Colorado College co-presidents on four years of Trump
Today is Inauguration Day. It’s also the day we publish our 100th newsletter.
Good morning, and happy Wednesday. On this pre-pandemic date in 2017, Donald J. Trump was inaugurated to the presidency of the United States. (This year, Joseph R. Biden will unseat the incumbent president, despite dozens of failed legal challenges to overturn election results in Trump’s favor, a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and impeachment of the sitting president for his role in inciting the riot.) As we write this on the day before inauguration, we hope tomorrow is safe for all, we thank our National Guard for protecting us, and we condemn any violence that may take place at all 50 state capitals. Please be careful.
🎉100th Newsletter Alert: It seems only fitting the COVID-19 Reporting Project’s 100th newsletter falls on such a historic day. First, we highlight some of our favorite briefs since the Reporting Project’s start in May, coupled with a chronology of what the Trump administration and COVID-19 were up to when we published them. Then, we interview the acting co-presidents of Colorado College on how four years of President Trump impacted the campus and what changes a Biden administration may bring.
How it started
Photo courtesy of Patil Khakhamian ’22
How it’s going
Photo courtesy of Lorea Zabaleta ’23
Road to 💯: The Reporting Project’s current four members have written a lot of newsletters, but not 100 of them. The project started in late May as a student-faculty collaborative grant: Miriam Brown ’21 and Arielle Gordon ’21 joined faculty members Corey Hutchins, Steven Hayward, and Najnin Islam to write daily newsletters throughout the summer. We also owe a big thanks to our resident microbiologist, Professor Phoebe Lostroh, who produces our COVID-19 forecasts for El Paso County every Monday.
➡️ICYMI: On Monday, our resident microbiologist Phoebe Lostroh analyzed outbreak data to give a special edition schools briefing for El Paso County. She also explained guidelines and government support needed for schools to reopen safely.
✉️In Your Inbox:
CC announced on Monday they will test all students living on-campus and locally in Colorado Springs for COVID-19 every week. The college will restrict a student’s Gold Card access to on-campus buildings if they refuse to participate in testing.
During the week of Jan. 18, one on-campus student and one staff member received positive test results and are now in isolation.
Acting Co-Presidents Mike Edmonds and Robert Moore sent out an email yesterday about Inauguration Day, urging students and faculty to “pause and reflect about civic engagement, democracy, and social justice.” The college is holding a conversation today about “Democratic Communication” for CC ID holders at 3 p.m. MST.
This year was a dumpster fire. 100 newsletters later, here’s how we covered it.
May 28, 2020
🐯The COVID-19 Reporting Project published its first newsletter breaking down CC’s new academic calendar. The college added an additional block in January and is offering three blocks this summer to provide students with more scheduling flexibility during the pandemic.
🦠The Center for Disease Control confirmed on May 28 the U.S. coronavirus death toll surpassed 100,000 people. A few days prior, the New York Times featured the names and details of 1,000 coronavirus victims on the front page, calling the toll “an incalculable loss.”
🍊President Trump signed an executive order aimed at weakening the legal protections of social media companies. The move came two days after Twitter put a fact-checking warning on a pair of Trump’s tweets for the first time after he claimed, without evidence, that mail-in voting was fraudulent.
✊🏾The death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer sparked Black Lives Matter protests across the country in what some consider the largest social movement in U.S. history.
June 21-24, 2020
🐯The CCRP interviewed former President Jill Tiefenthaler about her time at CC and her new job as CEO of National Geographic.
🦠U.S. News Health tweeted an article debunking various myths like ‘aiming a blow dryer up your nostrils can destroy the coronavirus.’
🍊Trump authorized federal officials to arrest and imprison anyone who vandalizes federal property for up to 10 years. This declaration, which became an executive order a few days later, could be used to sentence the president’s own supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
June 29, 2020
🐯CC released its plan for Pandemic Fall, and The CCRP explained steps the college would take to ensure health and safety when students returned in August.
🦠&🍊Joe Biden tweeted that Trump spent his weekend golfing while 39,496 people tested positive for COVID-19 and 347 people died of the virus.
July 15, 2020
🐯Fox21News interviewed two CCRP correspondents about how they’ve kept their classmates informed during the pandemic.
July 20-21, 2020
🐯The CCRP reported on the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference’s decision to cancel all Division III athletics this fall, meaning many CC athletic teams would not be able to compete.
🦠Citing rising case counts, Florida’s largest teacher’s union sued Gov. Ron DeSantis over his plan for schools to return to in-person learning.
🍊The president tweeted: “You will never hear this on the Fake News concerning the China Virus, but by comparison to most other countries, who are suffering greatly, we are doing very well — and we have done things that few other countries could have done!” (All of Trump’s tweets are available on this archive.)
Aug. 19, 2020
🐯The CCRP published exclusive coverage about the dorm-wide quarantine of Loomis Hall, which affected over 150 students who had just moved in only days before. Our correspondents reworked this story into an article for The Colorado Sun — which was then noticed by The New York Times and linked to in Amelia Nierenberg’s Coronavirus Schools Briefing.
Aug. 31, 2020
🐯Still on the quarantine beat, The CCRP reported the college locked down Mathias and South Hall as COVID-19 cases on campus reached double digits.
🍊The president began a press-briefing by boasting about the stock market, then continued on to detail how much the U.S. was improving in terms of coronavirus cases and testing. He said the AstraZeneca vaccine had reached phase three of its clinical trials and the vaccine would be delivered “in record time.” He spent the rest of the briefing condemning “left-wing political violence.”
Sept. 2, 2020
🐯The CCRP reported the college asked students to leave campus by Sept. 20, after the Big Three dorms on campus experienced large quarantines.
Sept. 22-23, 2020
🐯Our correspondents interviewed CC’s co-presidents about their first months on the job and their plans for the academic year.
🦠The coronavirus death toll passed 200,000 people in the United States on Sept. 22.
🍊The president said he would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power, saying “we’re going to have to see what happens.”
Oct. 1, 2020
🍊Close to midnight, President Trump announced he and Melania tested positive for COVID-19.
Oct. 21, 2020
🐯When the college released its plans for Socially-Distanced Spring, the CCRP scrapped the newsletter they’d be working on that day and instead explained the college’s plan for next semester.
🦠States across the U.S. reached record highs in COVID cases and the CDC redefined “close contact” as any exposure six feet or closer to an infected person adding up to 15 minutes.
Nov. 4, 2020
🐯The CCRP gets the kicker in a New York Times story about college journalists covering the pandemic, which described the newsletter as a “new way of getting information.”
Nov. 18-19, 2020
🐯The CCRP reported that CC’s entire hockey team had gone into quarantine after a player tested positive for COVID-19.
🍊The president, who lost his reelection earlier in the month, retweeted Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wrote that “House Republicans will STOP the fraud and abuse in American elections. The integrity of our elections must be protected!”
Nov. 21-23, 2020
🐯The CCRP interviewed CC alum and Infectious Disease Fellow at the University of Vermont Medical Center, Dr. Katherine Peterson, for the week’s COVID forecast.
🍊Trump tweeted, “Joe Biden was a total disaster in handling the H1N1 Swine Flu, would never have produced a Vaccine in record time (years ahead of schedule), and would do a terrible job of Vaccine delivery — but doesn’t everybody already know that!”
🦠The U.S. exceeded 12 million COVID-19 cases with the average daily death count hovering around 1,500 people.
Dec. 14, 2020
🦠The coronavirus death toll passed 300,000 people in the U.S.
Dec. 16, 2020
🐯A CC psychology professor explained to The CCRP the potential long-term impacts of Zoom and why students should turn their self-view off.
🍊The president tweeted, “all-time Stock Market high. The Vaccine and the Vaccine rollout are getting the best of reviews. Moving along really well. Get those ‘shots’ everyone! Also, stimulus talks looking very good.”
Jan. 18, 2021
🐯The CCRP reported on El Paso County school districts’ return to in-person learning and Professor Phoebe Lostroh detailed her findings after analyzing county outbreak data from the fall.
🍊Rudy Giuliani announced he will not represent Donald Trump at his second impeachment trials.
Jan. 19, 2021
🦠The coronavirus death toll passed 400,000 people in the U.S.
Thanks to everyone who’s supported the Reporting Project during this rollercoaster of a year.
Pandemic, insurrection, impeachment: CC presidents on the Trump administration’s triple whammy
If only there were a pandemic playbook.
That’s what Colorado College Acting Co-Presidents Robert Moore and Mike Edmonds were thinking as they made difficult decisions day after day with limited guidelines from the government.
Being the president of a college is no small task, even if you have ample time to prepare for it. Moore and Edmonds did not have that time — a month and a half before former Provost Alan Townsend was expected to assume his new role as interim president, he took a job at the University of Montana. So the Board of Trustees called upon Moore and Edmonds to start the job on July 1.
Now, almost seven months into their leadership, the co-presidents reflect on how four years of a Trump administration impacted CC and call on President-elect Biden to make decisions based on science.
‘Building the plane as we fly it’: How politics impacted CC’s COVID response
Throughout the summer, CC did its best to prepare for Pandemic Fall. They held nine town halls before the semester started to answer common questions. They set up arrival testing for all students through UCHealth. They developed enhanced social distancing protocols for everyone to follow during move-in.
But then the time came — only three days into first-year move-in — when administrators realized they would have to put a dorm of over 150 students under quarantine to control further spread of the pandemic. The other two freshmen dorms soon met the same fate.
Before they announced the infamous Loomis quarantine, CC leaders had a “long meeting” with people including the state epidemiologist and the state head of public health. No one really knew what to do, Edmonds said, adding that configuring the pandemic response was like “building the plane as we fly it.”
“What we were doing is we were teaching ourselves. And we were not being given direction of, you know, do X, Y and Z, so there was a lot of camaraderie and collaboration,” Edmonds said. “It would have been great to have just some template.”
Colorado’s county-level approach to public health restrictions have made El Paso County a difficult place to live at times, Moore said.
“The county commissioners tried to disassociate themselves from any health department because, despite what science said, they were not concerned about public health of the citizens of the county. They were concerned about the economy.” Moore said. “There’s many levels of government here who have different visions [on] what’s the purpose of government.”
Moore added having a federal government systematically reducing support for public health has been a “huge setback” in the college’s pandemic response, and said that having leaders who trust and believe science would have been “really good.”
The presidents also expressed frustrations about not always getting accurate data from public officials. Colorado anticipated receiving around 210,000 vaccinations this week after Trump announced he would release the second doses in the vaccine reserve, Moore said, but reports later uncovered the vaccine reserve’s supply was already diminished. Instead, Colorado expects around 83,000 vaccines the week of Jan. 18.
“What people need to hear is the truth,” Moore said.
Vaccine rollout for the CC community has also been difficult to plan without guidance from state officials. Many students and parents have asked if CC will require the COVID-19 vaccine for enrollment, Edmonds said, but the presidents don’t have an answer yet.
“We don’t know ... if there will be state direction around the vaccine,” Edmonds said. “We’re trying to figure that out as we get guidance from local and state public health officials.”
Co-presidents condemn the insurrection, say Trump’s actions were impeachable
On Jan. 6, while Congress was certifying the Electoral College votes and Biden’s victory, Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol. Members of Congress hid under desks and escaped through passages while millions watched, pondering what the riots would mean for the future of the country.
“We just had a violent mob assault the Capitol in an attempt to prevent those from carrying out our constitutional duty,” CC alum and U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney ’88 wrote in a tweet.
Many institutions of higher education such as Johns Hopkins University and Northwestern University decided to write something to support their students and to speak out against the riot. Colorado College was no exception.
“The first thought was, actions of that day required some statement,” Moore said. “That’s just not an event you can not respond to.”
The co-presidents decided it was important to send an email to the CC community to show the college’s stance in regards to the day’s events. The note denounced the choices of the mob and said their actions go against what CC stands for as an institution and the values of a liberal arts education.
“It was an effort to overthrow a democratic election. And I’m sorry, I’m still shocked that the president of the United States would urge people to assault Congress to try to prevent the next elected president from being certified as the winner,” Moore said. “So, I think I see that as impeachable.”
The email also pointed out the difference between the response of the National Guard to the insurrection compared to their handling of Black Lives Matter protests this summer, emphasizing that a commitment to anti-racism still remains extremely important.
“I think the Washington Post even this week was really clear about delineating this summer’s things as truly a protest and what happened at the Capitol as a riot, and there is a difference,” Edmonds said. “And I think that that stark contrast is quite painful.”
Looking toward the future: where do we go from here?
Today, Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States, and CC leadership hopes the new administration will improve things for the college.
“Science-based decision making out of the federal government would be a huge positive step forward,” said Vice President for Information Technology Brian Young.
As the nation prepares to transition from Trump to Biden, The Reporting Project asked the co-presidents how the last four years should be taught to students in the future.
Edmonds doesn’t want the Trump presidency to be sugar-coated or glorified, and said a lot of “ugly, hateful things” that happened in the past four years had “unfortunately” become normalized. The country also needs to think about how racism has always been structurally and behaviorally embedded in our society, he added.
“This nation was at risk of no longer being a democracy. That risk, and the potential for what could have happened, that needs to be taught,” Moore said. “I think people have to judge that but right now it feels to me like people were trying to overthrow the will of the people in a national election. And that’s pretty serious.”
Moore said early in his career, he worked in state government. That familiarity with elected officials has led him to question his prior beliefs about the purpose of government.
“In my life, I have believed government was here to help people and solve problems. That’s been hard to hold on to,” Moore said. “I thought everybody agreed that was why we had government — to do good.”
About the CC COVID-19 Reporting Project
The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project is created by Colorado College student journalists Isabel Hicks, Esteban Candelaria, Lorea Zabaleta, and Cameron Howell in partnership with The Catalyst, Colorado College’s student newspaper. Work by Phoebe Lostroh, Associate Professor of Molecular Biology at CC and National Science Foundation Program Director in Genetic Mechanisms, Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, will appear every Monday.