s government meantime made clear that it would move forward with promptly enacting and then rigidly enforcing laws intended to take aim at anyone in Hong Kong who dared to dissent.

Covid gave Xi cover. Turned out that in 2019 he was just biding his time.  Once the time was right – the virus crisis was all-consuming, the ultimate distraction – he pounced.

Leader

Xi Jinping is not the only leader in this drama. There are leaders of the opposition within Hong Kong. There are political leaders within Hong Kong who reliably represent the Chinese authorities. There are business leaders in Hong Kong – corporate titans who, not incidentally, supported the protesters in the past, but in the present want nothing so much as peace in their streets to be restored. And there are leaders in China who are other than Xi.  But he, Xi, is the supreme leader. The leader whose word is law. The leader with the power and authority to enforce the law. The leader who bridges no dissent. The leader who in recent years metamorphosed from authoritarian to totalitarian.

Todd Pittinsky and I wrote a book titled, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy. (The book is being published by Cambridge University Press; it will be available in September.) Xi is one of our exemplars: a leader who lusts – in his case for power.  

Our definition of lust is simple. We define lust as a psychological drive that produces intense wanting, even desperately needing to obtain an object or to secure a circumstance. When the object has been obtained, or the circumstance secured, there is relief, but only briefly, temporarily. Xi is a leader who lusts by every measure. All the evidence supports the proposition that he has a desperate want, or need to accumulate power, and then to accumulate more power. There is no evidence to the contrary, or even to suggest that when he accrues more power than he had previously, he will be satisfied, satiated. As Churchill said of Hitler, Xi’s appetite grows with his eating.

Xi’s tenure as all-powerful leader has not been without incident. In fact, early this year, when the corona virus started to spread in Wuhan, rapidly to become a significant threat, Xi disappeared from the political stage, presumably to decipher what was happening and to determine what to do about it. But, overall, his trajectory from being successful politician to being supreme leader who I should add, has now been given constitutional permission to stay supreme leader for life, has been near seamless.

So far, Xi, who is leader not only of the Chinese government but also, importantly, of the Chinese Communist Party, has spent most of his time in office consolidating his power within his own country. However, in the last few of years this started to change. Xi is no longer satisfied to control only his own people. He now wants other domains to dominate. It is not that his expansionist impulse is entirely new. China’s Belt and Road Initiative – which invests heavily in 70 countries around the world – began soon after he came into power. But Xi’s drive for power drove him more recently to lust after other juicy morsels, Hong Kong among them. Hong Kong has, of course, beckoned all along. But Xi seems to believe that now, finally, is the time to grab what rightfully is his. Beijing’s use of force, especially by the military, violently to suppress dissent in Hong Kong could still become a major political, economic, or even military problem. But Xi seems to be calculating that a likely win is worth the risk. Among its other virtues, it raises this question: if Hong Kong ends in China’s tent, how far behind can be Taiwan?     

Followers

I define followers by rank. Which in this case means followers are the many millions who comprise President Xi Jinping’s subordinates. Defining followers by rank – as opposed to behavior – has the virtue of signaling that while most followers follow most of the time, not all followers follow all of the time. Some followers, in other words, do not follow. Some, in fact, deliberately, willfully, refuse to follow.     

Like most prominent, especially dominant leaders, Xi has so many followers that they best are grouped. Followers can be grouped in different ways, for example, by type, or style. Previously (especially in my earlier book, Followership) I divided followers by their level of engagement. “Isolates” were, then, at the one end of the continuum. They were the least engaged. “Diehards,” in contrast, were at the other end of the continuum, they were the most engaged.

For the purposes of this post the followers who have mattered most are the people of Hong Kong – in particular the enormous numbers of protesters, who ranged from being occasional Participants to being willing, if not even eager, to put their lives on the line for their cause. (I call these sorts of followers, “Diehards.”) Their cause is freedom. Freedom to govern themselves as they decide. Freedom above all from the iron fist that is the despot’s in Beijing.

In 2019 were times when over a million denizens of Hong Kong took to the streets to protest. While in the main the demonstrations were peaceful, as the year went on, they became increasingly vicious, clashes with the authorities growing both in their numbers and in their levels of violence. By early 2020, when Covid-19 became a real and present danger, they had already dwindled, the protesters as much disheartened as frightened.

But a poll of Hong Kongers conducted in March of this year showed that 58% of respondents remained still in favor of resistance, while only 28% came out against. Among other things, this signaled what seems to have become an indefinite schism between the majority of the people of Hong Kong and the government of Hong Kong, which is widely seen now as acting in the interests of Beijing, not in the interests of its own people. As I write, on May 27^th, the tensions in Hong Kong are escalating still. Police brutality is one of the protesters’ biggest grievances. Nevertheless, not a single member of the police has at any point been charged for excessive use of force, from body-slamming to tear-gassing to pepper-spraying. In the last 24 hours alone some 360 people have been arrested for the approximate equivalent of disorderly conduct.

We cannot know, of course, how this will end. This though we do know. First, that Xi’s decision to brook no further dissent in Hong Kong likely is non-negotiable and non-retractable. Second, that from here on in those who violate his edicts likely are at significant personal risk. And third, that since in the last few hours Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the U. S. would no longer consider Hong Kong is autonomous from China, the implications for relations between the U. S. and Hong Kong, and between the U. S. and China, likely are considerable. Given these contexts, then, and these leaders, and these followers, while other outcomes are possible, they are not probable.  

The tie between being a leader and being a role model is tight. The idea that leaders are, or at least they ought to be, role models, has a long history and steady trajectory.

Plutarch, born around 50 A.D., has often been called the first modern biographer. What was his purpose in penning his classic, Lives, his brief biographical sketches of some of the most famous and powerful figures of ancient Greece and Rome? It was to depict them as role models or, in some cases, as anti-role models.

By his own testimony, Plutarch’s primary purpose was to “arouse the spirit of emulation,” to paint pictures largely (though not entirely) of men who were heroes, exemplars of moral good who, he hoped, would inspire other men to follow. Of Coriolanus, who was young when his father died, Plutarch wrote, “His example shows us that the loss of a father, even though it may impose other disadvantages on a boy, does not prevent him from living a virtuous or distinguished life, and that it is only worthless men who seek to excuse the deterioration of their character by pleading neglect in their early years.”

Nor has the presumption of leaders as role models receded over the ages. Even now role models are part of the pedagogy. Leaders are taught to be exemplary figures who their followers would do well to emulate.      

Go to any search engine, type in “leader as a role model,” and you will see what I mean. More than half a billion entries, nearly all in keeping with the idea that, ideally, leaders should be in some way so estimable – so admirable or attractive; so honorable or successful – that they are worthy of being mirrored. As an article in Psychology Today concluded, having role models “directly impacts not only how you perceive yourself but, just as importantly, how others perceive you.” For leaders to be a good role models, then, has an impact not only on them but on others, specifically their followers.

In their widely read book, The Leadership Challenge (originally published in 2007), James Kouzes and Barry Posner made the same point, though they used the phrase, “setting an example.” Leaders should, they wrote, “take every opportunity to show others by their own example that they’re deeply committed to the values and aspirations they espouse. No one will believe you are serious until they see you doing what you are asking of others. Leading by example is how leaders make visions and values tangible. It’s how they provide the evidence that they’re personally committed.”   

This literature has come regularly to mind during Donald Trump’s time in the White House. In the old days, boys freely and frequently aspired to become just like the American president – if not president themselves. Now numberless American parents have come reluctantly if ineluctably to conclude that they would never want their sons, or for that matter their daughters, to grow up to be just like the sitting president. Trump a role model? For most Americans, not hardly.   

I will not here delve into the president’s character or his behavior. There is, however, one decision he recently made that I cannot help but point to – it is that bluntly and blatantly anti-role model. It is his decision not to wear, so far never to wear, a mask – the pandemic notwithstanding.

• Notwithstanding that wearing a mask if not at least six feet distanced – especially in an enclosed space – is now recommended by virtually every medical expert.
• Notwithstanding that wearing a mask if not at least six feet distanced – especially in an enclosed space – is now recommended by virtually every inexpert, including most political, business, and military leaders.
• Notwithstanding that wearing a mask if not at least six feet distanced – especially in an enclosed space – is now recommended by the Center for Disease Control.
• Notwithstanding that wearing a mask is now mandated for all West Wing employees unless they are sitting directly at their desks – with two exceptions, the president and the vice president. .
• Notwithstanding that wearing a mask if not at least six feet distanced – especially in an enclosed space – has become a divisive issue. Democrats are significantly more likely than Republicans to report wearing a mask when they leave home. And there have been repeated reports of screaming and yelling, and even physical altercations, between those who wear masks and those who do not.    

In recent weeks masks have become not just a way of protecting the self and the public against COVID 19, they have become symbols – symbols of the culture wars. Symbols of the culture wars stoked instead of snuffed by the American president.

So much for leaders as role models. Plutarch would turn in his grave.

The study of the American presidency is a mainstay of American political science – maybe the main mainstay. Nothing is as central to the discipline as the White House – the persona of the person who has been in it, how he has performed, and what exactly he has or has not accomplished. Notwithstanding the intent of the Founders – to decentralize the United States government – our preoccupation from the beginning of the Republic, including in the academy, has been with the man who more than any other single individual has dominated the national discourse.

Political scientists as well as historians have tended to divide the presidential office into different roles. In his 1956 classic, The American Presidency, the eminent scholar Clinton Rossiter proposed three: first, Chief of State; second, Chief Executive; third, Commander in Chief. Since then other roles have been proposed, such as Legislative Leader and Party Leader. But in the main the three to which Rossiter pointed have stuck – they are still considered the most central, and the most critical.

Which brings us to Donald J. Trump. Well into the fourth year of his first, perhaps his only presidential term, it has become clear how he has performed and where his passions lie, specifically as they pertain to being Chief of State, Chief Executive, and Commander in Chief.

The last of the three can be dismissed with dispatch. There is no evidence that President Trump is a warrior, lusting to play the part of leader of America’s armed forces. In fact, after early romances with several of the nation’s most prominent military men, the love is gone – as are they. Generals James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and John Kelly did not last long in the Trump White House which, it turned out, was perfectly fine with the Commander in Chief. He never did want them for their military prowess, and he strained against their military manner.  

What about Trump as Chief Executive? Is this the role most suited to his skill set, such as it is? Or, at least, is it the role most in line with what he likes to do, enjoys doing? Turns out the answers to these questions too are no. Rossiter says the Chief Executive is charged with running the government, quoting Alexander Hamilton writing in The Federalist, “The true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.” Well, evidence is not only that Trump has no aptitude for running a government, but also that he has no interest. Not the slightest. Not the slightest interest in being an efficient manager or for that matter an effective leader.

We have known all along that before he became president, Trump had no political, military, or government experience or expertise whatsoever. We have also known all along that after he became president his interest in the specifics associated with being Chief Executive, and his level of curiosity about what it actually takes to run the government and to supervise the executive branch, have been low, very low.

If there was even a smidgeon of doubt about this in January 2020 there can be no doubt left in May 2020. Since the start of the pandemic Trump has sought at every turn to thrust the leadership and management of the pandemic into the hands of someone else – anyone else. The Vice President, members of his Cabinet, medical experts, chief executive officers of major American companies, and, most obviously, most strikingly, all 50 of the nation’s governors. President Trump has done the previously unthinkable. Rather than taking on the task himself, he has charged the 50 governors of the 50 states with running the show. With leading Americans out of the coronavirus crisis, and with taking care of business, literally, until the crisis has passed. Not for this Chief Executive the apparently tedious details associated with heading the executive branch.     

Which brings us to the president as Chief of State. On this I quote Rossiter directly. The president “remains today, as he has always been, the ceremonial head of the government of the United States, and he must take part with real or apparent enthusiasm in a range of activities that would keep him running and posing from sunrise to bedtime …. Some of these activities are solemn or even priestly in nature; others … are flirtations with vulgarity.” It is this role – that of figurehead as opposed to working head – to which Trump has gravitated. It is this role to which the nation’s first television-star president is most naturally drawn, and it is this role that he prefers, to the exclusion of the others, to play.      

Trump does not play the part of Chief of State with “apparent” enthusiasm. He plays it with “real” enthusiasm. He does not feign his pleasure at being president. His pleasure in being president, more precisely in playing the part of president, is genuine. This distinction – between being president and playing the part of president – is an important one. For Trump’s passion is not now, nor has it ever been, for exercising the actual tasks at hand. His passion is not, in other words, for power over policy. With a few exceptions – yes, such as The Wall – his investment in public policy is low, and his ideology is fluid as opposed to fixed. This Republican was, after all, a Democrat for most of his life. Instead, Trump’s passion is for performance. He does not actually want to be Chief Executive or Commander in Chief or for that matter Legislative Leader or Party Leader. What Trump wants instead, desperately wants instead, is to play the part of Chief of State, fancy trappings, and abject loyalties, included. It’s why he will do what he thinks it will take to remain Chief of State four more years.  

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Added note: My colleague, Todd Pittinsky and I, recently became interested in leaders with unbridled passions. To this end we wrote a book titled, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy. It will be published in September by Cambridge University Press.

In the old days, when I used to give talks live and in person, it was not uncommon during the Q and A for someone in the audience to ask me who I thought was the greatest leader in the world. I would often turn the question around, and ask them, members of the audience, who they thought the greatest living leader. For years, the answer I would generally get, after a bit of back and forth, was Nelson Mandela. However, since Mandela’s death has been no obvious candidate. People have had a hard time coming up with the name of a single individual they widely agreed was the greatest living leader of all.

In the last few years, when I was pushed to answer the question myself, I did come up with a candidate – Bill Gates. Through some of my own research I had come fully to appreciate the leading role played by him and his wife, Melinda Gates, in the world of philanthropy. And, of course, this had to be paired with Bill Gates’s genius in founding (along with Paul Allen), and then running Microsoft, one of the most impressive, successful American companies ever.  

Now there is this – the pandemic. Now there is this most fraught, most daunting of global challenges and, again, there is Gates. Gates at the forefront. For as it happens, he not only foresaw the virus crisis (back in 2015), but he is as well-equipped as any lay person anywhere in the world to address it. Given his deep experience in global health, especially epidemiology, he is fully equipped to address it substantively. And, given his deep pockets, which are constantly being partly emptied only to be promptly replenished, he is fully equipped to address it financially.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has an endowment of $40 billion. Recently it decided to devote all its enormous, various resources, including its extensive expertise, to taking on Covid-19. Similarly, it appears that Bill Gates himself has decided to step out from behind his usual scrim to go public, to put his own face on the fight against the disease. Last week he seemed to have made more public appearances than he usually does in a year. And he is writing constantly, prolifically, and invariably highly knowledgably, about where in the process of the pandemic we are now.  

The coronavirus crisis seems to have got Gates’s competitive juices flowing. He is chomping at the bit to play his part in slaying this dragon – which means likely as not he will. Gates is great – a leader for the ages even now.         

In mid-April, the Mayo Clinic issued a policy statement in response to the coronavirus crisis. The statement was clear. It read in part: “Beginning today (Monday April 13) Mayo Clinic is requiring all patients and visitors to wear a face covering or mask to help stop the spread of COVID-19.” Notice the policy states that “all” patients and visitors are required to cover their nose and mouth, not “some.”

Two days ago, though, when Vice President Mike Pence visited Mayo Clinic, he wore no face covering of any kind. Pictures reveal that everyone around him was wearing mask. And we know that in advance of his visit Pence was informed about Mayo’s mask policy. Still, he wore no face covering whatsoever when he came to visit, nor did his willful refusal to follow the house rule seem to intrude on his experience.  

As soon as it became known that Pence had flagrantly flouted Mayo policy, he was slammed for what he did in the press and by the press. He was charged with acting “dangerously” and “disrespectfully,” and of setting a bad example. All of which is true – he did behave badly, and he did set a bad example for which he was roundly and soundly as well as properly pasted.  

But… was the Vice President the only one who did anything wrong? Or was there someone else, at least one someone else, who could be charged with shirking, or maybe it was shrinking from, his or her duty?

Imagine that you are responsible for running one of the nation’s premier medical facilities during a public health crisis.  In response to this crisis you set a policy intended to protect every single individual who crosses your threshold. The policy is assumed to be ironclad, no exceptions, for even a single exception would pose widespread risk.    

Further imagine that one day an anonymous man comes to visit who is not wearing a mask. Would you tell, or have someone else tell, this man to put on a mask? Would you insist that before this man sets foot on the premises he must put on a mask because failure to do so would violate policy? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, why would you do any different if this man were Vice President of the United States? Is the Vice President above the law? Or did you – if you were responsible for running one of the nation’s premier medical facilities during a public health crisis – follow his lead rather than lead yourself?

This is the seventh in a series of posts that explore followers in a pandemic – this pandemic. During the coronavirus crisis leaders have been regularly, even relentlessly examined, explored, deciphered, and dissected. The American obsession with the American president, Donald Trump, has been especially virulent, as if he alone is solely responsible for everything bad that has happened, and for that matter everything good. In other words, as is typical, followers, in this case Trump’s followers, have been ignored. More precisely, they have been ignored not in individual instances – but as a group. They have been ignored as a group that was deeply involved in bringing us to this point – and now in our frantic effort to cure what ails us. Each of these posts is, then, intended as a corrective. A corrective to the misleading, mistaken idea that our fixation on Trump is warranted – as if he were not just the leading actor but the only actor. In brief, if there is blame, blame must be shared.  

VII – The People

For all the different clusters that constitute the president’s followers, the followers that matter most even in these crazy times, are we the American people. For as I write it still holds that come November we the American electorate will get to decide if President Donald Trump should serve another four years as president of the United States or if, instead, he should be obliged next January to cede the Oval Office to someone else.  

“We the People” has a great ring to it. “We the people” sounds so idealistic it’s almost romantic, as if we the American people were one, unified in what we believed, unified in who we trusted, unified in how we thought we should move from the present to the future. This idealization of the American body politic is even further exaggerated during a time of national crisis by what is called the “rally ‘round the flag effect.” The effect is felt when times are tough, when on account of war or another national trauma the American people come together. An example was how we were in the aftermath of 9/11, when Americans of every stripe joined, when the American flag was on proud display at home and in the workplace, on cars, on clothes, and on the tops of state capitols. In the three weeks immediately following the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the nation’s oldest flag manufacturer went into overdrive, more than tripling its previous production. The nation was one.       

That was then. Now though things are different. Times have changed. Prior to the pandemic Americans were famously divided: politically divided; economically divided; culturally divided; divided by race and class and gender and sexual orientation; divided by geography and demography; red states and blue states; Republicans and Democrats; conservatives and progressives; a miserably fractious Congress all too accurately reflecting a woefully fractious America.

Which raises this question. Given that times have changed yet again – the post-pandemic context is dramatically different from the pre-pandemic context – will we change in response? Will we the American people feel much differently, think much differently, act much differently next July than we did last January? Importantly, will we become a nation a little less divided, a little more unified? And, specifically, will we, we the American electorate, we followers, prefer in increasingly large numbers to have a leader in the White House who is other than Donald Trump?

As the first of this series of posts pointed out, Trump has been famously able to hold on to his base. Whether this base will remain in place until Election Day is, however, not certain, especially in light not only of the health crisis but, additionally, of the financial crisis. There are, however two measures that provide some indicators. The first of these is the high level of American fear. Trump’s numberless reassurances going back months that everything will soon be fine is having only limited effect. To be sure, some states and some regions of the country are, as the president puts it, “opening up.” But as of this writing the American people are failing to respond as he would wish. A bipartisan majority of Americans say they want to continue to protect themselves during the pandemic by sheltering in place rather than going out to eat or to shop. Moreover, it seems clear that we the people prefer to follow the lead of the experts – as opposed to that of the president. According to a recent Reuters poll, 72% of adults say that people should stay at home “until the doctors and public health officials say it is safe” to go out.

To be sure, this number obscures some of the familiar divides. Once again there was a considerable partisan difference: 88% of Democrats agreed with the majority about waiting to go out until the experts say it is safe, whereas only 55% of Republicans did the same. Nevertheless, on this issue voters who identify as Republicans are drifting toward voters who identify as Democrats: the numbers of Republicans who agreed with Democrats about staying at home at least for now nearly doubled in the two-week period between late March and mid-April.        

Which returns us to what so far has been Trump’s unshakable base. Suffice for now to point out there is cognitive dissonance among Republicans: on the one hand most say they want to shelter in place no matter what Trump says; on the other hand fully 84% of Republicans say they approve the way the president is handling the virus crisis. (Notably only a puny 15 % of Democrats say the same.)

It is widely agreed that the new coronavirus is a moving target. We cannot now know how much damage it will ultimately inflict on the economy. More to the point, we cannot now know how much damage it will ultimately inflict on the nation’s health. Nor can we know when it will finally be vanquished by a vaccine, or effectively neutered by a remedy that will preclude our getting seriously sick and then still sicker.

What we can know though is this. That however dominant a figure during this pandemic is, inevitably, the American president, neither he nor any other leader can control the action. Moreover, as indicated at the start of each of these posts, Donald Trump has never, not for a moment, been the only player in this drama. As time passes, the critical role of his followers, including those in his close proximity such as Mike Pence and, yes, Anthony Fauci, will emerge more clearly. For leadership is never a person. Leadership is a system with three parts – leaders, followers, and contexts – each of which is of equal importance.     

This is the sixth in a series of posts that explore followers in a pandemic – this pandemic. During the coronavirus crisis leaders have been regularly, even relentlessly examined, explored, deciphered, and dissected. The American obsession with the American president, Donald Trump, has been especially virulent, as if he alone is solely responsible for everything bad that has happened, and for that matter everything good. In other words, as is typical, followers, in this case Trump’s followers, have been ignored. More precisely, they have been ignored not in individual instances – but as a group. They have been ignored as a group that was deeply involved in bringing us to this point – and now in our frantic effort to cure what ails us. Each of these posts is, then, intended as a corrective. A corrective to the misleading, mistaken idea that our fixation on Trump is warranted – as if he were not just the leading actor but the only actor. In brief, if there is blame, blame must be shared.  

VI – The Protesters

Protesting during a pandemic is hard. I do not refer to protesting online, or to bitching and moaning in private to friends and family. I refer to the old-fashioned kind, when protesting meant taking to the streets to send signals, aural and visual, that made clear just how furious you were, how very, very furious, about whoever or whatever your gripe.  

Recently, famously, were enormous, repeated protests like those in Hong Kong, against the long arm of the Chinese government. Also recently were similar protests in Peru, in Lebanon, in India, in Chile, in France, and in other countries around the world, each one a reflection of extreme dissatisfaction by some individuals and groups with someone or something. In the wake of the pandemic, however, these protests have come almost to a halt. Hardly any marching or mobilizing, hardly any rioting or rallying. Instead people are hunkered down in their homes, forbidden by their governments to congregate, most in any event discouraged by the dangers of the virus from doing anything other than what they are being told.

To be sure, there have been some exceptions to this general rule – protesters have not been silenced altogether. Chilean activists have projected images of crowds on to empty streets. In Hong Kong, a union of medical workers went on strike to take issue with the government’s response to the outbreak. And, as Erica Chenowith and her colleagues have pointed out, during the virus crisis protesters, activists, have found new ways of expressing their angers and frustrations. There are walkouts and car caravans. There is crowdfunding and mask-making. There are technologists developing new ways of checking individual temperatures and monitoring high-risk areas, and experimenting with drones to deliver supplies.

In the United States have also been sporadic, episodic protests that more closely resemble the old-fashioned kind – though only occasionally have they involved large numbers of people gathering in proximity. In general, protests engendered by the pandemic have fallen into two categories: those against big business and those against big government.

The first group of protesters consists in the main of underpaid and undervalued employees demanding improved working conditions – especially in corporate behemoths such as Amazon and Walmart. While the chorus of their complaints has not been large, loud, or disruptive enough to penetrate the body politic, it has been persistent enough to garner some attention in the press, some attention among the public, and some attention by their employers who incline to straddle the line between punishing the dissidents on the one hand, and giving in to their demands on the other.

Amazon, for example, fired a warehouse worker in New York City, Chris Smalls, who helped lead a walkout on Staten Island. Though the company denied firing Mr. Smalls for political activity, it has a track record of doing what it legally can to preclude its workers from publicly taking issue with company policy or in any was organizing. Some Amazon workers terminated during the pandemic claimed to have been singled out and, ultimately, pushed out because they pressed for better workplace conditions. Amazon, in turn, has continued to insist they were fired because they violated unrelated company policies.  Meantime, sometimes, Amazon workers are getting an important ally – the law. Case in point: New York State. On April 22, Letitia James, the state’s attorney general, sent Amazon a letter that read in part, “While we continue to investigate, the information so far available to us raises concerns that Amazon’s health and safety measures taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic are so inadequate that they may violate several provisions of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.” In France, incidentally, the law is much clearer about who is responsible for what. In response to concerns raised by Amazon employees through their union representatives (yes, their union representatives), a judge found in favor of them and against their employer. Amazon was effectively forced to rectify working conditions at several warehouses rendered unsafe by the coronavirus crisis. As is the company’s wont, its first response to the judge’s ruling was to scream bloody murder. It’s second response was to enter detailed discussions with Amazon employees about how to improve workplace safety.

Walmart has similarly suffered the slings and arrows of bad publicity when a small number of intrepid employees spoke publicly about what they claimed were unacceptable working conditions. Early in April a 21-year-old cashier at a Walmart in New Orleans, Maya Smith, walked out of her workplace in protest. She aired her grievances against Walmart on New Orleans Public Radio, claiming that the company forbade its workers to wear masks and gloves, even those who “interacted with everyone” and had to “touch everything.” “It’s really unsafe and unsanitary to be working in those conditions, knowing what’s going on,” she charged.  

Ms. Smith is indicative of countless women and men in similar situations. People who are essential workers – but who nevertheless are low wage workers not afforded even the few scant health care protections recommended by government agencies during the virus crisis. Walmart is the largest employer of African Americans and Latinx workers in the country. The problem is, of course, the usual one. Even in the best of times, not to speak of during a pandemic, low wage workers organizing on their own behalf is difficult, extremely difficult. Union membership now is small, and Income inequity has increased during the time of Trump, not decreased, which makes it even harder for workers like these to fight for their rights. There are organizations such as United for Respect (UFR), which describes itself as a “multiracial national nonprofit organization fighting for big and bold policy change” that will improve the “lives of people who work in retail.” But the mountain it hopes to scale is high. Safe to say that while UFR protesters have made a very, very small dent in the nation’s conscientiousness, on the nation’s conscience, they are not in any case on Trump’s radar.

Protesters that are on Trump’s radar are some like those in Michigan who in mid-April decided they were tired of their governor, Democrat Gretchen Whitmer, telling them what to do and when to do it. They were tired, in other words, of being told to stay in the house and away from work until such time as the government rescinded its restrictions. In fact, so many were so fed up that thousands clogged the streets of the state capitol, Lansing, demanding they be free to get out and do what they want when they want. The Washington Post described the scene this way: “They drowned [the] downtown in a cacophony of honking. They blared patriotic songs from car radios, waving all sorts of flags from the windows – President Trump flags, American flags and the occasional Confederate flag ….   Many got out of their cars and crashed the front lawn of the capitol building, with some chanting, “Lock her up!” and “We will not comply.”

The protest in Michigan – which was not, incidentally, the only one of its kind – was large enough and noisy enough to get the nation’s attention. Though a majority of Michigan residents continued to support Whitmer’s handling of the virus crisis, right wing groups promoted the event through e mails and social media posts, Fox News covered the event all day long including in prime time, and, in spite of the fact that the protesters in Michigan flagrantly violated his own administration’s guidelines, President Donald Trump could not help himself.  He could not resist. His inordinately divisive tweet? “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”   

Again, pandemics and protests are not natural allies. Protests suffocate when they are deprived of fresh air. And protestors stay away when a virus requires they stay in. Still, “not natural allies” does not mean outright enemies. Low wage workers are being heard at least by some of the people some of the time. And as it turned out, those protesters in Michigan were at the vanguard of men and women nationwide itching to get out and “open the country back up.” Think of them as Trump’s troops – shouting from the streets of Lansing that which even he dared not shout from the corridors of Washington power.  

This is the fifth in a series of posts that explore followers in a pandemic – this pandemic. During the coronavirus crisis leaders have been regularly, even relentlessly examined, explored, deciphered, and dissected. The American obsession with the American president, Donald Trump, has been especially virulent, as if he alone is solely responsible for everything bad that has happened, and for that matter everything good. In other words, as is typical, followers, in this case Trump’s followers, have been ignored. More precisely, they have been ignored not in individual instances – but as a group. They have been ignored as a group that was deeply involved in bringing us to this point – and now in our frantic effort to cure what ails us. Each of these posts is, then, intended as a corrective. A corrective to the misleading, mistaken idea that our fixation on Trump is warranted – as if he were not just the leading actor but the only actor. In brief, if there is blame, blame must be shared.  

V – The Experts

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for thirty-six years, has become during the coronavirus crisis a celebrity. His calm, serious, and yes, elderly, appearance and demeanor; his readiness to respond reasonably honestly to whatever the reporters’ questions; and his long experience and extensive expertise in viral epidemics; have made him the administration’s most prominent medical professional. They have also made him one of America’s most admired men. In a mid-April poll conducted by none other than Fox News, 80 % of Americans approved of Fauci’s response to the pandemic, whereas only 50% approved of Trump’s. And just this past weekend the nation’s leading comic barometer, “Saturday Night Live,” enshrined Dr. Fauci by having him played by none other than Oscar-winning middle-aged heartthrob, Brad Pitt.      

But though Fauci has become the best known of the medical experts, he is by no means the only similar professional to have been involved from the start. Since early this year, when it became known, at least to those in the know, that a virus crisis might be looming, were more than a handful of American scientists and physicians who knew about the new coronavirus. For example, as reported by the New York Times, early this year was the start of an e mail chain that came to be known, variously, as Red Dawn Breaking, Red Dawn Rising, and, later in the inevitable progression, Red Dawn Raging. It was hosted by the chief medical officer at the Department of Homeland Security, Dr. Duane Caneva. According to the Times, what started originally as a chain that included just a small core of medical experts gradually grew to include dozens. (See Eric Lipton, “Email Chain Shows Alarm Experts Felt in Early Days,” April 14, 2020.)               

Just a few outtakes reveal the extent to which several medical experts understood early on the possible magnitude of the national threat. They further reveal the extent of the frustration that the administration was not doing more to forestall a crisis that increasingly seemed imminent. Among the experts was growing “anger as their advice seemingly failed to break through to the administration, raising the chances that more people would die.”

• On January 28 Dr. Carter Mecher, a senior medical advisor at the Department of Medical Affairs, wrote that “Any way you cut it this is going to be bad.” He went on, “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.” Moreover, even then Mecher was raising the possibility that mitigation might mean closing schools, colleges, and universities.  
• The same day, January 28, Dr. James Lawler, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Nebraska who advised Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama on health issues, wrote sarcastically about “great understatements in history.” They included describing Pompeii as “a bit of a dust storm” – and the coronavirus as just another “bad flu season.”   
• On February 17 Dr. Eva Lee, a researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology who frequently worked with the federal government, wondered why, if the cruise ship Diamond Princess had become infamous in this circumstance for “the worst form of social gathering,” it would it be any “different than a mall with everyone walking around for 3-6 hours, eating, drinking, touching everything?”      
• By late February, concern among medical experts who were tracking the virus was turning to alarm. On the 23^rd, Robert Kadlec, the top disaster response official at the Department of Health and Human Services, responded to Dr. Lee, “Eva is this true? … So spreading and its wide scope is unavoidable because there exists these very healthy individuals who can spread effectively – even during incubation period -while they remain perfectly healthy.”

On February 21 Kadlec had convened the White House coronavirus task force – which included Dr. Fauci, Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services – in what by then was a state of high alert. Kadlec was hardly oblivious to the threat posed by a possible pandemic. In fact, one year earlier he had conducted a hypothetical exercise, a war game if you will, called “Crimson Contagion”  in which it was projected that in a pandemic Americans could suffer 110 million infections and more than a half a million deaths. Now, though, the threat of such a pandemic was real, which meant that Kadlec’s task force had to decide how to proceed. Specifically, it had to decide when to recommend abandoning “containment” in favor of “mitigation” – at least until such time as a vaccine was widely available.* More to the point of this post, the task force as a group, and each of its members as individual, had to decide how to proceed if the White House, if President Trump, remained impervious or perhaps oblivious to their cry of alarm.

It was decided that Kadlec and his group would meet with the president to present him with a plan named, “Four Steps to Mitigation.” But it never happened. For reasons ranging from a presidential blowup, to administration infighting, to a procedural glitch, the effort stalled. Moreover, once the stock market crashed in the wake of Dr. Nancy Messonier’s public warning about the dangers that lay ahead, the possibility of a more reasoned, conciliatory approach came to an end. (Messonier was the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. In issuing the warning, it appears that she jumped the gun or, at least, that she did not coordinate her remarks with Dr. Kadlec.) Trump became even more defensive than he usually is. Azar’s authority was further reduced. Additional messages that could be interpreted as alarmist were forbidden. And Vice President Mike Pence was put in charge of the administration’s response to the coronavirus. It could reasonably be concluded that by the beginning of March the window of early warning was closed. What the experts thought they knew in early January, and what the experts were sure they knew by late February, did not get heard when it matter most, early on; or where it mattered most, in the highest reaches of the White House.

This brings us back to Dr. Fauci – and to his associate at President Trump’s repeated (up to now) and repetitive (up to now) daily news conferences, Dr. Deborah Birx. In recent days, Dr. Birx has found herself in the decidedly unenviable position of having to defend, more or less, the president who had made the particularly egregious error of suggesting that an injection “inside the body” of a disinfectant such as bleach could help combat the virus. Birx has been assailed by those who found her semi-defense of the president inexcusable. And she has been defended by those more sympathetic to what they see as her impossible position. Impossible because she is on the one hand charged with protecting the public interest, and on the other hand reporting to a man for whom the public interest has usually seemed not primary but secondary.

Which returns us again, inevitably, to Dr. Fauci. Fauci is faced with a similar if not the same dilemma. How to straddle the line between personal politics and public responsibility? Fauci is not a novice. Not only is he a veteran of the political wars, he is a veteran of the culture wars. In the 1980s he played a central if not the pivotal medical role in the virus crisis that was H.I.V./AIDS. It’s why all along he has claimed a simple credo: “You stay completely apolitical and non-ideological, and you stick to what it is that you do. I’m a scientist and I’m a physician. And that’s it.”**  

Still, I cannot help but wonder – as I did in the case of General James Mattis – what exactly is a good soldier? Does a good solder go along even if he, or she, thinks that going along is the wrong thing to do? Or does a good soldier not go along if he, or she, thinks that not going along is the right thing to do?

A counterfactual: What if some of the good doctors, even all the good doctors referenced in this post had spoken truth to power early in the year? Had spoken out loudly and clearly and, if necessary, publicly, not in March or April but in January or February? Would things have turned out differently?  What, in short, are the virtues in cases like these of speaking out – versus those of shutting up? 

——————————————————————————

*For a fuller description of the sequence of events see, Eric Lipton, David Sanger, Maggie Haberman, Michael Shear, Mark Mazzetti, Julian Barnes, “Despite Timely Alerts Trump Was Slow to Act,” New York Times, April 12, 2020.     

**Quoted in The New Yorker, by Michael Spector, “The Good Doctor,” April 20, 2020/

This is the fourth in a series of posts that explore followers in a pandemic – this pandemic. During the coronavirus crisis leaders have been regularly, even relentlessly examined, explored, deciphered, and dissected. The American obsession with the American president, Donald Trump, has been especially virulent, as if he alone is solely responsible for everything bad that has happened, and for that matter everything good. In other words, as is typical, followers, in this case Trump’s followers, have been ignored. More precisely, they have been ignored not in individual instances – but as a group. They have been ignored as a group that was deeply involved in bringing us to this point – and now in our frantic effort to cure what ails us. Each of these posts is, then, intended as a corrective. A corrective to the misleading, mistaken idea that our fixation on Trump is warranted – as if he were not just the leading actor but the only actor. In brief, if there is blame, blame must be shared.  

IV – The Administration

This post is based on information that reporters – primarily from the New York Times and Washington Post – recently obtained in an effort to uncover what happened during the weeks immediately preceding the president’s publicly confirming and finally responding to the dangers posed to the American people by the coronavirus. These are the key questions: 1) who knew what? 2) who knew what when? 3) who did what? and 4) who did what when?

The purpose of this post is not to reiterate yet again what Trump missed or, rather, chose to avoid. Or to point yet again to the sluggishness of his response to the threat posed by the virus. Rather it is to ask whether those who saw the crisis coming should have done any differently. The individuals and groups here named are ultimately free agents. None was forced to do what they did. So, the question that arises is, given their status as followers – they were the president’s subordinates – were they courageous or were they timorous? This is not about finger-pointing. Who knows how any of us would respond if we saw something bad happening but felt we were caught in a workplace trap? Rather it is about raising age-old questions such as: Should we adhere to hierarchies? Should we follow orders? Or should we instead follow the dictates of our conscience?      

Here just a few examples of organizations, groups, and individuals caught early this year on the horns of such dilemmas.

• Some Pentagon officials first heard about the new coronavirus as early as last December.
• Warnings about the virus began to appear in intelligence reports in early January.  
• At about the same time similar warnings made their way to the National Security Council.
• On January 3^rd, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, received a call from his Chinese counterpart delivering an official warning about the new coronavirus.   
• Also in early January, Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was alerted to a potential virus crisis.
• And, so was Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services.
• And, so was Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s Deputy National Security Advisor. Almost immediately Pottinger, well known as a China hawk, urged more aggressive action against the virus, including calling out China.  
• Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney served on the initial coronavirus task force throughout the month of January.
• On January 18 Azar called President Trump to alert him to the coronavirus. Evidence is Trump, distracted by his impeachment, paid Azar scant heed. Evidence also is that Azar did not press the issue.    
• By late January it was well known within the White House that Americans were being threatened by a new, dangerous virus. Nevertheless there was considerable infighting – including about who would pay for protective equipment – and considerable reluctance directly to confront the president.
• The president, in turn, continued to stick his head in the sand. In other words, during the early months of 2020 there is no evidence that despite the increasing level of alarm among members of the administration, the president was paying much attention. Nor is there any evidence that members of the administration forced the issue. Evidence in fact is to the contrary – that none among those closest to the president were willing to take the risk of confronting him on the matter of the virus.
• A memo dated January 29 , that was sent to among others the president, written by senior White House aide Peter Navarro, clearly and accurately predicted the dangers posed by the coronavirus.
• At a meeting on that same day, January 29, Azar assured the president that the coronavirus was under control. According to an April 22nd article in the Wall Street Journal. Azar went on to claim that the “U.S. government had never mounted a better interagency response to a crisis.”  
• On January 30^th. the World Health Organization declared the virus a global health emergency.

In my next post I address the how the experts handled themselves during the first several months of this year, specifically the medical experts. Here I confine my further comments to three players: Pottinger, Navarro, and Azar. All three of these men understood relatively early on that a health crisis was looming – and that it was highly likely to be very costly. Costly to the national health and welfare – and costly to the financial markets. But none of these men blew the whistle. While they tried in various ways to be heard internally, not one of the three was ultimately willing to invoke the ire of the president. Moreover, none of the three was willing to do what it would have taken to be heard externally. They did not go beyond the confines of the White House to, for example, alert the press to the dangers posed by COVID–19.

Pottinger was relatively proactive internally. Beginning in mid-January he convened daily meetings about the coronavirus, and he alerted his boss, Robert O’Brien, the national security advisor, to the growing danger. But for various reasons Pottinger’s warnings were sidelined. And for various reasons he was willing to go along without strongly dissenting.   

Navarro was similarly alert early on to the possibility or even the probability that the coronavirus could put millions of Americans at risk of illness or death, and cost the U.S. trillions of dollars. On January 29^th he sent what the New York Times called “the highest-level alert known to have circulated inside the West Wing.” In other words, Navarro saw the problem not only early but clearly. In his late January memo, he wrote, “The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus crisis on U. S. soil. This lack of protection elevates the risks of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions.” One month later Navarro wrote another, similar memorandum, warning of an “increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infest as many as 100 million Americans with a loss of life of as many as 1-2 million souls.” It is not clear who exactly saw both memos or, more to the point, who exactly read them carefully. What is clear is that, again, Navarro did not challenge the president on this issue. Nor did he ring the alarm outside the corridors of White House power.         

Azar’s actions during this same period, during the early weeks and months of this year, are more ambiguous. On the one hand he also understood early on the level of threat posed by the virus. Moreover, he tried on several occasions to get others, including the president, to pay attention, to heed the warnings. But on the other hand, Azar has been called to task for backing down in the face of a president who was reluctant or even refusing to hear what he had to say. Azar was, after all, during this entire time Secretary of Health and Human Services. The virus was, therefore, in his bailiwick, in what was supposed to be his wheelhouse. Which is precisely why Azar could be charged with being too cautious by half. By trying to straddle a fine line between pleasing his boss and telling the whole truth and nothing but, he ended in limbo. He never did ingratiate himself with the president. And he never did level with the American people or for that matter members of Congress. By April Azar was effectively marginalized, if not, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, long for this world.

Whatever subordinates such as Pottinger, Navarro, and Azar knew, and whenever they knew it, at every turn they had a choice. The choice they made was to continue to play by the president’s rules – because they wanted to continue working in the White House. At no point did they directly confront Trump. And, at no point did they blow the whistle. For all practical purposes then, at a critical time in the virus crisis they remained silent witnesses. Whatever their private reservations or personal misgivings, during the initial critical period, the first few months of this year, they followed where the president led.