Coronavirus

Here we go again. President Trump has announced a big healthcare proposal that amounts to none at all. If anything, it will have a positively insalubrious effect upon the health of Americans.On Thursday Trump declared, ‘The historic action I'm taking today includes the first-ever executive order to affirm it is the official policy of the United States government to protect patients with pre-existing conditions. This is affirmed, signed, and done so we can put that to rest.’Umm, no. The fact is that Trump can’t simply issue a healthcare ukase and expect that it will have any practical effect. He can’t force insurers to provide coverage unless he wants to nationalize them.

A majority of voters believe that November's election can be conducted safely in person, according to a new poll provided exclusively to The Spectator. A Redfield and Wilton Strategies survey of 2,500 registered voters found that 66 percent either agree or strongly agree that social distancing measures can be enforced at polling stations and therefore the election can be held in person without creating a public health risk. Of those who may vote in the upcoming election, 56 percent said they would feel more comfortable than uncomfortable voting in person. Dr Anthony Fauci said in mid-August that 'there's no reason' voting in-person should not be safe, so long as people wore masks and socially distanced. Both President Trump and Joe Biden have agreed with this message.

So, the Pew Research Center polled more than a dozen allies and, guess what, the allies — from the UK and France to Germany, Japan and Australia — don’t like Donald Trump. I know, you are as astonished as I am. The Pew Research Center is reporting that people abroad — and not only people abroad, Americans, too: really everybody — dislikes Donald Trump. ‘The United States’ image has soured within the international community, hitting all-time lows among key allies,’ Business Insider reports in its précis of Pew’s findings. Other key points: ‘The results showed that people have less confidence in Trump as a leader than Russia's Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping’ — sounds bad, what?

For decades, Washington think tanks were vital to a virtuous revolving door. Young policy professionals, both Democrats and Republicans, would serve time in government, then remove themselves to think tanks where they further honed their professional skills and rethought issues, then go back into government at a slightly higher level. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 put a spike in that revolving door, shattering its mechanism. Not only were Democrats barred from the Trump administration, but so were the most talented of Republicans who, having assumed Trump would lose, declared themselves in opposition to him and thus disqualified themselves from work in his administration.

Does Nancy Pelosi’s unfortunate trip to a hair salon have any news value? Or is it much a hairdo about nothing? Compared to the big stories of the day, it hardly matters. The country faces violent disorder, we’re unsure who will become our next president and millions of people are trying to get back to work and school. To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart, 'It doesn't take much to see that the problems of one person getting a shampoo and blow-out don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.' But even in this crazy world, Pelosi’s misstep deserves some attention because it so perfectly encapsulates a larger, more troubling problem. Insiders like Pelosi are allowed to play by a different set of rules than the rest of us.

To win in November, Trump should seek inspiration from President Alexander Lukashenko, the 65-year-old autocrat who has ruled Belarus since 1994. He trounced his liberal opponent in the presidential election in August with 80 percent of the vote. I’m not suggesting Trump emulate Lukashenko’s methods. Among other things, the man dubbed ‘Europe’s last dictator’ disqualified his three main political opponents at the beginning of the race, imprisoning two of them. He has never won an election with less than 75 percent of the vote, although none have been found to be free and fair by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), an election monitoring body.

Joe Biden has faced questions on his mental and physical acuity throughout his presidential bid. For example, he first said he is cognitively tested ‘all the time’ and then clarified to say he has not had a formal cognitive test But there is a larger issue lingering over the 77-year-old — Joe Biden has not been tested for COVID-19. Joe Biden receives Secret Service protection and intelligence briefings similar to that of the President. So why is he refusing to be tested regularly, as the President is, for a highly contagious virus that has killed 173,000 Americans? As of August 19, COVID-19 has claimed the lives of approximately 41,000 Americans aged between 74 and 85. Joe Biden is an American aged between 74 and 85.

Members of media hailed the all-digital Democratic National Convention and convention coordinator Stephanie Cutter, the former Obama adviser famous for smearing Mitt Romney as a killer. The Washington Post’s conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin gushed that the week-long Zoom show should be nominated for an Emmy. Honest onlookers, however, would notice that there wasn’t an explanation as to why the event had to be held this way: China.