POLITICO NIGHTLY: ‘It’s not our problem to solve’

BY RENUKA RAYASAM

Presented by

With help from Myah Ward

SHOWTIME — On Saturday morning in Harlem, about 1,400 miles away from Tulsa, Okla., four miles from the Trump Tower and just down the street from the Apollo Theater, the 27th annual Juneteenth walk will take place. Jonelle Procope took over the Apollo 17 years ago and helped steer the organization from financial ruin to profit. The theater, where Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder launched their careers, where Ella Fitzgerald and Jimi Hendrix won amateur night and where Chris Rock filmed his HBO special “Bigger & Blacker,” had plans for expansion this fall.

Instead, Procope is steering the 86-year old organization through a new crisis. Like the leaders of other arts organizations, she has no idea when or even whether people will be able to attend live performances indoors. For now, in-person events are cancelled through the end of this month. Your host spoke with Procope about how she’s handling life in lockdown, managing through troubled times and how the moment is made for the theater’s work. This conversation has been edited.

Tell me about life in quarantine.

I have been in my house for three months since we closed down everything at the Apollo. It’s surreal. There's a level of, I don't want to call it depression, but just feeling out of sorts. I miss seeing my employees.

How has the shutdown affected the theater?

This year was going to be a banner year. We were going to end the year with a substantial surplus, which was the culmination of a lot of work that we’ve been doing over the last several years. We went from that to a deficit. The loss of all that programming just in those four months accounted for nearly $4 million in revenue. That meant mitigating expenses.

That normally means laying off employees.

We continued with partial furloughs, deferred compensation and now some layoffs. One of the things that was really of major concern was the fact that we would be laying people off in the midst of a pandemic and they wouldn’t have their health benefits. We’ve gone out and launched an employee emergency fund. I’m happy to say that we can cover the benefits for the people who are being laid off between July and the end of the year. Now what happens after that? I don't know.

How are you responding to the events in recent weeks? Are there new programs planned?

We’re going to do what we've always done. The aftermath of George Floyd has created a seismic shift in people's social consciousness. It’s an awakening in a way that I don’t think that we experienced before.

Art is such a great way to tackle some of these really difficult issues. Art is not only the great equalizer, but it allows you to talk about issues and it makes it more palatable for people to grapple with sometimes. We are not changing. We don’t have to change the focus or the messaging for the Apollo because these are things that we've always stood for.

How are you talking about these issues in your home and with your staff?

In the African-American community, these are realities that we’ve been living with. We are not surprised. These are things that have been going on forever. When you look at the conversations in the ’60s and you look at the conversation when the Voting Rights Act was passed and Rodney King, it's the same conversation.

It’s not our problem to solve. It's the problem of, I have to say, white America. If this is not the way they feel that our country should be on these issues, then they have to work to make the change.

We all know there’s unconscious bias. You talk to people and they’re liberal and progressive in their thinking and they would never consider themselves to be racist. And I believe that. But then, they’re part of institutions that have no diversity. I don’t even think they have thought about it, and now I think it’s a wakeup call.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Happy Father’s Day to all the hardworking papas out there, including my husband, who single-handedly manages to get two babies in the bath and into bed most nights. Reach out with tips: rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam.

A message from PhRMA:

America’s biopharmaceutical companies are sharing their knowledge and resources more than ever before to speed up the development of new medicines to fight COVID-19. They’re working with doctors and hospitals on over 1,100 clinical trials. Because science is how we get back to normal. More.

FIRST IN NIGHTLY

THE ALOHA WAY OF BEATING COVID — In mid-February, Hawaii did not yet have any recorded cases of Covid-19, and only 15 infections had been confirmed throughout the United States. But Josh Green, the Democratic lieutenant governor and a practicing emergency room doctor, was worried, Melanie Warner writes in POLITICO Magazine.

Green recently had learned that a man from Japan had spent nine days in the state and then tested positive for the virus upon returning home to Nagoya. The man, apparently, was sick — and contagious — toward the end of his vacation. He and his wife, who would later test positive herself, stayed in two hotels, one on Maui and one in Waikiki. They got in rental cars, went shopping in Chinatown, ate out at more than half a dozen restaurants, and met a friend in Honolulu for coffee. How many people had the couple unwittingly infected in that time? “For me, it really underscored the need to get ready,” Green said. With 28,000 travelers pouring into Hawaii every day during the months of January and February, 20 percent of them from Asia, the state seemed fertile ground for a major Covid-19 outbreak. But a catastrophe never came. Instead of a massive, uncontrolled outbreak, Hawaii has recorded the fewest Covid-19 cases per capita in the country.

Dice dealer Phil Moffett looks on as John Moore of California rolls the dice at a craps table at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino after the property opened for the first time since being closed in mid-March. | Getty Images

PALACE INTRIGUE

FLAG ON THE FIELD — President Donald Trump rebuked his administration's top infectious disease expert today, rejecting Anthony Fauci's warning that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic could keep professional football from returning this fall. “Tony Fauci has nothing to do with NFL Football,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “They are planning a very safe and controlled opening.”

The president's social media post put him at odds with the man who spent weeks as perhaps the most prominent face of the White House's coronavirus response team, Max Cohen writes. Fauci's role appears to have diminished in recent weeks as the Trump administration has shifted toward reopening the country. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told NPR’s “1A” earlier this month that, at the time, he had not spoken to the president for two weeks.

HAPPENING MONDAY 9 a.m. EDT - "INSIDE THE RECOVERY," PART IV: CONGRESS DURING COVID-19: Join POLITICO Playbook co-authors Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman for a special virtual program featuring congressional reporters Heather Caygle and Burgess Everett. Get a behind-the-scenes look at what it is like to report from inside the Capitol during a global pandemic, what legislation on police reform is gaining traction, and what to expect in the next coronavirus aid package. REGISTER HERE

AROUND THE NATION

THE WIND COMES SWEEPING DOWN THE PLAIN — By almost any measure, this has been a terrible month for Tulsa Mayor G. T. Bynum, Bret Schulte writes in POLITICO Magazine. Like almost every other city in America, Tulsa was the scene of major protests after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Demonstrators tried to take over an interstate highway and some even marched to Bynum’s house, an act he called “intimidation.” In a city that was the site of the nation’s most notorious massacre of Black residents, hundreds of whom were murdered in their homes by a white mob, the mayor’s insinuation that he felt threatened by unarmed protesters didn’t sit well in the Black community.

In the middle of all this, Trump, whose rhetoric after Floyd’s death inflamed tensions across the country, announced he would come to Tulsa to hold his first rally since the coronavirus pandemic had ended his public campaigning. Bynum, a moderate Republican, has stressed he had nothing to do with Trump’s visit, but he has also resisted repeated calls to cancel the rally at the 19,000-seat BOK Center downtown. Now Tulsa, population just under 400,000, is preparing for the arrival of tens of thousands of Trump supporters and counter-protesters. Whatever happens over the coming hours and days is unlikely to make Bynum’s job easier.

 

THE GLOBAL FIGHT

STUDYING ABROAD — Countrywide lockdowns. Closed borders. Coordination between nations. The EU’s unified response to the coronavirus has squashed a spike, while a number of states in the U.S. have seen a surge. Senior Europe health care reporter Sarah Wheaton breaks down what America can learn from Europe — and what both regions can learn from the resurgence in China — in the latest POLITICO Dispatch. “It is striking from where I’m sitting in Europe to see the U.S. states really just make their own decisions and have quite a patchwork of results, and I guess in some ways it will be a way to really understand whether these lockdown measures work,” Sarah said.

Listen to the latest POLITICO Dispatch podcast

JOIN NEXT WEDNESDAY 1 p.m. EDT - THE SPEED OF SCIENCE POST-COVID-19: What does the future of science in a post-Covid-19 world look like? What lessons can we learn to accelerate medical research outside of the coronavirus? How can newly developed drugs and vaccines be distributed equitably? What can we do to minimize misinformation from flawed or inaccurate scientific studies published during a public health emergency? Join Patrick Steel, CEO of POLITICO, and Alexander Hardy, CEO of Genentech, for this critical and timely discussion. REGISTER HERE.

TALKING TO THE EXPERTS

Nightly’s Myah Ward asked: How will time away from work and school during an extended pandemic change our social networks?

“If you organize all of your acquaintances on a model that looks like the rings of Saturn, and you're represented by the planet, then your most intimate contacts are in the innermost rings — your spouse or your parents or your kids or your best friend. And then it gets increasingly less intimate. The question is: Is the coronavirus going to draw people back into the middle rings or more into the inner and the outer rings? And I’m not sure.

If people aren't getting that middle-ring connection at work, or fewer people are, will they become more inclined to join a local neighborhood organization, or a church or synagogue? I’ve actually become a little bit more optimistic that the long-term implication is that there will be some sort of correction for the loss of the middle rings that happens through social distancing.” — Marc J. Dunkelman, author of “The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community”

“One thing we know is that social media, even though it has the descriptive social in it, it’s actually not that social. And it has a direct impact on an increase in loneliness and depression. If we don’t have our clubs, if we don’t have our workplace, if we don’t have our volunteer work, if we don’t have our neighborhood interaction, we’re missing pretty much the biggest slice of social interaction that promotes health and happiness in humans.

To quote an old blues song, you don't miss your water until the well runs dry. I think especially because our lives have migrated online in so many ways, we have kind of jumped over our social needs, and just assumed that digital contact will do the trick. And in so many ways, it doesn’t. It's more like a spare tire when you have a flat.” — Susan Pinker, author of “The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier”

“Over time, when there's a vaccine, when this pandemic is behind us, the overwhelming majority of people will be eager to get back into physical social life. They prefer to be in an office, prefer to be around their colleagues, to have separation between home and work. Zoom is just not a substitute for face to face or small group interaction.” — Eric Klinenberg, author of “Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life”

PUNCHLINES

DRAWN TOGETHER — Matt Wuerker closes out the week with a roundup of the best in satire, cartoons and memes on the news, including the Supreme Court’s momentous decisions, the pandemic and discussions on racial justice.

ASK THE AUDIENCE

We asked you: Show us what the Summer of Covid looks like in your area. Here are some of the pictures you sent us.

Illustration: Aubree Eliza Weaver/POLITICO

NIGHTLY NUMBER

37 percent The proportion of black respondents who say they know someone diagnosed with coronavirus, compared to 31 percent of Latino respondents and 27 percent of white respondents, according to a survey from Mitch Landrieu’s E Pluribus Unum initiative. Twenty-one percent of black respondents say they know someone who has died of coronavirus, compared to 12 percent of Latino respondents and 8 percent of white respondents.

PARTING IMAGE

Black business owners from across the U.S. march in Tulsa on Juneteenth. The group carried a lawsuit — contained in a casket — to the Page Belcher Federal Building seeking financial damages for minority-owned businesses that they say received a reduced amount of PPP funds. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

A message from PhRMA:

America’s biopharmaceutical companies are sharing their knowledge and resources more than ever before to speed up the development of new medicines to fight COVID-19. They’re working with doctors and hospitals on over 1,100 clinical trials.

And there’s no slowing down. America’s biopharmaceutical companies will continue working day and night until they beat coronavirus. Because science is how we get back to normal.

See how biopharmaceutical companies are working together to get people what they need during this pandemic.

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Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam

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