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Month: March 2020

Meanwhile …

Published by digby on March 14, 2020

Oh look: The latest revelations about the criminality of our First Family:

The Trump Organization, not unlike the Trump administration, is rife with stories of corruption and grift, incompetence due to the cutting of corners, and general crapulence. ProPublica and New York Public Radio station WNYC have published a brand-new joint investigative story about how Trump’s business interests in 1980s-1990s New York City included the bribing of tax assessors in order to lower The Apprentice host’s property taxes. Speaking with five former city employees and one former Trump organization employee, the reporters heard testimony implicating Trump’s business interests more directly in connection with a real estate housing scam that came to light in 2002.

The five former city employees were among more than a dozen who had been indicted in 2002, in what The New York Times called the “largest tax fraud case in the history of New York City government.” Trump has always maintained that he was ignorant of any of this happening, including the claim that in “one instance, tax payments on property owned by Donald Trump were instead applied to the account of a corrupt property owner.”

The Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, Alan Garten said that the ProPublica report was old news, and that all previous investigations had cleared Donald Trump and the Trump Organization of any wrongdoing. Pointing out that “at no time did the Trump Organization or any of its employees or principals ever pay anyone for the purpose of unlawfully obtaining a lower tax valuation,” Garten called the report “reckless” and questioned the outlet’s journalistic ethics.

However, this is not simply a re-reporting of what happened before. ProPublica and WNYC report now that two of the former New York City employees say they took bribes themselves “from middlemen representing the Trump Organization to lower assessments on 40 Wall St. after Trump took over the skyscraper in 1995.” Frank Valvo, a former city assessor who served prison time for the fraud, says he remembers a co-worker telling him that the Trump Organization had agreed to pay bribes, saying there was elation between him and the other corrupt city worker.

According to the men ProPublica spoke with, the bribes came in the form of envelopes handed over to them. Once, upon receiving an envelope they thought was a little light, they were told that “Donald Trump thought the employee should be making the assessment changes for free.” This is amazing, pointing to Trump’s narcissistic belief that laws shouldn’t apply to him, and that he shouldn’t even have to pay into the rigged system he himself benefits the most from.

Moreover, according to the report, a former Trump Organization employee was able to say that he or she knew that Trump had a meeting arranged with Thomas McArdle. McArdle, his son Stephen E. McArdle, and a man named Joseph Marino were cited by all of the indicted and convicted assessors as the middlemen involved in the New York City scam in 2002. While Trump did not end up attending this reported meeting with McArdle, the former employee told ProPublica that that meeting did take place and that it included money and false information to hand over to the city’s assessors to lower the property evaluation.

Trump has denied knowing McArdle or ever using him as a consultant or in any other way. As ProPublica points out, Trump sued the city in 2002, saying, ”I’m getting ready to bring a major lawsuit against all the property owners whose taxes I was funding, because I was honest and used legal channels. The other people used illegal channels and got better results.” He received a $100 million tax break as part of an agreement involving a secondary lawsuit he launched against the city at the same time over building affordable housing.

I realize that this seems sort of beside the point at this moment. But it’s important to document all this stuff. Someday this pandemic will slow and something resembling normal life will resume. And we will still have to reckon with the fact that this country put a criminal in the White House.

The Market (bless its heart) isn’t coming to save you

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 14, 2020

That giant sucking sound you hear is the leadership vacuum of the most incompetent, feckless administration in U.S. history. The acting president who has treated the coronavirus as a messaging problem finally rolled out his plan for filling that vacuum in a Rose Garden press conference Friday.

Donald Trump announced a national emergency over the pandemic in a ploy to arrest a stock market in free fall. He will compensate for his leadership deficits with a team of CEOs — men, naturally — from the country’s largest retailers and health care firms. That’s his plan anyway. Or rather, their plan.

Amid shaking hands(!) with them and dismissing suggestions his recent personal encounters with infected persons mean he is infected, Trump used the occasion to trail-balloon an epitaph: “No, I don’t take responsibility at all.”

Trump announced that Google is “helping to develop a website … to determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location.” His administration is working on it not just “strongly,” but “very strongly.” Trump told reporters Google has “1,700 engineers working on this right now. They’ve made tremendous progress.”

Google knows nothing about it, The Verge reported it first. Wired followed up:

A source at Google tells WIRED that company leadership was surprised that Trump announced anything about the initiative at the press conference. What he did say was also almost entirely wrong. There will be a coronavirus testing site, not from Google but from Alphabet sister company Verily. “We are developing a tool to help triage individuals for Covid-19 testing,” Google tweeted in a statement. “Verily is in the early stages of development, and planning to roll testing out in the Bay Area, with the hope of expanding more broadly over time.”

So, no.

Retailers, Trump said, will graciously offer sections of their parking lots for setting up drive-through virus testing. For “consumers,” Seth Maxon emphasizes at Slate. By Friday, several U.S. cities in cooperation with state and local healthcare providers had beaten retailers to establishing such stations, Business Insider reported.

Trump promised his partnership with the private sector would “vastly increase and accelerate our capacity to test for the coronavirus.” (That would be the government’s capacity he gutted nearly two years ago.) He then urged people not to get tested “if we feel that they shouldn’t be doing it.”

At a congressional hearing earlier in the week, Rep. Andy Harris, a Republican M.D., questioned Trump’s director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, about how a Democratic proposal to lower drug costs for people on Medicare might stifle private-sector “innovation.” Harris asked could Quest and LabCorp, given the miraculous power of a profit motive, have geared up to test for the coronavirus quicker than the government?

Alex Pareene continues at New Republic:

“As a clinician like yourself,” Redfield said in his answer, “I guess I anticipated that the private sector would have engaged and helped develop it for the clinical side.” He finished his response with more bewilderment: “I can tell you, having lived through the last eight weeks, I would have loved the private sector to be fully engaged eight weeks ago.”

Here were two men wondering aloud why reality had failed to conform to their ideology. Where was the private sector, exactly, during these eight weeks? How odd that these companies, whose only responsibility is to their shareholders, had failed to make up for the incompetence of this administration.

Odd, indeed. Trump told the press that under federal emergency authorities, the F.D.A. had approved a new test for the virus. “We therefore expect up to half a million additional tests will be available early next week,” Trump said.

Perhaps the acting president was taking credit for the half million testing kits and 1 million masks Chinese billionaire Jack Ma announced earlier Friday his charitable foundations would be delivering to the U.S. for free.

Taking credit for others’ successes and denying responsibility for his own failures are two of three things Americans can count on from Donald Trump. Scapegoating others for their misfortunes is a third.

As of this morning, it appears Trump will sign off on a bill “hammered out by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin” and passed through the House to “expand access to free testing, provide $1 billion in food aid and extend sick leave benefits to vulnerable Americans.”

Leave it to a woman.

Update: Got CDC director Redford’s name scrambled with questioner Harris. Fixed. (h/t RP)

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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.

Jared’s research

Published by digby on March 13, 2020

President Trump promised only the best people and so he has surrounded himself with the worlds most learned experts:

Just before midnight Wednesday, a doctor asked a group of fellow emergency room physicians on Facebook how they would combat the escalating coronavirus outbreak.

“I have direct channel to person now in charge at White House,” Kurt Kloss wrote in his post.

The next morning, after hundreds of doctors responded, Kloss explained why he sought the suggestions: Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, had asked him for recommendations.

Kloss, whose daughter is married to Kushner’s brother, sent Kushner 12 recommendations Thursday morning.

[…]

Trump appointed Vice President Mike Pence to lead a task force to combat the spread of the coronavirus two weeks ago. But in recent days as conditions worsened and criticism mounted, Kushner took a more active role, according to two people familiar with the situation.

Trump has tapped Kushner to lead on several contentious issues, including Middle East peace, immigration and criminal justice reform, all of which involved him engaging in lengthy consultations with impacted people before recommending a decision to Trump.

In a Facebook post, Kloss said Kushner is “now directly involved in the response to this,” referring to coronavirus.

The Facebook group, EM Docs, has nearly 22,000 members around the globe who are required to provide their credentials to join. The posts about Kushner’s request have been removed but a member shared pictures of them with POLITICO. The Spectator first reported on the posts late Wednesday.

This actually tracks with Trump’s earlier reliance on Fox News commentators, random military guys he runs into at rallies, cops etc over academics, Generals, and legal experts.

Recall:

So, what gives? Trump wants to know. Where’s his win? “We aren’t winning,” Trump complained, according to officials. “We are losing.” To help make his generals better understand what he was talking about the president of the United States compared U.S. policy in Afghanistan to the time his favorite restaurant in Manhattan closed down for renovations in the 1980s.

Trump told his advisers that the restaurant, Manhattan’s elite ‘21’ Club, had shut its doors for a year and hired an expensive consultant to craft a plan for a renovation. 

After a year, Trump said, the consultant’s only suggestion was that the restaurant needed a bigger kitchen.

Officials said Trump kept stressing the idea that lousy advice cost the owner a year of lost business and that talking to the restaurant’s waiters instead might have yielded a better result. 

He also said the tendency is to assume if someone isn’t a three-star general he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and that in his own experience in business talking to low-ranking workers has gotten him better outcomes.

It was a lie, of course. None of that happened the way he said it did.

Kloss reportedly wrote earlier on this Facebook page that he was relieved that Fauci was involved, so there’s that.

Apparently, neither the health experts or the financial experts Trump consulted knew what they were talking about. So he got Jared on the case. And that speech Wednesday night and the press conference today are the result.

Jared is a very stable genius, just like his daddy-in-law.

“No, I don’t take responsibility at all”

Published by digby on March 13, 2020

The press conference was basically an infomercial to pump the stocks of medical companies before the market closed. But these are the headlines:

If only they could shut him up.

If he won’t STFU, they need to pull the plug

Published by digby on March 13, 2020

Eric Boehlert with another great newsletter. (You can sign up here.)

As the coronavirus crisis becomes increasingly dire, news organization have to choose between covering the truth, and covering Trump.

Today, every time Trump addresses the novel virus and America’s unfolding pandemic, he makes things worse with his steady stream of reckless contradictions, lies, and misinformation. A proud agent of chaos, Trump is the worst possible leader at this moment, as the nation grapples with historic challenges.

On Friday, he held a rambling, incoherent Q & A with reporters at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, where he lied and said anybody who wanted to could get tested for the virus, called Washington’s Democratic governor a “snake,” and asked a Fox News reporter about the TV ratings for Trump’s recent town hall on that network. First thing Monday morning, the Down Jones averages tanked.

Then on Wednesday night, Trump delivered a stupefying address to the nation that was filled with falsehoods and sent global investors scrambling as it became clear, once again, that the United States still does not have a coherent, comprehensive plan to deal with this sweeping public health crisis. Instead of announcing the creation of field hospitals, surge testing for states, or the tapping of medical professionals from the National Guard, Trump announced an arbitrary travel ban from Europe, and garbled the facts in the process.

He’s an elected leader who’s desperately in over his head, as the policy-free president refuses to take seriously the perilous situation at hand. And with his careless speech Wednesday, Trump simply poured gasoline onto a blazing fire.

But here’s the truly pressing part, and the element the news media really has to deal with, even though it’s likely too scared to do so: The President of the United States is actively endangering the American public, and at what point does the press decide that dutifully broadcasting Trump’s misinformation is not in the nation’s best interest. At what point does the press unplug Trump for the good of the country? Or, put more simply, at what point does the press acknowledge there’s a madman in the Oval Office and that he’s doing real harm to this nation’s actual well being during our national health crisis?    

Normally we would expect the president to bring the country together, tell us al that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, and marshall a national response to the crisis we can believe in. But Donald Trump has made things worse from the beginning and continues to do so. If we manage to “flatten the curve” of this outbreak, it will be because state and local officials along with private businesses took the bull by the horns. It’s not as effective as a nationally led response but it’s the best we can do under these circumstances.

The biggest problem confronting us now is disinformation. And it’s coming from inside the White House.

Boehlert’s newsletter is free, by the way.

Trump’s very, very bad week. And ours.

Published by digby on March 13, 2020

The Dow Jones average dropped almost 10% on Thursday after two weeks of unprecedented volatility. It was the worst day on Wall Street since 1987. Cities and states have declared emergencies, and major sporting events have been canceled for the foreseeable future. Disney resorts are closed, Broadway is closed and schools in many cities and states around the country are closed. (That’s not true yet in the largest cities — but stay tuned.) Our nation is finally on the emergency footing experts have been predicting would be necessary for weeks now.

But that is no thanks to the president of the United States. In fact, he’s actively making things worse. From the beginning, he has been pretending that he already heroically saved the day — but his response has been nothing short of catastrophic.

One obvious illustration of Trump’s overwhelming incompetence in the face of this pandemic is that he personally appears to be oblivious to the most basic mitigation strategies that his experts have instructed everyone else in the country to observe. He is 73 years old. He has been in the presence of numerous people who have been exposed to the virus, from his appearance at CPAC to parties at Mar-a-Lago, yet he reportedly does not want to be tested. Nine members of Congress are in self-quarantine including the newly named White House chief of staff, Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro spent the weekend with Trump in Florida and we learned on Friday that Bolsonaro has now tested positive, following previous reports that his press secretary has the virus:

Most of those people have spent time with the president in recent days, including Bolsonaro and Graham. Trump has almost certainly been exposed but says he has not been tested and insists he will still shake hands with people. He went ahead and met with the Irish prime minister on Thursday. For a famous germophobe, our president is certainly being cavalier about this extremely contagious disease. More important still, he is not modeling the behavior experts are telling everyone in the country to follow.

But that’s entirely in keeping with his attitude about this epidemic since it was first brought to his attention months ago. Politico’s Dan Diamond reports that Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar tried to muscle his way past Trump’s aides back in January to try to make him aware of the impending crisis. Some among them, like Kellyanne Conway, didn’t think it was a presidential priority and Trump wasn’t interested.

As it became clear that the testing protocol had failed in epic fashion, Azar apparently didn’t feel comfortable offering the worst-case scenario to the president because he knew what his real concerns were:

Trump did not push to do aggressive testing because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of the Coronavirus outbreak, and Trump made it clear the lower the numbers on Coronavirus, the better for the president and his re-election this fall.

That was obvious from the president’s personal appearances but it’s interesting to see how it affected administration officials. By the middle of this week, Trump must have realized he could no longer treat the crisis as just another public relations problem he could tweet away with repetitive slogans. That was when he scheduled a fateful prime-time speech from the Oval Office.

Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and White House adviser Stephen Miller reportedly wrote the speech, and it was a total disaster. Trump called Covid-19 a “foreign virus” and announced a ban on all travel from Europe, mistakenly saying that European goods would also be barred. (He also made an exception for nations where, coincidentally, he owns resort properties.) He didn’t bother to inform European leaders in advance, explaining later that he hadn’t had time and anyway they hadn’t call him before they instituted a tax that one time.

The administration had to walk back a number of the president’s comments after the speech was finished. He had said cargo would be banned. It was not. He had said private insurance companies would guarantee coronavirus treatment at no cost. They had not. His original statement suggested that American citizens in Europe might not be allowed back to the United States. That comment led to chaos at European airports on Thursday morning as U.S. travelers paid exorbitant prices to get flights before the stated Friday deadline. But that wasn’t true either.

Keep in mind that all those mistakes were made in a prepared speech that Trump delivered with a teleprompter.

As for the travel ban itself, former Trump administration Homeland Security official Tom Bossert explained to MSNBC on Thursday that it was pretty much a waste of time:

Those travel restrictions and additional screening measures are going to have little to no effect at this stage on controlling the spread of the virus. I think people perhaps misunderstand that the virus is here already in large numbers and the reason we’re only 10 to 12 days behind Italy is that that disease takes some time to show symptoms in the people that have already been infected. So containment at this stage is not the best option.

According to the New York Times, Bossert has repeatedly tried to get through to the White House to discuss this but has been blocked by administration aides. So he’s writing op-eds and going on television to get their attention. Perhaps he’s on one of the enemies lists?

The problem is the same it’s been for the past month: lack of testing. Immunologist Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, testified before Congress on Thursday and said that “the system is not really geared to do what we are dealing with right now and that is a failing. … Let’s admit it.”

At virtually the same time, in a meeting with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar at the White House, Trump said that “testing has been going very smooth.”

According to the Washington Post:

Trump — who believed that by giving the speech he would appear in command and that his remarks would reassure financial markets and the country — was in “an unusually foul mood” and sounded at times “apoplectic” on Thursday as he watched stocks tumble and digested widespread criticism of his speech, according to a former senior administration official briefed on his private conversations.

Incoherent xenophobia isn’t quite as reassuring as he thought.

One imagines Trump’s mood was not improved when he saw both former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders give speeches that were clearly more presidential than his devastating appearance the night before.

Biden made the specific point that Trump’s incoherent foreign policy and his toxic behavior toward U.S. allies has made it nearly impossible to confront these difficult interconnected challenges.

As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes memorably quipped after Trump’s speech, “If all you’ve got is a wall, everything looks like an invasion.” This crisis makes it obvious that America can try to retreat from the world all it wants, but it won’t work. We share this planet and it gets smaller every day. If we are to deal with massive disruptions like global pandemics and the existential threat of climate change, we cannot afford to have leaders who fail to understand that. If nothing else, the Trump presidency has made that crystal clear.

My Salon column reprinted with permission

Lining up to be a hot lunch

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 13, 2020
Is talking about the coronavirus with Donald Trump any different?

An ABC News/Ipsos poll released Friday shows two-thirds of Americans are concerned they or someone they know will contract the coronavirus. After the acting president’s error-filled, useful information-free Oval Office speech to the planet Wednesday, they should be. Financial markets Thursday had their worst day since the Black Monday crash of October 1987. It was the market’s equivalent of a parliamentary vote of no confidence. And it was overwhelming.

Naturally, the new polling breaks along partisan lines:

Among Democrats, 83% are concerned about getting coronavirus, including 47% who are very concerned, and among Republicans, 56% are concerned, including only 15% who are very concerned. Only 17% of Democrats are not concerned while a larger 44% of Republicans are not concerned.

Overall, 54% of Americans disapprove of the president’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and 43% approve. CNN’s Keith Boykin wants to know who the the 43% are:

Major sports and entertainment franchises are shutting down to prevent contagion from spreading via their events. Hand sanitizer is disappearing from supermarket shelves. Even the conservative Washington Examiner warned readers Thursday, “Italy, which currently has over 12,000 cases and has now had to be completely shut down, was about where we are now just 12 days ago.”

But while over half the country is stocking up and hunkering down to ride out and/or slow the pandemic, nearly half of Republicans are lining up to be the virus’ hot lunch.

The average death rate the World Health Organization cites currently for those contracting the virus is 3.4%. But that rate is substantially higher for older patients. A transmission vector for Donald Trump’s coronavirus disinformation, Fox News can expect to lose a lot of viewers. More than half its audience is over 65.

Chart via Vox.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) standing beside her, Ohio Department of Health Director Amy Acton announced Thursday her extrapolation that 100,000 people in the state have already contracted the coronavirus. That number will be contested, primarily because of a continued lack of testing to support it. Nevertheless, DeWine has closed schools for three weeks and banned gatherings of over 100 people.

Talking Points Memo has been tracking national testing data compiled by the COVID-19 Tracking Project. Josh Marshall produced this chart:

Not all states are reporting their data or in the same way, TPM’s Josh Marshall notes.

Still woefully behind the rest of the planet in its response, the U.S. may eventually get its act in gear. For now, ABC reports, “relatively few Americans have changed their behavior since the coronavirus has landed here.”

I’m not going to waste my time arguing with a man who’s lining up to be a hot lunch.  — Matt Hooper, Jaws

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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.