This is a short teaching video created by Tim Slekar, dean of the college of education at Edgewood College in Milwaukee.
In the video, you will see Trump denounce Howard Zinn and the “1619 Project,” a series of essays about African American history published by the New York Times magazine.
Trump is reading from a teleprompter.
He has a reputation as a non-reader. You can be sure that he has never read anything written by Howard Zinn and he has never read the “1619 Project.” Based on many comments he has made, it’s apparent that he never studied American history and has no tolerance at all for teaching the history of racism, ethnic groups, persecution, discrimination, segregation, or anything that reflects poorly on our great leaders. He thinks that Robert E. Lee was a patriot, not a traitor who led a rebellion to dissolve the Union and preserve white supremacy. He has frequently referred to the Confederate flag as part of our “great national heritage.” He has opposed all efforts to rename military bases named for leaders of the Confederacy.
In the video, you will see that he is issuing an executive order to create a “1776 Commission” to rewrite American history and to inspire patriotism by removing all problematic issues from teaching American history.
Only a very stupid man would hold history in such contempt and assume that it can be rewritten by a commission.
I am reminded of a trip that I took to the Soviet Union in 1988, before the Wall and the Soviet Union had fallen. My host was a high-level bureaucrat at the Ministry of Education. I met with professors at pedagogical institutes, visited schools, asked questions. On one day, my host tried to impress me by offering me a plate of sliced tomatoes; that was a great delicacy because fresh food of any kind was not in the stores. During conversation, she mentioned that the Department’s big project was rewriting the history of the USSR. I asked her who was in charge of writing it. She said, proudly, “Chairman Gorbachev.” I was trying to imagine the head of state in charge of writing new history textbooks.
I feel the same about Trump’s “1776 Commission,” which hopefully will disappear after November 3.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Maybe Gorby would have told the truth about Stalin.
De-stalinization was the program of Khruschev beginning in 1954.
Trump reads his teleprompter in a monotone and can’t even stand up straight. He is obviously a ‘great example’ of American exceptionalism. Revise history and Make America Great Again.
It’s annoying to watch him. He’s monotone, switches lt>rt while leaning on the podium and he has a flat affect. His reading is so slow and the vocabulary so childish that it sounds like it’s made to be read by a 10 year old. Stephen Miller has a really easy job at writing these speeches. It is truly the worst “acting” I have ever seen….. from a man who thinks he is the best at everything. What I have to say about his performances are….. “You’re Fired”!
The next Trump will be younger, smarter, much more articulate, and much, much more dangerous.
History is best told by historians, just like issues related to education are best handled by trained educators. Government involvement with history will distort the truth. In the hands of this president, the result will be more than a distortion. It will result in “alternative facts,” aka, propaganda replacing what really happened.
this reminds me of a Sat. Night Live skit where a candidate from the South was asked about an event and his reply was something along the lines of “nothing to worry about, we write our own history down there.”
trump is “THE” National Security Threat like none other.
Thanks for sharing! Tim Slekar’s lesson should be shared far and wide Trump’s monotone reading off the teleprompter is a clue that he had no idea what he was reading and most likely that was the first time he actually saw the text of what he was reading.
Trump often wanders away from his teleprompter’s text and pitifully ad libs, but not this time! He can’t ad lib this time. because he has no idea what he is reading aloud.
Trump is being handled by his ‘so called advisors’ whose sole goal is to destroy our national identity.
What he is actually proposing is an indoctrination of the youth of our nation. Much like what was done in the past under Hitler, Mao, Stalin and others including when our government forced Native American children to attend so called government run boarding schools where the hair was cut and they were not allowed to speak their native language.
This is one of the most dangerous speeches of his presidency.
We need to share this far and wide.
One of the most frightening documents I’ve ever seen is a Nazi-era secondary school textbook called Rasse und selle, “Race and Soul,” written by a psychologist named Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß. The book is full of text and pictures meant to convey the notion that the Nordic races are descended from a pure Aryan stock and superior to all others. The text is lavishly illustrated for a textbook of that period, and the photographs were all chosen to show Nordic peoples as ideal and people of other races as degenerate. They are meant, in each case, to convey the “type.” The pictures of Nordic persons look like Greek statues. Of course, Nazi ideology drew heavily upon philological studies that posited an ancient “Aryan” stock that spoke proto-Indo-European.
It’s interesting to note, in this regard, that recent studies have shown that the Vikings were not some sort of pure, tall, blonde, blue-eyed “race” but were, in fact, mongrels like the rest of us. Which reminds me of a Nazi-era joke about the perfect Aryan man–that he was blonde like Himmler, tall like Hitler, and lithe like Goering.
If anyone had any doubt that Trump and his propaganda minister Stephen “Goebbels” Miller are Nazis, this push for nationalist/exceptionalist/mythological indoctrination should make this quite clear.
I know that book, Bob. A chilling piece of propaganda meant to appeal to people as dumb and bigoted as Trump.
There are other concerns about this farce in addition to those of revisionism. Believe it or not, its also tied to the Tik Tok machinations of trump. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/09/22/concern-mount-trumps-5bn-patriotic-education-fund-tiktok-deal/
People who didn’t and don’t attend public schools and don’t support public schools want to impose a history curriculum on students and families they don’t have any respect for.
Would it be too much to ask that public schools get policy from people who actually support our schools and students? Why don’t they jam this cheap junk into their own schools? Why are our kids always the test population? The only time we hear from the Trump Administration is when they’re bashing our schools and kids and ordering us to do something. If they can’t contribute anything why don’t they just leave us alone? It’s bad enough we’re paying thousands of them not to work- it’s even worse when they do show up for work.
It’s the worst of both worlds. We get no support from ed reformers yet we’re stuck with their dumb, gimmicky ideas. They all support vouchers. Make the Trump History Mandate a requirement for a voucher. Experiment on your own kids.
“Education Secretary Betsy DeVos called for Congress to pass coronavirus relief legislation with funding for school choice, warning that more private schools are on the brink of closing without federal help.
placeholder”We need to have immediate relief for those schools,” DeVos told Fox News in an interview. “Think about the impact of all of these kids who suddenly now are showing up at the traditional public school door because they no longer have this other option. That’s a crisis in the making right there.”
Amazing. Having utterly failed to even SHOW UP for the 90% of US students who attend public schools, the ed reform “movement” are running a full-on voucher political campaign.
They have spent much more time aiding and promoting private schools than they have assisting public schools. And it’s such an echo chamber this insanity is never even questioned.
They simply do not serve public school students and families.If you hire them in government that’s what you’re hiring. People who will make no practical or useful contribution to 90% of students.
It simply doesn’t occur to them to serve public schools.
“Meanwhile, public schools, which are largely funded by state and local governments, are facing financial hardships and teacher layoffs because tax revenue has dried up due to the economic crisis and Congress hasn’t passed a comprehensive aid package to help replenish those funds.”
Meanwhile. That’s the afterthought. The schools 90% of kids attend are a “meanwhile”
8 months and no one got around to the unfashionable public schools that serve the vast, vast majority of students. This is what ed reform has brought us- ludicrous public policy that utterly ignores the vast majority of students so they can focus exclusively on their ideological agenda.
You could hire people who actually value public schools and public school students. It’s been twenty years but they’re out there. You’ll have to expand the search though – outside of TFA, Walton, Gates and Broad.
This is so grotesquely simple-minded that I’m tempted to day just that and move on. However, since Diane mentions the Soviet Union in her original post, I want to bring up David Remnick’s book “Lenin’s Tomb,” which may be the best book for the common reader on the decline and fall of the Soviet Union. Mr. Remnick’s central thesis in the book asserts that it was the return of the study and teaching of history to scholars and ordinary people–i.e. not Communist Party hacks– that as much as anything led to the end of the Soviet Union. The truth–about the state-engineered famine in the Ukraine, about the massacre in the Katyn Woods, about the purges, about Stalin, about Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956 to the Politburo on the cult of personality and its consequences, all of it, really–emerged and became a key element of public discourse. The textbook revision project Diane cites simply got away from the Communist Party.
President Trump and Stephen “Goebbels” Miller (and thanks, Bob Shepherd for that, which is pitch perfect) want to take this country to the Soviet Union from 1930 to 1985 where the study of history is concerned. If they were my students I would require them to read Lerone Bennett Jr.’s “Before the Mayflower” and write a lengthy book report; for the President, well, I suppose he could draw pictures.
Just sayin’.
for the President. . . .
LMAO
Shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, a team of professors from a university where I was in Grad school went to Russia to tour and advise universities there. Upon their return, they said that one of their greatest challenges was convincing the Russians why their use of the word “Defectology” was an inappropriate term for Special Education.
About a decade later, I was asked to speak to a contingent of educators from one of the countries that became independent after the fall of the Soviet Union, after they toured the US and observed in a variety of schools here. They had a lot of questions about education in America and I soon discovered that they, too, had the “defectology” mindset. What they were most confused about was why our autistic children looked so different from their autistic kids. They had not known about the autistic spectrum or considered the ranges of severity there might be with autism or other disorders, such as learning disabilities.
That always struck me as odd, since we’ve long known there are ranges of severity for other matters, such as vision and hearing problems. For those in the Soviet Union and other Eastern block countries, any problem out of the ordinary was considered to be a defect and, most often, this meant that kids were worthy of being ostracized..
We did the same to kids with special needs here, too, not that long ago, because that’s the medical model, were what is seen as being wrong with the child is central, and their strengths are often overlooked or discounted altogether. Even at a renowned children’s hospital where I interned for a year as a Grad student in the early 90s, each floor was designated for a different disorder. (When I asked about it, I was told that made rounds easier for doctors.) The only places where kids were integrated there were in the play rooms, which were designated for different ages, not by medical problem, thanks to specialists in Child Life.
But we definitely have a similar past and when we educate future teachers about this, we’re honest about it and don’t clean it up, as should be the case, in order to make America more equitable for historically marginalized people.
Wow
Yes, I visited the Pedagogical Institute for “Defectology” in Moscow. I was stunned by the insensitive and stigmatizing term.
I volunteered in an orphanage in rural Russia (Mstyora, in Vladimir Province) in the summer of 1994. At the time, I’d had four years of experience working with adolescents in one of New England’s “Ivy League” psychiatric hospital, the Brattleboro Retreat.
Which is why I was shocked at what I saw in that detsky dom (children’s home).
Mark, I would love to hear more about your experience in the detsky dom.
Sure, Diane. I was studying Russian language in 1994 when I received a flyer about working in a detsky dom. The sponsoring organization, whose name I have forgotten, arranged adoptions for parents in the United States from a number of detsky doms in Russia. In June of 1994, I found myself, with about 75 other undergraduates, on an Aeroflot plane headed to Moscow.
RIght after landing at Sheremetyovo, our group broke up into smaller groups which got on buses and headed toward our assignments. I was bound for Mstyora, a rural town on the Klyazma River in Vladimir Province famous for its school that trains artisans to create those tiny painted and lacquered boxes one finds for sale at tourist destinations in Russia.
My bus stopped to drop off my fellow volunteers along the way, so I was able to see several detsky doms. They were mostly run down and filthy, with staff that appeared ambivalent about the kids. At one of them, for kids with orthopedic problems and mostly confined to wheelchairs (these institutions for adults are called “internats” and are something of a scandal in Russia), it was very clear that these kids were on their way, as Judy Heumann put it in the excellent documentary “Crip Camp,” to being “sidelined.”
I ended up at one of the better of the orphanages I saw. The director was a good (and more importantly at this time in Russia, honest) man who clearly cared about the kids. The kids were well fed and clothed. Like much of Russia, there was little or no fresh food–other than the leeks and small potatoes coming out of gardens–around. The diet in the Mstyora Detsky Dom was very starchy, and portions were small. Milk–the detsky dom had three cows–was a big part of the kids’ diet; the kitchen staff made excellent yogurt with it.
Before leaving the states, I stocked up on craft supplies and tennis balls to teach kids how to juggle. I was really surprised how the kids, taking the plastic lace (when I was a kid, we got this stuff at summer recreation programs sponsored by my school district, and we called it “gimp”) that I brought for braiding and weaving and began working it into the kinds of complex braids that I could never figure out as a child. I had no instructions for this stuff–the kids just figured it out on their own.
At this detsky dom there were two houses: one for kids from infancy to age ten, and one for kids from age ten to eighteen, when most kids left to make a go of it in the world. I worked primarily in the latter house, and the two women in our group worked with the younger children.
The detsky dom was well staffed: there was a doctor and a psychologist, as well as a number of what we could call house parents. There was also a complement of, for lack of a better term, physical plant workers who were very good with the kids. In fact, most of the workers at the detsky dom brought their own kids around in the evening to hang out with the kids living in the home. It was a nice community.
By the time I was in Mstyora in 1994, I’d had four years experience working with troubled kids. Because I knew what the physical signs of fetal alcohol syndrome looked like, I recognized right away that quite a few of these kids were born to alcoholic mothers.
Unsurprisingly, developmental problems abounded. Most kids were small for their age; I saw what I would later hear called, in the psychiatric hospital where I worked with adolescents, “failure to thrive.” A lot of what I saw is well described by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris in her recent book “The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity.”
While the staff was comparatively good–I heard some real horror stories from others in our larger group, especially those who went to Yekaterinburg and one other destination east of the Urals–but they nonetheless often shocked me. For instance, one morning, while hanging out with the detsky dom’s psychologist and a group of kids after breakfast, she (the psychologist) said of one of the boys, “He’s not smart but he has the face of an angel.” The boy, who the doctor told me arrived at the detsky dom at age nine looking like a toddler, was clearly crestfallen. And while I understand the power of the threat of ostracism not only in Russian culture in general, but in particular in a place like Mstyora, on a vast steppe with unforgiving winters, but I found the staff’s threats to ostracize children who hadn’t finished their chores (“You’ll end up alone and cold on the steppe!”) harsh and inappropriate for orphaned kids.
As I say, when I returned to Moscow and met up with people who had been in other detsky doms, they had a lot of stories about mistreatment of kids. The sponsoring organization of this endeavor gave each of us a $50 bill with a letter explaining that it was to defray the cost of hosting us. I know that the director of the detsky dom in which I served used the money to put on a couple of special dinners–including “tsarskaya riba,” the “Tsars’ Fish,” sturgeon–for the kids and staff of the home. I heard from other people that the directors of their homes showed up with new clothes or other luxuries that they bought with their payments.
The kids in Mstyora were a lot of fun. As a teacher, as a youth mentor, and as someone who has worked with kids a lot, I always try to keep my charges in the center of focus in my work. The kids loved the attention: we played lapta, a bat and ball game similar to cricket, juggled, went for walks, and held literacy and literature contests at the library (Russians are very proud of their literary culture). You’d be surprised how many Russian children recognize pictures of, and the poetry and prose of, Turgenev, Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, among many others.
As far as the gravamen of this discussion, a “Defectology” model of understanding and dealing with disabilities, yes, I saw that, though I never heard it called that as such. What became very clear, and I’ve seen this depressing regularity in every institution for children in which I’ve served, was that expectations of these kids was low: they themselves would bear children early, become alcoholics, drug addicts, and petty criminals, and in general require that the state manage them.
There were quite a few kids of Central Asian descent in the detsky dom, and there was some subtle, casual, racism directed at them: mostly comments about their eyes and derogatory comments about Muslims.
OK–Please forgive my prolixity, Diane. If you want to see a picture of some of the kids I worked with in Mstyora, I put one on the masthead of my blog, Mark’s Text Terminal.
And thanks for asking, eh?
When political leaders make up curriculum, they have motives that are far from the motives of the teachers. Thus the very process of determining some standard for the history curriculum moves the country closer to tyranny.
To stir the words of Voltaire: I may not agree with all the points of the 1619 project or accept every proposition of Howard Zinn, but I will defend unto death their right to suggest their ideas and argue their points.
We cannot live in a society that achieves the level of freedom desired by all until all are considered in the discussion of freedom. Our country is a work in progress, and will be forever, or until some group is removed from the dialogue, as so many have been removed in the past.
Writing critique out of the history people have access to isn’t just stupid. Is an essential component of maintaining illegitimate power. It’s a tried and true piece of totalitarian regimes.
Okay, that means voting is more than just voting to save our lives, our country, our environment, and our species. Voting Trump out also means saving our history.
Trump doesn’t do well with younger voters, people that will have to live with the results of Trump long after he is gone.
According to NPR, Young people could wield significant political power: Millennials and some members of Gen Z comprise 37% of eligible voters, roughly the same share of the electorate that baby boomers and pre-boomers make up, according to census data analyzed by the Brookings Institution.
“But for decades, youth voters have showed up to the polls at low rates.”
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/12/909131065/will-2020-be-the-year-of-the-young-voter
If the younger generations do not turn out and vote in huge numbers, then they deserve the world they inherit from my generation if Trump is re-elected.
Let’s take a look at what Howard Zinn said in his Afterword of “A Peoples History of the United Sates” . I believe this would be Zinn’s response to Trump today.
“There is a certain drumbeat of scolding one hears these day, about the need for students to learn facts. “Our young people are not being taught facts,” said presidential candidate Robert Dole ( and candidates are always so scrupulous about facts) to a gathering of American Legionnaires. I was reminded of the character in Dickens’ “Hard Times” the pedant Gradgrind, who admonished a younger teacher: “Teach nothing but facts, facts, facts.”
But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. behind every fact presented to the world–by a teacher, a writer, anyone–is judgement. The judgement that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts, omitted, are not important. …..
…The consequence of those omissions has been not simply to give a distorted view of the past but, more important, to mislead us all about the present.”
Have you heard all of these ‘facts’ before? It comes from a far R site call “Renew Right”. It’s part of the Make America Great Again by making Michelle and Barack out to be as lying as Trump. If we’re ‘lucky’ it will become part of the new “Patriotic History”. /s
…………………….
Michelle Obama told one lie about her time in the White House that you won’t believe
Michelle Obama is on the warpath.
The former First Lady continues to try and help Joe Biden win the election by lying about America.
And Michelle Obama told one lie about her time in the White House that you won’t believe.
During a recent episode of her podcast, Michelle Obama, her brother Craig Robinson, and her mother Marian Robinson ran down America as a racist country full of racist white police officers.
“You were riding down the street and you got stopped by the police, and they accused you of stealing your own bike,” Obama stated. “And they would not believe you, to the point where you were like, ‘Take me to my home.’”
But that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Obama falsely claimed she and Barack Obama wouldn’t have gotten away with any of the supposed scandals that have yet to bring down Donald Trump.
“When we were in the White House, we could’ve never gotten away with some of the stuff that’s going on now, not because of the public, but our community wouldn’t have accepted that. You worked, you did your best every day. You showed up,” Obama ranted.
Michelle Obama has a short memory.
Under Operation Fast and Furious, the Obama administration ran guns to Mexican drug cartels in hopes of causing enough chaos to lay the groundwork for gun control.
Two border patrol agents were murdered by gang members using these firearms.
Under Barack Obama, the IRS targeted Tea Party groups for political harassment.
And Obama even ordered the murder of an American citizen in the Middle East through a drone strike.
Any one of these was an impeachable offense.
But the Fake News Media yawned and pretended the only scandal of the Obama administration was when Barack Obama showed up at a press conference wearing a tan suit.
Renewed Right will keep you up-to-date on any new developments in this ongoing story.
Under Operation Fast and Furious, the Obama administration ran guns to Mexican drug cartels in hopes of causing enough chaos to lay the groundwork for gun control.
I wonder how “Patriotic History” will change Trump’s total lack of leadership and the resulting number of deaths, especially among the poor, the elderly and minorities. CDC has even lost its respectability.
………………………………………
The University of Washington predicts the U.S. toll will double to 400,000 by the end of the year.
Wednesday, September 23, 2020 1:00 am
US tops grim milestone of 200,000 virus deaths
Associated Press
The U.S. death toll from the coronavirus topped 200,000 on Tuesday, by far the highest in the world, hitting the once-unimaginable threshold six weeks before an election that is certain to be a referendum in part on President Donald Trump’s handling of the crisis.
“It is completely unfathomable that we’ve reached this point,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins University public health researcher, eight months after the scourge first reached the world’s richest nation, with its state-of-the-art laboratories, top-flight scientists and stockpiles of medical supplies.
The number of dead is equivalent to a 9/11 attack every day for 67 days. It is roughly equal to the population of Salt Lake City or Huntsville, Alabama.
And it is still climbing. Deaths are running at close to 770 a day on average, and a widely cited model from the University of Washington predicts the U.S. toll will double to 400,000 by the end of the year as schools and colleges reopen and cold weather sets in. A vaccine is unlikely to become widely available until next year.
The bleak milestone was reported by Johns Hopkins, based on figures supplied by state health authorities. But the real toll is thought to be much higher, in part because many COVID-19 deaths were probably ascribed to other causes, especially early on, before widespread testing.
In an interview Tuesday with a Detroit TV station, Trump boasted of doing an “amazing” and “incredible” job against the virus. And in a prerecorded speech to the U.N. General Assembly, he demanded Beijing be held accountable for having “unleashed this plague onto the world.” China’s ambassador rejected the accusations as baseless.
For five months, America has led the world by far in sheer numbers of confirmed infections – nearly 6.9 million as of Tuesday – and deaths. The U.S. has less than 5% of the globe’s population but more than 20% of the reported deaths.
Brazil is No. 2 with about 137,000 deaths, followed by India with approximately 89,000 and Mexico with around 74,000. Only five countries – Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Spain and Brazil – rank higher in COVID-19 deaths per capita.
“All the world’s leaders took the same test, and some have succeeded and some have failed,” said Dr. Cedric Dark, an emergency physician at Baylor College of Medicine in hard-hit Houston. “In the case of our country, we failed miserably.”
Black and Hispanic people and American Indians have accounted for a disproportionate share of the deaths, underscoring the economic and health care disparities in the U.S.
Worldwide, the virus has infected more than 31 million people with nearly 967,000 lives lost, by Johns Hopkins’ count, though the real numbers are believed to be higher because of gaps in testing and reporting.
On Feb. 26, Trump held up pages from the Global Health Security Index, a measure of readiness for health crises, and declared, “The United States is rated No. 1 most prepared.”
It was true. The U.S. outranked the 194 other countries in the index. Besides its labs, experts and strategic stockpiles, the U.S. could boast of its disease trackers and plans for rapidly communicating lifesaving information during a crisis. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was respected around the world for sending help to fight infectious diseases.
But monitoring at airports was loose. Travel bans came too late. Only later did health officials realize the virus could spread before symptoms show up, rendering screening imperfect. The virus also swept into nursing homes and exploited poor infection controls, claiming more than 78,000 lives.
At the same time, gaps in leadership led to shortages of testing supplies. Internal warnings to ramp up production of masks were ignored, leaving states to compete for protective gear.
Trump downplayed the threat early on, advanced unfounded notions about the behavior of the virus, promoted unproven or dangerous treatments, complained that too much testing was making the U.S. look bad, and disdained masks, turning face coverings into a political issue.
On April 10, the president predicted the U.S. wouldn’t see 100,000 deaths. That milestone was reached May 27.
SCIENTISTS BLAST CDC REVERSAL ON AIRBORNE THREAT
Scientists are firing back at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after the agency reversed its identification of the coronavirus as an airborne virus, a conclusion that many experts say scientific evidence has supported for months now. The CDC’s brief recognition of the virus as being airborne on Friday was celebrated as long overdue by concurring scientists, who expressed relief that the agency was finally catching up. Three days later, however, the agency said that new language in its coronavirus guidance had been published in error. [HuffPost]
Number of States Reporting COVID-19 Surges More Than Doubles in One Week
Jamie Ross
Reporter
Published Sep. 23, 2020 7:05AM ET
Reuters/Tom Brenner
At least 22 states are reporting a rise in new COVID-19 cases—more than double the number from last Monday, when only nine states were reporting an upward tick in cases. The figures, compiled by Johns Hopkins University and reported by CNN, show that most of the states experiencing COVID-19 surges are in the country’s heartland and Midwest. Wisconsin has one of the highest positivity rates in the nation at around 16, and Kentucky has also reported a spike in its COVID-19 rates. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has found that COVID-19 is now the second-leading cause of death in the U.S, behind heart disease, and a new projection shows that an additional 150,000 people could lose their lives from the virus over the next three months.
Read it at CN
The Hill:
Despair at CDC after Trump influence: ‘I have never seen morale this low’
The Trump administration’s bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic and its subsequent efforts to meddle with recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are taking a substantial toll on the nation’s foremost public health institution.
In interviews with half a dozen current and former CDC officials, they described a workforce that has seen its expertise questioned, its findings overturned for political purposes and its effectiveness in combating the pandemic undermined by partisan actors in Washington.