"Some of the people that took the biggest advantage of us are our allies" — Trump goes on a harangue about NATO and America's European allies pic.twitter.com/5EMxs279lO
The President lashes out at reporters accusing them of writing fake news and accuses the media of wanting the shutdown to continue in order to hurt him at the polls pic.twitter.com/8CirtCgeHG
If you watched his rally today you heard him going on and on and on about how the US is doing more testing than anyone in the world could have ever dreamed any nation could ever test.
Well:
The president reinforced the idea in a tweet on Wednesday: “Just reported that the United States has done far more ‘testing’ than any other nation, by far! In fact, over an eight day span, the United States now does more testing than what South Korea (which has been a very successful tester) does over an eight week span. Great job!”
Trump is under enormous pressure over the availability of tests, and leaders both in Washington and around the world have held up South Korea as a benchmark country for comparison because of its rapid deployment of the tests.
There is no “official” U.S. government count of testing. Trump administration officials have said that’s partly because they didn’t want to slow down availability of the test by imposing uniform reporting requirements.
But the COVID Tracking Project website is collecting data from state and local governments and appears to be one of the more reliable sources in the nation on testing data.
The site has counted 367,710 coronavirus tests administered in the U.S. as of Wednesday. South Korea, by comparison, has conducted 357,896 tests, according to public health officials there. Assuming those numbers are accurate, the U.S. has exceeded South Korea in terms of raw tests.
But the huge difference in population adds an important piece of context to those figures.
That means South Korea has tested roughly one in every 144 of its residents. In the U.S., the per capita testing rate is closer to one in every 900 residents.
They are calling in retired nurses to work 80 hour weeks without proper protective gear. And they are responding. Of course they are.
Apparently, Graham thinks that these greedy nurses will be looking to make a profit from the crisis by getting themselves laid off in the middle of the epidemic and collecting that sweet, sweet 24 bucks an hour. Apparently, they’re all in for the money.
According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration simply has no idea what the government is supposed to do in a crisis: coordination and distribution. They think that because companies are coming forward “offering” to help manufacture needed goods that they have no need to be further involved.
But it’s clear that there is some price gouging going on, a bidding war among states and localities and general chaos in “the market” since nobody knows what products to prioritize or where to send it. That’s what the government’s supposed to do. It’s why the Defense Production Act was passed in the first place:
A mad scramble for masks, gowns and ventilators is pitting states against each other and driving up prices. Some hard-hit parts of the country are receiving fresh supplies of N95 masks, but others are still out of stock. Hospitals are requesting donations of masks and gloves from construction companies, nail salons and tattoo parlors, and considering using ventilators designed for large animals because they cannot find the kind made for people.
The market for medical supplies has descended into chaos, according to state officials and health-care leaders. They are begging the federal government to use a wartime law to bring order and ensure the United States has the gear it needs to battle the coronavirus. So far, the Trump administration has declined.
“I can’t find any more equipment. It’s not a question of money,” said New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, whose state is battling the nation’s worst outbreak. “We need the federal help and we need the federal help now.”AD
At best, Cuomo said, his team has secured enough protective gear for health workers to last a few weeks. It’s been unable to buy most of the 30,000 ventilators it estimates it will need to keep hospitalized patients breathing at the peak of the crisis, he said.New York’s Cuomo urges Trump to use Defense Production ActAmid the coronavirus pandemic, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said March 22 that President Trump should “order factories to manufacture” medical equipment. (New York state)
His pleas are echoed by others, including the American Medical Association, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Joe Biden, who have called on the Trump administration to use the Defense Production Act to order companies to mass produce medical supplies. The law, enacted during the Korean War, allows the government to require companies to manufacture certain goods and to pay them for it.
Although governors and hospital leaders welcome the many U.S. companies stepping forward to make masks and ventilators, they fear the voluntary efforts will be too scattershot without federal coordination.AD
“When we went to war, we didn’t say, any company out there want to build a battleship? Who wants to build a battleship?” Cuomo said.
President Trump and his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, have repeatedly said they don’t need to force companies to produce under the Defense Production Act because so many manufacturers are volunteering to make medical supplies. Trump seemed to acknowledge the chaos on Tuesday, however, calling the world market for masks and ventilators “crazy” in a tweet, adding that it was “not easy” to acquire them.
But he also tweeted that he hasn’t had to use the Defense Production Act “because no one has said NO! Millions of masks coming as back up to States.” In a briefing Tuesday evening, Trump added: “Companies are heeding our call to produce medical equipment and supplies because they know that we will not hesitate to invoke the DPA in order to get them to do what they have to do. It’s called leverage.”
Trump put that China hawk fringe-dweller Peter Navarro in charge of this and he insists that everything is going great.
Here are some ads that Super PACs are running. This is controversial because some people think it’s too risky to criticize the president during the crisis.
I don’t agree. The truth is all we’ve got. And this is the truth:
The following are from Never Trumpers using their dark arts for good.
This one is clever because it mimics the famous “Bear” ad back in the 1960s.
We must bear witness to what is happening and document the atrocities. People in the future won’t believe it.
The first symptom was fever. I figured I had the flu. No such luck. The mild to moderate symptoms of this coronavirus make garden-variety flu seem like a tea party. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) described the relentless, soul-sapping fever as being hit by “a ton of bricks…”
My image is more particular. Seven days into the waves of fever, I was drifting half in and half out of sleep. I was wearing a down jacket with the hood cinched around my head. I was buried under the covers, teeth chattering. A week like that is a very long time. (Nine days, and counting, is still longer.)
In my weird dream, I was on the high-winter prairie. I was on horseback. The ground was black mud, and where the animals stepped, the impressions of their shoes froze almost immediately. Meanwhile, a hard, freezing rain was falling, filling the ruts with ice water. I fell from the horse into the mud. The horse kept walking over me. I couldn’t stand up.
Those are my mild to moderate symptoms. And I’m thankful for them. Because I don’t have certain other symptoms — not yet. My headaches have been few. For many covid-19 sufferers, the headaches are excruciating. My lungs are working well, which means I don’t have to enter the hospital.
It’s going to be a race now to see whether I can finish this column before I pass out.
And here’s the ending:
The idea that we’re on the brink of a return to normalcy is flatly insane. We’re barely saying hello to covid-19 in its mild and moderate mercies. That phrase itself reflects the blithe taxonomy of pandemic triage — whatever doesn’t kill you must be mild or moderate. It only makes sense in the context of a far deadlier version of the virus that, if allowed to run wild, will shatter public confidence in our leaders for years to come.
I am thankful for my mild to moderate symptoms. I’m not sure I could survive anything worse.
LA Mayor Eric Garcetti said yesterday that we are about a week behind NewYork City in coronavirus cases and deaths. The numbers here are doubling every three days. But it’s still a bit mystifying why we would be so far behind. We had some of the first cases and the early quarantines were all here. There is an immense amount of trave from Asia which undoubtedly sent infected people here before the porous ban was enacted. What gives?
Anyway, there are lots of theories:
New York’s coronavirus outbreak has violently erupted over the past few days, and the state is now driving the national epidemic — while on the West Coast, public health experts are wondering if an early and aggressive response saved California from a similar fate.
California reported some of the earliest coronavirus cases in the United States in late January. And in the first week of March, California and New York were neck and neck on cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. But over the past week, New York case counts have doubled every few days, and the state now has 10 times the cases California does: 25,000 to 2,500.
Infectious-disease experts say early maneuvers in California, especially in the Bay Area — first discouraging people from gathering in crowds and then ordering them to shelter in place — may have had a dramatic impact, even if they came only a few days ahead of those in New York.
But other factors may also be in play. New York is testing far more people — three times as many as California — and therefore identifying more cases, for example. And it’s possible that what’s happening 3,000 miles away could be California’s future.
“New York may just be three or four days in front of us. We’re going to see an increase in the number of cases here as well,” said Dr. Warner Greene, a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco who specializes in HIV but is studying the new coronavirus. “Days matter — they really matter. You think you’re fine, you’re absolutely fine, but this thing is just waiting to explode.
“But we went into shelter in place quicker; we got people apart quicker,” Greene said. “That could be a contributing factor to what we’re seeing in California now. And that’s why I think the whole country should be sheltering in place.”
The World Health Organization on Tuesday identified the United States as the next potential epicenter of the pandemic, with China and South Korea both on a path to recovery and Italy starting to see signs of its outbreak slowing down, though gradually.
New York state now makes up roughly half of the United States’ 50,000 cases of COVID-19. Tuesday afternoon, experts on the White House Coronavirus Task Force advised that residents who have fled New York City, where the bulk of cases are located, should place themselves in a two-week quarantine to avoid infecting people in other parts of the country.
The state is also testing more people than anywhere else in the country — 90,000 as of Monday, compared with about 27,000 in California.
How and why New York’s testing is so far beyond California’s isn’t clear. California officials will “explain the ambiguity” on Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom said earlier this week when asked about the discrepancy at a news conference.
But testing alone doesn’t explain why New York’s case counts are so much higher than California’s, or why the rate is spiraling up so fast on the East Coast. The death toll in New York was four times higher than California’s — 210 deaths to 51, as of Tuesday evening. Deaths tend to be a much more reliable marker of the spread of the disease than cases because determining how someone died is not dependent on the availability of testing kits.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued “stay at home” orders last Friday, one day after Newsom did the same for California and four days after Bay Area health officers told 6.7 million people to shelter in place.
I think density may have something to do with it too. San Francisco is pretty dense but there aren’t a lot of huge apartment buildings. LA has some tight neighborhoods but it’s nothing like New York.
And could it be possible that LA’s natural”social distancing” through sprawl may have contributed to lessening the spread all at once? We famously don’t use public transportation, many of our malls are outdoors and we spend a lot of time in our cars by ourselves. Perhaps our lifestyle just naturally “flattens the curve” in ways that other more dense cities does not?
It’s certainly possible this will catch up with us over the next few days. We’ll know soon enough. They have not been testing much here so it might just be that. But the lower death rate so far is an indication that we might not get that huge surge that New York is dealing with right now.
Fingers crossed. The last thing we need is the health system of the second biggest city in the country overwhelmed the way New York is overwhelmed right now. It will be bad no matter what but what’s happening in New York is just horrific.
The idea of a joint declaration by the seven important industrialized countries on the corona crisis is on the brink , according to information from European diplomatic circles . The reason is a dispute over what the pandemic should be called.
Accordingly, the State Department insists on the name “Wuhan virus”. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo represents the line of his president. Donald Trump speaks mostly of the “Chinese virus” at press conferences and on Twitter.
The other G7 members reject a label that suggests the pandemic is a Chinese problem.
They propose the term “Covid-19” also used by the World Health Organization (WHO). No agreement could be reached in the negotiations of the political directors of the G7 foreign ministries.
This is ridiculous.
I don’t know if Pompeo has a larger agenda. They do seem to be looking for a confrontation with China out of this whole thing but it’s unclear exactly what they think they’ll get out of it. But first and foremost, this is being done to appease Little Lord Fauntleroy in the White House who constantly needs to be reassured that his juvenile, re-election “branding” is being carried out at the highest levels of government.
I guess it doesn’t matter if they can issue a joint statement. But you would think that international cooperation would be a top priority during a global pandemic. Apparently not.
You have to feel sorry for President Trump. He’s under a lot of pressure and he got some very bad news this week. Sure, the coronavirus pandemic is racing through the American population like an out-of-control locomotive. And yes, massive numbers of Americans have abruptly lost their incomes. But this week the crisis came home to Trump himself. He had to face the fact that he personally stands to lose a fortune as his hotels and resorts, here and abroad, are shut down and he and his family are hemorrhaging money.
Normally Americans could feel secure that the president of the United States wasn’t making life or death decisions based upon the financial needs of his family business — the one he continues to own and be involved with even while he is in the White House. But this is Donald Trump and nothing has been normal for years now.
Over the weekend he was asked at one of his daily White House coronavirus campaign rallies about whether or not he would be taking any bailout money, or if he had sold any stock before the market crashed. He answered with a long, meandering disquisition about how hard it is for rich people to run for office:
"It cost me billions of dollars to be president, and I'm so happy I did it. Because who cares?"
Take a two minute tour through Trump's mind during a historic pandemic and economic crisis. Wild. pic.twitter.com/qLOYShtqzm
He’s said that sort of thing before, but his evasion of the question was even more clumsy than usual. He admitted for the first time that he speaks to his sons about the business, which he originally promised not to do. So he was very well aware of all the details outlined in this Washington Post story revealing that the Trump Organization has had to close its properties and it is costing him nearly half a million dollars a day.
This may be the real explanation for his recent abrupt pronouncement that he plans to end all this stay-at-home pandemic folderol and send everyone back to work. He needs the money.
But really, this is just the latest round of the Trumpian magical thinking he has indulged in since the beginning of this crisis. It’s clear that he’s completely in over his head and truly doesn’t know what to do. The health experts tell him that he must do things that endanger his personal fortune and his prospects of re-election. His business buddies, on the other hand, tell him the doctors and scientists are making mountains out of molehills: All he needs to do is appease the markets and give businesses confidence and everything will be fine. As he has done since he became president, he makes decisions impulsively, based upon wishful thinking and the advice he got from the last person he talked to.
For the first couple of months of this looming crisis, Trump counted on luck to get him out of it. He assured everyone that he had it totally under control and people didn’t need to worry their little heads about anything. When that failed, and cases started turning up around the country just as the experts had predicted, he tried to claim that the system was actually working perfectly, the people who were sick were all getting better and it was all working out great.
That was when he started searching for a miracle.
At first, Trump seemed to think he could force the pharmaceutical industry to quickly whip up a vaccine. He pushed them publicly and privately to get on the ball and just get ‘er done. Despite his self-professed “natural ability” to understand immunology and epidemiology, it took quite a while before it finally sank in that this could not possibly be done in a few days or weeks.
That was when he turned to a miracle cure. It’s unclear where he originally got the idea that doctors had discovered a treatment with the use of an older malaria drug. But wherever he heard about hydroxychloroquine, he decided it was going to be the magic bullet that got him out of this jam. He began selling it as “the answer” relentlessly, even at one point tweeting:
As this Salon article by Nicole Karlis points out, that’s a long shot. Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that a new Chinese study has found that this drug makes no difference for patients with COVID-19. But Trump has been touting the fact that New York will begin running a trial this week as if that signaled it was already a proven treatment.
Having secured a “cure,” he startled every health professional and political leader in the country with his new motto: “The cure must not be worse than the disease.” Evidently, he’s been fielding a lot of calls from business leaders who just want to get their profits flowing again, regardless of how many people will die. Since his own profits are in jeopardy as well, Trump eagerly switched gears.
So did his devoted followers, including Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who went on Fox News and said that seniors (like himself) should be willing to be “sacrificed” so the children don’t “lose our whole country” to an “economic collapse.” Glenn Beck suggested that seniors should all go into the workforce and take the risk of the disease while younger people shelter in place, presumably until the virus ravages the elders and burns itself out. Apparently, these people are so primitive they believe in human sacrifice to the market gods. They certainly have very little faith in the resilience of the American people or the economy.
In any case, this is all a very bad idea:
Health experts say abandoning restrictions in the U.S. soon would be disastrous — because the virus could “spread widely, rapidly, terribly, and could kill potentially millions in the year ahead with huge social and economic impact," says @T_Inglesbyhttps://t.co/uYwxT8eJGC
Trump has a sunnier view. In a Fox News town hall on Tuesday, he declared that America would be back at work by Easter, only two and a half weeks away. He said, “Easter Sunday, and you’ll have packed churches all over our country. I think it would be a beautiful time.” Fox anchor Bill Hemmer affectionately suggested that would be the “resurrection of America.”
This is all nonsense, of course. Trump never ordered a national lockdown, can’t order one lifted. He can tell everyone they’re free to go back to work as long as they wash their hands, but “stay at home” orders are coming from governors and mayors, not the federal government. Moreover, he can’t just order the virus to stop infecting people so we can get the economy going again. Article II of the Constitution is powerful, but it doesn’t make him God.
Much of the government at all levels has learned that in order to be allowed to do its job in this emergency, officials must pretend that Trump is a great leader directing a magnificently successful response. But the truth is that his magical thinking, from the beginning, left the whole country woefully behind the curve in dealing with this, and now states and localities have had to take the reins under terrible circumstances. Trump is just a figurehead to be appeased with flattery while the real leaders try to get the job done.
Update:
“I think if the Senate hasn’t completed writing this bill,” Scarborough said, “I think it’s extraordinarily important for the health of this nation, and I just got a note, I’ve been worried about this all night and I just got a note from an ambassador who has the same concerns, it’s extraordinarily important that Donald Trump’s own companies are not exempted from this bill, from this relief because by exempting Donald Trump’s companies, you give him the worst incentives to reopen this government — or to reopen this country quickly.”
Unfortunately, he may be right.
I do suspect, however, that some of Trump’s buddies will happy to step up. He’s still got at least 8 months to make sure they’re taken care of in some other way…
Lionel Trilling observed in 1950 that “in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.” Oh, conservatism was still around during the postwar period, but the conservative impulse (linked with the reactionary one) he famously described as “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”
The right’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic reinforces that impression. The conservative flair for messaging has always concealed the real game the way Lee Atwater said abstractions like “forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff” concealed the racist underpinnings of the GOP’s Southern Strategy.
Now, with a $2 trillion stimulus bill passed by the Republican-controlled Senate, the GOP has discarded its mask of fiscal responsibility and decided saving its donors (if not its voters) from financial ruin is something the United States can and must afford. Irritable mental gestures once made regarding balanced budgets existed to slash the country’s New Deal and Great Society safety nets. “Lazy blacks” had to be protected from the moral hazard of their slacker ways. The real agenda was freeing up more for those who already have it. With the stock market in the grip of the pandemic, handouts to business flow like the Mississippi.
“So weird how the Tea Party isn’t rising up in opposition to all this government spending,” tweetedPod Save The World‘s Ben Rhodes. But it gets weirder.
Donald Trump’s campaign revealed there was a cultish impulse underlying smaller government, family values “and all that stuff.” And not just a cult of Trumpish personality, either. This cult believes humans exist to serve the economy, not the other way around. The Market — bless its holy name — sits on the right hand of the Father closer than Jesus, even. It must be appeased. With human blood, if necessary.
The acting president suggested Tuesday that people might come out of their COVID-19 shelters, quit social distancing, and get back to work by Easter. Presumably, so the Market can rise on the third day. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick suggested grandparents should be willing to die to save the economy for their children and grandchildren.
Glenn Beck, Stuart Varney, Brit Hume, and others, make obeisance to the notion it is better for some Americans to risk death rather than the Market suffer further harm. Beck thinks oldsters should throw themselves into the volcano to serve the Precious. Varney disagrees. He thinks stay-at-home restrictions should concentrate on older, at-risk humans. Yummy younger people should feed themselves to Moloch because “that’s what the market likes.”
Jamelle Bouie finds irony in guys like Beck who promoted supposed Obama “death panels” for older people now advocating human sacrifice “for the glory of Supreme Leader Trump.”
The other great irony is that he peddles gold and survival seeds. He's been training his audience to be preppers for YEARS and now they have the chance to use those skills and he's like "naw, back to work!"
But it was Nicole Hemmer (“Messengers of the Right“) who noticed another irony in Beck’s recommendation. Beck “peddles gold and survival seeds,” she observes. “He’s been training his audience to be preppers for YEARS and now they have the chance to use those skills and he’s like ‘naw, back to work!'”
Irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble self-reliance.
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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. 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.
