Nurse Jodi Doering’s tweet thread from Saturday about COVID patients in denial went viral and landed her network interviews.
“Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real.’ And when they should be… Facetiming their families, they’re filled with anger and hatred,” she told CNN on Monday.
Doering has company along the Rio Grande in Texas:
UPDATE: Here’s another one.
The Trump era is a perverse reworking of the old saw that in America anyone can grow up to be president. The expression speaks to the egalitarian ideal that in our democratic republic of the people, etc., anyone might lead it. Not that Donald J. Trump, idiot heir to Fred Trump’s fortune, began life as just anybody. He did prove you really don’t have to know what the hell you are doing to hold the job. Poorly, of course. But he’s held the job now for almost four years and a quarter million dead.
Even Sarah Palin might do it. Digby on Monday cited President Obama’s assessment of Palin:
“Through Palin, it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican Party — xenophobia, anti intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward Black and brown folks — were finding their way to center stage. She had no idea what the hell she was talking about.”
By surrounding himself with the idiot sycophants he needed to feel like he is the smartest man in the room, Trump has “outed” a vast array of nincompoops in public office. It is something right out of Superman (1978):
Miss Teschmacher : Tell me something, Lex, why do so many people have to die for the crime of the century?
Lex Luthor : Why? You ask why? Why does the phone always ring when you’re in the bathtub?
[walking away]
Lex Luthor : *Why* is the most diabolical leader of our time surrounding himself with total nincompoops?
Anyone sufficiently appealing to Trump’s sense of himself finds a job in this confederacy of dunces in which bluster substitutes for competence. In the supposedly meritocratic world in which we supposedly live, one of the foremost things anyone should know is what they don’t know — the limits of their competence. In many professions, not knowing can get people killed.
Trump has no use for competence. Case in point: Dr. Scott Atlas. A neuroradiologist from Stanford’s Hoover Institution with no training in infectious diseases, Trump saw him on Fox News echoing his thoughts on the coronavirus, masks, and avoiding lockdowns to fight it. Trump assigned him to the White House coronavirus task force in August where, despite public denials, his advocacy of “herd immunity” and allowing the virus to spread (and Trump to ignore it) has contributed to the new wave of infections and death.
Atlas stirred additional controversy with a tweet on Sunday:
ABC News reports:
Dr. Scott Atlas, a controversial member of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force, is facing heavy criticism after telling Michiganders to “rise up” against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s new COVID-19 restrictions imposed as new cases surge in the state.
Whitmer has denounced Atlas’ call to action, in a call with Michigan Capitol reporters Monday morning, slamming it as “incredibly reckless, considering everything that has happened, everything that is going on.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top expert on infectious diseases, told NBC’s “Today” program Monday he “totally disagrees” with Atlas, and Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, called the comment “particularly irresponsible,” noting the death threats officials say Whitmer has faced.
“He is supposedly a physician and a disgrace to our profession,” Jha said in a tweet Sunday night.
Atlas denies he was teasing violence with his “rise up” comment. But he was not clever enough not to make it.
In the professional world, you can lose your license for practicing outside your area of expertise. In Trump’s White House that’s the reason they hire you … if only you’ll lick clean the president’s elevator shoes.
Atlas is hardly a one-off. Throughout his presidency, Trump has taken advice almost daily from Fox host Sean Hannity, a man with little expertise in anything except offering uniformed opinions. Then there are his GOP sycophants on Capitol Hill: Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Louis Gohmert of Texas, etc. The list of incompetents is long and getting longer.
Republicans hope to add to it in the administration’s waning days, explains Catherine Rampell:
The Senate is expected to vote as soon as this week on Trump’s nomination of Judy Shelton to the Fed. Simply put, Shelton is a demonstrably unqualified partisan quack who has no business working at the world’s most powerful central bank. Her nomination has been condemned by hundreds of economists and Fed alumni, including prominent Republicans and at least seven Nobel laureates. The senators poised to confirm her appear to know she is unfit; ahead of February hearings, a former Republican Senate Banking Committee aide said that “the idea of even calling her as a witness for something was beyond the pale” not long ago.
Shelton has advocated bringing back the gold standard. Her other positions on economic policy spin like a weathervane in the wind. Whatever the party’s political need du jour, she spins.
Senate Republicans have confirmed other unqualified cranks to senior Trump administration jobs — including to helm departments that nominees themselves earlier said shouldn’t exist. But both parties have long seen the Fed as too important to the domestic and global economies to politicize. A central bank requires political independence, real and perceived, to function, as events in Argentina and pre-euro Italy have amply demonstrated.
What Shelton’s nomination appears to be is “a desire to salt the earth for incoming President-elect Joe Biden.” As we know, Republicans who look the other way at government spending under GOP administrations become born-again deficit hawks once a Democrat occupies the Oval Office. Points for consistency in that anyway.
The competence gap in this administration reminds me of the exchange in Tom Clancy’s “Debt of Honor” I have quoted before. Serving in high government positions does not mean someone is smarter then you. Maybe not even as smart as you. They just have different jobs. What becomes dangerous is people accepting positions for which they are clearly unqualified for the money and prestige it brings, no matter the consequences to others. Some of those consequences are terminal.
But in an increasingly complex world, less complex people rebel at feeling left behind and powerless in it. Trump is their avatar.
“A man’s got to know his limitations,” Dirty Harry said in Magnum Force (1973). Too many in Trump’s orbit do not. Nor does Trump. Nor do any of them care.
Sarah Palin crawled out from under a barstool this week and went on Newsmax to try to appear relevant. Responding to a short passage in Obama’s new book, she said:
“It’s kind of pleasurable to know that I’ve been living rent-free in his head for 12 years. The movement that he still cannot accept nor understand . . . that movement was all about giving the voiceless a voice, empowering people who are fed up, want accountability in their government, want a smaller, smarter government, things that he just hasn’t been able to grasp.”
Yeah, I don’t think he’s spent too much time thinking about her in the last 12 years.
Here is what he said. And boy is he right:
“Through Palin, it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican Party — xenophobia, anti intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward Black and brown folks — were finding their way to center stage. She had no idea what the hell she was talking about.”
It’s Thanksgiving time so I think it’s a good day to show this which totally proves Obama’s point.
This Vox interview between Ezra Klein and Ann Applebaum is illuminating. It’s quite long and worth listening to.
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for the Atlantic, a senior fellow of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and most recently the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. In it, Applebaum, once comfortable in center-right elite circles, grapples with why so many of her contemporaries across the globe — including right here in America — have abandoned liberal democracy in favor of strongman cults and autocratic regimes.
Klein’s written excerpt captured some of the most interesting exchanges. Here’s one bit:
Klein: As a very quick typology of the Republican Party, I think you could cut people into three groups. There are the people who liked Donald Trump from the beginning, or bought into an apocalyptic understanding of America that Donald Trump seemed to share. A good example is Patrick Buchanan. Then there are people who don’t have unbelievably strong feelings about Donald Trump, but they really hate the left. They’re the anti-anti-Trumpers. And their dislike for the left is enough to make them make peace with him. I would probably put Mitch McConnell in this category.
But the people I’m most interested in are the people who saw exactly what Donald Trump is and loathed it and then also accommodated it. Somebody I want to use here as a case study, because you’ve written about him and I’ve spent some time reporting about him, is Lindsey Graham. He ran against Donald Trump in 2016 and called him “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” And he said, “if we nominate Trump, we’ll get destroyed, and we’ll deserve it.”
Now, he’s out there telling Trump not to concede the election. He’s saying that if Republicans concede, they’ll never win again. He’s telling Sean Hannity that Democrats only win elections when they cheat. What do you think happened to Lindsey Graham?
Applebaum: Lindsey Graham is particularly difficult to explain when you look at his background. If you were to look at him as a type, you would imagine him to be the most loyal American patriot and admirer of the Constitution. He has a very strong affiliation to the military. He got through college on a military scholarship. His parents died when he was young, so he had a hard-knock story and was saved by the American military. And he’s said that many times. If you were to imagine a type of person who would never betray American ideals, it would be Lindsey Graham.
But this is where you have to get into questions of personality and personal weakness. Graham is clearly someone who needs to be around a leader. For many, many years, he was John McCain’s sidekick. And in those years, he was a McCain Republican. I saw him at conferences in Europe where he talked about America’s role in the world, America promoting democracy. And then when McCain died, he seemed to need another role and he attached himself to Trump.
He appears to like the role of a power broker. When he runs into journalists in Washington, he likes recounting how he was just on the phone with the president. So the feeling of being close to power, of being next to someone important, this seems like a role that he is psychologically attached to playing. It’s a recognizable personality type.
If you look at the story of other nations that have been occupied by others or where people are part of political systems that they don’t admire, you will always find people like Lindsey Graham who give up their ideas, who move close to power, and who then seek to play some kind of role in the new system benefiting them.
Klein: My understanding of Graham — and I spent a bit of time with him over the years — is that in the middle of the Trump era, as he began to make this transition, his explanation was if he flattered Trump enough, he could direct Trump in important ways on things that are important to him, particularly foreign policy. This ends up failing. The abandonment of the Kurds, for instance, was a huge blow to Graham. But he does try to become this adviser to Trump, and from what I understand, there was a certain level of realpolitik about that.
And then slowly it became something other than that. He began to look at things through new eyes. He was very radicalized by the Kavanaugh [Supreme Court] hearings. He’s out there telling people that the thing about the left is they hate us. All the smart people out there, they hate us.
Something that you emphasize in the book is the way that cooperating with a regime like this often is a product not of one big decision to change sides, but of a series of small decisions, a series of small accommodations. And eventually you wake up and you’re on the other side. Can you talk a little bit about that process?
Applebaum: There’s actually social science studies of this and usually it’s done in the form of examining corruption inside companies. How do people end up going along with corruption if their company is carrying out some kind of scam?
The studies show that it’s always a step-by-step process. You accept one aspect of it: “Well, everybody else is keeping double books, so I can, too. That’s just what people do in this company, and it’s normal.” And then the next step is: “I’ll do this transaction in cash and I’ll keep it in the drawer. And I’m still a good person; I’m still a good worker. I’m doing this to help my company stay out of trouble or keep its head above water.” As each step becomes normalized, as people get used to the situation, then they can take the next step.
This is very similar to what happens in occupied countries. I’m not saying that the United States is Vichy France or occupied East Germany. But these are useful parallels to look at because they show you what human psychology is like when someone is working inside a system whose ideology they previously disagreed with or disliked. You see the same kinds of patterns.
Something like that also happened inside the Republican Party: People who thought of themselves as patriots, as good people — as politicians working in the interest of the United States — made small decisions over time, each time reminding themselves of why what they were doing was for the good of the country.
For Lindsey Graham, it was: I’m here to guide Donald Trump in the right direction. And then, at each stage, the situation becomes normalized. Eventually Lindsey Graham came to see his opponents as anti-American radical leftist socialists who he had to fight against. He still probably thinks he’s playing the same role — that he’s a good person fighting for American values — even though what he’s doing is almost precisely the opposite of what he said he would do or the kind of person that he was four years ago.
Klein: I want to talk about one of those decision trees that I think is happening right now, which has to do with the stolen election narrative that is taking hold among the Republican base.
Donald Trump is simply saying outright, in all caps, that he won the election and that the election has been stolen. There are some Republicans, like Graham, who are siding with him explicitly on that. But many of the others are doing something that I would describe as signaling emotional solidarity with Trump’s claims while not quite buying into them but not disputing them either. On Saturday, Marco Rubio tweeted, “The media can project an election winner, but they don’t get to decide if claims of broken election laws & irregularities are true. That is decided by the courts and on the basis of clear evidence and the law.”h
I agree with everything in that tweet. But the point of that tweet is to signal solidarity with a president saying something quite different. I think there is a belief among many elected Republicans right now that their base needs to grieve the election, that Donald Trump needs to grieve the election, and so it’s best to indulge the idea that it might have been stolen. Let them process the law slowly, let the courts shut that down, and then you can move on in a less emotionally traumatic way for your base. I just don’t think they’re going to be able to control it in that way. I think this is going to overtake them just like all the other conspiracies have overtaken them.
But I’m curious, do you have sympathy for that view? Is there something to be said for that strategy?
Applebaum: I’m afraid that I think it’s a little bit more sinister than that.I think that — certainly on Trump’s part, and other Republicans are probably coming to see this the same way as well — this is an attempt to create a new kind of base: an enraged receiving base, which will always think that the election was stolen and which will always assume that something went wrong and will always feel that they were deprived of something. And this base will then have uses in the future.
I don’t believe it will be all of the Republican Party. I can’t tell you right now how many of them it will be. But it will be a significant number of people. And in some congressional districts and some states, it could even be a majority. And this will be a base that is usable. This will be a base that not only dislikes the Democratic Party or disagrees with them, it will think that the Democratic Party is evil and anti-democratic — that they have stolen the election.
Think about what that means. That means that they aren’t even a legitimate political party. It means that there is a base of people who will be not just skeptical of mainstream media — whatever you think mainstream media is, which may even include Fox now. They will be not just skeptical of Fox, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. They will think all of those institutions are part of a deliberately constructed conspiracy to steal the presidency. And that kind of feeling — that conviction that the other side isn’t just wrong, it’s evil and traitorous — that’s then a useful group of people who can be motivated politically and maybe in other ways in the future
She is exactly right. This is a “base” of people who believe that Democrats are evil and must be defeated by any means necessary. But I think most observers fail to see how much these people enjoy believing that. At his ecstatic hate-fests, Trump always asks his cult members, “Is there anything more fun than a Trump rally?” and they cheer wildly. These are people who love to hate their enemies. It’s fun for them. It gives them pleasure.
They will certainly be very “useful.”
Obama told NPR today, “I’m distressed that you haven’t seen more Republican leadership make [Biden’s win] clear … the amount of time that’s being lost in this transition process has real world effects.”
Distressed? How about outraged?
Here’s one of the potential heroes who’s obviously been reminded that he’s a Republican first and an American second:
Last week Oklahoma senator Jim Lankford, a Republican, argued that Joe Biden should be receiving classified intelligence briefings despite the standstill with the GSA. Lankford said he would step in if the standoff continued.
But that was last week. This week Lankford sounded less worried:
After saying he would step in if President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris still weren’t receiving detailed intelligence briefings Friday, Sen. James Lankford (R., Okla.) said over the weekend his comments had been blown out of proportion.
“I’m not in a hurry, necessarily, to get Joe Biden these briefings, it’s been interesting how the media, the national media, not this network, but others have twisted this term ‘step in.’ I happen to chair the committee that oversees GSA, that is the entity that has to be able to make this call,” Mr. Lankford said an interview with the pro-Trump Newsmax TV Saturday.
On Wednesday, in an interview with KRMG radio in Tulsa, Okla., Mr. Lankford said: “If that’s not occurring by Friday, I will step in as well and be able to push and say, this needs to occur,”
Mr. Lankford said he was using the term “step in” to ask the General Services Administration about their process and act as a sounding board for the agency.
There is not ONE of them with any conscience. They do not care about democracy, they don’t care about the country and they don’t care about American lives. This has been made manifestly clear. I don’t know why anyone would think otherwise at this point.
There’s a question for the ages…
It’s obvious that Trump and the Republicans plan to do everything in their power to sabotage Biden’s presidency. Trump wants to prepare the ground for a rematch in 2024 and the rest of the GOP hopefuls figure it will work for them as well. The others just want power for power’s sake.
This should not be a surprise to any of us. It’s what they do. Recall Mitch McConnell in Obama’s first term, the minute he took control of the Senate:
“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,”
That will be his credo from the moment the new congress is in session if he is still Majority Leader. It doesn’t matter that it will cost hundreds of thousands more American lives. They just do not care.
Biden is incredulous as any decent person should be. But it’s who they are:
Good luck with that cooperation thing…
From this interview in The Atlantic:
The threats to American democracy—and to the broader cause of freedom—are many, he said. He was withering on the subject of Donald Trump, but acknowledged that Trump himself is not the root of the issue. “I’m not surprised that somebody like Trump could get traction in our political life,” he said. “He’s a symptom as much as an accelerant. But if we were going to have a right-wing populist in this country, I would have expected somebody a little more appealing.”
Trump, Obama noted, is not exactly an exemplar of traditional American manhood. “I think about the classic male hero in American culture when you and I were growing up: the John Waynes, the Gary Coopers, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Clint Eastwoods, for that matter. There was a code … the code of masculinity that I grew up with that harkens back to the ’30s and ’40s and before that. There’s a notion that a man is true to his word, that he takes responsibility, that he doesn’t complain, that he isn’t a bully—in fact he defends the vulnerable against bullies. And so even if you are someone who is annoyed by wokeness and political correctness and wants men to be men again and is tired about everyone complaining about the patriarchy, I thought that the model wouldn’t be Richie Rich—the complaining, lying, doesn’t-take-responsibility-for-anything type of figure.”
Ain’t that the truth. The old model was John McCain. And there were plenty of flaws with those guys too. Even the masculine heroes in my book like Nelson Mandela or Mark Twain or Franklin Roosevelt were flawed human beings who didn’t fit that movie mold he speaks of, weren’t infantile whiners and delusional braggarts as Trump is.
Honestly, looking beyond Trump’s obvious incompetence and ignorance the idea that anyone would like a person with his personality, much less put him up on a pedestal as a great leader, is what continues to confuse me more than anything. I will never wrap my mind around the idea that such a lying, whiny little bitch who trowels on makeup and dyes his hair became the hero of the aggressively macho American right wing.
WTF????
Last summer, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota welcomed bikers from across the country to the annual rally in the town of Sturgis. Hundreds of thousands showed up and they partied like there was no tomorrow. Noem, a rising Republican star, didn’t cancel the state fair and refused to issue much guidance on how to avoid spreading COVID-19. As the state’s caseload rose quickly throughout the fall, Noem spent $5 million of federal COVID relief money creating ads to encourage tourism.
She has rejected all advice from the CDC and has made it clear that she will defy any mandates coming from the new administration as well. She says she leaves it up to her people to do what’s best for their families because she values freedom. Apparently, she believes these people should have the freedom to infect innocent bystanders as well.
Tomorrow has arrived. The state is now considered to be one of the worst COVID hotspots in the world and hospitals are in a desperate situation. Over the weekend a South Dakota nurse wrote this disturbing dispatch on Twitter:
I have a night off from the hospital. As I’m on my couch with my dog I can’t help but think of the Covid patients the last few days. The ones that stick out are those who still don’t believe the virus is real. The ones who scream at you for a magic medicine and that Joe Biden is going to ruin the USA. All while gasping for breath on 100% Vapotherm. They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that “stuff” because they don’t have COViD because it’s not real. Yes. This really happens.
I’m sure it does. Here are some Americans who simply refuse to take the threat seriously, even when a family member has succumbed to the virus:
Noem is already being mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2024 or beyond, which makes sense. She is one of Donald Trump’s natural heirs, even using his patented lies and happy-talk approach to the virus, telling lawmakers recently that “in South Dakota, we didn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach and the results have been incredible.” Incredible yes. Incredibly horrific.
What she’s done to her state, Trump and the Republican Party are doing to the entire country. The winter surge that all the scientists predicted is upon us and it’s very bad. The president and his administration are obsessively trying to convince their voters that the election was stolen from them (which is a lie) so they aren’t even pretending to be interested in the rapidly spreading pandemic. Republican officials are missing in action on everything, with senators even refusing to appear on the Sunday morning shows in case they might be asked to explain why their president and their party are tilting at electoral windmills while refrigerator trucks are being commandeered in some states because the morgues are all full.
Well, there are some who are happy to continue to spread reckless disinformation:
The Washington Post reported that despite official protestations to the contrary, “many administration officials paint a portrait of chaos, with senior advisers enabling some of Trump’s most questionable instincts on the pandemic.” As an example they point to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ apparent belief that “one of the main ways the virus is spread is through waiters touching the cups of different people at restaurants.” (As I have pointed out earlier, Meadows is not the sharpest tool in the shed.)
And they’re doing this as the White House itself may be the most famous hotspot in the world, having been the site of two super-spreader events that sickened numerous members of the staff, Republican officials, Trump family members and even the president himself. More than 130 Secret Service members are reportedly in quarantine due to Trump’s reckless campaign travel.
And according to the Post, the health agencies have not been allowed to cooperate with the Biden transition team amid a worsening public health crisis. They no longer even ask for health expert advice before they plan events anymore.
Much of this is reportedly attributable to Jared Kushner, who was responsible for persuading Trump not to bother pretending to care about the virus anymore and who brought on the most pernicious “adviser” of all, Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist from the conservative Hoover Institute and a regular on Fox News. There is no one more responsible for spreading a crude “herd immunity” theory without understanding that it can only happen without a mass loss of life when combined with a vaccine and mitigation strategies over time.
Atlas is still at it. After Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced some new restrictions to try to contain the rapid spread of the virus in her state on Sunday night, Atlas tweeted, “The only way this stops is if people rise up. You get what you accept. #FreedomMatters #StepUp” He was highly indignant when it was suggested that he should not incite violence in a state where armed militia members were recently arrested for plotting to kidnap and execute the governor over COVID restrictions.
Numbers are climbing exponentially. The U.S. has reported 11 million total COVID cases as of Sunday, and it was 10 million just a week ago. One in 400 people have tested positive since then. With the lax attitude found among roughly half the population, hospitalization and death rates are going to start climbing quickly as well.
Ed Yong of the Atlantic tweeted out a chilling reminder for the country:
He continued with a reminder not to forget about the long-haulers. “A lot of the 1.5 million Americans who were infected this month — many young & prev healthy — will still be sick well into 2021.”
In North Dakota, officials are allowing COVID-positive health care workers to continue working. They have no choice. There is a shortage, and unlike in the spring when health care workers came from all over the country to help out in the Northeast, the whole country is affected this time and they can’t be spared. In fact, while federal and state governments have been playing games and we’ve all been distracted by the Trump show, those front-line workers have been going to work every single day, month after month, dealing with this deadly disease. The burn-out rate is growing rapidly as well.
As Yong writes in this article: “The most precious resource the U.S. health-care system has in the struggle against COVID-19 isn’t some miracle drug. It’s the expertise of its health-care workers — and they are exhausted.” There is no help on the way. The federal government is paralyzed because the president is even less competent than he was before he lost the election and most Republican governors have more or less washed their hands of the problem. Everyone else is struggling along on their own. We are in for a rough few months.
Brilliant:
With Thanksgiving around the corner and COVID-19 coming on like the Tet Offensive of 1968, Jeff Tiedrich and I were on the same page over the weekend. Thanksgiving, fascists, and the virus were on our minds.
I wrote about them on Sunday here and on Twitter, and earlier this morning. People are making adjustments to their holiday plans to work around the pandemic. Some people, anyway.
The Associated Press reports:
According to a Kaiser Family Foundation’s October health tracking poll, two-thirds of the public are worried they or their family will get sick from the coronavirus, up 13 percentage points since April.
It does not take a lot of imagination to figure who is in the last third. Many of them were without masks out in the streets of the nation’s capitol on Saturday. Defeating the virus should be a patriotic thing to do, but patriotic these days is yet another contested concept.
Americans gave their lives storming the beaches of Normandy to defeat Nazism. They ate Thanksgiving dinner out of mess kits. #MAGA & @realDonaldTrump must find it abhorrent to wear masks and forgo a single Thanksgiving to defeat a virus now killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.
My father-in-law would have eaten his Thanksgiving dinner in 1944 somewhere in Alsace near the German border. My wife believes her dad and buddies in his unit might have kicked Trump’s #ProudBoysUSA asses as pieces of fascist shit. Just sayin’.
My friend Asher was waiting in line this morning to get a COVID test at Judiciary Square in Washington, D.C. People were lined up down the block.
“This better be the last asteroid ever,” said the last dinosaur ahead of the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction.