Month: April 2020

So Mitch McConnell inadvertently admitted that Trump botched the pandemic response. He told Hugh Hewitt:

“It came up while we were tied down in the impeachment trial. And I think it diverted the attention of the government because everything every day was all about impeachment.”

And here we thought the response was “perfect.” But Mitch didn’t come up with this. It’s been bubbling up in the right-wing fever swamp for a while.

Trump did quite a dance when he was asked about it yesterday:

Q    Mitch McConnell.  Yeah.  He said that impeachment diverted the attention of the government.  Do you think that, in any way?  This was happening and building at the same time.  Did it divert your attention or your team’s attention or the Vice President’s attention?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, I don’t like to think I did.  I think I handled it very well, but I guess it probably did.  I mean, I got impeached.  I think, you know, I certainly devoted a little time to thinking about it, right?

Q    (Inaudible) the pandemic?

THE PRESIDENT:  So, but think of it: It was a hoax.  It was a total hoax.  And when you think that I got impeached only because they had a majority in the House.  They didn’t get one — they didn’t get one Republican vote — 196 to nothing.  Not one Republican.  It’s nev- — I don’t think it’s ever happened.  The Republicans stuck together and they stuck together in the Senate — 52 to a half.  A half.

So, you know, when you say that — yeah, I think it took a lot of — I see them going and saying about speed.  Well, they probably illegally impeached me in the sense that, if you look at the FBI today — with what happened, the horrible things — nobody cares about that now because all they’re thinking about is the virus, and that’s okay with me.

But you look at the report that came out from IG Horowitz; it’s disgraceful what went on.  It’s disgraceful.  It’s a total disgrace.  They got caught in the act.  But you know what?  We won’t talk about that now.  Did it divert my attention?  I think I’m getting A-pluses for the way I handled myself during a phony impeachment.  Okay?  It was a hoax.

But certainly, I guess, I thought of it.  And I think I probably acted — I don’t think I would have done any better had I not been impeached.  Okay?  And I think that’s a great tribute to something; maybe it’s a tribute to me.  But I don’t think I would have acted any differently or I don’t think I would have acted any faster.

But the Democrats, their whole — their whole life, their whole being, their whole existence was to try and get me out of office any way they can, even if it was a phony deal.  And it was a phony deal.  And it turned out — and all you have to do is look today at the FBI reports.  Take a look at what the FBI did.  Take a look at the people.  Take a look at Comey’s report — 78 pages of total kill.  Take a look at that.  Take a look at the report on McCabe.  Just read it and you’ll see how horrible it was.  And you know what?  I don’t think this country is going to take it if you want to know the truth.

Yes, he was distracted by the impeachment. Also his approval ratings, Sean Hannity, his golf score, his profits, the media, his twitter feed, election polls the usual. In other words, he isn’t actually a president. He’s a celebrity influencer who spends all his time thinking about his popularity. And he’s hired a bunch of sycophantic amateurs who also don’t know how to do anything so they couldn’t take action without him.

Never Trumper George Conway proved that even if he was “distracted” by the impeachment, it doesn’t explain what happened next:

Look at the calendar. The impeachment trial ended on Feb. 5. In reality, it was over before it even started, thanks in large part to McConnell. The only drama was about whether there’d be any witnesses — and that ended on Jan. 31, when the Senate voted not to hear testimony.

This is an important point. Trump knew old Mitch had him covered. He was only obsessed with impeachment because it was about him, not because he feared being convicted. That was never going to happen.

And anyway, he did manage to find time for recreation:

That left plenty of time to deal with the virus.  And while some lawyers in the executive branch and Congress were working on impeachment around the clock, impeachment didn’t consume the government. Trump managed to get to Mar-a-Lago at least four times in January and February, working in a few rounds of golf along the way.

He held five campaign rallies around the country during the impeachment trial.  Trump even had the bandwidth during the trial to comment on the coronavirus: On Jan. 22, he told CNBC “we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.” On Jan. 24, he tweeted, “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

On Jan. 30, at a speech in Michigan, he said again, “We think we have it very well under control.” On Feb. 2, referring to his administration’s Jan. 31 order partially banning travel from China, Trump told Sean Hannity, “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”  

Most importantly, impeachment didn’t keep U.S. intelligence agencies from warning the president and Congress in January and February about the danger of the virus. In particular, as Josh Rogin wrote, impeachment notwithstanding, “throughout January and much of February, senior Trump administration officials heatedly debated the scope and scale of the coronavirus pandemic.”

He didn’t want to hear it. The economy was doing well, the Democrats were in the midst of a contentious primary campaign and he was excited to be campaigning. The last thing he wanted was to have to be president. And so he ignored it and his people all understood that Dear Leader wanted the numbers to stay low.

And here we are.

Earlier today, I wrote:

It is simply impossible to grasp how badly Trump has failed. No movie plot would be ever be green-lighted that featured such an implausibly inept national leader. 

Turns out the screenwriter for Contagion, which is actually a very good movie with an excellent score by Cliff Martinez, agrees with me:

I never contemplated a federal response that was so ignorant, misguided and full of dangerous information. I thought our leaders were sworn to protect us. I don’t get to write this story this time. This is a story we are all writing together.

Are there scenes or characters you would change or adjust based on what we are seeing now with this novel coronavirus?

I would have never imagined that the movie needed a “bad guy” beyond the virus itself. It seems pretty basic that the plot should be humans united against the virus. If you were writing it now, you would have to take into account the blunders of a dishonest president and the political party that supports him. But any good studio executive would have probably told us that such a character was unbelievable and made the script more of a dark comedy than a thriller.

The entire interview is worth a read. He’s clearly appalled at Trump and not afraid to say it out loud. All of us need to.

At yesterday’s Coronavirus Campaign Rally, Trump made this dumb remark:

Think of it: 151 countries.  Somebody said to me today — that wasn’t in this particular world — they didn’t know that we had that many countries.  A hundred and fifty-one countries.  That’s something.

You know who said that? Someone who certainly isn’t in “this particular world.” His name is Donald Trump. How do we know this? Because he’s made the same ridiculously ignorant comment before.

November 7, 2017: “

After I had won, everybody was calling me from all over the world. I never knew we had so many countries.”

I think that may be the most honest thing he’s ever said.

Gabe Sherman reports on what’s happening behind the scene:

The national debate set off by Donald Trump’s announcement that he wanted churches packed on Easter was, like so many Trump crises, a self-inflicted one. In the days after Trump tweeted that “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” his medical advisers, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, implored Trump not to relax the government’s social distancing guidelines. Trump dug in. “His view was: I need to show people that there is light at the end of the tunnel,” a former West Wing official told me.

Under pressure, members of the coronavirus task force discussed privately how parts of the country might be opened in April, but cautioned Trump not to get locked into a specific timetable given the deteriorating conditions in New York hospitals and ominous upticks in cases in New Orleans, Detroit, and elsewhere. “They discussed it internally, but they never intended Trump to announce it,” a Republican working with the task force told me.

Trump’s impulsive decision—and its messy aftermath—consumed the West Wing during the critical week that governors were pleading with the White House to deliver medical supplies before hospital systems began to collapse. “It was totally crazy,” the Republican told me.

Dr. Fauci, Senator Lindsey Graham, and others raced to convince Trump that an Easter opening would be a cataclysmic error that could cost millions of lives. “This is a very, very stressful situation for everybody, including me,” Fauci told me in a phone interview on Monday. By last weekend Fauci’s arguments broke through: Trump agreed to extend the social distancing guidelines until the end of April.

Trump’s latest tonal and tactical shift (and almost certainly not the last) was driven by several factors, both personal and political. Trump learned that his close friend, 78-year-old New York real estate mogul Stan Chera, had contracted COVID-19 and fallen into a coma at NewYork-Presbyterian. “Boy, did that hit home. Stan is like one of his best friends,” said prominent New York Trump donor Bill White. 

Trump also grew concerned as the virus spread to Trump country. “The polling sucked. The campaign panicked about the numbers in red states. They don’t expect to win states that are getting blown to pieces with coronavirus,” a former West Wing official told me. From the beginning of the crisis, Trump had struggled to see it as anything other than a political problem, subject to his usual arsenal of tweets and attacks and bombast. But he ultimately realized that as bad as the stock market was, getting coronavirus wrong would end his presidency. “The campaign doesn’t matter anymore,” he recently told a friend, “what I do now will determine if I get reelected.”

Here’s another major management failure of epic proportions:

For an ordinary West Wing dealing with a crisis of this magnitude, the chief of staff would be a central player, mediating, delegating, making the trains on time. But Trump has only very intermittently been able to tolerate another person with power in his White House. Mick Mulvaney had essentially been a lame duck for months, and since he was pushed out in early March, there’s been no chief of staff at all—Mark Meadows, whom Trump appointed weeks ago, only resigned his congressional seat on Monday to fill the post. “How can you not have a chief of staff during one of the biggest crises in American history?” a former West Wing official said.

Not that Mulvaney was any good at the job, but he was better than the dumpster fire also known as Jared. He’s the one telling Trump that New York doesn’t really need all those ventilators:

Jared Kushner, who’s often been in competition with Trump’s chiefs of staff, continues to be the central West Wing player, leading a shadow coronavirus task force that is more powerful than the official group led by Vice President Mike Pence. In conversations Kushner has blamed HHS Secretary Alex Azar for the criticism Trump has received, according to a person in frequent touch with the West Wing. “This was a total mess,” Kushner told people when he got involved last month. “I know how to make this government run now,” he said, according to a source.

[…]

In recent days Kushner has advocated for his usual, iconoclastic public-private approach, drawing on business contacts. Last week he called Wall Street executives and asked for advice on how to help New York, people briefed on the conversation said. Kushner encouraged Trump to push back against New York governor Andrew Cuomo after Cuomo gave an emotional press conference during which he said New York was short 30,000 ventilators.

In a White House meeting around this time, Kushner told people that Cuomo was being an alarmist. “I have all this data about ICU capacity. I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators,” Kushner said, according to a person present. During an interview on Hannity on March 26, Trump said: “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.”

Now that Hopey Hicks is back, she’s said to be helping Trump become more presidential.

It’s not working.

Meanwhile, here’s some world class fluffing:

Hicks declined to comment. But Gidley, who is often in meetings with her and Trump, said: “No one has to give President Trump advice about being presidential—he is just a natural-born leader—and in this time of crisis, the country clearly sees the president is focused on the safety and security of the American people and always has their backs.”

Uh huh.

The only thing that matters is that someone persuaded him that he cannot win re-election by pretending the virus is going to go away. That’s all that matters to him, not the projected death toll or the cost in blood and treasure. Its all about him.

I don’t doubt that he’ll go back to “cheerleading” as he calls it because he won’t be able to help himself. He’s bought himself a month to pimp snake oil and hope against hope that something turns up that he can spin as his own heroic intervention to save the day. But no one should confuse anything he says or does as revealing that he either understands or cares about the reality of this situation. He cares about number one, period.

You hate to see it:

Via C&L — oopsie:

In order to combat COVID-19, we need both a decisive public health response and a decisive economic response. I’ve laid out exactly what I would do if I were president during this crisis, take a look: https://t.co/Q58OQW6tQO

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 31, 2020

Biden’s got some other things to say too:

hot damn @JoeBiden's team did it again. check out this side-by-side comparison. pic.twitter.com/dBrPDIbIO4

— Florida Chris (@chrislongview) March 31, 2020

As president, I would never send an American soldier anywhere in the world without the equipment and protection they need. We should not do any less for the heroes on the front lines of the battle we’re in now. pic.twitter.com/ZWNExlKq3H

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 31, 2020

I think that one is effective even though I personally hate war metaphors. I acknowledge that most Americans like them. And I suspect many Americans are yearning to believe once again that the United States is capable of functioning even somewhat competently.

Here are a few more. I’m sharing them because Trump is sucking up so much oxygen with his terrible response and Coronavirus Campaign Rallies that it seems sort of unfair that Biden’s getting so little airtime.

I know these are confusing and scary times, so for the first episode of our new podcast I sat down with Ron Klain, former White House Ebola Response Coordinator, to help provide some clarity around COVID-19.

Listen at https://t.co/gfVHzRcDXo or wherever you get your podcasts. pic.twitter.com/bCd1houIqo

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 30, 2020

Donald Trump’s ego will cost lives. pic.twitter.com/JNcGny13KO

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 28, 2020

You can't deal with the economic crisis until you deal with the public health crisis. It's a false choice. https://t.co/8y1UMD4fMT

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 28, 2020

Losing a loved one is incredibly difficult, but it’s even harder when you’re not able to be with them in their final moments — and that’s what’s happening around the country because of the coronavirus. It’s heartbreaking, and I’m keeping everyone affected in my prayers. pic.twitter.com/vAISTRxi5O

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 28, 2020

Anyone would be better at handling this crisis than Donald Trump. If it were Biden, I think the role of comforter-in-chief would be well handled. He’s very good at expressing empathy. As for managing the crisis I have little doubt that he would put competent, experienced people in charge and trust the experts. That’s what any normal president would do.

By the way, Biden wrote this op-ed about the threat of the pandemic on January 27th.

It is simply impossible to grasp how badly Trump has failed. No movie plot would be ever be green-lighted that featured such an implausibly inept national leader. When you describe Trump’s fail, it sounds like it simply can’t be true, no one could screw up that badly. But he has. And he still is screwing up.

Nearly a quarter million Americans are at risk of dying this year alone as a direct result of Trump’s incompetence and neglect. That’s roughly 80 times the Americans who died on 9/11.

Nearly a quarter million American deaths from Covid-19. That is more than the combat deaths of every single war Americans have fought except for World War 2.

That is how bad a job Trump is doing. He turned a deeply serious crisis into… there aren’t words to describe the level of his failure. “World-changing catastrophe” sounds hopelessly inadequate.

Why, why is he still president?

Donald Trump thought the job of being president was to “make deals” in the same way he made deals as president of the Trump Organization, his family business. The job does require negotiation skills, to be sure, but it turns out that Trump is very bad at those, which should have been obvious to anyone who gave a cursory look at his business career.

Trump had a lot of help from his father when it came to the real estate business, but his real talent was for turning celebrity into cash. It is literally the only thing he’s good at. He spent decades working the tabloid press in New York City, building his name as a Big Player with a Big Lifestyle, culminating in his very own reality TV show. He was a Kardashian before Kardashians had been invented — a person whose “job” is simply to live in the media.

The job of a president is just a bit more complicated than that. There is an element of celebrity, of course, especially in the modern era. Trump has indeed mastered that side of the job. In fact, it’s pretty much all he understands. He bragged about the ratings for his coronavirus campaign rallies and made this weird observation about them during Tuesday’s event:

"They can't get enough of it."

Of course reality show president thinks this is some kind of reality show we're all binge-watching…rather than a pandemic that is killing people. https://t.co/wmvTObvuwc

— Marina Fang (@marinafang) March 31, 2020

He’s good at being the center of attention. You have to give him that. But aside from dealing with Congress and foreign leaders — which, as mentioned, he does very badly —the main job of a president is to manage the federal government and lead the nation in a time of crisis. And Donald Trump has absolutely no idea how to do either of those things.

Despite his manufactured image from his reality show “The Apprentice,” he’s never known how to manage anything. Back in 2016, Politico reported:

Rather than magisterial and decisive, Trump the actual boss swings wildly between micromanaging meddler and can’t-be-bothered, broad-brush, big-picture thinker. He is both impulsive and intuitive, for better and for worse. He hires on gut instinct rather than qualifications; he listens to others, but not as much or as often as he listens to himself.

It is no surprise, then, that he has floundered in trying to do what presidents must do in a national emergency — oversee the federal government’s response. All he can do is hold those White House campaign rallies he thinks people are enjoying so much.

There have been a number of great articles written in recent days about the “lost month” of February when Trump consistently downplayed the crisis even when people who understood the clear and present danger were running around the government with their hair on fire. The failure to get testing up and running in the early days will be remembered as a deadly blunder. His recent lurch from a promise to end all public health mitigation strategies by Easter and relaunch the economy to predicting the deaths of 100,000 to 200,000 people has been dizzying.

The celebrity PR strategy is obvious. After downplaying the virus as no worse than the flu and insisting that life should go back to normal immediately, he’s now calling himself a hero for saying no to the people who said it was the flu and wanted life to go back to normal. Anything less than 200,000 dead will be proof of his genius. You have to give him points for chutzpah, if for absolutely nothing else.

The problem is that the crisis management isn’t getting any better. For instance, Politico reported on Tuesday that even as some people in the government have been asking foreign countries to pitch in with much-needed protective gear, another part of the government was actually shipping that same gear overseas — to those same countries.

Trump aides were reportedly alarmed when they heard about this:

Crossed wires would only confuse our allies, they worried, or worse — offend them. And Americans confronting a surging death toll and shortages of medical equipment back home would likely be outraged.

Ya think?

Obviously, it’s perfectly normal for the U.S. to send urgent medical supplies to other countries. What’s not normal is that those supplies are so necessary and so hard to obtain here at home. Did no one notice the 24/7 screaming on cable news about this shortage?

According to the Washington Post, state governors are still pleading for the equipment they were promised from the federal stockpile, and testing is still a major problem, which may actually have been made worse when private companies entered the market.

Trump told the states they needed to go out and get equipment for themselves and now they’re all bidding against one another — as well as against FEMA, which only recently entered the game. The Pentagon is still holding onto 2,000 ventilators because nobody has clearly decided where to send them.

Meanwhile, Trump is apparently on the horn all day, chatting with everyone from A-Rod to Wolfgang Puck and announcing policy changes based on what they tell him.

Cooped up in the White House for weeks now, except for a brief trip to Virginia on Saturday, Trump appears to be working the phones even harder than usual. Corporate executives, governors, celebrities and foreign leaders looking to get something from the U.S. government seem especially eager to secure a telephonic audience with the president.

Puck apparently got him to agree to restore the tax deduction for business meals. Lord only knows what foreign adversaries and corporate CEOs are cajoling him into doing.

Up until recently, it appeared that Peter Navarro, Trump’s China-hawk economic adviser, had been given the logistical task of working with industry to get medical supplies to where they most needed. That obviously didn’t go too well. So last week they finally brought in a professional, Rear Adm. John Polowczy, to deal with the logjam.

On Sunday he told Axios, “Today, I, as leader of FEMA’s supply chain task force, am blind to where all the product is.” That’s very reassuring.

Republicans have said for years that we need to run the government like a business because people in the private sector know how to get things done. Unfortunately, the businessman they picked to take this on was the owner of a vanity business dedicated to selling his phony “brand” as a self-made billionaire. When faced with a serious managerial crisis and a demand for real leadership, he didn’t have the faintest idea how to do it.

It may be April Fool’s Day, but this is no joke. We are now in the third month of this deadly epidemic and the federal government is still flailing around, and failing us.

My Salon column reprinted with permission.

A rising flood of COVID-19 patients and a shortage of ventilators are forcing physicians to choose which patients live and which die. Lack of critical medical supplies has New York City doctors operating under battlefield conditions. The nation is fighting a war against the disease state by state with a reality-star president providing little national coordination.

A March 28 email from the chief of NYU Langone Health Department emergency medicine advised doctors to “think more critically about who we intubate,” The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. Hospital leadership reassured doctors it would support life-and-death decisions they make during the pandemic:

“For those patients who you feel intubation will not change their ultimate clinical outcome (for example cardiac arrests, some chronic disease patients at end of life, etc) you will have support in your decision making at the department and institutional level to withhold futile intubations,” the email continued.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo Tuesday decried the lack of federal coordination. States are left to bid against each other, eBay-style, to obtain medical supplies on the open market, he said. Worse, they end up bidding against the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Cuomo’s younger brother, Chris, a host for CNN, has been diagnosed with the illness.

“What sense does this make?” the exasperated governor asked reporters:

“The federal government, Fema, should have been the purchasing agent: buy everything and then allocate by need to the states. Why would you create a situation where the 50 states are competing with each other and then the federal government and Fema comes in and competes with the rest of it?”

Why? Because chaos is Donald Trump’s style, “a textbook case of how not to run a complex organization,” the New York Times declared less than two weeks into his term. Jeremy Konyndyk led the global fight against Ebola during the Obama administration. He told the Washington Post weeks ago, “To the extent that there’s someone to blame here, the blame is on poor, chaotic management from the White House and failure to acknowledge the big picture.”

The situation arises from having a posturing incompetent sitting in the White House talking about war and playing general. Did Franklin Roosevelt and the War Department leave army divisions to bid against each other for tanks, guns, and ammunition? In this “war,” Donald Trump has.

A president with no depth was out of his the moment he faithlessly took the oath of office. Now he faces hundreds of thousands dying on his watch. He lacks the skills to manage this crisis. Worse, he doesn’t know he lacks them. His principle concern now is not saving lives, but perception management.

“Anyone who says he now soberly accepts the realiity [sic] of the pandemic. No. He switched claims,” Jay Rosen tweets. “From we’re doing a fantastic job, the virus is like 15 people to we’re doing a fantastic job, if we did nothing it would be millions dead.”

Kellyanne Conway just previewed the Big Lie that Trump will use to salvage reelection amid his coronavirus fiasco.

It rests on the idea that no one could have anticipated this crisis.

That's a ludicrous whopper. But they're going with it.

New piece:https://t.co/cAgwvIm9Z2

— Greg Sargent (@GregTSargent) March 31, 2020

The New York Times revealing the truth won’t stop the White House from lying:

WASHINGTON — White House economists published a study last September that warned a pandemic disease could kill a half million Americans and devastate the economy.

It went unheeded inside the administration.

Americans will die. Americans are dying. Trump will not lead, follow, or get out of the way. Those with the power to force him from office will not. They are complicit.

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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.