Month: October 2020

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.”

these arguably would’ve been the two most shocking stories of Obama’s entire 8 yrs in office!

— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) October 2, 2020

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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Is there anything cuter than this ‘animal preschool?’ Zookeepers at the Australian Reptile Park had their hands full with baby Tasmanian devils, kangaroos, koalas, and more 🍼🦘🐨 pic.twitter.com/PKV6vScqtJ

— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) September 28, 2020

I don’t know about you but I needed that …

Oh dear God. This battle is going to last for a long, long time. Ian Millhiser on the Supreme Court:

The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will hear two consolidated cases that could eviscerate the right to be free from racial discrimination in voting. And the Court agreed to hear these cases just weeks before the Senate is likely to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court, giving a Republican Party that is often hostile to voting rights a 6-3 majority on the nation’s highest court.

It’s difficult to exaggerate the stakes in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee and Arizona Republican Party v. Democratic National Committee.

The cases involve two Arizona laws restricting the right to vote. One law requires ballots cast in the wrong location to be tossed out, while the other prevents individuals from delivering another person’s absentee ballot to the elections office. But as these cases arise under the Voting Rights Act — a seminal law preventing racist voting laws that the Supreme Court has already weakened considerably — they provide a conservative-majority Supreme Court the opportunity to dismantle what’s left of the Voting Rights Act.

Early Friday morning, the White House revealed that President Trump tested positive for Covid-19. But that news will, at most, impact just one presidential election. The Court’s decision in the Democratic National Committee cases, by contrast, could fundamentally reshape all elections moving forward. It could allow racist voter discrimination to run rampant throughout American democracy. And it potentially endangers the ability of the Democratic Party, with its multiracial coalition, to compete in all future elections, at least at the national level.

We cannot know yet what the Supreme Court will do in this case. Perhaps two Republican justices will get cold feet and agree to save the Voting Rights Act. Or perhaps Democrats will win a landslide victory in the upcoming election and pack the Supreme Court with additional justices — stripping the GOP of its Supreme Court majority in the process.

Barring such events, however, American democracy is in terrible danger.The Supreme Court’s decision to hear the Democratic National Committee cases could threaten the fairness of American elections for years to come.

I know that it’s hard to remember in light of our current circumstances but the sad fact is that the Grim Reaper McConnell set this in motion when he stole the Garland seat. They had a 5-4 majority for this even before RBG died. Whatever happens in the election, the fight is going to continue unless the Democrats have the guts to re-balance our system by adding states and expanding the Supreme Court. Otherwise it will be almost impossible to fix this democracy.

I noticed this behavior when I watched the even live and wondered if they understood anything about how this virus works. They clearly did not:

https://twitter.com/Z_Everson/status/1312085241272700928?s=20

I have pretty much been under house arrest for the duration as well. I really, really don’t want to get this thing. Apparently, these GOPers think they are immune.

By the way, Notre Dame’s president who attended that event has also tested positive. It is starting to look like this may have been the super-spreader event.

Not because she caught COVID but because her diagnosis obscured this:

The first lady, Melania Trump, delivered a profanity-laced rant about Christmas decorations at the White House and mocked the plight of migrant children who were separated from their parents at the border in 2018 during a conversation secretly taped by a former aide and close confidante.

“I’m working like a — my ass off at Christmas stuff,” Mrs. Trump laments to the former aide, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who has just published a tell-all book, in a recording that was first broadcast on CNN on Thursday night. Mrs. Trump continued, “You know, who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff and decoration?”

Later in the conversation, which occurred in July 2018, the first lady complained about the criticism leveled at President Trump and his administration that summer for separating families in a crackdown on illegal immigration.

“I say that I’m working on Christmas planning for the Christmas, and they said, ‘Oh, what about the children?’ That they were separated.” She used another obscenity to express her exasperation, asking Ms. Winston Wolkoff, “Where they were saying anything when Obama did that?”

The audio recording puts the first lady’s frustrations on full display only weeks before Mr. Trump faces voters in his bid for a second term.

[…]

The recordings appear to present Mrs. Trump as irritated that she does not receive the positive news coverage that she believes she deserves, in part because people say she is not speaking out enough about her husband’s actions as president.

“They say I’m complicit. I’m the same like him. I support him. I don’t say enough. I don’t do enough,” she tells Ms. Winston Wolkoff in a conversation that sounds as if she is confiding in a close friend.

The conversation took place only weeks after Mrs. Trump — who was born in Slovenia and became a United States citizen in 2006 — made headlines when she traveled to an immigrant shelter for children in Texas along the Mexican border and wore a jacket that read, in white capital letters, “I really don’t care. Do U?”

At the time, the president and the first lady’s spokeswoman said that the message on the jacket was aimed at reporters, not at the children she was visiting.

Asked by Ms. Winston Wolkoff why she wore the jacket, Mrs. Trump said she did it to annoy her husband’s critics.

“I’m driving liberals crazy, that’s for sure,” she said. “And that, you know, that’s — and they deserve it, you understand. And everybody’s like, ‘Oh, my God. This is the worst. This is the worst.’ After, I mean, come on. They are crazy, OK?”

In the recordings, she complains that the news media was not willing to write a positive article about her visit and her efforts to help reunite children with their parents. She says they do not understand the limits of what she can do because reuniting them “needs to go through the process and through the law.”

Of the news media, she says: “They will not do the story. We put it out. They would not do the story. You would not believe it. They would not do the story because they are not — they would not do the story because they are against us because they are liberal media. Yeah, if I go to Fox, they will do the story. I don’t want to go to Fox.”

The recordings also suggest that the president’s view of immigration — and in particular his support for the idea of separating children at the border to deter illegal crossings — influenced the way she saw the issue as well.

In one part of the conversation, according to CNN, Mrs. Trump questioned whether the mothers and children who claimed to have been subject to violence in their home countries were really lying to Border Patrol officials.

“A lot of, like, moms and kids they are teached how to do it,” Mrs. Trump said. “They go over and they say like, ‘Oh, we will be killed by a gang member, we will be, you know, it’s so dangerous.’ So they are allowed to stay here.”

She said the families, most of whom come from Central America, could have chosen to stay in Mexico.

“They are teached by other people what to say to come over and to, you know, let them go to stay here,” she said. “Because they could easily stay in Mexico, but they don’t want to stay in Mexico because Mexico doesn’t take care of them the same as America does.”

She’s a privileged whiner just like her husband. And she’s also a terrible person and kind of an idiot. Their marriage is more than just a transaction (which it is.) There is a meeting of the rather empty minds there too

Look for the Proud Boys in this official Trump campaign video:

Supporters of the far-right Proud Boys group can be seen in an official President Donald Trump campaign video released earlier this year following a rally in Colorado.

The arms of one person holding a MAGA hat and wearing a black and yellow Proud Boys jacket can be seen towards the end of video, parts of which were filmed at Trump’s rally at the Broadmoor World Arena in Colorado Springs in February.

A similar black and yellow jacket can also be seen briefly earlier in the video, entitled “Stronger.”

The Colorado Times Recorder first identified the people in the clip as belonging to the group of several Proud Boys members who attended the rally in matching jackets.

The group were also photographed flashing the “OK” hand symbol—a gesture that has been simultaneously co-opted by the far-right to show a support for white supremacy as well as a trolling tactic to trick the media and liberals into thinking the fingers spell out WP (white power).

The OK hand gesture was added to the Anti-Defamation League’s database of hateful symbols in September 2019.

“We are aligned with Trump in that we believe in America First,” one of the Proud Boys supporters at the rally, who only wished to be identified as Nate, previously told the Colorado Times Recorder.

Also:

Enrique Tarrio is serving as the Florida state director of a political support group Latinos for Trump

A spokesman for the Trump campaign told DailyMail.com that neither Tarrio nor his ‘Latinos for Trump’ are affiliated with the president’s official ‘Latinos for Trump Coalition’

Tarrio is the national chairman of the Proud Boys, the ‘white supremacist’ group who Donald Trump told to ‘stand back and stand by’ at Tuesday’s debate 

Tarrio, ran for congress as a Republican earlier this year 

Tarrio, 36, has been pictured with Trump confidant Roger Stone who is a Proud Boys member, the president’s son Don Jr, and GOP Senator Ted Cruz   

Cruz co-sponsored a Senate resolution based on a petition written by Tarrio to designate the left wing group Antifa as a ‘domestic terrorist organization’

Couldn’t happen to a nice bunch of COVID deniers. Gabriel Sherman reports:

Trumpworld is gripped by fear and panic this morning as the country absorbs the news that Donald Trump, Melania, and Hope Hicks tested positive for COVID-19. “There are so many threads to pull. No one knows where this is going to go,” a stunned former West Wing official told me. 

The biggest unknown is the state of the president’s health. This morning the New York Times reported that Trump is exhibiting “coldlike symptoms.” Two Republicans in close contact with the White House told me that Trump’s symptoms have included a cough and fever. Melania is said to be asymptomatic. “They are worried about the president because of his age,” one of the sources said. Sources said Trump will likely want to be seen in public as soon as possible to blunt the narrative that he is sidelined by the virus he’s spent the last six months downplaying. “He’s going to want to get out there a lot sooner than people think,” the former official said. “But it will be hard to hide if he’s sick. Also, who will want to be in a room with him?” The White House did not respond to a request for comment. 

Campaign advisers are also gaming out how Trump’s COVID diagnosis will play out with only 32 days left until the election. Sources I spoke with are doubtful the next two debates will happen. “There really can be nothing for 14 days. It’s as if the campaign ended yesterday,” a second former West Wing official told me. Republicans close to Trump are discussing what kind of message Trump should put out that might limit the political damage. “He could come out and say, ‘Look, I had COVID and it wasn’t that bad. It just shows that I’m strong and we should open up the country,’” the former West Wing official said. “He could make a mockery of it.” 

Meanwhile, Hicks has experienced more pronounced symptoms than the president. Two sources said she has had a high fever and a cough, with one source adding she lost her sense of smell. Hicks is said to be frustrated with Trump for taking such a cavalier approach to the virus. She was one of the few West Wing staffers to wear a mask in meetings, which her colleagues chided her for. “She was made fun of because she wore a mask,” a friend said. Sources told me Hicks is also upset that news coverage has made it appear that she gave Trump the virus, when in fact no one knows where he got it. “It’s so unfair she’s sort of being blamed,” the friend told me. 

They seem to be assuming Trump will be lucky and not have a serious case — so he can come out and “mock the virus.” I’m sure all the people who weren’t so lucky — and the families of the dead — will find it to be hilarious.

One thing we know about this disease is that people can have mild symptoms one day and very severe symptoms the next. And it sometimes comes in waves. Assuming that his reportedly mild symptoms mean he’s going to have a mild course is premature at best.

I will just remind eeryone that Trump is a disgusting pig who did this four years ago exactly:

Here is Trump mocking Hillary Clinton's pneumonia on October 1st, 2016. pic.twitter.com/3g2L3pyO3x

— The Recount (@therecount) October 2, 2020

Leave it to Donald Trump to test positive for COVID-19 just two days after a disastrous debate performance. It’s tempting to think this is yet another of his reality show stunts, but it’s hard to believe that he could get away with faking something like this considering that the Trump White House leaks like a sieve. It’s more likely he does have the virus and his best-case scenario will be that he’s one of the lucky asymptomatic cases and can spend the rest of the campaign testifying to his youthfulness and strength, no doubt attributable to “good genes.” 

As the man himself says, “We’ll see what happens.”

Meanwhile, there’s still a lot going on that requires some sustained attention from the American people, none more important than the ongoing threat that the election, now just a month away, is going to be sabotaged. I don’t use that word lightly. It is becoming very obvious that this is being planned and will be implemented in an attempt to ensure that Trump cannot lose.

In fact, according to some incredible reporting by Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times Magazine, Republican operatives were locked and loaded back in 2016, but just didn’t need to pull the trigger. They had lawyers at the ready to contest the election on the basis of “voter fraud” in all those close states if it had gone the other way.

Rutenberg’s story makes the often-overlooked point that this is not really a Trump operation. Sure, he said back in 2016 that he wouldn’t accept the results unless he won and this time he’s telling his voters that the only way he can lose is if the vote is rigged. But this isn’t his idea. He’s just the first Republican to crudely telegraph the plan ahead of time.

The history of vote suppression in America goes all the way back to the beginning, of course. Only white men were allowed to vote. But white supremacists turned it into a winning agenda during Reconstruction and have continued to profit from it ever since. After the Voting Rights Act was passed in the 1960s and racist political power shifted from the Democrats to the Republicans, it turned into a well-funded, subversive, anti-democratic political strategy. During the last couple of decades it’s become the GOP’s life raft. The majority of their almost exclusively white party is in full-blown rebellion against what is soon to be a multiracial, multi-ethnic majority, which for obvious reasons is centered in the Democratic Party.

Donald Trump speaks to all of that, sometimes in blatant terms that the vote suppressors undoubtedly wish he wouldn’t. But I’d bet money that half the blather about voter fraud that everyone assumes are just Trumpisms are things he’s heard from establishment Republicans.

A lot of us have been chronicling this phenomenon for a long time. For me, the 2000 election was the eye-opener, when it became clear that Republicans were much better prepared to wage a scorched-earth battle to prevail in any election dispute. In a plan masterminded by Trump’s pal Roger Stone, the GOP had teams of lawyers ready to descend on Florida the moment they were called. Some of those lawyers are now on the Supreme Court — or are about to be rammed through a confirmation process, just in time for an election the president has already announced will require a vote in his favor. Again, this isn’t coming from Donald Trump. His loose lips are giving away the game, but he’s not the one who invented it.Advertisement:https://3830d075541d551dc278e230da78e3d1.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

For instance, is it even remotely reasonable to think that Trump came up with the idea to stack the Postal Service board with GOP donors, and install a crony to slow down the processing of mail in advance of an election we know will require record levels of mail-in voting? From Rutenberg’s Times Magazine piece:

When Congress headed off for its summer recess with no deal on money for voting or the Postal Service, Trump told reporters. “They need that money in order to make the Post Office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” he said. “Now, if we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. They just can’t have it.”

He didn’t think of that.Advertisement:https://3830d075541d551dc278e230da78e3d1.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

That particular scheme is this year’s contribution to an ongoing, long-term plan to curtail Democratic voting. It is sophisticated and legally complex and its followers have fanned out to every state that may be close, with lawsuits and legal challenges ready to go after the election.

Right now, aside from throwing sand in the gears of the post office, they’re going to great lengths in states all over the country to make it difficult to vote early or drop off mail-in ballots. They’re filing lawsuits against states that want to count ballots that are mailed on or before Election Day but arrive later, a practice that’s been in place for absentee ballots and military ballots for many years. On Thursday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott abruptly ordered the removal of all but one early-voting drop box in each county. That includes Harris County, the home of Houston — an overwhelmingly Democratic city — which encompasses nearly 1,800 square miles and about 4.7 million people.

If Democrats decide they’d better take the risk and vote on Election Day instead, there are the possible “poll watchers” Trump has threatened to send forth. He could be provoking a disastrous situation all over the country with calls for his voters to storm polling places to “make sure” the voting is fair and their votes are counted, but he didn’t invent this either. This particular form of voter intimidation has been practiced ever since Jim Crow. We even had a former chief justice of the Supreme Court who participated in it as a young lawyer in the 1960s.

In fact, Republicans were so aggressive about such tactics that courts issued consent decrees barring them from doing it in many jurisdictions for years. Those decrees have conveniently been recently lifted, under the same logic that the Roberts court gutted the Voting Rights Act. In that decision, the chief justice famously declared:

Our country has changed and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.

Rutenberg’s story lays this entire history out in great detail and shows how it has accelerated during the Trump years. In fact, that’s the real Operation Warp Speed.

So for all of our legitimate worries about Russian interference in our election, it turns out that the most dangerous assault on our democracy is a long-term Republican establishment operation led by a bunch of lawyers from elite schools. Trump is just the first candidate to come along who is corrupt and unpatriotic enough to unleash them completely. 

Russian roulette comes to mind this morning for several reasons you might expect. Everyone around the acting president has been spinning one cartridge in that revolver for months.

BREAKING – Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chairwoman, tested positive for the coronavirus on Wednesday, multiple sources say. She has mild symptoms. She was last with POTUS last Friday and has been in Michigan since then.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) October 2, 2020

There will be more.

White House residence staff ‘nervous’ after Trumps test positive for Covid-19, source says

The acting president himself is now symptomatic. How symptomatic?

Trump is showing symptoms of the novel coronavirus, but mild ones, including cold-like symptoms. At a fundraiser at his golf club at Bedminster, New Jersey last night, one attendee said the president came in contact with about 100 people & seemed lethargic https://t.co/04Y187AA19

— Josie Ensor (@Josiensor) October 2, 2020

NBC News national security and intelligence correspondent Ken Dilanian did not mention “covid fog” directly in his TV appearance within the hour. He did, however, express concern that the man with the nuclear “football” containing missile launch codes may now be impaired.

Stat News reports that up to one-third of people who had Covid-19 report lingering neurological and psychological symptoms:

Even people who were never sick enough to go to a hospital, much less lie in an ICU bed with a ventilator, report feeling something as ill-defined as “Covid fog” or as frightening as numbed limbs. They’re unable to carry on with their lives, exhausted by crossing the street, fumbling for words, or laid low by depression, anxiety, or PTSD.

The man with access to that briefcase, the man charged with making clear-eyed, life-and-death decisions on a moment’s notice, now risks long-term covid fog.

Not that he wasn’t foggy before.

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“It affects virtually nobody,” the acting president said of the coronavirus at a September 21 rally.

Welcome to the ranks of virtual nobodies, Mr. Acting President.

The virus that has killed 209,000 Americans now has infected Hope Hicks, one of the acting president’s closest advisers, the acting president, his wife, and likely many more to be announced on the mask-averse White House staff. They work together and travel together, maskless, in tight quarters.

“We will get through this TOGETHER!” tweeted Trump-is-for-Trump even as his administration continues its fight in the courts to strip health insurance from 20 million Americans.

Here is how CNN announced the story:

(CNN) A country already unnerved by a devastating health catastrophe and a turbulent political season faced fresh upheaval Friday as Americans awoke to news President Donald Trump had contracted coronavirus.

The President made the announcement on Twitter at nearly 1 a.m. ET on Friday and the development — after months of debilitating losses, set against a badly mismanaged federal response overseen by a commander-in-chief who repeatedly downplayed the crisis — threw fresh turmoil into the country’s leadership at a moment of deep national strain.

“This season of the reality show called ‘America’ has jumped the shark,” tweeted Anthea Butler, a professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania..

“In ‘America,’ the shark jumps you!” replied Salon’s Paul Rosenberg.

“How do we know it’s true?” tweeted Anand Giridharadas (“Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World“), echoing my first reflex. Could this be a flailing — if impossible to keep secret — ploy by the liar-in-chief to stop his reelection from swirling down the drain?

But that’s not likely. First, as Cliff Schecter points out, if Trump just wanted sympathy, “they could have just come out w Melania’s having it.” And second, he has to know what this would do to the stock market and the domestic economy he has tried desperately to prop up.

Axios reports:

Stock futures plunged after Trump tweeted the news. Market watchers warned of a potentially deep selloff, with an unknown extent of the spread at the top of the American government.

Giridharadas points to this chilling thread by The Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr:

A reminder to all Americans that the net effect of our prime minister catching COVID-19 was that it prompted a surge of patriotic support. From which he emerged with renewed popularity. Which enabled him to tear up key functions of the state

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) October 2, 2020

Donald Trump has the ‘China plague’. If I was Chinese-American, I would be fucking terrified right now

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) October 2, 2020

Some Trump adversaries will no doubt gloat (quietly, at least) while wishing him, his wife, and his staff speedy recoveries. Assuming again that the acting president in his desperate hour has not manufactured a hoax diagnosis to go with what for much of the year he called a hoax pandemic. Nothing is beyond him.

With Trump’s heaven-knows-what underlying conditions, obesity, and terrible fitness in general, we could under the provisions of the 25th Amendment have an Acting President Pence or even Pelosi by Election Day.

Lucky for Trump and Co., the White House staff all have excellent, government-funded health care. You’re welcome. Now us?

Maybe two weeks of quarantine will give this nuevo virtual nobody time to pass his ACA replacement plan. Because I’ve gotta say it is hard not to be impressed by the acting president’s health-care plan. It’s better. It’s cheaper. You’re gonna love it. And it’s been better, cheaper, you’re gonna love it, and he’s going to sign it — “a full and complete health care plan” — within two weeks for the last for three and a half years.

Nothing like COVID-19 in the morning to concentrate the mind.

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