White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway is suggesting President Donald Trump should return to the podium to brief the American people on the coronavirus pandemic as approval of his handling of the crisis continues to drop.
Co-host of Fox News’s “Fox and Friends” Steve Doocy asked Conway on Friday if she can explain how Trump’s numbers on polling are “underwater” when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic.
Conway argued Trump’s approval rating was higher when he was briefing the nation on a regular basis about the coronavirus.
“The president and task force were there most days giving the information. I think the president should be doing that,” Conway said.
Yeah, that’s not going to happen. They haven’t held a pandemic related event in the last 10 days.
As COVID is exploding all over the country.
He believes he can ignore the pandemic and it will go away. Jared tells him that he needs to be out there touting all his alleged accomplishments and Jared probably believes that. He’s a very stable genius too. Certainly, that’s what Trump wants to be doing so that’s what they are going to do.
But please go ahead and re-institute the White House Coronavirus rallies. I think they accounted for at least a five point drop in the polls. It would probably be worth double that today.
But perhaps what is most surprising, there are real signs that Trump’s base is leaving him on the issue of the coronavirus. Trump’s coronavirus approval rating with Republicans is dropping below 80% in the average poll. You see that well in the ABC News/Ipsos poll (78%) and the Quinnipiac poll (79%). Trump’s overall approval rating, as measured by Gallup, regularly has hit 90% since the beginning of 2018 and has never been lower than 85%.
Trump’s numbers look even worse when you examine where he is with groups that make up that base: whites without a college degree and rural voters. Whites without a college degree and rural voters went for Trump by around a 30-point margin (depending on thesurvey) as a group in 2016. Among whites without a college degree, Trump’s approval rating on coronavirus is an average of the ABC News/Ipsos and Quinnipiac polls is just 50%. That matches his disapproval rating. In other words, Trump’s doing no better than even among what is supposed to be a bedrock group.
The numbers are no better for him among rural voters. In an average of the ABC News/Ipsos and Quinnipiac polls, his approval rating is at 48% among rural voters. His disapproval stands at 50%. Again, you want to be running up the score with base groups that voted for you by around 30 points in 2016. Trump’s just running even here.
Now, there was no reason it had to be this way for Trump. Back in early April, Trump was getting strong ratings from all of these groups in his base. He was averaging a 90% approval rating in the ABC News/Ipsos and Quinnipiac University polls when it came to his coronavirus performance. He was well into the 60s with both whites without a college degree and rural voters in both polls. What we’ve seen is that his base is clearly running away with him because they judge his performance over the last few months to be negative.
The big question with an election in the fall is whether these voters are merely saying they disapprove of Trump on the coronavirus but are still going to vote for him.T here are certainly some members of his base who are never going to vote for former Vice President Joe Biden, even though they dislike Trump’s handling of coronavirus. Still, there are signs that Trump’s coronavirus performance is hurting him even against Biden.
Trump has just a 75-point lead among Republicans against Biden in the Quinnipiac poll. He wants that to be at least 80 to 85 points, as it was in 2016. Biden has an 86-point lead among Democrats in the same poll. This mirrors other national polling showing that Biden is doing better among Democrats than Trump is doing among Republicans.
Trump’s ahead by a mere 13 points among whites without a college degree against Biden in the Quinnipiac poll. An aggregate of other polling doesn’t show quite that same decline, although it has Trump doing about 10 points worse with them. Likewise, Trump’s up 21 points with rural voters in the Quinnipiac poll. That looks a lot like an average of the polling.
Overall, these may seem like large margins, but they’re not anywhere near as well as Trump did in 2016. It’s pretty clear Trump’s having issues with his base. It’s another illustration of the fact that Trump likely can’t win if voters don’t trust him on the coronavirus.
Apparently, it took literally enabling the deaths of large numbers of his own voters for any of them to care about the fact that he is a miserable failure. I guess that figures.
This is the kind of crisis that reveals a president for what he is. Not every president experiences such a thing. But in the last couple of decades we’ve had some doozies. 9/11, the financial crisis and now this.
I certainly have problems with the way all of them were handled. Invading a country that didn’t attack us after 9/11 remains one of the worst decisions of all time. But the suffering and death inflicted on his own countrymen out of total incompetence and denial puts Trump in a class all by himself. Apparently, some of his voters are starting to realize just how bad he is.
On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the United States had set a record for new cases of COVID-19 in one day, with more than 74,000. And the death toll is now surging as well, although not yet approaching the terrible levels we saw in April. Indeed, the U.S. is one of four countries, including Brazil, South Africa and India, that account for more than two-thirds of all the cases on the planet. And we’re No. 1!
Weirdly, despite all this winning, President Trump didn’t celebrate this particular achievement. Instead, his minions at the White House arranged for him to host another inappropriate campaign rally at the White House. This time, instead of having the press line up like a bunch of potted plants they gathered friendly staffers in the Rose Garden to cheer Trump’s incomprehensible rambling and give him the little boost he so desperately needs.
Nonetheless, his new crew has no choice but to go with Trump’s gut, so they have decided to help him pretend the country isn’t in the midst the worst public health crisis in a hundred years and instead hold another Rose Garden event to celebrate the administration’s massive roll-back of environmental protection policies. Trump was giddy with excitement to see the big trucks. He likes trucks:
On South Lawn, WH seeks to make a political point by setting up a crane lifting the weights of regulation from the bed of a "red" truck, while showing the burden of regulations weighing down a "blue" truck. pic.twitter.com/OoWmRPnWum
When Trump spoke he said they had cut “25,000 pages of job-destroying regulations,” saved the oil industry, cut auto regulations making them cheaper and also “better, they’ll be stronger, and they’ll be safer.”
But what pleases him the most is that he’s “brought back” incandescent lightbulbs and improved the shower experience:
It’s doubtful that voters are all that interested in these topics at the moment, and Trump’s bragging about destroying environmental regulations strikes a particularly sour note at a time when people are suffering from the pandemic and tremendous economic insecurity. There’s more than a whiff of fiddling while the country burns to see him out there babbling about dishwashers right now.
But it is a sad fact that his administration has done a tremendous job of destroying many of the government protections that allowed Americans to drive safer cars, drink cleaner water and breathe fresher air. The New York Times reported this week that a Harvard study shows that the EPA and Department of Interior have taken a wrecking ball to climate and environmental regulations. Even an incompetent brute like Donald Trump is capable of getting things done if he will allow his henchmen to do their worst.
We’ve seen the same phenomenon at the Department of Justice under Attorney General William Barr. They have established dozens of new precedents under the “unitary executive” principle, not because Trump believes in such an arcane constitutional philosophy — of course he has no idea what that means — but because what benefits him also benefits the conservative legal project. Likewise, the Department of Homeland Security has become a singleminded instrument of Trump’s cruel anti-immigration policies.
The fact is that while Trump hasn’t achieved much of anything by the normal measure of a presidency — important legislation, leadership on the world stage or handling a major crisis — his empowerment of certain elements of the radical right has given him a legacy in spite of himself.
I’ve never been one to say that because he is ignorant and incompetent, he hasn’t done much harm. Clearly he has. But I have always felt that he exposed weaknesses in our system and frankly, our society, that are likely to be exploited by a future authoritarian who is more efficient and capable than he is.
There’s another dimension to Trump’s accomplishments, however, one I hadn’t thought about before. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post wrote about a new study positing that “demagogic populists” like Trump and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil achieve at least some of their goals not by what we think of as authoritarian overreach but by what they call “executive underreach”:
Law professors David Pozen and Kim Lane Scheppele present “executive underreach” as a species of leadership failure that’s as destructive as executive overreach, defining it as:a national executive branch’s willful failure to address a significant public problem that the executive is legally and functionally equipped (though not necessarily legally required) to address.
But crucially, the paper links this phenomenon to fundamentally illiberal and anti-democratic tendencies: Hostility to science and expertise; and the leader’s abiding faith in his ability to confuse the public with disinformation as a substitute for acting in the national interest…
I don’t think I need to delineate all the ways in which Trump’s response to the greatest crisis of his presidency fits that description. He blithely continues as he began, believing he can persuade the public that the pandemic isn’t happening so they will party like it’s 2019 and reward him with a second term. Rather than use the power that’s vested in the presidency for its intended purpose — that is, in an emergency — he does virtually nothing, issuing empty threats and confusing messages and essentially making everything worse by failing to act as the system requires of the executive during a crisis. The whole thing falls apart when that vital part of the machine just doesn’t work.
In other words, no one should take heart in the fact that Trump hasn’t used the crisis as a means to consolidate power, as one might expect from such a fundamentally autocratic personality. He isn’t capable of that, but he’s more than capable of the form of illiberal leadership described above, which is every bit as destructive to democracy.
Meanwhile, as usual, Trump keeps issuing hyperbolic, reality-show teasers about all the big things he plans to announce in the future:
Trump says he'll be announcing "many exciting things" over the next 8 weeks, "things that nobody has even contemplated, thought about, thought possible," with"levels of detail" and "levels of thought that a lot of people believed very strongly we didn't have in this country"
What the Trump administration and Congress do between now and Labor Day could decide the fates of the Trump presidency, the Republican Party, and countless millions of Americans.
Schools across the country will reopen (or they won’t). Congress will renew the $600 weekly federal unemployment benefits to families that run out July 31 (or it won’t). As temporary holds on evictions expire, millions of renters without jobs or government will be homelessness (or they won’t). States that reopened their economies too soon and saw hospitals overrun with COVID-19 patients will shut down again (or they won’t). Tens of thousands more Americans will die (or they won’t). You get the idea.
The problem facing the Trump administration and its congressional enablers is their own shortsightedness and classist economic proclivities. They have, as the overused expression goes, painted themselves into a corner. New York magazine’s Eric Levitz sums up the GOP’s dysfunction in a single, tidy sentence:
[A]s an organization whose top shareholders are reactionary plutocrats, the GOP has an inveterate distaste for using the power of the state to reshape economic outcomes in a manner that benefits working people — and an utter disgust with doing so in a manner that increases labor’s leverage over capital, however minutely.
Ideology meant they could not set aside the need to ensure people who derive their living from labor rather than from capital are properly incentivized to keep stock values afloat. “Worrying about employment incentives in the midst of a pandemic is even crazier than worrying about those incentives in the aftermath of a financial crisis,” writes Paul Krugman. But leopards and spots, scorpions and their nature, etc.
Levitz continues:
And now, with the CARES Act’s unemployment provisions set to expire at month’s end, Republicans are reportedly fighting to slash the incomes of 32 million unemployed Americans — at the peak of a pandemic, and just months before voters head to the polls — in order to combat the nonexistent problem of overly generous unemployment benefits reducing the national labor supply. Meanwhile, with as many as 28 million Americans at risk of eviction between now and September, McConnell is also reportedly opposed to providing housing relief to avert an explosion in homelessness on the eve of the election.
Trump insists any aid renewal include a payroll tax cut targeted, Levitz points out, at Americans who haven’t lost their jobs. But as a snake oil salesman like Trump knows, tax-cut elixir will cure whatever ails ya, from gout to eviction. Buh-leeve me.
A payroll tax cut that eats into support for Social Security makes Democrats uneasy, but in the short term, with so many unemployed anyway and in immediate distress, it should not be a deal-breaker. Levitz believes it is not the time for Democrats to debate policy. If they can get “$1 trillion in fiscal aid for states, an extension of existing UI benefits, another round of $1,200 checks, billions in funding for addiction-treatment centers, and the party’s other priorities,” they should make the deal.
Levitz believes “responsible” Republicans will set aside their aversion to redistribution and deficits to avoid a wave of homelessness and further financial collapse before the November elections.
Even if that happens, Trump is still determined to have schools reopen and parents get back to powering the economy for investors. Pandemic or no pandemic, 200,000 deaths or not. He wants “his” economic miracle back, his only argument for reelection. And if not, Republicans argue the country will reelect him in November based on fond memories of how things were in January. Seriously.
Odds are increasing that voters will pitch him out on his ear in memory of friends and relatives lost to his and his party’s dysfunction.
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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, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.
On South Lawn, WH seeks to make a political point by setting up a crane lifting the weights of regulation from the bed of a "red" truck, while showing the burden of regulations weighing down a "blue" truck. pic.twitter.com/OoWmRPnWum
… once in a while, people might not be disgusted with their whole ridiculous party:
Americans’ political party preferences have swung sharply from a 2-point Republican advantage in January to an 11-point Democratic advantage in July, according to Gallup’s monthly averages of telephone polls in 2020.
The dramatic shift is more a product of fewer people identifying as Republican or Republican-leaning (down 8% since January) than gains among those who identify as Democratic or Democratic-leaning (up 5%).
50% of U.S. adults identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, compared to 39% for the GOP.
32% of Americans polled identified as Democrats, and another 18% said they are independents who lean toward the Democratic Party.
Meanwhile, 26% identified as Republicans, with another 13% saying they lean toward the GOP.
The month of June alone saw a 3% increase in people identifying as Democratic and Democratic-leaning, while the number of people identifying as Republican or Republican-leaning dropped by 5%.
That shift came amid mass protests following the death of George Floyd, which catapulted racial injustice to the forefront of the national conversation, and as the U.S. continued to struggle to contain the coronavirus.
Trump has also seen a significant decline in job approval ratings in recent months. 38% of Americans approved of the job he is doing in the latest Gallup poll.
Why would people have any faith in the Republican Party when they are such cowards that they can’t even step up and say something when the President is actively promoting the killing their own constituents.
State Hotspots: Arizona: 11% of total cases in those younger than 20. California: 8.4% in those younger than 18. Mississippi: 9.4% in those under 18. Washington state: 11% in those 20 and younger. Tennessee: 4.5% of cases involving those 10 and under, and 11% for those 11 through 20.
Regional authorities are also seeing the surge. Harris County, Texas, where Houston is located, is an epicenter of the recent rise in U.S. cases. There, those younger than 20 made up 11.4% of about 49,000 cases, according to the county’s public health department. Children up to age 9 represented 4.1%.
Studies have found that children tend not to suffer from severe coronavirus symptoms as often as adults, but there remain unknowns.
I don’t know about other states, but in California young Latino and African Americans are hugely over-represented in positive cases and there are rising numbers of them being hospitalized.
It’s not just the younger kids. It’s also their parents:
Age data collected from state health departments by Bloomberg shows that the oldest Americans now represent a lower percentage of infections than they did at the start of the outbreak. The surge in recent cases is led by the group most likely to have school-aged children, those in their 20s, 30s and up to their 50s in some states.
At the same time, the prevalence in children has risen as testing has become more available to those with mild or no symptoms.
What they don’t know yet is whether kids can spread COVID the way they spread influenza and the common cold. They’re studying it now and hopefully, the data will be available soon. That’s a huge consideration in how they should open schools. But it’s also a huge consideration in how we think about the well-being of families and the health of kids generally.
Nobody really knows yet what this virus might be doing to people long term or how it affects growing children and young adults, even if they have only mild symptoms. It’s an ass-kicking disease that every reputable single scientist and medical doctor tells us has lots of weird characteristics they’ve just never seen before.
People who are being cavalier about this are reckless and foolhardy. People like this:
Kayleigh: The President has said unmistakably he wants schools to open up… When he says open, he means open in full… the science should not stand in the way of this.. pic.twitter.com/y5qeiblKHu
Straining to produce a Both Sides debate about today’s deadly pandemic, USA Today’s editorial page made a dreadful decision this week and provided a national platform to a senior Trump White House adviser who has spent this year lying about the public health crisis. Given space in USA Today, he used the newspaper to condemn America’s top doctor fighting Covid-19. It’s a disturbing example of how the media have become so attached to the idea of “balance” they will provide it even if it means putting the public at risk, as this erstwhile and dangerous piece did.
On Tuesday, USA Todaypublished an opinion column by White House trade representative Peter Navarro, who has no medical background. His piece was clearly part of a larger, orchestrated campaign by the White House to smear Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, as the virus spreads without pause across the country on Trump’s watch.
“The White House is making a concerted effort to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci as he becomes increasingly vocal about his concerns over reopening the country amid a national surge in coronavirus cases,” CNN recently reported.
The push to discredit is a stunning, irresponsible move by the White House as America’s grapples with one of the worst pandemic outbreak in the world. Instead of fostering trust during the emergency, the White House has set out to destroy the reputation of scientific leaders. The fact that USA Today decided to help the White House demean Fauci is unforgivable and reckless. Why the newspaper thought it was a good idea to give Navarro, a White House trade adviser with a dubious background who has called Joe Biden the “candidate of Chinese Communist Party,” yet another opportunity to mislead the public about America’s top epidemiologist, remains puzzling.
At some point, editors have to realize that providing this radical White House with a forum to push obviously false claims about a public health crisis represents a monumentally bad idea. If the solution means temporarily suspending the Both Sides approach, editors need to do so.
New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet was recently forced to resign when he failed to learn that lesson. He okayed an Op-Ed from a Republican senator who basically urged that martial law be invoked, using the full force of the U.S. military as a way to silence nationwide protests that erupted in the wake of a Minneapolis policeman murdering an unconscious black man, George Floyd. The stunning column, which urged the U.S. Army be sent into cities over the objection of local mayors and governors, came not only at a time of widespread abuse as peaceful protesters were beaten and tear gassed nationwide, but at a time when journalists were targeted for unlawful assault by law enforcement.
As for the USA Today hit on Fauci, it’s hard to describe how untrustworthy Navarro is, especially on the topic of Covid-19. Tapped as a dishonest White House surrogate, he has spent most of this year lying about the virus and putting the public at risk. He has falsely claimed “everybody” thought the virus would wash away in warm weather.
He’s a huckster who claims “Communist China” weaponized the virus in order to sink the U.S. economy. Note that Navarro “was first recruited by Trump because he wrote a string of books about the Chinese strategic threat – one called Death by China – despite having spent almost no time in the country and having no grasp of the language,” the Guardian has reported.
In his USA Today piece, Navarro claimed Trump’s belated decision to ban flights from China last winter saved “hundreds of thousands of American lives,” which is absurd —nearly 40,000 people traveled from China to the U.S. after the restrictions were announced.
“When I warned in late January in a memo of a possibly deadly pandemic, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was telling the news media not to worry,” Navarro boasted. Left unsaid was that after Navarro wrote that memo warning of a possibly deadly pandemic, he appeared in the press telling Americans they have “nothing to worry about” regarding a possible pandemic. He also stressed the American economy was not “particularly vulnerable to what happens in China” with the virus. Did USA Today not know that, or did the paper not care that Navarro would lie so blatantly about his role in the pandemic fiasco?
More bogus claims from him:
“And when Fauci was telling the White House Coronavirus Task Force that there was only anecdotal evidence in support of hydroxychloroquine to fight the virus, I confronted him with scientific studies providing evidence of safety and efficacy.”
Question: If Navarro had submitted a piece falsely claiming there’s no scientific evidence to support the idea that wearing a mask helps stop the spread of the virus, would USA Today have published it in the name of hosting a Both Sides debate?
UPDATED: USA TODAY editorial page editor Bill Sternberg on Thursday issued a statement saying the Navarro column did not meet the paper’s fact-checking standards. I’m glad Sternberg acknowledged the paper’s error. But the problems with the Navarro column were blindingly obvious and it never should have been published.
On Tuesday night, White House trade adviser PeterNavarro—whom Donald Trump affectionately calls “my Peter”—decided to dump gasoline on a smoldering fire when he sent USA Today a statement that it published as an op-ed in which he slammed Dr. Anthony Fauci for standing in the way of “the president’s courageous decision” making on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wait. He calls him “my Peter”? Lol…
Having just downplayed the significance of anti-Fauci talking points that they themselves had sent to media outlets, members of the White House press office were left, once again, to repair the residual damage, insisting that the USA Today opinion piece didn’t go through the “normal White House clearance processes.”
But the fact that Navarro didn’t get official clearance for his statement was largely an irrelevant point. After all, he didn’t need it. According to three individuals familiar with the matter, in the past few months Trump has privately encouraged multiple senior officials and allies, including Navarro, to remind journalists and the American public of how Fauci has been “so wrong”—in the president’s phrasing—in some of his predictions about the coronavirus pandemic.
Navarro hadn’t “gone rogue,” as one White House official put it. He’d performed the precise task that many in Trump’s orbit have been given in recent days. He pleased the boss.
As Trump’s re-election campaign has struggled to tear down former Vice President Joe Biden with less than four months until Election Day, the president’s staff has devoted considerable resources to finding novel ways to make him feel better about the crumbling world around him.
They tell him tales of his sagging poll numbers being fake. They’ve concocted ways of convincing him that the adoring crowds he loves on the campaign trail are still there and ready. They’ve pledged that the social, racial, and economic crises ravaging the nation are ephemeral. And they’ve carried his water as he seeks to reassert his authority over situations falling beyond his control.
Among Trump’s modern-day court jesters are administration brass and prominent White House allies. Navarro may be the most pugnacious of the bunch. But he’s hardly the only one going out of his way to trash Fauci, a coronavirus task force member and leading infectious-disease expert.
Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who informally advises Trump, told The Daily Beast earlier this week that he’s already in the midst of co-authoring a new memo for the president, titled “Dr. Wrong,” that will demonstrate “how many times Dr. Fauci’s been wrong during not just corona, but during his entire career.”
Stephen Moore, the guy Trump tried to appoint to the Fed and was ignominiously forced to withdraw when people were reminded that he’s an ignorant hack and a racist and sexist to boot. I’m sure Trump would call him “my Stephen” if that moniker wasn’t already taken by Stephen Miller.
This is just sad:
Beyond trying to publicly humiliate Fauci, the president’s lieutenants have sought to lift his spirits in numerous other ways during this dark and deadly chapter for the country. One of them is to simply highlight for the president—as much as they possibly can—the images and footage of Trump-loving citizens the president has affectionately dubbed his “beautiful ‘boaters’” during the pandemic.
According to two people who’ve been in the room when Trump has fixated on the issue, the president has repeatedly stressed that “boaters”—MAGA fans who join in on pro-Trump flotillas, with ships adorned with Trump and Mike Pence banners and gear—are a shining exemplar of the enthusiasm gap he enjoys over Biden. He has delighted in advisers showing him boater photos and videos that have bubbled up on social media. And during strategy sessions in the past two months, he’s told officials to keep bringing him more and to push out the content on their own accounts, as well.
[…]
John McLaughlin, a top Trump pollster whom the president values in part for providing internal data that give Trump significantly better odds than most of the public polling does, told The Daily Beast that though “there’s not enough boaters” to buoy the president to a November victory, “we also do well with bikers, NASCAR fans, NFL, college and high school tailgaters, golfers, aviators, RV people, campers, [and] homeowners,” for instance.
McLaughlin is also a hack, by the way.
And then there’s this, which is the most pathetic of all:
[T]his past weekend, when the president made headlines for wearing a mask in front of news cameras following his lengthy stretch of petty refusal, several of his senior aides and allies took to Twitter to lavish praise on Trump for how good he looked and to claim that this was somehow a small victory over Barack Obama’s VP.
They would like to get him in front of rally crowds, which makes him very happy, but since he’s botched the response to the virus so badly they can’t do it. So this is what they’re reduced to:
Unable to get him out of D.C., Trump’s staffers have, instead, tried to assuage his stir-craziness and gloom by other means, including telling the president how many people are viewing him while he’s in the nation’s capital.
But no matter how much they try to buck him up this is still reality. And it bites
