The Trump Era Sucks and Needs to Be Over

By Matt Taibbi, Matt Taibbi's Substack

06 September 20

The race is tightening. Is America sure it's ready to give up its addiction to crazy?

n Donald Trump’s interview with Laura Ingraham last week, he talked about the “shadow people” he believes lurk behind Joe Biden:

INGRAHAM: Who do you think is pulling Biden’s strings? Is it former Obama officials?

TRUMP: People that you’ve never heard of. People that are in the dark shadows. 

Fifteen years ago, the Fox News personality was likely to be the one pushing the conspiratorial envelope. Glenn Beck playing with rubber frogs while railing about assassination plots or spinning elaborate tales connecting Barack Obama to both Hitler and Stalin represented the outward edge of crazy in mainstream discourse. 

Today the Fox anchor is the voice of restraint, pleading with the President of the United States to stay on planet earth while cameras roll:

INGRAHAM: What does that mean? That sounds like conspiracy theory.

TRUMP: No, people that you haven’t heard of. They’re people that are on the streets. They’re people that are controlling the streets…

We’ve been living with Trump for so long, we’ve gotten out of the habit of asking the basic questions we normally ask, when a famous person says something odd. What is he thinking? Is he being serious? Does he mean this as metaphor — is he talking about the donors and party higher-ups who may indeed have outsize influence behind his elderly opponent’s candidacy — or does he really believe in a nebulous, Three Days of the Condor-style secret spooks’ club, working after hours to install a socialist dictatorship through Joe Biden? 

Donald Trump is so unlike most people, and so especially unlike anyone raised under a conventional moral framework, that he’s perpetually misdiagnosed. The words we see slapped on him most often, like “fascist” and “authoritarian,” nowhere near describe what he really is, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. It’s been proven across four years that Trump lacks the attention span or ambition required to implement a true dictatorial regime. He might not have a moral problem with the idea, but two minutes into the plan he’d leave the room, phone in hand, to throw on a robe and watch himself on Fox and Friends over a cheeseburger. 

The elite misread of Trump is egregious because he’s an easily familiar type to the rest of America. We’re a sales culture and Trump is a salesman. Moreover he’s not just any salesman; he might be the greatest salesman ever, considering the quality of the product, i.e. himself. He’s up to his eyes in balls, and the parts of the brain that hold most people back from selling schlock online degrees or tchotchkes door-to-door are absent. He has no shame, will say anything, and experiences morality the way the rest of us deal with indigestion. 

Pundits keep trying to understand him by reading political scare-tracts like The Origins of Totalitarianism or It Can’t Happen Here, but again, the books that explain Trump better tend to be about things like pro wrestling (like Controversy Creates Cash or The Business of Kayfabe) or the psychology of selling (like Pre-Suasion or Thinking Fast and Slow). The people howling about outrageous things Trump says probably never sat in a sales meeting. In Pre-Suasion, psychology professor Robert Cialdini, who went undercover with salespeople to discover their secrets, describes how one got clients to agree to his company’s $75,000 fee:

Instead, after his standard presentation… he joked, “As you can tell, I’m not going to be able to charge you a million dollars for this.” The client looked up from his written proposal and said, “Well, I can agree to that!” The meeting proceeded without a single subsequent reference to compensation and ended with a signed contract…

Sound familiar? When Trump first hit the campaign trail in 2015-2016, reporters were staggered by the outrageous promises Trump would toss out, like that he’d slap a 45% tariff on all Chinese products, build a “high” wall across the Mexican isthmus, or deport all 11.3 million undocumented immigrants (“They have to go,” he told Chuck Todd). 

Those of us with liberal arts educations and professional-class jobs often have trouble processing this sort of thing. If you work in a hospital and someone asks you a patient’s hematocrit level, no one expects you to open with fifteen times the real number. But this is a huge part of Trump’s M.O. 

By the end of the 2016 race, some of us in media were struggling with what to tell readers about Trump’s intentions, given that he would frequently offer contradictory proposals (with matching impassioned explanations) within minutes of each other, sometimes even within the same sentence. He would tell one crowd to whoops and hollers that he couldn’t wait to throw all them illegals back over the river, then go on Hannity that same night and say he was open to a “softening” on immigration:

Everybody agrees we get the bad ones out… But when I meet thousands and thousands of people on this subject…they’ve said, ‘Mr. Trump, I love you, but to take a person that has been here for 15 or 20 years and throw them and the family out, it’s so tough, Mr. Trump.’

Read what sales books have to say about morality or belief systems and Trump starts to make even more sense. What did Cialdini notice about John Lennon’s idealistic clarion call, Imagine? That Lennon increased his chances of selling political change with the line, “But I’m not the only one…” It turns out you can increase demand for anything from government policies to items on a Chinese menu simply by asserting, as Trump constantly does, that “everybody’s talking about it.” Ask students to draw long and short lines on a piece of paper, and when asked, the people drawing long ones think the Mississippi River is longer. Trump’s constant invocations about a future of “so much winning” worked, even with people who tried consciously to dismiss it as bullshit. 

Read Brian Tracy’s The Psychology of Selling and you learn that the key to closing a sale not only involves identifying the “needs of your prospect,” but making sure to promise a big enough change to make action seem worth it:

The customer must be substantially better off with your product or service than he is without it. It cannot represent a small increment in value or benefit… [it must be] great enough to justify the amount of money you are charging, plus the amount of time and energy it will take to implement your solution.

The question, “What is Trump thinking?” is the wrong one. He’s not thinking, he’s selling. What’s he selling? Whatever pops into his head. The beauty of politics from his point of view, compared to every other damn thing he’s sold in his life — steaks, ties, pillows, college degrees, chandeliers, hotels, condominiums, wine, eyeglasses, deodorant, perfume (SUCCESS by Trump!), mattresses, etc. — is that there’s no product. The pitch is the product, and you can give different pitches to different people and they all buy. 

In 2016 Trump reeled in the nativist loons and rage cases with his opening rants about walls and mass deportations, then slowly clawed his numbers up with the rest of the party with his “softening” routine. Each demographic probably came away convinced he was lying to the other, while the truth was probably more that he was lying to all of them. Obviously there are real-world consequences to courting the lowest common denominator instincts in people, but to Trump speeches aren’t moral acts in themselves, they’re just “words that he is saying,” as long-ago spokesperson Katrina Pierson put it. 

In this sense the Republican Party’s 2020 platform is genius: there isn’t one, just a commitment to “enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda,” meaning whatever Trump says at any given moment. If one can pull back enough from the fact that this impacts our actual lives, it’s hard not to admire the breathtaking amorality of this, as one might admire a simple malevolent organism like a virus or liver fluke.

Trump blew through the Republican primaries in 2015-2016. His opponents, a slate of mannequins hired by energy companies and weapons contractors to be pretend-patriots and protectors of “family values,” had no answer for his insults and offer-everything-to-everyone tactics. Like most politicians, they’d been protected their whole lives by donors, party hacks, and pundits who’d turned campaigns into a club system designed to insulate paid lackeys from challenges to their phony gravitas. Trump had no institutional loyalty to the club, shat all over it in addition to its silly frontmen, and walked to the nomination. 

So long as he was never going to win the actual presidency, this was funny. The Republicans deserved it. Watching GOP chair Reince Priebus try to pretend he wasn’t being forced to eat the biggest-in-history shit sandwich by embracing his obese conqueror at the 2016 convention was a delicious scene, similar to what most Americans probably felt watching Bill Belichick squirm at the podium after the Eagles pummeled him in the Super Bowl. 

The Democrats aren’t much better, though, and the spectacle of “inevitable” Hillary Clinton being too shocked to ascend to the Javits Center podium, instead sending writhing campaign creature John Podesta to announce through a forced smile that the mortified audience shouldn’t worry and should get some sleep instead, was also high comedy, not that I really saw it at the time.

They all deserved it, every last politician ruined that year. The country did not, however, which is why the last four years have been a nightmare beyond all recognition. The joke ended up being on us. 

The paradox ensnaring America since November, 2016 is that Trump never intended to govern, while his opponents never intended to let him try. In an alternate universe where a post-election Donald had enough self-awareness to admit he was out of his depth, and the D.C. establishment agreed to recognize his administration as legitimate for appearances’ sake, Trump might have escaped four years with the profile of a conventionally crappy president, or perhaps a few notches below that — way below average, maybe, but survivable.

Instead it was decided even before he was elected that admitting the president was the president was “normalizing” him. Normally no news is good news, and the anchorman is encouraged to smile on a day without war, earthquakes, terror attacks, or stock market crashes. Under Trump it became taboo to have a slow news day. A lack of an emergency was a failure of reporting, since Trump’s very presence in office was crisis. 

We spent four years moving from panic to panic, from the pee story to the Muslim ban to Michael Flynn’s firing to the Schiff hearings in March 2017 to Jim Comey’s dismissal to Treason in Helsinki to Charlottesville to the caravan to the Kavanaugh hearings and beyond. When Trump fired Jeff Sessions, perhaps the most determined enemy of police reform in recent history — one of his last acts as Attorney General was issuing an order undermining federal civil rights investigations — liberal America exploded in media-driven street protests:

The problem was this all played into Trump’s hands. Instead of crafting a coherent, accessible plan to address the despair and cynicism that moved voters to even consider someone like Trump in the first place, Democrats instead turned politics into a paranoiac’s dream, imbuing Trump’s every move with earth-shattering importance as America became a single, never-ending, televised referendum on His Orangeness.

The last four years have been like living through an O.J. trial where O.J. testifies all day (and tweets at night). Not only has this been maddening to those of us who desire a more Trumpless existence, especially since it’s constantly implied that being anything less than enthralled by the Trump show is an inexcusable show of privilege, it’s massively increased the chances of the whole exhausting spectacle continuing, by giving Trump something to run on again. 

Ever since Trump jumped into politics, the pattern has been the same. He enters the arena hauling nothing but negatives and character liabilities, but leaves every time armed with winnable issues handed to him by overreacting opponents. 

His schtick is to provoke rivals to the point where they drop what they’re doing and spend their time screaming at him, which from the jump validates the primary tenet of his worldview, i.e. that everything is about him. Political opponents seem incapable of not handing him free advertising. They say his name on TV thousands of times a day, put his name on bumper stickers to be paraded before new demographics (e.g. “BERNIE BEATS TRUMP”), and then keep talking about him even off duty, at office parties, family dinners, kids’ sports events, everywhere, which sooner or later gets people wondering: who’s more annoying, the blowhard, or the people who can’t stop talking about the blowhard? 

Nearly the whole of Trump’s case for re-election in 2020 comes from the wreckage of these endless, oft-overheated Spy vs. Spy-style intrigues against him. What would he be running on, if he didn’t have Russiagate, “fake news,” and impeachment? When the Democrats failed to bring the latter up even once during the recent DNC, conspicuously disinviting key impeachment players like Adam Schiff and Tom Steyer, it made Trump’s martyrdom argument for him: if Ukraine was the Most Important Issue In the Universe just eight months ago, where is it now? 

American politics has become an interminable clash of off-putting pathologies. Call it the hydroxychloroquine effect. Trump one day in a press conference mutters that a drug has “tremendous promise” as a treatment of coronavirus. Within ten seconds a consensus forms that hydroxycholoroquine is snake oil, and the New York Times is running stories denouncing Trump’s “brazen willingness to distort and outright defy expert opinion and scientific evidence when it does not suit his agenda.”

Then you read the story and find out doctors have been prescribing the drug, that “early reports from doctors in China and France have said that [it] seemed to help patients,” and moreover that the actual quote about it being a “game changer” from Trump included the lines, “Maybe not” and “What do I know? I’m not a doctor.” In response to another Trump quote on the subject, “What do you have to lose?” journalists piled on again, quoting the president of the American Medical Association to remind audiences “you could lose your life” — as if Trump had recommended that people run outside and mainline the stuff.

Trump being Trump, he responded to this criticism by doubling down over and over, eventually re-tweeting a video boosting the drug by a doctor named Stella Immanuel. She turned out to believe that alien DNA had been used in medical treatments, atheist doctors were working on a religion vaccine, and uterine endometriosis is caused by demon sperm. Asked about this “misinformation,” Trump somehow managed to include both a xenophobic putdown about the Nigerian doctor and a lie about his enthusiasm for her, saying, “I don’t know what country she comes from… I know nothing about her.”

All of which is insane, but so is rooting for a drug to not work in the middle of a historic pandemic, the clear subtext of nearly every news story on this topic dating back to March. Rule #1 of the Trump era is that everything Trump touches quickly becomes as infamous as he is, maybe not the biggest deal when talking about an obscure anti-malarial drug, but problematic when the subject is America itself.

Trump’s argument is, “They lie about me.” He attracts so much negative attention, and so completely dominates the culture, that the line between him and the country that elected him becomes blurred, allowing him to make a secondary argument: “They lie about you.” This incantation works. The New York Times just ran a story about how “Chaos in Kenosha is already swaying some voters” that quoted John Geraghty, a former Marine. Geraghty’s first vote was for Barack Obama, and called Trump’s handling of coronavirus “laughable,” but still:

Mr. Geraghty said he disliked how Mr. Trump talked but said the Democratic Party’s vision for governing seemed limited to attacking him and calling him a racist, a charge being leveled so constantly that it was having the effect of alienating, instead of persuading, people. And the idea that Democrats alone were morally pure on race annoyed him.

With the election just a few months away, the country is coming apart at the seams. In addition to a pandemic, an economic disaster, and cities simmering on the edge of civil war, we’re nursing what feels like a broken culture. Life under Trump has been like an endless Twitter war: infuriating, depressing, filling us all with self-loathing, but also addictive. He is selling an experience that everyone is buying, even the people who think they oppose him the most. 

My worry is with that last part. Institutional America is now organized around a Trump-led America. The news media will lose billions with him gone (and will be lost editorially). The Democratic Party has no message — literally none — apart from him. A surging activist movement will be deflated without him, along with a host of related fundraising groups and businesses (watch what happens to “dismantling white supremacy training” in a non-Trump context). 

It feels like a co-dependent relationship, and the tightening poll numbers in battleground states make me wonder about self-sabotage. He’ll likely still lose, but this is all beginning to feel like a slow-motion rerun of the same car crash from four years ago, when resentment, rubbernecking, and lurid fascination pulled him just across the finish line. People claim to hate him, but they never turn off the show in time, not grasping that Trump always knows how to turn their negative attention into someone else’s vote. 

Isn’t four years of this enough? I don’t even care anymore whose fault it is: Trump has made us all crazy, and it’s time for the show to be over. We deserve slow news days again. 

Tenants Just Won a Nationwide Eviction Ban. They're Still Fighting to Cancel Rent.

By Rebecca Burns, In These Times

06 September 20

President Trump’s surprise eviction moratorium is an election hail-mary. But to stave off a disastrous housing crisis, organizers say Democrats—including Joe Biden—must embrace bolder measures.

s anoth­er month of rent came due Sep­tem­ber 1, ten­ant orga­niz­ers were greet­ed with a rare bit of good news. The Trump admin­is­tra­tion announced a sweep­ing mora­to­ri­um on res­i­den­tial evic­tions through the end of the year, pro­vid­ing an unex­pect­ed 11^th-hour reprieve to mil­lions of renters who had run out of options. 

It is a stun­ning move from a pres­i­dent who began his career in a fam­i­ly busi­ness syn­ony­mous with hous­ing dis­crim­i­na­tion?—?and an unmis­tak­able piv­ot meant to draw vot­ers’ atten­tion away from the Trump administration’s dis­as­trous mis­han­dling of the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic in advance of the Novem­ber elec­tion. 

The order, which was issued by the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion (CDC), rep­re­sents the far­thest-reach­ing evic­tion pro­tec­tion to date. The agency jus­ti­fied the move as an emer­gency mea­sure to stop the spread of Covid-19. The CDC’s author­i­ty to take this kind of action will like­ly be chal­lenged in court, but for now, all ten­ants who make less than $99,000 per year appear to be cov­ered, as long as they attest they’ve made their best effort to pay rent.

“Hous­ing orga­niz­ers have been fight­ing for pro­tec­tions like this for months,” says Jake Mar­shall, an orga­niz­er with the Chica­go-based Autonomous Ten­ants Union, which has been urg­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic Illi­nois Gov. J.B. Pritzk­er to extend the state’s evic­tion mora­to­ri­um and use his emer­gency pow­ers to offer broad­er relief to ten­ants. “While the CDC’s order is just kick­ing the can down the road, it’s fright­en­ing that Trump seems to be kick­ing it more effec­tive­ly than most Demo­c­ra­t­ic offi­cials.” 

Since the start of the pan­dem­ic, a nation­al ten­ants’ move­ment has been gath­er­ing strength and clam­or­ing for action. In gen­tri­fy­ing cities like Oak­land, Calif., New York and Chica­go?—?his­toric hotbeds of hous­ing activism?—?ten­ant unions, rent strikes and takeovers of vacant build­ings are on the rise. And places like Kansas City, Mo., upstate New York and cen­tral Flori­da?—?places not known for this kind of activism?—?have seen the growth of their own hous­ing orga­niz­ing cam­paigns, some­times draw­ing strength from Black Lives Mat­ter protests.

“The Trump admin­is­tra­tion has been quick to cel­e­brate the nation­al evic­tion mora­to­ri­um as his offer­ing to work­ing fam­i­lies,” says Tara Raghu­veer, hous­ing cam­paign direc­tor for the nation­al grass­roots group People’s Action. “But it must not be attrib­uted to Trump. This is a vic­to­ry for ten­ants.” 

Raghu­veer and oth­er advo­cates stress, how­ev­er, that it’s a tem­po­rary vic­to­ry. With­out fur­ther fed­er­al action, which Trump and oth­er Repub­li­cans have fought tooth and nail, mil­lions of renters still face an “evic­tion cliff” at the end of Decem­ber.

In August, as $600 week­ly fed­er­al unem­ploy­ment pay­ments expired and evic­tions pro­ceed­ings restart­ed in more than 30 states, a report by the Aspen Insti­tute Finan­cial Secu­ri­ty Pro­gram and the Covid-19 Evic­tion Defense Project warned than that 29 mil­lion peo­ple could be at risk of evic­tion by the end of 2020. That out­come would be unprece­dent­ed in mod­ern U.S. his­to­ry. Esti­mates put the num­ber of unhoused peo­ple in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street crash at up to 2 mil­lion. Around 10 mil­lion peo­ple were forced out of their homes after the 2008 finan­cial cri­sis. 

It is impos­si­ble to pre­dict how this cur­rent cri­sis will play out, says Zach Neu­mann, a Col­orado attor­ney who found­ed the Covid-19 Evic­tion Defense Project to con­nect ten­ants with vol­un­teer legal coun­sel. “But if even a third of the peo­ple at risk of evic­tion become home­less, I think we’re going to be liv­ing through some­thing mag­ni­tudes larg­er than the Great Depres­sion, in terms of the tran­sience, the fam­i­ly sep­a­ra­tion, the dev­as­tat­ing and last­ing impact on every aspect of our com­mu­ni­ties.”

A patch­work of pro­tec­tions

Before the pan­dem­ic, near­ly half of U.S. rent­ing house­holds spent more than a third of their income on rent, and 40% of U.S. adults report­ed they couldn’t cov­er a $400 emer­gency. When the U.S. unem­ploy­ment rate hit 15% in April, it was obvi­ous that rent pay­ments were going to be a prob­lem. 

More than 40 states and ter­ri­to­ries did act to lim­it or stop evic­tions, accord­ing to Emi­ly Ben­fer, a vis­it­ing law pro­fes­sor at Wake For­est Uni­ver­si­ty who has been track­ing the orders in a pub­licly avail­able spread­sheet. 

But to date, almost none of these mora­to­ri­ums had halt­ed all stages of the evic­tion process, leav­ing many land­lords free to file new court cas­es against ten­ants, pro­ceed with hear­ings or seek enforce­ment of past evic­tion orders. Sim­ply edu­cat­ing ten­ants about how to nav­i­gate the maze of par­tial pro­tec­tions has required a her­culean effort from legal aid orga­ni­za­tions. 

Accord­ing to Ben­fer, the CDC’s Sep­tem­ber 1 order pre­vents land­lords from pur­su­ing evic­tion cas­es for non-pay­ment of rent until Jan­u­ary 2021. 

This a key pub­lic health inter­ven­tion, Ben­fer says. “The CDC’s emer­gency action is crit­i­cal to pro­tect­ing pub­lic health and pre­vent­ing the spread of the virus both in and across states,” she adds. “Evic­tion increas­es the risk of Covid-19 and results in long-term poor health out­comes.” 

How­ev­er, the mora­to­ri­um does noth­ing to pre­vent ten­ants from rack­ing up thou­sands of dol­lars in back rent and fees owed, nor does it help home­own­ers and small land­lords who depend on rental income to pay their mort­gages. 

“While this is an extreme­ly impor­tant mea­sure, with­out rental assis­tance to cov­er the mount­ing debt, it will only delay evic­tion, shift the harm to small prop­er­ty own­ers, and result in dev­as­tat­ing con­se­quences,” Ben­fer says. “Con­gress must quick­ly bol­ster this nec­es­sary pub­lic health inter­ven­tion with rent relief to sus­tain the hous­ing mar­ket and final­ly end the evic­tion cri­sis.”

The CDC order also con­tin­ues to allow evic­tions for rea­sons oth­er than non-pay­ment of rent, such as lease vio­la­tions, lead­ing to fears that land­lords will find ways to skirt the mora­to­ri­um. 

“We know that land­lords will find ways to evict and retal­i­ate against their ten­ants because it’s already hap­pen­ing,” Tara Raghu­veer says.

While the fed­er­al mora­to­ri­um opens the door to crim­i­nal penal­ties of land­lords who vio­late it, it also remains to be seen how rig­or­ous­ly the order will be enforced. Exist­ing pro­tec­tions didn’t save Sara Cruz, 27, from los­ing her home in August. Cruz says she was already liv­ing pay­check to pay­check before the pan­dem­ic, work­ing as a serv­er in Vero Beach, Fla. She lost her job in March. Despite qual­i­fy­ing, she has yet to receive assis­tance from Florida’s unem­ploy­ment sys­tem, one of the slow­est in the nation. Cruz found a local agency will­ing to cov­er her rent but says her land­lord refused it. 

In July, Cruz was served an evic­tion notice. Under Flori­da law, one of the harsh­est in the nation for renters, ten­ants must respond in writ­ing with­in five days or face a default judg­ment. Cruz says she did, but a police offi­cer came to her door with an evic­tion order the next day. While even fil­ing evic­tions poten­tial­ly vio­lates Florida’s statewide order, com­pli­ance varies wide­ly depend­ing on juris­dic­tion. 

Cruz used the rental assis­tance her land­lord reject­ed to secure the first avail­able apart­ment she could find, leav­ing behind many of her belong­ings. She says she has no idea how she’ll pay for Sep­tem­ber.

Accord­ing to Cruz, in cen­tral Flori­da, you “have the rich, and then you have the peo­ple who serve the rich.” She adds, “until the econ­o­my is back on track, they should not be allowed to be kick­ing peo­ple out.” 

Fol­low­ing her evic­tion, Cruz con­nect­ed with Orga­nize Flori­da, which runs one of the largest grass­roots vot­er reg­is­tra­tion oper­a­tions in the state. The group has been flex­ing its mus­cle to stop evic­tions. 

In addi­tion to join­ing a statewide push to can­cel rent and mort­gage pay­ments, Orlan­do-area hous­ing orga­niz­ers are join­ing the call from Black Lives Mat­ter to defund police depart­ments, says Vanes­sa Kev­erenge, an orga­niz­er with the group. Activists are tar­get­ing the Orange Coun­ty Sheriff’s Office, which has request­ed a $15 mil­lion bud­get increase for 2021.

“That mon­ey could be going to help peo­ple at immi­nent risk of evic­tion,” Kev­erenge says. “We’re being told there’s no mon­ey, when the money’s right there.”

Build­ing ten­ant pow­er

The loom­ing wave of evic­tions is expect­ed to hit com­mu­ni­ties of col­or espe­cial­ly hard. Data from the Cen­sus Bureau’s House­hold Pulse Sur­vey sug­gests near­ly half of Black and His­pan­ic renters were unsure they would be able to pay August rent on time, a fig­ure twice as high as that of white renters. The risk is espe­cial­ly acute for Black women, who in 17 states already faced evic­tion at dou­ble the rate of white renters, accord­ing to an analy­sis from the ACLU. 

“I don’t think we can talk about Black lives mat­ter­ing with­out talk­ing about evic­tion,” says Jenay Man­ley, a mem­ber of the hous­ing rights group KC Ten­ants in Kansas City, Mo. Man­ley, who is Black, says she and her two chil­dren have strug­gled finan­cial­ly dur­ing the pan­dem­ic after she left an abu­sive rela­tion­ship. “We need to talk about Black lives mat­ter­ing before the point where we are bru­tal­ized or killed by police,” she says.

Man­ley was one of two KC Ten­ants mem­bers arrest­ed and charged with tres­pass­ing dur­ing a July 30 action. The group suc­cess­ful­ly shut down evic­tion hear­ings, which had resumed in Jack­son Coun­ty after a two-month pan­dem­ic pause. 

Since launch­ing in Feb­ru­ary 2019, KC Ten­ants has grown into a for­mi­da­ble force in local pol­i­tics. After help­ing make hous­ing a cen­tral issue in local elec­tions in the spring, the group capped off its first year with the pas­sage of a ground­break­ing ten­ants’ bill of rights in the Kansas City Coun­cil. It estab­lish­es a new Office of the Ten­ant Advo­cate and expands pro­tec­tions against dis­crim­i­na­tion and retal­i­a­tion by land­lords.

As the Covid-19 cri­sis began in March, the group helped form the Coali­tion to Pro­tect Mis­souri Ten­ants, com­prised of about 50 com­mu­ni­ty, labor and faith orga­ni­za­tions from across the state. Demand­ing a ban on evic­tions, fore­clo­sures and util­i­ty shut-offs, as well as sus­pen­sion of rent and mort­gage pay­ments for the dura­tion of the cri­sis, the coali­tion staged a series of actions tar­get­ing Repub­li­can Gov. Mike Par­sons. In April, pro­test­ers lined up along the shoul­der of Inter­state 70, stretch­ing from Kansas City to St. Louis, and post­ed signs every five miles read­ing, “Gov­er­nor Par­sons is killing the poor.” 

In May, they marched to the governor’s man­sion and post­ed their own evic­tion notice. 

KC Ten­ants mem­ber Tiana Cald­well, 42, was among those ini­tial­ly sched­uled to appear in the Jack­son Coun­ty evic­tion court July 30. A two-time can­cer sur­vivor with con­ges­tive heart fail­ure, Cald­well pays about $300 in out-of-pock­et med­ical costs each month. Cald­well fell behind on rent after she and her hus­band were fur­loughed in March. 

As soon as the evic­tion mora­to­ri­um expired in May, Caldwell’s land­lord filed to evict. Cald­well, her hus­band and their teenage son had already spent six months with­out a home fol­low­ing a 2018 evic­tion, when Cald­well was too sick to work. The prospect of repeat­ing the ordeal was gut­ting. 

In June, Caldwell’s hus­band returned to his job as a main­te­nance work­er and their long-delayed fed­er­al stim­u­lus checks arrived. They were able to work out an arrange­ment with their land­lord to pay $4,000 in back rent and fees, in exchange for drop­ping the case. They scraped the mon­ey togeth­er by their June 30 dead­line. 

But in July, Cald­well received a court sum­mons. She called the com­pa­ny that owns her home and was assured she had noth­ing to wor­ry about. Cald­well attend­ed the sched­uled video hear­ing any­way, only to dis­cov­er her land­lord was seek­ing the mon­ey she had already paid. The case was dis­missed after Cald­well pro­duced receipts?—?but had she tak­en the landlord’s advice, she might have lost a judg­ment by default. 

Cald­well believes her expe­ri­ence belies guid­ance from state and local elect­ed offi­cials, who have called for land­lords and ten­ants to nego­ti­ate in good faith in lieu of for­mal evic­tion mora­to­ri­ums. 

“They’re telling us to make arrange­ments with our land­lords, but the land­lords aren’t being hon­est,” Cald­well says. 

Cald­well says she’s heard scores of sim­i­lar sto­ries from renters who call the KC Ten­ants hot­line. A group of about 15 vol­un­teers fields as many as 200 calls a week, con­nect­ing des­per­ate renters with legal rep­re­sen­ta­tion, mutu­al aid and com­mu­ni­ty sup­port. Cald­well talked to one ten­ant who had come up with back rent, only to be evict­ed for a minor lease vio­la­tion. In anoth­er call, a sin­gle moth­er described being sex­u­al­ly propo­si­tioned when she told her land­lord she had lost her job and was unable to pay. 

“We decid­ed as a group that we’re not going to throw any­one away,” Cald­well says. 

Can­cel the rent

Tem­po­rary pro­tec­tions can­not sub­sti­tute for fur­ther fed­er­al action, des­per­ate­ly need­ed to pre­vent com­mu­ni­ties from hurtling over the evic­tion cliff. While the Demo­c­ra­t­ic-con­trolled House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives passed a $100 bil­lion rental assis­tance fund?—?as part of May’s HEROES Act and as a stand­alone bill?—?it’s dead on arrival in the GOP-con­trolled Sen­ate.

By halt­ing evic­tions, Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump went a step fur­ther than his Demo­c­ra­t­ic oppo­nent Joe Biden, who in August released a state­ment urg­ing Con­gress to enact an emer­gency hous­ing pro­gram, but offered few specifics. Biden’s run­ning mate, Sen. Kamala Har­ris (D?Calif.), had called more specif­i­cal­ly for a one-year evic­tion ban and has intro­duced a bill that would fund legal rep­re­sen­ta­tion for ten­ants fac­ing evic­tion. 

Many ten­ant orga­niz­ers argue that, in the midst of the pan­dem­ic, even a mas­sive rental-assis­tance fund like the one sup­port­ed by Demo­c­ra­t­ic lead­er­ship would be inad­e­quate?—?like­ly with long delays (sim­i­lar to unem­ploy­ment assis­tance) and leav­ing out undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants and vul­ner­a­ble groups. 

The best solu­tion, they say, would be to just can­cel rent. 

In April, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D?Minn.) intro­duced a bill endorsed by KC Ten­ants, Orga­nize Flori­da and dozens of oth­er grass­roots groups that would sus­pend rent and mort­gage pay­ments for the dura­tion of the cri­sis, with land­lords and mort­gage hold­ers receiv­ing fed­er­al aid to cov­er their loss­es if they agree not to evict ten­ants with­out cause, among oth­er con­di­tions. For land­lords who want out of the hous­ing mar­ket, the bill would cre­ate a fund for non­prof­its, pub­lic hous­ing agen­cies, coop­er­a­tives, com­mu­ni­ty land trusts and local gov­ern­ments to acquire their prop­er­ties. 

The bill has not yet attract­ed wide­spread sup­port in Con­gress but is inspir­ing pro­gres­sive state leg­is­la­tors. 

In July, Demo­c­ra­t­ic New York State Sen. Julia Salazar and Assem­bly­woman Yuh-Line Niou intro­duced a new bill to can­cel all rent and cer­tain mort­gage pay­ments, after a sim­i­lar bill faced oppo­si­tion from Demo­c­ra­t­ic lead­er­ship. In this ver­sion, land­lords would be required to show they are expe­ri­enc­ing finan­cial dis­tress to con­tin­ue col­lect­ing rent, says Rebec­ca Gar­rard, cam­paigns man­ag­er for hous­ing jus­tice at Cit­i­zen Action of New York, a grass­roots group. 

“We don’t need a pub­lic bailout of bil­lion­aire Wall Street land­lords in New York,” Gar­rard says. “We hope that this approach will sig­nal to oth­er states and the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment what pos­i­tive solu­tions could actu­al­ly look like.”

The push gath­ered momen­tum from grass­roots orga­niz­ers in Itha­ca, N.Y., which in June became the first city to pass a res­o­lu­tion call­ing for rent can­cel­la­tion?—?though the mea­sure requires action from the state to take effect. 

While it was pre­vi­ous­ly “unfa­mil­iar ter­rain” upstate, “ten­ant orga­niz­ing has real­ly bloomed,” Gar­rard says. “If there’s a pos­i­tive, unin­tend­ed con­se­quence of the pan­dem­ic, it’s that there’s a fierce ener­gy from ten­ants to mobi­lize and defend each oth­er.”

Accord­ing to Genevieve Rand, a mem­ber of the Itha­ca Ten­ants Union, that ener­gy evolved out of an active net­work of work­place orga­niz­ing. Rand worked at a café pri­or to the pan­dem­ic and formed a union in May 2019. She then helped orga­nize week­ly meet­ings with oth­er ser­vice-sec­tor employ­ees to talk about wages and local work­ing con­di­tions. 

As in many oth­er cities with a high con­cen­tra­tion of low-wage ser­vice work­ers, Itha­ca now has a high unem­ploy­ment rate?—?and a brew­ing evic­tion cri­sis. Rand her­self faces evic­tion. But the Itha­ca Ten­ants Union has been expand­ing expo­nen­tial­ly.

“Every sin­gle per­son” who was involved in the work­place orga­niz­ing net­work has tak­en part in both ten­ant orga­niz­ing and Black Lives Mat­ter protests, Rand says. 

On August 6, as local hous­ing courts reopened, about 50 mem­bers of the Itha­ca Ten­ants Union staged a block­ade to pre­vent attor­neys and land­lords from enter­ing. The same day, Demo­c­ra­t­ic New York Gov. Andrew Cuo­mo announced an exten­sion of the evic­tion mora­to­ri­um. 

These are small steps, but accord­ing to Rand, they send a mes­sage to those in pow­er. “We’re get­ting ready,” Rand says. “We’re not going to let our neigh­bors be tossed out on the street.”?

At least a dozen oth­er groups nation­wide staged phys­i­cal block­ades of courts and homes in July and August to pro­tect ten­ants. In Prince George’s Coun­ty, Md., more than 50 peo­ple showed up with only a day’s notice after the DC Ten­ants Union and oth­er groups spread word that a land­lord planned to change the locks on someone’s home?—?the kind of ille­gal evic­tion that orga­niz­ers warn may per­sist, even with an evic­tion mora­to­ri­um. 

In Chica­go, the Autonomous Ten­ants Union, Chica­go Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ists of Amer­i­ca, Chica­go Teach­ers Union and oth­er com­mu­ni­ty groups took turns occu­py­ing a plaza out­side the city’s evic­tion court in mid-August. The action result­ed in an exten­sion of Illi­nois’ evic­tion mora­to­ri­um, but orga­niz­ers say self-styled pro­gres­sive lead­ers must do more to avoid the unthink­able?—?being out­flanked by Trump on hous­ing. 

“Democ­rats should prove their com­mit­ment to hous­ing jus­tice by bridg­ing the gaps in the CDC order,” Jake Mar­shall says. “Pur­sue ‘just cause’ for evic­tion leg­is­la­tion, leg­is­late to can­cel rent and make sure each and every ten­ant knows their rights.”