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Month: April 2020

He blew it

Published by digby on April 5, 2020

There is a long, long list of good reasons to vote against Trump in November. After all, the man was impeached for extorting a foreign government to sabotage his political rival’s presidential campaign and was only acquitted because his party has become a soulless death cult devoted to protecting him. Most Americans already know that re-electing him would likely spell the end of us.

But they cheat. And the the chances of having a fair election have dwindled significantly since the pandemic struck. Trump and his henchmen will do everything in their power to ensure that the vote among Democrats is suppressed.

That means the Democrats must be ruthlessly focused an on message to try to cut through the cacophony of other news to make sure that people understand the stakes.

Jonathan Alter suggests that they focus on “the lost months”

In his Feb. 5 State of the Union address, Trump said of the spreading coronavirus, “My administration will take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from this threat.” This did not happen. 

“Necessary steps” were not taken, “safeguards” were neglected. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of Americans will die unnecessarily as a direct result of the president’s negligence. ..

Trump understands that he might have blown it, which is why—like a sweaty salesman—he has repeated “We’re doing a good job” more than a dozen times at his bogus and petulant news conferences. And now, even as he crassly brags about his ratings amid the “carnage” (his word, from his inaugural address), he’s getting set to use the mounting death toll to exploit a gruesome expectations game.

Here’s his only real plan: pivot from the fantasy of jammed churches on Easter Sunday to support for Anthony Fauci’s “best case” projections of 100,000 to 240,000 dead. If, through the heroic efforts of doctors and nurses on the battlefront, the numbers fall in the lower range—still possible, as Fauci notes—you can bet Trump will spend the general election campaign declaring a kind of sick victory over sickness.

This will be an obscene distortion of what he actually did—and, worse, didn’t do—in early 2020. But making logical arguments this summer and fall about Trump’s failures won’t be easy. Joe Biden and other Democrats charging that “Trump sent mixed signals” or saying “Look at South Korea now” will not be enough. By all means, let’s establish the accountability commission Rep. Adam Schiff wants, but it won’t change many minds. 

What might affect the outcome is a short, tight, resonant meme, a dramatic phrase that crystallizes and immortalizes the historic moment—the way John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World did after the Russian Revolution. The phrase must somehow capture all the squandered time and missed opportunities without frontally attacking Trump in ways that just push people back into their partisan corners. The headline on a superb Boston Globe editorial—“Trump Has Blood on His Hands”—is plenty true, but too blunt an instrument to win an election.

Instead we must tar Trump with his lack of preparedness the way “the emails” were stuck to Hillary Clinton in 2016, “the hostages” to Jimmy Carter in 1980, “the pardon” to Gerald Ford in 1976, and “Hoovervilles” to Herbert Hoover in 1932.

So what should the frame be? I’m partial to a headline in the March 28 New York Times: “The Lost Month: How a Failure to Test Blinded the U.S. to Covid-19.” The article detailed how testing screw-ups (by a still-unnamed pharmaceutical company) and bureaucratic bumbling led the government to lose the critical weeks it needed to get on top of testing the way China, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Germany and other nations have. 

Of course, we now can see that Trump’s incompetence runs much deeper and ran much longer than one month of snafus on testing (which he lied about almost daily). “The Lost Month” was actually “The Lost Months.” In fact, we lost three full years—years when the Trump administration let its contempt for science and “deep state” civil servants cripple the ability of the federal government to respond to a crisis. Trump didn’t fill 700 vacancies at the CDC, didn’t replenish stockpiles of medical supplies (while lying about Obama’s response to pandemics), and didn’t stop John Bolton from closing the pandemic preparedness office at the National Security Council (later lying that he knew nothing of it). 

Trump has said repeatedly that no one could have seen this coming—just another lie. Bill Gates warned of it in a famous 2015 speech and Trump’s own NSC predicted it in a 69-page report. A Feb. 3 report from the U.S. Army estimated that “between 80,000 and 150,000 [Americans] could die” from coronavirus. 

Even if the true period of negligence is longer, “The Lost Months” is resonant shorthand for what led the United States to have the most coronavirus cases of any country in the world. Repeated enough—with GOP-style message discipline—it could work as code for: He messed up big-time.

I don’t know if that’s exactly the right phrase. It seems a little abstract to me. But whatever it is, it should come out of every Democrat’s mouth every time they speak. No one should be able to think of Trump over the next six months without hearing it.

It’s not just like the flu…

Published by digby on April 5, 2020

I know that Trump and his minions all continue to believe this is a global plot to destroy Trump but this would be taking it to a new level.

Sadly, it appears that some people are determined to tempt fate — for all of us. Karoli Kunsat C&L writes:

Louisiana pastor Tony Spell is clinging to his constitutional right to kill his flock, telling CNN’s Victor Blackwell that he planned to bring worshippers in by the busload in spite of the stay-at-home order and risk of death from COVID-19.

Earlier in the week the Life Tabernacle Church pastor called the virus “politically motivated” and vowed to exercise his First Amendment right to assemble. Today he had much more to say about that.

“This morning, yes, sir, 10:00 AM,” he told Blackwell in response to whether he’d hold services this week. “We will actually run our buses. We have 27 buses that we cover in a 50-mile radius of our city. We bring people into the house of God, feed them natural food and spiritual food and then we go right back into our respective places. It takes us about eight hours to run into service on Sunday morning and then we come back in tonight.”

Now he claims they disinfect the church and practice social distancing but I’m thinking about those buses and that it absolutely won’t matter whether or not they bleach everything before putting 1800 or so people together for 8 hours to eat and sing. They should take a lesson from the Skagit Valley Choir.

When Blackwell challenged him to reconcile his “pro-life” stance with his decision to place people at risk of getting a disease that might kill them, Spell had an answer for that, too.

“My response to that is people’s hope is in the house of God,” Spell declared. “If they do contract the virus, if they have fears of the virus, the church is more essential now than ever to pray with people, to let them know there is a physician in Jesus Christ.”

He emphasized, “He is the healer; come under you all that are weary and heavy-laden, let me give you rest.”

And as a parting shot, he noted, “We were supposed to be at a million and a half body bags and we’re at 4,800 so the narrative is false.”

Do you suppose God would want any of these worshippers to have access to scarce ventilators or would he prefer to help those who help themselves?

Dr. Oz is advising Trump on coronavirus

Published by digby on April 5, 2020

If you wondered where Trump was getting his “data” on hydrocychloroquine, it’s exactly where you might expect. The following is from CNN’s Brian Stelter’s newsletter:

“Try it,” Trump said Saturday, talking about hydroxychloroquine, despite a dearth of evidence that the drug is effective and safe for preventing or treating the virus. The drug has not been approved by the FDA for that use. But Trump is hyping the drug anyway… and sounding a lot like his Fox allies. THR’s Jeremy Barr noted Saturday afternoon: “The three biggest advocates for hydroxychloroquine that I’ve seen in the last few weeks are Dr. Oz, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham.”

“And Fox & Friends,” The Daily Beast’s Justin Baragona added. “Last week, Dr. Oz said he emailed the White House coronavirus task force, asking them to consider a policy recommendation from Brian Kilmeade.”

He is getting his information from snake oil salesman Dr Oz and Trump henchmen on Fox News.

Yesterday Dr. Trump really pushed it hard, saying he might take it himself (despite assuring everyone he doesn’t have it) which means that he is no longer touting it as a miracle cure but rather a miracle vaccine. Imagine that. He’s obviously thinking that it will prevent you from getting the virus.

Meanwhile, the efficacy of the drug even as a treatment is far from proven. But that doesn’t mean that the president’s top advisers aren’t selling it as if it is and he isn’t pushing it hard in his Daily Coronavirus Rally. The question is, why? Why is he so hooked on this one drug?

It’s tempting to assume there’s a financial motive and I wouldn’t be surprised if there is one. But honestly, I think it’s more likely just a reflection of Trump’s magical thinking and grandiose self-regard. He wants more than anything for a miracle cure to “fix” this problem before the election and he heard about this one from his most trusted advisers on Fox News. He jumped on it so that he could take credit for it.

If the studies show that the drug does work, he will sell it as another sign of his very stable genius and his cult will applaud his magnificence. And if it turns out to be useless, he will just fall back on his “well, we had nothing to lose” and move on as if he did nothing wrong. It will be put on the colossal pile of Trump blunders and gaffes and everyone will move along.

But this is actually one of the worst things he’s done, whether it ends up being a good treatment or not. To have the president go on television and pimp miracle cures in the midst of a global pandemic, based on nothing more than political propaganda by his state TV operation, is stunningly irresponsible. The fact that his health advisers have to bow and scrape to his idiocy in front of the country in order to retain any influence on actual policy just makes it all the worse.

By the way, Oz was featured early on all over NBC News as one of its “Coronavirus Crisis Team” where he gave some spectacularly bad advice. Someone must have noticed that they were promoting quackery so he naturally moved to friendlier territory on Fox.

Setting an example

Published by digby on April 5, 2020

Trump repeatedly undercut the CDC’s recommendation on Friday, saying he wouldn’t be wearing one because “I’m feeling good.”

“I just don’t want to be doing that. I don’t know. Somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk, great Resolute Desk, I think and wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens. I don’t see it for myself.”

He is not greeting any kings, queens, or dictators right now. Nobody is traveling to see him at the moment.

He just doesn’t want to disturb his hair and make-up.

Is he too stupid to be fascist?

Published by digby on April 5, 2020

I wrote below about the president’s firing of the Intelligence Community Inspector General. It looks like he’s making a major power grab:

Sources close to President Trump expect him to fire more inspectors general across his government, after his Friday night removal of Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community I.G. who alerted Congress to the complaint that triggered impeachment.

Conservative allies of the president have told him that these I.G.s are members of the “deep state” trying to undermine him. Trump appears to have embraced that view.

  • A conservative ally of the president said inspectors general are part of the U.S. government’s “regulatory and compliance systems/organs” that protect the establishment.
  • The subject of “deep state” I.G.s has been discussed within the Groundswell network, the influential circle of conservative activists helmed by Ginni Thomas.

The outster of Atkinson, to take effect in 30 days, comes amid a broader initiative to purge the administration of officials seen as disloyal to the president.

  • The timing of the disclosure, as the nation struggles to manage the virus crisis, means it may go unnoticed by many Americans.

It’s obvious that they are making this move during the emergency for just that reason. This is something the Democrats should make a huge, huge deal out of and make sure the country is made aware of it. For him to do this in the midst of this catastrophe says a lot. Even some cult numbers on the fence might find this rank opportunism to be a bit much. (Ok, that’s wishful thinking. But some independents who lean GOP could be a bit taken aback.)

I don’t know if he’s too stupid to go full fascist. And the people around him are not exactly stable geniuses either. But his musings yesterday about how he doesn’t believe in vote-by-mail along with this should get your antennae twitching. It’s entirely possible that they will instigate some otherwise unthinkable election shenanigans.

Pirates and scammers and Ferengis, oh my

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 5, 2020

Pirates and profiteers arrive on the heels of any crisis. Ferengis, essentially, they look to profit from human suffering. The coronavirus pandemic has them hoarding, trading, and profiteering in Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) on the epidemic’s sidelines and in figurative back alleys. What is not clear at the moment is where the U.S. government ends and where the thievery begins.

TPM’s Josh Marshall is looking for leads to help sort out just which government agency is confiscating shipments of PPE headed to states and hospitals and where those shipments wound up. Reports are spotty. Marshall cites a couple of cases in Massachusetts and New Jersey.

The Financial Times reports an incident in which a shipment of medical masks from U.S. manufacturer 3M that was bound for Germany was intercepted in Thailand and diverted to the US. 3M claims it has no evidence of that happening:

According to the German newspaper Tagesspiegel, the German capital ordered 200,000 special FFP2 and FFP3 masks that are used to protect emergency staff and care workers from infection with coronavirus.

Andreas Geisel, Berlin’s interior minister, confirmed that the consignment had been “confiscated” in Bangkok and never reached Berlin.

“We consider that an act of modern piracy,” he said. “You don’t treat your transatlantic partners like that.”

The U.S. president at a White House news conference on Friday criticized 3M for not directing all its production to U.S. needs, even demanding the firm send 10 million N95 masks to the U.S. from its hub in Singapore, FT reports.

These reports are likely the tip of the iceberg. Or several icebergs.

Politico reports that the Department of Justice’s COVID-19 Hoarding and Price Gouging Task Force will redistribute tens of thousands of N95 masks and other supplies confiscated from an alleged hoarder(s). The numbers vary from report to report making it unclear whether one or more seizures are involved. The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services statement says the owner will receive fair market value for the confiscated supplies.

Buzzfeed News reports the government plans to purchase coveted 5-minute coronavirus testing machines from Abbott Labs. Just not enough to supply the country:

According to a spreadsheet circulated in a Monday email between officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services, California’s public health lab would receive just 15 testing machines and 100 coronavirus tests. Los Angeles County’s public health lab would receive the same amount.

According to the spreadsheet, all 50 state health departments, as well as some local health departments, would each receive 10 to 15 devices for a total of 780 devices distributed nationwide. Each lab would also be receiving 100 coronavirus tests — a total of 5,500 tests across the country. The document was first reported by Kaiser Health News.

But getting back to pirates and profiteers, it seems the Trump administration means to ensure at least some middle men get a piece of the action. An Abbott spokesperson told reporters the firm “will have shipped more than 190,000 of those rapid tests to 21 states” by the end of the day on Friday (emphasis mine):

HHS spokesperson Mia Heck confirmed that the agency only ordered 5,500 tests “because only 50k would be available in the first week, and we wanted to leave market share for hospitals and other healthcare providers to purchase through the commercial sector.”

“Psst. Hey, bud! C’mere.” – Lefty the Salesman

Business Insider (subscription required) reports a thriving black market exists in medical supplies. Jared Moskowitz, Florida’s top emergency management official, explained it to a press conference last week:

“The N95 private market right now is like a Ponzi scheme,” Moskowitz told reporters on Monday, using the technical term for respirator masks that filter 95 percent of airborne particles. “All day long we try to find these masks. We’re talking to brokers. We’re talking to distributors. We’re talking to medical salespeople. We’re chasing down warehouses only to get there to find out that they’re empty.”

“We’re being told these supplies are on planes only to see that they’re phantom planes, chasing ghosts when they don’t appear on FlightAware,” the former Democratic state legislator continued. “We’re constantly engaging in bidding wars, being asked to wire money to accounts that were set up that very same day with email addresses that were created only a couple of days ago.” 

Because 3M prioritizes orders from states and hospitals, purchase agreements themselves have become “golden tickets” for profiteers. Scammers lure some states into fake deals just to obtain them:

In an effort to stem the tide of fraud and profiteering, on March 20, 3M announced that it would work with “governments, medical officials, customers and distributors around the world to help get supplies where they are needed most.” It later clarified that it was directing more than 90 percent of its respirator production to healthcare and public health. The new guidelines, Plishka and Watters told Business Insider, had the unintended consequence of creating a black market for purchase orders — just the piece of paper — from states or other authorized buyers.

Now, anyone who wants to get into the lucrative 3M supply chain needs to have such a purchase order to demonstrate that the ultimate recipient of the masks is a priority. Potential scammers, Watters and Plishka told Business Insider, can “flip” the orders by selling them to other middlemen, who use them to buy masks from 3M that they can sell on the black market.

Such behavior, like the poor, we will have with us always. But only in the age of Trump has “Use your leverage” become a commandment endorsed at the highest levels.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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.

Prescient

Published by digby on April 4, 2020

I understand that Trump’s new chief of staff, mark Meadows, wants to fire Stephanie Grisham and make Kayleigh the White House Press Secretary.

Familiarity breeds contempt

Published by digby on April 4, 2020

Trump was bragging about his monster TV ratings the other day, obviously under the impression that everyone was just lovin’ his “performance.” I suspected at the time that he might rue the fact that so many people were seeing him in action.

The more people see of him, the more they realize just how deranged and incompetent he is:

Support for President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has diminished over the past two weeks, according to a new survey, with a majority of Americans now disapproving of his response to the public health crisis.

An ABC News/Ipsos poll released Friday reports that 52 percent of respondents disapprove of his management of the deadly outbreak, while only 47 percent approve.

The president’s latest rating in the survey shows Trump’s support backsliding from the levels he achieved in mid-March, when more than half of Americans, 55 percent, approved of his response and 43 percent disapproved.

Since that previous iteration of the poll was published on March 20, the administration extended its social-distancing guidelines for another 30 days and worked to increase its testing capacity for the virus.

But Trump also drew significant criticism for his initial reluctance to invoke the Defense Production Act to furnish much-needed medical equipment for states, and was forced to abandon his proposal to reopen the economy by Easter, which contradicted the advice of public health experts.

At the same time, the administration has begun issuing more dire warnings regarding the severity of the outbreak, predicting that as many as 240,000 people could die even if Americans heed the federal government’s guidance, and the number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 has soared beyond 245,000.

Friday’s survey is the latest example of public polling to show support for the White House’s coronavirus response dwindling after Trump initially received higher marks for his efforts to stem the disease’s rapid spread.

Most people don’t pay the kind of attention to politics that people like you and I do. They may vote and they may give the stories of the day a cursory look but only we junkies have spent an inordinate amount of time watching this flaming freakshow of a president try to pretend he knows the first thing about the job on a daily basis.

He can’t fake it. And unless you’ve watched this closely, you probably believed that much of the criticism of him in the press and among Democrats was just politics. I can see how someone might think it’s very hard t believe anyone could be as bad as we say he is.

Now people’s lives have been personally impacted in a big way. And worse, for Trump, many of them are at home all day with the TV on watching this blazing dumpster fire and having the appalling realization that this guy is everything we said and more.

That poll only went through March 19th, by the way. His performance has only gotten worse since then.

He’s “pivoted” back to pretending we’ll be back to normal before you know it

Published by digby on April 4, 2020

In that Washington Post article I flagged this morning laying out the administration’s dysfunctional response there was this little nugget:

It may never be known how many thousands of deaths, or millions of infections, might have been prevented with a response that was more coherent, urgent and effective. But even now, there are many indications that the administration’s handling of the crisis had potentially devastating consequences.

Even the president’s base has begun to confront this reality. In mid-March, as Trump was rebranding himself a wartime president and belatedly urging the public to help slow the spread of the virus, Republican leaders were poring over grim polling data that suggested Trump was lulling his followers into a false sense of security in the face of a lethal threat.

“Denial is not likely to be a successful strategy for survival,” GOP pollster Neil Newhouse concluded in a document that was shared with GOP leaders on Capitol Hill and discussed widely at the White House. Trump’s most ardent supporters, it said, were “putting themselves and their loved ones in danger.”

Trump’s message was changing as the report swept through the GOP’s senior ranks. In recent days, Trump has bristled at reminders that he had once claimed the caseload would soon be “down to zero.”

So he changed his “tone” for an afternoon.

Aaaand today:

California Governor Gavin Newsom was asked about starting up the football season at his press conference today. He said no, they have been watching the numbers as Asian countries start to go back to normal and they do not indicate that it will be a good idea to do this four months from now.

One might expect the president to understand by now that putting 50,000 people close together in a petrie dish (aka a football stadium) might not be all that smart when we are just starting to get it under control. But Trump’s gonna Trump and we’ll be fighting him every step of the way to stay alive. That’s really what we’re talking about. He cannot be responsible because he doesn’t know what that is. He can only see the looming election and believe that he has to convince the American people that he was a big hero who led the country to victory.

I guess we’re going to see if his powers of bullshit are strong enough to overcome the pile of dead bodies that will have piled up by then.

Update: Here you go: