Another election, another Bob Woodward book. For this one, titled Rage, President Trump granted Woodward a stunning 18 separate interviews. I can only assume that Trump considered this a challenge of some kind and wanted to prove that he was the one person who could beat Woodward at his own game. If so, it didn’t work out so well:

President Donald Trump admitted he knew weeks before the first confirmed US coronavirus death that the virus was dangerous, airborne, highly contagious and “more deadly than even your strenuous flus”…In a series of interviews with Woodward, Trump revealed that he had a surprising level of detail about the threat of the virus earlier than previously known. “Pretty amazing,” Trump told Woodward, adding that the coronavirus was maybe five times “more deadly” than the flu.

Trump’s admissions are in stark contrast to his frequent public comments at the time insisting that the virus was “going to disappear” and “all work out fine.” The book, using Trump’s own words, depicts a President who has betrayed the public trust and the most fundamental responsibilities of his office. In “Rage,” Trump says the job of a president is “to keep our country safe.” But in early February, Trump told Woodward he knew how deadly the virus was, and in March, admitted he kept that knowledge hidden from the public. “I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward on March 19, even as he had declared a national emergency over the virus days earlier. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

…The book highlights how the President took all of the credit and none of the responsibility for his actions related to the pandemic, which has infected 6 million Americans and killed more than 185,000 in the US. “The virus has nothing to do with me,” Trump told Woodward in their final interview in July. “It’s not my fault. It’s — China let the damn virus out.”

This is where words fail you. Trump always knew. He knew just how bad the coronavirus was and deliberately played it down. Just as he once thought that big talk could save a casino from going bankrupt, he figured big talk could keep the virus at bay. It never seems to occur to him that most problems have actual underlying causes that need to be addressed. Just keep lying to people and everything will be OK.

It didn’t work with the casinos and it didn’t work with the coronavirus. The difference is that his lies about his casinos mostly just hurt himself. His lies about the coronavirus have killed tens of thousands of Americans.

This is Part 2 of America’s biggest disgraces. It shows the NAEP reading and math scores for students from 4th grade to 12th grade. In every grade, all the way up to high school graduation, Black students lag far behind their white counterparts:

The folks who run the NAEP are infamously shy about explaining their test scores in a way that makes sense to people. They are just numbers floating in air. However, it’s possible to apply some arithmetic to these scores and convert them into something a little more understandable.¹ In a nutshell, on average, Black students are roughly 2-3 years behind in 12th grade; 1-2 years behind in 8th grade, and about 1 year behind in 4th grade. Other research suggests that they’re already about half a year behind by first grade.

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of using “systemic racism” as something of a talisman that eliminates the need for further exploration, but if this isn’t a consequence of systemic racism then I don’t know what is. You’ll see these test results in blue states and red states; in poor areas and middle-class-areas; and in urban and rural areas. It’s far too widespread to be simply the product of individual bigotry here and there. It’s as systemic as systemic can be.

And it’s inexcusable. It’s not the case that if Black students graduated with the same scores as white students this would eliminate all racism. However, it is the case that we will never make serious progress toward eliminating racism until Black students are educated on a par with white students. No matter how broadminded they are, employers simply won’t hire kids with a 10th grade reading level when they could hire kids with a 12th grade reading level instead.

We’ve spent a lot of time and money on this problem over the past 50 years with little to show for it. At this point, nearly everyone is tired of trying. But both states and the federal government have shown an occasional appetite in the past for funding large numbers of experiments and tracking them closely, and that’s what’s needed here. It’s not especially sexy, so think of it as a sort of Manhattan Project aimed at the Black-white gap: hundreds of experiments funded with tens of billions of dollars and lasting a decade or more. Will that come up with answers? Nobody can say for sure, but it would be shame upon shame to give up before we’ve done this.

¹For the math nerds out there, standard deviations are reported for all these tests and it turns out that Black students score consistently about 0.8 standard deviations below white students. With a little bit of handwaving, this ends up equating to about a 13 percent lag, which is roughly 2.5 years for an 18-year-old; nearly 2 years for a 14-year-old; and 1 year for a ten-year-old. In any case, please take these as rough approximations, though they match up fairly well with other research findings.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 8. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Sure, it looks quiet, but don't let looks fool you.Kevin Drum

Here’s an odd thing: the presidential campaign appears to be hanging at least partly on who can most effectively lose the white suburban vote. On one side this is deliberate and on the other it’s not, but either way it’s all out there and it’s all getting media coverage.

On one side we have President Trump tweeting a video of a black man shoving a white woman; defending Kyle Rittenhouse, the white man who allegedly killed two protesters in Kenosha; banning the use of diversity training at federal agencies; and tweeting that the Department of Education is “looking at” the use of the Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project in public schools. These actions and others are almost laughably racist, obviously designed to appeal to Trump’s core base of supporters. But because they’re so obvious, they’re also likely to turn off moderate white suburbanites who aren’t willing to swallow such overt and toxic racism.

The other side is completely different. It’s not organized. It’s not connected to either Joe Biden or BLM. It’s not aimed at winning any campaign at all. Nonetheless, it has one thing in common with Trump’s deliberate atrocities: it’s covered by the press and, fair or not, many readers and viewers see it as a product of “the left” without any nuance. It includes things like serious defenses of looting during BLM protests; recommendations that schools shouldn’t be named after Benjamin Franklin; the firing of serious researchers for merely noting the existence of studies that suggest nonviolent protests are more effective than violent ones; and professors removed from their classes for repeating Chinese syllables that sound vaguely like the N-word. These are the kinds of incidents that might make moderate white suburbanites wonder if things haven’t gotten a little out of hand.

Most likely both sides are cancelling each other out and Trump will continue to lag behind his 2016 performance in suburban areas without much change. Still, I get emails from friends in swing states like Virginia and North Carolina who worry about their neighbors being turned off by some of the more extreme abuses of wokeness. The folks behind this stuff might want to think twice about their motivations and the rest of us might want to think twice about whether it’s wise to stay silent about it. Nobody needs a Sister Souljah moment or anything ridiculous like that, but neither should we stay silent and let the media frame this for us. I think we all know how that would go.

This is another frame from a sequence of super intense sunset photos that I shot at Willaha, Arizona, just south of the Grand Canyon. I put up a previous one here a few months ago. This one lacks the moon, but it includes the objects at the bottom left that look sort of like a broken-down wagon and a broken-down person sitting beside it. That’s not what it is, of course: I think the rectagular doodah was a sign and the stuff beside it was just some random foliage. Still, it looks sort of like a Grapes of Wrath scene as long as you ignore the airport control tower off to the left.

I started doing these little “Fact of the Day” posts last week, and I never intended to do them daily—or to do them forever. But I’ll keep doing them periodically. There are lots of facts to unpack, after all.

Today is Part 1 of a 2-part series: America’s biggest disgraces. The first one is pretty familiar to everyone who reads this blog: even after Obamacare improved things, we still have nearly 9 percent of the population that has no health coverage. We are the only rich nation in the world that treats its poor this way, and it’s something we should all be ashamed of.

Part 2 comes tomorrow.

Joyce Boghosian/White House/ZUMA

Hey, do you all remember that big Serbia-Kosovo treaty that President Trump bragged about last Friday? No? I don’t blame you. You probably don’t care all that much about Serbia and Kosovo in the first place, and anyway, according to Majda Ruge there was nothing new in it anyway. It was just a laundry list of stuff that both countries had already agreed to long ago.

Still, no harm, no foul, right? Presidents hype things during election years all the time. As long as no harm was done—

For all the supposed high-level political attention brought to this agreement, U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell couldn’t get the parties to issue a unified statement—raising questions about the legal status of the signed documents and reflecting a degree of sloppiness that comes with prioritizing speed and showiness over content.

…Was it worth it? For this agreement to come about, Grenell helped bring down the reformist Kosovo government of former Prime Minister Albin Kurti, got Donald Trump Jr. to threaten the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Kosovo, and deepened a transatlantic rift that will certainly be exploited by regional politicians. This is amateur-hour diplomacy, and the damage done dwarfs any gains.

That’s peculiar. Even during election season, why bother with such heavy handedness to accomplish next to nothing? I mean, if that’s all there was to it—

The downside…is that both parties risk drifting further away from the EU, as it requires opening an embassy in Jerusalem. Whether Serbia and Kosovo will actually do so is a different issue altogether, but it creates additional problems for both countries when it comes to aligning their foreign policy with the EU.

Finally we get to the bottom of things. The agreement requires both Serbia and Kosovo to open embassies in Jerusalem, which is catnip to Trump’s evangelical base. Maybe you and I don’t care much about Serbia and Kosovo—and maybe evangelicals don’t either—but embassies in Jerusalem is a whole different thing. Even if they never actually happen, they will become a cause célèbre among evangelicals, spread via sermons, church newsletters, Facebook chains, and so forth. It may not be the greatest way of conducting foreign policy, but it’s a great way of running a political campaign.

NOTE: It seems very likely that this study is just wrong. Jennifer Beam Dowd has a good explanation of its defects here. I’m leaving the original post in place for anyone who wants to understand how the study was done, but you shouldn’t take the results seriously.

During the month between August 2nd and September 2nd the US recorded 1.4 million new cases of COVID-19. According to a new study, 19 percent of those cases were caused by the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota.

That is not a typo: 19 percent. And God only knows how many more to add to that as infections spread not from attendees, but from the next generation of people infected by the attendees. It’s probably impossible to ever know.

The study’s methodology was relatively straightforward: the authors used anonymized cell phone data to determine where attendees came from and where they returned to. Then they measured increases in COVID-19 in those places. After plotting every county in the US, they found a strong dose-response relationship between increases in COVID-19 and the number of attendees from each county. After a bit of arithmetic, they estimated that Sturgis was responsible for a total of 266,000 new cases in the one-month study period.

The authors also estimate a total public health cost of about $12 billion as a result of these additional infections, which may or may not be entirely accurate. To me, though, that’s hardly a dramatic figure when the total cost of the pandemic appears to be in the range of trillions of dollars. What’s more important is the knowledge that these kinds of superspreader events are what keep the pandemic going and prevent us from ever getting back to normal. Other similar kinds of events might be far smaller than Sturgis, but there are a lot more of them. Shut ’em down!

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through September 7. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

I don’t have any pictures truly suitable for Labor Day, so I chose the closest I could find: a close-up picture of these industrious little ants, working hard at whatever it is that ants do. They’re perfectly harmless as long as you keep them away from atomic explosions.