Those brilliant posters by artist Rob Sheridan are available on t-shirts.
Meanwhile Trumpworld’s Soviet propaganda campaign proceeds apace:
Dear Leader is strong and powerful. The 210,000 dead people are just a bunch of suckers and losers. Obviously.
It’s an odd campaign strategy but maybe it will work for him.
Donald Trump’s erratic and reckless behavior in the last 24 hours has opened a rift in the Trump family over how to rein in the out-of-control president, according to two Republicans briefed on the family conversations. Sources said Donald Trump Jr. is deeply upset by his father’s decision to drive around Walter Reed National Military Medical Center last night with members of the Secret Service while he was infected with COVID-19. “Don Jr. thinks Trump is acting crazy,” one of the sources told me. The stunt outraged medical experts, including an attending physician at Walter Reed.
According to sources, Don Jr. has told friends that he tried lobbying Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, and Jared Kushner to convince the president that he needs to stop acting unstable. “Don Jr. has said he wants to stage an intervention, but Jared and Ivanka keep telling Trump how great he’s doing,” a source said. Don Jr. is said to be reluctant to confront his father alone. “Don said, ‘I’m not going to be the only one to tell him he’s acting crazy,’” the source added.
One area where the family seems united is over the president’s manic tweeting early Monday morning. After Trump sent out more than a dozen all-caps tweets, the Trump children told people they want Trump to stop. “They’re all worried. They’ve tried to get him to stop tweeting,” a source close to the family told me.
The Trump family’s private concern about Trump’s behavior could raise questions about his fitness for office. Trump has been prescribed drugs that medical experts say can seriously impair his cognitive function. Last night the New York Times reported that steroids, which Trump is reportedly taking, specifically dexamethasone, are known to “affect mood, causing euphoria or a general happiness.”
There is a long history in the Trump family of denying serious illness. According to a Trump family friend, Trump’s father, Fred Trump Sr., insisted on working even after his Alzheimer’s disease advanced in the 1990s. “To retire is to expire!” Fred Sr. would say. The friend said that as Fred Sr.’s disease worsened––he once came down the stairs wearing three neckties––the family created a system so that Fred could think he was still running the Trump Organization. Every day Fred Sr. would go to the office in Brooklyn and they would give him blank papers to sort through and sign. The phone on Fred’s desk was set up so that it could only dial out to his secretary. “Fred pretended to work,” the family friend said.
He always sounds crazy so it’s hard to tell. But the “I feel 20 years younger” is a steroid tell. They should be very, very concerned about this guy making decisions during this period. And as far as I can tell, there’s nobody in the White House or in the family who can stop him on a normal day. On steroids?
Trump says he’s leaving the hospital because he feels better than he has in 20 years:
That’s the steroids talking. And it may be making him manic. Anyone who’s ever taken them knows the crash is going to be epic and if he doesn’t have a relapse requiring him to helicopter back to Walter Reed he will be lucky.
But meanwhile he’s telling all his fans to go out and get the virus because it’s the fountain of youth. And suggesting that the medical care he’s getting is standard when, in fact, it’s highly, highly unusual.
This story in the NY Times reveals just what a terrible patient he has been. I’ll bet that the doctors will be glad to see him go:
With the president determined not to concede weakness and facing an election in just 30 days, officials acknowledged providing rosy assessments to satisfy their prickly patient.
Determined to reassert himself on the political stage on his third day in the hospital, Mr. Trump made an unannounced exit from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in the early evening, climbing into his armored Chevrolet Suburban to ride past supporters holding Trump flags gathered outside the building. Wearing a suit jacket and face mask but no tie, Mr. Trump waved at the crowd through a closed window as his motorcade slowly cruised by before returning him to the hospital.
“It’s been a very interesting journey,” Mr. Trump said in a one-minute video posted on Twitter, looking stronger and sounding more energetic than he had the last couple of days. “I learned a lot about Covid. I learned it by really going to school. This is the real school. This isn’t the let’s-read-the-books school. And I get it. And I understand it. And it’s a very interesting thing and I’m going to be letting you know about it.”
Mr. Trump’s camera-friendly, morale-boosting “surprise visit,” however, may have masked the reality of his condition, and his seeming energy may have reflected the fact that he was given the steroid dexamethasone, according to medical experts. Dexamethasone has been shown to help patients who are severely ill with Covid-19, but it is typically not used in mild or moderate cases of the disease.
Moreover, some medical experts said Mr. Trump’s trip out of the hospital was reckless, unnecessarily putting both hospital staff members and Secret Service agents at risk for a stunt. Others questioned the president’s statement in his video that he had met soldiers while at Walter Reed.
“Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be quarantined for 14 days,” Dr. James P. Phillips, an attending physician at Walter Reed, wrote on Twitter. “They might get sick. They may die. For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater. This is insanity.
In a telephone interview on Sunday night, Dr. Phillips also said the trip raised the alarming question of whether the president was directing his doctors.
“At what point does the physician-patient relationship end, and does the commander in chief and subordinate relationship begin, and were those doctors ordered to allow this to happen?” he said, noting that it violated standards of care and would not be an option open to any other patient. “When I first saw this, I thought, maybe he was being transported to another hospital.”
Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said precautions were taken in organizing the excursion. “The movement was cleared by the medical team as safe to do,” he said.
But the criticism threatened to reinforce views of Mr. Trump’s handling of the pandemic as a whole, which has been widely criticized and remains his biggest political vulnerability.
He’s high on steroids right now. This may be the scariest moment of his presidency.
As we watch the latest episode of the Trump show, it’s important not to forget the 210,000 dead:
Nearly five months after his father’s death, Brian Walter still can’t shake the feeling that he might’ve caused it.
As a New York City subway worker, Walter, 46, was exempt from the stay-at-home mandate that he hoped would keep others in his family safe. He became the designated shopper for his parents and sanitized everything he brought into their home.
But despite all their precautions, Walter and his father, John, both contracted the novel coronavirus, and after 19 days in the hospital, John Walter died May 10.
On Sunday, Brian Walter was one of nearly two dozen people directly affected by the coronavirus to mourn the more than 200,000 American who have been killed by covid-19 and push for a national plan for recovery.
They gathered on the grassy Ellipse just south of the White House and in proximity to the Rose Garden, where those attending President Trump’s announcement of his Supreme Court nominee flouted recommendations on wearing masks and social distancing. Trump and at least eight other people who attended the Sept. 26 ceremony have since tested positive for the coronavirus.
“It’s very important we get the message across that this is not a hoax or a conspiracy or a fake illness,” Walter said. “Just because it hasn’t affected you personally doesn’t mean it’s not real. The events of last weekend prove that you can be isolated for a while, but if you make one wrong move, the virus could get you.”AD
Walter looked at 20,000 empty black chairs that had been placed on the Ellipse over the weekend, each representing 10 people in the United States who have died of covid-19. The U.S. coronavirus death toll soared past 200,000 last month, and Covid Survivors for Change, a network aimed at helping those affected by the virus locate support groups and other resources, declared Sunday a national day of remembrance.
210,000. The number is mind-boggling. The suffering of many who battled and continue to battle terrible bouts of the disease is overwhelming. The families and friends of the dead number in the millions.
This is an epic crisis and world historic tragedy.
Four years ago, almost to the day, Donald Trump was on the campaign trail mocking Hillary Clinton’s bout of pneumonia and insisting that contracting such an illness rendered her too weak and unfit to be the president. The campaign ran what was called by some the nastiest political ad ever, called “Dangerous.” It depicted Clinton as a doddering invalid who was so incapacitated she couldn’t handle foreign policy and national security.
It’s not news that Donald Trump is a crude and cruel piece of work, of course. But it’s worth recalling that ugly incident because it provided a window into his twisted psyche and the way he views his “brand” as being a virile strongman with superior genes. One aspect of that brand is that he isn’t one of those losers who gets sick.
Perhaps the best way to understand exactly how Trump wants people to view him is to read the ludicrous letter he dictated to his New York physician, Dr. Jacob Bornstein, during the 2016 campaign, in which he described himself as potentially “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” whose “physical strength and stamina are extraordinary.”
Various reports have trickled out since we found out that Trump had tested positive for COVID-19, revealing that at first he was in denial about having been exposed to the virus, so much so that he flew around the country, further exposing hundreds of his supporters and donors to it. When he finally realized that he was sick, Trump reportedly got scared, asking his staff if he was “going to go out like Stan Chera,” an old friend of his from the New York real estate world who died of the disease last spring.
But just as Trump has admittedly “downplayed” the pandemic from the very beginning — spreading more disinformation than any other source, according to a recent study — he is now attempting to “downplay” his own illness by staging one amateurish propaganda stunt after another. It would be downright amusing if the stakes weren’t so high, and if so many other people’s lives weren’t hanging in the balance.
Although we can’t state this as a scientific certainty, it certainly appears that the gathering in the White House Rose Garden to announce the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett on Sept. 26 was a “super-spreader” event. There’s a long list of people who were in attendance and have since tested positive, and since it can take up to 14 days to show symptoms, there could still be more. Trump’s reckless visit to his golf club fundraiser in New Jersey to meet with donors from all over the country last week, after he knew that his aide Hope Hicks was sick, could well have been another super-spreader event: More than 200 people were there.
It remains unclear whether Trump had been tested before his debate with Joe Biden last Tuesday. He and his entourage showed up too late to be tested, refused to wear masks and were on the “honor system” when they all claimed they had tested negative that day. The timeline strongly suggests that Trump had already been infected, and the White House is not being forthcoming about his testing history. So far, Biden has tested negative three times. But until two weeks have passed, I don’t think anyone can feel reassured that Trump’s toxic aerosols didn’t make their way across the stage during his 90-minute primal scream session.
The Washington Post reports that even though the White House is clearly the site of a major COVID cluster, officials there didn’t bother to issue instructions to the staff until Sunday night — and even then, all they said was that staffers should stay home and call their health care provider if they feel sick. By all accounts, people are still working at the White House without masks and the CDC hasn’t started any official contact tracing. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump told people who had tested positive to keep it quiet and even his campaign manager, Bill Stepien, was kept in the dark as the virus ran unchecked through the White House. Stepien has since tested positive and is quarantining at home.
So it’s a chaotic mess in TrumpWorld, as usual. But what isn’t so usual is the way the medical professionals are handling this. It’s clear that Trump has been much sicker than anyone let on at first. He required supplementary oxygen at least twice, needing oxygen and has been given cocktail of experimental therapeutic drugs. All this is clearly threatening to his self-defined brand as the “healthiest individual ever elected.”
Presenting that image is so important to Trump that he has apparently convinced Dr. Sean Conley, the White House physician (and a Navy officer), to throw his integrity away in press conferences that are such obvious cover-ups he’s tripping over his own tongue. When questioned over his inconsistent reports about the status of the president’s health, Conley replied, “I didn’t want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction,” which is such an absurd statement you almost feel sorry for him. (Unless he really believes he could make Trump sicker by telling the truth.)
Meanwhile, Trump is staging videos from the hospital, having pictures taken of him signing blank pieces of paper and giving the impression that he’s working in different rooms around the clock — when the metadata makes clear that the photos were taken within minutes of each other. On Saturday night, his daughter posted this preposterous tweet:
This propaganda is reaching Soviet levels of absurdity, except that instead of the party and the bureaucracy going to extreme lengths to hide the ill health of their leader, this time it’s the leader himself running the cover-up. And because it’s Trump, it’s an outrageous exercise in narcissism.
In his video on Saturday, he said:
This was something that happened, and it’s happened to millions of people all over the world, and I’m fighting for them. Not just in the U.S., I’m fighting for them all over the world.
His fans are actually saying he led us into this battle against the virus by modeling the reckless and irresponsible behavior we should all be following:
They’re already commemorating the great victory:
Apparently, Donald Trump has Made America Great Again by getting COVID-19.
“This is insane.” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT)
Other people are mere props for the acting president’s ego. Their lives and safety mean nothing to COVID Donny (CNBC):
President Donald Trump on Sunday briefly ventured outside Walter Reed hospital in a motorcade to greet cheering supporters, a move that doctors have condemned for flagrantly disregarding precautions designed to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
COVID Donny wore a cloth mask. Everyone else in the vehicle with the contagious acting president wore N95 masks, gowns, and perhaps face shields.
The CNBC account continues:
In response to the criticism, White House spokesman Judd Deere told The Associated Press that Trump’s trip outside the hospital “was cleared by the medical team as safe to do.”
Deere added that precautions were taken, including the use of personal protective equipment, to protect the president, White House officials and Secret Service agents.
Women and men of the Secret Service have families at home. They are supposedly willing to take a bullet for the president, not from him.
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Anything that might happen could happen in 2020. So here’s some information you may need going forward. What happens if a federal candidate dies before the election? What do electors pledged to a deceased candidate do with their votes?
Via Zoe Tillman at Buzzfeed News:
If Trump became incapacitated or died in office, the 25th Amendment of the Constitution makes clear that Vice President Mike Pence would step in as president. The 20th Amendment, meanwhile, says that the vice president-elect will be sworn in as president if the president-elect dies before the start of their term.
What’s less settled — and could end up in court — is what happens if a candidate dies before the Electoral College meets to officially choose a president-elect, which is scheduled to take place on Dec. 14. Normally if a candidate leaves the race before Election Day, their political party can choose a new nominee, but ballots with Trump and former vice president Joe Biden’s names on them have already gone out to absentee voters in a number of states. With 30 days left before the election, it’s very unlikely there would be enough time for many states to change their ballots.
If Trump could no longer serve, it’s not clear if votes for him would automatically transfer to Pence (or whichever candidate is chosen by the Republican Party to take his place) or if electors could be in a position to select other candidates. Not all states are clear on those questions.
2020 just gets better and better, doesn’t it?
In its unanimous Chiafalo v. Washington decision, the Supreme Court ruled states could penalize (and or fine) electors for breaking their pledge.
What the Supreme Court did not do, however, was resolve what electors could do if a candidate died before the Electoral College voted. Kagan, who wrote the main opinion in Chiafalo, noted that some states, including California and Indiana, included language in their elector pledges that allowed for flexibility if a nominee died, but others did not.
“[W]e suspect that in such a case, States without a specific provision would also release electors from their pledge. Still, we note that because the situation is not before us, nothing in this opinion should be taken to permit the States to bind electors to a deceased candidate,” Kagan wrote.
Professor Richard Pildes commented in the Washington Post on Friday what might happen if the the deceased candidate’s party could not settle on a single replacement candidate:
If the RNC were deeply divided, and Republican electors then did not coalesce around a single replacement candidate, there might not be a majority winner in the electoral college. In that case, the House would choose the president from among the top three vote getters in the electoral college. In that process, each state delegation gets one vote.
A contingent election. And so it goes. Chaos, chaos, and more chaos under the king of it.
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His joyride today was reckless and irresponsible:
The Secret Service have been exposed a bunch of times because they have to advance his super-spreader rallies. There were reports that they were very upset on Friday that they’ve been treated so cavalierly.
As the virus spread among the people closest to him, Mr. Trump also asked one adviser not to disclose results of their own positive test. “Don’t tell anyone,” Mr. Trump said, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
Mr. Trump and his top advisers also aimed to keep such a close hold on the early positive results that his campaign manager, Bill Stepien, didn’t know that Hope Hicks, one of the president’s closest White House aides, had tested positive on Thursday morning until news reports later that evening, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Trump campaign said Friday evening that Mr. Stepien had tested positive.
The initial secrecy within Mr. Trump’s inner circle has created a sense of anxiety within the West Wing. Publicly, the White House has issued evolving and contradictory statements about the president’s health that has some officials worried about their own credibility.
“I’m glued to Twitter and TV because I have no official communication from anyone in the West Wing,” an administration official said.
He put out this video just before he risked the lives of his Secret Service in that hermetically sealed SUV solely so he could go out and thank the Proud Boys and other nuts who are gathered outside Walter Reed raising a ruckus all day:
He says he “gets it” now (after 7 long months of pain and suffering and over 200,000 dead Americans) but then he does another one of his dangerous, useless photo-ops by getting in a car with other humans while he’s in full-fledged COVID, with no N-95 mask.
It never gets better. It only gets worse.
I’m sure you can see what’s wrong with this statement:
““I didn’t want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction. And in doing so, you know, it came off that we were trying to hide something, which wasn’t necessarily true”
Right. You wouldn’t want the virus to hear any bad news or it might get mad and make the president sicker. So shhhh. No bad news. It needs to believe that the strong, powerful President is beating it so it will give up and go infect someone else.
Honestly,. I can’t think of any other way to interpret that. But it is in keeping with the ignorance that’s come out of this White House from the beginning, from “it will just go away” to “maybe we could inject disinfectant to clean the lungs” to “we wouldn’t have all these cases if we weren’t testing” and more, this administration has long been well beyond propaganda to sheer stupidity. The president’s former doctor Ronny Jackson went out and made ridiculous comments and now this one is doing the same thing.
Apparently, Trump didn’t just spread COVID to everyone around him. He spread STUPID as well.
Joe Biden’s national lead over President Donald Trump nearly doubled after Tuesday’s presidential debate, with voters saying by a 2-to-1 margin that Biden has the better temperament to be president, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
The poll was conducted in the two days after the unruly and insult-filled Sept. 29 debate, but before Trump tested positive for Covid-19 and was hospitalized Friday at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
The Democratic nominee is now ahead of Trump by 14 points among registered voters, 53 percent to 39 percent — up from his 8-point lead in the previous poll before the debate.
That 14-point advantage represents Biden’s largest lead in the NBC News/WSJ poll during the entirety of the 2020 presidential campaign; his previous high was 11 points in July.
Here are some contrarians who apparently think acting like a middle school bully is exactly what Americans want in a president:
Frank Luntz, pollster: “Biden should not have told Trump to shut up. Trump has rattled him, and it’s not a good look for Biden. #Debates2020”
Hugh Hewitt, MSNBC/NBC: “Winner: @realDonaldTrump on points. Loser: Chris Wallace. Winner: Judge Amy Comey Barret, who will be a justice. Loser: @JoeBiden for (1) having no response to “name one Joe.” (2) “Antifa isn’t a movement.” (3) The lockdown discussion. Voters don’t want a Biden lockdown.”
Bill O’Reilly: “Biden is coming across soft on crime. Every time Trump directs a question to him about what he would do—he dodges.”
Guy Benson, Fox News: “Biden pretending that the job losses are Trump’s fault, while also demanding more shutdowns & slower reopenings. Absurd.”
Ari Fleischer, Fox News: “Biden is too weak to take a stand on the filibuster or packing the court. He should take a stand.”
Steve Hilton, Fox News: “oh please. knock it off with the Scranton schtick @JoeBiden. you’re funded by Wall Street and your economic policies would hurt working Americans the most.”
Kimberley Strassel, The Wall Street Journal: “Why is Biden allowed to repeat that the facts about Hunter–as put out by a Senate Committee, with data from Treasury Department–are discredited? Every newspaper has noted the money Hunter took, from Ukraine to China. It’s all true; even Hunter admitted it.”
Ari Fleischer, Fox News: “I thought that the president had the best line of the night when he said ‘I’ve done more in 47 months than you’ve done in 47 years.’ That was a pretty good way to sum everything up. And I still think that Joe Biden is leaving himself very vulnerable because he just refuses to take a stand out of weakness, he acknowledges it! ‘I won’t give you an answer on court packing or the filibuster because I don’t want my answer to be the issue.’ What kind of leader or statesman answers a question like that?”
Andrew Sullivan: “Trump is dominating. That’s the brutal truth. It’s painful. So far.”
Tim Pool: “Even Biden laughs at Trump’s jokes This is hilarious Trump knows how to entertain and that wins people over Its sales They won’t remember what you said but they will remember how you made them feel”Geraldo Rivera: “I thought that Joe wasn’t sharp, and the President I thought was so forceful at times that I thought he was gonna try and eat Joe Biden literally on the stage.”
Kimberley Strassel, The Wall Street Journal: “1) There are two ways to think of debates. a) Did you excite/enthuse base? On this, Trump wins. He was consistent, and made the points that he is running on in this election–law/order; economy; D corruption in terms of FBI investigation/Hunter; handling of virus. #Debates2020”
Bill O’Reilly: “Trump being very aggressive in contradicting what Biden says. First 7 minutes—Trump stronger.”
Dana Perino, Fox News: “President Trump was very good on some of the specifics, I would say especially law and order, judges, veterans, and military. And he could really parry with Joe Biden on something like the Green New Deal.”
Brit Hume, Fox News: “Trump came off as an enormously forceful personality, and if strength is what you’re looking for in a certain sense maybe people would judge him the winner.”
It appears they were wrong. People actually would prefer a an adult president who understands the meaning of discipline and decency. They love this dominating gorilla act but most people don’t. And, by the way, it turns out that touting policies and holding events that can kill your own voters isn’t really smart:
The biggest declines for Trump in the poll come from seniors (who are now backing Biden by a 62 percent-to-35 percent margin) and suburban women (58 percent to 33 percent).
And men 50 years and older moved from a 13-point advantage for Trump in the pre-debate NBC News/WSJ poll, to a 1-point advantage for Biden in this latest poll.
Also, he’s not getting much sympathy so far — for good reason:
An online ABC News/Ipsos poll released Sunday showed that 72 percent of Americans felt President Donald Trump did not take the risk of catching Covid-19 seriously enough or take the appropriate precautions for his own health.
That included 43 percent of Republicans and roughly 95 percent of Democrats.