Times Change
For the sake of the country—and the business model—the New York Times evolved during the Trump years: less dispassionate, more crusading. This has sparked a raw internal debate over the paper’s mission and future.
Inside the New York Times’ heated reckoning with itself.
On october 23, eleven days before the presidential election, Manohla Dargis, one of the movie critics at the New York Times, popped in to the #newsroom-feedback channel on the company’s Slack to pose an existential query. “Friendly question,” Dargis wrote to more than 2,000 of her colleagues. “What is this channel now?” The #newsroom-feedback channel had been created in June, after the Times published an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas arguing for the deployment of the military to quell nationwide protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd. The column was quickly lambasted: for factual errors, an inflammatory headline—“Send in the Troops”—and a feeling that the Times should not be in the business of publishing arguments for the use of American troops to crack down on American citizens. In response, dozens of the paper’s employees took to Twitter, writing in unison, “Running this puts Black @nytimes staffers in danger.”
This was a break from Timesian tradition, which prohibited employees from expressing their anger at the paper to the broader world. So the staff turned to Slack, taking aim first at the column (“It’s very Bolsonaro of Op-Ed to run this”); then at the op-ed section’s editor, James Bennet (“We’re tiptoeing around the elephant in the room, trying not to notice the stink of the huge pile of crap it’s just dumped. Should JB be replaced?”); and, eventually, at the Times itself. Employees of color felt unheard—“We love this institution, even though sometimes it feels like it doesn’t love us back”—while tech reporters worried the Times’ defense of the column, in the name of an open consideration of a wide range of opinion, was making the paper look like the companies its reporting was taking to task: “It is frustrating to hear some of the same excuses (we’re just a platform for ideas!) that our journalists and columnists have criticized tech CEOs for making.”
In the weeks after the Cotton op-ed, #newsroom-feedback served as a very heated pandemic-era office watercooler. This was healthy enough—albeit a distinctly un-Timesian way of handling dissent. The Times had always been a place where employees grumbled in the cafeteria, and complaints might slowly wind their way to the editorial cabal atop the newsroom known as “the masthead,” at which point any decisions would be handed down quietly. Now, Dean Baquet, the paper’s executive editor, was in #newsroom-feedback, answering critiques about the Times’ journalism from not only his reporters but also the paper’s software developers and data scientists.
The conversations could become tense.
would paste tweets criticizing the paper into the channel; the journalists would get defensive; someone would leak the argument to friends with Twitter accounts; and the ouroboros of selfcriticism would take another bite out of its tail and everyone’s time. “Gang, it would be great to shift the tone of this discussion,” Baquet jumped in to say during a fight about whether “Opinion”-section provocateur Bari Weiss’s description of a “civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals” was a reductive argument, a mischaracterization—or perhaps an unwelcome assessment with a modicum of truth.
The dustup laid bare a divide that had become increasingly tricky for the Times:a large portion of the paper’s audience, a number of its employees, and the president himself saw it as aligned with the #resistance. This demarcation horrified the Old Guard, but it seemed to make for good business. “The truth can change how we see the
world,” the Times declared in an advertisement broadcast at last year’s Academy Awards, positioning itself as a bulwark in an era of misinformation.
On Election Night, as the Times’ polling appeared to have overestimated Democratic response, subscribers experienced a partial repeat of 2016’s anguish about whether they were living in a bubble. Four years of upheaval and a summer of unrest, followed by the looming end of the Trump administration, had some inside the paper wondering the same thing. Was whatever might have been lost in the course of the Trump era gone for good— and good riddance?
the times has a fitful relationship to self-examination. After the Jayson
Blair plagiarism scandal of the early aughts, it created a public-editor position to answer questions and critiques from readers, only to discard it in 2017, partly with the idea that Twitter could do the same job. The paper also created a stanEmployees
“There’s still this huge gap between what the staff and audience and management want. The audience is Resistance Moms.”
dards department responsible for making sure the hundreds of pieces of journalism it publishes every day, in an increasing range of mediums, remain appropriately
Timesian. The department now has its own Slack channel, where editors and reporters can ask whether it’s acceptable to use the word poop in a story about feces being tested for covid-19 (verdict: “Best to avoid”) and how to decorously describe a recent Zoom incident at The New Yorker (“Less is more in display type”).
The Trump era forced a rushed period of reflection. “I was part of the discussion with Dean when we first described Trump as lying on the front page,” Carolyn Ryan, one of 14 masthead editors at the Times, told me recently. “It took 45 minutes.” The incident happened in September 2016, when Trump renounced his own birtherism, then falsely accused Hillary Clinton of starting the conspiracy theory. “It feels kind of quaint,” Ryan said of the decision. “But at the time, it was a shattering departure.”
It was also a shattering departure for
Times journalists to walk into the newsroom after Trump’s 2016 victory and find their colleagues in tears. A neutral objectivity had long been core to the way the paper saw itself, its public mission, and its business interests (Abe Rosenthal, a legendary
Timesman, had the words he kept the
paper straight carved on his tombstone), even if it was an open secret that the Times was published by and for coastal liberals. In 2004, the paper’s first public editor, Daniel Okrent, answered the headline above one of his columns—“Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?”—in the first sentence of his story: “Of course it is.”
At an all-staff meeting shortly after the 2016 election, Baquet told the paper’s staff that it could not become part of the “loyal opposition” to Trump. The Times would report on Trump aggressively—the paper earmarked an extra $5 million to cover the administration in 2017—but fairly, so that the paper could maintain its “journalistic weapon,” as one of its star writers put it to me, meaning the ability to publish something like Trump’s tax returns and have them be viewed as unbiased truth. “Some read it and like it. Some read it and don’t like it,” Richard Nixon said of the Times. “But everybody reads it.”
Trump presented the newsroom with a series of unprecedented questions. Do you point out his racism in a headline? The masthead’s answer was, in short: Yes, albeit sparingly and with purpose.
But the paper’s claim to holding the independent center was already slipping, as the staff came to grips with an increasingly polarized audience. Journalists were caught between the desire to appear objective to readers and sources—while avoiding backlash from left-leaning ones— and wishing they could get back to the job they thought they had signed up for. Most of the pressure to serve as the loyal opposition was coming from the outside: A Pew poll found that 91 percent of people who consider the Times their primary news source identify as Democrats, roughly the same as the percentage of Fox News viewers who identify as Republicans. In August 2019, the paper ran a front-page headline—“Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism”—that caused enough uproar on the left about reputation laundering on the president’s behalf that it was eventually changed to “Assailing Hate But Not Guns,” at which point the president himself joined the fray. “‘Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism,’ was the correct description in the first headline by the Failing New York Times,” he tweeted. “Fake News - That’s what we’re up against.”
But the Timesian impulse toward some kind of objectivity ignored the fact that the view from nowhere was actually too often a view from the Upper West Side and Montclair, New Jersey. “The whiteness of the paper has sometimes been a problem because it makes a bunch of nonwhite people run around like Cassandras—that’s what 2015 and 2016 felt like,” Wesley Morris, the paper’s criticat-large, told me recently, noting that many employees of color were perplexed by the paper’s initial reluctance to call out Trump for his most brazen expressions of authoritarianism and racism. “Watching that awareness change in four years has been really interesting,” said Morris.
when the cotton op-ed was published in June, the Times was already “a tinderbox,” as one Black employee said to me. Everyone had been stuck inside for three months, and Black Lives Matter protests were now rolling across the country. White Fragility and How to Be an Antiracist were surging toward the top of the Times’ best-seller list. More than 500 Times employees signed up for what one of the organizers called “Brave Space” events—a recasting of the phrase “safe space”—set up by the Black@NYT employee-resource group to talk about equity, allyship, and self-care in an incredibly stressful time for many.
Cotton’s column lit a match. During a company town hall two days later, while Bennet got teary answering questions, employees took to Slack again to express their frustration at the company’s seeming lack of action to rectify the situation. Bennet had joined the Times in 2016 with an explicit mandate to expand the voices in the op-ed pages beyond the center-left consensus in which most of its columnists fit. The “Opinion” section had suffered a number of controversies, and the newsroom had become frustrated with what seemed to be an alternate set of standards. Employees were galled to find out that Bennet had not read the column before it was published—while a Black photo editor had done so and objected to no avail. A development editor connected Cotton’s op-ed with a profile of Adolf Hitler from 1922, while an employee in brand marketing asked why Alison Roman, the food writer who had recently been suspended for disparaging comments she made about Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo, was seemingly being treated more severely than Bennet.
The conversation turned into what more than one Times employee described to me as a “food fight.” During the mêlée, “Opinion” columnist Elizabeth Bruenig uploaded a PDF of John Rawls’s treatise on public reason, in an attempt to elevate the discussion. “What we’re having is really a philosophical conversation, and it concerns the unfinished business of liberalism,” Bruenig wrote. “I think that all human beings are born philosophers, that is, that we all have an innate desire to understand what our world means and what we owe to one another and how to live good lives.”
“Philosophy schmosiphy,” wrote a researcher at the Times whose Slack avaright-leaning
“I think James Bennet’s ring was as meaningful for the paper’s existence and how it’s perceived as Jayson Blair was.”
tar was the logo for the hamburger chain Jack in the Box. “We’re at a barricades moment in our history. You decide: which side are you on?”
By Monday morning, Bennet was out. To those who saw the op-ed as one in a series of screwups, Bennet’s ouster was a long time coming. To those who believed his effort to present occasionally loathsome views for public consideration was core to the Times’ mission, the decision was a retreat from principle. “I call it a fucking disgrace,” said Daniel Okrent, the former public editor. “I think that James’s firing was as meaningful for the paper’s existence and how it’s perceived as Jayson Blair was.”
in the weeks that followed, one “Opinion” staffer told me it felt like no one at the Times got any work done at all. There were focus groups—38 of them and counting—and working groups and innumerable conversations about what the paper should be and look like and who it was for. The masthead started holding “Black-people meetings,” as one Black employee put it to me, in which members of the masthead talked one-on-one with employees of color to sort out why they felt the Times was an unwelcoming place. In #newsroom-feedback, there were many days in which several people were typing.
The gears of institutional change were slowly churning, as they had before. The
Times had long been a relative monoculture: Ivy League–educated white people writing for their cohort. Some blamed this bubble on the paper’s dismissal of Trump in 2016—not that any other mainstream media outlets had done any better. Since then, as business boomed in the Trump era, it had gone on a newsroom hiring spree, with a particular focus on trying to diversify its ranks: 40 percent of newsroom employees hired since 2016 have been people of color.
Several Black employees told me that the
Times was the most diverse newsroom they had ever worked in, but simply hiring more young Black reporters wasn’t a cure-all. “There’s a pipeline problem,” one Black editor told me. The newsroom joke, one reporter said, was that the masthead farmed diversity and inclusion to the softer sections of the paper—“Styles,” “Arts & Leisure,” The New York Times Magazine—so that “they could hire any white guy they wanted in D.C.” The paper’s more senior ranks were less diverse; it seemed to have structural problems that were limiting the promotion of Black employees. A newly instituted performance-review process gives every
Times employee one of six ratings; the lowest is reserved for employees who don’t meet expectations, with the other five in ascending order, from “Partially Meets Expectations” to “Substantially Surpasses Expectations.” A study conducted by members of the Times’ editorial union found that Black employees received 24 percent of the former rating, despite making up only 10 percent of the staff, while receiving 4 percent of the highest ratings.
Everyone I spoke to at the Times thought the place needed to diversify: more Black journalists, more Evangelical Christians, more Cuban émigrés, more “people who grew up on ranches who aren’t Nick Kristof,” as one put it. The racial-justice reckoning that shook the nation this summer brought a new urgency to the effort. Managers were required to attend unconscious-bias training. The Times Magazine commissioned a diversity study of bylines and subject matter “to quantify what everyone already knows,” as one staffer put it. The Times gave employees the day off on Juneteenth, which marks the emancipation of America’s slaves. The efforts felt sincere, but everyone knew the road to real change would be long. All employees could do was sigh when one masthead editor explained, in a town-hall meeting, that the paper’s diversity study was being led by Ivy Planning Group, a consulting firm named for the fact that its three founders all went to Ivy League schools.
What the paper did have—in increasing numbers in fact—was a growing cohort of people who came to the paper with a different set of values. They were younger, which produced some of the division. A reporter who identified as “young Gen X” warned me about “toxic millennial workplace values,” while a millennial complained about the masthead’s tortured relationship to social media by arguing that “boomer is a mind-set.”
But the most meaningful divide in the newsroom seemed to be by temperament. “The fundamental schism at the Times is institutionalist versus insurrectionist,” a reporter who identified with the latter group told me. (Almost all of the dozens of
Times employees I spoke to for this story requested varying degrees of anonymity; one told me, “You can’t use my name, but you can refer to me as a ‘woke millennial reporter’ or whatever.”) The institutionalists were willing to play the internal Game of Thrones required to ascend the masthead because they never wanted to work anywhere else. The insurrectionists, meanwhile, had often come from digital outlets or tech companies or advocacy groups and could imagine leaving the place at any time. (The newsroom noticed that some employees of “Wirecutter,” the most capitalist arm of the Times’ editorial operation, appeared to be the most socialist on Slack.) “I love my job. I like my co-workers. But it has not been my goal since I was 12 to work for the New York Times,” the “woke millennial reporter” told me. “I’m not so blinded by how great the place that I’m going to ignore the problems.”
Many of the insurrectionists were coming from places the Times didn’t traditionally recruit from, like new digitalmedia companies and outlets that practiced advocacy journalism, and part of the challenge had become integrating those employees into the Timesian way of operating. “There’s a generation at the Times that’s kind of been raised by wolves, by Times standards,” one institutionalist told me. The new recruits were brought in to help supercharge the company’s efforts at modernizing its news operation, but the Times hadn’t fully understand what it would mean to have a new breed of journalist inside the building. “We set out to diversify the newsroom, but didn’t say, ‘Isn’t the next step to take what these new voices have to bring?’” Baquet said on the Longform podcast this summer. “We started hiring from BuzzFeed; we started hiring from other places, and it was almost like we thought, Okay, now they’re just going to become just like us.”
Of all the fronts on which the Times was being pushed to change, the strongest insurrectionary energy was coming from legions of newsroom-adjacent employees
“The complainers are always right. But the solutions are hard.”
in digital jobs that didn’t exist a decade ago. The employees responsible for distributing the Times in the past—typesetters, pressmen, delivery drivers—had never been encouraged to speak up about the ethical questions at the heart of the paper’s journalism). But the app developers and software engineers who deliver the Times’ journalism to the world have held their hands up in just as many Ivy League seminars as their editorial peers. They might be too shy to march over to a masthead editor and complain about a clumsy headline, but #newsroom-feedback had opened a digital door to criticism. Reporters found that suddenly it was the Times’ programmers and developers, rather than their editors, who were critiquing their work. During the town hall about the Cotton op-ed, one data engineer said on Slack, “How many such process failures would be tolerated in tech?”
Many of the techsurrectionists had come from Facebook or Uber or Amazon to join the Times out of a sense of mission, leaving the ethical quandaries of the tech industry for what they thought were more virtuous pastures. “I joined the company for one reason, and it’s because I feel a responsibility to be a part of a mission that I believe in,” a product manager who previously worked at Apple wrote in #newsroom-feedback after the Cotton op-ed. “This feels like the rug’s been pulled out from under us—not just because it feels like that mission [has] been severely compromised by the decision to publish this piece, but even more so because the products we’re building were used to do it.”
“It’s like making telephone poles,” one software engineer added, “and finding out they’re being used as battering rams.”
Everyone in the newsroom recognized that they were beholden to the techsurrectionists, who didn’t seem to understand the messy humanness that went into the Times’ journalism, but did hold the keys to its business future. “We are competing for talent with the Googles and Facebooks, and what we have to offer these smart, talented peopany ple is our mission,” Ryan told me. “Now, we’re at this inflection point where people to whom we have said ‘Come be part of this mission’ also want to raise their hand when they’re upset about why we’re not covering a story the way MSNBC is covering it.” But as the election approached, and the news cycle continued at its unceasing pace, and the techsurrectionists continued lobbing critiques at the journalists, the newsroom started to snap back. In mid-September, when a software engineer posted an article from The Atlantic arguing that the media had learned little from its 2016 mistakes, several of the paper’s senior reporters jumped in. “This channel has been a good place for specific, constructive feedback,” Matt Apuzzo, an investigative reporter, replied. “But essentially dropping an allstaff retweet of broad-brush media criticism doesn’t feel productive.” Baquet, along with more than a dozen others, appended a thumbs-up Slackmoji to the comment.
It is difficult to think of many businesses that have benefited more from Donald Trump’s presidency—aside from the Trump-family empire—than the New York Times. After Trump’s election, in 2016, subscriptions grew at ten times their usual rate, and they have never looked back. The Times has gone from just over a million subscribers at the beginning of the Trump presidency to its record of more than 7 million last month. It has hired hundreds of journalists to staff a newsroom that is now 1,700 people strong—bigger than ever. Its stock has risen fourfold since Trump took office, and the Times has consolidated its Trump bump into a business that includes Serial Productions, the podcast juggernaut; Audm, the audio-translation business; and a TV show based on a Times series that was filming its second season this summer, until a covid-19 false positive on-set forced it to halt shooting, according to a person familiar with the production. The comhas been able to weather the pandemic in part because it now has more cash on hand—$800 million—than at any point in its history. It has become the newsmedia organization to rule them all. (A few disclosures that illustrate the point: I’ve written for the Times; I have friends who work at the Times; I recently wrote a book that was reviewed by the Times; I’m a member of the same union as the Times’;
and, until recently, I owned a small chunk of Times stock that I bought for $300 in the early 2010s as a bit of performative investment in the importance of journalism of my own.)
A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the
Times, has rejected the premise that being part of the resistance is good for business, much as Baquet has rejected that impulse in the newsroom, but the business side has leaned into its role as a defender of truth. Identifying as a reader of the Times has become a marker of resistance, and parts of the paper amount to service journalism for participatory democracy—even if the journalists doing the work don’t see it that way. “There’s still this huge gap between what the staff and audience and management want,” one prominent Times reporter said. “The audience is Resistance Moms and overwhelmingly white. The staff is more interested in identity politics. And management is newspaper people. There’s an impulse to be writing for a different audience.”
What the audience wants most of all, apparently, is “Opinion.” On a relative basis, the section is the paper’s most widely read: “Opinion” produces roughly 10 percent of the Times’ output while bringing in 20 percent of its page views, according to a person familiar with the numbers. (The Times turned off programmatic advertising on the Cotton op-ed after some employees objected to the paper profiting off the provocation.) Now that the paper has switched from an advertising to a subscription-focused model, employees on both the editorial and business sides of the
Times said that the company’s “secret sauce,” as one of them put it, was the backend system in place for getting casual readers to subscribe. In 2018, a group of data scientists at the Times unveiled Project Feels, a set of algorithms that could determine what emotions a given article might induce. “Hate” was associated with stories that used the words tax, corrupt, or Mr.—
the initial study took place in the wake of the Me Too movement—while stories that included the words first, met, and York generally produced “happiness.” But the “Modern Love” column was only so appealing. “Hate drives readership more than any of us care to admit,” one employee on the business side told me. (Continued on page 86)
“The whiteness of the paper has sometimes been a problem because it makes a bunch of nonwhite people run around like Cassandras.”
My grandfather died from complications of covid-19. The last time I saw him, I wore gloves and a plastic gown, and put a face shield on over a mask. I stood next to his hospital bed with my family. The doctor warned us not to touch him, but I did, gently, one gloved hand over his. That he should die without touch felt intolerable, a punishment for a man who didn’t deserve one. We reminded him that we loved him. My mother told him that the neighborhood bear had returned, that the farmers’ market had good carrots. Despite our alien look, he recognized us. The virus was bad, he said, but he’d fight it.
He tried. He lingered for several long days until the virus had its way. From the evening I got the call that he was sick until the moment my mother told us that he’d died, he fought. But he was 86 years old, which made him a high-risk covid patient. His health had been declining, gradually, for months. The virus attacked his lungs, and then his heart, with lethal precision. In the end, he was no match for it.
That is a fact. I admit it. I write it out syllable by syllable, a ritual to exorcise grief. But the exercise fails me now, as it has failed me for weeks, because grief isn’t all that haunts me. My grandfather’s death, six months into the pandemic, is more than a tragedy. His fate is as political as it is biological. And I am furious.
In the corner of southwest Virginia where my grandfather lived, mask wearing is far from universal. In the reductive stereotype perpetrated by outsider journalists, the area is Trump country. My grandfather’s memorial service—small, socially distanced, masks required—could have inspired a David Brooks column: Trump voters mingled with the deceased’s Bernie Sanders–supporting grandchildren in Appalachia.
Later, when I walked into Kroger and saw all the middle-aged men without masks on, I almost approached them. I wanted to know: Did one of you kill my grandfather? But the men were a distraction. They were taking a risk, yes, and putting others at risk, but they weren’t the real problem. That problem is larger than a few men without masks, or the president who encouraged them. Trump served as a vessel for widespread ideas—and as an apologist for older sins.
My grandfather’s name was Charles Tibbetts. Although he lived in Virginia, he would want you to know he was not from the South. He was from Maine and crossed the MasonDixon Line only because my grandmother had died and he wanted to live near his only child, my mother. He spent most of his life in a series of odd jobs: at a factory, and a shoe store, and finally at an estate owned by the heirs of the Curtis Publishing Company, which once produced The Saturday Evening Post. My grandfather kept the grounds, and my grandmother cleaned the house. They had followed prior generations of our family into domestic work. My great-grandmother was a “laundress,” as my mother put it, and my mother herself cleaned houses to help pay for college. It was better, she once told me, when the families that paid ours didn’t try to clean up after themselves—they only made more of a mess.
In my grandfather’s spare time, he fished and went to church. Sometimes he carved wood: toys, furniture, and, once, a feeding station for the backyard chipmunks. Mostly he worked and drove my mother to her music lessons, an endeavor that eventually bore fruit. My mother went to college for music, the first person in her family to graduate with a degree. She married another college graduate, and together they raised two more.
Like my grandparents, I too wound up working for media moguls. Before I became a journalist, I belonged to the D.C. cohort of 20-something communications professionals. On the day a nonprofit gave me my first salaried job, I printed out the offer letter and drove out to my grandfather’s cabin to give it to him. He clutched it in his hands and cried. I would make $50,000, enough to pay rent for one bedroom in a house and to start paying off student loans. It was more money than he’d ever made in a year. My grandfather lived just long enough to witness what the think-tank world calls “social mobility.”
Except our social mobility looked a lot more like stagnation. My mother spent much of her early childhood near the poverty line; decades later, so would I. With time, our financial situation improved. But progress was slow, and the results were fragile. Even after the Affordable Care Act, health-care expenses sometimes threatened to pull us under. My brother and I have a genetic disease. He could stay on my mother’s health insurance until he turned 26, but her own premium had soared to over $900 a month. She decided to drop her plan and pay for my brother’s until Virginia opted to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. This isn’t extreme poverty, which some economists define as life on $2 a day or less, but it’s something just as pervasive and persistent: a middle-class life threatened on all sides by catastrophe. Whatever social mobility my grandfather had set in motion now exists mostly as theory, not inhabited reality.
No amount of good fortune can ward off the indignities of age forever. So writes the Preacher in Ecclesiastes: For everything there is a season, a time to be born and a time to die. I had the funeral home print that passage in my grandfather’s funeral programs. It was a reminder that nobody escapes death. But even if money can’t buy you immortality, or inoculate you against covid, it can buy other precious things. Like time, or a good death.
sick, in and out of hospitals, and possessed of limited means, my grandfather belonged to a sacrificial category of person in America. This category has always existed, but the pandemic has exposed it and expanded its borders. It has become so difficult to pretend that American free-market capitalism is anything but brutal that conservatives have largely given up trying. Barely a month into the pandemic, Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, suggested that elderly Americans should be “willing to take a chance” on their own survival to keep the economy open for their children and grandchildren. “Those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves,” he said. The Catholic writer R. R. Reno called wearing masks “cowardice” and warned of “a demonic side to the sentimentalism of saving lives at any cost.”
I read Reno’s essay when he published it. I even wrote about it, months ago, and thought of it again at my grandfather’s deathbed. I did not feel like a sentimentalist. But I knew that others agreed with Reno and Patrick. Trump is one of them. My grandfather wasn’t, but in a sense he got overruled.
What distinguishes a sacrifice from a regular death? Not ceremony, which is present in all funerals. The difference is intent. Sacrifice is deliberate: Someone makes an offering in return for a boon, such as a good harvest, a healthy baby, power, love. Sometimes the offering is only prayer or a voice raised in worship. Other times, it costs the supplicant a bit more. But the effort is supposed to be worth it. The idea is that if we appease the gods, or the invisible hand of the free market, we’ll prosper.
But people rarely volunteer to sacrifice themselves. When Patrick said the elderly should be willing to “take a chance” on their own survival, he wasn’t really referring to himself, with the economic privilege and the top-notch medical care he could count on to protect him from harm. He was really talking about my grandfather.
We spent much of my grandfather’s last year on earth navigating an eldercare system that was not designed to ensure his survival. Like millions of elderly Americans, my grandfather’s care was covered by a combination of public and private insurance: a United Healthcare Medicare Advantage plan and a Medicaid supplement offered by Virginia. But it didn’t buy him decent care. His Medicare Advantage plan offered full coverage for only 20 days of rehab at a time; once the clock ran out, a $176 daily co-pay kicked in. For reasons known only to United Healthcare, the company repeatedly refused to spring for a longer period of care.
This became a problem. My grandfather needed repeat visits to local emergency rooms for a persistent infection, and a pattern emerged. A hospital would admit him, conclude correctly that he needed rehabilitation, and transfer him to a skilled nursing facility for short-term care. That’s when the clock would start. He had 20 days to get better, and if he didn’t, he was on his own. United Healthcare wouldn’t pay for more time, and we couldn’t afford his care on our own. In July, even after his condition worsened, he was discharged from rehab as soon as his insurance ran out. My mother wound up having to take him back to the hospital, and the clock started all over again.
Each hospital visit introduced a new risk of infection. So did each stay in rehab. Subject to lax regulation and uneven enforcement, nearly half of all nursing facilities suffer from what one federal report calls “persistent problems” with infection control. In August, my grandfather once again passed through the revolving door between hospital and rehab facility. He spent two weeks in quarantine as a precaution. Then he acquired a roommate with a cough. After he finished a course of antibiotics for his latest infection, he spent a brief interval at home before he had to be rushed back to the hospital. This time, he had covid-19.
On paper, my grandfather had certain advantages, like a loving family and comprehensive insurance. But a family’s love can’t regulate health-care facilities. And no insurance plan can make up for injustices so large they can swallow a person whole. Valley Health Care Center, my grandfather’s last rehab, is now the site of a major covid outbreak. At least 175 people have contracted the virus at Valley since August, and 16 have died. Some conservatives, including Trump, may consider this an acceptable sacrifice to make on behalf of the economy. But I don’t believe anyone benefits from mass death and suffering, or that the elderly and infirm should be made to feel like detritus while they are still alive, as my grandfather was. Toward the end of his life, his spirits began to flag. He wanted to go home, but he was never well enough to spend more than a week or two in his own bed. “They’re treating him like he’s already in a body bag,” my brother complained when the insurance company refused to cover a longer rehab stay. Soon enough, it was true.
“I lift up my eyes to the hills. From whence does my help come?” asks Psalm 121, the passage we used for my grandfather’s funeral sermon. The next verse supplies the answer: “My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” Without a health-care system that prioritized actual health care, it would have taken divine intervention to keep my grandfather covid free. Personal responsibility had nothing do with it.
out my grandfather had I watched Trump posture in front of the White House on the last night of the Republican convention and boast, inaccurately, that America was recovering from the pandemic. The camera pivoted to the audience, and I saw Wilbur Ross, our 82-year-old Commerce secretary, nod off, maskless and comfortable. Eventually, the hammer will fall, I told myself. Weeks later, it did, when Trump got sick.
My grandfather was dead by then, and I wanted justice, even though I knew a virus wouldn’t give it to me. Nobody deserves death by covid, and in any case, the discrepancy between Trump’s material circumstances and my grandfather’s meant that Trump was much more likely to survive. “I’m a perfect physical specimen,” he said after he recovered. This is obviously false. Trump’s recovery was a testament to the power of money to keep someone going well after their personal habits would have killed other, poorer men. Presidents have always enjoyed their luxuries, and Trump, rich since birth, boasted more advantages than most. When he got sick, the disparities in how he was treated compared with my grandfather felt like personal insults. A helicopter ferried Trump to the hospital. He had the best doctors. He stayed in a special suite with a real view. He even got to go for a joyride in an armored SUV to wave to his supporters.
Back in Virginia, my mother fumed and sent me angry messages about the president. She had shingles, and the anger and the stress so agitated her symptoms that a doctor told her to stop working. She had already lost thousands of dollars in income, a consequence of the months of caregiving she had provided my grandfather and, more recently, of bereavement. I scratched at my legs until the skin broke and scabbed over, then I scratched them again.
Trump got better. My family hasn’t, and neither have millions of others. Misery is a pandemic in its own right. With more than 230,000 Americans dead from a virus that could have been contained, multitudes have plunged into mourning. Black seniors my grandfather’s age have been killed at twice the rate of elderly whites. Some 13 million people have swelled the ranks of the unemployed, and one in three families with children now face food shortages. The same Republicans who offered up the elderly as a sacrifice to the market have opted to let children go hungry. Capitalism has become hyperbolic, the most evil version of itself. That transformation is driven not by the virus, but by a top-down emphasis on productivity over humanity. Maybe I am guilty of the demonic sentimentalism that Reno described, but I worry we are edging ever closer to old territory, where some members of society—the old, the sick, the weak, anyone viewed as insufficiently industrious—are judged unworthy of life.
My grandfather’s life was important, and not just to me. He was a human being who deserved the same level of dignity and peace that more fortunate men can purchase. He didn’t have to die the way he did, in a small, cold room, separated from everyone he loved. All his hard work, all his responsibility, meant a pittance in the end. There is no justice but a fairer future.
Sick, possessed of limited means, my grandfather belonged to a sacrificial category of person in America.