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At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, there were lots of stories about scrappy manufacturers promising to revamp their factories to start making personal protective equipment in the U.S.

Back in the spring, fuel-cell maker Adaptive Energy retooled part of its factory in Ann Arbor, Mich., to make plastic face shields. Now, 100,000 finished shields are piling up in cardboard boxes on the factory floor - unsold.

"We jumped in head first," said Ranvir Gujral, the company's principal owner. He added ruefully: "We weren't the only ones with a brilliant idea of getting our folks back to work and trying to help and manufacture PPE."

Since the coronavirus pandemic began, President Trump and industry officials have talked a lot about the need to ramp up domestic manufacturing of critical protective gear. But six months on, there are still shortages of all kinds of PPE, like N95 respirator masks, while face shields are easy to find.
Lack of a coherent national plan
The disconnect can be traced, in part, to the lack of a coherent national plan.

When Gujral and other domestic manufacturers saw an opportunity to help protect frontline workers - and to keep their own employees working, many of them shifted gears to make face shields and hand sanitizer, which are relatively simple to produce.

But fewer shifted to making N95 masks, which are far more complicated, and they're in short supply. Nurses and doctors are re-using masks over and over again. Some small medical practices can't even find supplies they can afford.

Still, President Trump consistently ignores that reality.

"We've opened up factories. We've had tremendous success with face masks and with shields," Trump said during a press briefing at the White House last week.

The market is, in fact, glutted with face shields. But the U.S. is still far short of the 3.5 billion masks that public health officials say are needed this year.

The White House narrative is that the pandemic revealed the danger of relying too much on Chinese suppliers, and that the U.S. has ramped up domestic production significantly, making those early shortages a thing of the past.

According to the White House, domestic production of N95 masks was about 40 million per month in March, and that is expected to increase to more than 160 million per month this fall. The White House says that would put the nation on track for "nearly 100% domestically supplied" masks by the end of the year, even though that level of production would still fall short of 3.5 billion.

"We are taking our business out of China. We are bringing it home. We want our business to come home," Trump said at the Republican National Convention.

But U.S. manufacturers worry the administration is fumbling a chance to bring the PPE industry back home.

"We're not seeing that happen. In fact, we're behind in manufacturing jobs. We're importing more PPEs than ever," said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing.
'This administration has really had a big firm focus'
The White House worked with some big companies, including 3M and Honeywell, to ramp up domestic production of respirator masks. That was relatively easy for them; 3M developed the first N95 mask, so it already has factories and established customers.

Even so, 3M and Honeywell haven't been able to make enough masks as the pandemic wore on and demand only increased.

"We're not tens of millions of masks short. We're hundreds of millions of masks short of where we need to be," Paul said. "It would make complete sense to want to scale up some small and mid-sized manufacturers to help fill in this massive gap."

But the federal government has no plan to help small- and mid-sized manufacturers move into PPE.

"This administration has really had a big firm focus," said Gary Gereffi, a professor at Duke University and the founding director of the Duke Global Value Chains Center.

"We've never really fully dealt with the ongoing demand for the basic items - the face masks and the gloves and the gowns," Gereffi said, partly because the administration has been more focused on discovering a vaccine that could bring the coronavirus outbreak under control.

As a result, Gereffi said: "We didn't have any agency in the government that knew which companies were producing these different products."

That leaves manufacturers like Ranvir Gujral, the factory owner in Michigan, to figure it out on their own. Gujral still wants to help in the pandemic. He's thinking about retooling his factory in Michigan again, this time to make N95 masks.

"We have the machines lined up. We have the raw materials lined up. We have the capital lined up," Gujral said.

What he's missing is some certainty that his investment will pay off. Gujral's factory wouldn't be ready to start cranking out masks until the spring.

"Are we going to still have demand? Are these customers still going to come to us?," he asked. "We don't want to be left holding the bag."

Gujral says he can't risk repeating his face shield experience with N95 masks.

"This is a big enough move to put us out of business if it doesn't go well," he said. "It's a bet-the-company move."

It's the same conundrum facing all sorts of industries. Things are made more cheaply overseas, especially in China. So are customers willing to pay a little more for masks that are made in the USA? Or other scarce items, like protective gloves or gowns?

"I hear that from across my industry," said Kimberly Glas, the president of the National Council of Textile Organizations, an industry trade association in Washington. "People aren't going to make an investment realizing that there's not a customer at the other end."

Even as the Trump administration downplays the PPE shortages, it has taken steps to try to shore up U.S. manufacturing of drugs and medical supplies. The president signed an executive order last month requiring federal agencies to buy American-made when possible.

It's a good step, said Glas, who worked at the U.S. Commerce Department during the Obama administration. But she says it will take more than that - a real strategic federal plan, or tax incentives - to convince domestic manufacturers to invest.

"My fear is a year from now, we will see these supply chains that were heavily dominated in China go back to China fully," Glas said.

And the U.S. will have squandered a chance to bring jobs back onshore, and make America self-sufficient when it comes to protecting against the coronavirus.

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Why Can't America Make Enough N95 Masks? 6 Months Into Pandemic, Shortages Persist

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, there were lots of stories about scrappy manufacturers promising to revamp their factories to start making personal protective equipment in the U.S. Back in the spring, fuel-cell maker Adaptive Energy retooled part of its factory in Ann Arbor, Mich., to make plastic face shields.

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Former Vice President Joe Biden continues to lead President Trump in the 2020 presidential election nationally by a substantial margin, according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.

Biden leads Trump by 9 points, 52% to 43%, among likely voters, the survey finds. This is the first time this election cycle the poll has screened for likely voters- this narrower group is the most likely to actually cast a ballot, compared to the larger group of people who are registered to vote.

There isn't much change from registered voters, however. Among them, Biden leads Trump, 52% to 42%. That's mostly unchanged from last month in the survey taken just before the party conventions began, a reflection of how remarkably consistent this race has been in national polling. Of course, the election will be determined in key states that make up the Electoral College rather than in a national popular vote.

When third-party candidates are included, it remains about the same. In a four-way race, adding Libertarian Jo Jorgensen and Green Party nominee Howie Hawkins, Biden leads Trump by a slightly lower 49% to 42%. Jorgensen pulls in 5%, while Hawkins gets 2%. Hawkins, however, has been rejected from the presidential ballot in some key states, including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Against Trump, Biden shows strength among white voters with a college degree, especially white women; women overall; young voters; and those who live in cities and suburbs.

Trump's strengths are with white evangelicals; whites without a degree, especially white men without one; and those who live in rural areas or small towns.

With likely independent voters, Biden leads by 21 points, 57% to 36%. Trump won independents by 4 points in 2016.

Notably, like in August's survey, Biden is again recording record support with white voters for a Democratic presidential candidate. Biden is getting 49% of white likely voters compared to 48% for Trump.

No Democratic presidential candidate has earned that much support with white voters in the past five decades.

Biden also leads with likely voters who are 65 and older, 51% to 47%, a reversal from 2016 when Trump won them, 52%-45%, according to exit polls.

But a warning sign for Biden: He is underperforming with likely voters of color. While he leads Trump 60% to 34% with nonwhites, that's a smaller margin than the 74% to 21% Democrat Hillary Clinton won with them in 2016.

(There were too few likely voters to report a breakout of African Americans and Latinos in this survey without the margin of error being too high, but the pollsters noted that the decreased margin for Biden was because of a weakness with Latinos.)

The survey researchers also found that Americans' votes are pretty locked in. Just 6% of voters were persuadable in the survey, measured as those who are undecided or who support a candidate but might vote differently.
Methodology The poll, conducted from Sept. 11 through 16, surveyed 1,152 adults by cell phone and landline for a margin of error of +/-3.5 percentage points. There were 964 registered voters in the poll for a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points and 723 likely voters with a margin of error of +/- 4.3 percentage points.

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Poll: Biden Maintains Lead Over Trump With Likely Voters

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Former Vice President Joe Biden continues to lead President Trump in the 2020 presidential election nationally by a substantial margin, according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll. Biden leads Trump by 9 points, 52% to 43%, among likely voters, the survey finds.

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SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:

The Gulf Coast faces catastrophic flooding after yet another hurricane - this one's Sally - lumbered ashore early this morning. Meanwhile, record-setting fires have been burning in the West for weeks. These climate-fueled disasters are not only dangerous, they're costly. Billions of dollars have been lost so far this year. NPR's climate team has been looking into what that means for the economy and for families. Nate Rott is in Oregon, and Rebecca Hersher is just back from the Gulf Coast.

Nate, Rebecca, hello to both of you.

REBECCA HERSHER, BYLINE: Hey there.

NATHAN ROTT, BYLINE: Thanks.

PFEIFFER: And, Becky, let's put this first question to you. We know that climate change makes a year like this one more likely to occur. That's because hotter temperatures help drive bigger, more damaging wildfires and hurricanes. But what do we know about the economic toll that takes?

HERSHER: Well, you know, unfortunately, this isn't the first year that the U.S. has had this kind of back-to-back situation with fires and storms. And that's the kind of thing, as you said, that global warming helps fuel. And the federal government - it actually tracks this data, so we have some idea of how expensive these things are. And the cost is just huge. So in the last five years, the U.S. has experienced more than $500 billion - with a B - in losses directly from climate-fueled weather disasters. And that's not including 2020's disasters that will likely be in the tens of billions.

PFEIFFER: Five hundred billion dollars in the last five years - an enormous amount of money. Nate, you're outside Eugene, Ore., near where one of the major fires is burning. Give us some sense of what those fires mean for the local economy there.

ROTT: Well, they've just been devastating. You know, you have businesses here in Eugene, up and down the state that have had to close just because of the smoke. And a lot of these businesses were already just hanging on by a thread because of the pandemic. Then you've got the direct damages from the fires - lost homes, lost timber, lost buildings, lost infrastructure. I talked to a telecom worker the other day at the incident command post for the fire I'm near, and he had just gotten back from being in the burnt area. His name is Rob Robison, and he described the scene where it just looked like a ghost forest, he said. They lost something like 60 miles worth of telephone poles that had been built. And he says each of those poles costs about $10,000.

ROB ROBISON: We're looking at, you know, multimillions worth of infrastructure to replace. I mean, it's just - there's so much infrastructure out there that's been destroyed now.

ROTT: And that's just in one valley from one fire in a state that's got fires in it, you know, basically from north to south. And Robison was frustrated because he said he felt like there were things that we could do right now to decrease risk to infrastructure but we haven't because it costs money.

PFEIFFER: Nate, on that point, when it comes to wildfires, for example, what can be done to decrease their long-term costs?

ROTT: So it's going to take a big change in the status quo. You know, right now, we spend billions of dollars just about every year fighting fires, you know, trying to put them out. And fire ecologists, land managers, even firefighters will tell you that money would be way better spent on the front end. Here's Sarah Altemus-Pope, a former smoke jumper who now runs a forest collaborative in southern Oregon.

SARAH ALTEMUS-POPE: We do have a lot of work that we need to do in our forests to get them back to a more healthy state where they're going to be more resilient in the face of climate change and resilient to disturbance. And to do that, we're going to have to invest in them.

ROTT: So she says we're going to need more prescribed fire, more thinning, more management of these places. And that is going to cost a lot of money, you know, billions of dollars.

PFEIFFER: So that's wildfires. Then there's hurricanes. And, Rebecca, as we mentioned, you just got back from the Gulf. Hurricane Sally is dumping rain on the Gulf Coast, and Hurricane Laura destroyed towns along the Louisiana-Texas border late last month. Give us a sense about the hurricane cost.

HERSHER: Well, you know, hurricanes are consistently the most expensive disasters that we see, especially hurricanes that cause a lot of flooding, like Sally. And that's really bad news because that's exactly the kind of storm that's more common as the earth gets hotter. This year has been really bad. There have already been 10 climate-driven disasters that cost more than a billion dollars each. That was as of July. And one thing to remember is that where people live really matters. You know, the number of homes in flood-prone areas - it's skyrocketed in the last three decades. So this same disaster today is going to cause more damage, hurt more homes than if it had happened previously. So zoning laws, building codes - they are really important. And climate experts say that there are big economic benefits to be had if we build in more resilient ways.

PFEIFFER: Rebecca and Nate, we've been talking about the overall economic costs of these climate-fueled disasters. But let's go to a more personal level. How does this affect families? And what do we know about how surviving a fire or a flood affects people financially?

HERSHER: Well, the effects are really dramatic for a lot of people, especially poor people. If you don't have savings to fall back on or can't afford adequate insurance, a disaster can totally derail a family's finances for decades. People whose home is their only source of wealth, for example, they're more likely to end up renting even years later. Bankruptcy is more likely. There are other costs, too. Like, for example, research suggests that young people who survive a hurricane - they're less likely to enter college. It takes longer to graduate if they do go. And survivors also have long-term mental and physical health problems often, and that can interfere with work. That obviously hits your income or create new costs of their own.

PFEIFFER: These are extreme weather disasters we've been focusing on. But what about the financial hit from less dramatic or less immediately noticeable climate impacts like the gradual rise of temperatures?

ROTT: So yeah, I mean, rising temperatures and heatwaves hurt agriculture, health, you know, certainly electrical bills. You know, you have warmer waters affecting fisheries. And, you know, then there's just that down-the-road impacts of ecological decline. You know, we're in an extinction crisis right now that climate change is only going to make worse. And we depend on ecosystems for everything from clean water and air to places to go where we can just escape from it all. And I don't really know how you put a price tag on something like that.

PFEIFFER: That's NPR's climate team Nate Rott and Rebecca Hersher.

Thank you to both of you.

HERSHER: Thanks so much.

ROTT: Happy to be here.

Copyright © 2020 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST: The Gulf Coast faces catastrophic flooding after yet another hurricane - this one's Sally - lumbered ashore early this morning. Meanwhile, record-setting fires have been burning in the West for weeks. These climate-fueled disasters are not only dangerous, they're costly. Billions of dollars have been lost so far this year.

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

It's not a normal fire season. Something worse is unfolding across the West. More than 3 million acres have burned in California this year. More than 10% of Oregon's residents have evacuated. Across the Pacific Coast states, at least 14 people are dead. But those numbers only begin to convey what it feels like to be there. A friend outside San Francisco told me it feels like the apocalypse.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

People are living under orange skies amid ashes. They're facing a risk that is immediate, local and personal. Many also think of the larger implications of climate change. For some, it can seem like the world is on fire.

ARMANDO MENDOZA: I got caught in a fire. I got caught in the middle of the Bear Fire.

MARTIN: Armando Mendoza (ph) was visiting family in Oroville in Northern California when strong winds sent flames racing towards town. He rushed to evacuate.

MENDOZA: The flames were, like, 50, 60 feet high. I barely made it out of there. And my buddies were behind me. They're on motorcycles. They were getting burned and everything. It was pretty crazy.

INSKEEP: Two hundred eighty miles south of there, near Fresno, California's Creek Fire grew to more than 175,000 acres on Thursday. Alex Hall, a reporter with our member station KQED, was driving through dense smoke that hung over Highway 168 near Shaver Lake.

ALEX HALL, BYLINE: And I came to a general store and gas station that's been here for well over a hundred years. It has a lot of history. It's called Cressman's.

MARTIN: It's like a local landmark there in the mountains with a little bakery inside, rows of framed black-and-white photos hanging on the wall. Alex spoke with the owner, Ty Gillett. He said the flames were getting closer.

TY GILLETT: We're trying to save the store and get prepared for when the fire gets here.

HALL: He was in the moment, you know, where you have to respond right now. And he just looked exhausted.

GILLETT: We've set up pumps and hoses. We've cut down a lot of trees.

HALL: You know, when I had talked to him, it seemed like we were all on the same page that everything was going to be OK. And then it wasn't.

INSKEEP: The next morning, Alex woke up and learned that Cressman's General Store was gone. She saw photos of a pile of smoldering rubble and she sent Gillett a text.

HALL: I said, Ty, this is Alex Hall, the reporter from KQED who interviewed you yesterday. I am so, so sorry to hear about your business. I hope you and your family are OK. And he said, still got a lot of stuff to process; lost our house last night, too.

INSKEEP: So both his business and his home were destroyed.

HALL: A lot of people keep saying, it is what it is. You get the things out that you can't replace. And then beyond that, you kind of just accept it for what it is. That seems to be the state of mind that I found most of the people I've interviewed so far.

MARTIN: Now let's go to Oregon, where the wildfires have now forced about 500,000 people from their homes. Oregon Public Broadcasting's Jonathan Levinson has been covering the fires.

JONATHAN LEVINSON, BYLINE: Nearly a million acres have burned across the state since Monday. That's almost double what burns in an average fire season. And the fires are still growing. There are 3,000 firefighters working across the state. In southern Oregon alone, an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 homes have been lost.

And in the northern part of the state, no one's been able to get back to their towns to assess the damage. And fire officials say things are moving so fast that they don't have a good estimate. At least four people have been killed so far in the state. But, you know, same as property damage, fires are still spreading, and they just don't know the extent of the loss yet.

MARTIN: Right. And we know that there's a fire season every year, but this really is just so exceptional. Can you tell us what you have seen as you've been out reporting?

LEVINSON: So I spent the past two days in Clackamas County. And that's just south of Portland. It's a mix of rural and suburban communities. And, you know, people were tense. They know the fire is getting close to their homes. They have no idea where the fire is exactly. They don't know if it's reached their town or their home. They don't know what they're going back to.

I spoke to Nancy Price (ph). She's 69. She and her husband had to evacuate their home in nearby Molalla. So that's, like, 20 miles from Portland. And they had to leave so quickly on Tuesday that they didn't pack anything, not even their medication. They were at a makeshift shelter at a community college parking lot when I spoke to them.

NANCY PRICE: The thing that's bothering me the most is we don't know what's going on, how soon we can get back in to see - just to know if we have a home. We don't know. That's the thing I dread the most - is not knowing.

LEVINSON: And so to give you an idea of how fast things are changing, while I was there talking to people, the evacuation zone actually shifted, and the shelter was suddenly elevated to a Level 2, which means prepare to leave. The most urgent, a Level 3 zone, which means leave now, had also moved and was now just a mile away from the shelter. And so suddenly, people who had already evacuated their homes were getting ready to evacuate the shelter.

MARTIN: What about Portland itself, where you are? Do the fires represent a real threat there?

LEVINSON: Well, some cities in northwest - in the northwest part of Clackamas County are - they're really Portland suburbs in places, and a lot of people commute into the city from some of the smaller towns in Clackamas County. The evacuation zone has steadily moved towards the southern edge of Portland. Between Wednesday and Thursday, it came about 10 miles closer. It's now about 6 miles from the southern edge of the city.

Portland Fire and Rescue spokesperson said that right now, there's no danger to the city. But there is a concern that a fire could start inside the city, in the parks, and so Mayor Ted Wheeler issued an emergency order closing the city parks and outdoor properties.

MARTIN: All right. Jonathan Levinson of Oregon Public Broadcasting, we appreciate your reporting on all this. Thank you.

LEVINSON: Thank you.

MARTIN: All right. So what is driving all these explosive wildfires, and how much does climate change factor into it? We're going to get the bigger picture now from Char Miller. He's the director of environmental analysis at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. And he has spent a long time studying wildfires.

Thank you so much for being here this morning.

CHAR MILLER: Oh, it's my great pleasure. Thank you.

MARTIN: This is a big question, but it's really the most important. Why is this happening right now, Char?

MILLER: Well, there's - God, there's so many reasons why. But let's start with the southwest and west drying out.

MARTIN: Right.

MILLER: This has been going on for 40 years. The expectation is that it will continue across the rest of this century. And we can tie lots of this to changing climate, of course. But what that changing climate is doing while it's drying out this region is also producing the kind of energy - literally fire energy - that we're watching every single moment.

I walked out of my house today at 3:15 in the morning, and the first thing that hit my face was ash. And immediately, my throat and nose could smell the woodsmoke. And we don't have massive fires. We've just got small ones currently burning in Southern California. So we - this is an immediate thing that we feel. You can see it.

And yet, the size of it and the speed with which these fires are moving - that's the other thing that's just really mind-blowing. As every firefighter is saying, that they're moving at a speed they're not - they're not used to fighting fire at this rate.

MARTIN: So why is that happening - just because everything's so arid, it's just...

MILLER: Yeah.

MARTIN: ...It's just spreading quicker, or the winds, or all of it?

MILLER: All of it. You know, there - the logic is, wind, fuel, heat. So we've got heavy winds. And, in fact, Oregon is having what in Southern California we call the Santa Ana winds, and they don't tend to get those. So when wind starts picking up the desiccated plants, the fuel is burning, and then it's moving quickly. One of the fires up in the Central Sierra moved 15 miles in an afternoon. That is totally unheard of, which means you can't really evacuate. Like, you can't outrace fires.

MARTIN: Right. And that's what we're seeing.

MILLER: Yeah.

MARTIN: I mean, can you explain - you mentioned climate change as a driver...

MILLER: Yeah.

MARTIN: ...Here. But as a result, then, I mean, have people been able to predict this? I mean, did policymakers, did, you know, local leaders - did they see this coming this year?

MILLER: I don't think - well, see, that's the problem, right? Climate change is this long-term process. It seems slow, but I think actually we can see its manifestation on all of these signal flares, all of these fires. But life on the ground is lived at the moment, not in the long term. And so as much as we might all say climate change, that actually doesn't seem to appear. And so policy doesn't change that rapidly.

And one of the ways you can see this is in housing. One of the striking things about every single one of these fires are the large numbers of people who are being evacuated - what is it, 500,000 in Oregon?

MARTIN: Right. Yeah.

MILLER: So if you think about those numbers, that means lots of people have moved into what we call the wildland-urban interface, which is awful. Let's just call it the fire zone. We know that they're fire zones, and yet we keep building in them. So it isn't just that human beings are helping to drive climate change with our emissions of one form or another. We're also driving the destruction that we're now seeing because we've moved into areas that historically have burned.

MARTIN: Can you say whether this is just the norm now? I mean, are we seeing a progression that every season is worse?

MILLER: Yeah. You know, the photographs - and I've taken my share of this dystopic imagery - we call that summer, right? This is not - this is an apocalypse to be sure, but I think it's the norm. And we used to call it the new normal, but I don't think it's new any longer. And so look - this tells us something about this moment. It tells us a great deal about the next decade and beyond.

MARTIN: Char Miller - he is the director of environmental analysis at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. Thank you so much for taking the time today. We appreciate it.

MILLER: My great pleasure.

(SOUNDBITE OF SLEEP DEALER'S "THE WAY HOME")

Copyright © 2020 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: It's not a normal fire season. Something worse is unfolding across the West. More than 3 million acres have burned in California this year. More than 10% of Oregon's residents have evacuated. Across the Pacific Coast states, at least 14 people are dead.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
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Last week, the Milwaukee Bucks shocked the sports world when they decided not to play in their playoff game against the Orlando Magic, in protest of the police shooting of Jacob Blake. As other pro sports teams joined in the sit-out, it seemed as if the NBA season might come to a dramatic, unforeseen end that could have cost the league millions of dollars. And while the playoffs resumed days later, there was still a tangible outcome: The league says some of its arenas will be turned into voting locations, and it will form a social-justice coalition to help promote voting and advocate for criminal justice reform.

The wildcat strike was unprecedented for the NBA - but the world of professional basketball is no stranger to protesting for Black lives. And for years, WNBA players have been at the forefront of those protests, speaking out against police brutality and gun violence. In many ways, Maitreyi Anantharaman wrote in Slate, these women "made the NBA strike possible."

I talked with Amira Rose Davis, a professor of history and African American studies at Penn State and co-host of the podcast Burn It All Down, about the history of activism by Black athletes and how Black women have often been written out of that history. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, which has been condensed and edited for clarity.
We've been hearing so much about the NBA wildcat strike this past week, but the WNBA has been in many ways more politically outspoken than the NBA. So why is this getting so much more attention?
I think it's twofold. The first answer is fairly simple. It is hard to generate the same level of interest, respect and engagement with Black women in sports or Black women overall. It's not just in the realm of sports in which Black women's labor and organizing goes overlooked for the man standing next to her.

I think the other thing that made the NBA get a lot of attention this week is because the wildcat strike as a form of direct action is a less common step in athletic activism. That made a splash, and then it had a domino effect with the WNBA, the MLB, the NHL - across the entire sports world. That domino effect became a huge part of the story.
So this kind of activism - it's new, right?
Yeah. What we've seen in this country, with athletic activism, has usually been individual acts of protest. When we have seen collective acts within sports, it's been a lot at the collegiate level. When the Clippers said they weren't going to play for a racist owner and got Donald Sterling out of the paint, we saw what the withholding of athletic labor might yield. But for the most part, it hasn't been collective action.

The WNBA, though, has moved as a league on the social justice front for years. Months before Colin Kaepernick took a knee, the Minnesota Lynx wore black shirts and had a press conference where they refused to talk about anything except for police brutality and the killing of Philando Castile. They have been, as a league, holding community partnership days where they highlight social justice initiatives. Maya Moore took the season off last year to focus on criminal justice reform, particularly [helping] to get the case of Jonathan Irons dismissed and to get him released from prison. And so I think that what you see there is a pattern of commitment to social justice, particularly racial justice, from the WNBA. It's not as just one person, but as a team, as a league. And that has really been the blueprint for some of the collective action that we're seeing now. I think it's important not to let that get lost in the conversation.
Why has the WNBA been so politically involved? And how long have they been this outspoken?
The WNBA is a league that is gritty by necessity. It catches so much hate because it's "too Black, too queer." It's full of women. And I think that it draws the ire of a lot of people. And so they as a league have always been fairly outspoken, because it's the only way to be. Their very presence on a court, their very insistence that they have the right to play and make a living by playing is a political act in and of itself. So I think they were already kind of primed towards action.

Black women make up a lot of the league, and the white women really are great allies. Because of that, when you talk to players, they'll give a variety of answers for what drives them, what motivates them to use their platform like this.
You're talking about how the WNBA is so much grittier; players get paid a lot less and don't have the same kind of partnerships or media exposure as their male counterparts. So is there a lot more on the line for these female players to protest and strike? What's at stake when someone sits out a game?
That's a great question, because it highlights the paradox of all of this: That at once, there's less at stake and more at stake. And what I mean by that is there's less to lose, right? There's less sponsorships to lose. There's less salary to lose because they didn't have as much to start with.

But on the other hand, there's more to lose, in the fact that their season is shorter. The labor is more precarious. There's just a small number of WNBA teams. And on those rosters, there's a small number of positions. They did the WNBA draft this year and, especially because of COVID, some of the players drafted weren't even able to get into a gym to play before they were cut from the team. There are many talented people able to play at the WNBA level, and not enough infrastructure to support that. And so I think that competition adds a level of precarity to their actions.

And yet, these women have always kept going, And I think that's really significant in terms of thinking about that risk factor, because their labor is a bit precarious. But it doesn't stop them.
Do you find that there are any similarities between the NBA strike versus what the WNBA has done?
Yes, certainly. I think the strength of what we saw with the NBA is its collectivity. And so it's when we go back to that long history of athletic activism in this country, we've seen all too often how disposable a singular athlete can be. We've seen athletes be blackballed. We've seen athletes be cut off from the team or ostracized. We've seen brands run away and scatter from the athletes they represent.

So what has been a source of protection is that collective action. The Clippers wouldn't have been effective if it was one person saying, "Hey, I don't want to play for Donald Sterling." But when the entire team is like, "Yeah, no, I'm not with this," then it's a different ballgame. And I think that that is a blueprint the WNBA has long abided by. Even when there were individuals like Kelsey Bone, who kneeled when not all of her teammates were kneeling, they all protected her. They were all advocating for her. And that is something that is a model of collective action.
Looking back historically, has it been typical for Black women athletes to be so politically engaged?
Yes. And I think the continuity here is that there's never enough people listening to them. I write about Black women athletes like Rose Robinson. She was a high jumper, and in 1959 in the Pan American Games in Chicago, she refused to stand for the national anthem. She later went on to work on a number of initiatives with [the Congress of Racial Equality,] CORE, like desegregating skating rinks in Cleveland. And like so many Black women athletes and Black athletes in general, she was tapped by the State Department in the middle of the Cold War to do "goodwill trips." These were designed to showcase Black artists and athletes to basically tell the world like, look, we're not really that racist. But she said, I'm not going. I have no interest in being a pawn in this political game. I have no interest in going and trying to convince the world that you treat black people in this country fairly. She made waves when she said that, and within six months of that - coincidentally or not - the IRS came after her for tax evasion.

The track Olympians in the '60s are some of my favorite examples. Wilma Rudolph, who won three gold medals in Rome in 1960, was very outspoken. She came home to her hometown of Clarksville, which wanted to hold a segregated parade, and she refused. And the resulting integrated parade was one of the first integrated things that happened in Clarksville, Tennessee. She participated in a direct action protest to desegregate local diners as well.

There's Kiki Stokes on the ScrapYard Dawgs pro-softball team. When their GM tweeted out a picture of them to Trump, trying to praise them for standing for the anthem, Stokes said, "I'm not playing for this team." That's her career that's impacted. But all of her white teammates joined her in solidarity and left the team. They all said, "We're not playing for this woman anymore," and they formed their own softball team. And I think that that is decisive action if I've ever seen it.
What does this moment in the NBA and WNBA say to you about race and gender dynamics in sports?
It's reflecting that Black women don't have this kind of choice to be in these boxes where it's like, am I in women's sports and fighting about pay equity, or am I over here as a Black woman talking about racial justice? And I think that one of the things this moment compels us to do is to consider that, and the significance of the WNBA centering "Say Her Name" and saying Black women are being killed. There's been too many instances of Black women being erased from the narrative even about police brutality. There's been too many instances of Black women being overlooked as leaders, as political leaders, as activists, as organizers, as athletes. It's too often that Black women are the only ones standing up for themselves. And I think that that doesn't stop when you hit the field of sports.

And I think that we know in sports that women are going to fight for space in ways that men don't have to. And I think we also know in sports that women who are conventionally attractive and who are heterosexual are going to be able to get platforms, while queer women or women who present a variety of different genders on the spectrum are going to have to fight for endorsements or for a platform. And I think that all of these things are thrown into focus right now, especially as the world has kind of stopped.

In the media, we're talking right now about college football as if it's the only fall sport. But there are Black women athletes on college campuses. I've talked to so many of them who are track stars, who had their whole spring season canceled, who are volleyball or soccer stars, who have had their whole season canceled. They have been some of the leading voices on campus, mobilizing black athletes into collective efforts- like Anna Cockrell at USC, who's doing tremendous work. And they are too often in real time being erased from the narrative. And I think that seeing it in real time is just a reinforcement of the kind of understanding that Black women are experiencing this double bind and being erased from simplistic narratives. I think these Black women athletes historically and today are demonstrating above all else that they are very, very brave.
Natalie Escobar contributed to this story.

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How Black Women Athletes Paved The Way For The NBA Strike

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast subscribe to Code Switch podcast Last week, the Milwaukee Bucks shocked the sports world when they decided not to play in their playoff game against the Orlando Magic, in protest of the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

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President Trump is under fire for misleading Americans by publicly downplaying the risk of the coronavirus even while he privately acknowledged the magnitude of the threat, a central revelation in Rage, a new book by journalist Bob Woodward.

"I wanted to always play it down," Trump said on March 19 in an interview recorded by Woodward. "I still like playing it down because I don't want to create a panic."

Trump told Woodward privately in early February that he understood the danger and severity of the coronavirus, even as he told Americans not to worry about something he compared to the seasonal flu.

"Just stay calm and it will go away," he said on March 10.

Trump has defended his approach by saying he wanted to avoid panicking the public. "I don't want to jump up and down and start screaming, 'Death! Death!' because that's not what it's about," Trump said when pressed this week about why he played down COVID-19 in February and early March.

More than 190,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus and the number keeps rising.

The president said he sees himself as a cheerleader for the nation, keeping panic at bay. But this "keep calm and carry on" approach is "incongruous on its face" with the way he has talked about other threats - those where fear might work to his political advantage, said Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of political discourse from Texas A&M University, who has written a book about how Trump wields language.

"Trump routinely uses fear appeals. He routinely tells you who to be afraid of, whether it's an internal threat or an external threat to the nation. He uses fear appeals to try and motivate voters," Mercieca said.

Trump has time and again used ominous language and tweeted out videos of violence in other areas where he sees risks for the nation. As Trump campaigned during the 2018 congressional elections, he described "caravan after caravan after caravan of illegal aliens" as he sought to generate concern about Central American migrants seeking asylum. He said they would "flood into our country and overwhelm your communities. That's what's happening. Have you seen the pictures?"

More recently, he has incited fear about low-income housing destroying the suburbs and of anarchists taking over towns. On Thursday, shortly before a press conference at which he insisted it was important to avoid panic about the virus, Trump took a very different tack on a different issue on Twitter:

The Democrats never even mentioned the words LAW & ORDER at their National Convention. That's where they are coming from. If I don't win, America's Suburbs will be OVERRUN with Low Income Projects, Anarchists, Agitators, Looters and, of course, "Friendly Protesters".
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 10, 2020

And then there are hurricanes, a threat where - as with the pandemic - a dose of fear and preparation can save lives. With storms, Trump is there every time to play up the potential for danger, "the likes of which you've never seen before."

"It seems to be one of the biggest hurricanes we've ever seen," Trump said about Hurricane Dorian, warning people in several states, including Alabama, to prepare for the worst. That storm wasn't headed to Alabama, but a map of the storm was modified to look like it was, an incident that became known as " Sharpiegate."

Trump has cast the stakes in the upcoming presidential election in apocalyptic terms, railing that a Democratic win would crash the economy. "Your stocks will be down to nothing," Trump threatened earlier this month. "And we will have a depression like you've never seen before."

Mercieca said that for this truly frightening pandemic, Trump never settled on a way to make the rhetoric work for him. He went from downplaying the risk to casting himself as a wartime president leading America into battle with the invisible enemy to again urging everyone to return to normal life, saying the virus would go away eventually. On Thursday, Trump insisted he was taking the pandemic seriously and then, in the next breath, returned to cheerleading.

"We are going to get through this," Trump said. "And we are right now, I think, I hope, we're rounding the final turn."

But that's not the assessment of the nation's leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci. With approximately 40,000 new cases and 1,000 deaths per day in the U.S., Fauci said the numbers are way too high and could get worse as the weather gets cooler and people spend more time indoors.

"We need to hunker down and get through this fall and winter because it's not going to be easy," Fauci said.

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Trump Says He Prevented Panic On Pandemic. That's Not His Usual Approach

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subscribe to The NPR Politics Podcast podcast President Trump is under fire for misleading Americans by publicly downplaying the risk of the coronavirus even while he privately acknowledged the magnitude of the threat, a central revelation in Rage, a new book by journalist Bob Woodward.

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A lawsuit filed by a group of Oklahomans is seeking reparations from the city of Tulsa and other local government entities for the ongoing devastation caused by one of the most heinous race massacres in U.S. history nearly 100 years ago.

The plaintiffs include relatives of those affected by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre as well as a 105-year-old survivor, Lessie Benningfield Randle, who suffers from "emotional and physical distress that continues to this day," according to the complaint filed this week in Tulsa County District Court.

"For a long time, the word 'reparations' was a non-starter, but it is finally losing its taboo," Damario Solomon-Simmons, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed. "The urgency of the protests across America shows that reforms won't last unless we pay for the crimes of the past."

As many as 300 African American residents were slaughtered when white mobs descended on Tulsa's Greenwood district. Hundreds of homes and businesses were looted and torched, reducing much of the 35-square-block section of the city, commonly referred to as Black Wall Street, to rubble.

A commission that studied the event decades later found the massacre was sparked by an incident in an elevator. It said that a Black man named Dick Rowland probably accidentally stepped on the foot of a white woman, Sarah Page, who screamed. Rowland fled, according to the 2001 report, but was accused of sexual assault and eventually jailed.

White mobs gathered outside the Tulsa County Courthouse demanding Rowland be released to them and there was "lynch talk in the streets of Tulsa," the report said. The bloodshed started soon afterward.

The lawsuit claims "the brutal, inhumane attack" was carried out by white residents as well as members of the Tulsa Police Department, the Tulsa County Sheriff's Department, the National Guard and other leaders of the city and county.

The complaint also says the massacre is an "ongoing nuisance" and alleges that Tulsa officials are "enriching themselves by promoting the site of the Massacre as a tourist attraction," while the residents of the Greenwood district have received no significant benefits from those efforts.

Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum said he would not comment on the pending litigation, according to a statement from his spokesperson.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs argue the effects of the massacre are still felt in the Greenwood district. They say unemployment among Black Tulsans is more than double that of white people in the city and that the median household income for Black residents is $20,000 less than their white counterparts.

While no specific damage amount was sought in the court filing, the suit estimates just the property damage suffered by residents of the Greenwood district is between $50 million and $100 million in today's currency.

This is not the first time that survivors of the massacre or their relatives have pursued redress through the courts. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal to hear a case that also sought reparations.

Lawyers are now seeking to use the same Oklahoma statute that figured into the decision against Johnson & Johnson in 2019 for its role in the opioid crisis. The plaintiffs argue the massacre was a public nuisance, which is defined as something that affects an entire community or neighborhood simultaneously but "damage inflicted upon individuals may be unequal."

There has been renewed interest the Tulsa Race Massacre in recent months.

A group of Tulsa residents and business leaders tried to get a court to force event organizers to implement coronavirus safety protocols ahead of President Trump's June rally in the city.

The president's rally, his first since the virus caused large parts of the national economy to shutter, was originally slated for June 19. That day, also known as Juneteenth, commemorates the effective end of slavery in the United States.

The event was eventually pushed to the following day. But it came after the Trump administration withered a barrage of criticism from those who said the original date was another example of the president stoking racial pain and anger just weeks after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day.

In July, Tulsa officials moved forward with a test excavation at Oaklawn Cemetery to determine if a plot of land on city-owned property contained human remains thought to be from the race massacre 99 years ago.

Scientists, using ground-penetrating radar, previously said they found "anomalies" there that could indicate the existence of an unmarked burial ground.

However, after eight days of searching, the city said "no evidence of human remains are present in the excavation area," according to a statement.

"This initial test excavation was the first of many efforts to find Tulsa Race Massacre victims and this is just the beginning of our work to bring healing and justice to the families," Bynum, the mayor, said. "We remain committed to find out what happened to our fellow Tulsans in 1921."

Officials said several sites of interest around the city could still be potential mass graves stemming from the race massacre.

Read the lawsuit below:

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Oklahoma Lawsuit Seeks Reparations In Connection To 1921 Tulsa Massacre

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A lawsuit filed by a group of Oklahomans is seeking reparations from the city of Tulsa and other local government entities for the ongoing devastation caused by one of the most heinous race massacres in U.S. history nearly 100 years ago.

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Mangroves help protect coastal areas from flooding and sequester more carbon than tropical forests. But new studies suggest they may be wiped out by the rise of sea levels.

SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:

In coastal areas in the tropics and subtropics, few trees play a more important role than mangroves. Mangroves grow along shorelines, and they protect coastal areas from erosion and storm surge. They also store large amounts of carbon, which helps slow climate change. But as NPR's Greg Allen reports, new research suggests the effects of our changing climate may wipe out large mangrove forests.

GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: In 2017, Hurricane Irma's eye passed over this area in the Florida Keys. Big Pine Key saw 130-mile-per-hour winds and an 8-foot storm surge which wrecked homes and battered the island's lush vegetation.

JAN SVEJKOVSKY: These are some of the oldest - or were some of the oldest mangroves in this entire area.

ALLEN: Three years after the hurricane, most of the shrubs and trees have come back on Big Pine Key. A notable exception are the mangroves. Jan Svejkovsky, an oceanographer who lives on the island, takes me to an area where large mangrove trees, some over 50 years old, are dead.

SVEJKOVSKY: So it weathered many hurricanes before. And Irma, unfortunately, it wasn't able to stand against, so...

ALLEN: Along the water's edge, a dense forest of mangroves, once lush and green, is now brown and bare. Using high-definition satellite imagery, Svejkovsky surveyed the widespread die-off of mangroves here and on nearby islands. In some areas, he says, more than 40% of the mangroves died and show little sign of coming back. As for why, Svejkovsky says researchers are still figuring it out. He says it appears to be related to a fine sediment left behind by the hurricane storm surge that covered the mangrove roots.

SVEJKOVSKY: When it dries, it actually dries very hard, almost like cement. And so all the aerial roots that, of course, the mangroves depend on to breathe were covered with this stuff.

ALLEN: In other parts of the Florida Keys where Irma had less of an impact, the mangroves are doing fine. But here and on nearby islands, Svejkovsky says the dead mangrove forests will decay and eventually become mudflats, leaving the land vulnerable to flooding that will only get worse as sea levels rise.

Lynn Wingard is a research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Mangroves, she says, help build up a berm that protects the islands.

LYNN WINGARD: I kind of describe it like the rim of a bowl. In many of these islands, the center parts of the islands are below sea level. If you erode away the rim of the bowl, then the water starts getting in.

ALLEN: Wingard says with the die-off of mangroves, an area on one island she studied that used to be dry some of the time is now underwater, a lagoon. It's a trend she and others worry could get worse. There's evidence mangroves are beginning to move into areas that used to be too cold for them, and some experts think they could migrate inland. But new research suggests sea levels may rise faster than mangroves can adapt.

Miriam Jones, also a research geologist at USGS, says since the end of the Ice Age, huge mangrove forests have often been wiped out by hurricanes and drought. Climate change, she says, is likely to bring more of this extreme weather.

MIRIAM JONES: In a place like Florida, where you do experience a lot of these storms, it's potentially going to cause the demise of many of the mangroves along the Florida coastline.

ALLEN: A decline in mangroves around the world would have implications for efforts to combat climate change. Along with salt marshes and sea grasses, mangroves capture and hold huge amounts of carbon at a much faster rate than forests on land.

Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE FLASHBULB'S "I CAN FEEL IT HUMMING")

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Climate Change May Wipe Out Large Mangrove Forests, New Research Suggests

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Mangroves help protect coastal areas from flooding and sequester more carbon than tropical forests. But new studies suggest they may be wiped out by the rise of sea levels. SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST: In coastal areas in the tropics and subtropics, few trees play a more important role than mangroves.

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Naomi Osaka ascended to victory on Saturday, September 12, beating Victoria Azarenka of Belarus to win her second U.S. Open title and her third Grand Slam title in just three years. After losing the first set, Osaka rallied to win the second and third sets for a stunning triumph.

Osaka made a bold statement with yesterday's win, cementing her status as one of the greatest in the sport. But some of the 22-year-old's most powerful moments at the Open came not on the tennis court, but rather as she walked into the Arthur Ashe Stadium each day, where she used her platform to send a powerful message about racial injustice.

For each of the seven rounds of the U.S. Open, the tennis player wore a mask bearing the names of Black victims of police brutality or racial violence - and the final was no exception. When Osaka arrived for Saturday's match, she wore a mask bearing the name of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old Black boy who was killed by Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann in 2014.

"I feel like I'm a vessel at this point in order to spread awareness." she told ESPNW after her quarter-final win on September 8. There, she wore a mask with the name George Floyd, the Black man killed by Minneapolis police in May, sparking protests around the country and the world.

Throughout the tournament, Osaka also honored Breonna Taylor, the Black woman fatally shot by police in March while asleep in her home; Elijah McClain, who died after being placed in a chokehold by police in August 2019; Ahmaud Arbery, who was killed while jogging in February; Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old who was fatally shot in 2012 while walking home from a convenience store; and Philando Castile, the Black man who was fatally shot by police during a traffic stop in 2016.

Some of the families of those she's honored have reached out to thank her for her advocacy, including Trayvon Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton, who said, "We thank you from the bottom of our hearts." Ahmaud Arbery's father Marcus Arbery, Sr. told Osaka, "God bless you for what you're doing." Osaka later tweeted that after watching the video messages, "I cried so much. The strength and the character both of these parents have is beyond me."

In a post-match interview, when asked what message Osaka intended to convey with the masks, the tennis player had a quick response. "Well, what was the message you got?" she said. "I feel like the point is to make people start talking."

This isn't the first time Osaka has taken a stand against racial injustice. Last month, shortly after the shooting of Jacob Blake, she boycotted a match to protest police brutality before the Women's Tennis Association agreed to postpone it. She arrived at the match wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt. In a Twitter post about her decision to sit out the match, she wrote, "Watching the continued genocide of Black people at the hand of police is honestly making me sick to my stomach."

"I'm extremely tired of having this same conversation over and over again. When will it ever be enough?"

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Naomi Osaka Showed Support for Black Lives Matter While Winning Her Second U.S. Open

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Naomi Osaka ascended to victory on Saturday, September 12, beating Victoria Azarenka of Belarus to win her second U.S. Open title and her third Grand Slam title in just three years. After losing the first set, Osaka rallied to win the second and third sets for a stunning triumph.

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These days, Miriam Robles spends a lot of time on the phone. In between her day job as an environmental justice organizer at Mi Familia Vota, a Latino political advocacy group that opposes President Trump, Roblesphone-banks to register new voters.

One new voter she's worked with is her 18-year-old brother, Kevin.

"I was super excited to get him registered," she says. "I helped him fill out his primary ballot and made sure that he applied for [Arizona's] Permanent Early Voting List. For him, he is looking at this fiercely as something that he could do for his family."

Robles says it's a bittersweet feeling, helping her brother perform his civic duty while she is unable to vote.

Their father came to the United States from Mexico through a temporary work program in the '90s. Robles and her mother joined him in Phoenix when she was 3 years old under a visitor's visa. They all stayed. Her brother and sister were born in the U.S. and are citizens, but Robles remained undocumented and applied for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, better known as DACA, in high school.

DACA is an Obama-era program that currently shields from deportation roughly 640,000 immigrants who were brought into the U.S. as children.

Robles says growing up, there was always a looming fear for the safety of her family.

"That's definitely something that all children of undocumented parents have to go through, whether they're documented or not, is having that conversation of, 'If I get deported, this is what you need to do.' And that's a really scary conversation to have at any age," she says.

"Even today, I'm a 24-year-old, and I still have plans if something were to happen and I know exactly how I would make sure my siblings are safe and things like that."

Only recently has Robles felt comfortable sharing her family's story.

"I grew up in a majority-white neighborhood," she says. "So for me, it was even hard to talk about my status. I have friends who I've known 10 to 15 years, and I'm just now letting them know what my situation is because, you're obviously scared. I've had friends who have had their parents deported because someone called [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] on them."

Of particular concern to Robles is a path toward protected status for her parents, and the DACA program itself.

Shortly after taking office, Trump attempted to dismantle DACA. The Supreme Court recently sided with recipients in protecting the program, but the administration is still trying to scale it back. It has reduced the renewal period for current recipients from two years to one year, which doubles applicant fees, and has stopped processing new applications.

Robles says she feels compelled to speak up now in a year that has brought a national reckoning on racial injustice.

"If I can see Black activists going out there and getting arrested and getting beaten, then why would I not want to do the bare minimum and share my story, you know?"

In her work and activism, Robles often faces a common refrain: that people have no plans to vote.

"They're like, 'Well [the impact of voting is] very marginal.' And so for me, what's been really important is to just come from a place of a lot of vulnerability and say, 'Some of us actually live in those margins and some of us, our lives are decided by those margins.' "

Robles also says it can feel disheartening to push so hard for people to vote, knowing it's not possible for her.

"I definitely get a little sad, but it also gives me hope. I think a lot of people have these fantasies of like what their future [will be] like. A lot of little girls always imagine, 'Oh, my wedding day.' For me, that's always been, 'Oh, the day that I become a citizen and get to vote!' "

Cristina Jiménez, co-founder of United We Dream Action, an immigrant youth-led organization, says people such as Robles are the most effective messengers for political participation.

"When you hear from people whose lives have been impacted by a policy and by how we vote, that really builds the consciousness of people around us, that our vote matters a lot," she says.

It's a story that's personal for Jiménez, too.

"Growing up undocumented, not having the right to vote and living in this country for over 20 years, I will be voting for the first time after becoming a citizen last year," she says. "This is my first presidential election. And when people [ask] me why am I passionate about this election,it's because I have experienced directly how policies that are voted on by elected officials have a direct impact on people's lives."

United We Dream Action is also trying to organize as Trump runs for reelection, four years after building a base of support among mostly white, native-born voters, with an anti-immigrant platform that he's built on while in office.

Though polls show Trump performing better with some minority groups than he did in 2016, his record while in office may help organizers such as Robles make voters who oppose Trump's policies more motivated to turn out than four years ago.

She recalls a conversation with a white man who said he wasn't planning to vote because it wasn't worth it.

"There's a certain subset of Americans who definitely treat politics as a spectator sport as opposed to how I see it as a means of survival," she says. "I did bring up how it's really easy to make these judgment calls when your life and your well-being isn't the one at stake. At that point, I don't know if changed his mind, but he definitely left with that to think about."

Robles says she'll keep having those conversations right up to Election Day.

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She Can't Vote Herself, But This DACA Recipient Is Working To Register Others

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These days, Miriam Robles spends a lot of time on the phone. In between her day job as an environmental justice organizer at Mi Familia Vota, a Latino political advocacy group that opposes President Trump, Roblesphone-banks to register new voters. One new voter she's worked with is her 18-year-old brother, Kevin.

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President Trump on Wednesday again said widespread distribution of a vaccine against the coronavirus would happen before the end of the year, directly contradicting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield. The CDC chief testified earlier Wednesday that a vaccine would not be widely available until next spring or summer.

Trump said he expects the government to be able to distribute a vaccine "sometime in October," though "it may be a little later than that."

When asked why his message on a vaccine timeline and the efficacy of masks differed so profoundly from the CDC director's, Trump said that Redfield had "made a mistake" and "misunderstood" the questions.

"He's contradicting himself," Trump said of Redfield. "I think he misunderstood the questions. ... But I'm telling you, here's the bottom line: Distribution is going to be very rapid. He may not know that. Maybe he's not aware of that. And maybe he's not dealing with the military, etc., like I do. Distribution is going to be very rapid, and the vaccine's going to be very powerful."

Trump in his Wednesday briefing also refuted Redfield's assertion to a Senate panel that wearing a mask remains "the most important, powerful public health tool we have."

Trump instead downplayed the importance of masks compared to a vaccine while also mocking his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, for routinely wearing masks in public spaces per public health guidelines.

"The vaccine is going to have tremendous power. It's going to be extremely strong. It's going to be extremely successful. We're not going to have a problem," Trump said. "And the mask may help. And I hope it helps. I think it probably does. But again, the mask is a mixed bag. There are some people, professionals ... that don't like the masks because of the touchiness."

On Biden, the president said: "Joe feels very safe in a mask. I don't know. Maybe he doesn't want to expose his face."
Health officials testify to Senate panel
Top Trump administration health officials testified Wednesday that a vaccine for COVID-19 is not likely to be widely available until next spring or summer, and stressed the importance of wearing a mask in the fight against the coronavirus.

"I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine," Redfield told a Senate panel Wednesday.

Redfield, along with Adm. Brett Giroir, head of the Trump administration's testing effort, and Bob Kadlec, who heads the Department of Health and Human Services preparedness and response efforts, appeared before a Senate subcommittee on response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Vaccine timeline
Redfield said a vaccine might become available in November or December for first responders but not widely available until "the second or third quarter" of next year. He later testified it would take six to nine months after the Food and Drug Administration had authorized the vaccine before it could be distributed nationally.

Trump has repeatedly said that a vaccine would be ready in a much quicker time frame. "We're going to have a vaccine in a matter of weeks, it could be four weeks, it could be eight weeks," Trump told Fox News this week, adding that it "could be" before the election, and that "we'll start delivering it immediately upon getting it."

Those remarks contradict what most health officials have been saying, including one of the leaders of Operation Warp Speed, the administration's drug development program. Dr. Moncef Slaoui told NPR that it was "extremely unlikely" that a vaccine could be ready before the election.

Speaking after being briefed by scientists Wednesday, Biden cast doubt on Trump's truthfulness regarding development of a vaccine. "I trust vaccines. I trust scientists. But I don't trust Donald Trump," Biden said. He added that if a vaccine met certain criteria, he would urge people to take it.

Last week, nine drugmakers signed a pledge that they will not submit vaccine candidates for FDA review until their safety and efficacy are shown in large clinical trials. ( Here's more on how you can tell if a vaccine is working in these types of studies.)
Defending report's "scientific integrity"
Redfield, the CDC director, also defended the integrity of scientists at the agency during the hearingafter accusations by a leading HHS official that there was a "resistance unit" of scientists and they were guilty of "sedition."

Redfield said that "not only is it not true, it deeply saddened me when I read those comments."

"CDC is made up of thousands of dedicated men and women, highly competent; it is the premier public health agency in the world," he added.

The top spokesman for HHS, Michael Caputo, who is now on leave, alleged in a Facebook Live broadcast this week that government scientists were working to undermine the Trump administration.

Redfield also denied that a key HHS report, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, had been altered or amended to cast the Trump administration in a more favorable light.

"The scientific integrity of the MMWR has not been compromised; it will not be compromised on my watch," Redfield vowed.

Politico first reported, and NPR later confirmed, that Caputo and his scientific adviser, Paul Alexander, sought to review the reports before publication.

HHS announced Wednesday that Caputo would be taking a 60-day leave of absence to "focus on his health and the well-being of his family" and that Alexander will be leaving the department.
Administration's pandemic response
In her opening remarks, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the panel, blasted Trump, referring to reporting in Bob Woodward's new book about what the president knew about the virus versus what he said publicly.

"I was deeply angered last week to hear President Trump admitting that even though he understood COVID-19 was even more deadly than your strenuous flu, that's a quote, he was intentionally playing down the crisis," she said.

Giroir testified that since "post-Memorial Day peaks," the number of new COVID-19 cases is down 19%, the number of hospitalizations is down 49% and the number of deaths is down 33%. But Giroir testified that "these gains could be fleeting or even reversed" if people stop wearing masks and avoiding crowds.

More than 190,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, and the death toll is expected to surpass 200,000 later this week.

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Contradicting The CDC, Trump Says COVID-19 Vaccine Could Be Ready By End Of Year

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President Trump on Wednesday again said widespread distribution of a vaccine against the coronavirus would happen before the end of the year, directly contradicting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield. The CDC chief testified earlier Wednesday that a vaccine would not be widely available until next spring or summer.

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The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday at age 87will inevitably set in motion what promises to be a nasty political battle over who will succeed her at the Supreme Court.

Just days before her death, as her strength waned, Ginsburg dictated this statement to her granddaughter Clara Spera: "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

She knew what was to come. Ginsburg's death will have profound consequences for the court and the country. Inside the court, not only is the leader of the liberal wing gone, but with the court about to open a new term, Chief Justice John Roberts no longer holds the controlling vote in closely contested cases.

Though he has a consistently conservative record in most cases, he has split from fellow conservatives in a few important ones, casting his vote with liberals for instance, to protect at least temporarily the so-called DREAMers from deportation by the Trump administration, to uphold a major abortion precedent and to uphold bans on large church gatherings during the pandemic. But with Ginsburg gone, there is no clear court majority for those outcomes.

Indeed, a week after the upcoming presidential election, the court is for the third time scheduled to hear a challenge brought by Republicans to the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. In 2012, the high court upheld the law by a 5-4 ruling, with Roberts casting the deciding vote and writing the opinion for the majority. But this time the outcome may well be different.

That's because Ginsburg's death gives Republicans the chance to tighten their grip on the court with another appointment by President Trump, allowing conservatives to have a 6-3 majority. And that would mean that even a defection on the right would leave conservatives with enough votes to prevail in the Obamacare case and many others.

At the center of this battle will be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. In 2016, he took the unprecedented step of refusing for nearly a year to allow any consideration of President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, a widely respected centrist liberal whom Republicans had previously praised as the kind of nominee they would like from a Democratic president.

Back then, McConnell's justification was the upcoming presidential election, which he said would allow voters a chance to weigh in on what kind of Supreme Court justice they wanted.

But now, with the tables turned, McConnell has made clear he will not follow the same course. In a statement Friday, McConnell said Trump's nominee to fill the vacancy left by Ginsburg's death would receive a vote on the Senate floor.

"In the last midterm election before Justice Scalia's death in 2016, Americans elected a Republican Senate majority because we pledged to check and balance the last days of a lame-duck president's second term. We kept our promise. Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president's Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year," McConnell said in a written statement.

"By contrast, Americans reelected our majority in 2016 and expanded it in 2018 because we pledged to work with President Trump and support his agenda, particularly his outstanding appointments to the federal judiciary. Once again, we will keep our promise."

It's unclear of the timing of the vote, and the traditional nomination process takes longer than the amount of days left before the November election.

McConnell's tactics have worked well for the GOP in the past, firing up the Republican base, and proving a major factor in Trump's 2016 election. With a Republican in the White House, McConnell then stripped from the Senate rule book just about every procedural rule that allowed the minority party to slow down controversial nominees.

So what happens in the coming months will be bare-knuckles politics, writ large, on the stage of a presidential election.

For some Republicans facing reelection, Ginsburg's death puts them between the proverbial rock and a hard place. A vote to confirm another Trump nominee could, for instance, doom the reelection prospects of Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Cory Gardner of Colorado. But a vote against confirmation could infuriate conservative Republicans in their states, depressing both campaign contributions and turnout for them.

But even if both were to vote against confirmation, a huge assumption since they have never voted against a Republican Supreme Court nominee, the Democrats would still need two more Republican votes. They might get Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, but they would still be one vote shy because of Vice President Pence's tie-breaking vote. It's hard to see where that extra vote would come from. Tennessee's Lamar Alexander is the most moderate of the retiring Republican senators, but he is McConnell's closest friend in the U.S. Senate.

It will be a fight Ginsburg had hoped to avoid, telling Justice John Paul Stevens shortly before his death that she hoped to serve as long as he did - until age 90.

"My dream," she said in an interview, "is that I will stay on the court as long as he did."

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Justice Ginsburg's Death Sets Up Political Battle In The Senate

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subscribe to The NPR Politics Podcast podcast The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday at age 87will inevitably set in motion what promises to be a nasty political battle over who will succeed her at the Supreme Court.