january/february 2021

“We are what we pretend to be,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in the opening of his 1962 novel, Mother Night, “and so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” Republicans in Congress are pretending to be seditionists—and so they have become, in fact, seditionists.

Forget all the whispered denials and the off-the-record expressions of concern in private; ignore the knowing smirks on camera from GOP officials who are desperately trying to indicate that they’re in on the joke. Brush aside the caviling of the anti-anti-Trump writers who would rather talk about that time in 2017 when some Democrats objected to the Electoral College vote (and were gaveled down by Joe Biden himself).

This is sedition, plain and simple. No amount of playacting and rationalizing can change the fact that the majority of the Republican Party and its apologists are advocating for the overthrow of an American election and the continued rule of a sociopathic autocrat.

In a bombshell conversation with Georgia’s secretary of state yesterday, President Donald Trump made monkeys of every Republican official and every conservative talking head who professed to believe Trump’s allegations of voter fraud. The president himself made clear that he had only one end in view: overturning the 2020 election.

You knew this already, of course. Anyone connected to reality knew it. Even most of Trump’s political allies probably knew it. But important incentives induced people in the pro-Trump camp to pretend otherwise. And now, as so often happens, Trump has yanked away the protective deception to reveal the truth.

And now again, Trump presents the country with a crisis and a conundrum.

If your memory can reach back to the time before COVID-19—no shame if it can’t—you may recall the last big story before the pandemic struck: the impeachment of President Donald Trump.

In December 2019, the House of Representatives impeached Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, all stemming from a ploy in which he attempted to extort the Ukrainian government into assisting his reelection campaign. In February, the Republican-led Senate voted not to remove him from office. After that, impeachment mostly disappeared from national discourse, barely playing a role in the presidential election, even though it was a historic moment and the idea was stunningly popular, and even though it involved Trump’s attempt to scuttle the campaign of Joe Biden, who ended up as the Democratic presidential nominee. But views on Trump were already largely ossified, and besides, there was the pandemic and an economic crisis to deal with.

For months, the debate about whether to open schools has centered on one question: Are schools safe? The only trouble is, this hardly matters anymore. Except in the few remaining regions with modest rates of viral spread, the transmission risk from and within schools is now beside the point. So many teachers and staff members are sick, quarantining, or have stepped down that many schools trying to remain open or to reopen just do not have the personnel available to do so well.

The examples are countless. Littleton Public Schools in Colorado, in announcing their shift to remote learning, stated that one of their primary reasons for doing so was that “keeping enough staff in schools for supervision is becoming a real concern. It is especially difficult, and impossible on some days, to have enough licensed teachers in classrooms delivering quality instruction.” Jeannine Nota-Masse, the superintendent of Rhode Island’s second-largest school district, was quoted in a local news story as saying, “Now you have students in the building and not enough adults to cover for the adults that are home for various reasons.” One elementary school near Milwaukee lacked 10 teachers on a recent day; Metro Nashville Public Schools has, according to The Tennessean, “had more than 200 teachers or staff members in quarantine or self-isolation each week since the end of October.” In a Reuters survey of 217 districts across 30 states, about half reported significant staffing issues—and this was before Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the arrival of deep winter.

A new variant of the coronavirus is spreading across the globe. It was first identified in the United Kingdom, where it is rapidly spreading, and has been found in multiple countries. Viruses mutate all the time, often with no impact, but this one appears to be more transmissible than other variants—meaning it spreads more easily. Barely one day after officials announced that America’s first case of the variant had been found in the United States, in a Colorado man with no history of travel, an additional case was found in California.

There are still many unknowns, but much concern has focused on whether this new variant would throw off vaccine efficacy or cause more severe disease—with some degree of relief after an initial study indicated that it did not do either. And while we need more data to feel truly reassured, many scientists believe that this variant will not decrease vaccine efficacy much, if at all. Health officials have started emphasizing the lack of evidence for more severe disease.