At this point the White House really is nothing more than a cover-up operation so I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that the president’s annual physical is shrouded in secrecy:
It’s been more than six months since President Donald Trump claimed to have started his annual physical at Walter Reed hospital but the White House is declining to explain why he has yet to complete the yearly doctor’s examination.
Senior administration officials did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment about the delay — despite Trump announcing this week he was taking an unproven and potentially dangerous drug after being exposed to an aide who tested positive for coronavirus.
Asked in early March about when he would complete his physical, the president told reporters, “I’m going probably over the next 90 days. I’m so busy, I can’t do it.”
A month later, as the coronavirus pandemic hospitalized UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Trump said he would finish the exam “at the appropriate time” adding, “but I feel very good.”
A president’s annual physical typically occurs at the beginning of a new year. Trump’s 2019 exam was conducted in February, and his 2018 physical was conducted in January. It is uncommon for a president to complete a routine physical exam months apart and in multiple stages.
“As a part of granting a president as much power as we do, he has the obligation to demonstrate that he is well or, if he is not, to let us know exactly what is amiss,” said presidential historian Michael Beschloss.
“From the time in the 1950s when Dwight Eisenhower released unprecedented information about the heart attack, ileitis and stroke he suffered in office, most presidents have fulfilled that demand, including releasing the results of regular physicals,” Beschloss said. “Too often in history have presidents concealed secret illnesses and medicine routines that had the potential to undermine their leadership, and the wellbeing of all of us.”
In November 2019 — six months ago this week — Trump began what the White House described as “portions” of his third physical during a two-hour examination at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
That visit to Walter Reed was unannounced and remained shrouded in secrecy for two days as the president remained out of public view and as the White House declined to answer questions about it.
The president’s physician, Dr. Sean Conley, later wrote in a memo released by the White House that Trump’s “interim checkup” had been “routine.” Conley at the time said a “more comprehensive” examination would occur this year and that the president’s labs and exam results would be released in a corresponding report.
At 73, Trump is the oldest person to be sworn in for his first term as president.
Now that he’s been taking Hydroxychloroquine, proven to be dangerous, it’s even more relevant.
By the way, the White House physician, the Navy veteran Sean Conley D.O., was apparently chosen by Dr. Ronny Jackson, who is now running for congress as a full-blown Trumpie. Conley is the one who prescribed the Hydroxychloroquine.
“I would really love to see in North Dakota that we could just skip this thing that other parts of the nation are going through where they’re trading a divide — either it’s ideological or political or something — around masks versus no mask. This is a, I would say, senseless dividing line, and I would ask people to try to dial up your empathy and your understanding.”
“If someone is wearing a mask, they’re not doing it to represent what political party they’re in or what candidates they support,” Burgum said, before his voice began breaking. “They might be doing it because they’ve got a 5-year-old child who’s been going through cancer treatments. They might have vulnerable adults in their life who currently have covid, and they’re fighting.”
And that someone might just be a decent human being who doesn’t know if they might have the virus without knowing it and don’t want to take the chance of infecting someone else — especially those people who might have a five-year-old undergoing cancer treatment or someone taking care of an elderly parent. If everyone wore masks, socially distanced where ever possible, and washed their hands obsessively we could significantly reduce the risk of transmission.
I will never understand why so many people find these guidelines so onerous that they simply cannot do it. And the fact that following these guidelines would allow the economy to open more safely and allow people to go back to work and let businesses welcome back customers. I just don’t understand all these supposed adults acting like a bunch of rebellious teenagers.
I hadn’t heard about these folks shaming the mask wearers but I can’t say I’m surprised. It’s been turned into a symbol of Trump loyalty — because Trump has turned it into a symbol of loyalty. They’d follow him over the edge of the Grand Canyon.
— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) May 20, 2020
ABC’s long-running daytime women’s talk show “The View,” has long been perceived by conservatives as a bastion of the left. On Wednesday night, President Trump’s campaign decided to give it some competition, launching its own women’s talk show called “The Right View.”
The campaign touted the new weekly program online Tuesday afternoon with a sizzle reel for the show, including a logo, theme song and live-audience soundtrack.
“For too long, women on ABC’s ‘The View’ have believed they represent all women’s views,” Mercedes Schlapp, Trump 2020 senior advisor for strategic communications, told Just the News. “They project the fake news’ narrative to viewers across the country and are obsessed with their blatant hatred of President Trump.
“Our new series – ‘The Right View’ – will make talk shows great again by breaking through the mainstream media’s deception and providing the facts about President Trump’s clear record of accomplishment,” she said.
“The Right View,” program will air on Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. and will be hosted by senior women from the Trump campaign, including presidential daughter-in-law Lara Trump, former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, Schlapp and Katrina Pierson.
Wednesday’s evening program is expected to target Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, sing the praises of Trump’s coronavirus response, discuss reopening a post-COVID-19 economy and address the so-called ObamaBidenGate scandal.
This new women’s program fits against the backdrop of a country fighting a global pandemic, as the Trump campaign embraces an unorthodox, David-vs.-Goliath online mentality that catapulted an unexpected GOP political newcomer into the White House.
At-home coronavirus campers have tuned into their social media, with the Trump campaign reporting that more than 1 million viewers participated in each of the campaign’s daily online broadcasts over the past seven weeks. The programming has featured coalitions of “Black Voices For Trump,” “Women For Trump,” “Catholics For Trump,” “Army For Trump,” and “Latinos for Trump,” and others.
“I think the American people, when they see the news, want to hear the truth,” Hicks said. “And right now, there’s just a massive distrust of what you’re seeing out there.”
I don’t think there’s much doubt that the Trump folks are planning a post-presidency media empire. So far, it seems to be digital, but I doubt Trump will be satisfied with that. He’s a TV guy all the way.
But, as I’ve written before, I suspect that Trump’s cult is going to dissipate more quickly than we might imagine. Sure, he might have a core that will stick with him for a while but they will move on to the next iteration of the right-wing fever swamp that seizes their imagination. From Goldwater boys and girls in the 60s to the Reagan Revolution in the 80s to Newt’s Republican Revolution in the 90s to the Flag-waving Bushies and the Tea Party in the aughts to the Trumpies now. They are all the same people, regularly reforming themselves into whatever freak show the leaders have concocted to take their money.
I don’t suggest they will ever go away. They’ve been around forever and I doubt they’ll ever go away. But hopefully we won’t have one of their own conspiracy-mongering weirdo members in the White House again for a while.
A deadly pathogen is afoot in the land. An unknown number of us are walking around with it inside us. We spread it unaware and asymptomatic. The mimetic drive to recreate normalcy, to reopen businesses and expose countless millions to the virus in workplaces and in churches is itself symptomatic of a set of social pathologies that may kill the country if they don’t kill us individually.
Earlier, we chuckled at the preppers with their nitrogen-packed foods and backyard bunkers. They have cached weapons and ammo, etc., so they can survive Armageddon when society collapses and there is no law except the gun. Or with their pimped-out AR-15s they’ll mount an armed insurrection against a Predator-equipped military when democracy turns to tyranny (i.e., their tribe loses political power). Turns out they cannot survive a few weeks at home with power, water, and Netflix but no Chick-fil-A.
The cult of hard work measures human worth by productive potential: no work, no worth. It is so ingrained in this consumer culture that even people prepared to ride out Armageddon cannot tolerate the feeling of worthlessness attached to not working and consuming for even a few weeks. For the Midas cult, those elites bent on turning everything and everyone they touch into gold, the U.S. cannot get workers back on the wheel fast enough. Workers’ diseased bodies and the old and unproductive are expendable. Fodder. Grist.
Read between the headlines. I don’t have to spell it out for you.
The novel coronavirus pandemic has exposed just how warped this culture is and just who is and is not essential. Not that those committed to the status quo will open their eyes to see it, both those with power and those without.
“I think the political moment has changed,” she said, pointing to the debate over what constitutes an essential worker during the pandemic. “Turns out it’s not an investment banker. … It’s people who get out there who put their own health at risk in order to keep life going in this country.”
The central issue in American life is the imbalance of power, Anand Giridharadas believes. The centrality of the perspectives of the powerful influences what we see on cable TV and in the halls of Congress. The shape of national policies reflect their shaping it.
The One-percent strive to remove the governor from the country’s economic engine. They paint the government as the enemy (except when it hands out money to corporations) under the guise of “freedom.” This has engendered a “paranoid attitude” about government, Giridharadas believes, as well as an infantile conception of freedom as the absence of government.
Conveniently for the One-percent, this blinds Americans to the threats to freedom posed by private actors: banks, employers, toxin-producing industries, etc. Workers’ best protection against them is the government, not their trusty AR-15s.
“And so this childlike freedom obsession that tens of millions of Americans unfortunately have is literally killing us in this pandemic,” Giridharadas says, “because they are so focused on government oppressing them through lockdowns that they don’t understand that you can end up way more impressed by a virus. You could end up way more impressed by not having economic security. You can end up way more oppressed by having the kind of healthcare system that encourages people to stay home instead of get tested.”
The elite perpetuate this system and profit from feeding bodies into their economic furnaces. We should reform corporate law to promote stakeholder capitalism, says Giridharadas. But people like Jamie Dimon (CEO of JPMorgan Chase) and the Business Roundtable “are not serious” about it even while giving lip-service to the notion. They are more interested in “the moral glow of voluntary virtue.” But heaven forfend it should be a rule. That would be government tyranny.
Giridharadas got me thinking about Mitt Romney’s infamous comment that “Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax.”
The less discerning hear that as 47% of Americans pay no taxes. But working people pay withholding taxes with the first nickel they earn. Withholding is the bulk of the taxes low-wage workers pay. Mitt Romney’s complaint was that 47% pay no income taxes, which is the bulk of what the Mitt Romneys pay.
About a decade ago, you could picture federal revenue each year (roughly) as five one-dollar bills. Two were income tax. Two more came from payroll taxes, and the last was corporate and other taxes. As the rich got richer and corporations paid less, that has shifted.
One-percenters complain they pay too much in taxes and the 47% pays too little because the One-percent pays them too little so the One-percent can collect more. Thus, One-percenters pay even more income tax. So instead of rebalancing the economic power in this country toward the people who are really essential, the One-percent buys off politicians who will cut their taxes so they can keep the more. As a bonus, they still get to complain the 47% doesn’t pay anything because the One-percent still pays them too little.
Clear?
But our system has been custom-tailored to suit the rich, Giridharadas say. And it doesn’t have to be that way. That is a choice.
“So many other countries are not like this and they still have capitalism,” he continues. Shocking? “Do you know that Germany has capitalism? Do you know that all the Scandinavian countries have capitalism? They have great companies there.” And universal health care.
Meanwhile, in the depths of this pandemic-induced depression, Republicans are worried that we are coddling the unemployed, hoping to use the threat of job loss and loss of health insurance to get them back on the wheel at risk to their lives. And the MAGAs who this weekend will wave flags and celebrate Americans who died protecting their country are incensed about having to wear masks to protect themselves and their neighbors.
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.
BOAR CROSSING: Police temporarily blocked off a road when about 30 wild boars, including adults and newborns, tried to make a crossing in the Lichterfelde district of Berlin. https://t.co/6MwYaI90xKpic.twitter.com/de0dxXtTRH
NEW ADDITION: An endangered pygmy hippo calf was born at the San Diego Zoo for the first time in more than 30 years—and was standing, walking and following his mother within hours! https://t.co/Z58ThQE52tpic.twitter.com/CgUOQlMdRi
At the intersection of Rawsonville and Textile Roads, on a slender stretch of turf that runs the length of a half-deserted strip mall, Kathryn Prater and Kelra Rise are dancing.
The longtime friends, white women in their early 40s, haven’t had much to celebrate recently. Rise lost her job as a shipping clerk two months ago and is now uninsured and struggling to get by; Prater, a school bus driver, will receive her final paycheck in two weeks with no obvious prospect of income thereafter. Their pain is representative of Michigan on the whole, a state battered by Covid-19 to the tune of 5,000 deaths; a state crushed under the weight of a 22 percent unemployment rate; and now, a state reeling from a 500-year flood in mid-Michigan that has displaced tens of thousands of people. If America has a headache, Michigan has a migraine.
But in this moment, none of it matters. For the masses gathered on the side of the road, the sight of a presidential motorcade—and the knowledge that Donald Trump himself has come to their backyard, to visit the local Ford plant and pay homage to the old “Arsenal of Democracy”—is sufficient to distract from the suffering of the day. Country music blares from the back of a parked pickup truck. Giddy customers fork over $5 bills and pull MAGA shirts over their outfits. One man hoists a Betsy Ross-era flag from his fishing pole, with a naked brunette doll—“Governor Half-Whit!” he cries, echoing a presidential putdown—dangling from a noose.
I’ll have a lot more from President Trump’s visit to Ypsilanti. For now, here’s one MAGA supporter hoisting a Betsy Ross flag on a fishing pole with a naked doll (“Governor Half-Whit!”) hanging from a tiny noose. pic.twitter.com/QG9ATL4ygF
[E]ven as Trump stuck predominantly to the script on Thursday, portraying himself as the fireman who had ventured into a state smoldering with rage and anxiety, the scent of kerosene followed close behind. Just 24 hours before he arrived in Michigan, the president launched a dangerous disinformation campaign, accusing the secretary of state of going “rogue” by illegally sending absentee ballots to every Michigan voter. He threatened to block funding to Michigan—a state beleaguered by multiple converging disasters, including one that was unfolding just as the tweet was sent—“if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!”
To be clear, none of this is accurate. Voters were sent applications to vote absentee, a practice consistent with a newly adopted Michigan law (a law that exists in other states, red and blue alike). The Michigan GOP has itself sent out applications. There is nothing sordid or illegitimate going on; both parties here understand the rules of the game and are attempting to master them before November.
But Trump is playing his own game. Ever in need of a foil—be it Barack Obama’s birth certificate, John McCain, Megyn Kelly, Low Energy Jeb, Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco, Crooked Hillary, the Deep State, Never Trumpers, Sleepy Joe, Obamagate, or combinations thereof—the president has set his sights on the institution of the ballot box. The benefit is twofold: Trump can simultaneously incite the distress of his base to juice enthusiasm come November while establishing a built-in justification should he lose.
The effects are already manifest. In conversation after conversation with voters here Thursday, Trump supporters repeatedly—and completely unsolicited—say Democrats are attempting to steal the election from the president.
“I lived in Chicago for six years. We know how Mayor Daley stuffed the ballot box for JFK against Nixon.” says Keith Brudder, a 72-year-old landscape contractor from the nearby town of Willis. “That’s what the Democrats in charge here want to do, with this mail-in voting. There’s just no way to have accountability for those ballots like you do when people come to the voting booth.”
“In Wayne County alone, more than a million people who weren’t registered to vote in 2018 got to vote anyway, and that’s how Whitmer and these Democrats got elected,” says Matthew Shepard, a retired career military man who drove his hulking, orange paramilitary-style truck 90 minutes south from Shiawassee County to cheer on the president. (He offered no documentation for those statistics.) “That’s the only way Trump loses this election—this mail voting scam.”
Deborah Fuqua-Frey, who sits on the board of the Washtenaw County GOP and helped organize the pro-Trump rally here, says the United Auto Workers union “controls the outcome of the 2020 election.” And that terrifies her. “Because nobody knows how to stuff the ballot box like the UAW,” she says. “Trust me, I was a third-generation UAW member, and I know they’re always looking for new ways to cheat. That’s what they’re going to do with the mail system.”
You will notice that this crowd is pretty sparse. I doubt they represent more than a handful of Americans. But it does show that Trump is getting his message across. If he wins it’s a sign of his magnificent electoral prowess. If he loses, the game was rigged.
For answers to this question listen to a great interview with Rebecca Solnit by Chris Hayes for the podcast: Why Is This Happening? Finding solidarity in a disaster with Rebecca Solnit: podcast and transcript
I recommend people listen to this not just to understand why conservatives are acting this way, but also because she describes all the good ways ordinary people in communities normally respond to disasters vs how movies and media portray them.
REBECCA SOLNIT: …the hundredth anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake and fire was coming up in 2006, around 2004, I got involved in a few projects to think about what had happened, started looking really closely at what happened, and then realized that the earthquake didn’t do that much damage. Institutional authorities, treating the public as an enemy to be controlled, and making bad decisions was actually the most destructive force. And in the meantime, ordinary people were, as you note, remarkable, altruistic, creative, innovative, generous, putting the conditions of survival in a ruined city together.
She describes some of the bad decisions made by institutional authorities after the earthquake, (7:24)
Some people died, fire started. But the U.S. military, headed by General Funston, who had been a war criminal in the war in the Philippines, immediately assumed ordinary people would behave badly. And a lot of authorities assume what happens in disaster is that things are out of control. They see the fact that they are no longer in control as terribly dangerous because they assume the only thing that keeps ordinary people behaving well is the power of institutional authority with its threat of violence. So, the mayor issued a shoot to kill order for potential looting, which is the disaster moment for petty theft.
Then they get into a discussion on who is pushing the rush to return to normal, why they are doing it and and how those people define normal. (36:22)
CHRIS HAYES: And I think that the idea about the return to normal and how loaded that is along various lines of societal division is so at the forefront right now because you have this near, this insane situation of a vocal group of people, largely wealthy people, and they’re sort of propagandists, and Stooges wanting to march the country into untold death, destruction and misery because normalcy to them is so important.
REBECCA SOLNIT: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, and it’s not really just returning to the status quo, it’s returning to profitability, specifically to being back in business and propping up the markets. And I feel like, in a way, I never quite recognized before, these are people for whom dead things like money are alive and beloved in a tenderhearted way, and living beings are dead to them in some way.
I mean, who was it who said the other day that we should send America’s kids back to school and that whatever it was like a 3% casualty was an acceptable rate and it’s like, “Dude, you just said you’re willing to let a few million children die.”
He asked political psychology researchers why are conservatives dismissing the danger, opening states and counties prematurely, refusing to wear masks and waving off the deaths of older people as a small price to pay? Their explanations don’t totally fit with how their research would predict how conservatives would act. Klein gives his opinion why he thinks conservatives are dismissing the danger:
But once a politician captures a party, other dynamics take over. For one thing, partisans trust their leaders and allied institutions. Very few of us have personally run experiments on the coronavirus, or gone around the world gathering surface temperature readings over the course of decades. We have to choose whom to believe, and once we do, we’re inclined to take their word when describing contested or faraway events.
For another, we all fall prey to motivated reasoning, in which we shape evidence, arguments, and values to align with our incentives. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
I just read a column by Bob Altermeyer from August 23, 2018 that adds more understanding of conservative minds.
Why Do Trump’s Supporters Stand by Him, No Matter What?
When you don’t know why your beliefs are true, you can’t defend them very well when other people or events confront them. Once you’ve run out of whatever counter-arguments your authorities have loaded into you, you’re done. But being flabbergasted doesn’t mean you change your beliefs. You can keep on believing as much as before if you want. You can even pat yourself on the back for believing when it seems clear you are wrong. Some people do this, and you know who taught them to.
That is dogmatism, and experiments show that authoritarian followers have two or three times the normal amount of it because they believe many things strongly, but don’t know why. When the evidence and arguments against their beliefs becomes irrefutable, they simply shut down. … When they hear bad news about Trump, they tell each other the explanation that the president gave, and that is good enough. It doesn’t matter that it makes no sense or contradicts earlier things he said or promised. The important thing is they are hearing it from a fellow believer and it is their job to believe it and say it too. Research shows that authoritarian followers value group cohesiveness much more than other people do, and strongly condemn persons who stop believing what the group believes.
Read the whole Altermeyer piece, it’s useful for understanding Trump’s followers. My next piece is, “How we can save conservative lives against their will.”
Seriously ill Covid-19 patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine were more likely to die or develop dangerous heart arrhythmias, according to a large observational study published Friday in the medical journal The Lancet. https://t.co/0JNP6TDk5V
Donald Trump is lazy and stupid so he’s desperate for a miracle cure that will end the virus so he can go back to doing the only thing he really cares about: holding rallies.
He may even succeed. Today he came out and demanded that the churches be re-opened immediately and said he would “override” the Governors. (No one knows what that means…)
Law enforcement officials have restructured the division of federal prosecutors that oversaw the case against President Trump’s longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr., according to people briefed on the matter, the latest upheaval in an office at the center of the recent political turmoil at the Justice Department.
The reorganization of most of the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington was implemented last week, capping a tumultuous 15-week stint by Timothy Shea, a longtime adviser to Attorney General William P. Barr, as the interim U.S. attorney in Washington. Mr. Shea’s tenure abruptly ended this week when Mr. Barr named him the acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The White House said Monday that Mr. Trump intended to nominate Justin E. Herdman, the U.S. attorney in Cleveland, to replace Mr. Shea.
Law enforcement officials had discussed an overhaul of the unit for years, but it was not clear why Mr. Shea implemented it when he seemed on the verge of leaving, according to half a dozen people briefed on the changes who would not be named discussing it for fear of retribution. Some lawyers in the office were said to express concern because he was moving prosecutors out of the public corruption unit, which is part of the criminal division. Some feared that it was in response to the turmoil over Mr. Stone’s case, in which Mr. Barr intervened to ask for lighter sentence than prosecutors had recommended, and that members of the unit were being unfairly scrutinized for potential leaks.
[…]
Mr. Shea finalized a plan this spring to overhaul every part of the criminal division except for the national security section, which was responsible for the prosecution of Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, which Mr. Barr sought to withdraw after a sustained campaign by Mr. Trump and his supporters. Mr. Barr’s action was highly unusual and it prompted the federal judge overseeing the case to ask a former judge to oppose it.
Mr. Shea made his most extensive changes at the fraud and public corruption unit, which handled politically sensitive matters like the Stone case. It also oversees the ongoing investigation into stock trades that Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, made as the pandemic was unfolding in the United States. F.B.I. agents seized Mr. Burr’s cellphone last week in a major escalation of the inquiry.
[…]
Mr. Shea’s prospects of becoming U.S. attorney permanently were thrown into jeopardy in his first week on the job, when the president complained about the sentencing recommendation for Mr. Stone made by career prosecutors in the office. Mr. Stone was convicted of seven felonies in an effort to impede a congressional inquiry that threatened Mr. Trump.
Mr. Barr intervened to ask a federal judge for a lighter sentence than prosecutors had requested. He denied that he did so at the president’s urging and instead blamed the prosecutors’ original recommendation on a miscommunication with Mr. Shea.
[…]
Mr. Shea had grown increasingly isolated from the prosecutors he was leading after many employees started to work remotely, according to current and former department employees. Some workers told associates that he had damaged the office by doing what they saw as Mr. Barr’s bidding. Other said he had been put in an impossible position of trying to ingratiate himself with lawyers who did not trust the attorney general. Few assumed he would stay.
Nonetheless, Mr. Shea himself was taken aback when his departure appeared in media reports on Monday before the White House announced that Mr. Herdman would replace him, as were others in the office, according to two people familiar with the matter.
This is pretty devastating. It hits everyone. The Trump cult is reminded that he was once a scathing credit of their Dear Leader. The Trump critics see what a groveling hypocrite he is. It’s a two-fer.
He really is a piece of work. The fact that he’s decided to run with the “Oranges of the investigation” hearings in the Judiciary Committee shows that he’s nervous.
