Month: March 2020

Does he wish now he’d stayed home in his gilded penthouse on Fifth Avenue? The short-fingered vulgarian, his ego inflated with helium and daddy’s money? He would show them, show them all. Especially the black guy. Being president during a pandemic must be the rudest awakening for a man hopelessly out of his depth (none) on his best days. No on-the-job training he would have ignored could have prepared him for this. He cannot bully the coronavirus into submission, litigate it to death or boast it away.

Does he give a thought for the millions of lives soon to be lost on his watch? Or does an atavistic drive for his own survival and for perpetuating delusions of greatness occupy his time? He’d rather be cheating at golf, that’s certain.

The rest of us normally spend our days just trying to get by, pay the bills, and maintain our relationships in a world increasingly hostile to them all. People of the acting president’s class — the Midas cult — view the world through the lens of money. “You can measure your manhood by it,” James Taylor sings, and many do. For them, the list above from CNN Business is something no amount of Viagra can remediate. Although pathological narcissism seems to be holding it own.

With its new “tone,” the White House response to the pandemic is too little too late. Even so, the acting president rates his performance 10 out of 10 while conceding the country may be headed for recession. “Major airlines could be bankrupt by the end of the year,” blares one headline. “Say Goodbye to Movie Theaters,” reads another. And to reelection, he has to wonder.

During this election season, during this period of social distancing, are people watching the White House’s belated, fumbling response to the pandemic and rethinking their priorities and their choices? What if someone who listened to Dr. Anthony Fauci had been president? Fauci is the only one worth trusting, and still he is hamstrung by Donald Trump’s multiple deficiencies, trustworthiness being foremost among them.

Michael Gerson ponders the imbecility of the “government is the problem” philosophy that’s driven the Republican Party since before Ronald Reagan pronounced it. The rotten fruit of that philosophy brought Trump to power. Republicans in Congress at the beginning of this epidemic chose not to relieve him of command before his replacing competence with sycophants cost lives through criminal neglect. They voted their pocketbooks and power instead.

“Who cares about integrity, wisdom and public spirit when the stock market is rising and the economy is booming?” Gerson writes. We all should have cared. They should have cared. They did not:

It has recently been common in our politics to assert that the establishment has failed, that our institutions and systems are corrupt, and that we need political disrupters to shake things up or burn things down. This is now revealed as the political philosophy of spoiled children. We no longer have the luxury of apocalyptic petulance or the language of faux revolution. We need trusted experts to carry hard truths. We need our systems and institutions to bear enormous weight. We need public officials to encourage an orderly urgency, to repair what is broken and to calm irrational fears.

Perhaps all these lessons will be quickly forgotten once the emergency is lifted. But it would be better if this period were known as the “Great Sobering,” when our country relearned the high stakes of politics, the indispensability of public character and the importance of a functioning president.

The political cult behind this president set out to prove government is the problem through decades of policies meant to weaken and shrink it enough to drown it in the bathtub. Failure-by-design in a time of crisis would prove them right and allow the vultures of avarice to pick its metaphorical bones. Now they will have real ones to pick as well as each other’s.

Six San Francisco Bay area counties have ordered 6.7 million residents to shelter in place until at least April 17 to slow the spread of COVID-19, the ice-nine of our time. (He wouldn’t get the reference.) Two emergency room physicians on opposite sides of the country are in critical condition after exposure, one man in his 40s in Washington state and another, 70, in New Jersey. COVID-19 is no respecter of class.

Somewhere in an alternate universe, it’s St. Patrick’s Day.

Update: Somewhere in an alternate Washington, D.C. there are still adults trying to un-FUBAR this mess.

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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.

This piece by Gabe Sherman documents Trump’s odyssey over the past couple of weeks leading to his reluctant acceptance that he’s dealing with an emergency. As recently as last week he was calling sports teams to beg them not to cancel their seasons thinking he could finesse this problem by pretending it doesn’t exist:

 “Trump thinks this is a media problem,” a Republican close to the White House told me. Treating COVID-19 as a public-relations crisis put Trump at odds with the medical community, including the White House’s chief coronavirus adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci. During an interview on Meet the Press this weekend, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases urged the United States to move toward a national lockdown similar to the actions taken by Italy and Spain. “I think we should really be overly aggressive and get criticized for overreacting,” Fauci said.

With the markets in free fall despite emergency action by the Fed over the weekend, Trump is waking up to the reality that’s been clear to everyone: Coronavirus poses a once-in-a-hundred-years threat to the country. “In the last 48 hours he has understood the magnitude of what’s going on,” a former West Wing official told me. As Trump processes the stakes facing the country—and his presidency—he’s also lashing out at advisers, whom he blames for the White House’s inept and flat-footed response.

He has to blame someone and this time it’s Jared’s turn in the barrel:

Sources told me Trump is regretting that Kushner swooped into the coronavirus response last week. Kushner, according to sources, encouraged Trump to treat the emergency as a P.R. problem when Fauci and others were calling for aggressive action. “This was Jared saying the world needs me to solve another problem,” a former White House official said. One source briefed on the internal conversations told me that Kushner advised Trump not to call a national emergency during his Oval Office address on March 11 because “it would tank the markets.”

The markets cratered anyway, and Trump announced the national emergency on Friday. “They had to clean that up on Friday,” another former West Wing official said. Trump was also said to be angry that Kushner oversold Google’s coronavirus testing website when in fact the tech giant had a fledgling effort. Trump got slammed in the press for promoting the phantom Google product. “Jared told Trump that Google was doing an entire website that would be up in 72 hours and had 1,100 people working on it 24/7. That’s just a lie,” the source briefed on the internal conversations told me.

He probably would have tried to ride it out but it arrived on his doorstep:

One reason the president’s attitude may be changing is that coronavirus showed up at his doorstep, literally: Mar-a-Lago is now a hot spot. Last weekend, Trump interacted with a Brazilian government official who tested positive for COVID-19. The appearance of coronavirus inside the president’s bubble jolted the president’s inner circle that up until that point treated the virus more like a Democratic plot.

With coronavirus lurking on the property, about a hundred guests sipped cocktails by the pool at a 50th birthday party for Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, former Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle. RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel announced after attending the party that she was self-quarantining after experiencing flu-like symptoms. Another turning point was an intervention by Guilfoyle’s former colleague Tucker Carlson. A source who attended the party told me Carlson went to Mar-a-Lago to confront Trump directly about his failure to take the virus seriously.

But so what? What do we expect this incompetent to do about it? Well, not much apparently:

Now that Trump is engaged and the crisis is accelerating—the Dow dropped nearly 3,000 points on Monday—Republicans fear he is operating without a playbook at a time when one is desperately needed. On Sunday night, with no unified message coming from the government, rumors swirled online that Trump would imminently announce a national lockdown (the White House tweeted that the rumor was false). But several former White House officials told me they believed the rumor to be true. “This is not what he likes to do,” a former West Wing official said. “There’s no boogeyman he can attack.” On Monday, Trump reportedly told governors they’re on their own. “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment—try getting it yourselves,” Trump said on a conference call, according to the New York Times.

… Republicans fear a lockdown could compound the crisis if Trump is cooped up in the White House with nothing to watch but the news. “What’s he going to do, watch reruns of the Masters from 2017? He’s just going to watch TV and tweet and it’s going to get worse,” the former official said.

He has no playbook but taking credit for things he did not do and blaming others for the things he did. He is completely out of his depth and it couldn’t be more obvious.

Nonetheless, the press was very impressed today when he came before the cameras and admitted that up is up and down is down for a change. But it’s too late for that. He is who he is and he thought that he could replicate his magical stock rebound of Friday by showing up at 3:30 and … saying something. But as he stood there, trying unsuccessfully to sound like a normal person, the stock market ticker just kept going down and down and down until it closed 3,000 points down — the largest point drop and the second-largest one-day percentage drop in history.

He has always believed that everything in life can be fixed with a savvy PR strategy. Between his daddy’s money bailing him out and a willing media, it’s worked for him. But he doesn’t know what to do now and apparently, nobody around him does either (or, if they do, he won’t listen to them.) We must hope that the bureaucracy will somehow rise to the occasion and the state and local authorities can fill the gap.

I’ve always thought that Reagan’s quote, ““The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help ” was a ridiculously cutesy statement coming from a two-term president. But with Donald Trump in charge, for the first time, I think he had a point.

There’s a reason that Republicans have been very, very slow to recognize that we are in a crisis. They may not be realizing it even now because they’ve been convinced by their president and his Fox Greek Chorus that it’s a plot to destroy their Dear Leader.

But it appears that Trump and Fox may have decided their plan to stick their fingers in their ears and sing “lalalala” wasn’t working:

Fox News personalities such as Sean Hannity and Laura In­graham accused the news media of whipping up “mass hysteria” and being “panic pushers.” Fox Business host Trish Regan called the alleged media-Democratic alliance “yet another attempt to impeach the president.”

But that was then.

With Trump’s declaration on Friday that the virus constitutes a national emergency, the tone on Fox News has quickly shifted.

On his program on Friday, Hannity — the most watched figure on cable news — lauded the president’s handling of what the host is now, belatedly, referring to as a “crisis.”

“Tonight, we are witnessing what will be a massive paradigm shift in the future of disease control and prevention,” he said. “A bold, new precedent is being set, the world will once again benefit greatly from America’s leadership. . . . The federal government, state governments, private businesses, top hospitals all coming together, under the president’s leadership, to stem the tide of the coronavirus.”AD

[…]

Just a week ago, Hannity shrugged at the pandemic. “So far in the United States, there’s been around 30 deaths, most of which came from one nursing home in the state of Washington,” he said last Tuesday. “Healthy people, generally, 99 percent recover very fast, even if they contract it.”

By way of comparison, he added: “Twenty-six people were shot in Chicago alone over the weekend. I doubt you heard about it. You notice there’s no widespread hysteria about violence in Chicago. And this has gone on for years and years. By the way, Democratic-run cities, we see a lot of that.”

Ingraham, whose program follows Hannity’s, also seems to have had a fast-dawning recognition that the social and economic dislocation of the virus was more than just a Democratic talking point wielded against the president.

In late February, Ingraham called Democrats the “pandemic party” and displayed photos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) alongside enlarged images of coronavirus molecules. “How sick that these people seem almost happiest when Americans are hurting,” she said.

[…]

Her advice: “We need to take care of our seniors. If you’re an elderly person or have a serious underlying condition, avoid tight, closed places, a lot of people, don’t take a cruise maybe. Everyone else wash your hands, use good judgment about your daily activities. Yeah, pragmatic thinking, especially if you’ve been overseas recently in one of the hardest-hit areas.”

In fact, health experts have repeatedly said that everyone, not just “seniors” or the chronically ill, should avoid contact with other people, a strategy known as “social distancing.” Their advice extends to people everywhere, not just those who recently traveled abroad. (On Friday, Ingraham tweeted that it was a “great time to fly if not in at-risk population!” The tweet was later deleted.)

By Wednesday, after Trump announced a travel ban on people from the European Union, Ingraham had started calling the pandemic “this dangerous health crisis.” She characterized warnings issued by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Anthony S. Fauci about the potential spread of the disease as “sobering and scary to hear.”

[…]

There are more examples in the full article — about Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo and Trish Regan whose show was canceled after she claimed the virus was a Democratic plot.

This has been a stunning illustration of the destructive nature of Fox News and its symbiotic relationship with this grotesque fun-house mirror of a presidency. It has taken them two full months to realize that they were actually hurting their Dear Leader and killing their own audience with this nonsense.

But some habits are very hard to break:

Host Stuart Varney is now asking the former acting director of ICE whether we're "maybe importing the virus" via immigration through the US southern border pic.twitter.com/STOTk8Bw4P

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) March 16, 2020

This article about how South Korea managed to gear up for this pandemic in record time and “flattened the curve” efficiently:

How South Korea accelerated its coronavirus testing, while early missteps left the U.S. lagging far behind, is a story of flexibility, preparedness and painful lessons from a past fumble.

Much of South Korea’s current disease control response system was forged after a 2015 local outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, caused by a different coronavirus. At the time, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found itself unable to handle the abrupt surge in demand for tens of thousands of tests amid the largest outbreak outside of Saudi Arabia, which ultimately killed 38 patients and infected nearly 200.

The experience prompted the country to overhaul its CDC and pass laws to prepare for the next epidemic. Central to the changes was the ability to cut through a bureaucratic months-long process to get test kits rapidly approved and working during an emergency. The Zika virus epidemic of 2016 served as a small-scale dry run of the new system.

As luck would have it, last December, the South Korean government held a mock disease response drill — under the premise of a coronavirus outbreak.

By Jan. 11, when China had reported just 41 cases and the WHO was discounting the prospect of human-to-human transmission, South Korea was distributing tests even though it wasn’t yet possible to test for the specific strand of the novel coronavirus causing the outbreak in Wuhan. By Jan. 31, with seven known cases in South Korea, test kits based on the virus’ genetic code released by China had been distributed to local government labs across the country.

By the time authorities discovered a large cluster of thousands of infections in the southeastern city of Daegu in late February, the network of public health institutions and private labs and hospitals was prepared.

Early on, officials dropped the requirement that patients had to have traveled abroad in order to be tested, a criteria that has been an impediment to testing in America. When it became clear many of those who had attended the services of an obscure religious sect had been infected, authorities tested all of those with symptoms among the church’s more than 200,000 members. When outbreaks developed at a psych ward and at a call center, authorities called for a nationwide survey of all locked psych wards and all call centers. Officials also began screening all pneumonia patients with no known causes for the novel coronavirus.

Hong Ki-ho, director of laboratory medicine at Seoul Medical Center, who is also a member of the COVID-19 task force at the Korean Society of Laboratory Medicine, said Korea’s CDC, private labs and manufacturers had all contributed to the unprecedented scale-up of testing.

“It feels like a miracle that it all came together like this,” he said, noting the chaos and confusion the delays in testing caused during the MERS outbreak. “It’s so many times the scale of what it was during MERS, and we had so little time to prepare.”

Another key component of South Korea’s response is making tests free for the vast majority of those who have been screened, and covering the cost of their hospitalization and treatment. Even those who request a test without a doctor’s note can do so at the moderate cost of about $130.

After a peak in late February, when the number of infections was jumping by as many as 900 cases a day, the pace of new infections in South Korea has slowed to about 100 new cases reported Saturday. With new clusters being discovered in the densely packed Seoul metropolitan area this week, South Korea still faces challenges.

That hasn’t stopped the country from holding itself out as a model for other nations, highlighting the fact that it appears to be gaining a handle on the outbreak without the drastic travel restrictions China, the U.S. and other countries have imposed on their citizens.

“Public trust can only be earned and harnessed through full openness and transparency,” Lee Tae-ho, vice minister of foreign affairs, told reporters. “This public trust has resulted in a very high level of civic awareness and voluntary cooperation that strengthens our collective effort to overcome this public health emergency.”

I have a sneaking suspicion that the pandemic team that Bolton and Trump disbanded might have learned from the South Korean experience with MERS as well and would have launched into action earlier too. They had learned from H1N1 and Ebola here as well so there’s every reason to believe they could have marshaled a much more effective federal response than we got from Trump who just wanted to keep his “trade deal” going and his “numbers” down.

Heckuva job, Boltie.

This article in the Washington Monthly reports on an experiment in vote by mail in Utah which outlines exactly what every state should be doing in advance of November. In fact, they should do it in advance of any upcoming primaries if they have the time:

While Suncrest feels like one community—it has one Mormon church and one restaurant—it’s divided into two counties: Salt Lake and Utah. In fact, the county line runs right down the middle of it. Both sides are similar in population size; each is 90 percent white. In the 2016 election, however, they had dramatically different voter turnout rates. Suncrest’s Salt Lake County residents showed up to vote at a rate nearly 18 percentage points higher than their Utah County counterparts, with about 81 percent of Salt Lake’s registered voters casting ballots compared to Utah’s 63 percent.

What made the difference? The two counties used different voting systems. Whereas Utah County stuck with the traditional model of people lining up at polling places to cast ballots, Salt Lake County switched to conducting its election entirely by mail. Under that system, otherwise known as “vote at home,” voters receive their ballots in the mail weeks before Election Day and can either mail them back or drop them off at a secure site. In other words, Suncrest, a demographically homogenous community, offered something no other part of the country has: a natural experiment to compare traditional voting to voting at home.

Usually, an electoral reform is deemed successful if it increases voter participation a few percentage points. The jump in Salt Lake County’s turnout was on a whole other level. And the disparity wasn’t limited to Suncrest. In that same election, 21 of Utah’s 29 counties had switched to vote at home. Those counties had an average turnout rate of nearly 9 percentage points higher than those that voted the old-fashioned way—and 5 percent higher than was predicted by a generally accurate turnout forecast, according to a study by Pantheon Analytics that was commissioned by the Washington Monthly.Usually, an electoral reform is deemed successful if it increases voter participation by a few percentage points. In its first vote-at-home election, turnout in Salt Lake County surged by 18 percentage points.

The success of those counties led six of the remaining eight holdouts to try vote at home in the 2018 midterm election, including Utah County. Sure enough, Suncrest’s Utah side turned out 8 percentage points higher than it did two years earlier. Such an increase was especially unusual, given that midterms generally see lower turnout compared to presidential election years. Now, in 2020, Utah will run its first statewide election entirely by mail.

That has lessons for the rest of the country. For the past few presidential elections, national turnout has hovered around 55 percent of eligible voters; for the past few midterm elections, it has fluctuated from the mid-30s to the 50s. Before counties started mailing out ballots, Utah’s voter participation hadn’t been much better. But it addressed the issue, taking a cue from other states that were experimenting with vote at home to boost turnout.

[…]

If getting more people to vote isn’t enough, the outbreak of the novel coronavirus has made vote at home more essential than ever. The threat of the community-spread infection, which thus far has no vaccination or cure, could be more pronounced at polling places, where thousands of voters will stand close together in lines and put their hands on doorknobs, pens, and touch screens. Vote at home accomplishes two things at once: It takes away the threat of the virus spreading at polling places, and it mitigates the possibility that voters will not show up to vote out of fear of getting infected. For those who want to prevent a public health crisis from crippling a presidential election, the solution is already out there. It just also happens to have even broader lessons beyond how to vote during a pandemic.

That’s why Utah is so important: It shows the most politically palatable route to reform. Think of it like a business strategy. You start by giving customers a taste of a good product. Then, if all goes according to plan, they want more of it. In essence, Utah did precisely that by having its counties experiment with vote at home. They got voters hooked, simply by letting them try it out.

Read the whole thing. This primary has shown that same-day voting can be very different than early voting so that’s a wrinkle. I think we’ll need to think about that when it comes to primary elections. In fact, we need to think about a lot of things when it comes to primary elections.

I have been voting by mail for years now and its the best. If I lose the ballot for some reason I can go in and vote with a provisional ballot. It’s very, very easy as it should be for everyone.

There were some complaints about the bill the House passed last week after negotiations between the administration and Pelosi to blunt the economic effects of the coronavirus crisis on average workers. It was insufficient, leaving a number of workers behind. But I suspect they were all worried about this when they made their deal:

The Senate is under tremendous pressure to send President Donald Trump a bill passed by the House to help Americans deal with the coronavirus outbreak, but complaints from a few GOP lawmakers and technical snags could delay action for up to several days.

The package providing free virus testing and paid sick leave for many workers is almost certain to pass this week, though Senate rules allow any one senator to delay a final vote for days. The bill, which overwhelmingly passed the House early Saturday morning, is running into resistance from some Republicans worried about the impact of a temporary paid sick leave provision on small businesses.

It’s unclear when the Senate will vote on the virus bill. The chamber is set to debate a surveillance measure, and it would take the permission of all 100 senators to address the virus bill early in the week.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Sunday that the administration is trying to allay concerns about the legislation, which is aimed at blunting some of the economic impact for workers and families as the coronavirus outbreak spreads in the U.S.

“We are hearing feedback that certain small businesses are concerned about the burden of this. We were very focused, we need to get the money to people quickly,” he said on the “Fox News Sunday” program. “We don’t want them to have to deal with big bureaucracy.”

This is a perennial problem for Democrats. The Republicans in charge lead us into a crisis and then Democrats are forced to make compromises just to get anything done. Since right-wingers are nihilists, they really don’t care if people suffer. They count on being able to blame the Democrats for any suffering they cause and have their brainwashed voters believe them.

Trump has weaponized all this on a level we haven’t seen before. But he didn’t invent it. And McConnell is a master.

Here we have a hard-fought negotiation between the Houe and the White House which required some compromises to bring Mnuchin and Trump along. McConnell took off for a long weekend, signaling clearly that he didn’t give a shit and would happily let people go bankrupt if that’s what it takes. He and his henchmen are now leveraging that to get their own goodies and water down the bill further. What are the Democrats going to do about it?

They simply have to be voted out of power or this is going to get worse and worse. And it’s hard to imagine what that might look like at this point.

It feels as though the United States entered a new phase in the coronavirus crisis over the weekend. Although President Trump continued to tout his bungling response to the pandemic as a heroic success, the virus just keeps coming. Based on what we hear from all the experts, this is really just the beginning.

Local and state governments, along with the private sector, have stepped up with their own mitigation plans, canceling events and closing schools and nonessential services. Over the past few days, we’ve seen the closures of restaurants, bars, casinos and other businesses where people gather in groups all over the country.

I’m taking executive action to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 in @LACity by closing bars, nightclubs, restaurants (except takeout/delivery), entertainment venues and gyms until March 31 unless extended. Grocery stores will remain open. Watch live: https://t.co/iDFp1C4Zpz pic.twitter.com/IlTcanN2tA

— Mayor Karen Bass (@MayorOfLA) March 16, 2020

The CDC announced new guidelines over the weekend directing people not to gather in groups of more than 50.

Trump, on the other hand, still seems to be living in a bubble. He tried unsuccessfully last week to show his executive prowess with an Oval Office address that fell so flat the stock market dropped by 2,500 points. He was so proud that it regained 1,900 points the following day that he sent around autographed copies of the stock ticker to all his sycophants in the media.

Simply unbelievable @realdonaldtrump autograph on stock market chart 3-13-20. Lou Dobbs show: https://t.co/cpofPN3qGt

— Michael Shields (@Vigilantgrandad) March 14, 2020

He was still bragging about it over the weekend, when he apparently got tested after likely exposure to the coronavirus (his test was reportedly negative) and then announced the next day that he was “very happy” the Federal Reserve had reduced interest rates close to zero.

In his appearances and tweets, Trump made the usual false claims about what a great job he’s done and slandered the previous administration over its handling of the H1N1 flu outbreak. During a press briefing on Sunday, he insisted that the virus is “something we have tremendous control of.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, begged to differ. After Trump left the room, he said, “The worst is yet ahead for us. It is how we respond to that challenge that is going to determine what the ultimate endpoint is going to be. We have a very, very critical point now.”

Everything points to the fact that we are heading for a very rough ride for a while, both in terms of public health and economic security. We are not alone. The rest of the world is dealing with this too. But as far as I know, there no other leader of a Western democracy is actively misleading the public with happy talk and lies every day.

David Leonhardt of the New York Times wrote a weekend column looking at all of Trump’s comments over the past two months:

[T]hey show a president who put almost no priority on public health. Trump’s priorities were different: Making the virus sound like a minor nuisance. Exaggerating his administration’s response. Blaming foreigners and, anachronistically, the Obama administration. Claiming incorrectly that the situation was improving. Trying to cheer up stock market investors.

His fatuous comments and outright lies are not taken seriously by well over half the country. But his followers still listen to him, and believe what he says.

On the far fringe there are people such as this former Milwaukee sheriff, once shortlisted for a big job at the Department of Homeland Security:

Slightly less hysterical, but equally conspiratorial, was the former New York police commissioner recently pardoned by Trump:

Why do I feel this hysteria is being created to destabilize the country, and destroy the unparalleled and historic economic successes of President @realDonaldTrump?

Worldwide Deaths… Jan-Feb 2020
2,360: Coronavirus
69,602: Common Cold/Flu
240,950: HIV

— Bernard B. Kerik (@BernardKerik) March 16, 2020

He is echoing the president himself, who reportedly told GOP donors at Mar-a-Lago:

We’ve done good. But no matter what we do, it will never be good for the press. Because they’re using this to try and win an election. 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.

Trump’s supporters aren’t going anywhere, at least not yet.

The Washington Post reported on the various ways individuals are trying to piece together information about the outbreak. One anecdote featured some Arkansas pastors who were concerned their parishioners were not taking the crisis seriously.

“One pastor said half of his church is ready to lick the floor, to prove there’s no actual virus,” said King, lead pastor at Second Baptist church in Conway, Ark.

They are getting a lot of this from right-wing media, of course. I wrote about that last week and it isn’t improving:

Kellyanne Conway laughably calls Jeanine Pirro's Fox News show a "resource for America" to learn about coronavirus pic.twitter.com/aD6nyqL4iT

— Jason S. Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) March 15, 2020

The New York Times checked in with some Trump voters who said, incredibly enough, that they see someone who is listening and responding to experts, coming up with solutions and keeping the nation calm. One woman said, “I appreciate what Donald Trump is doing, saying, ‘Yeah, there’s a problem, we’re taking care of it, but don’t panic. It’s going to be OK, don’t freak out about it.'”

I suspect that most people freak out when hearing him speak on the subject because he clearly has no idea what he’s talking about.

According to the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released on Sunday, Trump’s job approval stands at 46 percent, exactly the same as it was last month before the crisis really hit. His core fans truly do believe he’s doing a heckuva job. And because of that, they see this unfolding crisis differently than the rest of the country:

Sixty-eight percent of Democratic voters are worried that an immediate family member might catch the coronavirus, compared with just 40 percent of Republicans who agree. Fifty-six percent of Democrats believe their day-to-day lives will change in a major way, versus only 26 percent of Republicans.

And 79 percent of Democrats say the worst is yet to come [the same view held by epidemiologists] versus just 40 percent of Republicans who hold the same opinion.

Forty-seven percent of all voters say they’ve stopped or plan to stop attending large public gatherings, which includes 61 percent of Democratic respondents but just 30 percent of Republicans. What’s more, 36 percent say they’ve canceled or plan to cancel travel, which includes 47 percent of Democrats but just 23 percent of Republicans.

And 26 percent say they’ve stopped or plan to stop eating out at restaurants, which includes 36 percent of Democrats but only 12 percent of Republicans.

What accounts for these differences? Republicans are being told how to respond by Trump’s own henchmen on their favorite “news” channel:

“If you’re healthy, you and your family, it’s a great time to go out and go to a local restaurant, likely you can get in easy. Let’s not hurt the working people in this country…go to your local pub” pic.twitter.com/jXdhOfwe9R

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 15, 2020

Everything points to the fact that we are heading for a very rough ride for a while both in terms of public health and economic security. We are not alone. The rest of the world is dealing with this too. But as far as I know, there is no Western Democratic leader aside from Trump who is actively misleading the public with happy talk and lies every day.

People keep saying that this is Trump’s Katrina, referring to President George W. Bush’s bungling of one of the worst disasters in U.S. history. But it pays to remember that Bush’s approval rating also didn’t fall much in the immediate aftermath of that storm. He was right where Trump is at the time, mired in the low 40s. That rating briefly dipped in the two months after the disaster hit and then bounced back up to 43%. It wasn’t until the next year that he drifted down into the 30s.

Maybe it took a while to sink in for Republican voters that their hero was failing them, and perhaps the same thing will happen with Trump. If this epidemic hits their own communities — and it will hit everybody’s — you’d think the Trump bubble might finally pop. I wouldn’t count on it. Their devotion runs deep and I’m not sure anything can break it, not even a disaster of unprecedented scale like this one. He could let their grandmother die of COVID-19 on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes.

My Salon column reprinted with permission

This seems, on the surface, to be a totally misbegotten attempt to secure early, exclusive access to a coronavirus vaccine for the United States. It is nothing of the sort. It’s just a cheap publicity stunt.

The entire purpose was to exploit the media and send a potent message to Trump’s base, that he is putting America First during the pandemic and doing everything he can to keep “us” safe.

And every time the media notes how despicable and selfish the Trump administration is behaving by trying to corner the world market on vaccines, they simply make it clearer to his base that Trump has their back — and no one else does.

Just as bad: Because the media, even now, hasn’t caught on to how deeply cynical and manipulative the Trump administration is, Trump is getting all this MAGA-boosting publicity entirely for free.

A few seconds of thought makes it clear that of course, the Trumpists were fairly certain a German company would never give Americans exclusive access to their vaccine, regardless of the cost. But if the Trump administration could leak to the press that “at least we tried,” it would appear to their base like they were actually doing something rather than flailing about (which is the truth).

Yes, the Trump administration really is that calculating. And yes, the MAGA-ts really are that gullible.

And yes, the media really are that naive to fall for such an obvious set-up.

A neoconservative is “a liberal who has been mugged by reality,” Irving Kristol famously wrote. We will watch a similar proposition tested on a national scale. What becomes of a Trump supporter mugged by the COVID-19 pandemic?

Politico ponders that question, though not by interviewing red-hats sickened by it:

While the MAGA movement is divided over how seriously to take the coronavirus threat or how to tackle it, the message among his supporters is increasingly unanimous: If Trump fails to control the virus, prevent its spread and prove his leadership, much less save the economy, he will lose the election and cripple his movement.

Trump’s supporters elected him because he was a “wartime leader” who could fight against the swamp and the elites, so they expect the same against a truly invisible threat, said War Room host and former Breitbart editor Raheem Kassam. “If, for a second, people think that he doesn’t have that strength, or he doesn’t have that fortitude, then it will become a problem,” he said.

The rest of the article quotes conservative figures of varying prominence, but not MAGAs diner patrons the press so often seeks out to take America’s temperature. Those soon to be running real temperatures will have their faith tested, both in Trump and in God. For them, this is not a theoretical exercise.

Construction litigator Mark Frilot is in a coma on life support in Louisiana. He’d been diagnosed and given treatments for the flu before becoming delirious:

Heaven Frilot said Sunday she could hardly believe it. Her husband is 45, a construction litigator who is “never, ever sick.” But now, after seeing images of huge groups partying in New Orleans on Saturday despite the state’s request for people to practice “social distancing,” she is speaking up, hoping her family’s experience can serve as a warning for those who underestimate the risks of COVID-19.

An elementary school administrator my sister knows (and his wife) are among a cluster of cases in Rome, Georgia. Kyle Abernathy is on oxygen and his wife has been transported to Emory Hospital in Atlanta. A local paper reports:

From Kyle Abernathy, “I have tried to be quiet on social media and have enjoyed reading all of our friend’s and families’ posts for prayer. I am so encouraged and uplifted to know we have such a strong support team behind us. As of now, April and I remain hospitalized. She is critical but stable, requiring a ventilator and sedation. Her body needs strength. Please pray for this specifically. She is my bride and I miss her. I want to be able to see her when she’s better. “

Clay Bentley sings in the same choir at the Church at Liberty Square in Cartersville, Georgia. Quarantined and in the hospital, initially he too was told he had the flu:

“I have had the flu before, but I ain’t never felt this bad,” he said.

He said he’d been told that seven or eight people in the choir were in the hospital.

The government conservatives worked so long to drown in the bathtub has floundered in responding to this pandemic. After weeks of dithering and spin, the Trump administration seems finally, slowly to be coming to grips with the reality of it in spite of the man leading them.

These victims will not be featured either in liberal or conservative thought journals. But the virus has hit them and their families hard. Should they survive, will their views on religion, politics, and the role of government in protecting them survive their “mugging”?

This crisis is just beginning.

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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.

This Kevin Drum post is sobering:

I’m not promising to do this every day, but having done it once it’s now fairly easy to update. Note that the y-axis on these charts now goes up to 140x because the base trendline from Italy has continued to grow. That will continue to go up until the number of new cases flattens out.

It’s worth noting that these growth rates are all based on official figures, and obviously they depend on how widespread testing is in various countries. The US numbers, for example, may be artificially low simply because we don’t have test kits available. We won’t know for sure until kits become widely available and we begin testing larger numbers of people.

Also worthy of note is that actions we take now will affect the growth of coronavirus a couple of weeks from now, but our growth rate over the next two weeks or so is probably set in stone no matter what we do. This is partly because of simple inertia in our public habits, and partly because the pool of victims that will be identified in two weeks already exists. They’re asymptomatic right now, but they won’t be for long. We should be preparing for a 10x increase in coronavirus cases over the next two weeks.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

We are right there with Italy.

By the way, they banned flights from China before we did. Just saying.