There’s no other explanation:
How hard is it to take the smallest precautions like wearing a mask and social distancing? Why do they have to be so openly defiant?
Pence is a religious fanatic so maybe he thinks God will save him. DeSantis isn’t a stupid person. He educated. The only explanation for him is that he’s a monster.
Here’s another one:
Pompeo has refused to explain why he asked Trump to fire the State Department inspector general, but it’s no mystery: Linick was investigating Pompeo’s history of potentially illegal behavior and misuse of taxpayer funds.
Pompeo refused to say why he made the recommendation to fire State Department IG Steve Linick.
POMPEO: “In this case, I recommended to the President that Steve Linick be terminated. I frankly should have done it some time ago.”
QUESTION: “You have said, sir, that Mr. Linick was ‘undermining’ the department’s mission. What exactly does that mean? Can you give us examples? Even the President doesn’t know what that means. He says he didn’t really know much about it before you mentioned it. So what specifically has Mr. Linick done?”
POMPEO: “Yeah. Yeah, unlike others, I don’t talk about personnel matters. I don’t leak to you all, and I’ll just say this: I can’t give you specificity. We’ll share with the appropriate people the rationale.”
Just before he was fired, Linick made an inquiry into Pompeo’s misuse of taxpayer funds for elaborate dinners with Republican politicians and donors.
NBC News: “State Department officials involved in the dinners said they had raised concerns internally that the events were essentially using federal resources to cultivate a donor and supporter base for Pompeo’s political ambitions — complete with extensive contact information that gets sent back to Susan Pompeo’s personal email address.”
Linick was also investigating Pompeo for abuse of power for using government staff to complete personal errands.
NBC News: “The State Department inspector general who was removed from his job Friday was looking into whether Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made a staffer walk his dog, pick up his dry cleaning and make dinner reservations for Pompeo and his wife.”
And Linick was concluding an investigation into the Trump administration’s possibly illegal circumvention of Congress to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia.
New York Times: “The State Department inspector general fired by President Trump on Friday was in the final stages of an investigation into whether the administration had unlawfully declared an ‘emergency’ last year to allow the resumption of weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for their air war in Yemen.”
Aaaaand, Pompeo certainly did know about the last one which he said he didn’t (“someone walked my dog to sell arms to my dry cleaner” hahaha.”) because he answered written questions about the Saudi arms sale:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declined an interview request for the State Department inspector general’s inquiry into whether the Trump administration acted illegally in declaring an “emergency” to bypass a congressional freeze on arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to three people with knowledge of his actions.
Mr. Pompeo chose instead to answer written questions from investigators working for the inspector general, Steve A. Linick, who was fired by President Trump on Friday.
That indicates that the secretary of state was aware of Mr. Linick’s investigation and the specific lines of questioning about Mr. Pompeo’s decision last year to resume the sales of bombs and other weapons, which had been stalled since 2017. Saudi Arabia has led Persian Gulf nations in an air war in Yemen that has resulted in large numbers of civilian deaths.
Pompeo and his wife are quite the little aristocrats running the State Department like their personal fiefdom and donor outreach group for the 2024 presidential campaign — at taxpayer expense.
And the Saudi arms sale is dirty on the same level that the arms to Iran were dirty during the Reagan administration. Maybe someone needs to look into what they’ve done with the money. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were doing an “Iran-Contra for Dummies” and they sent the money to that sad sack who tried to invade Venezuela a couple of weeks ago.
God help us if Mike Pompeo ever become president. He has the worst attributes of every corrupt, undemocratic, demagogic, GOP president in the modern era. There have been a bunch of them. He’s not as dumb as Trump but he’s just as self-serving and unethical.
WTF is up with the Hydroxychloroquine obsession?
BRAZIL HEALTH MINISTER RESIGNS Brazil’s Minister of Health, Nelson Teich, resigned from his position after only several weeks in office. Dr. Teich and his predecessor were reportedly pressured by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to promote the use of hydroxychloroquine and to work with the state governors to lift social distancing restrictions, which may have contributed to their respective decisions to resign.
President Bolsonaro reportedly instructed Dr. Teich to issue federal guidance that would increase the early use of hydroxychloroquine, despite concerns regarding the drug’s efficacy and risk of severe adverse effects. President Bolsonaro has also clashed with state governors, some of whom are resisting orders to relax social distancing measures.
Brazil has been reporting increasing COVID-19 incidence and deaths, including reporting its record high daily COVID-19 incidence and deaths yesterday, and the health system in São Paulo is reportedly on the brink of collapse.
Russia has been similarly obsessed with this drug.
Why are all these authoritarians so insistent that this particular drug is their magic cure-all? It’s like some sort of mass delusion.
Maybe it will turn out to have some usefulness. But the idea that these non-scientists are absolutely convinced that they’ve found the miracle cure based on nothing more than anecdotes speed through wingnut media speaks to the fact that these right wing authoritarian leaders are getting high on their own supply. They are as insane as their own followers.
As Chris Hayes put it last night:
Is the only good Democrat a dead Democrat?
That’s actually the first sentence in this article:
Is the only good Democrat a dead Democrat?
That’s what Otero County’s District 2 Commissioner Couy Griffin alleged at a May 17 gathering in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
“I’ve come to a place where I’ve come to the conclusion that the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat,” he said to a crowd gathered in Sierra County.
Griffin clarified moments later that he meant a political death – as opposed to a physical death, but his prior statements received cheers from the crowd before the clarification.
He was speaking at a “Cowboys for Trump” rally New Hope Revival Church in Truth or Consequences. Naturally they were violating a state order against large gatherings.
These guys are real pips:
There are many figures of speech that one can interpret as being violent even if they weren’t intended that way. For instance, saying someone is “in the crosshairs” is technically a threatening statement but most people who use it aren’t suggesting that the person they’re talking about should literally be in gun sites.
The comment “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat” is unambiguous, particularly coming from a guy who commonly threatens them with death on his social media feed. He can say that he meant “a political death” but that’s not a common expression that can be read both ways.
In fact, as any “Cowboy for Trump” knows, it comes from an old racist, genocidal expression: “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.”
The New Mexico Republicans had nothing to say about this. Here is Griffin’s response:
“This is the pathetic wasteland that the Democrats have resorted to,” Griffin wrote. “I am sorry if I spoke in opposition to a political party which includes murdering babies and one that can’t tell the difference between a woman and a man. The liberal progressive agenda needs to die.”
He seems nice.
During the impeachment of President Trump, an expert witness called by Democrats floated a theoretical scenario involving the president threatening a state hammered by a natural disaster, to illustrate the corruption of Trump’s shakedown of Ukraine.
What would we think if Trump dangled federal disaster aid as leverage to force a governor to do his political bidding, asked Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, adding: “Wouldn’t you know in your gut that the president had abused his office? That he betrayed the national interest?”
Trump has now done something very close to this. And the answer to Karlan’s question is: Yes, Trump is abusing his office and betraying the national interest:
In case you haven’t heard parts of Michigan are underwater this morning, with record rain and dams failing. Nice of Trump to threaten the state as people are being evacuated.
He’s been threatening states when he felt like it from the beginning of his term. He just recently said that he wouldn’t provide aid unless they agreed to get rid of sanctuary cities. He has repeatedly made inane threats to California that if we refuse to “rake the forest” or some such nonsense he would not allow any federal aid. It’s a little unusual for him to go after a state that he badly needs if he wants to win re-election but I guess he feels he can leverage hatred for the Democratic governor to his advantage. (The problem is that she has a 70% approval rating, but whatever.)
Much of this is bluster that he cannot follow through on. But this latest threat has an even more nefarious purpose. He is working overtime to prime his cult to believe the election was rigged against him because people voted by mail.
During a pandemic.
Which he has made exponentially worse with his corruption and incompetence.
It’s going to be a very fraught election. They will cheat because they always do. But under Trump, we can’t be sure that even if the Democrats manage to score a win big enough that they can’t contest it that they will accept the results.
Sargent is right. This is exactly the scenario that Karlan was illustrating.
I started wearing a mask at the end of February because I happened to have some (from the choking smoke in California last summer) and I figured it made sense. I wasn’t the only one. From the beginning, there were a few people like me and I assumed it would become a normal thing. But then the authorities said they were actually bad because people would touch their faces, which seemed silly to me — just don’t touch your face! And obsessively wash your hands and use hand sanitizer!
I realize they wanted to save the medical-grade masks for the health care workers because there was such a shortage but that bad advice during a pandemic was unhelpful. The medical people need to take a hard look at whether they did more harm than good with that.
Anyway, I’ve been a mask believer from the beginning. Here’s some new evidence that short of a vaccine, they are one of the few strategies that help reduce the spread of the virus.
As the debate over the effectiveness of wearing masks during a pandemic continues, a new study gives weight to arguments by medical professionals and government leaders that wearing a mask does indeed reduce virus transmission — and dramatically so.
Experiments by a team in Hong Kong found that the coronavirus’ transmission rate via respiratory droplets or airborne particles dropped by as much as 75% when surgical masks were used.
“The findings implied to the world and the public is that the effectiveness of mask-wearing against the coronavirus pandemic is huge,” Dr. Yuen Kwok-yung, a leading microbiologist from Hong Kong University who helped discover the SARS virus in 2003, said Sunday.
The study was released by the department of microbiology at The University of Hong Kong, and local media state it will be published in the Clinical Infectious Diseases medical journal, suggesting it is yet to be peer reviewed. The sample size was also reportedly in the double digits.
The team’s conclusion comes after months of conflicting information from world health bodies concerning masks. The World Health Organization has questioned their effectiveness outside of medical settings, while governments including those in the U.S. and U.K. initially urged citizens to leave them for health worker use, only to later make a U-turn and encourage widespread mask-wearing.
The study, which the Hong Kong team calls the first of its kind, used hamsters in two cages; one group of hamsters infected with Covid-19 and the other healthy. The researchers created three different scenarios: mask barriers placed just on cages with the infected subjects, masks covering the healthy subjects, and one with no mask barriers at all, with a fan between the cages allowing particles to be transmitted between them.
With no mask barriers at all, two-thirds of the healthy hamsters — 66.7% — were infected with the virus within a week, the researchers found.
When the mask was placed over the infected cage, however, that infection rate dropped to 16.7%.
The infection rate went up to 33% when the mask barrier was only used to cover the healthy hamsters’ cage.
The hamsters who were still infected despite having the mask barrier also had less of the virus in their bodies compared to those infected without the masks, the researchers found.
“In our hamster experiment, it shows very clearly that if infected hamsters or humans — especially asymptomatic or symptomatic ones — put on masks, they actually protect other people. That’s the strongest result we showed here,” Yuen said.
“Transmission can be reduced by 50 (percentage points) when surgical masks are used, especially when masks are worn by infected individuals,” he said.
It’s obvious to me that a lot of people just aren’t going to do it for a variety of reasons. But even if some of us do it, it will reduce the spread. And I take heart in the finding that the infected hamsters that wore masks had less virus in their bodies than those who didn’t have the masks. Every little bit of advantage helps.
So, I will keep wearing the mask:
Earlier this week Attorney General Bill Barr held a press conference at the Justice Department, supposedly about a recent terrorism arrest in South Florida. But nobody cared about that and neither did Barr. He was there to talk about “Obamagate,” and everyone knew it. Barr had an announcement to make about special counsel John Durham’s “investigation of the investigation,” meaning his attempt to blame the Russia investigation on a conspiracy within the Obama administration:
Now as to President Obama and Vice President Biden, whatever their level of involvement, based on the information I have today, I don’t expect Mr. Durham’s work will lead to a criminal investigation of either man. Our concern over potential criminality is focused on others.
Barr lugubriously explained his reasoning as a gentleman and man of principle:
Over the past few decades, there have been increasing attempts to use the criminal-justice system as a political weapon. The legal tactic has been to gin up allegations of criminality by one’s political opponents based on the flimsiest of legal theories. This is not a good development. This is not good for our political life, and it’s not good for the criminal-justice system. And as long as I’m attorney general, the criminal-justice system will not be used for partisan political ends. And this is especially true for the upcoming elections and in November.
And we cannot allow this process to be hijacked by efforts to drum up criminal investigations of either candidate. And I’m committed that this election will be conducted without this kind of interference. Any effort to pursue an investigation of either candidate has to be approved by me.
I’m surprised he didn’t salute and break into the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” after delivering that monologue. More than that, I’m surprised the press corps didn’t break into hysterical laughter at the sheer absurdity of that sanctimonious drivel.
First of all, for all Barr’s braying about the horrors of using the political system as a political weapon, he is clearly threatening to use the criminal justice system as a political weapon when he suggests that he’s planning to bring charges against whomever Durham may have decided committed a crime. This entire investigation is about using the criminal justice system as a crude weapon of political revenge.
Just saying what he said about Obama and Biden the way he said it —”whatever their involvement” — is reminiscent of the way former FBI director James Comey announced that he wouldn’t prosecute Hillary Clinton over the largely-invented email scandal and then went on to trash her as reckless and unethical. (Ironically, Comey may be one of the people Barr decides to indict on Durham’s recommendation, which would prove once and for all that God has a sense of humor.)
Barr’s grotesque mischaracterization of Robert Mueller’s report back in March of 2019 was as hackishly political as a low-level partisan operative’s PR stunt. The speeches he gives to friendly audiences of cops and religious institutions could have been written by any right-wing Republican demagogue running for office. His media appearances are brazenly tendentious. The fact that he has the nerve to say that “the criminal-justice system will not be used for partisan political ends” after he has gone to great lengths to let Trump’s cronies off the hook is beyond parody.
No attorney general in history has been more shamelessly political than Bill Barr.
It’s unlikely that Barr actually believes he is acting with integrity, but anything’s possible. He seems to be steeped in the right-wing fever swamp. Nobody else in this world is so gullible as to believe that his “investigation of the investigators” is anything but retribution on behalf of Donald Trump. All you have to do is read Trump’s Twitter feed to understand exactly what it’s all about. Even the president’s cult-like devotees don’t pretend otherwise.
As Bob Cesca wrote in Salon on Tuesday, the whole “Obamagate” charade is mostly red meat for the MAGA crowd and an attempt to distract the public and the media from the tens of thousands of Americans who just won’t stop dying from COVID-19 and ruining Trump’s campaign schedule. But the Durham probe is real, and it’s likely to cause a flurry when Durham announce whatever he’s found, regardless of whether Obama and Biden are mentioned. Despite Barr’s protestations to the contrary, he’s happy to drop a carefully timed bomb into the presidential campaign.
Trump, on the other hand, was not happy at all when asked about Barr’s comments:
Barr is doing Trump a favor. He knows there was no criminal behavior by Obama and Biden but he’s framing his decision as a matter of higher principle — that being that the Department of Justice should never investigate a former president and vice president for alleged crimes committed while in office.
That ties a nice bow on the president-as-monarch theory. Under Barr, the DOJ now says that a president can’t be investigated or charged while in office, that Congress cannot conduct oversight, and now that the president cannot be investigated or charged after he or she leaves office either. If they could just get rid of that pesky two-term limit, the presidency would be all it could be.
Personally, I think the odds of the Justice Department pursuing Trump’s crimes under a President Biden or a President Anybody Else are exceedingly small. Unless something emerges that’s even more heinous than what we already know, I feel fairly confident they’ll just want to close the book on this chapter of history and “move on,” unfortunately. There are always the state courts, which have plenty of criminal and civil material to work with. The lawsuits already wending their way through the courts, resulting from various grifts, acts of defamation and alleged sexual misconduct will have Trump tied up in legal knots for years.
That doesn’t mean the Congress shouldn’t do everything in its power to investigate this power grab by the executive, and look at anything that comes crawling out from under the rocks they turn over. Trump’s incompetent and irresponsible pandemic response may require a full-fledged 9/11-style commission, and the political reforms necessary to repair our democracy will take years to formulate and execute. If Democrats manage to get a majority in both houses on Capitol Hill, they must not be allowed to shirk this duty no matter how dire the exigent circumstances may be. Because the country cannot survive another presidency like this one.
In that regard, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Trump’s loyal lackey, may not be doing him any favors with his long-promised plan for a big show trial starting in June, pandemic or no pandemic. While Graham has said that the doesn’t think Trump’s demand that Obama be called to testify in person is wise, he apparently plans to bring in other big guns from the previous administration:
It should be quite the extravaganza.
It is unprecedented, in fact, for Congress to initiate such an investigation, and it remains to be seen how well this will work out for Trump and the Republicans. But the good news is that if Trump is defeated in November and the next Congress begins a multi-faceted, thorough investigation of all the Trump administration’s malfeasance, corruption and unconstitutional behavior, Republicans won’t have much grounds for complaint. They will have set the precedent, egged on by none other than Donald Trump himself. All the Democrats will have to do is wave his Twitter feed in their faces.
Successfully convincing black voters to turn out “could overwhelm the political system if Democratic candidates persuade them that voting will get them power” for advancing their interests, writes Nsé Ufot, executive director of the New Georgia Project Action Fund. Despite project founder Stacey Abram’s monumental 2016 efforts to reach them, roughly 900,000 eligible black people stayed home, she writes in the New York Times. A majority of those were in Atlanta.
Exacerbating the problem in 2020 is the pandemic and Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s decision to reopen the state for business too early even for the acting president. A model from Georgia Tech predicts COVID-19 deaths in the state could more than quadruple by August.
Voter suppression efforts remain a serious issue in a state where Kemp “served as umpire, player and scorekeeper” in the 2016 election he won over Abrams by 54,700 votes. Efforts to close polling locations and purge voter rolls produced the longest lines in the country that year, Ufot explains.
Ufot expects the pandemic and Republican efforts to ramp up voter suppression and intimidation will make it even harder to motivate black voters this fall. The refrain she hears repeated is, “Will our votes even be counted?”
What to do? Ufot writes:
If Democrats invest in an enormous marketing and organizing campaign that persuades black people and young people to participate in our democracy, we will win. That campaign should answer uncomfortable questions about what happened in Georgia in 2018 and explain how this year will be different. Through millions of personal conversations, organizers can connect the dots between who makes decisions that puts their lives at risk and who can make things better. That’s how we can show young people grieving the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in South Georgia that voting is a way to create real change by electing new sheriffs and prosecutors.
Campaigns never balk at investing significant resources to court moderate white men. But when all the data is laid out about black people, why does the political industry hesitate? Black people have long been the most loyal supporters of the Democratic Party — indeed, no other major voting bloc is as loyal to a political party as black people.
Every 10 new black voters nets eight Democratic votes, but the party gets only two net votes for every 10 new white, college-educated female voters. Democrats have to stop treating black people as deserving of only mailers after Labor Day and instead see them as the core of the multiracial coalition.
“If Democrats invest” is the problem, as I see it. Who Democrats? The Democrats? There is no The Democrats.
One of the leaders of North Carolina’s Bernie Sanders delegation to the 2016 national convention in Philadelphia called to say he’d just come out of his first caucus meeting with the convention’s 57 delegations.
Fifty-seven? Right. Fifty states, the territories, the District of Columbia, and Democrats Abroad. As often as critics condemn the Democratic Party, the call brought home that there is no The Democrats. There are 57 party organizations that trickled into the union over nearly two centuries, each with its own charter and bylaws, local history, and local languages and customs (not all of them European). The Democratic National Committee may organize the quadrennial convention and administer the national voter file, but it is not the One Ring that rules them all. Chairman Tom Perez runs the DNC. He does not run the party.
Therein lies the problem of addressing Ufot’s desire for Democrats to invest more in turning out the black vote. Democrats are no more a coherent group than black voters. There is no central authority charged with treating black voters as deserving more than mailers after Labor Day. There are only candidates, their campaigns, under-resourced state party organizations, and assorted Democrat-curious, nonprofit advocacy groups. There is no The Democrats.
What makes it appear Republicans are better organized is the network of millionaire/billionaire-funded foundations and nonprofits supporting right-wing agendas. Their donors might belong to the Republican Party but they are not the party. The Democratic Party has no such support network as Martin Longman wrote of the “wingnut welfare” system in 2017.
Ufot acknowledges that obliquely:
We need foundations, state and federal governments and the Democrats to prevent and neutralize disinformation campaigns. They ought to invest in trusted messengers to spread competing messages with good information, in addition to inspirational candidates who can alleviate voters’ concerns.
But again, there is no they organized around doing it. And black voters are themselves factionalized, at least in a couple of North Carolina cities with which I am familiar.
Overall voter turnout in Charlotte is consistently two percent below the state average. Charlotte/Mecklenburg is the largest county in the state, with nearly 2:1 Democrat-to-Republican registration, and with the highest black registration. Plus, nearly 50 percent more Unaffiliated voters than Republicans (2018).
A 2016 coordinated campaign organizer explained to me that Mecklenburg is so Democratic that whenever a vacancy occurs on city council or county commission everybody and their brother runs for the seat. Factions line up behind their favorites, primaries get nasty, and losers go home holding grudges. At election time, Democrats don’t come together to work together on turnout.
Is Atlanta like that? I wouldn’t be surprised.
2020 is a tough nut. The pandemic has neutered many of the standard campaign tactics. Organizers on a call I attended said they plan to go heavy on digital. Well, I didn’t need a consultant from D.C. to know that. But what about the rest? What about rural areas with lousy Internet where Democrats need to win to reclaim state legislatures? We’re still figuring that out as we go. And we is every candidate, campaign, and under-resourced state party, pretty much on their own. No one is in charge because no one is in charge.
If it’s any consolation, Republicans as a party are no better off, just more inclined to fall in line. And better-supported by the millionaire/billionaire class.
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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.
Any excuse to arm up, I guess:
As healthcare workers lined up outside of hospitals in personal protective equipment preparing to risk their lives for COVID-19 patients, Americans across the country lined up in front of gun shops.
The New York Times reported that 2 million guns were sold in the U.S. in the month of March alone—the second-busiest for gun sales after December 2012, the month of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and just following Barack Obama’s re-election. Another alarming statistic to arise out of this pandemic: March 2020—when shelter-in-place orders and school closures rolled out across the nation—was the first March America didn’t have a school shooting since 2002.
“I’m not sure I understand it,” says Tom Kubiniec, CEO of SecureIt, a defense contractor that designs and builds weapon storage systems, including armories for the U.S. military. “If you’re somebody who takes defense and safety seriously, you would have had a firearm locked and secured properly, ammunition stored safely, and you’d already be ready.”
This idea of being “ready” is born out of anticipation of civil unrest—which has lately been incited by President Trump himself. The president went on a Twitter rampage on April 17 tweeting, “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” and “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!,” encouraging citizens to protest stay-at-home orders. Then he took it a step further, tweeting: “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”
The tweet refers to the historic gun safety legislation Virginia recently passed, which includes requiring background checks on all gun sales, mandating reporting of lost and stolen firearms, and reinstating Virginia’s one-handgun-a-month policy.
“We know that the gun lobby works to sell guns in times of tragedy and natural disasters, and [the COVID-19 pandemic] is no different,” Moms Demand Action Founder Shannon Watts tells Marie Claire. “During President Barack Obama’s second term, they talked about needing guns to ward off hurricanes, tornadoes, riots, terrorists, gangs, and criminals. In 2016, they talked about needing guns in case there was a breakdown in societal order [after Donald Trump’s election]. After Hurricane Harvey, they passed laws to help loosen gun [restrictions] in Texas.
It’s almost like they’re rooting for societal collapse from the sidelines.”
Oh, they definitely are.
I have to wonder if this time it might happen. Between COVID and the possibility of Trump losing the election everything is in place for some kind of violent backlash.
On the other hand, a lot of this is about buying toys and costumes. So who knows?
They put a hack economist in charge of the epidemiological modeling so why not put hack doctors in charge of the economic re-opening?
Republican political operatives are recruiting “pro-Trump” doctors to go on television to prescribe reviving the U.S. economy as quickly as possible, without waiting to meet safety benchmarks proposed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.
The plan was discussed in a May 11 conference call with a senior staffer for the Trump reelection campaign organized by CNP Action, an affiliate of the GOP-aligned Council for National Policy. A leaked recording of the hour-long call was provided to The Associated Press by the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive watchdog group.
CNP Action is part of the Save Our Country Coalition, an alliance of conservative think tanks and political committees formed in late April to end state lockdowns implemented in response to the pandemic. Other members of the coalition include the FreedomWorks Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council and Tea Party Patriots.
A resurgent economy is seen as critical to boosting President Donald Trump’s reelection hopes and has become a growing focus of the White House coronavirus task force led by Vice President Mike Pence.
Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign communications director, confirmed to AP that an effort to recruit doctors to publicly support the president is underway, but declined to say when the initiative would be rolled out.
“Anybody who joins one of our coalitions is vetted,” Murtaugh said Monday. “And so quite obviously, all of our coalitions espouse policies and say things that are, of course, exactly simpatico with what the president believes. … The president has been outspoken about the fact that he wants to get the country back open as soon as possible.”
Why is this a problem?
During an emergency such as the current pandemic, it’s important that the government provide consistent science-based information to the public, said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, an epidemiology professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
Trump and his followers believe what they want to believe and this is only going to make things worse. But what can you do?
I have said for a while that it’s important to find out your doctor’s political leanings because if he’s a Republican in today’s world it means he or she doesn’t believe in science and modern medicine. I mean it.
Just read this crazy story about doctors in pimping Hydroxychyloroquine in Utah if you don’t believe me: