Daniel Czerepak, a former Army captain, was arrested by Port Authority police in September in Fort Lee, New Jersey, when he tried to use a forged placard to get onto a site being used to refurbish the George Washington Bridge, according The Record newspaper.
The bridge is one of the main commuter access points connecting New Jersey to New York City.
Police said that Czerepak was doing reconnaissance on the bridge, and they submitted evidence that he had visited other local bridges and tunnels and was “keeping track of what he’s learning.”
Toll data showed he’d visited the Lincoln Tunnel, Brooklyn Bridge and Verrazano-Narrows Bridge prior to his arrest. All are major New York City arteries. Police also found illegal high-capacity magazines at his Wallington, New Jersey, home during a search. His sister told the local newspaper that they were items from his Army service and not loaded.
As of this week, Czerepak did not face terrorism related charges. However, he is awaiting trial on charges of fraud, receiving stolen property and unlawful possession of high-capacity magazines.
He had been transferred from the local jail to a psychiatric unit in a local medical center in January, and local prosecutors told the judge in the case that they are requesting his mental health records in order to better provide treatment. For that, he must submit to a mental health competency evaluation, which includes a review of his history.
If the test is not completed. “he is going to sit in a holding pattern indefinitely,” Judge Frances McGrogan said.
Family members said that Czerepak was an Army captain who left the service in January 2019, though he had returned home in October 2018 ahead of his discharge.
As an ROTC cadet, Czerepak had graduated from Rutgers University in 2012 and then received a commission. He was stationed first in Texas and later deployed to Kuwait then South Korea, family members told The Record.
Many Americans, perhaps most, appear to view the president as a public intellectual or shock-jock media personality. Voters increasingly pledge their loyalty to a candidate who not only articulates what they want to hear, but does so in the way they want to hear it. One problem with this reduction of the presidency — one among many — is that it eliminates nearly everything that the federal government does from political consideration.
Donald Trump gains support from his congregants, rather than loses it, when he excels in the only role that he is capable of performing — a weird combination of dive-bar drunkard, unable to filter the stream of pollutants that move through his mind and out his mouth, and Fox News talking head. A former reality television star and a member of the WWE Hall of Fame, Trump represents the culmination of “infotainment,” the process that has dragged politics from the Lincoln-Douglas debates down to relentless name-calling, bloviation and lies.
It turns out that the work of politics is actually boring. Talented writers like Aaron Sorkin or David Mamet can make a fictionalized version of drafting legislation or managing public agencies seem exhilarating or amusing, but ensuring that the Department of the Interior competently oversees the management of public land is not likely to translate into a hit show on any cable network or streaming platform.
There is nothing like a potential pandemic to remind an easily distracted electorate that governance matters. As the coronavirus spreads, the death count rises and people all over the world begin to fear infection, the incoherent and dangerous reaction of the Trump administration offers a high-stakes indictment. This is what happens when you elect someone to run the federal government who has no prerequisite knowledge, experience or ability for public policy and administration.
The Obama administration opened 49 overseas offices of the Centers for Disease Control, designed to proactively prevent viruses from reaching pandemic proportions. Over the objections of medical experts within his own administration, our current president has shut down 39 of them. One of these satellite CDC offices was in China.
For the past two years, Trump’s budget proposal has included reductions to the CDC and the National Institute of Health. If we want proof that elections have implications on the actual work of government — on not merely who is able to give inspiring or outrageous speeches with a title in front of his or her name — the House Democratic majority prevented those cuts from going into effect.
Congress could not, however, prevent Trump from neglecting the fundamental responsibilities of his position. In 2018, the director of the National Security Council’s global pandemic prevention effort resigned, and his entire staff subsequently did likewise. Trump has not replaced them, creating massive vulnerabilities in the U.S. response to the coronavirus outbreak.
“Over the last long period of time, you have an average of 36,000 people dying” a year, the president said, gesturing toward National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony S. Fauci, who nodded confirmation.
Trump continued: “I never heard those numbers. I would’ve been shocked. I would’ve said, ‘Does anybody die from the flu? I didn’t know people died from the flu.’ … And again, you had a couple of years where it was over a 100,000 people died from the flu.”
The president is correct. Seasonal influenza has killed 12,000 to 61,000 people in the United States every year since 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There have been several years where more than 100,000 Americans were killed by particularly nasty influenza strains.
One of those episodes was the 1958 pandemic, which killed 116,000 in the United States.
In 1918, Friedrich Trump was a successful, 49-year-old businessman, husband and father of three living in Queens, according to Gwenda Blair in her 2001 book “The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire.” One day in May, he came home from a stroll feeling sick. He died almost immediately.
He was a victim of the first wave of the Spanish flu pandemic. A second, deadlier wave hit in the fall. All told, the pandemic killed at least 50 million people worldwide and 675,000 in the United States, according to the CDC.
Friedrich’s eldest son, Frederick, was only 12 when his father died, but he and his mother would pick up the family business. It would be another 28 years before Fred and his wife would have their fourth child, a boy they named Donald.
This same grandfather’s biography has come up as a sticking point before. Friedrich came to the United States at 16 from Germany and today would be classed as an “unaccompanied alien child,” experts told The Washington Post in 2018. Trump has come under fire for his administration’s treatment of unaccompanied minors and other children from Central America trying to enter the country via the southern border.
In his 20s, Friedrich Trump made his way to the Pacific Northwest, where he made his fortune opening taverns, restaurants and hotels, usually in red-light districts, in Gold Rush-era mining towns.
According to CAIR’s analysis, the vast majority of Muslim Americans who participated in the primary voted for Sanders, at 58.2%, followed by Biden at 26.8%. Both Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren — each of whom has since dropped from the Democratic presidential primary race — polled within the 5% range.
“These survey results show exactly why several 2020 presidential candidates have made unprecedented attempts to court American Muslims voters,” CAIR Government Affairs Director Robert McCaw said in a press release accompanying the survey’s findings. “The interconnectedness of the American Muslim community and its more than 1 million registered voters makes Muslims a strong and increasingly critical voice in American politics.”
Indeed, Sanders in particular has counted on several high-profile Muslim supporters to serve as top surrogates for his campaign, including Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who frequently joins Sanders at rallies, and Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who has been vocal in her criticisms of both Biden and Sanders’s 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton.
Biden, meanwhile, has drawn criticism for his hiring of Amit Jani as his campaign’s Asian American Pacific Islander national vote director, after it was reported that Jani was a vocal supporter of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose time in office has seen India become increasingly hostile — and recently violent — toward Muslims.
“As an Indian-American, who’s seeing the humanitarian crisis imposed on Kashmir by the Modi government — it is truly troubling to see Biden elevating someone who is in support of this now bordering on fascist regime in a leadership position,” Imraan Siddiqi, CAIR’s Arizona chapter director, told The Intercept in September.
According to CAIR’s data, Muslim American voters broadly supported Sanders’s top campaign issue of Medicare-for-All, with 61.2% of respondents endorsing a single-payer system. Respondents also signaled overwhelming support — nearly 1 in 4 — for raising the minimum wage, as well as more government investments in affordable housing. The full CAIR poll can be found here.
Blame Boris Johnson for almost everything, but not for the arrival of the coronavirus. He puts on his serious face, slightly unrumples his hair and tells people to wash their hands. As no one voted for him for public health advice he would do well to let untrusted politicians opine as little as possible, leaving public announcements to the respected chief scientific officer and chief medical officer.
But there is no way of keeping politics out of this. If this epidemic is only half as bad as the official worst-case scenario, the pressure on every aspect of public services will be tested to breaking point. The full effect of a decade of austerity is about to be brutally exposed.
Until now, the Tories have won and won again, despite the deepest austerity – confident that most people, most of the time, know nothing of cuts in public services they aren’t using now or can’t see. Though the A&E crisis is never off our TV screens, the remainder stays below most voters’ radar. But this virus may expose the true state of the country for all to see.
Tim Cook, an ICU doctor, writing in the Guardian, gave a graphic picture of the lack of intensive care and critical care beds – Britain ranking 23rd out of 31 countries for provision, and almost bottom for the number of hospital beds overall. But what of every other service?
Local authorities have the lead role in public health emergencies: they do disaster rehearsals for imaginary terror or biohazard attacks, coordinating with the army for emergency tents and temporary morgues, says Tony Travers, professor of government at the LSE. But coronavirus would probably be a crisis in every council simultaneously, with each being unable to call on help from the others. Over the past decade councils have lost between a third and a half of their income, with a quarter of their staff gone and up to a half lost in some places. Already the flooding has left those local authorities warning they haven’t got the money to cope.
Councils’ incapacity was exposed, Travers says, over the Grenfell tragedy. Kensington and Chelsea was not exceptionally badly run, but it could not cope with rehousing and supporting its residents after the tower block calamity: a team of chief executives from other local authorities had to come in and take over. The council on its own had lost too much administrative capacity. Councils run most services, and most, such as environmental health, have been hugely depleted: the National Audit Office describes that service as “failing”.
That civic incapacity will be revealed time and again by a coronavirus outbreak, with Whitehall’s civil service reduced to its smallest size in decades: look at the panic-hiring just announced to manage the Brexit customs fallout. If, as government plans suggest, one in five staff are out of action, the care sector will be hit hardest and fastest, as it is already so fragile and understaffed. That puts at risk the lives of old people at home alone or in care homes unable to care, with day centres mostly closed down in the cuts.
Money will need to flow fast to stop some care homes going bust and to hire emergency staff from agencies, no doubt at higher rates. Children’s homes face the same crisis, with many more children in care than a decade ago: social work departments are already overstretched. As for understaffed prisons, the prospect of virus outbreaks there and many staff off sick is frightening.
A spokesperson from the Department of Health and Social Care said yesterday, somewhat over-reassuringly: “The UK is extremely well prepared for these types of outbreaks and Public Health England has issued tailored guidance for care providers setting out action to be taken in a variety of circumstances.”
Public Health England does indeed inspire trust in its advice and oversight, but boots on the ground and helping hands are provided locally, and councils have taken the heaviest hit in the great austerity. Ever since George Osborne’s first budget in 2010, the plan was to “devolve the axe” to them. The Local Government Association this week warns they have lost £15bn.
The public realm will be exposed: the number of people working in it has fallen to just 16.5% of all jobs, the lowest since 1945. We will feel the spending cuts, with only £86 spent now on public services for every £100 spent in 2010.
The government is trying to recruit the 20,000 police it cut, but this takes time. Call in the army, says the emergency plan, but it’s now at its smallest ever, down to 73,000 from 103,000 in 2003. Even if there are no food panics requiring police or army at supermarket checkouts for rationing, emergency services are already planning to triage what they can provide with tough restrictions on their services.
In our book, The Lost Decade 2010-2020, David Walker and I have chronicled this unprecedented decline. The Tories have escaped electoral censure for austerity – so far. Perhaps, with luck, the virus will pass over without putting the country to the test. But if it is an epidemic on the scale Public Health England warns of, the politicians who have left the country so defenceless can expect trouble. Voters will be shocked to discover how far the things they took for granted have been depleted; and that the government may no longer be able to keep its citizens safe.
• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist. The Lost Decade 2010-2020 and What Lies Ahead for Britain, by Polly Toynbee and David Walker, is published this week by Faber, £10.99 rrp. To order a copy for £8.99 with free UK p&p for orders over £15, visit the Guardian Bookshop.
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