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Month: March 2020

“The scale of government’s failure is so complete and so sweeping it borders on the incomprehensible”

Published by digby on March 30, 2020

Eric Boehlert with another useful insight into the media and the plague of Donald Trump. You do have to wonder how this can all just be attributed to ignorance and malfeasance…

Everything Trump has done in response to the coronavirus national emergency has been dead wrong. That’s confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines that were established over a decade ago for when dealing with a health crisis. The agency created a 450-page manual and Trump and his team have not only ignored the recommendations — be consistent, transparent, factual, and credible — they’ve actively done the opposite.

To date, Trump has ignored intelligence warnings, called the crisis a hoax, downplayed the threat, lied about virus testing, lied about the government’s on-the-ground response, lied about the rate of infection, blamed the Obama administration, misled the country about a cure, packed his days with non-action, blamed governors, failed to order a national lockdown, refused to work with certain Democratic officials, and has provided zero national leadership. (“I don’t take responsibility at all.”)

“The U.S. response will be studied for generations as a textbook example of a disastrous, failed effort,” said Ron Klain, who was tapped by President Barack Obama to oversee the nation’s fight against Ebola in 2014.

Trump has seemingly done everything to help spread the disease. “We have to understand that faced with “the invasion” of this virus the President has chosen to stand down, do nothing, let people die and it ravage America,” wrote Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, in an entirely accurate description of what has transpired — Trump stood down and let a virus invade the country, knowing from intelligence briefings what that would mean for the U.S. population.

No other country is facing the coronavirus disaster while its national leader appears not to care how many of his country’s citizens die, and who day after day refuses to take common sense steps to address the crisis. (Where are the tests, masks, hospital beds, and respirators?)

Trump’s behavior has been shocking — except it hasn’t been. For five years, since entering the national political scene in the summer of 2015, Trump has shown us who he is everyday, a deeply damaged narcissist who can’t stop lying.  Yet the press treats his sociopath tendencies as taboo.

The larger, looming question is, why is Trump doing this? Or as Greg Sargent recently asked at the Washington Post, why must Democrats and other officials try to force Trump be do the right thing? Why is he refusing to protect the population from a deadly invasion?

Maybe he’s vengeful. A fatalist? Maybe he wants to wreck the economy to create investment opportunities? He’s under the thumb of a foreign entity? He wants to cancel the November elections? Who knows. And honestly, the “why” isn’t what matters now. It’s increasingly not credible to suggest Trump has simply been distracted or incompetent during this crisis, leading to constant “flip-flops,” as the New York Times politely calls his hourly contradictions, as the country faces dire circumstances.

It’s time for journalists to stop expressing shock regarding his erratic and heartless behavior, because that unwarranted shock just helps normalize Trump’s dangerous behavior. It plays into the idea that Trump at times behaves rationally, and picks and chooses when he should act like a leader, and when he does not need to — that Trump can mimic the actions of a sane person when the situation calls for it.

If we take a step back, the scale of government’s failure is so complete and so sweeping it borders on the incomprehensible. After a while, explaining this away as Trump being unfocused, or not having a plan, or being shortsighted just doesn’t add up. The failure to protect has been so thorough, it’s difficult to suggest it’s happened coincidentally.

Why is it taboo? The possible answers are too disturbing for the press to ponder, therefore they’re deemed off-limits. Instead of addressing the reality, the press prefers to stick with the safe narrative that the White House is muddled and disorganized. To address the other possibilities would raise stunning questions about the President of the United States —the types of questions that have never been asked about any president in this nation’s history.

In essence, the press plays dumb, as the Wall Street Journal urges Trump to “rethink the coronavirus strategy,” as if there was ever a Trump “strategy” to begin with, while Politico suggests the life-and-death problems the U.S. faces today stem from Trump’s “short-term thinking.”

That’s the simple explanation. What’s going on is far more complicated, and far more disturbing.

Be sure to subscribe to PRESS RUN, Boehlert’s free newsletter. The way the media covers this crisis will play a gigantic role in how it affects our future. We need to stay on top of it.

A little inspiration from a political leader in a time of need

Published by digby on March 30, 2020

No, it’s not coming from the White House, needless to say. He’s appearing on Fox and Friends gibbering like a spoiled child:

No, I’m talking about Governor Andrew Cuomo. Well worth listening to:

Why he needs them to ask him nicely

Published by digby on March 30, 2020

Recall these prescient words during Donald Trump’s impeachment trial:

“Imagine living in a part of Louisiana or Texas that’s prone to devastating hurricanes and flooding. What would you think if you lived there and your governor asked for a meeting with the president to discuss getting disaster aid that Congress has provided for? What would you think if that president said, ‘I would like you to do us a favor? I’ll meet with you, and send the disaster relief, once you brand my opponent a criminal.’

Wouldn’t you know in your gut that such a president has abused his office? That he’d betrayed the national interest, and that he was trying to corrupt the electoral process? I believe the evidentiary record shows wrongful acts on those scale here.” — Professor Pamela Karlan’s testimony

And this from Adam Schiff:

In fairness to Trump he isn’t asking Governors to investigate his political rival. He just wants them to “appreciate” him, meaning they are required to extoll his virtues in public in order to get the federal aid they need to save people’s lives.

Why? So he can use their coerced words in ads like these:

He extorted the president of Ukraine into publicly declaring an investigation into his political rival in exchange for badly needed military aid. Now he is extorting American governors into publicly singing his praises in exchange for badly needed medical aid for their dying citizens — so he can use them in campaign ads.

This is what he does. It is who he is. If people cannot see that the man is corrupt all the way down to the blackened void where his soul should be, we won’t survive this.

Apocalypse Now

Published by digby on March 30, 2020

I’ve been watching a lot of BBC news the last few days in order to try to get a sense of what’s happening around the globe. The US news media is nearly useless in this regard.

This story just floored me:

That footage is like something out of a dystopian, science fiction movie. Horrifying.

Their country is being led by an unfit ideologue too. It is not going to end well.

Trump’s “ratings” really aren’t that good

Published by digby on March 30, 2020

Here’s an example of what President Trump thought was important to share with his millions of Twitter followers this past weekend as we watched the nation’s coronavirus numbers climb into the tens of thousands:

As historian Kevin Kruse tweeted in response: “People stop to look at really bad highway accidents too.”

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of it. Trump’s friends at OAN brought up both his Nielsen ratings and his approval ratings at the White House coronavirus campaign rally on Sunday as well. Twice:

At least Trump agreed to extend the federal social distancing guidelines through the end of April, ruefully conceding that his stated goal of having millions of Americans crowded into churches on Easter Sunday was “aspirational.” He said “people” had all told him he should open the nation for business right away (“They said just ride it, ride it like a cowboy, ride that sucker all the way through”), but when he was told on Sunday that more than 2.2 million people could die he decided not to. He said that if we keep the death toll down to 100,000 to 200,000 it will show that his team has done “a very good job.”

Last month Trump was assuring us that the U.S. only had 15 cases and they would be down to zero in no time — and now pretty much any number below 2.2 million is proof that his genius leadership saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

He also insulted reporters and claimed the hospitals don’t really need all those masks, insinuating several times that he thinks doctors and nurses are either hoarding them or selling them on the black market. These rallies have to have some good old-fashioned Trumpian red meat, after all. Just because we’re dealing with an unprecedented global crisis doesn’t mean his followers shouldn’t be entertained.

His “ratings” are understandable. He schedules them for the usual news hour on the East Coast, most people are off work and sitting at home, and everyone’s anxious for news. But he shouldn’t be too sure that everyone is tuning in because they think he’s so terrific. Plenty of people are watching his incoherent antics with shock and dismay.

These are not press conferences and they convey very little useful information. He is performing a bizarre ritual, modeled on his campaign rallies but with the specter of mass death hanging over them. He reads from written remarks which contain almost normal-sounding talking points, randomly punctuated by weird, mind-boggling digressions, lies and conspiracy theories.

The subsequent Q&A session features a setpiece in which the president humiliates one or more reporters who ask him a question he doesn’t want to answer. Lately, they’ve featured an array of comely OAN personalities asking him a fawning question that allows him to attack the media and brag about himself. An expert or official will take the podium from time to time and deliver some data points, but those are minor players in the president’s daily drama.

After he’s finished he leaves the podium to his majordomo, Mike Pence, to proudly hold up his little poster with the CDC guidelines and deliver his patented lugubrious sermon on the greatness of the president and the American people. And that’s the end of it.

Despite Trump’s depraved obsession with TV ratings even at a time like this, those aren’t the ratings that matter. Over the past few days some new polls have been released that confirm Trump’s approval ratings are ticking up. They aren’t quite as healthy as some of his fellow global leaders, however. Morning Consult gathered polling from around the world:

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has had the most dramatic shift in fortune: his net approval rating has risen by nearly 30 points in a matter of days. French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison have all had their net approval rating increase by double digits since March 11, when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus to be a global pandemic.

Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, already had a 60 percent approval rating. Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe either dropped a little or showed tepid improvement of just a few points. In the poll they cite, Trump was at 44% approval and 49% disapproval. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight has him at very similar numbers in its poll of polls, at 45.8% approval to 49.8% disapproval. That’s very good by Trump standards, but only because his ratings have been mired in the low 40s for his entire term. Improvement of two or three points amid a major crisis isn’t much.

There have been three presidential campaign polls in the last week or so, all showing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden holding a lead, although the numbers are all over the place. A Fox News survey conducted last week had Biden well ahead of Trump, 49% to 40%, while the Monmouth poll from last weekend had Biden leading 48-45. An ABC News/Washington Post poll shows a statistical tie, with Biden leading by 49% to 47%. 

Bear in mind that these numbers are all irrelevant at this stage. I went back and looked at polling in the 2012 election at exactly this stage in the race, and presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney was leading President Obama by a couple of points. Obama won that race in November, 52-47. That’s making no prediction about what happens this year. The current bizarre, shelter-in-place campaign couldn’t be more different. I just bring it up to show that polling in April isn’t a good indicator of November results even in the best of times. And we are definitely not in the best of times.

That ABC News/Washington Post poll flagged what seemed to be a harbinger of doom for the Democrats, pointing out that while enthusiasm for Trump was sky-high among his supporters, only 24% of Biden voters were very enthusiastic about him. That certainly doesn’t sound good.

But this election is really all about Trump, for better or worse, and the Fox News poll looked at the same issue with a slightly different slant. A majority of respondents said they were extremely interested in the election, and among them Biden was favored over Trump 52-43, indicating that while Democrats may not be particularly excited about their candidate they are highly motivated to vote against the other guy. That’s “negative partisanship” at work, which Trump has turned into a governing principle but may also be what seals his fate in November.

All those foreign leaders are seeing a big bump in their approval ratings because they are rising to the occasion and handling this emergency like responsible adults. Some are undoubtedly doing the job better than others, but none of them (with the possible exception of Trump’s good buddy Bolsonaro) is using it as an excuse to get in front of the cameras, air their political grievances and attack the press.

Trump is putting on a macabre show every day to keep himself front and center. But he can’t escape the fact that his management of the crisis has been disastrous and his public leadership has been appalling. Every day that’s on display for the whole world to see, while on the side of the screen the body count ticks up and up and up.

My Salon column reprinted with permission

Getting it right

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 30, 2020
Photo @JoMoSeattle / Twitter / #WeGotThisSeattle

COVID-19 showing up in New York City knocked Seattle off the front pages. Seattle’s outbreak was in some sense a curiosity until the virus attacked the home of national media outlets. Since then, New York has become the epicenter of the pandemic in the country both in numbers and in media coverage. The first cases recorded here in my mountain redoubt came via a visitor from New York City.

Seattle’s early outbreak made it a laboratory for testing remediation efforts such as social distancing. The acting president admitted Sunday night the practice should last at least until the end of April. Seeing images of body bags at Elmhurst Hospital in his native Queens and knowing a friend is in a coma there made the pandemic real enough for Donald Trump to back away from the April 12 reopening date he promoted a week earlier.

Meanwhile, Seattle is seeing results from its containment strategy, the New York Times reports:

Deaths are not rising as fast as they are in other states. Dramatic declines in street traffic show that people are staying home. Hospitals have so far not been overwhelmed. And preliminary statistical models provided to public officials in Washington State suggest that the spread of the virus has slowed in the Seattle area in recent days.

While each infected person was spreading the virus to an average of 2.7 other people earlier in March, that number appears to have dropped, with one projection suggesting that it was now down to 1.4.

As disruptive to daily life as the restrictions are, they seem to have slowed transmission. Gov. Jay Inslee told reporters the state is not “within 1,000 miles of declaring victory.” Recent testing reveals new cases in rural areas. Restrictions should stay in place to prevent a rapid resurgence of the outbreak. Washington state officials began asking citizens to keep their distance from one another at the end of February. A month later, that strategy seems to be paying off.

Such evidence seems finally to have impressed Trump enough to make him back away from rosier predictions of seeing packed churches by Easter.

The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker adds:

Trump said he was convinced by data modeling presented to him by two physicians advising him on the pandemic — Anthony S. Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator — that the death rate in this country probably will not peak for another two weeks.

In his press conference on Sunday, Trump cited the March 16 worst-case death estimate of 2.2 million from the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team. if nothing was done to mitigate the virus’ spread.

“The prospect of 2 million deaths seemed to stick with Trump,” Rucker observes, “because he repeated the statistic 16 times at Sunday’s news conference.” It suggests Trump is laying the groundwork for declaring his lackluster response a glorious victory should the final death tally be less.

Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on Sunday told CNN’s Jake Tapper the pandemic could result in 100,000 to 200,000 U.S. deaths.

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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

A Predictable Horror

Published by tristero on March 29, 2020

My heart goes out to the students who followed Falwell’s utterly insane decision to re-open Liberty University and returned to school:

…Mr. Falwell — a staunch ally of President Trump and an influential voice in the evangelical world — reopened [Liberty University] last week, igniting a firestorm. As of Friday, Dr. Eppes said, nearly a dozen Liberty students were sick with symptoms that suggest Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. Three were referred to local hospital centers for testing. Another eight were told to self-isolate.

I am at a loss for words and sick to my stomach over this. I can only hope and pray that these poor kids recover. And that somehow, Falwell and Trump are held accountable.

He’s not saying we won’t get our hair mussed…

Published by digby on March 29, 2020
I’m not saying we won’t get

President Trump Turgidson extended the federal guidelines to April 30th. Apparently, someone told him that 2.2 million people were likely to die if he opened up by Easter and he had a change of heart. He said that if we could keep the number to 100,000 to 200,000 it would be just terrific, hence the Strangelove reference.

Of course, that would have been avoidable if Trump hadn’t been sitting around tweeting and watching Fox instead of taking the crisis seriously for months.

Some highlights of today’s atrocity:


It’s just depressing at this point.

Dr. Rudy in the house

Published by digby on March 29, 2020

Twitter removed this tweet by the president’s lawyer because it’s against their policy to spread false coronavirus information:

Mediaite reports:

Fact: those are not facts. Kirk and Giuliani appear to be riffing on an article posted by conspiracy blogger Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit, and which falsely claims that:

“Hydroxychloroquine is safe and in at least three international tests was found 100% effective in treating the coronavirus.” — There have been extremely limited studies that aren’t scientifically significant, neither of which show the drug to be “100% effective.” One of the studies showed no benefit at all from the treatment.

“Michigan Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer is the latest Democrat to ban doctors from prescribing the lifesaving drugs hydroxychloroquine and Z-Paks to save senior citizens in the state.” — Like many states, Michigan is warning prescribers not to hoard the medications for themselves by improperly self-prescribing.

It’s literally the first sentence in the warning letter:

The Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs has received multiple allegations of Michigan physicians inappropriately prescribing hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine to themselves, family, friends, and/or coworkers without a legitimate medical purpose.

The letter also notes that the drug is not proven effective against Covid-19, and that improper prescribing may be “investigated”:

Prescribing hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine without further proof of efficacy for treating COVID-19 or with the intent to stockpile the drug may create a shortage for patients with lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, or other ailments for which chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are proven treatments. Reports of this conduct will be evaluated and may be further investigated for administrative action. Prescribing any kind of prescription must also be associated with medical documentation showing proof of the medical necessity and medical condition for which the patient is being treated. Again, these are drugs that have not been proven scientifically or medically to treat COVID-19.

As the letter notes, these prescribing practices are causing shortages of the drugs for patients suffering from ailments that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are actually proven to treat.

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump also cited a false Gateway Pundit article to attack a governor, in that case Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York. Trump is currently in a public feud with Cuomo and Whitmer over his response to the outbreak.

Gabe Sherman of Vanity Fair said on MSNBC this morning that his sources at Fox News tell him the company is getting very nervous about its liability for deaths of people who are watching the network and believing all the misinformation they’re handing out. They should be.

They fired Trish Regan for saying the virus is a hoax. But she’s far from the only one on the network who is selling snake oil. The hosts who have these quacks and charlatans on are also liable.

And then there’s this trainwreck: