Month: March 2020

President Trump’s Oval Office speech last week was a massive dud and the stock market took a huge dive last Thursday. So Trump decided to take the bull by the horns and held a press conference in the Rose Garden with a group of CEOs just before closing time the next day. The market made a sharp upward turn as he spoke and the president was extremely pleased with himself. Numerous reports about the deliberations within the dysfunctional White House over the past week, however, have made it clear that was the only thing that pleased him.

According to the New York Times, it’s been an extremely chaotic time with infighting among the various task force members, Jared Kushner stepping all over everyone’s toes and incompetent leadership from the top. In other words, it’s been business as usual in the Trump administration. Unfortunately, this time this bumbling White House is confronting its first real crisis and one of the most serious global challenges in decades.

On Sunday, Trump appeared in the White House briefing room to announce that the Federal Reserve had cut interest rates virtually to zero, but on Monday the market dropped precipitously again. Although Trump obviously thought that he could turn it around with another end-of-day press conference, it didn’t work. The market closed down nearly 3,000 points, and every bit of news about the coronavirus was so bad that even Trump dialed down his bragging a notch and avoided the incessant happy talk that had pervaded all his other appearances.

One thing the president had noticed, apparently, was that Vice President Mike Pence was getting good reviews in the media for his daily briefings, with newspapers and cable news pronouncing that his serious tone was welcome and necessary in the crisis. It is, therefore, no surprise that Trump led the briefing again on Tuesday, shoving Pence to the background. Why let the veep hog all that good press?

As Dan Froomkin noted this week in Salon’s Press Watch column, many members of the media remarked on the change in Trump’s “tone” on Monday, although by the end of the briefing the president had reverted to form:

But Trump being Trump, he couldn’t bring himself to apologize for the many lost weeks of insufficient federal response, nor admit even the tiniest flaw: He rated his performance a 10 out of 10. And soon enough, he was back to sending out vile tweets about the “Chinese Virus” and attacking “failing” governors who had the audacity to critique the federal response.

Froomkin pointed out that the press, for the most part, has looked for leadership among other players in this crisis, particularly health experts, governors and mayors who have stepped into the breach both in terms of actual response and delivering the clear public information required in an emergency such as this. After Tuesday’s briefing, a reporter asked the president why he’d changed his tone on Monday. Trump said that he hadn’t changed it at all, adding, “I have seen that people actually liked it.”

The truth is that he’s not the only one who has changed his tone. Fox News and other right-wing media have made an abrupt pivot as well, and as has been the case throughout the Trump presidency, it’s a chicken-and-egg question as to who went first.

This compilation by the Washington Post illustrates the change:

How Fox News has shifted its coronavirus rhetorichttps://t.co/iWGZqoprvY pic.twitter.com/L9nITMkV6F

— The Fix (@thefix) March 17, 2020

Some right-wing commentators are now saying that Trump has made “a sharp pivot to a “wartime” footing,” taking command of the crisis. Former Trump communications director Jason Miller said, “This is a war unlike anything we’ve faced in American history and it’s going to take an unconventional president who isn’t trapped by preconceived notions of doing things the way they’ve always been done to lead us through this.”

His leadership has certainly been “unconventional” up until now:

“Trump didn't cause the pandemic. What he did was squander America's only advantage—a lag time during which to prepare for the crisis—thus encouraging the spread of the disease when it might have been contained. He has, in real and material ways, made this crisis worse.” pic.twitter.com/dpfEqH02uI

— Sarah Longwell (@SarahLongwell25) March 17, 2020

Trump likes the war metaphor.

The world is at war with a hidden enemy. WE WILL WIN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2020

I felt a little sense of déjà vu as I read those pieces and watched the media response to Trump’s appearance on Tuesday. It recalled an earlier episode in which a president looked like a deer in the headlights during a crisis and was then elevated to heroic status by the press when he appeared at Ground Zero with a bullhorn and spoke to the assembled rescue workers:

I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!

The ecstatic reaction from the media fully activated the impulse to rally around the president, and that was the end of virtually all skepticism about the American response to the 9/11 attacks for the next year. The media made George W. Bush into a “wartime” leader that day, and granted him all the power that came with it.

We are once again facing a national crisis. This time it’s not just hitting a couple of cities, as devastating as that was. This is affecting everyone in the country. The economic fallout stands to be even worse than the 2008 financial crisis. And once again, you can sense that the media is longing to anoint a leader to perform some ostensibly heroic ritual to make us all feel better.

That’s why my antennae went up when I heard all the TV commentators making so much of Trump’s new “tone” and how he seemed to be a different, more serious president. This comment by Dana Bash at CNN was so effusive that the Trump team sent it out to their followers:

Watch CNN's Dana Bash praise President @RealDonaldTrump's leadership on the coronavirus:

"He is being the kind of leader…that people need and want and yearn for in times of crisis and uncertainty." pic.twitter.com/gvKSqWN6ge

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) March 17, 2020

The AP headlined an article, “Trump changes his tone, gets real on the coronavirus threat.” CNN published one called “What drove Trump’s newfound somber tone on coronavirus.” In fairness, both articles feature plenty of skepticism and don’t soft-soap Trump’s failures so far. But as this crisis deepens there is a danger that mainstream media commentators and pundits will fall into the same trap they fell into after 9/11.

Trump won’t be able to hold his big rallies for the foreseeable future. They were key to his success in 2016, but it wasn’t the rallies themselves as much as all the free TV exposure they gave him. I think he has figured out that he will be able to hold these televised press conferences, surrounded by experts, and appear to be in command and look presidential instead.

Recall that he reportedly told a group of GOP donors at Mar-a-Lago just a week or so ago:

They’re trying to scare everybody, from meetings, cancel the meetings, close the schools — you know, destroy the country. And that’s ok, as long as we can win the election. But I really believe that if they see that the Trump administration is handling this virus in a professional, competent way, I don’t believe that’s going to hurt us.

Trump’s feral survival instincts have kicked in, and they’ve saved him many times before. If he can manage to control himself even a little bit, his supposed nemesis, the media, may give him the boost he needs to win again.

My Salon column reprinted with permission

“The era of small government is over,” declares Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times as the COVID-19 crisis deepens. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told the public Tuesday the epidemic there might not peak for another 45 days.

Peak.

Worse, New York would need as many as 110,000 hospital beds for treating patients. The state has 5,000. Most patients will need ICU beds and ventilators (30,000 of those; the state has 3,000 on hand), Cuomo said. He called on federal authorities to charge the Army Corps of Engineers with constructing temporary facilities to meet the need. That need will be nationwide and could last months.

Commenting on his past friction with President Trump, Cuomo told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, “We are going to have a real tragedy where people die because they couldn’t get the right health care. And I need the help of the federal government – I need that partnership. I’m a former cabinet secretary in the Clinton administration. I was Secretary of Housing and Urban development. I did disasters all across the country. I know the potential of the federal government and we need it here.”

There’s no heavier burden than a great potential, Peanuts‘ Linus once said. Now that we need to realize it, the man with the power lacks every quality needed to meet the moment, especially as a lawmaker, a statesman, and a human being. He cannot even fake empathy. He is the wrong man at the wrong place at the wrong time. Plus, Trump leads a political party ill-disposed to large-scale government action for mitigating human-sized tragedies.

Sometimes you go to war against a virus with the misleaders you have. What is required of them now is “to take responsibility for economic life on a scale not seen since the New Deal,” Bouie believes. They’ve spent over half a century trying to dismantle the original New Deal.

Echoes of Buck Turgidson

Odds are this will not end well. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that as many as two million Americans could die, many times more than died in WWII. Another estimate from the Imperial College London agrees with that two-million figure should efforts to contain the contagion prove insufficient:

If Britain and the United States pursued more-ambitious measures to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, to slow but not necessarily stop the epidemic over the coming few months, they could reduce mortality by half, to 260,000 people in the United Kingdom and 1.1 million in the United States.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has recommended $850 billion in economic stimulus to include bailouts for large businesses (naturally) and loans to small ones, plus an assortment of tax deferments and cuts. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah and several Democrats in Congress have suggested cash payments directly to citizens to help pay for housing, food and medicine while businesses are closed. None of which will help citizens fighting for their lives in hospital hallways.

Republicans have for decades eschewed “big government” action. Conservative ideologues funding them insist the Market (bless its name) is best equipped to meet human needs. But short-term shortages of hospital beds and ventilators will not be met by market demand. The acting president has spent the first three years of his tenure dismantling the supposed “Deep State” peopled with women and men who seek public service as a calling. He has replaced experienced public servants with fawning Trump-o-philes. Now when America needs experience and a steady hand most, Trump is left to outsource federal responsibilities to private sector CEOs driven instead by pecuniary impulses. The man who suggested raking forests to mitigate wildfires might as well try to learn the violin overnight.

Nothing on the table is too big for this moment, Bouie argues:

In forcing people to stay away from each other, the outbreak has made our mutual interdependence clear. This, in turn, has made it a powerful, real-life argument for the broadest forms of social insurance.

And for the party that pioneered American social insurance, the party of F.D.R. and L.B.J., it’s an opportunity to once again embrace direct state action as a powerful tool for preserving and promoting prosperity. If the era of small government is over, and it is, then it’s well past time for Democrats to seize a moment that belongs to them.

First, Democrats have to help an incompetent president and his party not kill their own constituents.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

I think we need more soothing in these troubled times. So here you go:

Working from home when your children’s school gets cancelled.https://t.co/f6Ona75Qh6

— Daniel Peter (@danieljpeter) March 13, 2020

oh my god, the chicago aquarium closed due to coronavirus, so they let the penguins run around and check out the other exhibits. (staff was present.) pic.twitter.com/YGa8CugymE

— Evan McMurry (@evanmcmurry) March 16, 2020

In these trying times I have nothing to offer you but my freshly bathed whippet drying herself off. pic.twitter.com/JQdRd1cr3p

— Tabatha Southey (@TabathaSouthey) March 17, 2020

Some humor? Some…well, I’ll let the legendary @darth decide. These puppers have no respect! Climbing all over mommy! #StayHomeSaveLives #Puppies #dogs pic.twitter.com/klrCcFTPXE

— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) March 17, 2020

Hug your furry friends, folks. It makes everything better.

Thanks to the Helpers. Let’s take care of ourselves and each other. Hanx pic.twitter.com/09gCdvzGcO

— Tom Hanks (@tomhanks) March 15, 2020

It’s not just Trump. His whole crew is a bunch of incompetent boobs:

Officials inside the State Department say they are disturbed at the way Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other senior administration officials have handled the building’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Over the last two weeks, officials inside the department’s headquarters in Washington and in at least two embassies overseas have voiced their frustrations to superiors about the absence of information on how the department planned to prevent community spread; the scant guidance on how to handle travel and meetings with foreign officials from hotspot regions; and the lack of transparency on internal coronavirus case numbers.

That’s according to five State Department officials, all of whom spoke to The Daily Beast over the last week on the condition of anonymity because they fear retribution from the secretary’s office. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment but Pompeo was set to brief reporters Tuesday afternoon.

“When the cases started to jump in the U.S., there was almost zero communication on whether we should continue on with our work like normal or whether we should curtail interactions with people from countries in Asia and Europe where the virus was already killing hundreds of people,” one official said. “We knew there were conversations ongoing in the secretary’s office, but there was no transparency about how they were handling all of it.”

The increasing frustration among officials at State comes as the Trump administration tries to play catch up with the rest of the rest of the world—to not only contain the virus but to treat COVID-19 patients with limited amounts of key medical supplies and equipment. The internal calls for more clarity from Pompeo’s office underscore the degree to which the department has struggled to maintain a foothold on the evolving crisis and to restore calm among its own people. 

Sure. Why should the Secretary of State be on top of a global pandemic just because he has employees arrayed all over the world who are dealing with that along with numerous other challenges?

The top officials of this administration have dropped the ball on every level, in every way. But why would that be a surprise? They are not serious people. They are Trump loyalists and they have been following his lead.

We know what that has been until this week: “keep the numbers down.”

This is horrific. They are still arresting undocumented workers and putting them in close quarters in holding cells with other people where they can spread and contract this virus. I am appalled:

In the darkness of the early hours Monday, about a dozen immigration agents gathered outside a Starbucks in Bell Gardens. For the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, who make daily arrests, it was supposed to be business as usual.

But that morning, they greeted one another with elbows instead of handshakes; the Starbucks where they rendezvoused was only grab and go; and they passed freeway signs that read: “Wash your hands stay healthy avoid COVID-19.”

The ICE agents were about to spend the day trying to arrest targets on a most unusual of days: the day after the California governor and L.A. mayor ordered people to ramp up their efforts of social distancing over the coronavirus. The agents had N95 respirator masks in their vehicles, just in case.

With safety measures taken across the state, immigrant advocates have criticized ICE for its continued enforcement operations. More than 45 organizations signed a letter this week calling on the Department of Homeland Security to suspend such actions.

ICE said it would take precautions, given the new reality. But the arrests would go on.

This should not be a priority. These are human beings who are as susceptible to this virus as anyone else. Like this guy:

Around 5 a.m., the officers waited outside of Pedro Castillo Bravo’s home. He was convicted in 2015 for DUI causing bodily injury and hit and run.

The officers knew the 56-year-old would soon be heading out to work collecting metal. In less than an hour, they spotted movement in the driveway.

“I can’t tell if it’s the target or not, but they got into the target vehicle,” an officer’s voice crackled over the radio. After Castillo prepared to leave, an officer knocked on his car door.

He asked if Castillo was sick or taking medication, to which he said no. He asked him if he’d been arrested before and Castillo admitted he had. The officer, who wore a pair of black gloves, handcuffed Castillo and placed him in the back of a white Dodge Challenger.

Since the 2015 conviction, Castillo said, he had not driven again drunk. That morning, after work, he planned to visit the grocery store — worried about the lack of food at home and the stores emptying amid panic buying.

“I’m the head of the house,” Castillo said, growing teary eyed. “If they have me here locked up, what about rent and food?”

He is deportable because of this crime he committed five years ago. There is no reason to do this in the middle of a crisis. It’s not as if he’s out there committing crimes as we speak. It’s cruel. But as they say, that is the point.

The next president has to do something about this rogue agency. Disband, reform, whatever. But this has to stop.

From Karoli Kuns at C&L:

During his press conference, Donald Trump claimed the WHO tests were not up to FDA standards, choosing instead to develop our own. Dr. Joseph Fair confirms the exact opposite is the case.

“The reason WHO didn’t offer us the test is because they only offered them for free to impoverished nations,” Dr. Fair explained on MSNBC. “We have to buy them.”

Turning to the question of flawed tests, Dr. Fair said, “The tests that were out that were inaccurate were — false positives and false negatives — were actually the CDC tests, not the commercial tests.”

“So that’s the opposite of what happened,” he concluded.

That is backed up by this report from the Washington Post

Founder of a small Berlin-based company, the ponytailed 54-year-old first raced to help German researchers come up with a diagnostic test and then spurred his company to produce and ship more than 1.4 million tests by the end of February for the World Health Organization.

“My wife and I have been working 16 hours a day, seven days a week, ever since,” Landt said by phone about 1 a.m. Friday, Berlin time. “Our days are full.”

By contrast, over the same critical period, U.S. efforts to distribute tests ground nearly to a halt, and the country’s inability to produce them left public health officials with limited means to determine where and how fast the virus was spreading. From mid-January until Feb. 28, fewer than 4,000 tests from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were used out of more 160,000 produced.

The reason the CDC tests weren’t used? Because they DID NOT WORK.

Here are the quotes from the health officials on the issue at the press conference this morning:

Officials have acknowledged that there are still not enough tests to meet demand, but on Tuesday they pushed back on criticism that the administration rejected a test from the World Health Organization that could have been used to save time until the U.S. developed its own test.

“No one ever offered a test that we refused,” said Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services. “This was a research-grade test that was not approved, not submitted to the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] … there was a small number that we have greatly surpassed in a very short period of time.”

The CDC decided to create its own test, instead of using the one developed by the WHO. 

The WHO test, which adopted a German test as its model, was developed soon after Chinese researchers publicly posted the genome of the coronavirus in January. It shipped millions of tests to countries around the world, but generally only those without the capability to develop their own.

The U.S. developed its own test around the same time, but manufacturing and quality control issues soon set it well behind the WHO. 

CDC officials acknowledged that one of the three components of the initial test were faulty, but it took weeks before the agency approved a workaround. 

Public health experts and some governors have also said bureaucratic red tape around approvals slowed the development of new tests in the U.S.

Administration health officials have been loosening regulations, and on Monday night the FDA said it would allow states to take responsibility for tests developed and used by laboratories in their states, without involving the federal government. 

Deborah Birx, a State Department official coordinating the White House coronavirus task force, told reporters that the testing delays were due to the rigorous scientific process involved in approving U.S. diagnostic tests.

“We were adamant about having a high quality test based on our commercial vendors,” Birx said. “Over the next few months you’ll begin to see that other tests that were utilized around the world were not of the same quality, resulting in false positives and potentially false negatives.”

President Trump then doubled down on the defense.

“So number one, nothing was offered, number two, it was a bad test. Otherwise, it was wonderful,” Trump said.

Last week, one of my Salon columns was about Trump’s task force, including Deborah Birx who came out and degraded her credibility even more than she already had by making this claim about the WHO tests this morning. She is part of the conservative evangelical cabal around Mike Pence in the White House. She may be a thoroughly qualified immunologist but she seems to be a Trumpie as well. After today I’m going to have a very hard time trusting anything she has to say.

57 days later. pic.twitter.com/umsfZHyBuo

— Lindsay Holst (@LindsayLHolst) March 17, 2020

Some words to the wise:

The media is telling us that today is the day Trump become a president. Again. He’s pivoted to being a great leader we can all count on. That’s a relief. I thought he bungled this whole thing.

“Big picture…”
pic.twitter.com/MQ49iyiTpM

— MJR jnr (@onetruebritt) March 17, 2020

“If you look at the big picture, this was remarkable from the president of the United States. It’s an important thing to note from an American standpoint, from a human standpoint. He is being the kind of leader that people need, at least in tone, today, that people need and want and yearn for in times of crisis and uncertainty” — Dana Bash, CNN

It’s good they’re telling us this. Otherwise, people who know what’s been going on might not have felt so reassured from his tweeting and press conference this morning.

Some highlights:

White House officials still have no straight answers for why more people haven't already been tested for coronavirus pic.twitter.com/tg20iurlvZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 17, 2020

Failing Michigan Governor must work harder and be much more proactive. We are pushing her to get the job done. I stand with Michigan!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2020

Cuomo wants “all states to be treated the same.” But all states aren’t the same. Some are being hit hard by the Chinese Virus, some are being hit practically not at all. New York is a very big “hotspot”, West Virginia has, thus far, zero cases. Andrew, keep politics out of it….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2020

REPORTER: You keep calling for unity. Yet you attack Democrats almost every day. Are you going to set the example?

TRUMP: "I only do that when I have to respond … if they are going to play fair, there will be nobody better than Donald Trump in terms of bipartisanship." pic.twitter.com/4jby3BWuzO

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 17, 2020

I don’t know about you, but that’s not the leadership I’ve been yearning for.

Following up on this post from last night, this piece in The New York Times laid out what our great Dear Leader has really been doing. Also not what we’ve been yearning for:

Senior aides battling one another for turf, and advisers protecting their own standing. A president who is racked by indecision and quick to blame others and who views events through the lens of how the news media covers them. A pervasive distrust of career government professionals, and disregard for their recommendations. And a powerful son-in-law whom aides fear crossing, but who is among the few people the president trusts.

The culture that President Trump has fostered and abided by for more than three years in the White House has shaped his administration’s response to a deadly pandemic that is upending his presidency and the rest of the country, with dramatic changes to how Americans live their daily lives.

It explains how Mr. Trump could announce he was dismissing his acting chief of staff as the crisis grew more severe, creating even less clarity in an already fractured chain of command. And it was a major factor in the president’s reluctance to even acknowledge a looming crisis, for fear of rattling the financial markets that serve as his political weather vane.

“What begins every kind of mobilized response by the president — clear assignments and some sense that this is an absolute priority — none of that seemed to be a part of the president’s discussion,” said Kathleen Sebelius, who served as the health and human services secretary under President Barack Obama. “The agencies were kind of left to their own devices.”

Crises are treated as day-to-day public relations problems by Mr. Trump, who thinks ahead in short increments of time and early on in his presidency told aides to consider each day as an episode in a television show. The type of long-term planning required for an unpredictable crisis like a pandemic has brought into stark relief the difficulties that Mr. Trump was bound to face in a real crisis.

Mr. Trump has refused repeated warnings to rely on experts, or to neutralize some of the power held by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in favor of a traditional staff structure. He has rarely fully empowered people in the jobs they hold.

John F. Kelly, the second White House chief of staff under Mr. Trump, tried to change the president’s habits, limiting who could reach him and how many people he could solicit fringe information from. But Mr. Trump found ways to get around Mr. Kelly’s edicts, calling people on his cellphone and issuing orders he did not tell Mr. Kelly about.

“Part of this is President Trump being Donald J. Trump, the same guy he’s always been, and part of it is a government he has now molded in his image, rather than having a government as it has traditionally been, to serve the chief executive, and to serve the job of governing the country,” said David Lapan, a former spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon, and a former aide of Mr. Kelly.

To his critics, it was only a matter of time before the president’s approach to governing would have severe consequences not only for him but also for the country at a time of crisis.

“In some ways, Trump has been one of the luckiest presidents in history, because that crisis didn’t come till his fourth year,” said Ron Klain, an adviser to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the so-called czar handling the response to the Ebola outbreak under President Barack Obama. “But it was inevitable, sadly, that it would come, and here it is.”

Yes, here it is, and he’s been a DISASTER so far. We need to deal with reality here, not some kumbaaya nonsense that his “tone” has changed (as if that means anything at all. )

Without the dedicated pandemic team on the White House’s National Security Council, which was disbanded in 2018, the management of the government’s vast coronavirus response fell to Alex M. Azar II, a former drug executive and Mr. Trump’s health and human services secretary.

But almost as a matter of course Mr. Trump did not want to highlight the virus as a public health threat when it was developing in China in January. Concerned about rattling financial markets, he signaled to advisers that he wanted to play it down, seizing on a health expert’s belief that the coronavirus might follow traditional influenza patterns and weaken after April. He told members of his private club, Mar-a-Lago, and said publicly that any danger would pass by April 1.

As the threat of the coronavirus accelerated, Mr. Azar and a small group of health officials with decades of government experience, including Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Kadlec, the assistant health secretary for preparedness and response, and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, began daily meetings on the sixth floor of health and human services’ Washington headquarters.

The group, was officially designated as a 12-person “task force” in late January by the departing chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, but personal disputes quickly sprang up as pressure grew from other agencies and departments to be involved.

Among the members of the task force, Dr. Fauci, an infectious disease expert who first became prominent explaining the AIDS epidemic to President Ronald Reagan, emerged as an effective spokesman who did not shrink from contradicting Mr. Trump.

The article then goes into the feuding and turf wars between Azar and everyone, which apparently added significantly to the dysfunction. Again, an example of exceptionally poor leadership at the top. Trump didn’t get involved in any positive way. But he did have one complaint:

But Mr. Azar has hardly escaped Mr. Trump’s criticism. The president has complained about Mr. Azar’s television appearances, and prefers to see Ms. Verma, who has been jostling for a more prominent position on the task force, giving interviews, people familiar with the discussions said.

He finally decided the needed a “czar” and picked Pence, who unexpectedly got some good reviews:

The choice was initially denounced by the president’s critics, who thought Mr. Pence would simply affirm the president’s desire to play down the looming threat. But some of those critics and several governors grappling with virus outbreaks have changed their mind about Mr. Pence, who has given near-daily briefings and, they said, has become a reassuring presence even as Mr. Trump has intermittently tried to retake the stage.

He’s re-taken the stage.

Pence is a cipher on TV now. And I think you know why.

And then there’s Jared:

Mr. Kushner’s early involvement with dealing with the virus was in advising the president that the media’s coverage exaggerated the threat. But when Mr. Pence’s chief of staff asked him to help merge the Pence and Trump communications operations because the two-person shop in the vice president’s office found itself overwhelmed and trying to keep up, Mr. Kushner, long critical of the White House communications shop, tried to supplement the vice president’s team with other aides. One of them was Hope Hicks, the former White House communications director, who recently rejoined the administration as Mr. Kushner’s aide.

But Mr. Kushner also sought to take on a more expansive role for himself despite his lack of knowledge on the topic and without talking to most of the task force members or public health experts.

Mr. Kushner’s involvement has also introduced a new but familiar face at the Department of Health and Human Services: Adam Boehler, a close friend of Mr. Kushner, a former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services employee and the head of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. Mr. Kushner dispatched Mr. Boehler to work with the department in its renewed efforts to increase testing, a move that Mr. Azar told associates he welcomed.

Mr. Kushner’s influence was immediately felt. He urged his father-in-law to go ahead with a ban on some travel from Europe and to declare a national emergency, after Mr. Trump had dithered and second-guessed himself for agreeing to it. He got executives at several pharmaceutical corporations to agree to help with mobilized testing efforts, and has pushed for an increase in medical supplies to hospitals.

But after Mr. Trump delivered an error-ridden Oval Office address last week, the president followed it with an appearance Friday in the Rose Garden in which he said Google had developed a coronavirus testing website that did not exist. Mr. Kushner was deeply involved in both efforts, and had sold his father-in-law on the website as a smart concept.

By Sunday evening, Mr. Trump was raging to aides that the press coverage was terrible after the promised national website failed to materialize. And on Monday, after Mr. Pence had been praised for his calm demeanor, Mr. Trump decided to answer questions from reporters himself.

“They’re working hand in hand,” Mr. Trump said in a White House news conference, flanked by members of the task force. “I think they’re doing really a great job.”

As for his own performance during the crisis? “I’d rate it a 10,”

Feeling reassured? Yeah, I knew you would be.

I’m not trying to beat the dead Trump horse here. But whether we like it or not, we are in the middle of a pandemic and a presidential campaign. It’s vitally important that we stay wedded to the truth about this imbecile in the White House and not bathe him in phony glory as they did with George W. Bush after 9/11 when he stood there with his bullhorn, especially since we know how badly this rsponse has been bungled.

Remember, what Trump himself said at Mar-a-lago just last week:

“They’re trying to scare everybody, from meetings, cancel the meetings, close the schools — you know, destroy the country.

And that’s ok, as long as we can win the election.

But I really believe that if they see that the Trump administration is handling this virus in a professional, competent way, I don’t believe that’s going to hurt us.”

Get out of the way. Do it now.

Through neglect, lies, opportunism, and sheer incompetence, Trump managed to transform an extremely serious health crisis into a global catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. Thousands, if not millions, more people will die because Donald Trump is in charge instead of a president who knows what s/he is doing. While this virus spread unchecked, Trump wasted weeks and weeks of time, minimizing the obvious problem, obsessing over his ratings and poll numbers, bragging about what a genius he was, flaunting his racism, and flat-out lying to the world.

Just go. And take Pence, Kushner, Miller, and your whole worthless crew with you.

This monumental disaster is fully and completely Donald Trump’s responsibility. And it is just beginning.