Republicans routinely use “personal responsibility” as a dog whistle to imply non-white and non-Republican Americans are not real Americans. Presumably, such lessers deserve their lot in life (and no taxpayer help) because they made bad choices.
The acting president, his White House staff, his reelection campaign, his staff, and his acolytes on Capitol Hill this year presented a never-ending seminar in bad choices. And in their consequences.
The coronavirus outbreak in and around the White House kept growing a tweet at a time Friday night. Observers added red circles to images of last weekend’s mostly unmasked announcement of the acting president’s Rose Garden nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. As the list of the infected grew, you couldn’t keep up with the victims without a scorecard.
For his part, the acting president wound up in Walter Reed Hospital Friday night, ferried there by military helicopter. He will receive the finest medical care in the world at taxpayer expense despite his lifetime of bad choices. Nearly 210,000 U.S. dead will not get the chance to see him held accountable for them.
Others now testing positive include (via USA Today): Melania Trump, former White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway, GOP Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, GOP Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, the Rev. John Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame University, and a White House reporter.
Plus Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien.
An apology from Jenkins got lost in outbreak reporting. After being tested ahead of the event, “we were notified that we had all tested negative and were told that it was safe to remove our masks.” The rapid COVID-19 tests the White House uses are notoriously inaccurate.
The outbreak may or may not have begun with close adviser Hope Hicks who traveled with Trump to events in Cleveland Tuesday and Minnesota Wednesday. She felt ill on the return flight Wednesday and tested positive for coronavirus. The acting president announced his and his wife’s positive tests early Friday morning. By Friday evening he was hospitalized “out of an abundance of caution.”
Consequences from the acting president’s bad choices cascade far beyond his inner circle:
Zeke Miller of the Associated Press, asked journalists who don’t have an enclosed office in the workspace and aren’t part of the press pool — the rotating group of reporters that follows the president and shares its reporting with other reporters — to stay away from the White House altogether.
After Hick’s positive test, the acting president nonetheless attended a fundraiser at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club Thursday night. Donors who attended are reportedly “freaking out.”
Politico reports that 11 new cases in Cleveland are linked to Tuesday’s presidential debate setup and planning. Several people among the Trump family and his entourage refused to wear masks during the event.
A Washington Post team recounts how this behavior was typical for Team Trump:
Mask-wearing had become rare among Trump’s staff and the Secret Service agents and military service crew aboard Air Force One — even after national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien tested positive in July.
On the campaign trail, Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric have spoken to packed audiences in indoor venues. And the Trump campaign violated state regulations limiting the size of gatherings in Nevada, earning a public rebuke from the governor after the president addressed thousands at an indoor event there last month.
They all took their cues from Trump himself, who has rarely worn masks, sometimes mocked those who did and disputed the advice from his own government’s experts.
“A whole world, with Trump at its center, suddenly faced the threat that the president had encouraged them to deny or understate,” they report:
“He’s never cared about us,” one agent told a confidant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal reaction.
The sense of invincibility Trump tried to project publicly as well as among those who work in the rabbit warren that is the West Wing has vanished:
Inside the West Wing’s narrow corridors, where staffers for months have worked in proximity largely without masks, what had long been an atmosphere of invincibility turned into one of apprehension and panic. “People are losing their minds,” said the outside adviser.
First, aides fretted about their own risks of exposure. If the president got infected, so might they.
Not to imply Republicans have a lock on bad choices. North Carolina’s Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, Cal Cunningham, has been leading in the polls in his race against incumbent Republican Thom Tillis (now infected, and he wore a mask to the Rose Garden). Cunningham made headlines late Friday night for sending “text messages of a sexual nature” to a California public relations strategist. How’s that for managing public relations?
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