Month: March 2020

Jesus H. Christ! These people are killing us:

The White House has ordered federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified, an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion, according to four Trump administration officials.

The officials said that dozens of classified discussions about such topics as the scope of infections, quarantines and travel restrictions have been held since mid-January in a high-security meeting room at the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), a key player in the fight against the coronavirus.

Staffers without security clearances, including government experts, were excluded from the interagency meetings, which included video conference calls, the sources said.

“We had some very critical people who did not have security clearances who could not go,” one official said. “These should not be classified meetings. It was unnecessary.”

The sources said the National Security Council (NSC), which advises the president on security issues, ordered the classification.”This came directly from the White House,” one official said.

Meanwhile:

National security adviser Robert O’Brien claimed Wednesday that an initial cover-up of the coronavirus in China “cost the world community two months” and exacerbated the global outbreak.

In the face of a global crisis, the world’s two most powerful countries are pointing fingers at one another.

Asked about China’s initial response, as well as spurious claims from some Chinese officials and media that the outbreak may not have started in China, O’Brien emphasized that “this virus did not originate in the United States, it originated in Wuhan.”

• “Unfortunately, rather than using best practices, this outbreak in Wuhan was covered up,” O’Brien said, citing instances of doctors who were “silenced.”
• “It probably cost the world community two months to respond,” he continued, adding that if teams from the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been invited in early on, “I think we could have dramatically curtailed what happened in China and what’s now happening across the world.”
• Speaking at the Heritage Foundation, O’Brien echoed other administration officials in saying President Trump’s “courageous decision” in late January to block air travel from China “bought the United States six to eight weeks to prepare for the virus.”

This is absurd. We have known about this virus since at least December. Even I was writing about it when it was confined to Wuhan back in January. (I did call it the “Wuhan virus” at the time because it didn’t have another name and it was confined to the city.)

Here’s Trump in January at Davos:

Trump spoke to CNBC about the virus on Wednesday as fears grow around the world that it could become impossible to contain. “We have it totally under control,” Trump said from the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

Asked about the confirmed case in Washington state, Trump responded: “It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Tuesday that a Washington state resident who was returning from China on Jan. 15 was diagnosed with the Wuhan coronavirus.

Trump said he believes that Xi and Chinese health officials will tell officials around the world everything they need to know about the virus, citing his “great relationship” with the Chinese president. Meanwhile, the first case of the coronavirus has been confirmed in Asia’s financial capital Hong Kong.

In all, China reported 440 confirmed cases on Wednesday, up from 218 on Tuesday.

A week later:

President Trump on Thursday spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping about the coronavirus after officials said more than 600 people had died from the disease in China.

“President Trump expressed confidence in China’s strength and resilience in confronting the challenge of the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak,” a White House spokesman said in a statement. “The two leaders agreed to continue extensive communication and cooperation between both sides.” 

Please. Trump cared about his idiotic trade deal and didn’t care a bit about any of this. Now, as usual, he trying to blame them for the fact that he fucked up royally.

This gets to the heart of it:

One man… immune to information.

PANDUMBIC pic.twitter.com/gZUPZJBmwV

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) March 10, 2020

He will not learn. He doesn’t want to learn. He made that clear long before he became president:

He said in a series of interviews that he does not need to read extensively because he reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I already had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”

Trump said he is skeptical of experts because “they can’t see the forest for the trees.” He believes that when he makes decisions, people see that he instinctively knows the right thing to do: “A lot of people said, ‘Man, he was more accurate than guys who have studied it all the time.’ ”
[…]
Trump’s approach goes beyond the chief executive manner of Reagan or the younger Bush. “We’ve had presidents who have reveled in their lack of erudition,” said Allan Lichtman, a political historian at American University, citing Warren Harding and Lyndon Johnson as leaders who scoffed at academics and other experts. “But Trump is really something of an outlier with this idea that knowing things is almost a distraction. He doesn’t have a historical anchor, so you see his gut changing on issues from moment to moment.”

One day last month, Trump had a visit from a delegation of prominent executives in the oil, steel and retail industries, and one of the executives told Trump that the Chinese were taking advantage of the United States. “He said, ‘I’d like to send you a report,’ ” Trump recalled. “He said, ‘I’d love to be able to send you’ — oh boy, he’s got a lengthy report, hundreds of pages. . . . I said, ‘Do me a favor: Don’t send me a report. Send me, like, three pages.’ ”

Trump said reading long documents is a waste of time because he absorbs the gist of an issue very quickly. “I’m a very efficient guy,” he said. “Now, I could also do it verbally, which is fine. I’d always rather have — I want it short. There’s no reason to do hundreds of pages because I know exactly what it is.”

We are now living through the consequences of electing such a man to the most powerful job in the world.

And keep in mind that there are tens of millions of people who worship this fool and believe he is a very stable genius.

I think it’s been pretty clear from the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak that President Trump’s top concern has been American business, rather than public health. He has pinned his re-election hopes on an argument that his leadership has produced the greatest economy in world history, and 2,000-point plunges in the stock market are very off-brand.

So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 9, 2020

He has spent the last week talking about how great everything’s working out on the disease front, but he’s awfully concerned about the health of American businesses. On Monday he crashed Vice President Mike Pence’s daily coronavirus briefing and made the bold announcement that he would be boldly announcing a major economic rescue plan the next day. He said he would speak with House Republicans and Senate leaders about necessary legislation, apparently under the illusion that he could pass it without going through Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

This impromptu tease of some sort of economic intervention was apparently news to the rest of his administration. As CNBC reported:

[I]nside the administration, some officials were stunned by Trump’s claim Monday that he would hold a press conference Tuesday to announce an economic plan. “That was news to everyone on the inside,” one official said. The actual details of any plan remain up in the air. “It’s not there right now,” an official said. “A lot of details need to be worked out.”

Trump didn’t hold his Big Reveal on Tuesday. But he did go up to Capitol Hill to meet with Republicans. He apparently proposed a plan to eliminate the payroll tax through the election, which landed with a thud in both parties. He also proposed delaying the tax filing deadline and providing sick leave, along with a demand that the government “help” the travel industry and bail out the oil and gas industry. According to the Washington Post, he was very short on details and even his devoted GOP Senate minions were not impressed.

Nonetheless, Trump emerged from the meeting upbeat about the virus, telling the country that “a lot of good things are going to happen.”

“We want to protect our shipping industry, our cruise ships … we want to protect our airlines” — it’s remarkable how transparent Trump is about the fact he views a pandemic that’s killing people mainly as an economic problem pic.twitter.com/d3gTae3Lle

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 10, 2020

House Democrats have been working on practical legislation to benefit workers for some time, including offering free coronavirus tests and unemployment insurance for people who are unable to work due to the fallout from the crisis. There is no word on whether Senate Republicans might be interested, but since the president is reportedly unwilling to be in the same room with Pelosi it’s hard to see how any negotiation can take place.

The oil industry has its hand out for a big bailout, along with the airlines and cruise lines. Not to be outdone, manufacturing and consumer product industries are lining up for some of that free money, looking for tax breaks and credits and anything else they can come up with. One lobbyist described it to the Post as, “We’re in the spaghetti-on-the-wall phase of this conversation.”

But there is one industry being hard hit by the crisis that doesn’t need anyone to lobby for it. The hospitality industry has its own lobbyist right in the Oval Office. The president mentioned this in passing during that press conference on Monday:

We’re also working with the industries, including the airline industry, the cruise ship industry — which, obviously, will be hit. We’re working with them very, very strongly. We want them to travel. We want people to travel to certain locations and not to other locations at this moment. And hopefully that will straighten out sooner rather than later. But we’re working with the industries, and in particular those two industries.

We’re also talking to the hotel industry. And some places, actually, will do well, and some places probably won’t do well at all. But we’re working also with the hotel industry.

Let us note that Trump’s family business, from which he has continued to profit throughout his presidency, is the hotel industry. His ongoing financial interest in those properties may explain why he seemed downright gleeful at the prospect that international travel is now circumscribed, saying last Friday:

A lot of people are staying here. They’re going to be doing their business here. They’re going to be traveling here. They’ll be going to resorts here.

Gosh, I wonder what made him think about that?

The AP reports that despite the fiction that Trump has turned his businesses over to his sons Don Jr. and Eric (who seem to spend most of their time appearing on Fox News) and has no involvement with the company, sources say he often asks them how the properties are doing. And he’s got plenty to worry about.

His businesses are not doing all that well, in fact. The Trump International Hotel in Washington remains the equivalent of Tony Soprano’s Bada Bing Club, where all the movers and shakers and hangers-on gather to curry favor with the boss. But the Trumps have put the hotel’s lease up for sale (they don’t actually own the building) and at least one prospective buyer has said, “It’s underperforming and unrealistically priced.” Trump’s Doral golf resort near Miami, where he briefly tried to bamboozle the G8 nations into hosting next year’s conference, is a known money loser. In fact, it appears that most profits from the Trump Organization these days come from people buying political access and federal government spending on security and entourage for the president’s frequent weekend and vacation jaunts.

It will surprise absolutely no one to learn that the re-election campaign and Republican Party are putting massive sums of money into the Trump coffers.

According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), Trump-allied political committees and the Republican party have spent a whopping $18.1m at Trump properties since he launched his 2016 campaign. Republican candidates, elected officials and Pacs have ponied up another $1.2m in the same period.

Coronavirus could affect all that. After all, even some of Trump’s staunchest congressional allies are now self-quarantining in parking lots after having been exposed to a person carrying the virus at the CPAC conference last week. Who knows how much money he’ll lose if rich Republicans start socially distancing themselves from his properties?

Trump wants to seize this opportunity to bail out hoteliers like, uh, himself. https://t.co/kqA5R3zldU

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) March 10, 2020

Trump’s happy talk about the virus can be chalked up to his efforts to stave off steep losses if people abandon his hotels and resorts. His desire to throw massive sums of money at the industries involved are similarly motivated. And his desperation to prop up the financial markets is all about maintaining the illusion that the economy is still supercharged long enough to get him re-elected.

As usual, Donald Trump’s primary concern, if not his sole concern, is Donald Trump.

My Salon column reprinted with permission

The only disaster the acting president cares about is his losing reelection. But those with the ability to manipulate the enfant terrible will see opportunity knocking in the convergence of a pandemic, the second economic meltdown this century, and a presidential election.

Naomi Klein wrote during the second Bush II term that there are those waiting patiently and greedily to profit from disaster. Pre-positioned even. “Disaster capitalism,” she named it.

Klein warned that in such situations a regime will justify its antidemocratic actions with “there is no alternative” to “impose a system – whether political , religious or economic – that is rejected by large numbers of the people … even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.”

More than control of the White House is at stake this year. Those with means, the might and security will see that bigger picture and act on it before most of us can pull on our pants.

A former White House public health official told Republican House lawmakers that most people in the United States will likely be exposed to the coronavirus in the next two years:

The comment appeared to go further than the most recent public warnings from the CDC. Nancy Messonnier, director of the the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, said in a press call Monday that “as the trajectory of the outbreak continues, many people in the United States will at some point in time either this year or next be exposed to this virus and there’s a good chance many will become sick.”

Many. Not all. And many who do fall ill will recover quickly. For vulnerable populations that include older lawmakers the virus could prove far more urgent. While the White House dithers, pressure will build to act decisively and perhaps heavy handedly. This bug appears very contagious:

Governments are now bowing to the reality of unprecedented, economy-killing measures seen as Draconian just weeks ago. Italy early Sunday restricted travel in and out of the region surrounding Milan and ordered closings of schools, museums, pools, gyms and theaters, among other public places. 

While a hard-and-fast lockdown of a U.S. city like Seattle is hard to imagine, something similar might happen, said Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “You don’t want to alarm people, but given the spread we see, you know, anything is possible,” he told Fox News.

That ought to worry people already seeing our democracy slipping away. (We’re not a democracy; we’re a republic Republicans insist.) While we are watching the virus spread and Democrats wage intramural skirmishes, what are we not seeing beyond the headlines?

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate examine the asymmetrical warfare waged by an increasingly right-leaning judiciary “unmoored from any standard judicial conventions of circumspection and restraint” and fueled by the “conservative outrage machine.”

More progressive judges are beginning to push back against the Roberts Supreme Court. U.S. District Court Judge Lynn Adelman writes in the Harvard Law review of the “anti-democratic nature of the Court’s decisions weakening the middle class by augmenting corporate power and reducing that of ordinary Americans.”

Lithwick and Stern write, “Neomi Rao, a Trump judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, has created a cottage industry out of writing preposterous Trump-friendly polemics [founded upon] the proposition that Trump must triumph and work backward from there.”

While defeating Trump is the shiny object of the left’s attentions, below the fold and off front pages antidemocratic efforts are afoot:

Adelman’s critique of the court’s conservative wing is not particularly seemly or polite. But it was not all that polite when the Supreme Court accurately noted that the Virginia judiciary endorsed “the doctrine of White Supremacy” in upholding interracial marriage bans. It was not especially polite when the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that Arizona legislators suppressed minority votes out of racism. It was not all that polite when Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that Colorado voters discriminated against gay people out of sheer animus.

These cases reflect a decades-long effort to secure the blessings of liberty for a smaller and whiter slice of the electorate, and democracy be damned.

“If this were a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier… as long as I’m the dictator,” George W. Bush said with a “hehehe” a month before his inauguration.

So, pay closer attention to down-ballot races where people of that mindset are pre-positioning to ensure and extend minority rule while your attentions are elsewhere. Trump isn’t joking. Nor are his white nationalist supporters.

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Paul Krugman made an important point on twitter:

If the goal of a short-term stimulus is to put money in people’s hands, then we should put money in people’s hands: just mail out checks. There is no reason to structure it as a payroll tax cut, which does nothing for those not getting paychecks.

There’s also a powerful case for aid to state and local governments trying to cope with this crisis — which would also help sustain spending. So why a tax cut? 

The answer, I suspect, is that Trump and his party want to maintain the pretense that tax cuts are the answer to all problems, even when in practice they’re being purely Keynesian right now. There’s no reason Dems should let this prejudice intrude on a rescue package Trump desperately wants. They can and should demand a package that makes sense. 

I tweeted they should just write checks yesterday because I fully expect the Republicans to insist that “entitlements” be cut should payroll taxes decrease since they are dedicated to financing Social Security and Medicare. (Yes, I know that’s a fiction, federal money is fungible and MMT says that you don’t have to worry about such things, but I’m speaking about the politics of it.) Democrats should resist this.

Anyway, Trump’s idea was half-baked at best:

 [I]nside the administration, some officials were stunned by Trump’s claim Monday that he would hold a press conference Tuesday to announce an economic plan. “That was news to everyone on the inside,” one official said.

The actual details of any plan remain up in the air. “It’s not there right now,” an official said. “A lot of details need to be worked out.”

The president’s schedule for Tuesday includes a 5:30 p.m. ET media briefing for his coronavirus task force.

In addition to the potential payroll tax cut, which faces skepticism from Senate Republicans, Trump also said the administration would work with travel industry players, such as airlines and cruise lines, as travel restrictions and fears stemming from the outbreak take a toll on them. American Airlines on Tuesday, for instance, slashed international and domestic flights as demand craters.

Republicans in congress didn’t get a heads up either. Trump went up there today and they’re apparently starting to work on something but we don’t know any of the details yet.

Pence said in the briefing today that they plan to “help” businesses pay for people to stay home from work but it’s hard to see how a payroll tax would do that. Eliminating taxes from a non-existent paycheck doesn’t get you very far.

Kudlow sounded completely incoherent in today’s briefing. He said that they are thinking about completely eliminating the payroll tax which would cost a trillion dollars and eliminate the dedicated Social Security trust fund. When questioned further he said that they needed to get the details clarified. Jesus.

He did say that the middle and lower-income people have done GREAT in Trump’s fantastic economy and that it’s important that we do tax reform and cut more taxes so we can have huge growth and then everything will be EVEN GREATER!

God help us.

Elon Musk:

“I think college is basically for fun and to prove that you can do your chores, but they’re not for learning,” Musk said.

Riiiiiiiiiight.

That’s why, when Elon needs major surgery, he simply goes to the local butcher.

That’s why, when Elon needs an accountant, he just asks his applicants whether they can add and subtract. Percentages also a good thing to know.

That’s why, when Elon wants someone to manage his next rocket project, he hires someone who started a local plumbing business with her sister.

That’s why, when Elon needs some really deep analysis of how a car’s infrastructure can handle high bursts of wind on a highway, he hires a high school kid who’s really good with computer graphics.

Adding: yes, duh, there are plenty of jobs where a college education is besides the point. My field, music, has plenty of great practitioners who never went to college. (But there are also plenty who have.) And yes, duh, college is a place where young people socialize (have fun!) and often build important friendships, romances, and contacts.

But twenty seconds of deeply concentrated thought — something apparently beyond Musk’s capacity these days — brings one to the profoundly trivial conclusion that college is not at all “basically for fun,” that actual knowledge is imparted in college. Yep, even in the so-called party schools.

But billionaires spouting sheer blithering idiocy get listened to and publicized because… I can’t think of a single good reason.

TPM flags what I imagine is going to be the next great fight to contain the coronavirus. And yes, it’s a fight between people who are trying to save lives and the President of the United States:

As Washington state grapples with what may be the country’s worst outbreak of novel coronavirus, the absence of a COVID-19 emergency declaration from President Trump has hamstrung its ability to respond to the crisis.

The state would like to apply for a Medicaid waiver that would let Washington give people more options for where to receive care, so that it can lessen the pressure on its already overtaxed health system.

The problem for the state is that one of the types of waivers currently under discussion — a waiver known as 1135 — can be triggered only by the President declaring an emergency or a disaster under the Stafford Act, something he has notably failed to do, despite all signs indicating that the coronavirus outbreak stands to be a major public health crisis.

Sue Birch, director of the Washington State Health Care Authority, told TPM that the state was discussing a 1135 and 1115 waiver with Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. While the agency had been receptive, Birch said, the 1135 waiver comes with a built-in limitation: it cannot go through absent an emergency declaration from President Trump.

Governor Inslee was on Rachel Maddow last night and he said they were anticipating having to institute some serious mitigation strategies such as establishing quarantine facilities for people who don’t have the ability to quarantine themselves appropriately. That’s going to require the Federal Government to take actions like this.

But Trump is refusing to even talk to Pelosi about emergency legislation. He has not declared an emergency because he thinks that would interfere with his fantastic public relations strategy of saying everything is going great. He might. But he will wait until there is absolutely no choice which is what got us into this mess in the first place.

The dysfunction goes all the way down:

Since the new coronavirus began to spread, the judges union has been asking the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the part of DOJ that runs immigration courts, for additional word on how to handle the situation. But Tabaddor said the info thus far has been minimal and not tailored to the specific needs of immigration courts as public spaces that see large numbers of individuals from around the world. 

So the National Association of Immigration Judges took the matter into its own hands on Monday, encouraging its members to post flyers from the CDC that explained in both English and Spanish how to combat the spread of the coronavirus that causes the illness COVID-19. The posters encouraged people to stay home if sick and wash their hands frequently, among other advice. 

Spreading this type of information is vital during the outbreak, particularly in public spaces. So far, there have been more than 700 cases of the coronavirus in the U.S. Worldwide, there have been more than 115,000 cases reported and more than 4,000 deaths as a result of COVID-19. 

But later on Monday, Santoro notified court administrative staff that “judges do not have the authority to post, or ask you to post, signage for their individual courtrooms or the waiting areas,” the Miami Herald reported early Tuesday morning.

They backtracked later and said they could post the notices.

But think about this. These judges had been asking for guidance about how to handle all this for weeks and they couldn’t get it. The DOJ clearly didn’t want to warn the people who come into these courts about the dangers. Perhaps they thought that immigrants breathe different air than the good Trump voters who don’t deserve to die.

Most likely, it was another example of the Trump presidency being the most incompetent administration in history due to the demand that it spends all its time defending and appeasing the clueless, immature president who thinks running the most powerful country on earth is like shooting “The Apprentice.” They have all adapted to the idea that their job is pleasing President Trump not serving the country.

I’m cautiously optimistic that the US may withdraw from Afghanistan before too long. The policy hasn’t ever worked. The horrible side effect, of course, is that the suffering and repression of women in the country will surely reassert itself under Taliban rule and I don’t even want to think about how awful it’s going to be.

Regardless, it’s an untenable situation. The problem is that Trump is president and he’s almost surely going to make everything much worse than it would otherwise be.

For instance:

President Donald Trump’s phone call with Taliban leaders last week was profound and unprecedented in the long timeline that makes up America’s longest war.

For some in American national security and diplomatic circles, it was a climax in a frustrating, years-long peace process. For others, it was also a worrisome event—not because of what Trump said but because of who, exactly, he spoke with. Some of the Taliban leaders on the other end of the line were also on secret U.S. kill-or-capture lists. The commander in chief was chatting with people his government officially still wanted jailed or dead, two Defense Department sources told The Daily Beast.

Of course, any peace initiative is going to require talking with one’s enemies—and this call was no exception. But some U.S. defense officials insisted that this was a step too far, and a sign of what they see as a slapdash approach to ending America’s involvement in the Afghan conflict.

It’s the latest indication that Trump, who has long wanted out of Afghanistan, is far apart from the Pentagon on how to wind down the U.S. military’s longest foreign war. Military anxieties are understandable. The U.S. is, for the first time, taking a gamble on negotiating an endgame with an enemy it doesn’t trust and which has all the leverage in the negotiations. A pre-deal ceasefire already broke down on Wednesday, five days after the deal was unveiled, when the U.S. bombed a Taliban position in Helmand to disrupt an attack by the militant group on a checkpoint run by Afghan security forces. 

NBC News reported late last week that there is “persuasive intelligence” that the Taliban has no intention of abiding by the deal. 

The Taliban has all the leverage and they are dealing with an imbecile who can be flattered into giving away the store. What could go wrong?

You may recall that over the weekend, the Surgeon General told CNN’s Jake Tapper,” the president, he sleeps less than I do and he’s healthier than what I am.” This is an absurd comment, of course. The fact that he stays up all night watching Fox and tweeting doesn’t make him immune from disease. And he clearly isn’t healthy. You only have to look at him to see it.

But apparently, this is a White House talking point. John Amato caught this on Fox:

Then on Monday’s Fox and Friends, the faux White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham doubled down on this lie when asked if both Bernie Sanders and Pres. Trump should stop holding rallies.

Co-host Ainsley Earhardt said, “Stephanie, when Bernie was on ‘Meet the Press’ over the weekend, Chuck Todd asked him if he was going to continue to be on the campaign trail because we keep hearing if you’re around 80 years old you are susceptible, and he is 78 years old.”

“President Trump is 73. Will he continue to have rallies and be out there on the campaign trail?” she asked.

Grisham dutifully replied, “He actually just addressed this. Yes, he plans on still holding rallies. And I’ll tell you what, with our President — this man who doesn’t sleep and who I have seen work 15-16 hours a day every day — I have no problem thinking that he’s going to be just fine and just healthy.”

He doesn’t “work” as normal people understand it. He tweets and watches TV and talks on the phone with his buddies and has a few meetings where his staff all kiss his feet and that’s about it. There are plenty of reports about this. Even in business he always showed up at the office late and then said something like, “what’s going on” and just did whatever crossed his mind that day. He’s obsessed with himself and that’s all he cares about.

Now he has possibly been exposed to this coronavirus and he falls into the highest risk category. I have no doubt that they are lying about him being tested. Of course, he was tested after shaking hands with all the Typhoid Marys at CPAC. And they should. They aren’t telling the truth about this because they want him to appear to be “tough” and superhuman.

But he really should get more sleep. He acts crazy most of the time and it’s probably at least partly because he’s sleep-deprived and using some kind of stimulant to wake him up (and keep his weight in check….) None of that is the recipe for good health in a 73-year-old man.