Nov. 17, 2020

Aaron E. Carroll is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He is a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine and the Regenstrief Institute who blogs on health research and policy at The Incidental Economist and makes videos at Healthcare Triage. He is the author of “The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully.” @aaronecarroll

When schools are closed, however, handing students a check will not replace what they’ve lost.

When we prioritize, they should be among the last things to close. Almost everything else should be put on pause first. This is what Europe is doing. No one can explain why, once again, the United States is choosing its own path.

(This was the case when I argued that closures were necessary back in March.)

Closing schools also exacerbates social and economic disparities. In some cities, especially in poorer areas, as many as one in three children didn’t — or couldn’t — take part in online learning when schools across the country were closed in the spring. Students who fall behind will have an incredibly difficult time catching up. They will be less likely to graduate, with enormous, lifelong consequences.

Schools are necessary for the economy as well. If they are not open, many parents cannot work, even if they’re doing so from home.

Unfortunately, our schools are not, for the most part, prepared to deliver high quality educational content online. Kids are also social animals and need safe in-person interactions for their mental health and development.

Following this playbook will require billions of dollars from the federal government, but the costs are well worth the investment. Education is hugely important.

Finally, we need to recognize that some teachers are at higher risk than others, and be thoughtful in how we protect them. We need to invest in rapid, repeated testing schemes to provide an added layer of protection. Many colleges and universities have figured this out.

Third, students need to be universally masked. Before anyone says that kids will refuse this, as a pediatrician and a father I can assure you that at some point in their lives, children also refuse to wear pants. They’ll learn.

Second, class start and end times need to be staggered so students aren’t bunched together in the halls. Likewise, schools need to make sure students eat apart, and certainly are not confined to one lunchroom.

First, classrooms need to be less dense, so that students are sitting at least six feet apart at all times. Some classrooms may not be able to accommodate this, but there are often other school spaces that can be used for learning, like auditoriums and libraries. Vacant hotel ballrooms, office buildings, gyms and theaters could even be converted into temporary classrooms.

None of this is based on statistical modeling or science. Positivity rates are affected by testing rates as much as by prevalence of infection, and no one should be under the illusion that we’re identifying the majority of cases through our testing of symptomatic people. To do that, we’d need to engage in random-sample asymptomatic testing as well. Until then, we need to use a variety of signals, including analyses of who is getting infected and where.

It’s not even clear how some areas derive their thresholds for closing schools. Some places, like New York City, have declared that schools might close if positivity rates reach 3 percent. Other areas have much higher thresholds, like 10 percent. Some have none at all.

But when schools do the right things, those infections are not transmitted in the classroom. They’re occurring, for the most part, when children go to parties, when they have sleepovers and when they’re playing sports inside and unmasked. Those cases will not be reduced by closing schools.

Cases have definitely been more common in school-age children this fall.

We should not be having large weddings. We should not be going to public events. We should not be eating indoors at restaurants. We should not be drinking indoors at bars. These are the activities responsible for a vast majority of transmissions, and these should be the focus of our initial interventions.

Don’t get me wrong. With cases climbing to levels we haven’t seen before, we need to restrict our physical interactions. But we should do so rationally and in an evidence-based manner. We should figure out what poses the greatest danger and act accordingly, instead of automatically asking schoolchildren to bear the brunt of the pain.

Bizarrely, they almost always seem to focus on schools first. That’s exactly the opposite of what they should be doing.

That’s exactly the opposite of what we should be doing right now.

Are We Seriously Talking About Closing Schools Again?

Our focus should not be a debate about the proper terminology. Instead, we should react to the frightening substance of what we’re facing, even if we also believe that the crassness and the incompetence of this attempt may well doom it this time.

Indeed, there was a “memorandum coup” in 1971, which resulted in a change of government after the military issued threats, and the full military takeover in 1980.

many of the 74 million people who voted for Trump now believe that the election was outright stolen. They believe that they were robbed of the right to vote. How many of these supporters will be tempted to carry Trump’s claims about being cheated out of an election victory to their logical conclusion?

Now he’s establishing a playbook for stealing elections by mobilizing executive, judicial, and legislative power to support the attempt. And worse, much worse, the playbook is being implicitly endorsed by the silence of some leading Republicans, and vocally endorsed by others, even as minority rule becomes increasingly entrenched in the American electoral system.

What starts as farce may end as tragedy, a lesson that pundits should already have learned from their sneering dismissal of Trump when he first announced his presidential candidacy. Yes, the Trump campaign’s lawsuits are pinnacles of incompetence, too incoherent and embarrassing to go anywhere legally.

In 1851, failing to change the laws that prevented him from staying in power, he organized his third coup d’état, which was successful. Napoleon III reigned as emperor until 1870, remaking France in the process.

In 1852, Karl Marx famously modified Hegel’s observation that historical occurrences tend to repeat by adding that they may occur the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. Marx was mocking Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte who had just seized power in a coup (or, in the interest of technical precision, an autogolpe), declaring himself emperor. Louis-Napoléon did indeed seem like a figure worth ridicule, but the well-heeled members of ruling classes often confuse lack of propriety for weakness.

When voters try to contest gerrymanders or power grabs, many of the cases end up before the U.S. Supreme Court, where lifetime appointments are made by the president but approved by the Senate. The Senate is so lopsided right now that 26 states containing just 17 percent of the U.S. population elect a majority of senators—the smallest that proportion has ever been. That’s the people in the smallest 26 states. The Republican Party’s Senate majority in recent years has rested on its strength in these rural states.

In North Carolina in 2016, for example, the Republicans won a veto-proof supermajority in the state House of Representatives—obtaining more than two thirds of the seats—despite winning just 52 percent of the vote. Statewide races cannot be similarly gerrymandered, though, and that year, North Carolina voters elected a Democratic governor and attorney general. In response, the lame-duck legislature rushed to take away key powers from those offices. They succeeded. The general assembly then used its veto-proof majority to override 23 of Governor Roy Cooper’s 28 vetoes in the first three years of his term, rendering one of his key remaining powers effectively useless.

In North Carolina, where I live, only three of the state’s 13 representatives in the House were Democrats after the 2014 congressional election, despite Democrats getting 44 percent of the vote. In 2016, the Democratic Party’s vote share in the state increased to 47 percent, but still only three representatives were Democrats. In 2018, Democrats won an even larger share of the vote—48.3 percent—but still had only three representatives. In 2019, North Carolina’s blatantly gerrymandered district maps were finally struck down by the Supreme Court. And so, this year, the Democrats managed a meager increase in representation—five representatives out of 13—despite again receiving 48 percent of the vote.

Joseph diGenova, a lawyer for the Trump campaign, said that Krebs should be “taken out at dawn and shot.” (DiGenova later said that the statement had been “made in jest.”)Before the election, the president pressured the attorney general to investigate his opponent and his son, after being impeached for pressuring a foreign state to announce its own investigation into his opponent’s son.The president also fired the chief of the Pentagon, along with other top officials. These dismissals remain unexplained, but Trump was reportedly infuriated at the defense secretary’s opposition to using active-duty military troops against protesters in U.S. cities—portending what he might have liked to do, even though his incompetence has meant that he hasn’t found a way.

The president’s election lawyer said that “the entire election, frankly, in all the swing states, should be overturned, and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for Trump.” She has since been dismissed from his team, but he has not publicly repudiated her statements, and she continues to make similar statements.

The president has amplified messages that call for people to “fight back hard” against the allegedly stolen election.

The president, who has the power to appoint judges for lifetime appointments, and who has appointed nearly a third of federal judges on the crucial circuit-court level in the United States—more than any other president in recent history at this point in their presidency—has asked the courts to throw out valid votes wholesale, especially in cities with minority voters.

The president and his key allies have repeatedly called for Republican state legislators to steal the election for him by appointing new electors who will support him instead of backing the winner of the state’s electoral votes.

The president has repeatedly and baselessly claimed that the election was stolen from him, and continues to do so daily. He is, effectively, charging that election officers around the country are involved in a dangerous conspiracy and that the incoming president is the leader of this illegal attempt.

What is it that the Republican leadership is hoping will pass without too much comment, solved by the ticking down of the transition clock? Let’s run through it—and this is not even all of it. Every day adds more.

With just a few notable exceptions, Republican officials have met Trump’s lies with a combination of tacit approval, pretending not to notice them, or forbearance. In a recent survey, an alarming 222 Republicans in the House and the Senate—88 percent—refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the presidency. Another two insisted Trump won.

That scene itself was unsettling. But when, just a few hours later, Trump retweeted Sterling’s plea with a shrug and a reassertion of his desire to steal the election, the situation turned profoundly frightening. “Rigged Election,” the president wrote. “Show signatures and envelopes. Expose the massive voter fraud in Georgia. What is Secretary of State and @BrianKempGA afraid of. They know what we’ll find!!!”

But in English, only one widely understood word captures what Donald Trump is trying to do, even though his acts do not meet its technical definition. Trump is attempting to stage some kind of coup, one that is embedded in a broader and ongoing power grab.

The U.S. president is trying to steal the election, and, crucially, his party either tacitly approves or is pretending not to see it. This is a particularly dangerous combination, and makes it much more than just typical Trumpian bluster or norm shattering.

It’s a matter of life or death,” the linguist Willem DeReuse told New Scientist.

Punditry can tend to focus too much on decorum and terminology, like the overachieving students so many of us once were, conflating the ridiculous with the unserious. The incoherence and incompetence of the attempt do not change its nature, however, nor do those traits allow us to dismiss it or ignore it until it finally fails on account of that incompetence.

Much debate has ensued about what exactly to call whatever Trump is attempting right now, and about how worried we should be.

In political science, the term coup refers to the illegitimate overthrow of a sitting government—usually through violence or the threat of violence. The technical term for attempting to stay in power illegitimately—such as after losing an election—is self-coup or autocoup, sometimes autogolpe.

If so, I asked her, where is the prime minister? Why isn’t he on TV to tell us that? Another woman approached the counter. “This must be your first,” she said to the young woman behind the counter, who was still shaking her head. “It’s my fourth.”

On the evening of September 11, 1980, my mom was approached by a neighbor who held rank in the Turkish military.