How Biden stage managed his COVID response
Plus: Trump can’t stop using the presidential seal
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How Biden stage managed his COVID response
Trump can’t stop using the presidential seal
Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald just starred in a mini doc about their art and inspiration
How Biden stage managed his COVID response
Politicians are obsessed with showing us they’re working through COVID-19.
On the day he tested positive with a breakthrough infection last month, President Joe Biden followed his predecessor and vice president by posting a photo working from home unmasked.
“Folks, I’m doing great,” he tweeted from the @POTUS account. “Thanks for your concern.” In a follow-up video posted to social media he said his symptoms were mild.
In the face of COVID, both U.S. presidents who’ve so far been infected while in office responded by projecting business as usual. “I got through it with no fear,” Biden said during a Rose Garden address last week after testing negative. He wore aviators.
Of course, Biden and Trump had two different experiences in two different phases of the pandemic. “When my predecessor got COVID, he had to get helicoptered to Walter Reed Medical Center. He was severely ill,” Biden said. “Thankfully, he recovered. When I got COVID I worked from upstairs in the White House in the offices upstairs for that five-day period. The difference is vaccinations of course.”
Biden argued it was proof we’ve made progress in the battle against COVID. He touted his administration’s work to make free tests available and improve ventilation in schools and public buildings, as well as paxlovid, the oral antiviral pill that can prevent hospitalization and death.
It’s true much has changed about the pandemic since Trump left office. But Biden’s bravado felt all too familiar. He showed more modesty in his remarks Monday announcing the U.S. killed al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri, which even Fox News agreed was a BFD.
A year ago, Biden declared independence from the virus, but today, more than 400 Americans a day are still dying from COVID. It’s estimated 2.4% of the U.S. working population is out of work because of complications from long COVID. Though we’re in a new phase of the pandemic, it’s not over.
A rebound positive test on Saturday forced Biden back into isolation, rendering his second victory over COVID speech premature. Politics is a line of work that rewards machismo, but time and time again, COVID has proven to be a crisis that requires humility. It’s a value too few politicians feel comfortable projecting.
Trump can’t stop using the presidential seal
We get it, you used to president.
Photographers at Trump’s Bedminster golf club in New Jersey spotted the presidential seal on display while the club hosted the Saudi-backed LIV Golf series (if you didn’t like Biden’s fist bump with the Saudi crown prince, you’ll hate what Trump said hosting the tournament).
Insider photographed the seal on a golf towel and golf cart, which would appear to violate federal law prohibiting the use of official government seals “in a manner reasonably calculated to convey a false impression of sponsorship or approval by the Government of the United States.”
Trump’s been caught using the seal on golf items before. Last year, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington, or CREW, filed a complaint with the Justice Department about the seal being used on a golf tee marker (above). CREW filed an earlier complaint in 2018 about the seal appearing on golf tee markers when Trump was in office.
Trump’s campaign also sold Space Force-branded merchandise during the 2020 campaign in an apparent violation of the Defense Department’s branding guidelines.
Knowingly misusing the presidential seal and other official government seals can be punished by fines and up to six months in prison, but I found no evidence of anyone being sentenced for doing so on the Justice Department website.
CREW president Noah Bookbinder said using the seal for commercial purposes “is no trivial matter,” in a statement following last year’s complaint, especially because it “involves a former president who is actively challenging the legitimacy of the current president.”
Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald just starred in a mini doc about their art and inspiration
The New Yorker just dropped a 10-minute mini documentary about artists and Obama portraitists Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald.
“Paint & Pitchfork: Illustrating Blackness” by Christine Turner clocks in at nearly 10 minutes and shows Wiley and Sherald working in the studio as they talk about what inspires their art.
Sherald recalled an elementary school field trip to see artwork by artist Bo Bartlett and being moved by his 1986 “Object Permanence.”
“The work was an image of a Black man standing in a yard with his wife and son, and I had never seen that before,” she said. “I had never seen contemporary work before. So I had an emotional response to it. I knew in that moment that I wanted to make paintings of people.”
Sherald said she’s often asked if she will ever paint anybody other than Black people and her answer is no, “because the image of whiteness has been perpetuated beautifully throughout history, so like you really don't need my help.”
“I'm here to paint my own ideal and to represent that in the world, and if I can't do that, then something is deeply wrong,” she said. “You should look at a history book and then see if you still want to ask me that question, because the problem is you recognize an absence of yourself, but you don't recognize the absence of me.”
Wiley said he was curious about the tropes he saw in historical paintings when he was young, and he would try and copy artists he liked and put himself into their work.
“As a young kid, looking at old historical paintings, I wondered, why are they wearing those powdered wigs and those pearls?” he said. “What's up with all the lap dogs?”
Wiley said he made art for validation and a desire to make something new.
“I think I make art for that person inside of me that wants to be approved,” he said. “But also that person inside of me that wants to shake up the world. So there's two different things going on. There's the desire for acceptability and then there's the desire for revolution.”
You can watch the full mini doc here.
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