Month: April 2020

“Intellectual incontinence” is the perfect way to describe the president, as Jennifer Senior does in this NY Times op-ed:

From the beginning, Donald J. Trump has taken a rather peculiar view of the new coronavirus: If he can’t see the damage it’s doing, it’s not doing any damage.

It was how Trump justified saying nothing to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who blithely kept his state open through April 2. “They’re doing very well,” Trump said of Floridians on March 31. “Unless we see something obviously wrong, we’re going to let the governors do it.” It is how he justifies opening up the country when tests remain in short supply. “You don’t need testing,” he explained on April 10, “where you have a state with a small number of cases.” Tests were necessary only “if there’s a little hot corner someplace.”

Where he could see it, in other words.

The hole in this reasoning is not terribly difficult to spot. It’s like offering to use a condom after you’ve already gotten a woman pregnant. Horse-has-left-the-barnism as national policy. Yet this is now the logic for reopening the United States, ZIP code by ZIP code.

One could argue, to some degree, that Trump is simply doing what humans are hard-wired to do. “We believe our eyes before we believe what people tell us,” said Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard social psychologist and author of “Stumbling on Happiness,” when I phoned to ask him about the infuriating persistence of this habit. “The apparatus that sees the world is over 400 million years old. The prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that comprehends projection models from the C.D.C. — is maybe 2.5 million years old. That’s brand-new, in evolutionary terms. It’s still in beta testing.”

Which is why fighting things we can’t see is so hard, like pandemics and climate change.

But this, one could argue, is the most important job of the presidency: to sweat the long-term stuff. Our implicit assumption is that presidents will plan, self-moderate and reason. Executive function is an essential requirement for executive office.Debatable: Agree to disagree, or disagree better? Broaden your perspective with sharp arguments on the most pressing issues of the week.Sign Up

In Trump, alas, we have the opposite: a man renowned for intellectual incontinence, rather than discipline. His plans to fight this pandemic vary from hour to hour, minute to minute. He has all the focus of a moth. It’ll miraculously disappear I mean it’s a mild flu I mean it’s serious I mean reopen the country I mean don’t reopen the country I mean yes reopen the country I mean I have absolute authority I mean the governors will do it.

His prefrontal cortex — the very part of the brain that controls executive function, anticipating and regulating and decision-making — is entirely offline.

If this indiscipline were conjoined with a devil-may-care courage — an indifference to what others thought, a willingness to quickly adapt — that would be one thing. But it isn’t. And having the strength to establish new norms is another cognitive requirement to lead during a crisis.

Trump, curiously, was selected and celebrated precisely for his gleeful assault on norms. But during this pandemic, he has been remarkably hesitant to help establish a new way of life. Only under duress did he start to encourage a national program of social distancing. He persisted in shaking hands at news conferences, even when the rest of us were leaving six-foot wedges between ourselves and our fellow citizens. He says that he, personally, won’t wear a face mask.

His gleeful assault on norms is nothing more than flailing about from minute to minute because he’s in so far over his head he can barely breathe. There’s no ” idea” (such as “disruption leads to creativity”) behind it. He just has no idea what he’s doing.

This is a person who thinks the F-35 stealth aircraft is literally invisible. So yeah, his mind is certainly incapable of understanding something like a pandemic.

His narcissism makes it worse, of course:

Here's Trump rambling at length about how smart he is and how well he understands public health pic.twitter.com/1Co6MaRkzl

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 6, 2020

The New York Times’ David Leonhardt​​ ‘s newsletter:

This has been the week when everybody seems to be thinking about reopening the economy. Governors are talking about it. So are President Trump and leaders in much of Europe. Today, Trump plans to announce new guidelines on social distancing that will move the country toward reopening.

But before anyone gets too excited, it’s worth taking a look at what’s happening in Singapore, which has been celebrated for a model response to the virus.

Singapore’s approach has certainly been aggressive — and more effective than the American approach. In January, as the virus was spreading within the Chinese city of Wuhan, Singapore officials began screening travelers arriving in their country and placing anyone who tested positive into quarantine. Singapore also quarantined some travelers who didn’t have symptoms but had been exposed to the virus. And Singapore tested its own residents and tracked down people who had come in contact with someone who tested positive.

The result has been only 10 deaths, out of a population of 5.6 million, despite the country’s close ties with China. “They never had a big outbreak, because they were ready and nimble,” Aaron Carroll, a professor at Indiana University’s medical school and a contributor to The Times, told me.

Thanks to that response, Singapore had been able to avoid the kind of lockdowns that other countries had put in place. Restaurants and schools were open, albeit with people keeping their distance from each other. Large gatherings were rare. Singapore, in short, looked as the United States might look after the kind of partial reopening many people have begun imagining.

But Singapore doesn’t look that way anymore. Even there, despite all of the successful efforts at containment, the virus never fully disappeared. Now a new outbreak is underway.

The number of new cases has surged, as you can see in the chart above. In response, the country announced a lockdown two weeks ago. Singapore’s “present circumstances,” Carroll writes in a piece for The Times, “bode poorly for our ability to remain open for a long time.”

Many public health experts agree. Moving toward reopening still makes sense. But it will need to be done with extreme care. Even if it is, as in Singapore, people should be prepared for a series of partial reopenings — varying from place to place — that will sometimes be followed by new lockdowns.

As Ed Yong writes in The Atlantic:

The only viable endgame is to play whack-a-mole with the coronavirus, suppressing it until a vaccine can be produced. With luck, that will take 18 to 24 months. During that time, new outbreaks will probably arise. Much about that period is unclear, but the dozens of experts whom I have interviewed agree that life as most people knew it cannot fully return. “I think people haven’t understood that this isn’t about the next couple of weeks,” said Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota. “This is about the next two years.”

Both the Carrol and Yong articles are well worth reading if you want to know what should be done: aggressive testing, tracking, quarantining and long-term social distancing. Oy…

Trump has dropped the ball and caused many more deaths than were inevitable. He continues to do it making things worse and worse. But even under the best of circumstances we would be dealing with this thing for quite a while. It’s depressing but it’s something we just have to face.

The latest cock-up:

The president spent much of his day hosting conference calls with company executives, industry groups and others that he announced Tuesday as part of a hastily formed outside advisory council devoted to the issue.

Advisers said the effort was aimed at building national momentum to reopen much of the country’s economy by next month. Trump said guidelines for such an effort will be announced Thursday.

“Today, I spoke with the leaders of many of our nation’s most renowned companies and organizations on how to achieve the full resurgence of the American economy,” Trump told reporters at the daily coronavirus briefing in the Rose Garden on Wednesday evening. “. . . We want to get our country open again.”

But across the business world, there was private unhappiness with how the White House handled the announcement of the advisory council — which it has dubbed its “Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups” — and others warned that Trump’s goal of a May 1 reopening date for much of the country was unrealistic.

Many of the chief executives urged the White House to focus more on mass testing, according to several participants on the calls. Public health experts have argued that widespread testing is a key prerequisite to reopening the economy because it would determine who is infected and needs to be isolated, giving Americans greater confidence that they can safely return to work and public life.

Trump seemed to downplay the issue while speaking Wednesday in the Rose Garden.Trump says mass testing not needed to reopen the country“It’s not necessary, but it would be a good thing to have,” President Trump said of mass testing for coronavirus on April 9. (Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

“We have the best tests in the world,” Trump said. “And we will be working very much with the governors of the states. We want them to do it. . . . The states are much better equipped to do it.”

No, he’s not doing what needs to be done. The pandemic will go on much longer because of it. I think we’re gong to have to accept that and just hope the governors can mitigate it somewhat.

(And if we want to stay alive we might not want to travel to places like South Dakota — and maybe steer clear of anyone with South Dakota plates no matter where they are. And I say that with tremendous sorrow for good people of South Dakota who are trying to do the right thing and are being forced into this death cult by their Trump-loving moron of a Governor.)

Anyway, whether it’s a big thing or a small thing, they simply cannot do it right:

Some of the groups involved in the calls were notified in advance of Trump’s announcement, while others heard their names for the first time during the Rose Garden event Tuesday night.

“We got a note about a conference call, like you’d get an invite to a Zoom thing, a few lines in an email, and that was it. Then our CEO heard his name in the Rose Garden? What the [expletive]?” said one prominent Washington lobbyist for a leading global corporation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. “My company is furious. How do you go from ‘Join us on a call’ to, ‘Well, you’re on our team?’”

How could they not get that simple thing right? What? Even my cat Mookie could have organized that better.

This tweet crystalizes it:

"These are all methods that we learned from the Americans," says deCODE Genetics CEO Kari Stefansson on Iceland's ability to control the coronavirus spread. “You taught us how to do this but you haven’t been doing it yourself. And that is pretty sad.” pic.twitter.com/2YwaTkbL4Q

— CNBC's Closing Bell (@CNBCClosingBell) April 15, 2020

That’s the most depressing thing I’ve read all day. And I’ve read a lot of depressing things today.

We elected an inept, narcissistic con man to lead us. Surprisingly, it turns out that actually matters.

A colleague once described a certain international client as having a “medieval” management style. Lords and serfs stuff. With a nod to their corporate logo, a vendor called them “the blue Mafia.” They’d set arbitrary deadlines just to make you jump through your ass (or work through the weekend).

After a packed kickoff meeting in which a top manager pressured a sweating underling into agreeing to such a deadline, a pair of young, freshly minted trainees walked out ahead of me. The first marveled at how their boss had pressured the poor slob into agreeing to his demands.

The other replied, “Yeah, they didn’t teach us that one in the class.”

It was like a Trump cabinet meeting with less ass-kissing. But the whatever-the-king-wants was the same.

The king wants his name on stimulus checks he can throw to peasants from his coach. The king wants to defund the World Health Organization (WHO) to distract from his mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. The king — he of the “acting” Everystaffer — wants to adjourn Congress for not approving his appointees fast enough. How dare they not say, “Yes, sir. How high?”

The withholding of funding from WHO looks identical to what Trump did with Ukraine (for which he was impeached), MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell observed Wednesday night. He asked former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal for his take on Trump’s latest off-the-rails briefing.

“The president is trying to assert the powers of Congress,” Katyal said. Congress sets the budget. The president cannot simply “nix out” budgeted spending for foreign or domestic groups he doesn’t like.

“His claims here are very much King George-y,” Katyal said. The Supreme Court has ruled the president cannot use the recess power as “an end run around Senate confirmation.”

“Here, his reason is, ‘My judges aren’t being confirmed.’ Well, give me a break,” Katyal said, “He’s had 50 court of appeals judges confirmed in three years. Obama had 55 in his eight years. In the last two years of Obama, he only got two court of appeals nominees confirmed. Two. Trump gets that on any given Tuesday.”

Ron Klain, the “ebola tzar” during the Obama administration, said what’s worse is that under Trump we are going backwards on COVID-19 testing. Knowing who is infected and who isn’t is a necessary precondition for safely sending people back to work. But already inadequate testing rates have fallen since the first week of April.

JOHN DEERING CARTOON: The Fifth Horseman https://t.co/qjB0StbvPS

— AR Democrat-Gazette (@ArkansasOnline) April 15, 2020

Trump last week announced the federal government would stop subsidizing states’ testing regimes. The solution to the testing problem, Klain said, is for Trump to use his powers under the Defense Production Act to “order millions and millions of tests, and get them where they’re needed.”

“The funny thing … is that the president is claiming a lot of powers he doesn’t have and not using the one power he does have to get these tests made and distributed.”

But more tests would show more infections and Trump is very sensitive about how bad large numbers of infections make him look. So sensitive, in fact, that he’d rather not know the real scope of the pandemic and send people back to work, worsening it, causing another spike in infections and death. He cannot help himself even to help himself. He’s set an arbitrary May 1 deadline for “re-opening” the economy and White House advisers cannot get him to relent.

Not only does Donald Trump not have your back, he doesn’t even have your front.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV 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.

I think this sums it up:

REPORTER: Why did you have your name added to coronavirus relief checks?

TRUMP: "Well I don't know too much about it, but I understand my name is there … I'm sure people will be very happy to get a big fat beautiful check and my name is on it." pic.twitter.com/u4cayuDeNk

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 15, 2020

Click on one of those tweets to see the whole thread. I’m drinking. Care to join me?

The Daily Beast reports:

A protest movement is taking hold targeting states that have extended social-distancing rules, closed schools, and restricted access to large religious gatherings. And it’s being fed by loyalists and political allies of President Donald Trump.

At issue are seemingly contradictory directives from Trump—who said on Tuesday that his team was in the process of drafting new guidelines that would allow some states to bring critical industries back to work, possibly this month—and public health officials and many governors, who have urged people to stay home as the number of coronavirus-related deaths continue to rise.

The tension has prompted Republican lawmakers and supporters of the president to publicly call for Americans to defy their local orders, claiming they infringe on constitutional rights.

On Monday, Richard Grenell, acting director of the Office of National Intelligence and the U.S. ambassador to Germany, posted a photo of the Bill of Rights on Instagram with a title “Signed Permission Slip to Leave Your House.” Below the post, in the caption, Grenell wrote, “Love this!” A reporter tweeted the post after its publishing saying, “Seems the top US intelligence chief ADNI ⁦@RichardGrenell⁩ isn’t a fan of the stay at home orders.” Grenell responded, “‘Seems’ Grenell is a fan of the Constitution to me.” 

The calls for defiance have grown so much so this week that officials inside the Trump administration coronavirus task force have begun discussing how to reconcile the growing discomfort of the president and his allies while also ensuring more Americans do not further contract the virus. One official told The Daily Beast that there is concern among task force officials that once they loosen the social-distancing guidelines for some portions of the country, Americans living in hot-spot areas will follow suit even if they’ve been asked to remain at home. 

Jesus …

But this isn’t really new, is it? The hardcore right believes they have the god-given right to kill the rest of us. This is fundamental to their notion of what constitutes “liberty” — the right of another to stay alive never supersedes the right of others t o kill you, whether from a virus or a gun or a lack of health care if you are sick. Under Trump it’s become a death cult.

That they fatuously call themselves “the party of life” because they care more about a potential life inside the womb than they care about any actually living human being is particularly rich.

I am not surprised they are doing this. In fact, I’m surprised it took them so long.

By the way:

More than eight in 10 voters, 81 percent, say Americans “should continue to social distance for as long as is needed to curb the spread of coronavirus, even if it means continued damage to the economy.” Only 10 percent say Americans “should stop social distancing to stimulate the economy, even if it means increasing the spread of coronavirus.” Nine percent of voters have no opinion.

While Democrats (89 percent) are more likely than Republicans (72 percent) to say Americans should continue the “social distancing” measures, large majorities in all demographic groups say it’s more important to stop the spread of the virus than to resume economic activity that could undermine those mitigation efforts.

Greg Sargent takes a look at Trump’s new crusade to scapegoat the WHO for his own mistakes and finds — surprise! — that it doesn’t hold up:

The WHO’s initial mistakes were real, and many critics beyond Trump have pointed to them. The organization was too trusting of China’s early obfuscations about coronavirus, and failed to aggressively push China to be more transparent. The WHO also arguably was too slow to declare a global public health emergency.

But cutting off funding as a punishment is counterproductive and deeply absurd. Indeed, even if you accept that the WHO committed serious errors, the timeline is still far more damning to Trump, by the terms that he himself has set through his criticism of the organization.

The timeline is far more damning to Trump

By Jan. 23, the WHO was already warning that coronavirus could “appear in any country,” and urged all countries to be “prepared for containment” and get ready to exercise “isolation” and “prevention” measures against its spread.

At around the same time, on Jan. 22, Trump was asked point-blank whether he worried about coronavirus’s spread, and he answered: “No, not at all,” insisting it was just “one person coming from China” and that “we have it totally under control.”

And on Jan. 24, Trump hailed China’s “effort” against coronavirus and its “transparency” about it, predicting that “it will all work out well.”

So Trump showed less concern about its spread in countries outside China — including in our own — than the WHO did.

On Jan. 30, the WHO declared coronavirus a global public health emergency. While WHO was still too credulous toward China’s response, WHO also warned that all countries must review “preparedness plans” and take seriously what was coming.

By contrast, on Jan. 30, Trump was directly warned by his Health and Human Services secretary of the threat coronavirus posed. Trump dismissed this as “alarmist.”

And on Feb. 2, Trump boasted to Sean Hannity: “We pretty much shut it down, coming in from China.” He hailed our “tremendous relationship” with that country. Trump continued praising China’s handling of coronavirus all through the entire month of February.

So at the very least, Trump showed precisely the same credulity about China that Trump is now faulting the WHO for showing, but without appreciating the urgency of the international threat coronavirus posed to the degree that the WHO did.

As MSNBC’s Ari Melber aptly put it, these attacks on the WHO are “only calling attention to the fact that the WHO was ahead of President Trump.”

About those travel restrictions

Trump announced restrictions on travel from China on Jan. 31, and he constantly bashes the WHO for disagreeing with this move.

But, while it’s true that the WHO did recommend against restrictions on travel, Trump’s decision simply doesn’t demonstrate anything remotely like what he claims it does.

First, at least 40,000 people traveled to the U.S. from China after this announcement, raising reasonable questions about how much it actually accomplished. More importantly, Trump disastrously squandered the time bought by this decision.

Indeed, Trump utterly failed to use that time to mitigate the spread that was already underway here. As the New York Times damningly documented, plans for a federal system to track the virus were “delayed for weeks,” which, along with the failure to ramp up testing, left officials with “almost no insight” into its spread.

And in late February, Trump privately raged against his own officials’ conclusion that Trump had to communicate the need for strict social distancing measures far more urgently, leading to “crucial additional weeks” in which the “virus spread largely unimpeded.”

Thus, Trump’s constant citation of his travel restrictions actually points to a major failure: The decision persuaded him he had shut out coronavirus successfully, helping spawn the lax posture that produced all that lost time, the horrifying consequences of which are unfolding right now.

Indeed, that decision to this day still continues to delude him into believing he managed this disaster effectively. That’s why he keeps citing it as representative of his glorious, decisive leadership — and contrasting it favorably with the WHO’s response.

By the way, as late as March 8th he was telling his donors at Mar-a-lago that the social distancing recommendations were simply to “destroy the country.” Remember this?

“They’re trying to scare everybody, from meetings, cancel the meetings, close the schools — youknow, destroy the country. And that’s ok, as long as we can win the election.

They didn’t release the guidelines until over a week later. He knew. All he cared about was his re-election.

He can blame the WHO all he wants but he can’t escape his own devastating irresponsbility.

The list of things that will have to be fixed if Donald Trump is kicked out of office in November is vast. But the ongoing corruption of the oversight regime is should be at the top of the list.

The Pentagon’s inspector general “could not definitively determine” whether the White House influenced the procurement process for a major cloud computing contract because senior Defense Department officials were barred from answering questions on the subject during interviews, according to a 313-page report released on Wednesday.

Department personnel who evaluated proposals and awarded the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract were not pressured by any senior DoD leaders, the IG found. But investigators were unable to rule out whether the White House interfered with the contract award because DoD’s general counsel instructed senior DoD witnesses not to verbally answer questions about communications between the White House and Pentagon because of “the assertion of a ‘presidential communications privilege.’”

I would worry that Donald Trump’s henchmen on the federal courts would ensure that this non-partisan oversight is dead forever but since they are partisan hacks before ideologues, they will likely uphold oversight for a Democratic president if it comes to that. So that’s good. I guess….

So Trump is insisting that the country be “re-opened” (whatever that means) next month:

President Trump has all but decided to begin declaring the country ready to get back to business on May 1, two current and two former senior administration officials said, but a scramble is underway inside the White House to determine how to stagger a reopening of the economy amid the novel coronavirus pandemic while also protecting Trump from any political fallout.

Impatient with the economic devastation wrought by social distancing and other mitigation measures — and fearful of the potential damage to his reelection chances — Trump has been adamant in private discussions with advisers about reopening the country next month.

Ok. There are a million reasons why this is nonsense but let’s assume there’s an actual plan. We all know that the only way this can happen with any assurance that a whole bunch of us who managed to get through this first wave of the pandemic won’t get it and die in the next wave is if they put in place a better system for detecting outbreaks .

Trump says that’s not his problem. It’s up to the states to obtain tests and figure out how to do contact tracing. Not his job. He’s got more important things to do. Like tweet.

So the governors have had to take matters into their own hands and form compacts to use their own resources to try to stem the outbreak. (How they can keep people from South Dakota and other places where their ledes have their heads in the sand from coming into the state and infecting us is unknown…)

And anyway, the big roadblock is, you guessed it:

The number of coronavirus tests analyzed each day by commercial labs in the U.S. plummeted by more than 30 percent over the past week, even though new infections are still surging in many states and officials are desperately trying to ramp up testing so the country can reopen.

One reason for the drop-off may be the narrow testing criteria that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last revised in March. The agency’s guidelines prioritize hospitalized patients, health care workers and those thought to be especially vulnerable to the disease, such as the elderly. Health providers have been turning away others in part due to shortages of the swabs used to collect samples.

It’s not clear whether demand has peaked among the groups on the CDC’s priority list. But after being overwhelmed for weeks, commercial labs say they are now sitting with unused testing capacity waiting for samples to arrive.

The continued glitches in the U.S. testing system are threatening to impede attempts to reopen the economy and return to normal life. Expanding testing as much as possible is essential so officials have enough data to determine when it’s safe to lift social distancing measures and allow people to go back to work. Continued testing beyond that point will help officials detect — and stamp out — sparks that could set off new outbreaks.

FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn told POLITICO on Tuesday the White House Coronavirus Task Force is continuing to discuss whether changes to the testing criteria are warranted.

They have learned nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Update: In case you were wondering

A small study in Brazil was halted early for safety reasons after coronavirus patients taking a higher dose of chloroquine developed irregular heart rates that increased their risk of a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia…

Despite its limitations, infectious disease doctors and drug safety experts said the study provided further evidence that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, which are both used to treat malaria, can pose significant harm to some patients, specifically the risk of a fatal heart arrhythmia. Patients in the trial were also given the antibiotic azithromycin, which carries the same heart risk. Hospitals in the United States are also using azithromycin to treat coronavirus patients, often in combination with hydroxychloroquine.

Good lord:

On March 16, the White House issued initial social distancing guidelines, including closing schools and avoiding groups of more than 10. But an estimated 90 percent of the cumulative deaths in the United States from Covid-19, at least from the first wave of the epidemic, might have been prevented by putting social distancing policies into effect two weeks earlier, on March 2, when there were only 11 deaths in the entire country. The effect would have been substantial had the policies been imposed even one week earlier, on March 9, resulting in approximately a 60 percent reduction in deaths.

He didn’t lead, everyone was on their own trying to figure out what to do. Some states did better than others, working with what information they had. But we know from all the reporting that they were scrambling to figure out how to get tests throughout February and March and the President of the United States was lying about everything every day during that important period.

I’m sure it’s always confusing. But there is simply no doubt that the lack of leadership and integrity at the top of the federal government cost many lives. That’s Donald Trump’s legacy. He cannot escape it.