ReportWire

Tag: last spring

  • The Governor Who Wants to Be Trump’s Next Apprentice

    The Governor Who Wants to Be Trump’s Next Apprentice

    [ad_1]

    As every politician knows, openly campaigning for the job of vice president is bad form. But Kristi Noem doesn’t seem to care.

    Last week alone, the South Dakota governor sent out a dozen tweets praising Donald Trump. She went on Fox News’s Hannity to condemn attempts in Maine and Colorado to remove the former president from the ballot. And she hosted a get-out-the-caucus rally for him across the border in Iowa. “Show up for a couple hours and fight for the man that’s fought for you for years!” the 52-year-old governor told the crowd at the event in Sioux City. “The only reason that we have this country is because of the good that he did when he was in that White House—and how he still continues to tell the truth out there every single day.”

    Asked by a reporter at the event whether she would consider the Trump VP slot, Noem smiled and replied, “I think anybody in this country, if they were offered it, needs to consider it.” Later, she retweeted the clip.

    Noem’s name has been popping up on vice-presidential shortlists in the media—and in Republican focus groups—for a while now. The way that she has defended and mimicked Trump’s actions for the past several years suggests that as his VP, she would be more of an enabler than a moderating force—and aggressive on Trump’s behalf in a way that Mike Pence never was. Picking Noem as his running mate would signal that Trump will be even less willing in a second term to kowtow to the Republican establishment. Compared with two other names that also appear regularly in shortlists, Noem would be more comfortable in MAGA world than the GOP conference chair Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, but less kooky than the Trump loyalist and Senate candidate Kari Lake. Noem also has more actual governing experience than either.

    Read: Trumpism has found its leading lady

    It’s still early in the primary season. Republicans have yet to settle on a nominee, and although all signs point to Trump, even his own team claims it hasn’t officially begun the brainstorming process for a running mate. “Much too soon for any of that talk,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser on Trump’s campaign, told me. Typically, a VP candidate is not announced until around the time of the convention, months after the presidential primary is concluded. Unofficially, though, the audition process began long ago.

    Noem will be “very competitive,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist, told me. “She’s burnishing her MAGA credentials, and the more she comes across as a fire-breathing populist, that’ll help her.” (The governor did not respond to my requests for an interview.)

    Noem, a former farm girl and South Dakota beauty queen, was elected in 2018 as the state’s first female governor. Before that, she spent four years in the state legislature and another eight in the U.S. Congress as South Dakota’s sole House representative. But most Americans probably heard Noem’s name for the first time in 2020, when she made national news for her laissez-faire approach to the coronavirus pandemic.

    Like most governors, at the start of the virus’s spread, Noem closed schools and ordered businesses to follow CDC guidelines. But quickly, taking cues from the Trump administration, she let up on those regulations. Noem never issued a statewide mask mandate, and she encouraged counties to return to business as usual sooner than other states did. She welcomed the return of the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in late summer of 2020, which ultimately resulted in “widespread transmission” of the virus throughout the Midwest, according to a study from the CDC. Her office used $5 million in pandemic-relief funds for an ad campaign promoting state tourism.

    Her pandemic-era decisions were evidence of bold, freedom-loving leadership, Noem has said, and her handling of the crisis remains a top bragging point as she travels the country giving speeches and hosting fundraisers. In other ways, too, Noem has perfectly reflected the zeitgeist of the modern Republican Party. She has repeated Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.” In 2022, she signed legislation banning transgender girls and women from playing on female sports teams; last year, she called upon an adviser from the conservative Hillsdale College to rework the state’s social-studies curriculum as part of a broader effort to eliminate “critical race theory” from public schools. “She’s brought legislation that is increasingly far-right for South Dakota—more so than any previous governor,” Bob Mercer, a longtime journalist in the state’s capital, Pierre, told me.

    Jonathan V. Last: Nikki Haley’s endgame

    Noem has also seemed much more focused on securing national media attention than past state leaders. In 2020, she built the first TV studio in the state capitol, and she’s become a regular on Newsmax, Fox News, and other major conservative outlets. Last spring, she signed a gun-related executive order onstage during a speech at the annual NRA convention in Indiana. (In that address, Noem boasted that her 2-year-old granddaughter already had a shotgun and a rifle.)

    She has also brought in several aides with national political experience, including the former Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski. And she kicked off a new national “Freedom Works Here” ad campaign that urges Americans living all over the country to move to South Dakota for jobs. Noem has starred in each of the spots, cosplaying as various members of the South Dakota workforce, including a welder, a plumber, and a nurse.

    Trump has always favored a culture warrior, and Noem’s political choices alone are enough to warrant VP consideration. But the governor, who is married with three children, can also claim the kind of corn-fed American backstory that voters love and that most Republican politicians wish they had. She spent her childhood pulling calves and driving grain carts on the family farm. As a teenager, she was crowned South Dakota Snow Queen, and her 2022 memoir, Not My First Rodeo, is chock-full of folksy idioms and Bible verses; Noem’s political MO, she writes, citing Matthew’s Gospel, is to “be wise like snakes and gentle like doves.” The book also recounts her life’s biggest tragedy: When Noem was pregnant with her first child, her father was killed in a grain-bin accident, forcing her, she writes, to leave college and go home to run the farm. Noem ended up earning her college degree by taking online classes during her time in Congress.

    Noem has always been adept at appealing to voters by using “the great mythology of America that you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” Michael Card, a political-science professor at the University of South Dakota, told me. Those rural bona fides could be effective if she makes the Republican presidential ticket. But gender could work in her favor at least as much.

    “Trump is well aware of his deficiencies as a candidate,” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist and the publisher of The Bulwark, told me. And his weakness among women voters—compounded by a penchant for baiting women he perceives as a challenge and the long list of sexual-harassment allegations against him—makes choosing a female running mate seem advisable. He’ll likely try to find “somebody who normalizes him somewhat,” Longwell said, and exploit “the excitement of a woman on the ticket, someone to push back on the idea that the party is sexist.” Bannon agreed: Trump’s MAGA movement is mostly woman-led, he claimed—“smart to engage that base and make your case to suburban women.”

    Eric Schnurer: Kristi Noem’s National Guard deployment is America’s future

    Noem has downsides as a VP contender. It’s not as though Trump would need her on the ticket to win over rural voters; they already love him. Vice-presidential candidates can be chosen to deliver a state that might not be in the nominee’s column, but South Dakota is a safe Republican state, and, with only three Electoral College votes, it’s not a particularly useful pickup. And although Noem has yet to come under national scrutiny, she’s already had her share of controversy. In the spring of 2022, a Republican-controlled panel of South Dakota lawmakers found that one of Noem’s daughters had received special treatment in an application for her real-estate-appraiser license. (Noem has denied any wrongdoing.) And last fall, the New York Post and the Daily Mail ran reports about an alleged affair between Noem and Lewandowski. (In response, the governor’s spokesperson dismissed the allegation as “a false and inflammatory tabloid rumor.”)

    Trump has other options. He could run on a ticket with his current primary opponent Nikki Haley, as a way to appease moderate Republicans. The pairing doesn’t seem particularly plausible right now, given the sharp words both candidates have had for each other during this campaign, but Bannon sees it as a possibility—even if he and others in MAGA world don’t approve. “Haley has two constituencies—the Murdochs and the donors—and they are trying to buy her way on the ticket as VP,” he told me.

    As for Noem’s other potential rivals for a Trump VP pick, a lawmaker with Stefanik’s Ivy League credentials and political experience on the ticket could help Trump shore up support from moderates, some strategists said. “Elise could at least pass as somebody who eats with a fork in Washington circles but would satisfy the MAGA base,” Jeff Timmer, a Republican strategist and senior adviser at the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, told me. But Stefanik perhaps has to work harder to win over the MAGA crowd—she was dutifully parroting Trump’s lines on Meet the Press this weekend by referring to the convicted January 6 rioters as “hostages.” Aside from Lake, the former newscaster and failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate whom I profiled in 2022, other women who could get consideration include Senator Katie Britt of Alabama and Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.

    If Trump has secured the nomination, the VP-selection process could look very different from the way it did eight years ago. Back then, Trump was still looking to consolidate support among Republicans; now his lock on the party is airtight, unquestionable. “He gets to pick whoever he wants,” Timmer said. Which makes competition for the spot pretty unpredictable: Trump could follow his gut and pick a MAGA-style politician and relative outsider like Noem, or make a more strategic choice with a GOP insider like Stefanik. Regardless of whether Republican leaders like either, “they’re gonna smile and go along with it.”

    One thing is certain: No candidate will be considered for the Trump VP slot without having demonstrated sycophantic devotion to the former president—a willingness to defend him no matter what. Noem is not the only one to clear that bar, but she has jumped higher than most.

    [ad_2]

    Elaine Godfrey

    Source link

  • Medium COVID Could Be the Most Dangerous COVID

    Medium COVID Could Be the Most Dangerous COVID

    [ad_1]

    I am still afraid of catching COVID. As a young, healthy, bivalently boosted physician, I no longer worry that I’ll end up strapped to a ventilator, but it does seem plausible that even a mild case of the disease could shorten my life, or leave me with chronic fatigue, breathing trouble, and brain fog. Roughly one in 10 Americans appears to share my concern, including plenty of doctors. “We know many devastating symptoms can persist for months,” the physician Ezekiel Emanuel wrote this past May in The Washington Post. “Like everyone, I want this pandemic nightmare to be over. But I also desperately fear living a debilitated life of mental muddle or torpor.”

    Recently, I’ve begun to think that our worries might be better placed. As the pandemic drags on, data have emerged to clarify the dangers posed by COVID across the weeks, months, and years that follow an infection. Taken together, their implications are surprising. Some people’s lives are devastated by long COVID; they’re trapped with perplexing symptoms that seem to persist indefinitely. For the majority of vaccinated people, however, the worst complications will not surface in the early phase of disease, when you’re first feeling feverish and stuffy, nor can the gravest risks be said to be “long term.” Rather, they emerge during the middle phase of post-infection, a stretch that lasts for about 12 weeks after you get sick. This period of time is so menacing, in fact, that it really ought to have its own, familiar name: medium COVID.

    Just how much of a threat is medium COVID? The answer has been obscured, to some extent, by sloppy definitions. A lot of studies blend different, dire outcomes into a single giant bucket called “long COVID.” Illnesses arising in as few as four weeks, along with those that show up many months later, have been considered one and the same. The CDC, for instance, suggested in a study out last spring that one in five adults who get the virus will go on to suffer any of 26 medical complications, starting at least one month after infection, and extending up to one year. All of these are called “post-COVID conditions, or long COVID.” A series of influential analyses looking at U.S. veterans described an onslaught of new heart, kidney, and brain diseases (even among the vaccinated) across a similarly broad time span. The studies’ authors refer to these, grouped together, as “long COVID and its myriad complications.”

    But the risks described above might well be most significant in just the first few weeks post-infection, and fade away as time goes on. When scientists analyzed Sweden’s national health registry, for example, they found that the chance of developing pulmonary embolism—an often deadly clot in the lungs—was a startling 32 times higher in the first month after testing positive for the virus; after that, it quickly diminished. The clots were only two times more common at 60 days after infection, and the effect was indistinguishable from baseline after three to four months. A post-infection risk of heart attack and stroke was also evident, and declined just as expeditiously. In July, U.K. epidemiologists corroborated the Swedish findings, showing that a heightened rate of cardiovascular disease among COVID patients could be detected up to 12 weeks after they got sick. Then the hazard went away.

    This is all to be expected, given that other respiratory infections are known to cause a temporary spike in patients’ risk of cardiovascular events. Post-viral blood clots, heart attacks, and strokes tend to blow through like a summer storm. A very recent paper in the journal Circulation, also based on U.K. data, did find that COVID’s effects are longer-lasting, with a heightened chance of such events that lasts for almost one full year. But even in that study, the authors see the risk fall off most dramatically across the first two weeks. I’ve now read dozens of similar analyses, using data from many countries, that agree on this basic point: The greatest dangers lie in the weeks, not months, after a COVID infection.

    Read: Long COVID could be a ‘mass deterioration event’

    Yet many have inferred that COVID’s dangers have no end. “What’s particularly alarming is that these are really life-long conditions,” Ziyad Al-Aly, the lead researcher on the veterans studies, told the Financial Times in August. A Cleveland Clinic cardiologist has suggested that catching SARS-CoV-2 might even become a greater contributor to cardiovascular disease than being a chronic smoker or having obesity. But if experts who hold this assumption are correct—and the mortal hazards of COVID really do persist for a lifetime (or even many months)—then it’s not yet visible at the health-system level. By the end of the Omicron surge last winter, one in four Americans—about 84 million people—had been newly infected with the coronavirus. This was on top of 103 million pre-Omicron infections. Yet six months after the surge ended, the number of adult emergency-room visits, outpatient appointments, and hospital admissions across the country were all slightly lower than they were at the same time in 2021, according to an industry report released last month. In fact, emergency-room visits and hospital admissions in 2021 and 2022 were lower than they’d been before the pandemic. In other words, a rising tide of long-COVID-related medical conditions, affecting nearly every organ system, is nowhere to be found.

    If mild infections did routinely lead to fatal consequences at a delay of months or years, then we should see it in our death rates, too. The number of excess deaths in the U.S.—meaning those that have occured beyond historic norms—should still be going up, long after case rates fall. Yet excess deaths in the U.S. dropped to zero this past April, about two months after the end of the winter surge, and they have stayed relatively low ever since. Here, as around the world, overall mortality rates follow acute-infection rates, but only for a little while. A second wave of deaths—a long-COVID wave—never seems to break.

    Even the most familiar maladies of “long COVID”—severe fatigue, cognitive difficulties, and breathing trouble—tend to be at their worst during the medium post-infection phase. An early analysis of symptom-tracking data from the U.K., the U.S., and Sweden found that the proportion of those experiencing COVID’s aftereffects decreased by 83 percent four to 12 weeks after illness started. The U.K. government also reported much higher rates of medium COVID, relative to long COVID: In its survey, 11 percent of people who caught the virus experienced lingering issues such as weakness, muscle aches, and loss of smell, but that rate had dropped to 3 percent by 12 weeks post-infection. The U.K. saw a slight decline in the number of people reporting such issues throughout the spring and summer; and a recent U.S. government survey found that about half of Americans who had experienced any COVID symptoms for three months or longer had already recovered.

    This slow, steady resolution of symptoms fits with what we know about other post-infection syndromes. A survey of adolescents recovering from mononucleosis, which is caused by Epstein-Barr virus, found that 13 percent of subjects met criteria for chronic fatigue syndrome at six months, but that rate was nearly halved at one year, and nearly halved again at two. An examination of chronic fatigue after three different infections—EBV, Q fever, and Ross River virus—identified a similar pattern: frequent post-infection symptoms, which gradually decreased over months.

    Read: It’s not just long COVID

    The pervasiveness of medium COVID does nothing to negate the reality of long COVID—a calamitous condition that can shatter people’s lives. Many long-haulers experience unremitting symptoms, and their cases can evolve into complex chronic syndromes like ME/CFS or dysautonomia. As a result, they may require specialized medical care, permanent work accommodations, and ongoing financial support. Recognizing the small chance of such tragic outcomes could well be enough to make some people try to avoid infection or reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 at all costs.

    But if you’re like me, and trying to calibrate your behaviors to meet some personally acceptable level of COVID risk, then it helps to keep in mind the difference between the virus’s medium- and long-term complications. Medium COVID may be time-limited, but it is far from rare—and not always mild. It can mean a month or two of profound fatigue, crushing headaches, and vexing chest pain. It can lead to life-threatening medical complications. It needs recognition, research, and new treatments. For millions of people, medium COVID is as bad as it gets.

    [ad_2]

    Benjamin Mazer

    Source link