Day 83 of the second confinement period

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Data snapshot

The comic book is being worked on

Another Great Classic I am a serious Pink Floyd fan.

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▫️ COVID-19: The numbers of new cases and hospital cases are going up inexorably.

▫️ Vaccinations: The number of vaccinations is now on track since yesterday to achieve th 1 Million goal by the end of the month. It might appear low compared to other countries but vaccins are being kept in reserve to allow for the second vaccination two to three weeks later which is not the case in all countries.

▫️ Obituary for a failed presidency (© Susan B. Glasser – New York Times)

Precisely at noon on Wednesday, Donald Trump’s disastrous Presidency will end, two weeks to the day after he unleashed a mob of his supporters to storm the Capitol, seeking to overturn the election results, and one week to the day after he was impeached for so doing. He leaves behind a city and a country reeling from four hundred thousand Americans dead, as of Tuesday, from a pandemic whose gravity he downplayed and denied; an economic crisis; and an internal political rift so great that it invites comparisons to the Civil War.

In the end, Trump was everything his haters feared—a chaos candidate, in the prescient words of one of his 2016 rivals, who became a chaos President. An American demagogue, he embraced division and racial discord, railed against a “deep state” within his own government, praised autocrats and attacked allies, politicized the administration of justice, monetized the Presidency for himself and his children, and presided over a tumultuous, turnover-ridden Administration via impulsive tweets. He leaves office, Gallup reported this week, with the lowest average approval ratings in the history of the modern Presidency. Defeated by Joe Biden in the 2020 election by seven million votes, Trump became the first incumbent seeking reëlection to see his party lose the White House, Senate, and the House of Representatives since Herbert Hoover, in 1932. A liar on an unprecedented scale, Trump made more than thirty thousand false statements in the course of his Presidency, according to the Washington Post, culminating in perhaps the biggest lie of all: that he won an election that he decisively lost.

Yet Republicans—the vast majority, that is, of those who still identify themselves as Republicans—continue to embrace Trump and the conspiracy theories about his defeat that the departing President has spread to explain his loss. This, more than anything, might have been the most surprising thing about Trump’s tenure: his ability to turn one of America’s two political parties into a cult of personality organized around a repeatedly bankrupt New York real-estate developer. And so we are ending these four years having learned not that Donald Trump is a bad man—the evidence of that was already voluminous and incontrovertible before he entered politics—but that there are millions of Americans who were willing to overthrow our constitutional system in order to keep him in power, who would follow Trump’s dark lies rather than acknowledge unwelcome truths.

I often wonder whether, a few years from now, we will really be able to remember what it was like these past four years: the early-morning tweets firing the Secretary of State and overruling the Pentagon; the bizarre sight of an obese, orange-haired septuagenarian President dancing onstage to the Village People before thousands of adoring fans; the final shocking spectacle of the pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol as the President watched it on television in the White House and put out a video telling the rioters, “We love you.” Will we recall Trump’s strange obsessions—his conviction that windmills cause cancer and modern toilets don’t flush well—and also his toxic lies about more consequential matters, such as the deadly pandemic that he compared to a bout of the seasonal flu? I don’t know, although I am quite sure that there will be decades of efforts to understand how the most powerful country on earth came to have a leader who believed that hurricanes could be nuked.

This is my final Letter from Trump’s Washington . At noon on Wednesday, I, too, will transition—to writing about the Biden Presidency and what it means for a capital struggling to reckon with Trump’s disruptive legacy. Reading back through the more than a hundred and forty Letters from Trump’s Washington I wrote, what stands out in hindsight is the stalking menace of these past few years. As Trump became more powerful and less constrained by successive waves of White House advisers, he was correspondingly more and more outrageous, untruthful, and unmoored from reality. His sense of grievance and victimization escalated; so, too, did his threats, name-calling, and public provocations. He fired the F.B.I. director, a Secretary of State, an Attorney General, a Defense Secretary, three White House chiefs of staff, and two—or three, depending on whose account you believe—national-security advisers. He pardoned war criminals and boasted of complete and total vindication in the Mueller investigation, even though it offered no such thing. He forced the longest government shutdown in history when Congress would not fund his border wall—all while continuing to claim that Mexico would pay for it. The lack of meaningful consequences throughout his tenure only emboldened him further. The disaster of 2020 was not an unexpected catastrophe so much as a predictable crescendo.

It strikes me that the mistake, the original sin for many in Washington, was in pretending that the Campaign Trump of 2016 was not the true Trump, when in reality they knew there was never going to be a governing Trump, never going to be a Presidential Trump. What he said in all those rallies and tweets was his authentic self: foulmouthed, bullying, self-obsessed, casually racist, and capable not only of breathtaking lies but of repeating them over and over until they became a strategy unto themselves. Back in the summer of 2018, I published an entire column when the fact-checkers at the Washington Post determined that Trump had hit the disreputable mark of more than four thousand falsehoods in his tenure. Two and a half years later, his final tally of thirty thousand-plus is essentially double where the total stood just a year ago. The lies were the metastatic cancer of his Presidency. Many in his Republican base believed them; his party leadership succumbed to their dishonest force.

In the fall of 2017, my very first letter recounted a lunch I had with the Republican lobbyist Ed Rogers, who relayed a conversation with Steve Bannon, Trump’s recently banished chief White House ideologist. “There’s a bunch of people who think they have to protect the country from Trump,” Bannon had told Rogers. Bannon meant it as a criticism of insufficiently loyal Republicans; Rogers saw such internal pushback on Trump as an unpleasant responsibility. In many ways, this was the divide that would continue through the whole four years: a Republican establishment that loathed Trump but justified going along with him, fearing the political costs but also fearing the potentially worse costs—for themselves and, perhaps, for the country—of not doing so.

This was to be a running theme of the column: Trump’s frontal attack on Washington and the struggle to see if anyone within his party could, or would, constrain him. What started out as a question was soon answered. The answer was no. Republicans would not. They believed that they could not abandon Trump, that those who had tried had failed, and that there was no political path inside their own party that did not involve fealty on some level to him. They accepted the rewards he offered, from tweets of praise and generous tax cuts for the wealthy to judicial appointments for far-right ideologues who will shape the law for a generation. Many began to remake themselves in his ruder, cruder, pseudo-populist image. From that point forward, it was arguably not a question of whether a big crisis would hit but how bad it would be. The converging debacles of 2020 showed it to be very bad, indeed. But when Trump ran for reëlection on a platform of denying the severity of the coronavirus—even as hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying from it—the Party not only continued to back him; it handed him the nomination unopposed.

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▫️Vaccinations report

The government is keeping to the target of 1 Million by the end of January and added a target of 2,5 Million by the end of Feb.

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▫️Vendée Globe

Here is the standing earlier this morning for the 25 remaining competitors. It is anybody’s guess who will cross the line first. There are some tricky wind conditions ahead and a direct route to “Les Sable d’Olonne” seems impossible.

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France

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Actual v Original Targets for December 15th Targets

It is better to look at the 7 days rolling average which is still on an upward trend

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Occitanie

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176,82

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Below is the table, as a reminder, of the main parameters

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Glossary

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Latest info on PCR Tests

On paper, more than half of the population has been tested

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Meteo – Quite a fair amount of rain is being forecasted

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🔹Top 15 countries according to the new daily cases as of yesterday

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Improve your French

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🔹 Overseas titbits

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🇺🇸 There is so much insanity going on right now over the pond🇺🇸

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🔹Walks / Hikes / Places visited

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Nothing new yesterday

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Pics from our Occitanie region

Day 82 of the second confinement period

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Data snapshot

The comic book is being worked on

Another Great Classic The parties or “Les Boums” as we called them then.

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▫️ A new Defence Council is meeting this morning at the Elysée Palace. A decision should be taken there on the reopening of the ski lifts, which the ski resorts are calling for.

▫️ In France, the second wave is taking advantage of the winter to extend over time and is claiming more victims than the first. 373 new deaths and 23,608 contaminations were recorded between Monday evening and yesterday evening.

▫️ Yesterday evening, 585,664 people had been vaccinated in France.

▫️Germany has hardened and extended its anti-Covid arsenal until mid-February. Schools, bars, restaurants and cultural venues will remain closed until 14 February. Medical masks (FP2) will become compulsory in shops and public transport.

▫️ Many things happening today

⇢🇺🇸 In the USA, a new president will be sworn in, hopefully peacefully.

but maybe more importantly

⇢🇫🇷 In France, the Winter Sales are officially open.

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▫️Vaccinations report

The governement is keeping to the target of 1 Million by the end of January and added a target of 2,5 Million by the end of Feb. A target of 6.5 Million by the summer has also been communicated.

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▫️Vendée Globe

Here is the standing earlier this morning for the 25 remaining competitors. They are really zooming up the North Atlantic. The current leader APIVIA with skipper Charlie Dalin sailes 740 km in the past 24 hours. May I remind you we are talking sailing boats here…

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Very little else to add

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France

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Actual v Original Targets for December 15th Targets

It is better to look at the 7 days rolling average which is still on an upward trend

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Occitanie

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176,55

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Below is the table, as a reminder, of the main parameters

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Glossary

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Latest info on PCR Tests

On paper, more than half of the population has been tested

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Meteo – Getting milder and milder. The outlook says up to 19 next week on Friday.

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🔹Top 15 (used to be 10) countries according to the new daily cases as of yesterday

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Improve your French

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🔹 Overseas titbits

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🇺🇸 There is so much insanity going on right now over the pond🇺🇸

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🔹Walks / Hikes / Places visited

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Went to Narbonne yesterday for a short walk around a almost deserted town

Followed by an even more deserted Narbonne Plage

Drove home via the scenic routes avoiding the motorway

Some might not know, but the scenic routes are marked green on the Michelin maps and are usually worth it. Michelin maps are also available on the internet (better than Google Maps as far as France is concerned at least) on https://www.viamichelin.fr/

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Pics from our Occitanie region