Evaluating Chris Wallace’s Performance during the Debate

Dear Commons Community,

The video above is an evaluation of Chris Wallace’s performance as moderator during the first presidential debate from The Young Turks.

Wallace  conceded he was initially “reluctant” to step in during the Trump-Biden matchup. “I’ve never been through anything like this,” he said.

“I never dreamt that it would go off the tracks the way it did,”  

“I’m just sad with the way last night turned out.”

As reported by the New York Times.

Chris Wallace, the “Fox News Sunday” anchor and moderator of Tuesday’s melee of a debate between President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr., was on the phone Wednesday from his home in Annapolis, Md., reflecting on — his words — “a terrible missed opportunity.”

“I never dreamt that it would go off the tracks the way it did,” he said.

In his first interview since the chaotic and often incoherent spectacle — in which a pugilistic Mr. Trump relentlessly interrupted opponent and moderator alike — Mr. Wallace conceded that he had been slow to recognize that the president was not going to cease flouting the debate’s rules.

“I’ve read some of the reviews. I know people think, well, gee, I didn’t jump in soon enough,” Mr. Wallace said, his voice betraying some hoarseness from the previous night’s proceedings. “I guess I didn’t realize — and there was no way you could, hindsight being 20/20 — that this was going to be the president’s strategy, not just for the beginning of the debate but the entire debate.”

Recalling his thoughts as he sat onstage in the Cleveland hall, with tens of millions of Americans watching live, Mr. Wallace said: “I’m a pro. I’ve never been through anything like this.”

Mr. Trump’s bullying behavior had no obvious precedent in presidential debates, even the one that Mr. Wallace previously moderated, to acclaim, in 2016. In the interview, the anchor said that when Mr. Trump initially engaged directly with Mr. Biden, “I thought this was great — this is a debate!”

But as the president gave no sign of backing off, Mr. Wallace said, he grew more alarmed. “If I didn’t try to seize control of the debate — which I don’t know that I ever really did — then it was going to just go completely off the tracks,” he said.

Asked what he was feeling when he called the debate to a temporary halt — instructing the candidates that “the country would be better served if we allowed both people to speak with fewer interruptions” — Mr. Wallace said, “The answer to that question is easy: Desperation.”

Asked directly if Mr. Trump had derailed the debate, Mr. Wallace replied, “Well, he certainly didn’t help.”

Care to elaborate? “No,” Mr. Wallace said. “To quote the president, ‘It is what it is.’”

In the spotlight, Mr. Wallace was keenly aware of the complexity of his task: ensuring an evenhanded debate, avoiding taking sides, allowing candidates to express themselves while keeping the discussion substantive.

“You’re reluctant — as somebody who has said from the very beginning that I wanted to be as invisible as possible, and to enable them to talk — to rise to the point at which you begin to interject more and more,” Mr. Wallace said. “First to say, ‘Please don’t interrupt,’ then ‘Please obey the rules,’ and third, ‘This isn’t serving the country well.’ Those are all tough steps at real time, at that moment, on that stage.”

The Commission on Presidential Debates said on Wednesday that it would examine changes to the format of this year’s remaining encounters between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, a clear sign of its frustration with the results of Tuesday evening. The commission also took pains to praise Mr. Wallace for his “professionalism and skill.”

The suggestion that moderators be given the power to mute the candidates’ microphones — popular on social media in the hours after the event — did not sit well with Mr. Wallace.

“As a practical matter, even if the president’s microphone had been shut, he still could have continued to interrupt, and it might well have been picked up on Biden’s microphone, and it still would have disrupted the proceedings in the hall,” he said.

And he noted that cutting off the audio feed of a presidential candidate is a more consequential act than some pundits give it credit for. “People have to remember, and too many people forget, both of these candidates have the support of tens of millions of Americans,” he said.

Steve Scully of C-SPAN is set to moderate the next debate, in a town-hall format where Florida voters will ask many of the questions. Kristen Welker of NBC News is the moderator for the final debate. Mr. Wallace’s advice: “If either man goes down this road, I hope you’ll be quicker to realize what’s going on than I was. I didn’t have that advance warning.”

Back in Annapolis, “I’ve been involved in a certain amount of soul-searching.”

“Generally speaking, I did as well as I could, so I don’t have any second thoughts there,” Mr. Wallace said, in conclusion. “I’m just disappointed with the results. For me, but much more importantly, I’m disappointed for the country, because it could have been a much more useful evening than it turned out to be.”

It is interesting to hear Wallace’s perspective on the debate or maybe “debacle” is a better word.

Tony

McKinsey & Co.

Dear Commons Community,

In its latest report, McKinsey & Co. finds that executives are more hopeful about the economy than they have been at any time so far during the COVID-19 crisis.   Here is an excerpt.

“Six months after WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, the responses to the  latest McKinsey Global Survey suggest a positive shift in economic sentiment. More than half of all executives surveyed say economic conditions in their own countries will be better six months from now, while 30 percent say they will worsen (see above figure). That’s the smallest percentage of pessimists we’ve seen since the survey in April 2020.

Taking a cue from those executives, our researchers delved deep into the US situation, emerging with an understanding of what it will take to deliver an optimistic outcome. The case depends on the progress made to date—and the potential for more. We’ve learned much about the natural history and epidemiology of COVID-19. We’re developing better diagnostics, including rapid point-of-care tests, a few of which can be completed in about 15 minutes. Case management has improved. And pharmaceutical companies have turned out a remarkably robust pipeline of vaccine and therapeutic candidates. Put it all together, and an end to the pandemic is potentially within range.

Another new survey reveals the extent of the COVID-19 crisis’s disruption in working practices and behaviors. One-third of surveyed companies have accelerated the digitization of their supply chains, half have sped up the digitization of their customer channels, and two-thirds have moved faster to adopt artificial intelligence and automation. Many other workforce changes are also in progress.

Managers need to process these changes and many others, and come to grips with the long-term strategic-planning agenda. The essential question: what is the right way to think about 2021 and beyond? Should companies unbatten the hatches, or is it too soon?”

There is hope at the end of the coronavirus tunnel!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times had a podcast with Elon Musk.  He talks about electric cars, space travel, neural links and more.  One of his most provocative comments concerned artificial intelligence. Here is the exchange between Musk and Kara Swisher the hostess for the podcast.

Kara Swicher:

“So many years ago when we met you said A.I. would treat us like house cats. That they’re too smart to hate us. And you said, we’ll be like house cats. That’s how they think of us. And then later, when I met with you at your office, you switched it to anthills, which was your analogy that when you see an anthill you don’t kick it over unless you’re kind of a jerk. But when you’re making a highway you just roll over it. Can you give a metaphor of where we are with A.I. right now?

Elon Musk:

“I was just pointing out with the anthill analogy that A.I. does not need to hate us to destroy us. In a sense, that if it decides that it needs to go in a particular direction and we’re in the way then it would without no hard feelings it would just roll over us. We would roll over an anthill that’s in the way of a road. You don’t hate ants. You’re just building a road. It’s a risk not a prediction. So, yeah. I think that we really need to think of intelligence as really not being uniquely confined to humans. And that the potential for intelligence in computers is far greater than in biology.

Musk’s last sentence is most telling that the potential for intelligence in computers is far greater than biology. He foresees the world of tomorrow as well as anybody, but as with any speculation about the future, it is rarely the whether but the when!

Tony

Dear Colleagues,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that more than 50 doctoral programs in the humanities and social sciences won’t be admitting new students in the fall of 2021 — a response to the pandemic and ensuing economic turmoil.  It’s a sort of financial triage to help the programs devote funding to their current students, many of whom will be delayed in completing their degrees because of the disruptions. Suspending admissions for a year, some administrators say, will also allow them to reimagine their doctoral curricula to account for the flagging Ph.D. job market.

We needed to take a bold and aggressive action to make sure that we could support our students that we already had matriculated.

Princeton University’s sociology department was among the first to announce its decision, in mid-May, and other programs followed throughout the summer. More dominoes fell this month — and entire graduate divisions opted for universal pauses — as the University of Pennsylvania decided to suspend all school-funded admissions in its School of Arts and Sciences, and most programs in Columbia University’s social-sciences and humanities departments said they’d do the same. Nearly all cited the desire to support existing students.

That decision was a unanimous one for faculty members in Princeton’s sociology department, Dalton Conley, the director of graduate studies, said in May. Not only were many of the department’s students forced to halt in-person research — like ethnographic interviewing — or book a hasty return to the United States from their field-work sites as borders closed, but some, as parents, also confronted immediate child-care needs.

“We did a lot of careful analysis, as a social-science department, about the systemwide effects going forward and came to the conclusion that regular studies might be disrupted for quite some time,” Conley told The Chronicle. “We needed to take a bold and aggressive action to make sure that we could support our students that we already had matriculated.”

The department considered several models for doing so, including admitting fewer students over several years. In the end, Conley said, “we wanted to have a situation where we weren’t continually kind of having to go in and tinker here and there and cancel some admission slots, revisit the question, cancel additional slots. We wanted to have some buffer.” Taking a “one-time hit” and suspending admissions for a year, Conley and his colleagues decided, made it less likely that they’d have to revise enrollment numbers in the future.

I think that this is wise decision on the part of these programs. There is a definite need to think through how they should evolve in a post-pandemic world.

Below is a sample of programs that have been suspended.

Tony

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Dear Commons Community,

On the day that the coronavirus claimed one million deaths worldwide, Dr. Anthony Fauci yesterday singled out Fox News for what he called its sometimes “outlandish” reporting on COVID-19 at a time when the public needs vital facts about the pandemic.

The nation’s top infectious disease expert was interviewed by CNN’s Brian Stelter. In highlights from the conversation aired on “The Situation Room,” Fauci spoke of misinformation in the media and also discussed concerns relating to President Donald Trump’s controversial new coronavirus task force adviser, Dr. Scott Atlas.

“The bad guy is the virus. The bad guy is not the person on the other side of your opinion,” Fauci said.

“There is so much misinformation during this very divisive time that we’re in, and the public really needs to know the facts,” he added. “Some of the media that I deal with really kind of, I wouldn’t say distort things, but certainly give opposing perspectives on what seems to be a pretty obvious fact.”

“If you listen to Fox News, with all due respect to the fact that they do have some good reporters, some of the things that they report there are outlandish, to be honest with you.”

Fauci also expressed unease when asked if he believes Dr. Atlas is providing inaccurate information to the president. Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no background in infectious diseases, has shared information about the virus that has been rebuked by scores of experts in the medical community.

“I’m concerned that sometimes things are said that are really taken either out of context or are actually incorrect,” Fauci said.

He said most members of the White House coronavirus task force were working together, however, referenced Atlas as an “outlier.”

“My difference is with Dr. Atlas. I’m always willing to sit down and talk with him and see if we could resolve those differences,” he said.

Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also expressed concerns about Atlas sharing falsehoods during a phone call overheard by an NBC News reporter. “Everything he says is false,” Redfield said. He later confirmed that he was speaking about Atlas.

Atlas has taken on a leading role in the task force since joining in August. He has made regular appearances on Fox News and embraced a number of outlying views throughout the pandemic, including questioning the use of masks and embracing the controversial “herd immunity” strategy.

His former colleagues at Stanford medical school, where he was a professor, published an open letter warning that “many of his opinions and statements run counter to established science” and undermine public health authorities. He is currently a senior fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution.

When it comes to coronavirus, always listen to Dr. Fauci and be doubly cautious about anything that comes out of the Hoover Institution.

Tony

Tim Miller

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump was a populist fraud wrote the former Republican National Committee (RNC) spokesman, Tim Miller. But his new tax law became a “boon to the wealthy.”

Self-proclaimed billionaire Donald Trump’s astonishingly low federal income tax payments shut down his “economic populism con” that faked out the “rubes” who supported him, declared the former spokesperson for the RNC.

“While he was living a life of luxury that most Americans can only dream of, he was racked with massive debts and paying no income tax thanks to business write-offs on flamboyant haircuts, consulting fees paid to his daughter, and a summer retreat where his large adult sons liked to ride ATVs and laugh at the poor suckers who had to mow the lawn,” Tim Miller, deputy communications director for the RNC in 2012 and 2013, wrote Monday on the conservative news website The Bulwark.

Miller was reacting to a New York Times report on Sunday that said Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and again in 2017. In 10 of the previous 15 years, he paid none at all, according to the Times, which analyzed several years of Trump’s tax returns.

“Trump was not the brilliant businessman skilled at tax write-offs that we had been promised. He was a fraud who was paying nothing at all. Literally,” Miller noted.

Yet, during his last campaign, Trump purported to be a champion of Middle America and vowed to raise taxes on the wealthy because the “middle class is getting clobbered.” Trump said he “wouldn’t mind paying” more taxes, which no one realized at the time would have been right next to nothing.

But there “was no economic populist agenda” after he was elected, Miller pointed out. 

Instead, the tax bill Trump signed into law was a “boon to the wealthy” while he “billed the American people for millions upon millions of their hard-earned tax dollars” for golf holidays at his own resorts, Miller said.

Trump’s campaign promises were nothing more than “a story for the rubes,” added Miller, who is currently the political director of Republican Voters Against Trump.

The only “populist” action of the Trump era has been unleashing “cultural grievance” — using his bully pulpit to take down those “uppity athletes … shutting the door on new immigrants and refugees” and using “racial slurs without getting ‘canceled,’” he wrote.

Miller concluded: It’s the “same old racist, nativist nonsense wrapped in a phony soak-the-rich package.”

Let’s hope all those gullible Trump supporters realize what a fraud he is come the election in November.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post has an article this morning entitled, Trump Needs To Win The Election To Keep His ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ Card.  It speculates how Donald Trump’s tax returns highlight just how much he needs to stay in office to avoid possible prosecution and mountains of debt.

The New York Times’ detailing of two decades of President Donald Trump’s federal tax returns Sunday didn’t just expose how little Trump has paid in taxes. It also further exposed Trump’s personal stakes in November’s election, making it even clearer that the president sees a second term as a way to avoid potential prosecution and the burden of the mountainous debts he has amassed.

Trump’s tax returns and his refusal to release them have been the subject of political scrutiny since he decided to run for president in 2015. But they have caused him legal and financial problems for even longer: For the last decade, he has faced an Internal Revenue Service audit over a $72.9 million tax refund he claimed in 2010. 

The Times report raises questions about whether Trump violated federal law in evading taxes and offers a lens into why Trump has fought so hard to shield the returns from public view, legal and ethics experts said.

“Donald Trump’s financial records are the Rosetta Stone for understanding the depth of his corruption and crimes,” Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal attorney, said in a Monday interview with Yahoo News. “The more it is unraveled, the more he will unravel. It’s the reason he’s fought so hard to keep it under wraps.”

The Times report also raised the possibility that the IRS audit has been “paused” because Trump is president, suggesting that this case may not be resolved until his time in office concludes. 

The IRS did not respond to requests for comment about whether the audit had been temporarily halted. And there is no evidence that the president himself played any role in slowing it down if it indeed was put on pause. (Trump’s own appointee to head the IRS has disputed the assertion that he cannot release tax records because of the audit.) 

That it may have been paused, however, points to one of the clearest trends of the Trump presidency: his efforts to use his presidency to avoid legal scrutiny and prop himself up financially, as if his residence in the White House is his own personal “get out of jail free” card.

Citing legal opinions from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, Trump and his lawyers have repeatedly asserted that he cannot be prosecuted while he serves as president, a claim they argue shields him from scrutiny in federal, state and even civil litigation. In turn, he has so far escaped consequences for accusations of sexual assault, alleged defamation and questions about his finances.  

All of this gives the president tremendous incentive to remain in office.

The details of the returns the Times published Sunday are “consistent with what we’ve seen throughout the Trump presidency, which is that the president has taken every step possible to bend or break the law to serve his personal and financial interests,” said Donald Sherman, the deputy director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group.

“I think it confirms that he will likely continue to use the government, the tools of the government and his status as president to shield him from legal scrutiny,” he added.

Trump’s attorneys have routinely deployed that defense in cases involving the president’s tax returns, particularly in New York, where Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance has sought records similar to those the Times revealed on Sunday. 

Legal experts regard Trump’s defense as dubious, and in July, the Supreme Court twice rejected arguments that he was immune from congressional and legal subpoenas for financial records that could have forced him to release tax returns that may have revealed evidence of tax evasion and other illegal behavior.

Still, the court’s ruling made it unlikely that the documents would be turned over before the election. Vance’s subpoena, which requests eight years of Trump’s tax records, is still pending, thanks to an appeal from Trump. The ruling also forced congressional Democrats to return to lower courts to argue that their efforts to subpoena Trump’s tax returns met the legal test Chief Justice John Roberts outlined in the case.

Trump and his lawyers have deployed the immunity defense, too, in multiple defamation cases involving sexual assault allegations against the president: In May, the president’s attorneys argued that Summer Zervos, a woman who accused Trump of groping and kissing her, could not proceed with a defamation suit against the president because he is immune from prosecution while in office. 

And in September, Attorney General William Barr sought to intervene to protect Trump from a defamation suit brought by author E. Jean Carroll, who accused the president of raping her in the 1990s. The Justice Department argued it could do so because Trump was “acting within the scope” of the presidency when he called Carroll a liar ― the claim that prompted the defamation suit. The contention that Trump was acting in an official capacity may grant him immunity from a defamation claim.

The Supreme Court’s rejection of the argument that Trump is immune from investigative scrutiny simply because he is president was a setback for his legal team, said Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor who served as the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. 

But “because he controls the executive branch, he can use Bill Barr and the attorney general’s office to try to make sure that the federal government is not investigating, and he’s doing that,” Painter said. “As long as he’s in the presidency, he can ― I believe illegally ― keep the federal government from investigating him and his businesses by abusing his power and hoping the courts will back him up.”

Trump’s position also provides him with another entity to protect himself from scrutiny: his campaign arm. He has spent donations to his official campaign committee and the Republican National Committee on legal fees for himself, his adult children and his staff, as detailed by The New York Times. 

Campaign funds helped pay for lawyers for Trump family members and close associates when special counsel Robert Mueller’s grand jury summoned them for questioning in the Russia investigation. The campaign also paid the legal team that represented Trump during his impeachment trial in the Senate. Donor money has also paid lawyers to countersue former employees like Sam Nunberg, Cliff Sims, Omarosa Manigault Newman and Jessica Denson for allegedly breaching nondisclosure agreements.

Manigault Newman alleged in a 2018 tell-all book that the Trump campaign and RNC also paid former Trump associates to sign NDAs. She provided evidence that Lara Trump offered her $15,000 a month to work for the reelection campaign in exchange for signing an NDA covering her time in the White House. Other former Trump associates and family members paid by the campaign include Trump’s former bodyguard Keith Schiller, who has been paid $500,000 for unspecified consulting work. 

All of these payments help Trump by keeping him and his family from spending their own money on the legal expenses while silencing critics, both real and potential.

The Times report also revealed that Trump has amassed as much as $300 million in debt that is scheduled to come due over the next four years, suggesting that the president may struggle to meet his financial burdens in the near future unless he can remain in the White House. 

The tax returns obtained by the Times do not specify to whom Trump owes the money. But foreign creditors, in particular, are unlikely to call on a U.S. president who wields significant influence to repay loans immediately. Although Trump lists his creditors on required financial disclosures ― including Deutsche Bank, the large German financial institution ― that doesn’t tell the full story, Painter said: Trump’s debt raises significant concerns about whom he owes money to and what leverage they may have over the president. 

“He’s in a very precarious financial situation,” Painter said. “And we don’t know who the creditors really are. Because if Deutsche Bank makes a loan, you have no idea whether Deutsche Bank has the risk attached to that loan, or whether somebody else has made a commitment to Deutsche Bank to take on a piece of that, or all of it.”

That poses national security and other risks to the United States and also highlights the legal and financial uncertainty Trump and his web of businesses may face if he loses in November.

“When he’s not president anymore, we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Painter said. “And neither does he, so he wants to stay in order to continue to prop those businesses up. The minute he’s out, I think the loans could get called. And there could be a lot of investigations.”

The country needs Joe Biden to win!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague, David Podell, the President of Massachusetts Bay Community College, alerted me to President Trump’s banning of training programs including those on college campuses that he says promote racial or sexual “stereotyping” and “scapegoating.”

In a Twitter post on Tuesday, Trump said the ban, originally aimed at programs for government employees, was being extended to federal grantees and government contractors.

“Americans should be taught to take PRIDE in our Great Country, and if you don’t, there’s nothing in it for you!” he tweeted.

Diversity leaders say the executive order could have a chilling effect on efforts to improve campus racial climates.

In the executive order, Trump wrote that contracts can be refused or canceled if they don’t include an assurance that the recipients will avoid “workplace training that inculcates in its employees any form of race or sex stereotyping or any form of race or sex scapegoating.”

Experts interviewed by The Chronicle of Higher Education  said it was not clear whether colleges that received federal grants would have to halt programs that violate the executive order’s provisions or whether they would just be prohibited from using federal grants to pay for them.

The order states that “instructors and materials teaching that men and members of certain races, as well as our most venerable institutions, are inherently sexist and racist are appearing in workplace diversity trainings across the country, even in components of the federal government and among federal contractors.”

To obtain federal grants, recipients will have to state that they won’t use federal money to promote, among other things, ideas that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another,” that anyone “by virtue of his or her race or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive,” or that anyone “should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”

The executive order singles out higher education for programs that Trump finds objectionable. “Such ideas may be fashionable in the academy, but they have no place in programs and activities supported by federal taxpayer dollars,” it states. It goes on to contend that “research also suggests that blame-focused diversity training reinforces biases and decreases opportunities for minorities.”

Trump told agencies that dole out grants to identify which recipients violate the order, and directed the Department of Labor to set up a hotline to monitor complaints about such trainings.

As reported by The Chronicle, Shaun R. Harper, a professor of education and business at the University of Southern California, accused Trump of trying to create a distraction from the 200,000 lives he said had been lost due to the president’s mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis. Trump, he said, is also “firing up a base and further dividing the nation along racial and ideological lines.”

Harper, who founded and runs the USC Race and Equity Center, said he had no plans to change what his center does, but others might react differently.

“I’m afraid that institutional leaders and policy makers who didn’t want to do this stuff in the beginning — they were pushed and pressured by activists — will take an extremist view” in interpreting their training programs and assume they won’t pass federal muster, he said.

None of the programs Harper is aware of are “blame focused” or engage in stereotyping, he said. “I am pretty sure the Trump administration has no real idea of what actually happens in most of these programs. It’s reckless to engage in policy making without knowing what their substance and goal might be.”

Earlier this month, Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, notified federal agencies that Trump had learned that millions of taxpayer dollars had been spent “‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda.” He directed all government agencies to ferret out and cancel contracts related to training on “critical race theory” and “white privilege.”

The National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, which represents 1,100 members at 750 colleges and universities, released a statement this month decrying that ban. “At this time of racial reckoning with our past, the president deepens the divide and eliminates any possibility that individuals within the federal government can learn the consequences of racism and its deadly effects,” the group wrote. “Worse yet, it is a signal to our citizens and the world that racism does not exist and never existed. Eliminating these critical conversations on race is an erasure of history at a time when we need this understanding more than ever to transform our society into a just one.”

Eliminating these critical conversations on race is an erasure of history at a time when we need this understanding more than ever.

In an interview on Thursday the association’s president, Paulette Granberry Russell, said the vast majority of diversity officers would probably conclude that their programs didn’t violate any of the provisions about stereotyping or scapegoating that the order outlines. Therefore, she said, “it would be difficult to conclude that we should stop our workshops or training.”

She still worries, though, that the order could have a chilling effect on colleges’ diversity training since it will be subject to interpretation by federal agencies that dole out grants.

In an interview with The Chronicle, two top diversity officers said recently that their work had never been more important or exhausting, given the national reckoning on race.

Tuesday’s executive order invoked the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the words of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. to argue that instead of treating everyone as equals, supporters of diversity training are pushing an ideology that says “that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.”

The Association of American Medical Colleges also weighed in on Thursday, saying it was “concerned and alarmed” by the executive order. “While the executive order contains some elements that are universally agreed upon and with which we agree, it also exhibits a misunderstanding of most diversity- and inclusion-training programs and therefore will only further divide an already fragmented nation,” the group said.

The health-care disparities exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and protests against police brutality have demonstrated that the country hasn’t always lived up to its ideals of racial equity, the association said. “Only through better understanding of our conscious and unconscious biases, learning about other cultures in our pluralistic society, reaffirming our commitment to being anti-racist, and challenging long-held beliefs — that we hold ourselves and that we hold about others — will we heal the divisions now shaking our nation to its core.”

Trump is not interested in healing only destroying.

Tony

Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times expose that Donald Trump has avoided paying any federal income tax in 11 of the past 20 years reminds me of another New York real estate magnate, Leona Helmsley whose nickname, “the Queen of Mean” was a reference to her famous quote “only the little people pay taxes.”  In case you are too young to remember her, here is a quick bio.

Leona Helmsley, the “Queen of Mean” whose legendary cruelty towards her employees and disdain for “little people” was  the unacceptable face of New York high society in the 1980s.

Her summer house, Dunnellen Hall, in Connecticut, played a central role in her very public downfall in 1989 when she was found guilty of tax evasion and forced to serve 18 months in jail.

It was a housekeeper at the hall who revealed in the course of the trial the phrase that was to hang over the hotel magnate for the rest of her life: “We don’t pay taxes,” the housekeeper said her employer once told her. “Only the little people pay taxes.”

How Helmsley, alongside her husband, Harry, came to form an empire worth billions – including the Empire State Building, the Park Lane Hotel and a 100-seat private jet with bedroom attached – only to be brought as low as a New York prison cell ranks alongside that of Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko as one of the defining stories of the money-making 80s.

One moment she was being lauded in glossy magazines and New York salons as an unparalleled businesswoman, philanthropist and hostess of exotic Manhattan parties; the next people were lining up to lament her excesses.

Ed Koch, the city’s then mayor, called her the Wicked Witch of the West. A later mayor rose to prominence as one of her prosecutors: Rudy Giuliani. Her own lawyer, defending her during the 1989 trial portrayed her to the jury as a “tough bitch” and when the judge came to hand out sentence he said her conduct had been the “product of naked greed. You persisted in the arrogant belief that you were above the law.”

She earned the hostility of contractors she brought in to work on the $3m refurbishment of Dunnellen Hall that the couple bought in 1983. She refused to pay several, including one builder from whom she withheld $88,000 in fees on the grounds that he owed her $800,000 in “commissions” for work he had carried out on Helmsley hotels.

Several contractors are reputed to have begun the process that would end with Helmsley in jail by sending the New York Post details of how she used them to pass off the refurbishment of her private dwelling as tax-exempt business costs.

Her treatment of individual employees also cost her dear, as formerly terrified men and women queued up around the courthouse to testify against her. The jury heard how employees set up an alarm system that rang whenever she had left her home and was heading for one of her hotels.

Where Leona was “the queen of mean”  – let’s dub Trump the “don of con.” 

Tony