By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, March 20, 2020
Item: The Trump administration is asking the states to
muck up their unemployment-claims reports in order to avoid spooking the
markets. According to the New York Times, Gay Gilbert of the Office of
Employment Insurance sent out an email instructing the states to share only
“generalities,” not the actual numbers: “States should not provide numeric
values to the public.”
Item: Senator Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) sold between
$1.5 million and $6 million in stock in a California biotech company right
before the recent market crash. Feinstein’s spokesman told the Times
that the senator was not directly involved in the sale. “She has no involvement
in her husband’s financial decisions,” the spokesman said.
Item: On February 26, President Trump described the
coronavirus situation this way: “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple
of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve
done.” On March 17, he described it this way: “I have always known this is a
real pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
Item: While Senator Richard Burr (R., N.C.) was offering
a relatively rosy account of the coronavirus threat in public, he was taking a
much more alarmed — and realistic — view of the threat in a private audience
with a businessmen’s association. Senator Burr sold as much as $1.7 million in
shares in 33 transactions on February 13. Burr, the chairman of the
Intelligence Committee, says that he based this decision on “publicly available
sources,” especially CNBC’s Asia bureaus, calling to mind Hillary Rodham
Clinton’s claim that her remarkable talent for trading cattle futures was a
result of reading the Wall Street Journal.
Item: On February 10, President Trump made this
prediction about the coronavirus at a rally: “It miraculously goes away.” His
contention was that April’s warmer weather would end the epidemic.
Item: Senator Kelly Loeffler and her husband unloaded
millions of dollars in stock over a couple of weeks — beginning on the day she
received a coronavirus briefing. Her husband is the chairman of the New York
Stock Exchange.
Item: On March 13, Trump was asked about the lack of
access to coronavirus testing. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” he said.
Item: Senator James Inhofe (R., Okla.) sold hundreds of
thousands of dollars in shares of Apple, PayPal, and a real-estate-management
company on January 27. According to the Times, Senator Inhofe “said that
when he became chairman of the Armed Services Committee in late 2018, he had
instructed his financial adviser to begin selling off all equities in favor of
mutual funds and that the January sales were a part of that transition.”
The senators’ explanations run the gamut from the more or
less plausible, at a glance, to the barely plausible. Perhaps it would be more
accurate to say that these stories may be plausible on a case-by-case basis but
that that plausibility requires a level of trust that Washington as a whole has
not earned. And maybe Hunter Biden has some special charm known only to
Ukrainians.
Preet Bharara’s contention that members of Congress
should be prohibited from owning individual stocks during their tenure in
office may seem extreme, but, given current political realities, it may also be
the simplest and most direct measure that is available to us. There will be
investigations, of course, and these should come sooner rather than later, but
prevention would be better than retribution in these matters, because the point
here is not to prevent a few senators from purging their portfolios but rather
to defend and fortify — or perhaps restore — the credibility of our
institutions.
Bill Clinton, who was less a moderate than a frustrated
radical, complained that he was serving Dwight Eisenhower’s third (and then
fourth) term, and that after he died he hoped to be reincarnated as the bond
market, because the bond market gets to push everybody around. The bond markets
are a lot less pushy than they used to be (at least for the moment), but the
stock market still carries a big stick. President Trump, who had been staking
his reelection bid on a strong economy as evidenced by rising share prices —
never mind that he had once bitterly mocked Democrats for boasting of the
rising stock market during the Obama administration — tried to talk down the
coronavirus threat in the earliest days of the pandemic because he did not want
to see the markets tank. The stratagem was obvious. (Donald Trump is nothing if
not obvious.) What Senator Burr was doing in saying one thing in public
and something very different in private — while selling threatened shares — is
at least a little less obvious. Perhaps he was simply afraid of taking a line
different from the president’s in public. He wouldn’t be the first Republican
to suffer from that problem. “It was
cowardice, not corruption!” is not exactly a rousing defense, but
perhaps he has another one.
If you want to know why people are so vulnerable to
conspiracy theories and to misinformation, it is in part because they believe
that they are being lied to by those with whom they have entrusted great power,
that the truth is being kept from them by design. They are not wrong about
that: The New York Times has the emails explicitly directing state
authorities to keep the facts — “numeric values” — from “the public.”
Right now, the question for Trump, et al., is whether
they will be reelected. But there are military hospital ships anchored off both
coasts, and ventilators and other necessities are in short supply, for a
reason. Perhaps we will be successful at “flattening the curve” and avoiding a
pandemic that is as bad as it has the potential to be. These clowns in
Washington had better pray perfervidly that we are successful. Senator Burr is
not expected to run again in 2022. His retirement is understood to be a
foregone conclusion. But the world is going to remember that when history called,
Senator Burr called his broker, and it will take more than stock profits to
ensure that his retirement is a comfortable one.
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