March 13, 2020

By David Leonhardt
Opinion Columnist
The great problem with economic crises is that they’re reinforcing. People stop spending money, which leads other people to lose their jobs or have their incomes reduced. These layoffs and pay cuts lead, in turn, to further cuts in spending. And so on.
A century ago, economists didn’t understand how to break this vicious cycle — and the Great Depression ensued. Today, economists do understand: Governments need to step into the void and spend large sums of money, until the economy is able to function healthily again on its own. These sums of money have come to be known as stimulus packages.
This morning, House Democrats and the Trump administration seem close to a deal on a stimulus program, in response to the market downturn caused by the coronavirus. (Senate Republicans have largely sat out the talks, deferring to the Trump administration.)
According to news reports, the deal includes two weeks of paid sick leave; tax credits for smaller businesses, to help pay for the leave; enhanced unemployment benefits; and federal funds for Medicaid. It also seems likely to include free virus testing.
Katie Porter, a House Democrat from California, may have played a key role in assuring the free testing. In an exchange that’s worth watching, she pushed the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to agree to it. “I did the math,” Porter wrote afterward. “A full battery of coronavirus testing costs at minimum $1,331.”
Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, said Congress would almost immediately begin working on other legislation to address the virus. That’s the right approach. This crisis is unlike anything the country has been through, in its effect on both public health and the economy. The list of closures, cancellations and delays announced in the last 24 hours is staggering: Broadway, Disneyland, music concerts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Major League Baseball, the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, hundreds of schools and more.
As Jason Furman, a Harvard economist who helped design the Obama administration’s response to the financial crisis, wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week:
The likelihood that history judges the economic response to coronavirus as too little and too late is much higher than the converse. If the economic shock is small and stimulus proves to be unnecessary, its negative effects are likely to be small. But if the shock is bigger and policy makers fail to act now, it will be harder to reverse the economic damage. With the federal government able to borrow at a negative real interest rate, doing too much is a minimal risk.
Derek Thompson, The Atlantic:
In an outbreak, public-health interventions are the most effective stimulus. In many ways, though, giving people money is a public-health intervention. More than 10 percent of Americans skip doctor appointments even when they feel sick, because they don’t think they can afford it. In the next few weeks, the Trump administration may have to request that Americans withdraw from public life — to “cancel everything.” This request to engage in economically damaging activity may be more palatable for many families if it comes with a financial package that compensates them for the damage. In a precarious economy where millions of people feel like they have to work to survive, more Americans will insist on going to work even as they show signs of illness, which means more Americans will be infected, and sick patients will overwhelm America’s hospitals.
Nicholas Kristof and Stuart A. Thompson, in The Times: “Working with infectious disease epidemiologists, we developed this interactive tool that lets you see what may lie ahead in the United States and how much of a difference it could make if officials act quickly. (The figures are for America, but the lessons are broadly applicable to any country.)”
…
What if We Just Counted Up All the Votes for President and Saw Who Won?
It’s Time to Declare a National Emergency
The U.S. government needs a coordinated response to the coronavirus on par with its response to the 2008 financial crisis.
Trump utterly fails to rise to his first real crisis.
Trump enters the stage
Re: Trump enters the stage - economic enhancement package
by Meno_ » Fri Mar 13, 2020 4:52 pm
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Re: Trump enters the stage - Trump to declare National emerg
by Meno_ » Fri Mar 13, 2020 6:16 pm
Trump to reportedly declare national emergency over coronavirus – live
Declaring emergency would allow easier flow of federal aid
Unprepared America wakes up to coronavirus, gradually then all at once
Trump promises more coronavirus tests
Trump's deflecting, xenophobic reaction to coronavirus –
Louisiana will postpone its April 4 presidential preference primary amid ongoing concern over coronavirus, Kyle Ardoin, the state’s top election official announced on Friday.
The Democratic contest will be postponed until June 20. Ardoin is acting to the contest using a provision in state law that allows him to move an election in an emergency situation, according to the Advocate. Louisiana is the first state to postpone its primary election as the nation tries to contain the spread of the virus.
Election officials in other states are rushing to implement last-minute changes to safeguard against the virus. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose this week ordered local election officials to relocate all polling stations from senior centers and assisted living facilities. Some election officials in Illinois and Florida are taking similar steps.
Throughout the country, local election offices are taking extra sanitization steps, providing wipes and hand sanitizer at polling stations.
More reports are suggesting that Donald Trump will be declaring a national emergency at a 3pm press conference today.
A senior White House source said "stand by" when asked if President Trump would be declaring a national emergency today. Now, the president will speak at 3 p.m. and is expected to make that move which would free up up to $42.6 billion for efforts.
Miami mayor tests positive for coronavirus
The mayor of Miami, Florida Francis Suarez has tested positive for coronavirus, the Miami Herald is reporting. Suarez attended an event with a Brazilian government official earlier this week who has since tested positive with coronavirus.
Suarez announced earlier this week that he was not displaying any symptoms, but self-quarantined himself out of safety precaution once he learned that one of Bolsonaro’s staff members tested positive.
Suarez was one of several politicians who interacted with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and his staff, along with Donald Trump and his staff, when they came to Miami earlier this week. Earlier today, reports said Bolsonaro tested positive for coronavirus, but now other reports are saying the test came back negative.
BREAKING: Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, four days after the mayor attended a Miami event with a Brazilian government official who later tested positive for the virus. https://t.co/D9SHXIV1mN
Trump may declare national emergency at 3pm press conference
Three Bloomberg reporters are saying that multiple sources have told them that Donald Trump will announce a national emergency over coronavirus at a press conference this afternoon.
Declaring a national emergency will allow an easier flow of federal aid to state and local governments who are responding to outbreaks.
////BREAKING: Trump plans to declare a national emergency over the coronavirus outbreak, invoking the Stafford Act to open the door to more federal aid for states and municipalities, sources tell me, @jendeben and @SalehaMohsin
White House staff called into ‘urgent meeting’ over Bolsonaro
There are multiple reports that the White House Chief of Staff’s has called for an “urgent meeting” among staff because of news that Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who met with Donald Trump Saturday, has reportedly tested positive for covid-19.
[email protected]: A number of White House staff (including comms team) were just called to an urgent meeting in the Chief of Staff’s office because of the Brazilian President Bolsonaro positive test for coronavirus.
Donald Trump just tweeted that he will hold a press conference at 3pm EST on coronavirus. We got a sneak peak of what he will say from a tweet he posted moments earlier. He said the 40 coronavirus-related deaths in the US is due to the “very strong border policy” in place. “If we had weak or open borders, that number would be many times higher!” he wrote.
To this point, and because we have had a very strong border policy, we have had 40 deaths related to CoronaVirus. If we had weak or open borders, that number would be many times higher!
Keep in mind that the number of cases in the US has been rising dramatically over the past few weeks, yet Trump has stuck to praising himself and his administration for having a handle on a situation that is getting increasingly dire.
Boston Marathon postponed until September
State and local officials have postponed the Boston Marathon until 14 September over fears of the coronavirus outbreak. The race was originally scheduled for 20 April.
WGBH reported that this is the first time the marathon has been delayed in its 124-year history. About 30,000 people run the marathon each year.
10:24 EDT
Trump administration won't let states use Medicaid to respond to crisis
States experiencing dramatic coronavirus outbreaks are unable to use Medicaid more freely to respond to the outbreak by expanding medical care, the Los Angeles Times is reporting.
The White House has tools it can use to assist states looking to bolster their healthcare efforts, but so far, the Trump administration has not made any moves to ease the burden on states.
As coronavirus has intensified in the US over the last few weeks, Trump has tried to downplay the effect that the illness will have on Americans. He called the illness Democrats’ “new hoax” and has compared it to the flu, which has a far lower mortality rate.
Additionally, as the LA Times point out, Seema Verna, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has been a champion of conservative states who have been trying to cut the number of people on Medicaid.
Here’s more from the LA Times:
Months into the current global disease outbreak, the White House and senior federal health officials haven’t taken the necessary steps to give states simple pathways to fully leverage the mammoth safety net program to prevent a wider epidemic.
That’s making it harder for states to quickly sign up poor patients for coverage so they can get necessary testing or treatment if they are exposed to coronavirus.
And it threatens to slow efforts by states to bring on new medical providers, set up emergency clinics or begin quarantining and caring for homeless Americans at high risk from the virus.
Ted Cruz extends his self-quarantine
Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, said in a statement that he has extended his self-quarantine after learning that another person he interacted with on 3 March has tested positive for Covid-19.
Cruz tweeted on Sunday that he was in self-quarantine after learning that an attendee at the Conservative Political Action Conference he interacted with tested positive for coronavirus. Cruz said in today’s statement that his self-quarantine was supposed to end tonight and he is showing no symptoms, but will extend his self-quarantine until 17 March.
New: @tedcruz is extending his self-quarantine: “Unfortunately, last night I was informed I had a second interaction with an individual who yesterday tested positive for COVID-19."
Yesterday, the Utah state legislature passed a bill that would ban all elective abortions – which excludes abortion procedures for maternal health or procedure disease – if Roe v. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court.
The bill is a signal that conservative states are gearing up for an overturn of the decision in the near future. Under Donald Trump, the Supreme Court has had two conservative appointees who have had reservations about Roe v. Wade and the right to abortion.
Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments for June Medical Services v. Russo, a case from Louisiana about a law that significantly restricts abortion access by requiring doctors at abortion clinics to be registered at nearby hospitals. The law is similar to one the Supreme Court overturned in 2016.
The swing vote for the decision is likely to be chief justice John Roberts, who is known for being an institutionalist who does not like to disturb precedent.
The US Food and Drug Administration just sent out word that they will allow New York state’s health department to begin authorizing labs to conduct their own testing for Covid-19 once their tests have been validated.
Testing has been a serious concern in New York state and the US overall, with many fearing there is a shortage of available and quick testing for people who are showing symptoms. New York governor Andrew Cuomo told CNN that the US is “way behind on testing” and called the “federal bottleneck” so bad that he authorized New York officials to contract private labs for testing.
Here’s the FDA press release. Sounds like it authorizes New York’s health department to approve new labs for testing rather than making the labs apply to the FDA for approval.
The house is expected to continue discussion on a coronavirus economic stimulus package when it opens -
© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
Declaring emergency would allow easier flow of federal aid
Unprepared America wakes up to coronavirus, gradually then all at once
Trump promises more coronavirus tests
Trump's deflecting, xenophobic reaction to coronavirus –
Louisiana will postpone its April 4 presidential preference primary amid ongoing concern over coronavirus, Kyle Ardoin, the state’s top election official announced on Friday.
The Democratic contest will be postponed until June 20. Ardoin is acting to the contest using a provision in state law that allows him to move an election in an emergency situation, according to the Advocate. Louisiana is the first state to postpone its primary election as the nation tries to contain the spread of the virus.
Election officials in other states are rushing to implement last-minute changes to safeguard against the virus. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose this week ordered local election officials to relocate all polling stations from senior centers and assisted living facilities. Some election officials in Illinois and Florida are taking similar steps.
Throughout the country, local election offices are taking extra sanitization steps, providing wipes and hand sanitizer at polling stations.
More reports are suggesting that Donald Trump will be declaring a national emergency at a 3pm press conference today.
A senior White House source said "stand by" when asked if President Trump would be declaring a national emergency today. Now, the president will speak at 3 p.m. and is expected to make that move which would free up up to $42.6 billion for efforts.
Miami mayor tests positive for coronavirus
The mayor of Miami, Florida Francis Suarez has tested positive for coronavirus, the Miami Herald is reporting. Suarez attended an event with a Brazilian government official earlier this week who has since tested positive with coronavirus.
Suarez announced earlier this week that he was not displaying any symptoms, but self-quarantined himself out of safety precaution once he learned that one of Bolsonaro’s staff members tested positive.
Suarez was one of several politicians who interacted with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and his staff, along with Donald Trump and his staff, when they came to Miami earlier this week. Earlier today, reports said Bolsonaro tested positive for coronavirus, but now other reports are saying the test came back negative.
BREAKING: Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, four days after the mayor attended a Miami event with a Brazilian government official who later tested positive for the virus. https://t.co/D9SHXIV1mN
Trump may declare national emergency at 3pm press conference
Three Bloomberg reporters are saying that multiple sources have told them that Donald Trump will announce a national emergency over coronavirus at a press conference this afternoon.
Declaring a national emergency will allow an easier flow of federal aid to state and local governments who are responding to outbreaks.
////BREAKING: Trump plans to declare a national emergency over the coronavirus outbreak, invoking the Stafford Act to open the door to more federal aid for states and municipalities, sources tell me, @jendeben and @SalehaMohsin
White House staff called into ‘urgent meeting’ over Bolsonaro
There are multiple reports that the White House Chief of Staff’s has called for an “urgent meeting” among staff because of news that Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who met with Donald Trump Saturday, has reportedly tested positive for covid-19.
[email protected]: A number of White House staff (including comms team) were just called to an urgent meeting in the Chief of Staff’s office because of the Brazilian President Bolsonaro positive test for coronavirus.
Donald Trump just tweeted that he will hold a press conference at 3pm EST on coronavirus. We got a sneak peak of what he will say from a tweet he posted moments earlier. He said the 40 coronavirus-related deaths in the US is due to the “very strong border policy” in place. “If we had weak or open borders, that number would be many times higher!” he wrote.
To this point, and because we have had a very strong border policy, we have had 40 deaths related to CoronaVirus. If we had weak or open borders, that number would be many times higher!
Keep in mind that the number of cases in the US has been rising dramatically over the past few weeks, yet Trump has stuck to praising himself and his administration for having a handle on a situation that is getting increasingly dire.
Boston Marathon postponed until September
State and local officials have postponed the Boston Marathon until 14 September over fears of the coronavirus outbreak. The race was originally scheduled for 20 April.
WGBH reported that this is the first time the marathon has been delayed in its 124-year history. About 30,000 people run the marathon each year.
10:24 EDT
Trump administration won't let states use Medicaid to respond to crisis
States experiencing dramatic coronavirus outbreaks are unable to use Medicaid more freely to respond to the outbreak by expanding medical care, the Los Angeles Times is reporting.
The White House has tools it can use to assist states looking to bolster their healthcare efforts, but so far, the Trump administration has not made any moves to ease the burden on states.
As coronavirus has intensified in the US over the last few weeks, Trump has tried to downplay the effect that the illness will have on Americans. He called the illness Democrats’ “new hoax” and has compared it to the flu, which has a far lower mortality rate.
Additionally, as the LA Times point out, Seema Verna, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has been a champion of conservative states who have been trying to cut the number of people on Medicaid.
Here’s more from the LA Times:
Months into the current global disease outbreak, the White House and senior federal health officials haven’t taken the necessary steps to give states simple pathways to fully leverage the mammoth safety net program to prevent a wider epidemic.
That’s making it harder for states to quickly sign up poor patients for coverage so they can get necessary testing or treatment if they are exposed to coronavirus.
And it threatens to slow efforts by states to bring on new medical providers, set up emergency clinics or begin quarantining and caring for homeless Americans at high risk from the virus.
Ted Cruz extends his self-quarantine
Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, said in a statement that he has extended his self-quarantine after learning that another person he interacted with on 3 March has tested positive for Covid-19.
Cruz tweeted on Sunday that he was in self-quarantine after learning that an attendee at the Conservative Political Action Conference he interacted with tested positive for coronavirus. Cruz said in today’s statement that his self-quarantine was supposed to end tonight and he is showing no symptoms, but will extend his self-quarantine until 17 March.
New: @tedcruz is extending his self-quarantine: “Unfortunately, last night I was informed I had a second interaction with an individual who yesterday tested positive for COVID-19."
Yesterday, the Utah state legislature passed a bill that would ban all elective abortions – which excludes abortion procedures for maternal health or procedure disease – if Roe v. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court.
The bill is a signal that conservative states are gearing up for an overturn of the decision in the near future. Under Donald Trump, the Supreme Court has had two conservative appointees who have had reservations about Roe v. Wade and the right to abortion.
Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments for June Medical Services v. Russo, a case from Louisiana about a law that significantly restricts abortion access by requiring doctors at abortion clinics to be registered at nearby hospitals. The law is similar to one the Supreme Court overturned in 2016.
The swing vote for the decision is likely to be chief justice John Roberts, who is known for being an institutionalist who does not like to disturb precedent.
The US Food and Drug Administration just sent out word that they will allow New York state’s health department to begin authorizing labs to conduct their own testing for Covid-19 once their tests have been validated.
Testing has been a serious concern in New York state and the US overall, with many fearing there is a shortage of available and quick testing for people who are showing symptoms. New York governor Andrew Cuomo told CNN that the US is “way behind on testing” and called the “federal bottleneck” so bad that he authorized New York officials to contract private labs for testing.
Here’s the FDA press release. Sounds like it authorizes New York’s health department to approve new labs for testing rather than making the labs apply to the FDA for approval.
The house is expected to continue discussion on a coronavirus economic stimulus package when it opens -
© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
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Re: Trump enters the stage - the Beat goes on
by Meno_ » Sat Mar 14, 2020 1:57 am
Coronavirus spreads as US declares 'national emergency'
By Jessie Yeung, Joshua Berlinger, Adam Renton, Meg Wagner, Mike Hayes and Veronica Rocha, CNN
Updated 4:46 PM ET, Fri March 13, 2020
Coronavirus spreads as US declares 'national emergency' What you need to know
JUST IN: President Trump said he was declaring a "national emergency" to free up federal resources to combat coronavirus. Meanwhile, travel restrictions into the US go into effect today.
Talk to us: Do you have a question about coronavirus or a story about the outbreak? Share them here.
Stay updated: Our coronavirus newsletter. The Coronavirus: Fact vs Fiction podcast. Alerts on the pandemic in the CNN app. All the latest information and updated case numbers here.
8:39 p.m. ET, March 13, 2020
Brazilian president’s lawyer says she tested positive for coronavirus
From CNN’s Taylor Barnes in Atlanta
Attorney Karina Kufa, who reportedly traveled with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on his recent trip to the United States, tweeted Friday night that she tested positive for novel coronavirus.
“My coronavirus exam came back positive. I returned yesterday from Miami and I isolated myself immediately when I learned about the state of @Fabiowoficial’s health,” she wrote, referring to Bolsonaro’s press secretary, Fabio Wajngarten, who tested positive for the virus on Thursday. “I am following the protocols and feeling well. Now I only need a few days of rest to get back in the fight again!”
The Brazilian newspaper Estado de Sao Paulo, among other Brazilian media, reported that Kufa, who is Bolsonaro’s attorney and the treasurer of a political group launched by Bolsonaro, traveled with the Brazilian president on his recent trip to meet President Trump.
An Instagram account under Kufa’s name includes an image that appears to be the lawyer standing next to an artistic rendering of Bolsonaro in the studio of Miami artist Romero Britto. The Brazilian presidency published an article about Bolsonaro’s visit to Britto’s studio that includes the president standing next to the same rendering.
Earlier on Friday, Bolsonaro said that his own coronavirus test came back negative.
8:31 p.m. ET, March 13, 2020
Washington Monument will temporarily close
From CNN's Diane Ruggiero
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images/FILE
The Washington Monument will close temporarily, effective Saturday, suspending elevator tours, according to the National Park Service.
Visitors will still be able to visit grounds, as well as other monuments along the National Mall, according to a NPS statement.
7:50 p.m. ET, March 13, 2020
IOC president says governing body will listen to WHO's recommendation about future of Tokyo Olympics
From CNN's Homero De La Fuente
If the World Health Organization says the Olympic Games should be canceled, they will be, the Olympics' governing body president said.
International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach said in an interview with CNN affiliate ARD on Thursday that the IOC will listen to the advice of the WHO, and if the WHO tells the IOC to cancel the 2020 Tokyo Games, the IOC will follow that recommendation.
"We listen to the advice of the WHO that is the expert group who is responsible for exactly these questions," he told ARD. "That is why we have been linked to the WHO in a task force since mid-February and have constant contact. ... We will follow the advice of the WHO."
7:48 p.m. ET, March 13, 2020
Miami mayor says he's starting to feel the symptoms of coronavirus
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez learned Friday that he tested positive for coronavirus and he said he's already starting to feel the symptoms.
"You know it feels similar to the on set of a cold," he told CNN's Erin Burnett on Friday.
Suarez said he plans to share his experience in the hopes that "it calms people down because it's something I'm going through myself."
The mayor went on to say that he's not sure where he caught the virus, but noted that he was recently in close proximity of someone who tested positive for the virus.
In a statement that he released earlier, Suarez said, "If we did not shake hands or you did not come into contact with me if I coughed or sneezed, there is no action you need to take whatsoever. If we did, however, touch or shake hands, or if I sneezed or coughed near you since Monday, it is recommended that you self-isolate for 14 days, but you do not need to get tested."
7:48 p.m. ET, March 13, 2020
ICE suspends social visitation at detention facilities because of coronavirus
From CNN's Priscilla Alvarez
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is suspending social visitation at detention facilities “as a precautionary measure,” the agency announced Friday in a statement.
There have not been any confirmed cases among detainees in custody, ICE said, adding that the agency is incorporating US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance and instituting screening guidance for new arrivals.
8:03 p.m. ET, March 13, 2020
Poland will close borders to foreigners due to coronavirus
From CNN’s Artur Osinski in London
Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki Julien Warnand/Pool/AFP/Getty Images/FILE
Poland will not allow non-resident foreigners into the country for at least 10 days, starting Sunday midnight local time, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced Friday.
He said the measures were being implemented to tackle the spread of the novel coronavirus. Any Poles coming from abroad will be automatically put into quarantine for 14 days. Goods will be allowed to go through. All international flights and train services will be suspended.
Starting Saturday midnight local time, shopping malls will be partially shut, with only pharmacies, grocery stores, laundromats and chemical stores open. All dine-in restaurants, pubs, bars, casinos and nightclubs will be shut for at least 14 days. It will be possible to order takeaway or delivery food. All gatherings of more than 50 people will be banned.
At least 68 cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in Poland. Two deaths from coronavirus have also been reported there.
7:18 p.m. ET, March 13, 2020
Trump declares Sunday a national day of prayer
From CNN's Jason Hoffman
President Trump tweeted that he is declaring Sunday will be a National Day of Prayer as many churches around the country are closed due to the spread of coronavirus.
Large gatherings have been discouraged as social distancing is being used in an attempt to stop the spread of the virus.
"No matter where you may be, I encourage you to turn towards prayer in an act of faith. Together, we will easily PREVAIL!" he wrote in a subsequent tweet.
Read Trump's tweet:
7:16 p.m. ET, March 13, 2020
Uruguay reports first cases of coronavirus
From CNN's Jackie Castillo
Uruguay’s Ministry of Health reported four people have tested positive for coronavirus Friday. These are the first cases of coronavirus reported in Uruguay.
All four people entered the country earlier this month from Milan, Italy, the ministry tweeted.
According to statement, the patients are stable and at home.
7:14 p.m. ET, March 13, 2020
Three more shows suspend TV production over coronavirus concerns
From CNN’S Sandra Gonzalez
Three more series have decided to suspend production in wake of heightened concerns over coronavirus.
On Friday, Ellen DeGeneres announced on Twitter her daytime talk show would suspend production until March 30.
Comedy Central also said two of its series, “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” and “Lights Out with David Spade” would also suspend production.
“Our top priority is the safety of our guests and staff. Beginning Monday, March 16th, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and Lights Out with David Spade will temporarily suspend production as a precautionary measure. We will continue to closely monitor the situation per guidance issued by the CDC and public health authorities and hope to return Monday, March 30th," Comedy Central said in a statement.
View More
© 2020 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved
By Jessie Yeung, Joshua Berlinger, Adam Renton, Meg Wagner, Mike Hayes and Veronica Rocha, CNN
Updated 4:46 PM ET, Fri March 13, 2020
Coronavirus spreads as US declares 'national emergency' What you need to know
JUST IN: President Trump said he was declaring a "national emergency" to free up federal resources to combat coronavirus. Meanwhile, travel restrictions into the US go into effect today.
Talk to us: Do you have a question about coronavirus or a story about the outbreak? Share them here.
Stay updated: Our coronavirus newsletter. The Coronavirus: Fact vs Fiction podcast. Alerts on the pandemic in the CNN app. All the latest information and updated case numbers here.
8:39 p.m. ET, March 13, 2020
Brazilian president’s lawyer says she tested positive for coronavirus
From CNN’s Taylor Barnes in Atlanta
Attorney Karina Kufa, who reportedly traveled with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on his recent trip to the United States, tweeted Friday night that she tested positive for novel coronavirus.
“My coronavirus exam came back positive. I returned yesterday from Miami and I isolated myself immediately when I learned about the state of @Fabiowoficial’s health,” she wrote, referring to Bolsonaro’s press secretary, Fabio Wajngarten, who tested positive for the virus on Thursday. “I am following the protocols and feeling well. Now I only need a few days of rest to get back in the fight again!”
The Brazilian newspaper Estado de Sao Paulo, among other Brazilian media, reported that Kufa, who is Bolsonaro’s attorney and the treasurer of a political group launched by Bolsonaro, traveled with the Brazilian president on his recent trip to meet President Trump.
An Instagram account under Kufa’s name includes an image that appears to be the lawyer standing next to an artistic rendering of Bolsonaro in the studio of Miami artist Romero Britto. The Brazilian presidency published an article about Bolsonaro’s visit to Britto’s studio that includes the president standing next to the same rendering.
Earlier on Friday, Bolsonaro said that his own coronavirus test came back negative.
8:31 p.m. ET, March 13, 2020
Washington Monument will temporarily close
From CNN's Diane Ruggiero
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images/FILE
The Washington Monument will close temporarily, effective Saturday, suspending elevator tours, according to the National Park Service.
Visitors will still be able to visit grounds, as well as other monuments along the National Mall, according to a NPS statement.
7:50 p.m. ET, March 13, 2020
IOC president says governing body will listen to WHO's recommendation about future of Tokyo Olympics
From CNN's Homero De La Fuente
If the World Health Organization says the Olympic Games should be canceled, they will be, the Olympics' governing body president said.
International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach said in an interview with CNN affiliate ARD on Thursday that the IOC will listen to the advice of the WHO, and if the WHO tells the IOC to cancel the 2020 Tokyo Games, the IOC will follow that recommendation.
"We listen to the advice of the WHO that is the expert group who is responsible for exactly these questions," he told ARD. "That is why we have been linked to the WHO in a task force since mid-February and have constant contact. ... We will follow the advice of the WHO."
7:48 p.m. ET, March 13, 2020
Miami mayor says he's starting to feel the symptoms of coronavirus
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez learned Friday that he tested positive for coronavirus and he said he's already starting to feel the symptoms.
"You know it feels similar to the on set of a cold," he told CNN's Erin Burnett on Friday.
Suarez said he plans to share his experience in the hopes that "it calms people down because it's something I'm going through myself."
The mayor went on to say that he's not sure where he caught the virus, but noted that he was recently in close proximity of someone who tested positive for the virus.
In a statement that he released earlier, Suarez said, "If we did not shake hands or you did not come into contact with me if I coughed or sneezed, there is no action you need to take whatsoever. If we did, however, touch or shake hands, or if I sneezed or coughed near you since Monday, it is recommended that you self-isolate for 14 days, but you do not need to get tested."
7:48 p.m. ET, March 13, 2020
ICE suspends social visitation at detention facilities because of coronavirus
From CNN's Priscilla Alvarez
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is suspending social visitation at detention facilities “as a precautionary measure,” the agency announced Friday in a statement.
There have not been any confirmed cases among detainees in custody, ICE said, adding that the agency is incorporating US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance and instituting screening guidance for new arrivals.
8:03 p.m. ET, March 13, 2020
Poland will close borders to foreigners due to coronavirus
From CNN’s Artur Osinski in London
Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki Julien Warnand/Pool/AFP/Getty Images/FILE
Poland will not allow non-resident foreigners into the country for at least 10 days, starting Sunday midnight local time, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki announced Friday.
He said the measures were being implemented to tackle the spread of the novel coronavirus. Any Poles coming from abroad will be automatically put into quarantine for 14 days. Goods will be allowed to go through. All international flights and train services will be suspended.
Starting Saturday midnight local time, shopping malls will be partially shut, with only pharmacies, grocery stores, laundromats and chemical stores open. All dine-in restaurants, pubs, bars, casinos and nightclubs will be shut for at least 14 days. It will be possible to order takeaway or delivery food. All gatherings of more than 50 people will be banned.
At least 68 cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in Poland. Two deaths from coronavirus have also been reported there.
7:18 p.m. ET, March 13, 2020
Trump declares Sunday a national day of prayer
From CNN's Jason Hoffman
President Trump tweeted that he is declaring Sunday will be a National Day of Prayer as many churches around the country are closed due to the spread of coronavirus.
Large gatherings have been discouraged as social distancing is being used in an attempt to stop the spread of the virus.
"No matter where you may be, I encourage you to turn towards prayer in an act of faith. Together, we will easily PREVAIL!" he wrote in a subsequent tweet.
Read Trump's tweet:
7:16 p.m. ET, March 13, 2020
Uruguay reports first cases of coronavirus
From CNN's Jackie Castillo
Uruguay’s Ministry of Health reported four people have tested positive for coronavirus Friday. These are the first cases of coronavirus reported in Uruguay.
All four people entered the country earlier this month from Milan, Italy, the ministry tweeted.
According to statement, the patients are stable and at home.
7:14 p.m. ET, March 13, 2020
Three more shows suspend TV production over coronavirus concerns
From CNN’S Sandra Gonzalez
Three more series have decided to suspend production in wake of heightened concerns over coronavirus.
On Friday, Ellen DeGeneres announced on Twitter her daytime talk show would suspend production until March 30.
Comedy Central also said two of its series, “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” and “Lights Out with David Spade” would also suspend production.
“Our top priority is the safety of our guests and staff. Beginning Monday, March 16th, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and Lights Out with David Spade will temporarily suspend production as a precautionary measure. We will continue to closely monitor the situation per guidance issued by the CDC and public health authorities and hope to return Monday, March 30th," Comedy Central said in a statement.
View More
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Re: Trump enters the stage - Is Trump Caput?
by Meno_ » Sat Mar 14, 2020 7:11 am
A Profile in Courage
The Downfall of the Republican Party
There Is No Christian Case for Trump
PETER WEHNER
That said, the president and his administration are responsible for grave, costly errors, most especially the epic manufacturing failures in diagnostic testing, the decision to test too few people, the delay in expanding testing to labs outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and problems in the supply chain. These mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they created a false sense of security. What we now know is that the coronavirus silently spread for several weeks, without us being aware of it and while we were doing nothing to stop it. Containment and mitigation efforts could have significantly slowed its spread at an early, critical point, but we frittered away that opportunity.
“They’ve simply lost time they can’t make up. You can’t get back six weeks of blindness,” Jeremy Konyndyk, who helped oversee the international response to Ebola during the Obama administration and is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told The Washington Post. “To the extent that there’s someone to blame here, the blame is on poor, chaotic management from the White House and failure to acknowledge the big picture.”
Ben Rhodes: How Trump designed his White House to fail
Earlier this week, Anthony Fauci, the widely respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases whose reputation for honesty and integrity have been only enhanced during this crisis, admitted in congressional testimony that the United States is still not providing adequate testing for the coronavirus. “It is failing. Let’s admit it.” He added, “The idea of anybody getting [testing] easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re not set up for that. I think it should be, but we’re not."
We also know the World Health Organization had working tests that the United States refused, and researchers at a project in Seattle tried to conduct early tests for the coronavirus but were prevented from doing so by federal officials. (Doctors at the research project eventually decided to perform coronavirus tests without federal approval.)
But that’s not all. The president reportedly ignored early warnings of the severity of the virus and grew angry at a CDC official who in February warned that an outbreak was inevitable. The Trump administration dismantled the National Security Council’s global-health office, whose purpose was to address global pandemics; we’re now paying the price for that. “We worked very well with that office,” Fauci told Congress. “It would be nice if the office was still there.” We may face a shortage of ventilators and medical supplies, and hospitals may soon be overwhelmed, certainly if the number of coronavirus cases increases at a rate anything like that in countries such as Italy. (This would cause not only needless coronavirus-related deaths, but deaths from those suffering from other ailments who won’t have ready access to hospital care.)
Yascha Mounk: The extraordinary decisions facing Italian doctors
Some of these mistakes are less serious and more understandable than others. One has to take into account that in government, when people are forced to make important decisions based on incomplete information in a compressed period of time, things go wrong.
Yet in some respects, the avalanche of false information from the president has been most alarming of all. It’s been one rock slide after another, the likes of which we have never seen. Day after day after day he brazenly denied reality, in an effort to blunt the economic and political harm he faced. But Trump is in the process of discovering that he can’t spin or tweet his way out of a pandemic. There is no one who can do to the coronavirus what Attorney General William Barr did to the Mueller report: lie about it and get away with it.
The president’s misinformation and mendacity about the coronavirus are head-snapping. He claimed that it was contained in America when it was actually spreading. He claimed that we had “shut it down” when we had not. He claimed that testing was available when it wasn’t. He claimed that the coronavirus will one day disappear “like a miracle”; it won’t. He claimed that a vaccine would be available in months; Fauci says it will not be available for a year or more.
Trump falsely blamed the Obama administration for impeding coronavirus testing. He stated that the coronavirus first hit the United States later than it actually did. (He said that it was three weeks prior to the point at which he spoke; the actual figure was twice that.) The president claimed that the number of cases in Italy was getting “much better” when it was getting much worse. And in one of the more stunning statements an American president has ever made, Trump admitted that his preference was to keep a cruise ship off the California coast rather than allowing it to dock, because he wanted to keep the number of reported cases of the coronavirus artificially low.
“I like the numbers,” Trump said. “I would rather have the numbers stay where they are. But if they want to take them off, they’ll take them off. But if that happens, all of a sudden your 240 [cases] is obviously going to be a much higher number, and probably the 11 [deaths] will be a higher number too.” (Cooler heads prevailed, and over the president’s objections, the Grand Princess was allowed to dock at the Port of Oakland.)
On and on it goes.
To make matters worse, the president delivered an Oval Office address that was meant to reassure the nation and the markets but instead shook both. The president’s delivery was awkward and stilted; worse, at several points, the president, who decided to ad-lib the teleprompter speech, misstated his administration’s own policies, which the administration had to correct. Stock futures plunged even as the president was still delivering his speech. In his address, the president called for Americans to “unify together as one nation and one family,” despite having referred to Washington Governor Jay Inslee as a “snake” days before the speech and attacking Democrats the morning after it. As The Washington Post’s Dan Balz put it, “Almost everything that could have gone wrong with the speech did go wrong.”
Read: You’re likely to get the coronavirus
Taken together, this is a massive failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious.
The nation is recognizing this, treating him as a bystander “as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president,” in the words of Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times.
Donald Trump is shrinking before our eyes.
The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.
It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump presidency is over
The Downfall of the Republican Party
There Is No Christian Case for Trump
PETER WEHNER
That said, the president and his administration are responsible for grave, costly errors, most especially the epic manufacturing failures in diagnostic testing, the decision to test too few people, the delay in expanding testing to labs outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and problems in the supply chain. These mistakes have left us blind and badly behind the curve, and, for a few crucial weeks, they created a false sense of security. What we now know is that the coronavirus silently spread for several weeks, without us being aware of it and while we were doing nothing to stop it. Containment and mitigation efforts could have significantly slowed its spread at an early, critical point, but we frittered away that opportunity.
“They’ve simply lost time they can’t make up. You can’t get back six weeks of blindness,” Jeremy Konyndyk, who helped oversee the international response to Ebola during the Obama administration and is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told The Washington Post. “To the extent that there’s someone to blame here, the blame is on poor, chaotic management from the White House and failure to acknowledge the big picture.”
Ben Rhodes: How Trump designed his White House to fail
Earlier this week, Anthony Fauci, the widely respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases whose reputation for honesty and integrity have been only enhanced during this crisis, admitted in congressional testimony that the United States is still not providing adequate testing for the coronavirus. “It is failing. Let’s admit it.” He added, “The idea of anybody getting [testing] easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re not set up for that. I think it should be, but we’re not."
We also know the World Health Organization had working tests that the United States refused, and researchers at a project in Seattle tried to conduct early tests for the coronavirus but were prevented from doing so by federal officials. (Doctors at the research project eventually decided to perform coronavirus tests without federal approval.)
But that’s not all. The president reportedly ignored early warnings of the severity of the virus and grew angry at a CDC official who in February warned that an outbreak was inevitable. The Trump administration dismantled the National Security Council’s global-health office, whose purpose was to address global pandemics; we’re now paying the price for that. “We worked very well with that office,” Fauci told Congress. “It would be nice if the office was still there.” We may face a shortage of ventilators and medical supplies, and hospitals may soon be overwhelmed, certainly if the number of coronavirus cases increases at a rate anything like that in countries such as Italy. (This would cause not only needless coronavirus-related deaths, but deaths from those suffering from other ailments who won’t have ready access to hospital care.)
Yascha Mounk: The extraordinary decisions facing Italian doctors
Some of these mistakes are less serious and more understandable than others. One has to take into account that in government, when people are forced to make important decisions based on incomplete information in a compressed period of time, things go wrong.
Yet in some respects, the avalanche of false information from the president has been most alarming of all. It’s been one rock slide after another, the likes of which we have never seen. Day after day after day he brazenly denied reality, in an effort to blunt the economic and political harm he faced. But Trump is in the process of discovering that he can’t spin or tweet his way out of a pandemic. There is no one who can do to the coronavirus what Attorney General William Barr did to the Mueller report: lie about it and get away with it.
The president’s misinformation and mendacity about the coronavirus are head-snapping. He claimed that it was contained in America when it was actually spreading. He claimed that we had “shut it down” when we had not. He claimed that testing was available when it wasn’t. He claimed that the coronavirus will one day disappear “like a miracle”; it won’t. He claimed that a vaccine would be available in months; Fauci says it will not be available for a year or more.
Trump falsely blamed the Obama administration for impeding coronavirus testing. He stated that the coronavirus first hit the United States later than it actually did. (He said that it was three weeks prior to the point at which he spoke; the actual figure was twice that.) The president claimed that the number of cases in Italy was getting “much better” when it was getting much worse. And in one of the more stunning statements an American president has ever made, Trump admitted that his preference was to keep a cruise ship off the California coast rather than allowing it to dock, because he wanted to keep the number of reported cases of the coronavirus artificially low.
“I like the numbers,” Trump said. “I would rather have the numbers stay where they are. But if they want to take them off, they’ll take them off. But if that happens, all of a sudden your 240 [cases] is obviously going to be a much higher number, and probably the 11 [deaths] will be a higher number too.” (Cooler heads prevailed, and over the president’s objections, the Grand Princess was allowed to dock at the Port of Oakland.)
On and on it goes.
To make matters worse, the president delivered an Oval Office address that was meant to reassure the nation and the markets but instead shook both. The president’s delivery was awkward and stilted; worse, at several points, the president, who decided to ad-lib the teleprompter speech, misstated his administration’s own policies, which the administration had to correct. Stock futures plunged even as the president was still delivering his speech. In his address, the president called for Americans to “unify together as one nation and one family,” despite having referred to Washington Governor Jay Inslee as a “snake” days before the speech and attacking Democrats the morning after it. As The Washington Post’s Dan Balz put it, “Almost everything that could have gone wrong with the speech did go wrong.”
Read: You’re likely to get the coronavirus
Taken together, this is a massive failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious.
The nation is recognizing this, treating him as a bystander “as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president,” in the words of Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times.
Donald Trump is shrinking before our eyes.
The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.
It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. The Trump presidency is over
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- breathless
- Posts: 8339
- Joined: Tue Dec 08, 2015 2:39 am
- Location: Mysterium Tremendum
Re: Trump enters the stage - Trump will get tested
by Meno_ » Sat Mar 14, 2020 2:49 pm
Government coronavirus response: Trump declares national emergency, says he 'likely' will get tested
The move comes one day after Dr. Anthony Fauci called U.S. testing "a failing.''
President Trump announces national emergencyPresident Donald Trump on Friday declared a national emergency, releasing $50 billion to fight COVID-19.Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
President Donald Trump announced Friday he's declaring a national emergency to deal with the coronavirus crisis as cases increase alarmingly and criticism mounts over how he's responding to the situation.
He also said he "most likely" will get tested himself, although he said he had no symptoms. "I think I will be," he said. "Fairly soon, we're working on that, we're working out a schedule," he responded to a reporter's question, saying not because of any exposure he might have had, "but because I think I will do it anyway."
He had been photographed last weekend standing next to a Brazilian official who tested positive.
Speaking from the Rose Garden, Trump said, "To unleash the full power of the federal government, I am officially declaring a national emergency." Referring to that phrase as "two very big words," he said it would allow him to quickly get $50 billion to states, territories and localities "in our shared fight against this disease."
With Dr. Anthony Fauci, Vice President Mike Pence, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and other members of his coronavirus task force standing behind him, Trump said, "No resource will be spared -- nothing whatsoever."
The news conference was also an effort to deal with the political fallout two days after a speech to the nation Wednesday night that was seen as largely ineffective, leaving many confused and Wall street rattled.
"Declaring a national emergency does two things: it coveys to the public that the nation faces a serious crisis and that drastic action is necessary and it will immediately make available resources and other support that can be directed to protect communities across the nation," former Acting Homeland Security Undersecretary John Cohen, now an ABC News contributor, said.
MORE: Two-thirds of Americans concerned about contracting coronavirus, as country grapples with growing crisis: POLL
"This is an important step that based on current conditions should surprise no one -- the only surprise is that it wasn't done sooner," Cohen said.
"I'm also asking every hospital in this country to activate its emergency preparedness plan, so that they can meet the needs of Americans everywhere," Trump said in his remarks.
"Emergency orders I'm issuing today will also confer broad new authority to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Secretary of HHS will be able to immediately wave revisions of applicable laws and regulations to give doctors, hospital -- all hospitals -- and health care providers maximum flexibility to respond to the virus and care for patients," the president continued.
MORE: How hospitals can handle an influx of patients with COVID-19
"This includes the following critical authorities: the ability to waive laws to enable tele-health, a fairly new, and incredible thing," he said. "It gives remote doctor's visits and hospital check ins. The power to waive certain federal license requirements so the doctors from other states can provide services in states with the greatest need."
"They can do what they have to do. They know what they have to do. Now they don't have any problem getting it done," Trump said. "Today we're announcing a new partnership with private sector to vastly increase and accelerate our capacity to test for the coronavirus. We want to make sure that those who need a test can get it as very safely quickly."
He added, "We've been in discussions with pharmacies and retailers to make drive-through tests available in critical locations identified by public health professionals. The goal is for individuals to be able to drive up and be swabbed without having to leave your car."
"Again, we don't want everyone taking this test. It's totally unnecessary," the president said.
Trump then invited Fauci, the widely-respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to speak. He called Trump's actions an example of what he termed a "forward-leaning" approach to the crisis. "We still have a long way to go. There will be many more cases," he warned. "But what's going on here today is going to help it to end sooner than it would have."
"Not only are we bringing a whole of government approach to confronting the coronavirus, we're bringing an all-of-America approach," Pence said, speaking after Fauci.
"It's especially important now that we look after senior citizens with chronic underlying health conditions," he said, reminding that they "helped us with our homework" and "tucked us in at night." He later added, "And now it's time for us to be there for them."
MORE: Trump attempts to pass blame to Obama administration for shortcomings in coronavirus response
"Some of the doctors say it (the virus) will wash through, it will flow through. Interesting terms -- and very accurate," Trump said in answering a question. "I think you're going to find in a number of weeks it's going to be a very accurate term. In times of hardship, the true character of America always shines through."
His response about getting tested himself came after a reporter asked, "Are you being selfish by not getting tested and potentially –" but he cut her off, saying, "I didn't say I wasn't going to be tested."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a point of delivering her own statement about an hour before the president was scheduled to speak. She said House Democrats would pass a package of measures "today" to address what she called a "long overdue response" to the crisis, saying the three most important parts deal would deal with "testing, testing, testing."
Pelosi said the bill would ensure that free tests would be available for "everyone who needs a test," saying a coordinated, nationwide approach was needed to "understand the scale and scope" of the problem so that there could be a "science-based response."
The measure would also include paid sick and emergency leave, she said, as well as enhanced unemployment benefits to help families deal with the economic consequences.
The fast-moving developments came after the Trump administration moved Friday morning to appoint a point person for testing and announced expanded measures in what appears to be an acknowledgement of the lack of available testing and delays in processing the results.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has designated Adm. Brett Giroir to coordinate U.S. testing efforts as the cases of infected Americans grow exponentially. Under the HHS umbrella, the Food and Drug Administration is introducing an emergency hotline for private laboratories and providing new funding for partnerships with companies developing rapid tests that can detect the virus within an hour.
MORE: Coronavirus live updates: Mobile testing starts in New Rochelle, more schools close
The announcement of the boost in testing comes as capacity has struggled to catch up with the demand nationally at public health labs. Fauci called the current system “a failing" on Capitol Hill Thursday even as Trump told reporters the same day it's been "going very smooth."
MORE: Government response to coronavirus: Fauci backs Trump travel ban, says testing system 'a failing'
The House is expected to vote on a stimulus plan Friday to offset the economic fallout to everyday Americans from the outbreak, pending a deal between Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin -- the administration's point person on negotiations.
MORE: House set to vote on coronavirus economic relief once Pelosi and Mnuchin cut deal
Here are Friday's most significant developments in Washington:
President Trump declares national emergency
Trump administration announces steps to speed up testing
Pelosi says House Democrats will pass a economic relief measure 'today' that ensures free tests for everyone who needs one
Here is how developments in Washington are unfolding
Trump declares a national emergency
President Donald Trump declared a national emergency on Friday which he said "will open up access to up to $50 billion" to fight the novel coronavirus.
Trump also announced private sector partnerships to "accelerate our capacity to test for the coronavirus."
Fauci: 'We have not peaked yet'
Following two days of testimony before the House Oversight Committee, Fauci gave a warning on ABC's "Good Morning America" Friday that he has made before as the coronavirus continues to spread: "It gets worse before it gets better."
MORE: Government response to coronavirus: Fauci backs Trump travel ban, says testing system 'a failing'
"It will be at least a matter of several weeks. It's unpredictable, but if you look at historically how these things work, it will likely be anywhere from a few weeks to up to eight weeks," Fauci said. "I hope it's going to be in the earlier part, two, three, four weeks, but it's impossible to make an accurate prediction."
Pelosi: Agreement is 'near' with White House on aid package
Earlier, Pelosi said that she and the Trump administration were close to agreement on a coronavirus aid package to reassure anxious Americans by providing sick pay, free testing and other resources, hoping to calm teetering financial markets amid the mounting crisis.
“We have -- are near -- to an agreement,” Pelosi said, emerging from her office at the Capitol late Thursday night.
Mnuchin tells worried investors 'don't stare at the screen'
When asked Friday what his message is for Americans -- especially those close to retirement -- who are worried as they look at their 401Ks this morning, Mnuchin sought to project calm amid the economic turmoil caused by the coronavirus.
“Don't stare at the screen, okay,” Mnuchin said, in offering advice. “It will be higher or a year from now, as I said, people who weathered the crash in 1987, people who weathered the financial crisis. For long term investors, the US is the best place to invest in the world.”
MORE: House set to vote on coronavirus economic relief once Pelosi and Mnuchin cut deal
Mnuchin repeatedly noted that what the U.S. is facing today is "not the financial crisis," describing it as a temporary situation, but said the White House is looking at taking major stimulus actions to help Americans through this time.
“I can assure you, the president is determined, we will do whatever we need. I think the president is looking at a major stimulus package, whether it's through the payroll tax cut or through another means of delivering liquidity to hard working Americans,” said Mnuchin.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin speaks with reporters outside White House in Washington, DC, on March 13, 2020.Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
As the administration nears a deal with Pelosi on a COVID-19 aid package, Mnuchin described it as just the "second inning" in a baseball game.
“I think we view this as this is the second inning in a baseball game. The first inning was the $8 billion bill, this is the second inning,” said, Mnuchin, who said the plan to “come quickly back” to Congress on issues facing the airline industry.
His comments illustrate a major shift tone from the administration from just a week ago, when the president's top economic adviser Larry Kudlow said the administration at that time was not considering any sweeping stimulus measures.
MORE: Trump says he's 'not concerned' that Brazilian official he met with tested positive for coronavirus
Australian official tests positive for COVID-19 after meeting with AG Barr Ivanka Trump
Australia's minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, said Friday he's contracted coronavirus.
Copyright © 2020 ABC News Internet Ventures. All rights reserved.
The move comes one day after Dr. Anthony Fauci called U.S. testing "a failing.''
President Trump announces national emergencyPresident Donald Trump on Friday declared a national emergency, releasing $50 billion to fight COVID-19.Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
President Donald Trump announced Friday he's declaring a national emergency to deal with the coronavirus crisis as cases increase alarmingly and criticism mounts over how he's responding to the situation.
He also said he "most likely" will get tested himself, although he said he had no symptoms. "I think I will be," he said. "Fairly soon, we're working on that, we're working out a schedule," he responded to a reporter's question, saying not because of any exposure he might have had, "but because I think I will do it anyway."
He had been photographed last weekend standing next to a Brazilian official who tested positive.
Speaking from the Rose Garden, Trump said, "To unleash the full power of the federal government, I am officially declaring a national emergency." Referring to that phrase as "two very big words," he said it would allow him to quickly get $50 billion to states, territories and localities "in our shared fight against this disease."
With Dr. Anthony Fauci, Vice President Mike Pence, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and other members of his coronavirus task force standing behind him, Trump said, "No resource will be spared -- nothing whatsoever."
The news conference was also an effort to deal with the political fallout two days after a speech to the nation Wednesday night that was seen as largely ineffective, leaving many confused and Wall street rattled.
"Declaring a national emergency does two things: it coveys to the public that the nation faces a serious crisis and that drastic action is necessary and it will immediately make available resources and other support that can be directed to protect communities across the nation," former Acting Homeland Security Undersecretary John Cohen, now an ABC News contributor, said.
MORE: Two-thirds of Americans concerned about contracting coronavirus, as country grapples with growing crisis: POLL
"This is an important step that based on current conditions should surprise no one -- the only surprise is that it wasn't done sooner," Cohen said.
"I'm also asking every hospital in this country to activate its emergency preparedness plan, so that they can meet the needs of Americans everywhere," Trump said in his remarks.
"Emergency orders I'm issuing today will also confer broad new authority to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Secretary of HHS will be able to immediately wave revisions of applicable laws and regulations to give doctors, hospital -- all hospitals -- and health care providers maximum flexibility to respond to the virus and care for patients," the president continued.
MORE: How hospitals can handle an influx of patients with COVID-19
"This includes the following critical authorities: the ability to waive laws to enable tele-health, a fairly new, and incredible thing," he said. "It gives remote doctor's visits and hospital check ins. The power to waive certain federal license requirements so the doctors from other states can provide services in states with the greatest need."
"They can do what they have to do. They know what they have to do. Now they don't have any problem getting it done," Trump said. "Today we're announcing a new partnership with private sector to vastly increase and accelerate our capacity to test for the coronavirus. We want to make sure that those who need a test can get it as very safely quickly."
He added, "We've been in discussions with pharmacies and retailers to make drive-through tests available in critical locations identified by public health professionals. The goal is for individuals to be able to drive up and be swabbed without having to leave your car."
"Again, we don't want everyone taking this test. It's totally unnecessary," the president said.
Trump then invited Fauci, the widely-respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to speak. He called Trump's actions an example of what he termed a "forward-leaning" approach to the crisis. "We still have a long way to go. There will be many more cases," he warned. "But what's going on here today is going to help it to end sooner than it would have."
"Not only are we bringing a whole of government approach to confronting the coronavirus, we're bringing an all-of-America approach," Pence said, speaking after Fauci.
"It's especially important now that we look after senior citizens with chronic underlying health conditions," he said, reminding that they "helped us with our homework" and "tucked us in at night." He later added, "And now it's time for us to be there for them."
MORE: Trump attempts to pass blame to Obama administration for shortcomings in coronavirus response
"Some of the doctors say it (the virus) will wash through, it will flow through. Interesting terms -- and very accurate," Trump said in answering a question. "I think you're going to find in a number of weeks it's going to be a very accurate term. In times of hardship, the true character of America always shines through."
His response about getting tested himself came after a reporter asked, "Are you being selfish by not getting tested and potentially –" but he cut her off, saying, "I didn't say I wasn't going to be tested."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a point of delivering her own statement about an hour before the president was scheduled to speak. She said House Democrats would pass a package of measures "today" to address what she called a "long overdue response" to the crisis, saying the three most important parts deal would deal with "testing, testing, testing."
Pelosi said the bill would ensure that free tests would be available for "everyone who needs a test," saying a coordinated, nationwide approach was needed to "understand the scale and scope" of the problem so that there could be a "science-based response."
The measure would also include paid sick and emergency leave, she said, as well as enhanced unemployment benefits to help families deal with the economic consequences.
The fast-moving developments came after the Trump administration moved Friday morning to appoint a point person for testing and announced expanded measures in what appears to be an acknowledgement of the lack of available testing and delays in processing the results.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has designated Adm. Brett Giroir to coordinate U.S. testing efforts as the cases of infected Americans grow exponentially. Under the HHS umbrella, the Food and Drug Administration is introducing an emergency hotline for private laboratories and providing new funding for partnerships with companies developing rapid tests that can detect the virus within an hour.
MORE: Coronavirus live updates: Mobile testing starts in New Rochelle, more schools close
The announcement of the boost in testing comes as capacity has struggled to catch up with the demand nationally at public health labs. Fauci called the current system “a failing" on Capitol Hill Thursday even as Trump told reporters the same day it's been "going very smooth."
MORE: Government response to coronavirus: Fauci backs Trump travel ban, says testing system 'a failing'
The House is expected to vote on a stimulus plan Friday to offset the economic fallout to everyday Americans from the outbreak, pending a deal between Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin -- the administration's point person on negotiations.
MORE: House set to vote on coronavirus economic relief once Pelosi and Mnuchin cut deal
Here are Friday's most significant developments in Washington:
President Trump declares national emergency
Trump administration announces steps to speed up testing
Pelosi says House Democrats will pass a economic relief measure 'today' that ensures free tests for everyone who needs one
Here is how developments in Washington are unfolding
Trump declares a national emergency
President Donald Trump declared a national emergency on Friday which he said "will open up access to up to $50 billion" to fight the novel coronavirus.
Trump also announced private sector partnerships to "accelerate our capacity to test for the coronavirus."
Fauci: 'We have not peaked yet'
Following two days of testimony before the House Oversight Committee, Fauci gave a warning on ABC's "Good Morning America" Friday that he has made before as the coronavirus continues to spread: "It gets worse before it gets better."
MORE: Government response to coronavirus: Fauci backs Trump travel ban, says testing system 'a failing'
"It will be at least a matter of several weeks. It's unpredictable, but if you look at historically how these things work, it will likely be anywhere from a few weeks to up to eight weeks," Fauci said. "I hope it's going to be in the earlier part, two, three, four weeks, but it's impossible to make an accurate prediction."
Pelosi: Agreement is 'near' with White House on aid package
Earlier, Pelosi said that she and the Trump administration were close to agreement on a coronavirus aid package to reassure anxious Americans by providing sick pay, free testing and other resources, hoping to calm teetering financial markets amid the mounting crisis.
“We have -- are near -- to an agreement,” Pelosi said, emerging from her office at the Capitol late Thursday night.
Mnuchin tells worried investors 'don't stare at the screen'
When asked Friday what his message is for Americans -- especially those close to retirement -- who are worried as they look at their 401Ks this morning, Mnuchin sought to project calm amid the economic turmoil caused by the coronavirus.
“Don't stare at the screen, okay,” Mnuchin said, in offering advice. “It will be higher or a year from now, as I said, people who weathered the crash in 1987, people who weathered the financial crisis. For long term investors, the US is the best place to invest in the world.”
MORE: House set to vote on coronavirus economic relief once Pelosi and Mnuchin cut deal
Mnuchin repeatedly noted that what the U.S. is facing today is "not the financial crisis," describing it as a temporary situation, but said the White House is looking at taking major stimulus actions to help Americans through this time.
“I can assure you, the president is determined, we will do whatever we need. I think the president is looking at a major stimulus package, whether it's through the payroll tax cut or through another means of delivering liquidity to hard working Americans,” said Mnuchin.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin speaks with reporters outside White House in Washington, DC, on March 13, 2020.Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
As the administration nears a deal with Pelosi on a COVID-19 aid package, Mnuchin described it as just the "second inning" in a baseball game.
“I think we view this as this is the second inning in a baseball game. The first inning was the $8 billion bill, this is the second inning,” said, Mnuchin, who said the plan to “come quickly back” to Congress on issues facing the airline industry.
His comments illustrate a major shift tone from the administration from just a week ago, when the president's top economic adviser Larry Kudlow said the administration at that time was not considering any sweeping stimulus measures.
MORE: Trump says he's 'not concerned' that Brazilian official he met with tested positive for coronavirus
Australian official tests positive for COVID-19 after meeting with AG Barr Ivanka Trump
Australia's minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, said Friday he's contracted coronavirus.
Copyright © 2020 ABC News Internet Ventures. All rights reserved.
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Re: Trump enters the stage - What iffff Pres gets bug?
by Meno_ » Sat Mar 14, 2020 8:56 pm
IDEAS
What If the President Gets Sick?
The public deserves to know right away whether the chief executive is infected with COVID-19. He should have gotten tested sooner.
Donald trump acknowledged today that he has been tested for the coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, but says he does not yet know the results. He told reporters at the White House that he took his temperature this morning and it was “totally normal.” At the Conservative Political Action Conference and then at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump stood close to people known to be infected with the coronavirus. Given the contagiousness of the virus, it’s reasonable to worry that the president himself may now be infected. Yet the White House for days insisted that the president did not need to be tested. At almost midnight last night, the White House blasted to reporters a letter from Trump’s doctor repeating the claim that no test was called for. In the president’s reversal today, he made it seem as if the idea had only just occurred to him.
He said he was finally prompted to seek testing after reporters asked him during a press conference yesterday whether he would do so—a press conference in which he was surrounded by other people. By waiting this long to get tested, Trump engaged in gross dereliction of duty. Not only might the president fall gravely ill himself, but he might—and quite possibly already has—spread the illness to others. He has engaged in risky behaviors long after he should have stopped: shaking hands, sharing microphones, gathering crowds, standing very close to people of advanced age.
Any other president would see it as his or her job to model safe behavior. Trump is the president, the head of state. His mental and physical health are vital public concerns. Why is Trump continuing to act in ways that threaten himself and others?
Read: You’re likely to get the coronavirus
At moments of national crisis, there is a strong instinct to support the president’s leadership. In the media, this instinct expresses itself in the impulse to suppress our knowledge of the president’s history and character, and to report on him the way we would have reported on his predecessors. But just as the president has a duty, so do we. Our duty is to describe things as they are, not as we would wish them to be. The coronavirus is a powerful force, but it is not powerful enough to transmute Donald Trump into a different person from the one he was before the crisis.
So when we talk about the president and his protracted refusal to test, we should not write about that decision as if the president who were refusing the test were a figure from Mount Rushmore. It’s Trump. Why did he delay such an urgent health precaution for so long?
Five reasons based on hard experience come to mind.
Donald Trump is a fearful person. He is terrified of sharks. He is especially fearful of disease and death. He banished his chief of staff from the room for coughing. He told a German magazine in 2007 that he would not go near his own children when they were sick. Any medical test is an encounter with mortality. By refusing to look, the encounter is avoided—or postponed. Private citizen Trump hired oddball doctors who assured him that he was in fabulous condition when he obviously was not. President Trump promoted a White House doctor who suggested that Trump might possibly live to 200 given his “fabulous genes.” It’s plausible that Trump doesn’t want to be tested for fear of being told otherwise.
Pro-Trump propaganda depicts the president as muscular and virile. He himself retweeted a meme of his face Photoshopped onto the body of a young Sylvester Stallone. In fact, Trump is obese and rarely exercises beyond hitting a golf ball. A test that revealed illness would pierce the Trump image in ways intolerable to the president. The experience of illness is a humbling one. The ill person tumbles out of a universe of self-sufficiency into another, where he or she must depend on the care of others. But Trump sees himself as always in control, always in command. Better not to know.
Coronavirus tests are in desperately short supply because of Trump’s own negligence and that of his administration. He squandered preparation time because of his own characteristic defects as a manager, most notably his insatiable need for validation and flattery. Trump taking a coronavirus test would remind an anxious country that tests are available only for some, and not others. For Trump to cut to the head of the queue would remind everybody that it is his fault the queue is so long.
Trump’s supreme priority as president has always been to make as much money as he can out of his hotels and resorts. One of his first acts as president was to double the initiation fee at Mar-a-Lago, from $100,000 to $200,000. People willingly paid because Trump dispensed so many rewards to his customers, including ambassadorships of South Africa and the Dominican Republic. But if Trump got sick, it is quite possible he got sick at Mar-a-Lago. What happens to Trump’s resort business if Mar-a-Lago is revealed as a plague spot, a disease epicenter? Business will collapse, and Trump’s personal finances will be hit.
Even when nonlethal, COVID-19 can inflict debilitating suffering on those who succumb. Serious cases must be put on artificial respiration. They may be racked with diarrhea. Organs may fail too. COVID-19 patients can be in the hospital for weeks or even a month before they fully recover. The risk seems greatest for men over 70, with obesity as an additional risk factor—Trump’s exact medical profile.
What happens if President Trump does contract an illness that incapacitates him for days, weeks, or even longer? From the beginning of the Trump administration, many have joked about him as a candidate for the Twenty-Fifth Amendment on psychiatric grounds. If the coronavirus strikes him, depending on the severity, the Twenty-Fifth will have to be invoked on physiological grounds.
Trump is cunning and paranoid enough to recognize how much he is distrusted and disliked even by his own intimates, and certainly by his own party. If he has to step aside from office, will his vice president, Cabinet, and party in Congress really want to let him return? Maybe yes, but will Trump feel he can afford to take the risk? Better to carry on, exploit the weakness of others, and hope that he can bluff his way through self-inflicted disaster to one more comeback. That’s the path Trump has walked so successfully to this point. He’s not going to change now.
DAVID FRUM is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020). In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.
Copyright © 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
What If the President Gets Sick?
The public deserves to know right away whether the chief executive is infected with COVID-19. He should have gotten tested sooner.
Donald trump acknowledged today that he has been tested for the coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, but says he does not yet know the results. He told reporters at the White House that he took his temperature this morning and it was “totally normal.” At the Conservative Political Action Conference and then at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump stood close to people known to be infected with the coronavirus. Given the contagiousness of the virus, it’s reasonable to worry that the president himself may now be infected. Yet the White House for days insisted that the president did not need to be tested. At almost midnight last night, the White House blasted to reporters a letter from Trump’s doctor repeating the claim that no test was called for. In the president’s reversal today, he made it seem as if the idea had only just occurred to him.
He said he was finally prompted to seek testing after reporters asked him during a press conference yesterday whether he would do so—a press conference in which he was surrounded by other people. By waiting this long to get tested, Trump engaged in gross dereliction of duty. Not only might the president fall gravely ill himself, but he might—and quite possibly already has—spread the illness to others. He has engaged in risky behaviors long after he should have stopped: shaking hands, sharing microphones, gathering crowds, standing very close to people of advanced age.
Any other president would see it as his or her job to model safe behavior. Trump is the president, the head of state. His mental and physical health are vital public concerns. Why is Trump continuing to act in ways that threaten himself and others?
Read: You’re likely to get the coronavirus
At moments of national crisis, there is a strong instinct to support the president’s leadership. In the media, this instinct expresses itself in the impulse to suppress our knowledge of the president’s history and character, and to report on him the way we would have reported on his predecessors. But just as the president has a duty, so do we. Our duty is to describe things as they are, not as we would wish them to be. The coronavirus is a powerful force, but it is not powerful enough to transmute Donald Trump into a different person from the one he was before the crisis.
So when we talk about the president and his protracted refusal to test, we should not write about that decision as if the president who were refusing the test were a figure from Mount Rushmore. It’s Trump. Why did he delay such an urgent health precaution for so long?
Five reasons based on hard experience come to mind.
Donald Trump is a fearful person. He is terrified of sharks. He is especially fearful of disease and death. He banished his chief of staff from the room for coughing. He told a German magazine in 2007 that he would not go near his own children when they were sick. Any medical test is an encounter with mortality. By refusing to look, the encounter is avoided—or postponed. Private citizen Trump hired oddball doctors who assured him that he was in fabulous condition when he obviously was not. President Trump promoted a White House doctor who suggested that Trump might possibly live to 200 given his “fabulous genes.” It’s plausible that Trump doesn’t want to be tested for fear of being told otherwise.
Pro-Trump propaganda depicts the president as muscular and virile. He himself retweeted a meme of his face Photoshopped onto the body of a young Sylvester Stallone. In fact, Trump is obese and rarely exercises beyond hitting a golf ball. A test that revealed illness would pierce the Trump image in ways intolerable to the president. The experience of illness is a humbling one. The ill person tumbles out of a universe of self-sufficiency into another, where he or she must depend on the care of others. But Trump sees himself as always in control, always in command. Better not to know.
Coronavirus tests are in desperately short supply because of Trump’s own negligence and that of his administration. He squandered preparation time because of his own characteristic defects as a manager, most notably his insatiable need for validation and flattery. Trump taking a coronavirus test would remind an anxious country that tests are available only for some, and not others. For Trump to cut to the head of the queue would remind everybody that it is his fault the queue is so long.
Trump’s supreme priority as president has always been to make as much money as he can out of his hotels and resorts. One of his first acts as president was to double the initiation fee at Mar-a-Lago, from $100,000 to $200,000. People willingly paid because Trump dispensed so many rewards to his customers, including ambassadorships of South Africa and the Dominican Republic. But if Trump got sick, it is quite possible he got sick at Mar-a-Lago. What happens to Trump’s resort business if Mar-a-Lago is revealed as a plague spot, a disease epicenter? Business will collapse, and Trump’s personal finances will be hit.
Even when nonlethal, COVID-19 can inflict debilitating suffering on those who succumb. Serious cases must be put on artificial respiration. They may be racked with diarrhea. Organs may fail too. COVID-19 patients can be in the hospital for weeks or even a month before they fully recover. The risk seems greatest for men over 70, with obesity as an additional risk factor—Trump’s exact medical profile.
What happens if President Trump does contract an illness that incapacitates him for days, weeks, or even longer? From the beginning of the Trump administration, many have joked about him as a candidate for the Twenty-Fifth Amendment on psychiatric grounds. If the coronavirus strikes him, depending on the severity, the Twenty-Fifth will have to be invoked on physiological grounds.
Trump is cunning and paranoid enough to recognize how much he is distrusted and disliked even by his own intimates, and certainly by his own party. If he has to step aside from office, will his vice president, Cabinet, and party in Congress really want to let him return? Maybe yes, but will Trump feel he can afford to take the risk? Better to carry on, exploit the weakness of others, and hope that he can bluff his way through self-inflicted disaster to one more comeback. That’s the path Trump has walked so successfully to this point. He’s not going to change now.
DAVID FRUM is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020). In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.
Copyright © 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
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Re: Trump enters the stage - The politics of viral experienc
by Meno_ » Sun Mar 15, 2020 7:02 pm
{Now the things are beginning to confirm a reduction to primary experience: Mr.Trump waited too long to miss an opportunity to avoid thousands and thousands of infections and deaths, had he did as Phillippine President did:
Not politicize national health issyes, but take the lead, and start immediately to take steps to halt rapid progression.
Why did Trump wait until this was rubbed into his own narcissistic avoidance by institutions and even his closest adhearants?
Does this not at least give an inkling that he is primarily interested about his own political survival , and not the existential survival of the society he was elected to lead and protect?
Will this factor in with those who manage to be able to get up from their suck beds to hobble over to the ballot box?
Will this cross over to the independent thinker, or even his closest hombres, not to mention real democratic idealists?
Let us not hold our breaths for that one! }
Not politicize national health issyes, but take the lead, and start immediately to take steps to halt rapid progression.
Why did Trump wait until this was rubbed into his own narcissistic avoidance by institutions and even his closest adhearants?
Does this not at least give an inkling that he is primarily interested about his own political survival , and not the existential survival of the society he was elected to lead and protect?
Will this factor in with those who manage to be able to get up from their suck beds to hobble over to the ballot box?
Will this cross over to the independent thinker, or even his closest hombres, not to mention real democratic idealists?
Let us not hold our breaths for that one! }
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Re: Trump enters the stage - The death knoll of Trumpism?
by Meno_ » Sun Mar 15, 2020 10:10 pm
Every major political and economic forecast Doug Casey made over the last three decades came true...
From the dot-com bust... to the credit and housing bubble in October of 2006... to the 2008 meltdown.
Doug Casey even predicted the fall of the Soviet Union and correctly forecasted Brexit before it came to a vote.
But nothing comes close to Doug's new forecast for 2019-2020.
As Doug puts it, a major political coup is unfolding on American soil... that will topple Donald Trump's presidency...
And give rise to a new socialist state.
The stock market as we know it could lose nearly 40% of its value and a major recession could wipe out the wealth of hard-working Americans.
Just like Venezuela...
The general cost of living — including medication — will be out of reach for boomers, retirees, and even seniors...
Medicare and Social Security payouts will be cut in half to fund new welfare programs.
Food prices will shoot sky high. In fact, major brands like Kellogg's have warned prices will increase by 12%.
It's my sincere hope you and your family survive what's coming.
But only those who prepare will be able to live in peace in a new socialist America.
How do you do that?
But ensure you have what you need to survive when the next recession and socialism hit high gear.
Nick Giambruno
Chief Analyst, The Casey Report
P.S. Fair warning: These are not steps you should take while socialism is in full swing. You have to implement these steps before — which is now.
There isn't much time left. So I suggest you move quickly so you're one step ahead.
To prepare, see this important message while you still have time.
The Money & Markets, P.O. Box 8378, Delray Beach, FL 33482.
>>>>><<<<<>>>>><<<<<>>>>><<<<<>>>
{The Federal Reserve acts to the tune of almost a trillion dollars, in addition to slashing interest to almost zero :}
The Federal Reserve slashed interest rates to near-zero and unveiled a sweeping set of programs — including plans to snap up huge amounts of government and mortgage-backed debt — in an effort to backstop the United States economy as the spread of coronavirus poses a dire threat to economic growth.
“The coronavirus outbreak has harmed communities and disrupted economic activity in many countries, including the United States,” the central bank said in a statement on Sunday. “The Federal Reserve is prepared to use its full range of tools to support the flow of credit to households and businesses.”
At a news conference on Sunday afternoon, President Trump congratulated the Federal Reserve for its slashing rates to nearly zero.
“It makes me very happy,” he said.
FREE ACCESSThe New York Times is providing full coronavirus coverage to all our readers.
Besides cutting its key interest rate by a full percentage point, returning it to a range of 0 to 0.25 percent, the Fed said that it would increase its holdings of Treasury securities by at least $500 billion and its holdings of government mortgage-backed securities by at least $200 billion “over coming months.”
“The committee will continue to closely monitor market conditions and is prepared to adjust its plans as appropriate,” it said.
The Fed also encouraged banks to use its discount window, which provides ready access to financing, and said it was “encouraging banks to use their capital and liquidity buffers as they lend to households and businesses.” The Fed also eliminated bank reserve requirements — a suite of efforts meant to free up cash for the banks to keep lending.
From the dot-com bust... to the credit and housing bubble in October of 2006... to the 2008 meltdown.
Doug Casey even predicted the fall of the Soviet Union and correctly forecasted Brexit before it came to a vote.
But nothing comes close to Doug's new forecast for 2019-2020.
As Doug puts it, a major political coup is unfolding on American soil... that will topple Donald Trump's presidency...
And give rise to a new socialist state.
The stock market as we know it could lose nearly 40% of its value and a major recession could wipe out the wealth of hard-working Americans.
Just like Venezuela...
The general cost of living — including medication — will be out of reach for boomers, retirees, and even seniors...
Medicare and Social Security payouts will be cut in half to fund new welfare programs.
Food prices will shoot sky high. In fact, major brands like Kellogg's have warned prices will increase by 12%.
It's my sincere hope you and your family survive what's coming.
But only those who prepare will be able to live in peace in a new socialist America.
How do you do that?
But ensure you have what you need to survive when the next recession and socialism hit high gear.
Nick Giambruno
Chief Analyst, The Casey Report
P.S. Fair warning: These are not steps you should take while socialism is in full swing. You have to implement these steps before — which is now.
There isn't much time left. So I suggest you move quickly so you're one step ahead.
To prepare, see this important message while you still have time.
The Money & Markets, P.O. Box 8378, Delray Beach, FL 33482.
>>>>><<<<<>>>>><<<<<>>>>><<<<<>>>
{The Federal Reserve acts to the tune of almost a trillion dollars, in addition to slashing interest to almost zero :}
The Federal Reserve slashed interest rates to near-zero and unveiled a sweeping set of programs — including plans to snap up huge amounts of government and mortgage-backed debt — in an effort to backstop the United States economy as the spread of coronavirus poses a dire threat to economic growth.
“The coronavirus outbreak has harmed communities and disrupted economic activity in many countries, including the United States,” the central bank said in a statement on Sunday. “The Federal Reserve is prepared to use its full range of tools to support the flow of credit to households and businesses.”
At a news conference on Sunday afternoon, President Trump congratulated the Federal Reserve for its slashing rates to nearly zero.
“It makes me very happy,” he said.
FREE ACCESSThe New York Times is providing full coronavirus coverage to all our readers.
Besides cutting its key interest rate by a full percentage point, returning it to a range of 0 to 0.25 percent, the Fed said that it would increase its holdings of Treasury securities by at least $500 billion and its holdings of government mortgage-backed securities by at least $200 billion “over coming months.”
“The committee will continue to closely monitor market conditions and is prepared to adjust its plans as appropriate,” it said.
The Fed also encouraged banks to use its discount window, which provides ready access to financing, and said it was “encouraging banks to use their capital and liquidity buffers as they lend to households and businesses.” The Fed also eliminated bank reserve requirements — a suite of efforts meant to free up cash for the banks to keep lending.
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Re: Trump enters the stage - responsible for the wait?
by Meno_ » Mon Mar 16, 2020 2:18 am
Poem of 1918 written by a Young girl:
"I had a bird , it's name was Enza,
I opened the window and
Influenza"
{Now the following footage is 30 minutes, it is really worth while to see it.}
https://youtu.be/UDY5COg2P2c
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>><<<<<<>><<>><<><><><<<<<<>>>>>>>>>
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>><<<<
The horrific scale of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic is hard to fathom. The virus infected 500 million people worldwide and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims— that's more than all of the soldiers and civilians killed during World War I combined.Mar 3, 2020
{ How many people died from the black plague? }
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>><<<<<<<<><><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>><<>><<{{<}}<<<{<<>> :
The Black Death: The Greatest Catastrophe Ever. Ole J. Benedictow describes how he calculated that the Black Death killed 50 million people in the 14th century, or 60 per cent of Europe's entire population. The disastrous mortal disease known as the Black Death spread across Europe in the years 1346-53.
"I had a bird , it's name was Enza,
I opened the window and
Influenza"
{Now the following footage is 30 minutes, it is really worth while to see it.}
https://youtu.be/UDY5COg2P2c
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>><<<<<<>><<>><<><><><<<<<<>>>>>>>>>
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>><<<<
The horrific scale of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic is hard to fathom. The virus infected 500 million people worldwide and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims— that's more than all of the soldiers and civilians killed during World War I combined.Mar 3, 2020
{ How many people died from the black plague? }
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>><<<<<<<<><><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>><<>><<{{<}}<<<{<<>> :
The Black Death: The Greatest Catastrophe Ever. Ole J. Benedictow describes how he calculated that the Black Death killed 50 million people in the 14th century, or 60 per cent of Europe's entire population. The disastrous mortal disease known as the Black Death spread across Europe in the years 1346-53.
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Re: Trump enters the stage - More misinformation spoonfed
by Meno_ » Mon Mar 16, 2020 5:37 am
Donald Trump urged Americans to refrain from panic buying basic supplies during the Covid-19 pandemic as the administration announced plans to expand testing for the virus and health officials were preparing to release “advanced guidelines” on how to mitigate its spread.
During a press briefing at the White House on Sunday evening, Trump again appeared to downplay the threat of the novel coronavirus. “Relax, we’re doing great,” he said, during short, meandering comments that focused mostly on celebrating a decision by the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates. “It all will pass.”
The president’s remarks stood in marked contrast to his lead infectious diseases expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, who used the same conference to warn: “The worst is ahead for us”, describing the crisis as reaching a “very, very critical point now”. Earlier in the day Dr Fauci had declined to rule out a “national lockdown” of bars and restaurants as he urged more aggressive measures, similar to those in Europe and elsewhere, to contain the virus.
Trump said he had hosted a call with grocery industry leaders earlier in the day who had pushed him to spread a message against hoarding.
“They have actually asked me to say: ‘could you buy a little bit less, please?’ I thought I’d never hear that from a retailer,” Trump said, adding: “They have no shortages. We have no shortages other than people buying anywhere from three to five times [more].”
“Have a nice dinner, relax,” the president added.
Trump’s remarks came at the same time that California governor Gavin Newsom announced that the nation’s most populous state would enforce a closure of all bars and nightclubs, and make restaurants cut capacity by half. The governor also urged all those over 65 to self-isolate.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the leading US government agency for public health, announced a national recommendation shortly after, urging all gatherings of 50 people or over, including festivals, parades, weddings and sporting events, to be cancelled for the next eight weeks. The recommendation did not include schools or businesses.
Twenty-four states have already announced some form of school closure, with the state of Massachusetts becoming the latest to announce on Sunday. Governor Charlie Baker also banned gatherings of 25 people or more in the state.
Mike Pence, the vice-president and head of the president’s coronavirus taskforce, said on Sunday evening there were now 2,900 confirmed cases across 49 states in America, up from 2,200 on Saturday.
As the administration reels from criticism of its slow rollout of tests for coronavirus, Pence announced an ambitious new testing regimen, which he said would allow 1.9 million Covid-19 tests to be processed over the coming weeks at over 2,000 laboratories across the country.
He said the new resources would “enable all Americans who need to be tested to go to a community-based testing site outside of usual health care facilities”.
Pence commended leaders in 10 states for already rolling out “drive through” testing.
Dr Deborah Birx, the White House coordinator for responding to the pandemic, said those most vulnerable to the virus and the healthcare providers treating them should be tested first.
“We ask you to prioritize them and prioritize them in the lines,” she said, adding that the roll-out of more testing would lead to a “spike” in positive results.
The Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar, described the crisis as “an unprecedented challenge” and acknowledged the pandemic carried the risk of overwhelming the healthcare system in the US. Azar said the administration was working to increase the number of medical supplies, including ventilators, available to fight the pandemic. But he declined to cite specific figures citing “national security”.
Dr Fauci said that new “advanced guidelines” on how to mitigate the spread of the disease would be announced on Monday but there was little more detail on recommended measures of “social distancing”, actions that limit interaction between people in order to prevent further contraction.
Earlier on Sunday, Melania Trump, the first lady who has remained largely absent from public since the onset of the crisis, tweeted a link to the CDC website and urged readers to “Please take action to prevent further illness."
© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
&&&&&& &&&&&&&&
Incompetence
POLITICO
ANALYSIS
The incompetence pandemic
The first victim of the coronavirus? Leadership.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson holds a news conference to give the British government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak on March 12, 2020. | Simon Dawson/Pool via
BERLIN — Welcome to politics’ darkest hour.
If the coronavirus outbreak has taught us anything beyond the necessity of careful hygiene, it’s that the first victim of a pandemic is leadership.
At no time in the past 75 years has the world been in more need of a “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” moment; and at no time have global leaders so utterly failed to deliver.
From Beijing to Brussels, from Rome to Washington, London and beyond, politicians haven’t just failed to rise to the occasion, they’ve engaged in a dangerous game of parsing, obfuscation and reality-denial that has cost lives and delayed a resolute response.
Even though virologists have been warning for weeks that the outbreak could explode, political leaders, particularly in the West, did little to halt its advance.
Like the virus itself, which scientists have traced to the Chinese city of Wuhan (and leaders there denied and downplayed for weeks), the prevailing political strategy for confronting the crisis was Made in China.
Few may have expected inspired leadership from U.S. President Donald Trump, who dismissed the coronavirus as a Democratic “hoax” and just days ago predicted it would disappear “like a miracle.” Even so, his fumbling of a national address on the emergency, followed by his trademark blame-shifting for his government’s lack of preparedness (“I don’t take responsibility at all”), will be remembered as a low point in American political leadership.
Solidarity with allies? Think again. Trump followed up his ban on Europeans traveling to the U.S. (a decision he announced without even making a courtesy phone call to EU leaders beforehand) with an attempt to reportedly buy a vaccine-maker out from under the Germans’ noses, aiming to guarantee Americans are first in line for the corona shot the firm is developing.
The irony is that the Trump administration previously opted not to use the German-developed coronavirus test endorsed by the World Health Organization, choosing instead to develop its own version, which has proved unreliable. The decision has created massive delays in testing in the U.S., allowing the “foreign virus,” as Trump calls it, to spread unabated. South Korea tests more people per day than the U.S. has in total in the weeks since the outbreak began. The fiasco didn’t stop Trump from falsely claiming last week that “testing has been going very smooth.”
While Trump gets the most attention for his corona bungling, he’s hardly alone. Brazilian strongman Jair Bolsonaro, who met the American president last week in Florida, characterized the coronavirus panic as a media-fueled “fantasy.” A day later, his press secretary tested positive.
If there’s one leader who should recognize the historic gravitas of the moment and rise to it with stirring rhetoric matched by action, it’s the man who modeled his political career on Winston Churchill, Boris Johnson.
Instead of offering “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” however, Johnson has sounded more like the Grim Reaper.
“Many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time,” he said in a televised address on Friday, insisting that his government has “a clear plan.”
Trouble is, the strategy underlying that plan, dubbed “herd immunity,” appears to have unnerved more people than it has reassured, fueling fears that Johnson has no plan at all.
“The realization has struck No. 10 that Britain has lost control of Covid-19, but it should at least look as though it is doing something,” the Sunday Times concluded.
What about Angela Merkel? After all, crisis is the German leader’s speciality. From the financial implosion of 2008 to the refugee crisis of 2015, Merkel has thrived in times of peril.
Until now.
The German chancellor, revered by some as the “leader of the free world,” left management of the pandemic to her youthful health minister, Jens Spahn.
She only emerged from her corona shell following last Monday’s market meltdown and after Italy was forced to impose draconian measures to bring the spread of the virus under control. Asked why it took her so long to engage publicly, Merkel insisted she had been monitoring the crisis from behind the scenes since January.
“I make a decision about when and where I address an issue according to the circumstances and the facts,” she said.
Yet the facts were there for all to see. Truth is, Merkel has been more focused on the refugee influx on Greece’s border with Turkey and the crisis in Libya in recent weeks.
Even as Merkel has tried to maintain a sage public demeanor, the government’s response to the crisis has been marked by crossed wires and confusion.
Merkel’s economy minister, Peter Altmaier, repeatedly played down the economic risks posed by coronavirus, saying that he didn’t expect it to become “a major burden for the global economy.”
Then reality set in. After a rollercoaster week in the markets, he and Finance Minister Olaf Scholz on Friday unveiled Germany’s “bazooka,” an unprecedented program to extend unlimited liquidity to German companies hit by the crisis.
On the ground, Germany’s virus-fighting effort has been no more coherent. While some states have closed schools, others have not. Last week, Berlin canceled all cultural events only to permit a professional football match. Following an outcry, the game was closed to the public and then canceled altogether.
The city initially allowed its bars and clubs to remain open, then announced on Friday they would have to close on Tuesday. Over the weekend, city leaders decided to impose the closure immediately, dispatching police across the German capital to eject patrons. Meanwhile, Munich’s beer halls remain open, at least for now.
Most blame Germany’s incoherent crisis-fighting on the country’s federal structure, which leaves authority over key policy areas, including public health and education, to Germany’s 16 states.
Amid the lack of clear political direction, many Germans were convinced until this week that the outbreak would be no worse than a seasonal flu.
A similar picture has emerged across much of Europe. After weeks of largely ignoring the unfolding crisis, leaders from France to Austria have been forced by a sudden explosion of cases to impose severe limits on their citizens.
Just a week ago, France hosted the largest Smurf convention ever, drawing more than 3,500 visitors. On Saturday, the country’s prime minister announced the closure of all bars, restaurants and non-essential shops.
Though it makes sense for EU members to tailor their coronavirus strategies to local requirements, the variety of approaches across the region suggests little, if any, real coordination.
Anyone hoping European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen would plot a coherent path forward has been disappointed.
On Monday, as Italy’s government shut down public life in the country and stock markets melted, von der Leyen appeared before the press to boast about her first 100 days in office. Like an eager pupil who wanted to show the world how well she had prepared for her big speech, von der Leyen seemed almost offended that reporters were forcing her to address the gathering coronavirus storm.
Even then, she didn’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation.
The Commission’s “coronavirus response team” had the situation under control, she insisted.
© 2020 POLITICO LLC
During a press briefing at the White House on Sunday evening, Trump again appeared to downplay the threat of the novel coronavirus. “Relax, we’re doing great,” he said, during short, meandering comments that focused mostly on celebrating a decision by the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates. “It all will pass.”
The president’s remarks stood in marked contrast to his lead infectious diseases expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, who used the same conference to warn: “The worst is ahead for us”, describing the crisis as reaching a “very, very critical point now”. Earlier in the day Dr Fauci had declined to rule out a “national lockdown” of bars and restaurants as he urged more aggressive measures, similar to those in Europe and elsewhere, to contain the virus.
Trump said he had hosted a call with grocery industry leaders earlier in the day who had pushed him to spread a message against hoarding.
“They have actually asked me to say: ‘could you buy a little bit less, please?’ I thought I’d never hear that from a retailer,” Trump said, adding: “They have no shortages. We have no shortages other than people buying anywhere from three to five times [more].”
“Have a nice dinner, relax,” the president added.
Trump’s remarks came at the same time that California governor Gavin Newsom announced that the nation’s most populous state would enforce a closure of all bars and nightclubs, and make restaurants cut capacity by half. The governor also urged all those over 65 to self-isolate.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the leading US government agency for public health, announced a national recommendation shortly after, urging all gatherings of 50 people or over, including festivals, parades, weddings and sporting events, to be cancelled for the next eight weeks. The recommendation did not include schools or businesses.
Twenty-four states have already announced some form of school closure, with the state of Massachusetts becoming the latest to announce on Sunday. Governor Charlie Baker also banned gatherings of 25 people or more in the state.
Mike Pence, the vice-president and head of the president’s coronavirus taskforce, said on Sunday evening there were now 2,900 confirmed cases across 49 states in America, up from 2,200 on Saturday.
As the administration reels from criticism of its slow rollout of tests for coronavirus, Pence announced an ambitious new testing regimen, which he said would allow 1.9 million Covid-19 tests to be processed over the coming weeks at over 2,000 laboratories across the country.
He said the new resources would “enable all Americans who need to be tested to go to a community-based testing site outside of usual health care facilities”.
Pence commended leaders in 10 states for already rolling out “drive through” testing.
Dr Deborah Birx, the White House coordinator for responding to the pandemic, said those most vulnerable to the virus and the healthcare providers treating them should be tested first.
“We ask you to prioritize them and prioritize them in the lines,” she said, adding that the roll-out of more testing would lead to a “spike” in positive results.
The Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar, described the crisis as “an unprecedented challenge” and acknowledged the pandemic carried the risk of overwhelming the healthcare system in the US. Azar said the administration was working to increase the number of medical supplies, including ventilators, available to fight the pandemic. But he declined to cite specific figures citing “national security”.
Dr Fauci said that new “advanced guidelines” on how to mitigate the spread of the disease would be announced on Monday but there was little more detail on recommended measures of “social distancing”, actions that limit interaction between people in order to prevent further contraction.
Earlier on Sunday, Melania Trump, the first lady who has remained largely absent from public since the onset of the crisis, tweeted a link to the CDC website and urged readers to “Please take action to prevent further illness."
© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
&&&&&& &&&&&&&&
Incompetence
POLITICO
ANALYSIS
The incompetence pandemic
The first victim of the coronavirus? Leadership.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson holds a news conference to give the British government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak on March 12, 2020. | Simon Dawson/Pool via
BERLIN — Welcome to politics’ darkest hour.
If the coronavirus outbreak has taught us anything beyond the necessity of careful hygiene, it’s that the first victim of a pandemic is leadership.
At no time in the past 75 years has the world been in more need of a “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” moment; and at no time have global leaders so utterly failed to deliver.
From Beijing to Brussels, from Rome to Washington, London and beyond, politicians haven’t just failed to rise to the occasion, they’ve engaged in a dangerous game of parsing, obfuscation and reality-denial that has cost lives and delayed a resolute response.
Even though virologists have been warning for weeks that the outbreak could explode, political leaders, particularly in the West, did little to halt its advance.
Like the virus itself, which scientists have traced to the Chinese city of Wuhan (and leaders there denied and downplayed for weeks), the prevailing political strategy for confronting the crisis was Made in China.
Few may have expected inspired leadership from U.S. President Donald Trump, who dismissed the coronavirus as a Democratic “hoax” and just days ago predicted it would disappear “like a miracle.” Even so, his fumbling of a national address on the emergency, followed by his trademark blame-shifting for his government’s lack of preparedness (“I don’t take responsibility at all”), will be remembered as a low point in American political leadership.
Solidarity with allies? Think again. Trump followed up his ban on Europeans traveling to the U.S. (a decision he announced without even making a courtesy phone call to EU leaders beforehand) with an attempt to reportedly buy a vaccine-maker out from under the Germans’ noses, aiming to guarantee Americans are first in line for the corona shot the firm is developing.
The irony is that the Trump administration previously opted not to use the German-developed coronavirus test endorsed by the World Health Organization, choosing instead to develop its own version, which has proved unreliable. The decision has created massive delays in testing in the U.S., allowing the “foreign virus,” as Trump calls it, to spread unabated. South Korea tests more people per day than the U.S. has in total in the weeks since the outbreak began. The fiasco didn’t stop Trump from falsely claiming last week that “testing has been going very smooth.”
While Trump gets the most attention for his corona bungling, he’s hardly alone. Brazilian strongman Jair Bolsonaro, who met the American president last week in Florida, characterized the coronavirus panic as a media-fueled “fantasy.” A day later, his press secretary tested positive.
If there’s one leader who should recognize the historic gravitas of the moment and rise to it with stirring rhetoric matched by action, it’s the man who modeled his political career on Winston Churchill, Boris Johnson.
Instead of offering “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” however, Johnson has sounded more like the Grim Reaper.
“Many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time,” he said in a televised address on Friday, insisting that his government has “a clear plan.”
Trouble is, the strategy underlying that plan, dubbed “herd immunity,” appears to have unnerved more people than it has reassured, fueling fears that Johnson has no plan at all.
“The realization has struck No. 10 that Britain has lost control of Covid-19, but it should at least look as though it is doing something,” the Sunday Times concluded.
What about Angela Merkel? After all, crisis is the German leader’s speciality. From the financial implosion of 2008 to the refugee crisis of 2015, Merkel has thrived in times of peril.
Until now.
The German chancellor, revered by some as the “leader of the free world,” left management of the pandemic to her youthful health minister, Jens Spahn.
She only emerged from her corona shell following last Monday’s market meltdown and after Italy was forced to impose draconian measures to bring the spread of the virus under control. Asked why it took her so long to engage publicly, Merkel insisted she had been monitoring the crisis from behind the scenes since January.
“I make a decision about when and where I address an issue according to the circumstances and the facts,” she said.
Yet the facts were there for all to see. Truth is, Merkel has been more focused on the refugee influx on Greece’s border with Turkey and the crisis in Libya in recent weeks.
Even as Merkel has tried to maintain a sage public demeanor, the government’s response to the crisis has been marked by crossed wires and confusion.
Merkel’s economy minister, Peter Altmaier, repeatedly played down the economic risks posed by coronavirus, saying that he didn’t expect it to become “a major burden for the global economy.”
Then reality set in. After a rollercoaster week in the markets, he and Finance Minister Olaf Scholz on Friday unveiled Germany’s “bazooka,” an unprecedented program to extend unlimited liquidity to German companies hit by the crisis.
On the ground, Germany’s virus-fighting effort has been no more coherent. While some states have closed schools, others have not. Last week, Berlin canceled all cultural events only to permit a professional football match. Following an outcry, the game was closed to the public and then canceled altogether.
The city initially allowed its bars and clubs to remain open, then announced on Friday they would have to close on Tuesday. Over the weekend, city leaders decided to impose the closure immediately, dispatching police across the German capital to eject patrons. Meanwhile, Munich’s beer halls remain open, at least for now.
Most blame Germany’s incoherent crisis-fighting on the country’s federal structure, which leaves authority over key policy areas, including public health and education, to Germany’s 16 states.
Amid the lack of clear political direction, many Germans were convinced until this week that the outbreak would be no worse than a seasonal flu.
A similar picture has emerged across much of Europe. After weeks of largely ignoring the unfolding crisis, leaders from France to Austria have been forced by a sudden explosion of cases to impose severe limits on their citizens.
Just a week ago, France hosted the largest Smurf convention ever, drawing more than 3,500 visitors. On Saturday, the country’s prime minister announced the closure of all bars, restaurants and non-essential shops.
Though it makes sense for EU members to tailor their coronavirus strategies to local requirements, the variety of approaches across the region suggests little, if any, real coordination.
Anyone hoping European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen would plot a coherent path forward has been disappointed.
On Monday, as Italy’s government shut down public life in the country and stock markets melted, von der Leyen appeared before the press to boast about her first 100 days in office. Like an eager pupil who wanted to show the world how well she had prepared for her big speech, von der Leyen seemed almost offended that reporters were forcing her to address the gathering coronavirus storm.
Even then, she didn’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation.
The Commission’s “coronavirus response team” had the situation under control, she insisted.
© 2020 POLITICO LLC
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Re: Trump enters the stage - summary precontention
by Meno_ » Mon Mar 16, 2020 9:18 pm
{This is one way to interpret the afirmentioned : --- WW 2 gave the U S a tremendous boost, to take it out from the depressive prognosis for Capitalism's trials, a very large boost, that overfed , prior disparaged , hopelessly screwed consumers were politically cornered into.
World markets were controlled for a generation and living standards were sustained by liberal support from government borrowing, which finally had to be financed by then Communist China.
The fact is, this is reaching a climax, so the here elite decided enough is enough, time to take out the Chinase vs. Russian established collusive instability, to pull the plug sort of speak, as the seeming defeat of the South East Asian underbelly removed from the equation.
Trump was drawn in , by a kind of silent agreement, either play the humorous role that will play ok, thus relieving the establishment's debt over him of tremendous failures both personal and financial: that some have had over him, including international clientele.
The tequila sunrise did not avail to lessen the morning glory of pushing new world order preceptions to where expectations were programmed to arrive to by now, and the great divide between pseudo capitalist\ socialists and pure would have been retrograde union busting early 20th century hostile takeover capitalists would have liked to create a grand Capitalistic synthesis.
It didn't happen, and the cycle is stumped..
World markets were controlled for a generation and living standards were sustained by liberal support from government borrowing, which finally had to be financed by then Communist China.
The fact is, this is reaching a climax, so the here elite decided enough is enough, time to take out the Chinase vs. Russian established collusive instability, to pull the plug sort of speak, as the seeming defeat of the South East Asian underbelly removed from the equation.
Trump was drawn in , by a kind of silent agreement, either play the humorous role that will play ok, thus relieving the establishment's debt over him of tremendous failures both personal and financial: that some have had over him, including international clientele.
The tequila sunrise did not avail to lessen the morning glory of pushing new world order preceptions to where expectations were programmed to arrive to by now, and the great divide between pseudo capitalist\ socialists and pure would have been retrograde union busting early 20th century hostile takeover capitalists would have liked to create a grand Capitalistic synthesis.
It didn't happen, and the cycle is stumped..
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Re: Trump enters the stage - summary precontention
by Meno_ » Tue Mar 17, 2020 12:32 am
Meno_ wrote:{This is one way to interpret the afirmentioned : --- WW 2 gave the U S a tremendous boost, to take it out from the depressive 6prognosis for Capitalism's trials, a very large boost, that overfed , prior disparaged , hopelessly screwed consumers were politically cornered into.
World markets were controlled for a generation and living standards were sustained by liberal support from government borrowing, which finally had to be financed by then Communist China.
The fact is, this is reaching a climax, so the here elite decided enough is enough, time to take out the Chinase vs. Russian established collusive instability, to pull the plug sort of speak, as the seeming defeat of the South East Asian underbelly removed from the equation.
Trump was drawn in , by a kind of silent agreement, either play the humorous role that will play ok, thus relieving the establishment's debt over him of tremendous failures both personal and financial: that some have had over him, including international clientele.
The tequila sunrise did not avail to lessen the morning glory of pushing new world order preceptions to where expectations were programmed to arrive to by now, and the great divide between pseudo capitalist\ socialists and pure would have been retrograde union busting early 20th century hostile takeover capitalists would have liked to create a grand Capitalistic synthesis.
It didn't happen, and the cycle is stumped..
Note: California is in 'lock down mode'
The Dow suffered its worst single-day point drop in history. With investors panicking over the extent of the coronavirus crisis, the Dow dropped 2,997 points, or nearly 13%.
{Trump says recession is likely}
California lockdown
LA County, the Nation’s Most Populous, Orders Closure of Restaurants and Bars
This will affect nearly 10 million people in cities like Long Beach, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Culver City, Beverly Hills, and Pasadena
By Matthew Kang
on March 16, 2020 1:34 pm
Santa Monica Pier at dusk, Santa Monica, California
Today the nation’s most populated county, Los Angeles County, announced a sweeping closure of dine-in restaurants, bars, nightclubs, and other entertainment venues. (As in much of the country under similar orders, takeout and delivery are still allowed.) This order matches the one made by the City of Los Angeles, which announced closures for hospitality establishments late on March 15 in an effort to reduce interaction and curb the spread of the novel coronavirus.
This means cities like Long Beach, West Hollywood, Culver City, Glendale, and Santa Monica, which are essentially surrounded by Los Angeles city limits and often have lesser known boundaries, would have to follow the larger county government directive. Whether a restaurant or bar is in Cerritos or Westlake Village, El Segundo or Santa Clarita — all establishments will have to cease dine-in services.
LA County, which has over 10 million residents in 88 incorporated cities and unincorporated areas outside of the City of Los Angeles, issued a directive that the entire county have one standard. Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer said in a live broadcast that “there may be people infected everywhere in the county,” and to “minimize non-essential activities” as much as possible. As of March 16, there were 94 cases of COVID-19 in the county.
Previously, California Governor Gavin Newsom directed bars, wineries, and breweries to close across the state, and restaurants to reduce seating capacity by 50 percent and follow social distancing guidelines. The county guidelines will now exceed the state’s.
LA County’s closure mandate comes just after six San Francisco Bay Area counties, with populations totaling 6.7 million, ordered their residents to “shelter in place,” meaning people would be required to stay home except for “essential needs.”
“We are doing everything we can to avoid having to order entire communities to isolate,” LA County’s Ferrer said, but “nothing is off the table for anybody, anywhere in the United States at this point.”
New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced that all bars and restaurants are required to shut down by March 17 at 9 a.m., with the exceptions for takeout and delivery. More than a half dozen states, including Illinois, Ohio, and Massachusetts have issued a lockdown of non-essential businesses over the last two days.
I’m predicting a mass exodus of restaurants during the recession. No way these owners can stay open unless they are back by big money. I’m predicting up to 60% of these non-chain restaurants to fold.
Once rent, food costs, and construction costs go down, I expect a new wave of owners to come in and take advantage of lower costs. We are going to have less sitdown restaurants, and more quick serve restaurants with kiosks to reduce labor costs. Also I can see a lot more street vending coming into play as it makes more economical sense for owners AND customers.
© 2020 Vox Media, Inc. All Rights
Reserved
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{Some more hyperbole}
The Coronavirus Outbreak
Trump Now Claims He Always Knew the Coronavirus Would Be a Pandemic
The president tried to rewrite his history with advising Americans about the coronavirus. His own words prove him wrong.
“We have it totally under control,” President Trump said in January.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
March 17, 2020
WASHINGTON — For weeks, President Trump has minimized the coronavirus, mocked concern about it and treated the risk from it cavalierly. On Tuesday he took to the White House lectern and made a remarkable assertion: He knew it was a pandemic all along.
“This is a pandemic,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
This is what Mr. Trump has actually said over the past two months:
On Jan. 22, asked by a CNBC reporter whether there were “worries about a pandemic,” the president replied: “No, not at all. We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
On Feb. 26, at a White House news conference, commenting on the country’s first reported cases: “We’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck.”
On Feb. 27, at a White House meeting: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”
On March 7, standing next to President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil at Mar-a-Lago, his club in Palm Beach, Fla., when asked if he was concerned that the virus was spreading closer to Washington: “No, I’m not concerned at all. No, I’m not. No, we’ve done a great job.” (At least three members of the Brazilian delegation and one Trump donor at Mar-a-Lago that weekend later tested positive for the virus.)
On March 16, in the White House briefing room, warning that the outbreak would “wash” away this summer: “So it could be right in that period of time where it, I say, wash — it washes through. Other people don’t like that term. But where it washes through.”
That comment on Monday was part of Mr. Trump’s inching toward a more urgent tone in recent days. But his assertion on Tuesday that he had long seen the pandemic coming was the most abrupt pivot yet from the voluminous number of claims and caustic remarks he has made about the disease.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump spent much of a lengthy news conference praising his administration’s response to the pandemic, saying the only mistake his administration made had been a mismanagement of relationships with the news media.
When asked why he had suddenly adopted a somber and realistic tone about the virus on Tuesday, the president denied that he had changed his mind at all.
“No, I’ve always viewed it as very serious,” Mr. Trump said. “There was no difference yesterday from days before. I feel the tone is similar, but some people said it wasn’t.”
Besides denying the seriousness of the coronavirus over the past two months, he had also displayed an acerbic tone toward people who took it more seriously.
During a campaign rally in South Carolina on Feb. 28, Mr. Trump accused Democrats and the news media of hysteria and unfairly criticizing his administration by engaging in what he said was a political “hoax.” Some of his critics have stretched his comment to suggest that he was calling the virus itself a hoax, but his supporters have argued that he was referring to the Democratic criticism, not the virus itself.
And until recently, he and several of his advisers had privately mocked his health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, as alarmist.
Another theme has been the president’s offering inaccurate information.
At a campaign rally on Feb. 10, Mr. Trump suggested that the virus would be gone by April, a claim he has frequently repeated, even though his advisers had warned him that much about the virus was still not known.
As his administration came under intense criticism for a lack of urgency in issuing guidance to Americans or expediting tests for the virus, Mr. Trump continued misrepresenting what was available.
“Anybody right now and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test,” the president said on March 6 during a tour of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “They’re there. They have the tests and the tests are beautiful.”
During that visit, Mr. Trump praised his own “natural ability” to grasp scientific theories, and then he likened the quality of the test to a White House recounting of a phone call. “The transcription was perfect, right?” he asked reporters. “This was not as perfect as that, but pretty good.”
While his administration struggled to form a uniform answer about testing, Mr. Trump also made misleading claims about whether there would be a vaccine for the virus.
On Feb. 29, the president said a vaccine would be available “very quickly” and “very rapidly,” as he praised his administration’s actions as “the most aggressive taken by any country.” His statement about how long it would take for a vaccine to be publicly available was corrected by Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a member of the coronavirus task force, in front of reporters.
© 2020 The New York Times Company
Last edited by Meno_ on Wed Mar 18, 2020 5:22 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Trump enters the stage - almost $ 1 trillion bailout
by Meno_ » Wed Mar 18, 2020 1:48 am
{Minchin in considering personal grants to boost economy}
USA TODAY
Trump and Mnuchin say they are considering legislation that would include sending checks to most adult Americans to help them through the economic devastation of coronavirus disruptions.
"We're looking at sending checks to Americans immediately," Mnuchin said at a news conference Tuesday. He said all measures being considered are "stuff that needs to be done now. This is no fault to American workers. For medical reasons, we are shutting down parts of the country."
{They are considering $1,000 to every American}
USA TODAY
Trump and Mnuchin say they are considering legislation that would include sending checks to most adult Americans to help them through the economic devastation of coronavirus disruptions.
"We're looking at sending checks to Americans immediately," Mnuchin said at a news conference Tuesday. He said all measures being considered are "stuff that needs to be done now. This is no fault to American workers. For medical reasons, we are shutting down parts of the country."
{They are considering $1,000 to every American}
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Re: Trump enters the stage - wartime setting !
by Meno_ » Thu Mar 19, 2020 12:46 am
Wartime authority and eviction relief: Here are the major changes announced by Trump's coronavirus task force
JEANINE SANTUCCI | USA TODAY | 1 hour ago
President Donald Trump announced he is invoking the Defense Production Act to address the coronavirus crisis.
ASSOCIATED PRESS, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and the White House coronavirus task force announced the administration is enacting a wartime provision in response to the spread of the virus, and referred to the virus as an "enemy."
It's just one step the task force has taken to combat the coronavirus pandemic. In a series of press conferences over the last several days, the president has declared a national emergency and warned that Americans may need to practice social distancing through the summer.
Here are the updates the White House team gave on Wednesday to combat COVID-19:
Defense Production Act
The Defense Production Act grants the president the ability to direct the production of certain equipment. Trump did not say specifically how the administration plans to use the wartime authority, but it could allow for the expansion of the production of vital medical supplies like face masks and ventilators. Trump said the White House has "targets" for equipment.
“We need millions of masks,” Trump said. “We need respirators.”
'How bad is this?' It's bad': Trump shifts tone as pandemic worsens, crisis hits economy
The act gives Trump the authority to direct private companies for matters of public defense. And in 2009 that authority was expanded by Congress to allow for preparation for emergency response services.
Reports of a shortage of personal protective equipment at hospitals continue to surface. On Tuesday, the White House task force requested that construction companies donate any heavy duty N95 masks they have to hospitals and stop ordering more from manufacturers.
HUD to suspend foreclosures, evictions
Trump said that the Department Housing and Urban Development would suspend foreclosures and evictions through the end of April amid the coronavirus outbreak, which has resulted in layoffs and missed work.
Also on Wednesday, the Federal Housing Finance Agency said it would suspend foreclosures and evictions for at least 60 days for single-family homeowner mortgages backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.
Border between US and Canada closing
Trump announced earlier Wednesday that the border between the U.S. and Canada would temporarily close to discretionary travel, though it will remain open to trade. He said it was a mutual agreement with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
"We will be, by mutual consent, temporarily closing our Northern Border with Canada to non-essential traffic," Trump tweeted Wednesday.
At the coronavirus task force press conference Trump said the restrictions would likely last for 30 days.
Trump also confirmed that he plans to invoke a provision that would allow him to prohibit certain people from entering the country, including asylum seekers and those entering the country illegally at the southern border. But, he said, the U.S. would not be closing the southern border.
Measures to alleviate strain on health care system
The federal government is recommending health care providers and patients postpone any elective procedures to free up hospital resources for urgent coronavirus cases. Officials have warned that a surge in cases could overwhelm the health care system, underscoring the need for social distancing measures.
“We fully appreciate that this is going to have a major impact on the health care system,” said Seema Verma, director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Trump also said health officials are working on a "self swab" coronavirus test that would allow front-line health care workers to test themselves for the virus. "It would free up a lot," Trump said.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the Pentagon would also make 5 million masks available from its reserves to the Department of Health and Human Services, with the first million immediately available. The Defense Department will also make up to 2,000 ventilators available as needed, Esper said.
And Trump said the government is ordering "thousands and thousands" of ventilators in case they are needed to treat coronavirus patients.
Millennials should take precautions
Dr. Deborah Birx said at the Wednesday press conference that other countries have reported that young people are becoming ill from the coronavirus, which has been officials have advised affects the elderly and medically vulnerable the most.
"You have the potential to spread it," Birx said of the millennial generation. She urged young people to take precautions.
The task force has been asking Americans to avoid contact with others so they reduce the risk of unknowingly transmitting the virus, without showing symptoms, to those who could be the most impacted.
Contributing: Courtney Subramanian, John Fritze, David Jackson, Tom Vanden Brook
© Copyright Gannett 2020
JEANINE SANTUCCI | USA TODAY | 1 hour ago
President Donald Trump announced he is invoking the Defense Production Act to address the coronavirus crisis.
ASSOCIATED PRESS, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and the White House coronavirus task force announced the administration is enacting a wartime provision in response to the spread of the virus, and referred to the virus as an "enemy."
It's just one step the task force has taken to combat the coronavirus pandemic. In a series of press conferences over the last several days, the president has declared a national emergency and warned that Americans may need to practice social distancing through the summer.
Here are the updates the White House team gave on Wednesday to combat COVID-19:
Defense Production Act
The Defense Production Act grants the president the ability to direct the production of certain equipment. Trump did not say specifically how the administration plans to use the wartime authority, but it could allow for the expansion of the production of vital medical supplies like face masks and ventilators. Trump said the White House has "targets" for equipment.
“We need millions of masks,” Trump said. “We need respirators.”
'How bad is this?' It's bad': Trump shifts tone as pandemic worsens, crisis hits economy
The act gives Trump the authority to direct private companies for matters of public defense. And in 2009 that authority was expanded by Congress to allow for preparation for emergency response services.
Reports of a shortage of personal protective equipment at hospitals continue to surface. On Tuesday, the White House task force requested that construction companies donate any heavy duty N95 masks they have to hospitals and stop ordering more from manufacturers.
HUD to suspend foreclosures, evictions
Trump said that the Department Housing and Urban Development would suspend foreclosures and evictions through the end of April amid the coronavirus outbreak, which has resulted in layoffs and missed work.
Also on Wednesday, the Federal Housing Finance Agency said it would suspend foreclosures and evictions for at least 60 days for single-family homeowner mortgages backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.
Border between US and Canada closing
Trump announced earlier Wednesday that the border between the U.S. and Canada would temporarily close to discretionary travel, though it will remain open to trade. He said it was a mutual agreement with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
"We will be, by mutual consent, temporarily closing our Northern Border with Canada to non-essential traffic," Trump tweeted Wednesday.
At the coronavirus task force press conference Trump said the restrictions would likely last for 30 days.
Trump also confirmed that he plans to invoke a provision that would allow him to prohibit certain people from entering the country, including asylum seekers and those entering the country illegally at the southern border. But, he said, the U.S. would not be closing the southern border.
Measures to alleviate strain on health care system
The federal government is recommending health care providers and patients postpone any elective procedures to free up hospital resources for urgent coronavirus cases. Officials have warned that a surge in cases could overwhelm the health care system, underscoring the need for social distancing measures.
“We fully appreciate that this is going to have a major impact on the health care system,” said Seema Verma, director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Trump also said health officials are working on a "self swab" coronavirus test that would allow front-line health care workers to test themselves for the virus. "It would free up a lot," Trump said.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the Pentagon would also make 5 million masks available from its reserves to the Department of Health and Human Services, with the first million immediately available. The Defense Department will also make up to 2,000 ventilators available as needed, Esper said.
And Trump said the government is ordering "thousands and thousands" of ventilators in case they are needed to treat coronavirus patients.
Millennials should take precautions
Dr. Deborah Birx said at the Wednesday press conference that other countries have reported that young people are becoming ill from the coronavirus, which has been officials have advised affects the elderly and medically vulnerable the most.
"You have the potential to spread it," Birx said of the millennial generation. She urged young people to take precautions.
The task force has been asking Americans to avoid contact with others so they reduce the risk of unknowingly transmitting the virus, without showing symptoms, to those who could be the most impacted.
Contributing: Courtney Subramanian, John Fritze, David Jackson, Tom Vanden Brook
© Copyright Gannett 2020
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Re: Trump enters the stage - Outrage
by Meno_ » Thu Mar 19, 2020 5:02 am
Fox News
DEBRA MESSING
Published March 18, 2020
Debra Messing says 'MAGA' supporters 'will die,' blasts Trump's coronavirus response
Debra Messing shared a video criticizing Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and questioned whether or not the president’s supporters will turn on him as the death toll rises.
Messing has been very vocal on social media about her criticism of Trump and his administration in the past. On Tuesday, she took to Twitter to share a video of recent interviews in which Trump seemed to downplay the threat of the coronavirus. The president’s words are juxtaposed with a graph that seemingly depicts the rapid rise of cases in the United States.
“LIAR-IN-CHIEF,” Messing began her tweet. “#Maga have been unmoved by the 16500 lies 45 has made since elected. Now that innumerable people (including MAGA) will die, because of his lies and inaction, I wonder if MAGA will recognize that 45 must be voted out?”
ROB REINER DEMANDS DONALD TRUMP BE REMOVED FROM OFFICE OVER CORONAVIRUS HANDLING
The total number of confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus worldwide has now surpassed 200,000, according to Johns Hopkins University, while the death toll has topped 8,000.
IDRIS ELBA TESTS POSITIVE FOR CORONAVIR
Trump has been criticized by many in both Hollywood and politics for downplaying the severity of the virus as cases began to pour into the United States. The video Messing shared contains sound bites of the president saying things like, “We have it totally under control.”
He is also heard calling the coronavirus a “hoax” concocted by the Democrats and saying that it will “disappear” like a “miracle.”
Debra Messing said 'MAGA' supporters 'will die' amid coronavirus outbreak. (Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEW
Messing is among the many celebrities who have taken to social media to criticize Trump for the way he’s handled the outbreak so far as well as to warn followers of the dangers about the rapidly spreading sickness.
Coronavirus
©2020 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved. All market data delayed 20 minutes.
DEBRA MESSING
Published March 18, 2020
Debra Messing says 'MAGA' supporters 'will die,' blasts Trump's coronavirus response
Debra Messing shared a video criticizing Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and questioned whether or not the president’s supporters will turn on him as the death toll rises.
Messing has been very vocal on social media about her criticism of Trump and his administration in the past. On Tuesday, she took to Twitter to share a video of recent interviews in which Trump seemed to downplay the threat of the coronavirus. The president’s words are juxtaposed with a graph that seemingly depicts the rapid rise of cases in the United States.
“LIAR-IN-CHIEF,” Messing began her tweet. “#Maga have been unmoved by the 16500 lies 45 has made since elected. Now that innumerable people (including MAGA) will die, because of his lies and inaction, I wonder if MAGA will recognize that 45 must be voted out?”
ROB REINER DEMANDS DONALD TRUMP BE REMOVED FROM OFFICE OVER CORONAVIRUS HANDLING
The total number of confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus worldwide has now surpassed 200,000, according to Johns Hopkins University, while the death toll has topped 8,000.
IDRIS ELBA TESTS POSITIVE FOR CORONAVIR
Trump has been criticized by many in both Hollywood and politics for downplaying the severity of the virus as cases began to pour into the United States. The video Messing shared contains sound bites of the president saying things like, “We have it totally under control.”
He is also heard calling the coronavirus a “hoax” concocted by the Democrats and saying that it will “disappear” like a “miracle.”
Debra Messing said 'MAGA' supporters 'will die' amid coronavirus outbreak. (Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEW
Messing is among the many celebrities who have taken to social media to criticize Trump for the way he’s handled the outbreak so far as well as to warn followers of the dangers about the rapidly spreading sickness.
Coronavirus
©2020 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved. All market data delayed 20 minutes.
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Re: Trump enters the stage-Virus war social equity compensat
by Meno_ » Thu Mar 19, 2020 3:59 pm
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that the economic relief plan included payments of $1,000 for American adults and $500 per child sent within three weeks. It is not clear if Americans of every income bracket will be eligible for the payments or how they will be disbursed to those who do not have bank accounts. The Trump administration has proposed sending $500 billion directly to Americans in two waves.
“What we’re really focused on is providing liquidity to American businesses and American workers,” Mr. Mnuchin said on the Fox Business Network on Thursday. “This is an unprecedented situation.”
Mr. Mnuchin insisted that the Treasury and the Federal Reserve were working in lock step and were prepared to do whatever was necessary to provide liquidity to American companies so that they can weather the crisis without laying off workers.
He said that businesses that take advantage of emergency loans would be given loan forgiveness if they cannot pay them back.
He also suggested that the federal government was open to taking equity stakes in companies.
ESCALATING INTERVENTION President Trump invoked wartime law and expanded economic relief measures.
{ A social avenger: the tiny unseen enemy forcing the mammoth Capital to reverse in substantial disgrace}
----- zzz zzz-----------???
Recompense?
POLITICS
Trump directs FDA to examine whether malaria drug can be used for coronavirus
PUBLISHED THU, MAR 19 2020 11:57 AM EDT
President Trump said he directed the FDA to investigate whether an existing drug for malaria can be used to treat the coronavirus.
Some scientists have said the anti-malaria drug chloroquine could be a treatment for the coronavirus.
It is important "not to provide false hope," FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said at the White House's daily press briefing on the coronavirus.
The World Health Organization said last month that there is "no proof" the drug is effective in treating the coronavirus.
President Donald Trump said Thursday he directed the Food and Drug Administration to investigate whether an existing drug for malaria can be used to treat the coronavirus.
There are no proven therapies for the COVID-19 virus, which has rapidly grown into a pandemic. U.S. health officials say a vaccine ready for public use could take 12 to 18 months. But some scientists have said the anti-malaria drug chloroquine could be a treatment for the virus.
It is important "not to provide false hope," FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said at the White House's daily press briefing on the coronavirus. But Trump has "asked us to be aggressive" and "break through exciting, life-saving treatment, and we're doing that at the FDA," Hahn said.
The World Health Organization, however, said last month that there is "no proof" the drug is effective in treating the coronavirus.
Trump claimed that the U.S. would be able to make the anti-malaria drug available "almost immediately" and that "it's been approved." But multiple outlets reported minutes later that the FDA had not approved chloroquine for use in treating the coronavirus.
The FDA did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.
The announcement at the briefing Thursday came hours after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the White House's massive economic stimulus proposal would include $500 billion for direct payments to Americans.
US President Donald Trump listens to FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn (R) speak on the latest developments of the coronavirus outbreak, in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House March 19, 2020 in Washington, DC.
Brendan Smialowski | AFP | Getty Images
That money would be divided into two large tranches, each providing $1,000 per person and $500 per child – meaning a family of four would get $3,000, Mnuchin said in a Fox Business Network interview.
"As soon as Congress passes this, we get this out in three weeks. And then, six weeks later, if the president still has a national emergency, we'll deliver another $3,000," Mnuchin said.
The Trump administration has also asked Congress for an additional $45.8 billion to cover "unanticipated" costs incurred by agencies responding to the crisis.
Hahn, the head of one of those agencies, said at the White House that the FDA is "committed to continuing to provide regulatory flexibility and guidance."
"We're looking at everything that's coming across our desks as possible treatment options," Hahn said.
Some health authorities in the U.S. and China have been using Gilead Sciences' antiviral medication Remdesivir, which was tested as a possible treatment for the Ebola outbreak, in hopes that the drug can reduce the duration of the virus in patients. Antiviral drug Kaletra, developed by drugmaker AbbVie, has also been used by some authorities through so-called compassionate use programs.
The coronavirus, which is believed to have originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan, has rapidly spread around the world, infecting more than 219,000 people and killing at least 8,900, data from Johns Hopkins University shows. U.S. cases rose above 10,000 as of Thursday.
TRENDING NOW
1
Trump wants to send $1,000 to adults, $500 to kids in coronavirus stimulus bill, Mnuchin says
2
Coronavirus live updates: Italy death toll overtakes China's, Trump eyes banning bailout buybacks
3
Trump directs FDA to examine whether malaria drug can be used for coronavirus
4
Mark Cuban says bailed out companies should never be allowed to buy back their stocks ever again
5
Bank of America says the recession is already here: 'Jobs will be lost, wealth will be destroyed'
© 2019 CNBC LLC. All Rights Reserved. A Division of NBCUniversal
--------!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!--!!!!!---!!--!!--!!!!!!------
{For once Trump may be right on}
POLITICS
Trump blames China for coronavirus pandemic: 'The world is paying a very big price for what they did'
PUBLISHED THU, MAR 19 2020 11:54 AM EDT
President Donald Trump doubled down on blaming China for the coronavirus pandemic.
"It could have been stopped right where it came from, China," Trump said at a White House press conference.
Trump has repeatedly called coronavirus the "Chinese virus," and been criticized for doing so, both by Chinese officials, and by others, including former Vice President Joe Biden. Trump has said that term is "not racist at all."
President Donald Trump emphatically blamed China for the coronavirus pandemic Thursday, and again made a point of using the term "Chinese virus."
"The world is paying a very big price for that they did," Trump said, referring to Chinese government officials not sharing information sooner about the coronavirus outbreak when it began there.
"It could have been stopped right where it came from, China," Trump said at a White House press conference.
He argued that American officials would have been able to act faster if China's government had fully shared information about the outbreak, which began around the city of Wuhan.
"It would have been much better if we had known about this a number of months earlier," Trump said.
Two months ago, Trump praised China's response to coronavirus, saying that country "has been working very hard" to contain the virus, and writing in a tweet that, "the United states greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency."
But in recent days, Trump has repeatedly called coronavirus the "Chinese virus," and did so again at the beginning of his press conference.
His habit of doing so has drawn strong criticism from Chinese officials and from a number of U.S. politicians, including former Vice President Joe Biden, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Flanked by members of the Coronavirus Task Force, U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a news briefing on the latest development of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House March 19, 2020 in Washington, DC.
During a press conference on Wednesday, Trump defended his use of that term, saying it was "not racist at all."
"Because it comes from China," Trump said when asked Wednesday why he continued using the term. "That's why."
"I want to be accurate."
China on Thursday for the first time since the outbreak began reported no new domestic cases of coronavirus.
Asked if he believed that report, Trump said, 'I hope it's true."
"But who knows?" Trump said. "I hope it's true."
During an interview on CNBC's "Fast Money" on Wednesday, Hayman Capital Management founder Kyle Bass said that referring to the virus as the "Wuhan flu" or other terms noting its Chinese origin is warranted because of a long-standing practice of popularly naming pandemics after their perceived point of origin, such as the Spanish flu and West Nile virus.
"If we start naming diseases after numbers, we're never going to remember what kind of disease it is," Bass said.
He said the Chinese government has "propagandized" by asking people to refer to current outbreak as COVID-19 or coronavirus.
"We can call it whatever we want to call it. I'm not going to call it what the Chinese government wants me to call it," Bass said.
Earlier Wednesday, when asked about Trump calling coronavirus the Chinese virus, Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of World Health Organization's emergencies program, said: "Viruses no know borders and they don't care about your ethnicity, the color of your skin or how much money you have in the bank."
"So it's really important we be careful in the language we use lest it lead to the profiling of individuals associated with the virus," Ryan said.
Coronavirus live updates: Italy death toll overtakes China's, Trump eyes banning bailout buybacks
© 2019 CNBC LLC. All Rights Reserved. A Division of NBCUniversal
“What we’re really focused on is providing liquidity to American businesses and American workers,” Mr. Mnuchin said on the Fox Business Network on Thursday. “This is an unprecedented situation.”
Mr. Mnuchin insisted that the Treasury and the Federal Reserve were working in lock step and were prepared to do whatever was necessary to provide liquidity to American companies so that they can weather the crisis without laying off workers.
He said that businesses that take advantage of emergency loans would be given loan forgiveness if they cannot pay them back.
He also suggested that the federal government was open to taking equity stakes in companies.
ESCALATING INTERVENTION President Trump invoked wartime law and expanded economic relief measures.
{ A social avenger: the tiny unseen enemy forcing the mammoth Capital to reverse in substantial disgrace}
----- zzz zzz-----------???
Recompense?
POLITICS
Trump directs FDA to examine whether malaria drug can be used for coronavirus
PUBLISHED THU, MAR 19 2020 11:57 AM EDT
President Trump said he directed the FDA to investigate whether an existing drug for malaria can be used to treat the coronavirus.
Some scientists have said the anti-malaria drug chloroquine could be a treatment for the coronavirus.
It is important "not to provide false hope," FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said at the White House's daily press briefing on the coronavirus.
The World Health Organization said last month that there is "no proof" the drug is effective in treating the coronavirus.
President Donald Trump said Thursday he directed the Food and Drug Administration to investigate whether an existing drug for malaria can be used to treat the coronavirus.
There are no proven therapies for the COVID-19 virus, which has rapidly grown into a pandemic. U.S. health officials say a vaccine ready for public use could take 12 to 18 months. But some scientists have said the anti-malaria drug chloroquine could be a treatment for the virus.
It is important "not to provide false hope," FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said at the White House's daily press briefing on the coronavirus. But Trump has "asked us to be aggressive" and "break through exciting, life-saving treatment, and we're doing that at the FDA," Hahn said.
The World Health Organization, however, said last month that there is "no proof" the drug is effective in treating the coronavirus.
Trump claimed that the U.S. would be able to make the anti-malaria drug available "almost immediately" and that "it's been approved." But multiple outlets reported minutes later that the FDA had not approved chloroquine for use in treating the coronavirus.
The FDA did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.
The announcement at the briefing Thursday came hours after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the White House's massive economic stimulus proposal would include $500 billion for direct payments to Americans.
US President Donald Trump listens to FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn (R) speak on the latest developments of the coronavirus outbreak, in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House March 19, 2020 in Washington, DC.
Brendan Smialowski | AFP | Getty Images
That money would be divided into two large tranches, each providing $1,000 per person and $500 per child – meaning a family of four would get $3,000, Mnuchin said in a Fox Business Network interview.
"As soon as Congress passes this, we get this out in three weeks. And then, six weeks later, if the president still has a national emergency, we'll deliver another $3,000," Mnuchin said.
The Trump administration has also asked Congress for an additional $45.8 billion to cover "unanticipated" costs incurred by agencies responding to the crisis.
Hahn, the head of one of those agencies, said at the White House that the FDA is "committed to continuing to provide regulatory flexibility and guidance."
"We're looking at everything that's coming across our desks as possible treatment options," Hahn said.
Some health authorities in the U.S. and China have been using Gilead Sciences' antiviral medication Remdesivir, which was tested as a possible treatment for the Ebola outbreak, in hopes that the drug can reduce the duration of the virus in patients. Antiviral drug Kaletra, developed by drugmaker AbbVie, has also been used by some authorities through so-called compassionate use programs.
The coronavirus, which is believed to have originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan, has rapidly spread around the world, infecting more than 219,000 people and killing at least 8,900, data from Johns Hopkins University shows. U.S. cases rose above 10,000 as of Thursday.
TRENDING NOW
1
Trump wants to send $1,000 to adults, $500 to kids in coronavirus stimulus bill, Mnuchin says
2
Coronavirus live updates: Italy death toll overtakes China's, Trump eyes banning bailout buybacks
3
Trump directs FDA to examine whether malaria drug can be used for coronavirus
4
Mark Cuban says bailed out companies should never be allowed to buy back their stocks ever again
5
Bank of America says the recession is already here: 'Jobs will be lost, wealth will be destroyed'
© 2019 CNBC LLC. All Rights Reserved. A Division of NBCUniversal
--------!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!--!!!!!---!!--!!--!!!!!!------
{For once Trump may be right on}
POLITICS
Trump blames China for coronavirus pandemic: 'The world is paying a very big price for what they did'
PUBLISHED THU, MAR 19 2020 11:54 AM EDT
President Donald Trump doubled down on blaming China for the coronavirus pandemic.
"It could have been stopped right where it came from, China," Trump said at a White House press conference.
Trump has repeatedly called coronavirus the "Chinese virus," and been criticized for doing so, both by Chinese officials, and by others, including former Vice President Joe Biden. Trump has said that term is "not racist at all."
President Donald Trump emphatically blamed China for the coronavirus pandemic Thursday, and again made a point of using the term "Chinese virus."
"The world is paying a very big price for that they did," Trump said, referring to Chinese government officials not sharing information sooner about the coronavirus outbreak when it began there.
"It could have been stopped right where it came from, China," Trump said at a White House press conference.
He argued that American officials would have been able to act faster if China's government had fully shared information about the outbreak, which began around the city of Wuhan.
"It would have been much better if we had known about this a number of months earlier," Trump said.
Two months ago, Trump praised China's response to coronavirus, saying that country "has been working very hard" to contain the virus, and writing in a tweet that, "the United states greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency."
But in recent days, Trump has repeatedly called coronavirus the "Chinese virus," and did so again at the beginning of his press conference.
His habit of doing so has drawn strong criticism from Chinese officials and from a number of U.S. politicians, including former Vice President Joe Biden, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Flanked by members of the Coronavirus Task Force, U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a news briefing on the latest development of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House March 19, 2020 in Washington, DC.
During a press conference on Wednesday, Trump defended his use of that term, saying it was "not racist at all."
"Because it comes from China," Trump said when asked Wednesday why he continued using the term. "That's why."
"I want to be accurate."
China on Thursday for the first time since the outbreak began reported no new domestic cases of coronavirus.
Asked if he believed that report, Trump said, 'I hope it's true."
"But who knows?" Trump said. "I hope it's true."
During an interview on CNBC's "Fast Money" on Wednesday, Hayman Capital Management founder Kyle Bass said that referring to the virus as the "Wuhan flu" or other terms noting its Chinese origin is warranted because of a long-standing practice of popularly naming pandemics after their perceived point of origin, such as the Spanish flu and West Nile virus.
"If we start naming diseases after numbers, we're never going to remember what kind of disease it is," Bass said.
He said the Chinese government has "propagandized" by asking people to refer to current outbreak as COVID-19 or coronavirus.
"We can call it whatever we want to call it. I'm not going to call it what the Chinese government wants me to call it," Bass said.
Earlier Wednesday, when asked about Trump calling coronavirus the Chinese virus, Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of World Health Organization's emergencies program, said: "Viruses no know borders and they don't care about your ethnicity, the color of your skin or how much money you have in the bank."
"So it's really important we be careful in the language we use lest it lead to the profiling of individuals associated with the virus," Ryan said.
Coronavirus live updates: Italy death toll overtakes China's, Trump eyes banning bailout buybacks
© 2019 CNBC LLC. All Rights Reserved. A Division of NBCUniversal
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Re: Trump enters the stage - corona as metaphor
by Meno_ » Thu Mar 19, 2020 10:18 pm
No Empathy, Only Anger
Those seeking to support Trump’s party line need an excuse for their months of denial and deception—and they’ve found it.
DAVID FRUM2:29 PM ET
On the evening of June 21, 1941, American Communists went to bed subject to one party line. At the sun set, Britain was fighting an imperialist war against Germany, about which the United States must remain neutral.
American Communists awoke on June 22, 1941, to discover the party line abruptly changed. Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union. Now the war was a struggle between democracy and fascism, one the United States must immediately join.
The personalities on Fox News executed a similarly abrupt and total pivot on March 13, 2020. The Washington Post produced a stark before/after anthology of the same hosts saying precisely opposite things a few days apart.
Read: How to misinform yourself about the coronavirus
Yet the many weeks of denial have had their effect. An Economist poll released March 18 found that only 38 percent of Fox News viewers took the virus seriously, half as many as among MSNBC and CNN viewers. For Trump’s sake, Fox risked the lives of its own audience.
Like the old Moscow-line Communists, the upholders of the Trump party line now need an excuse for their long history of denial and deception. They insisted it was not Trump’s fault that he, and they, squandered precious weeks and that his administration is suddenly dithering and failing. No, no, Trump's failure was China’s fault! Did video evidence contradict the Trump party line? They accused anyone who recalled the truth of repeating Chinese propaganda.
The Trump party line swaps new lies for old. Whereas once the ideological enforcers called concern over the virus a hoax, now they say that it’s a hoax to remember they said it was a hoax.
What If the President Gets Sick?
The Atlantic has been pulled into the crosshairs of the new lies that replaced the old lies in a retweet by the president himself. In response to an article that documented how China’s official lying had aggravated the crisis in that country, and lamented that Trump’s official lying had done the same here, the president’s Twitter feed repeated a slur that The Atlantic “spews communist China’s propaganda.” This from a man who as a private citizen condoned the Tiananmen Square massacre, and who as president praised the mass-murdering Kim Jong Un as “one in 10,000.”
Trump wants Americans to call the novel coronavirus “the Chinese virus.” Trump’s new slogan aims at two goals.
Peter Wehner: The Trump presidency is over
The first goal is to shift blame away from Trump’s failures and onto China’s. This goal is very unlikely to succeed. We all saw Trump’s catastrophic misjudgments inflict their toll in real time. It was not the Chinese Communist Party that decided to host a cash-for-access party at Mar-a-Lago for Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend on the weekend of March 6–8, when a responsible president would have already begun modeling safe behavior. It was not the Chinese Communist Party that closed trans-Atlantic aviation and made no provision to receive throngs of returning Americans—exposing air travelers to hours of penned-in close contact with visibly sick people. It was not the Chinese Communist Party that urged Americans to buy stocks at the end of February, devastating the savings of anyone foolish enough to trust financial advice from Larry Kudlow, Eric Trump, or this president.
No, Trump won’t succeed in shifting blame.
It’s the second goal that could succeed. By revving up hate among their supporters against China, Trump and Fox can redirect those supporters’ rage from the dangerous target it might otherwise find: the trusted political and media figures who lied and lied and lied to them, exposing those supporters to disease and death for their own crass ends. Hate China, not me!
A president who sincerely mistrusted China would not have to resort to name-calling after the fact. He would have acted decisively, in good time. Instead, Trump relied on China to do his job for him. Trump tweeted on January 24: "China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!” It was Trump and Fox, not the independent media, who repeated Chinese propaganda and put Americans at risk.
A personal note: I was a target of one of Trump’s key media allies on Fox on Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson. Carlson has played an interestingly complex role on the Fox network. On the one hand, he was the first Fox host to speak some measure of truth about the virus, on Monday, March 9, two days after the infection-spreading birthday party at Mar-a-Lago. On the other hand, Carlson is the most explicit of Fox’s race-baiters, the Fox personality furthest from traditional conservatism and nearest to the new alt-right. Carlson is the main voice on Fox for Russian state propaganda, not only about Ukraine but even about such boutique issues as Montenegro. Carlson escapes the dilemma by attributing Trump-administration decisions to everybody except Trump himself, even blaming the Vanity Fair reporter who interviewed him instead of the president of the United States. “If you believe that the current paralysis is all Trump’s fault, you’re absolving an awful lot of guilty parties, maybe including yourself.”
Anyway, the personal bit:
China’s ambassadors are already spreading the lie that the Wuhan virus originated here in America, maybe created in a lab by the Pentagon. Don’t be shocked if at least one American media outlet promotes that idea. Many of them are already parroting the rest of the Chinese Communist Party line. A week ago, aging propagandist David Frum of The Atlantic suggested calling the coronavirus, quote, “The Trump plague” instead of the Wuhan virus.
What’s notable here is not the reference to me, but that Carlson builds his case against America’s independent media by citing something that has not happened: no reputable media organization has repeated China’s claim that the virus originated in the United States. When I tweeted March 9, “Wuhan virus or Trump plague?,” I was referencing not Carlson’s fantasy about what the media might say, but the hard fact that Trump had exposed Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel and other dignitaries to the coronavirus by proceeding with his weekend at Mar-a-Lago. Sadly, Carlson himself was one of those also exposed by Trump’s irresponsibility.
While Trump, Fox, and Carlson try to redirect the anger of the people they betrayed, it’s worth noticing something strikingly absent from the speeches and writings of this administration and its Trump-line network: a word of sympathy or compassion for the thousands of Americans getting sick and dying on this president’s watch, as a result of this president’s neglect of his duties. They’re not capable of such language. They gain power by targeting outsiders. A virus is the ultimate outsider, but it’s not a very satisfying target for rage. Only human beings will do, human beings marked in some way as different: by nationality, by ethnicity, by race.
After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush made an early visit to a Washington mosque. He spoke feelingly against bigotry, and helped curb the rash of hate crimes that erupted in the fall of 2001.
Trump and his party-line media do not do that. They cannot do that. That would take empathy—and empathy might dangerously remind Americans of the tragic cost of Trump’s mismanagement and absent leadership. Rage is all they feel, so rage is all they can express. Hatred fills their hearts, so hatred fills their mouths. The government and the government-line television network are, for the time being, in the charge of broken souls. Those broken souls are breaking a nation.
DAVID FRUM is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020). In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.
{Chinese connection transcended within -bounded political considerations}
Those seeking to support Trump’s party line need an excuse for their months of denial and deception—and they’ve found it.
DAVID FRUM2:29 PM ET
On the evening of June 21, 1941, American Communists went to bed subject to one party line. At the sun set, Britain was fighting an imperialist war against Germany, about which the United States must remain neutral.
American Communists awoke on June 22, 1941, to discover the party line abruptly changed. Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union. Now the war was a struggle between democracy and fascism, one the United States must immediately join.
The personalities on Fox News executed a similarly abrupt and total pivot on March 13, 2020. The Washington Post produced a stark before/after anthology of the same hosts saying precisely opposite things a few days apart.
Read: How to misinform yourself about the coronavirus
Yet the many weeks of denial have had their effect. An Economist poll released March 18 found that only 38 percent of Fox News viewers took the virus seriously, half as many as among MSNBC and CNN viewers. For Trump’s sake, Fox risked the lives of its own audience.
Like the old Moscow-line Communists, the upholders of the Trump party line now need an excuse for their long history of denial and deception. They insisted it was not Trump’s fault that he, and they, squandered precious weeks and that his administration is suddenly dithering and failing. No, no, Trump's failure was China’s fault! Did video evidence contradict the Trump party line? They accused anyone who recalled the truth of repeating Chinese propaganda.
The Trump party line swaps new lies for old. Whereas once the ideological enforcers called concern over the virus a hoax, now they say that it’s a hoax to remember they said it was a hoax.
What If the President Gets Sick?
The Atlantic has been pulled into the crosshairs of the new lies that replaced the old lies in a retweet by the president himself. In response to an article that documented how China’s official lying had aggravated the crisis in that country, and lamented that Trump’s official lying had done the same here, the president’s Twitter feed repeated a slur that The Atlantic “spews communist China’s propaganda.” This from a man who as a private citizen condoned the Tiananmen Square massacre, and who as president praised the mass-murdering Kim Jong Un as “one in 10,000.”
Trump wants Americans to call the novel coronavirus “the Chinese virus.” Trump’s new slogan aims at two goals.
Peter Wehner: The Trump presidency is over
The first goal is to shift blame away from Trump’s failures and onto China’s. This goal is very unlikely to succeed. We all saw Trump’s catastrophic misjudgments inflict their toll in real time. It was not the Chinese Communist Party that decided to host a cash-for-access party at Mar-a-Lago for Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend on the weekend of March 6–8, when a responsible president would have already begun modeling safe behavior. It was not the Chinese Communist Party that closed trans-Atlantic aviation and made no provision to receive throngs of returning Americans—exposing air travelers to hours of penned-in close contact with visibly sick people. It was not the Chinese Communist Party that urged Americans to buy stocks at the end of February, devastating the savings of anyone foolish enough to trust financial advice from Larry Kudlow, Eric Trump, or this president.
No, Trump won’t succeed in shifting blame.
It’s the second goal that could succeed. By revving up hate among their supporters against China, Trump and Fox can redirect those supporters’ rage from the dangerous target it might otherwise find: the trusted political and media figures who lied and lied and lied to them, exposing those supporters to disease and death for their own crass ends. Hate China, not me!
A president who sincerely mistrusted China would not have to resort to name-calling after the fact. He would have acted decisively, in good time. Instead, Trump relied on China to do his job for him. Trump tweeted on January 24: "China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!” It was Trump and Fox, not the independent media, who repeated Chinese propaganda and put Americans at risk.
A personal note: I was a target of one of Trump’s key media allies on Fox on Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson. Carlson has played an interestingly complex role on the Fox network. On the one hand, he was the first Fox host to speak some measure of truth about the virus, on Monday, March 9, two days after the infection-spreading birthday party at Mar-a-Lago. On the other hand, Carlson is the most explicit of Fox’s race-baiters, the Fox personality furthest from traditional conservatism and nearest to the new alt-right. Carlson is the main voice on Fox for Russian state propaganda, not only about Ukraine but even about such boutique issues as Montenegro. Carlson escapes the dilemma by attributing Trump-administration decisions to everybody except Trump himself, even blaming the Vanity Fair reporter who interviewed him instead of the president of the United States. “If you believe that the current paralysis is all Trump’s fault, you’re absolving an awful lot of guilty parties, maybe including yourself.”
Anyway, the personal bit:
China’s ambassadors are already spreading the lie that the Wuhan virus originated here in America, maybe created in a lab by the Pentagon. Don’t be shocked if at least one American media outlet promotes that idea. Many of them are already parroting the rest of the Chinese Communist Party line. A week ago, aging propagandist David Frum of The Atlantic suggested calling the coronavirus, quote, “The Trump plague” instead of the Wuhan virus.
What’s notable here is not the reference to me, but that Carlson builds his case against America’s independent media by citing something that has not happened: no reputable media organization has repeated China’s claim that the virus originated in the United States. When I tweeted March 9, “Wuhan virus or Trump plague?,” I was referencing not Carlson’s fantasy about what the media might say, but the hard fact that Trump had exposed Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel and other dignitaries to the coronavirus by proceeding with his weekend at Mar-a-Lago. Sadly, Carlson himself was one of those also exposed by Trump’s irresponsibility.
While Trump, Fox, and Carlson try to redirect the anger of the people they betrayed, it’s worth noticing something strikingly absent from the speeches and writings of this administration and its Trump-line network: a word of sympathy or compassion for the thousands of Americans getting sick and dying on this president’s watch, as a result of this president’s neglect of his duties. They’re not capable of such language. They gain power by targeting outsiders. A virus is the ultimate outsider, but it’s not a very satisfying target for rage. Only human beings will do, human beings marked in some way as different: by nationality, by ethnicity, by race.
After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush made an early visit to a Washington mosque. He spoke feelingly against bigotry, and helped curb the rash of hate crimes that erupted in the fall of 2001.
Trump and his party-line media do not do that. They cannot do that. That would take empathy—and empathy might dangerously remind Americans of the tragic cost of Trump’s mismanagement and absent leadership. Rage is all they feel, so rage is all they can express. Hatred fills their hearts, so hatred fills their mouths. The government and the government-line television network are, for the time being, in the charge of broken souls. Those broken souls are breaking a nation.
DAVID FRUM is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020). In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.
{Chinese connection transcended within -bounded political considerations}
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- Location: Mysterium Tremendum
Re: Trump enters the stage -Trump primary defenses
by Meno_ » Thu Mar 19, 2020 10:42 pm
The Guardian - Back to home
Coronavirus: Donald Trump steps up attacks on China and the media – video
Donald Trump
Trump sows confusion with claim coronavirus drug will be ready soon
President said malaria drug would be available ‘almost immediately’ but officials say chloroquine must still be tested
Donald Trump has sown fresh confusion about the US government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic by claiming that a therapeutic drug will be available “almost immediately” – only to be contradicted by officials.
In the latest measure to combat the spread of the virus, the State Department on Thursday issued a new alert urging Americans not to travel abroad under any circumstances and to return home if they are already abroad unless they plan to remain overseas
The global level four warning was unprecedented as such alerts are generally reserved for specific countries embroiled in conflict, natural disasters or where Americans face specific risks.
But the significant move came shortly after a worryingly rambling performance at Thursday’s White House press conference, the president asserted that chloroquine, used to combat malaria, had been approved and would be made available by prescription.
Medical workers self-isolate amid fears of bringing coronavirus home
“They’re doing great with the vaccines but there’s still a long process, but the therapies are something we can move on much faster potentially,” he told reporters. “And the treatments that will be able to reduce the severity or duration of the symptoms – make people better.
“Chloroquine, or hydroxychloroquine, this is a common malaria drug. It’s also a drug used for strong arthritis … It’s been around for a long time, so we know if things don’t go as planned it’s not going to kill anybody … It’s shown very, very encouraging early results, and we’re going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately.”
But minutes later, Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, cautioned that in fact chloroquine has not been approved for use against the coronavirus and must still be tested for its effectiveness and safety.
Chloroquine “is already approved, as the president said, for the treatment of malaria as well as arthritis condition”, Hahn pointed out. “That’s a drug that the president has directed us to take a closer look at as to whether an expanded use approach to that could be done to actually see if that benefits patients.
“And again, we want to do that in a setting of a clinical trial, a large pragmatic clinical trial to actually gather that information and answer that question that needs to be asked and answered.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday 10,491 cases of coronavirus, an increase of 3,404 from its previous count. The death toll rose by 53 to 150, it said, the biggest one-day jump so far.
The Trump administration has been widely condemned for its sluggish response, particularly to testing kits and medical equipment. Mike Pence told the briefing, without providing data: “Tens of thousands of tests are being performed every day.” Earlier this month, the CDC said around 2,500 tests were being performed daily.
The vice-president also claimed that companies have hugely increased their production of protective industrial masks and many construction companies are donating their stocks to hospitals. Medical workers have decried the widespread lack of protective equipment.
Trump, who built his political career on his ability to steward the economy, is now fighting to rescue it from a once in a generation catastrophe. Last week the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits rose by 70,000.
Trump signed an aid package, which the Senate approved earlier on Wednesday, that will guarantee free testing, paid sick leave to workers who fall ill, family leave for caregivers and food assistance for those in need.
Asked if he would support the federal government moving to take an equity stake in companies that need bailouts, Trump replied: “I do. I really do.”
He added: “We will be helping the airline industry. We will be helping the cruise ship industry. We probably will be helping the hotel industry … There’s a lot of executive power. If we don’t have to use it, that would be a good thing, not a bad thing.”
Trump also took a swipe at China, where the virus was first reported, musing: “If people would have known about it, could have been stopped in place, it could have been stopped where it came from, China.”
This prompted criticism from his presumptive rival in the presidential election, Democrat Joe Biden. His campaign said in statement: “The reality is, he did know about it and experts spent months trying to prompt Trump into action as he downplayed the growing threat of the virus and praised the Chinese government’s bungled early response – at a time when Vice-President Biden warned him not to take their word about the disease.
“Now, as this crisis explodes on his watch, Trump is desperately lashing out to try to cover up his incompetence and mismanagement.”
In a series of bizarre riffs, Trump described social distancing as a “hot term” now and chastised reporters for sitting too close together. He railed against the media for failing to give him credit for banning travel from China. “I got a [coronavirus] test because you people were driving everybody crazy,” he said.
Trump has been condemned for using the xenophobic term “Chinese virus”. In a profoundly weird finale, a reporter from the pro-Trump One America News Network asked: “Mr President, do you consider the term ‘Chinese food’ to be racist because it is food that originated from China?”
He answered: “I don’t think that’s racist at all.”
Unusually, Trump is not thought to have made contact with the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, the architect of his impeachment last year. Instead he has delegated negotiations to the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, who is said to have established a working relationship with Pelosi.
On Thursday the Senate began work on a $1tn-plus package to stem the economic fallout of the pandemic. The majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said the bill would include direct financial assistance to Americans, lending to key industries including airlines and money for more medical equipment.
“These are not ordinary policies. This is no ordinary time,” McConnell said on the Senate floor. “We have to beat back this virus
© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
Coronavirus: Donald Trump steps up attacks on China and the media – video
Donald Trump
Trump sows confusion with claim coronavirus drug will be ready soon
President said malaria drug would be available ‘almost immediately’ but officials say chloroquine must still be tested
Donald Trump has sown fresh confusion about the US government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic by claiming that a therapeutic drug will be available “almost immediately” – only to be contradicted by officials.
In the latest measure to combat the spread of the virus, the State Department on Thursday issued a new alert urging Americans not to travel abroad under any circumstances and to return home if they are already abroad unless they plan to remain overseas
The global level four warning was unprecedented as such alerts are generally reserved for specific countries embroiled in conflict, natural disasters or where Americans face specific risks.
But the significant move came shortly after a worryingly rambling performance at Thursday’s White House press conference, the president asserted that chloroquine, used to combat malaria, had been approved and would be made available by prescription.
Medical workers self-isolate amid fears of bringing coronavirus home
“They’re doing great with the vaccines but there’s still a long process, but the therapies are something we can move on much faster potentially,” he told reporters. “And the treatments that will be able to reduce the severity or duration of the symptoms – make people better.
“Chloroquine, or hydroxychloroquine, this is a common malaria drug. It’s also a drug used for strong arthritis … It’s been around for a long time, so we know if things don’t go as planned it’s not going to kill anybody … It’s shown very, very encouraging early results, and we’re going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately.”
But minutes later, Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, cautioned that in fact chloroquine has not been approved for use against the coronavirus and must still be tested for its effectiveness and safety.
Chloroquine “is already approved, as the president said, for the treatment of malaria as well as arthritis condition”, Hahn pointed out. “That’s a drug that the president has directed us to take a closer look at as to whether an expanded use approach to that could be done to actually see if that benefits patients.
“And again, we want to do that in a setting of a clinical trial, a large pragmatic clinical trial to actually gather that information and answer that question that needs to be asked and answered.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday 10,491 cases of coronavirus, an increase of 3,404 from its previous count. The death toll rose by 53 to 150, it said, the biggest one-day jump so far.
The Trump administration has been widely condemned for its sluggish response, particularly to testing kits and medical equipment. Mike Pence told the briefing, without providing data: “Tens of thousands of tests are being performed every day.” Earlier this month, the CDC said around 2,500 tests were being performed daily.
The vice-president also claimed that companies have hugely increased their production of protective industrial masks and many construction companies are donating their stocks to hospitals. Medical workers have decried the widespread lack of protective equipment.
Trump, who built his political career on his ability to steward the economy, is now fighting to rescue it from a once in a generation catastrophe. Last week the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits rose by 70,000.
Trump signed an aid package, which the Senate approved earlier on Wednesday, that will guarantee free testing, paid sick leave to workers who fall ill, family leave for caregivers and food assistance for those in need.
Asked if he would support the federal government moving to take an equity stake in companies that need bailouts, Trump replied: “I do. I really do.”
He added: “We will be helping the airline industry. We will be helping the cruise ship industry. We probably will be helping the hotel industry … There’s a lot of executive power. If we don’t have to use it, that would be a good thing, not a bad thing.”
Trump also took a swipe at China, where the virus was first reported, musing: “If people would have known about it, could have been stopped in place, it could have been stopped where it came from, China.”
This prompted criticism from his presumptive rival in the presidential election, Democrat Joe Biden. His campaign said in statement: “The reality is, he did know about it and experts spent months trying to prompt Trump into action as he downplayed the growing threat of the virus and praised the Chinese government’s bungled early response – at a time when Vice-President Biden warned him not to take their word about the disease.
“Now, as this crisis explodes on his watch, Trump is desperately lashing out to try to cover up his incompetence and mismanagement.”
In a series of bizarre riffs, Trump described social distancing as a “hot term” now and chastised reporters for sitting too close together. He railed against the media for failing to give him credit for banning travel from China. “I got a [coronavirus] test because you people were driving everybody crazy,” he said.
Trump has been condemned for using the xenophobic term “Chinese virus”. In a profoundly weird finale, a reporter from the pro-Trump One America News Network asked: “Mr President, do you consider the term ‘Chinese food’ to be racist because it is food that originated from China?”
He answered: “I don’t think that’s racist at all.”
Unusually, Trump is not thought to have made contact with the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, the architect of his impeachment last year. Instead he has delegated negotiations to the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, who is said to have established a working relationship with Pelosi.
On Thursday the Senate began work on a $1tn-plus package to stem the economic fallout of the pandemic. The majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said the bill would include direct financial assistance to Americans, lending to key industries including airlines and money for more medical equipment.
“These are not ordinary policies. This is no ordinary time,” McConnell said on the Senate floor. “We have to beat back this virus
© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
- Meno_
- breathless
- Posts: 8339
- Joined: Tue Dec 08, 2015 2:39 am
- Location: Mysterium Tremendum
Re: Trump enters the stage - Trumpocalypse? or witchunt?
by Meno_ » Fri Mar 20, 2020 4:23 am
No Empathy, Only Anger
Those seeking to support Trump’s party line need an excuse for their months of denial and deception—and they’ve found it.
On the evening of June 21, 1941, American Communists went to bed subject to one party line. At the sun set, Britain was fighting an imperialist war against Germany, about which the United States must remain neutral.
American Communists awoke on June 22, 1941, to discover the party line abruptly changed. Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union. Now the war was a struggle between democracy and fascism, one the United States must immediately join.
The personalities on Fox News executed a similarly abrupt and total pivot on March 13, 2020. The Washington Post produced a stark before/after anthology of the same hosts saying precisely opposite things a few days apart.
Read: How to misinform yourself about the coronavirus
Yet the many weeks of denial have had their effect. An Economist poll released March 18 found that only 38 percent of Fox News viewers took the virus seriously, half as many as among MSNBC and CNN viewers. For Trump’s sake, Fox risked the lives of its own audience.
Like the old Moscow-line Communists, the upholders of the Trump party line now need an excuse for their long history of denial and deception. They insisted it was not Trump’s fault that he, and they, squandered precious weeks and that his administration is suddenly dithering and failing. No, no, Trump's failure was China’s fault! Did video evidence contradict the Trump party line? They accused anyone who recalled the truth of repeating Chinese propaganda.
The Trump party line swaps new lies for old. Whereas once the ideological enforcers called concern over the virus a hoax, now they say that it’s a hoax to remember they said it was a hoax.
Trump Is Counting on the Supreme Court to Save Him
The Atlantic has been pulled into the crosshairs of the new lies that replaced the old lies in a retweet by the president himself. In response to an article that documented how China’s official lying had aggravated the crisis in that country, and lamented that Trump’s official lying had done the same here, the president’s Twitter feed repeated a slur that The Atlantic “spews communist China’s propaganda.” This from a man who as a private citizen condoned the Tiananmen Square massacre, and who as president praised the mass-murdering Kim Jong Un as “one in 10,000.”
Trump wants Americans to call the novel coronavirus “the Chinese virus.” Trump’s new slogan aims at two goals.
Peter Wehner: The Trump presidency is over
The first goal is to shift blame away from Trump’s failures and onto China’s. This goal is very unlikely to succeed. We all saw Trump’s catastrophic misjudgments inflict their toll in real time. It was not the Chinese Communist Party that decided to host a cash-for-access party at Mar-a-Lago for Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend on the weekend of March 6–8, when a responsible president would have already begun modeling safe behavior. It was not the Chinese Communist Party that closed trans-Atlantic aviation and made no provision to receive throngs of returning Americans—exposing air travelers to hours of penned-in close contact with visibly sick people. It was not the Chinese Communist Party that urged Americans to buy stocks at the end of February, devastating the savings of anyone foolish enough to trust financial advice from Larry Kudlow, Eric Trump, or this president.
No, Trump won’t succeed in shifting blame.
It’s the second goal that could succeed. By revving up hate among their supporters against China, Trump and Fox can redirect those supporters’ rage from the dangerous target it might otherwise find: the trusted political and media figures who lied and lied and lied to them, exposing those supporters to disease and death for their own crass ends. Hate China, not me!
A president who sincerely mistrusted China would not have to resort to name-calling after the fact. He would have acted decisively, in good time. Instead, Trump relied on China to do his job for him. Trump tweeted on January 24: "China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!” It was Trump and Fox, not the independent media, who repeated Chinese propaganda and put Americans at risk.
A personal note: I was a target of one of Trump’s key media allies on Fox on Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson. Carlson has played an interestingly complex role on the Fox network. On the one hand, he was the first Fox host to speak some measure of truth about the virus, on Monday, March 9, two days after the infection-spreading birthday party at Mar-a-Lago. On the other hand, Carlson is the most explicit of Fox’s race-baiters, the Fox personality furthest from traditional conservatism and nearest to the new alt-right. Carlson is the main voice on Fox for Russian state propaganda, not only about Ukraine but even about such boutique issues as Montenegro. Carlson escapes the dilemma by attributing Trump-administration decisions to everybody except Trump himself, even blaming the Vanity Fair reporter who interviewed him instead of the president of the United States. “If you believe that the current paralysis is all Trump’s fault, you’re absolving an awful lot of guilty parties, maybe including yourself.”
Anyway, the personal bit:
China’s ambassadors are already spreading the lie that the Wuhan virus originated here in America, maybe created in a lab by the Pentagon. Don’t be shocked if at least one American media outlet promotes that idea. Many of them are already parroting the rest of the Chinese Communist Party line. A week ago, aging propagandist David Frum of The Atlantic suggested calling the coronavirus, quote, “The Trump plague” instead of the Wuhan virus.
What’s notable here is not the reference to me, but that Carlson builds his case against America’s independent media by citing something that has not happened: no reputable media organization has repeated China’s claim that the virus originated in the United States. When I tweeted March 9, “Wuhan virus or Trump plague?,” I was referencing not Carlson’s fantasy about what the media might say, but the hard fact that Trump had exposed Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel and other dignitaries to the coronavirus by proceeding with his weekend at Mar-a-Lago. Sadly, Carlson himself was one of those also exposed by Trump’s irresponsibility.
Read: This is how Donald Trump will be remembered
While Trump, Fox, and Carlson try to redirect the anger of the people they betrayed, it’s worth noticing something strikingly absent from the speeches and writings of this administration and its Trump-line network: a word of sympathy or compassion for the thousands of Americans getting sick and dying on this president’s watch, as a result of this president’s neglect of his duties. They’re not capable of such language. They gain power by targeting outsiders. A virus is the ultimate outsider, but it’s not a very satisfying target for rage. Only human beings will do, human beings marked in some way as different: by nationality, by ethnicity, by race.
After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush made an early visit to a Washington mosque. He spoke feelingly against bigotry, and helped curb the rash of hate crimes that erupted in the fall of 2001.
Trump and his party-line media do not do that. They cannot do that. That would take empathy—and empathy might dangerously remind Americans of the tragic cost of Trump’s mismanagement and absent leadership. Rage is all they feel, so rage is all they can express. Hatred fills their hearts, so hatred fills their mouths. The government and the government-line television network are, for the time being, in the charge of broken souls. Those broken souls are breaking a nation.
DAVID FRUM is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse .
>>>>><<>>>>><<<<>>>>>><<<<<<>>>>>>><<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>?
The New York Times
Opinion
Of Course Trump Deserves Blame for the Coronavirus Crisis
Last Friday, Representative Andy Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, wrote a letter signed by 56 colleagues urging Donald Trump to invoke a law called the Defense Production Act in the fight against coronavirus. Passed during the Korean War in 1950, the law lets the president direct manufacturers to make supplies necessary for national security. “It very clearly allows the president to use the same powers for a public health emergency,” Levin told me.
At a time when the coronavirus pandemic is leading to a critical shortage of tests, ventilators, respirators, I.C.U. beds and protective gear for medical professionals, it seemed like an obvious move. “He has the power to get what we need,” said Levin. “And this is tens and hundreds of thousands of lives at stake in real time here.”
Finally, on Wednesday, Trump invoked the law, and it briefly looked as if things were going to get moving. But later that day, he tweeted that he’s holding off on actually using the powers the law gives him: “I only signed the Defense Production Act to combat the Chinese Virus should we need to invoke it in a worst case scenario in the future. Hopefully there will be no need, but we are all in this TOGETHER!”
Levin was incredulous. “The worst-case scenario is right now,” he said, adding: “This is something that is completely beyond partisanship. It’s an all-hands-on-deck crisis.”
With the world plunged into the most terrifying emergency in living memory, some people, and not just right-wing hacks, are saying that now is not the time to talk about the malfeasance of Donald Trump.
Barack Obama’s former political guru David Axelrod, commenting on a planned Democratic ad blitz hitting Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, tweeted that “now doesn’t seem the moment for negative ads.” On Wednesday I appeared on MSNBC with Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, who acknowledged that Trump made a grave mistake in initially downplaying the severity of the coronavirus. But, Hogan said, “We can’t waste a lot of time, you know, finger-pointing and talking about what mistakes the president made or anybody made in Washington. Let’s talk about what we can do right now.”
I understand this impulse. Those in the trenches fighting the pandemic can’t afford to waste time inveighing against presidential inadequacy. The rest of us are dealing with extraordinary personal upheaval and ever-present fear. In the four years that Donald Trump has dominated the national conversation, he’s gnawed away at the sanity of those of us who see him for what he is. In this new, even more dystopian era of coronavirus, it would be nice to be furloughed from having to think about him.
But while the calamity we are experiencing is not Trump’s doing, his dishonesty and incompetence have exacerbated it, and continue to do so. To point this out is not to dwell on the past but to confront the scale of our present crisis. Trump has been giving daily televised briefings in which he overpromises and spreads misinformation. He makes bad decisions and reverses himself only under the pressure of bad press. That makes frankness about his catastrophic ineptitude imperative.
Listen to our podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt
Because of Trump’s disdain for expertise and his obsession with loyalty, we entered this crisis with a government from which many competent professionals have been purged, and whose political appointees tend to be lackeys and mediocrities.
As has been widely reported, Trump’s administration dissolved the National Security Council’s global health security office, which was responsible for planning for disease outbreaks. “Some of the people we cut, they haven’t been used for many, many years, and if we ever need them we can get them very quickly and rather than spending the money,” he said at a briefing last month.
On Thursday The Times reported that Trump’s own Department of Health and Human Services ran a series of simulations last year about a pandemic respiratory virus originating in China that ultimately infected 110 million Americans. The exercise “drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.” Yet there’s little evidence of a serious push to increase America’s readiness.
When this coronavirus emerged in China, Trump’s instinct was to treat it as a public relations problem, insisting repeatedly that it would “go away.” South Korea and the United States announced their first coronavirus cases at around the same time; while South Korea ramped up the production of tests, the United States dithered. As Reuters reported, South Korea, a country of around 51 million, has tested 290,000 people. In the United States, a country of 330 million, only 60,000 tests had been conducted as of Tuesday.
Trump’s decision to ban some travel from Europe might have made sense, but the mistake-ridden Oval Office address announcing the move caused mass panic among Americans abroad. No one made adequate preparations to get hordes of travelers returning from coronavirus hot zones through security quickly, leading to crowds of people waiting as long as seven hours at some airports, a situation that seemed bound to spread infections.
Steven Teles is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and a political science professor at Johns Hopkins, where he teaches a class on policy disasters. He points out that most government decisions never reach the president’s desk, but that people in the bureaucracy tend to respond to the president’s priorities.
“What an executive can do is to inject energy and a general sense of direction to people who are going to make decisions without them pushing them all the way up the chain of command,” Teles told me. He suspects that when books are finally written about this debacle, a big part of the story will be that much of “the government didn’t get sufficiently energized early enough because there wasn’t a signal from the top.”
There still isn’t. Trump spent his news conference on Thursday attacking the media and putting the onus on governors to acquire medical supplies. “The federal government’s not supposed to be out there buying vast amounts of items and then shipping, you know, we’re not a shipping clerk,” he said.
He also touted an anti-malarial drug, chloroquine, saying that it “was approved very, very quickly and it’s now approved by prescription.” In fact, the F.D.A. has not approved chloroquine for treating Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Though doctors can prescribe it off label, it’s not yet established that the drug works for this purpose.
It can become tedious to dwell on the fact that the president is a dangerous and ignorant narcissist who has utterly failed as an executive, leaving state governments on their own to confront a generational cataclysm. But no one should ever forget it.
Soon, even if the pandemic is still raging, there will be an election, and the public will be asked to render a verdict on Trump’s leadership. Being clear that people are suffering and dying needlessly because the president can’t do his job isn’t looking backward. It’s the only way to move forward.
© 2020 The New York Times Company
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{The ironic twist between the latest Gallup pole , finding a favorable view of Trump's handling of the epidemic, stands in stark contrast with the opposite descent opinion:}
IDEAS
Donald Trump’s Cult of Personality Did This
The autocratic political culture that has propped up the Trump administration has left the nation entirely unprepared for an economic and public-health calamity.
REUTERS
The president of the United States is a menace to public health.
I don’t mean that I disagree with him on policy, although I do. I don’t mean that I abhor the president’s expressed bigotry toward religious and ethnic minorities, although that is also true. I am not referring to Donald Trump’s efforts to corrupt the Justice Department, shield his criminal associates from legal peril, or funnel taxpayer money to his tacky hotels and golf courses, although all of these things are reason enough to oppose the president.
Peter Wehner: The Trump presidency is over
What I am referring to is the fact that, soon after the coronavirus outbreak emerged in China, the rest of the world began to regard it as a threat to public health, while Trump has seen it as a public-relations problem. Trump’s primary method of dealing with public-relations problems is to exert the full force of the authoritarian cult of personality that surrounds him to deny that a problem even exists. This approach has paid political dividends for the Republican Party, in the form of judicial appointments, tax cuts for the wealthy, and a rapid erosion of the rule of law. But applied to the deadly pandemic now sweeping the planet, all it has done is exacerbate the inevitable public-health crisis, while leaving both the federal government and the entire swath of the country that hangs on his every word unprepared for the catastrophe now unfolding in the United States. The cardinal belief of Trumpism is that loyalty to Trump is loyalty to the country, and that equation leaves no room for the public interest.
Neither the tide of pestilence sweeping the nation nor the economic calamity that will follow was inevitable. They are the predictable outcomes of the president’s authoritarian instincts, his obvious incompetence, and the propaganda apparatus that has shielded him from accountability by ensuring that the public is blinded to his role in the scale of this disaster.
Fear of a Counterrevolution
Trump’s first public remarks on the coronavirus came during an interview with the CNBC reporter Joe Kernen on January 22. Kernen asked, “Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?” To which Trump replied, “No. Not at all. And—we’re—we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s—going to be just fine.” In February, he falsely declared that “we are very close to a vaccine,” and that “within a couple of days [the number of cases] is going to be down to close to zero.” In early March, he was still urging Americans to ignore the issue, saying, “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”
One might argue in the president’s defense that panic serves no one. It is important, in fact, that political leaders urge calm in the face of a crisis, even as they prepare for the worst.
Kori Schake: The damage that ‘America First’ has done
Except Trump was not preparing. He was consciously contradicting his administration’s own public-health officials at the time. In February, while Trump was lying to the public about being “close to a vaccine” and that cases “were going to be down to close to zero,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official Nancy Messonnier was telling reporters that Americans should get ready for “significant disruption to our lives.” The day after Trump told the public that “it will go away,” Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified to Congress that “we will see more cases, and things will get worse than they are right now.” Trump wasn’t trying to maintain firm resolve in the face of a crisis. He was lying to the public about the dangers it was facing in order to preserve his public standing.
Nor were the president’s dismissals of the dangers posed by the coronavirus an attempt to buy time for the federal government to appropriately respond. Trump has dealt with the pandemic with all the competence you would expect from someone whose main experience is pretending to be a tough businessman on television. The administration failed to ramp up testing capacity in time to determine the scope of infections, while lying to the public that “millions of tests” were available; it failed to mobilize federal resources such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Disaster Medical System, or the Army Corps of Engineers. Trump declared a state of emergency only on March 13, reportedly concerned that doing so earlier “could hamper his narrative that the coronavirus is similar to the seasonal flu and could further agitate Wall Street.” As of Tuesday, according to The New York Times, the Army Corps of Engineers was “still awaiting orders.”
In the meantime, doctors, nurses, and EMTs are getting sick. Medical workers are running out of face masks and gloves. The United States does not have enough ventilators for critically ill patients who need them. States lack sufficient testing capacity to measure the scale of the outbreak. Emergency rooms are overwhelmed. Hospitals are running out of beds. The president is tweeting praise of himself.
Nor has the president’s party evinced any greater sense of civic obligation than the president himself. Instead, as Trump downplayed the potential consequences of an outbreak, did nothing to prepare the federal government to curtail one, lied to the public about the availability of coronavirus tests, falsely claimed that the number of cases was going down, and misled the public about measures being taken to contain new infections, Republicans were echoing the servile praise of conservative media outlets and Trump officials, even as they quietly understood that the nation was about to be overwhelmed by a global pandemic, having been briefed in late January about the seriousness of the contagion. But instead of informing their own constituents about the danger they were in, several allegedly attempted to profiteer off of a pandemic by selling stocks right before one of the biggest Wall Street market crashes in American history. Properly warning the public of impending catastrophe might have drawn condemnation from the president, so they watched the cataclysm silently while turning a profit.
Derek Thompson: The coronavirus will supercharge American inequality
Other nations not led by Trump have also struggled to restrain the spread of the coronavirus. But the United States had advance notice of how bad the pandemic would get not just from China, but from Italy, where the potential severity was apparent in late February. South Korea, whose first case of the coronavirus was detected in late January, around the same time as the first case in the United States, has already contained its own outbreak by rapidly developing and implementing a widespread testing regime. Trump spent the intervening weeks trying to pump stocks and lying to the public about having everything under control, while the conservative propaganda apparatus that surrounds him did the same. Even public-health officials were forced to serve two masters, having to juggle their responsibilities coping with the widening coronavirus pandemic while maintaining a Juche-like commitment to lavishing the president with praise.
The bizarre ritual of public-health officials fawning over the president during coronavirus briefings is not some trivial matter. In fact, it illustrates how democratic backsliding during the Trump administration has damaged the federal government’s ability to respond to emergencies and the credibility of its public statements on matters of life and death. Authoritarian leaders prize loyalty over expertise, and part of the way such leaders determine loyalty is through demanding sycophantic praise from underlings, smoking out those unwilling to bend the knee. This is how you end up with the president’s unqualified, pampered son-in-law, his foggy brain addled by Fox News propaganda, using his influence to undermine officials trying to turn back the outbreak.
A pandemic is precisely the kind of situation that shows why it is important to have a government staffed by qualified civil servants, rather than whimpering toadies who can’t deliver bad news to a mercurial president whose main priority is protecting himself. At least part of the federal government’s delayed response, Politico reported, is because Trump “rewards those underlings who tell him what he wants to hear while shunning those who deliver bad news.” The president’s fragile ego is proving deadly.
Trump is hardly the first politician to lie about the scope of a problem to preserve his public image. The distinction here is that, having decided that he would downplay the dangers of the coronavirus, the authoritarian cult of personality built up around the president and maintained by conservative media reverently amplified the president’s messaging. The conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, to whom Trump recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom, told his listeners that “this virus is the common cold.” The Fox News host Sean Hannity proclaimed that the president’s critics were attempting to “bludgeon Trump with this new hoax,” while his colleague Pete Hegseth told viewers, “I feel like the more I learn about this, the less there is to worry about.” The network aired a parade of medical experts offering bogus health advice about the coronavirus, including the claim that the “worst-case scenario” is that “it could be the flu.” Republican legislators appeared on the network urging Americans to defy federal health officials’ advice to avoid large public gatherings and work from home if possible, with Representative Devin Nunes of California telling Fox News on March 15, “It’s a great time to just go out, go to a local restaurant,” or “go to your local pub.”
Read: Red and blue America are experiencing the same pandemic
Trump and the conservative media apparatus have had the predictable impact of persuading audiences not to take health officials’ warnings seriously, viewing them as just another liberal “hoax.” One pastor in Arkansas told The Washington Post that “half of his church is ready to lick the floor, to prove there’s no actual virus,” adding that “in your more politically conservative regions, closing is not interpreted as caring for you. It’s interpreted as liberalism, or buying into the hype.”
Conservatives have argued that it is the mainstream media’s fault for being so relentlessly negative about the president. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tweeted that “one of the dangerous consequences of having a totally dishonest left wing news media was that most Americans discounted their hysteria as phony.” Gingrich’s attempted indictment of the mainstream press is a backhanded acknowledgement that the conservative media do not conceive of their job as informing the public.
It’s true that the media often make mistakes; they are, after all, made up of human beings. Media conventions can be subverted, facts can be misunderstood or misreported, sources can mislead, reporters can succumb to confirmation bias, and editors can fail to see the big picture. For the most part, though, these outlets are trying their best to inform the public.
Trumpist media outlets, by contrast, have created a bubble of unreality where nothing but the most effusive praise of Trump is acceptable, where anyone who disagrees with or criticizes the president is part of a grand conspiracy to destroy him, and where the only facts that exist are those that reflect well on the president. Many conservatives don’t distrust the mainstream media because they are biased; they distrust the media because the media do not tell them what they want to hear, and their own outlets have trained them to believe that the truth can only be exactly what they want to hear.
Nor can mainstream media bias explain why many Trumpist media outlets, supposedly so much more committed to the truth than their mainstream counterparts, consciously endangered their audience by disregarding and dismissing public-health warnings. Fox News told its audience that the coronavirus was a minor problem their heroic leader was quickly resolving, while quietly having its staff follow the very precautions its hosts were ridiculing on air. The mainstream press didn’t force Fox News to do that.
The coronavirus pandemic provides a rigorous case study in the priorities of most of the conservative press: Faced with a choice between informing their own audiences about dire threats to public health and propping up a Republican president, they chose the latter, because informing the public is not their job. The job of outlets like Fox News is to ensure that the conservative masses believe that their leader is infallible, even if it causes them tremendous personal harm.
As cases began flooding into hospitals and medical facilities all over the country, the president shifted his tone, finally recognizing the reality of the pandemic and the economic catastrophe that threatens both the health and livelihoods of millions of Americans. On Tuesday, Trump declared that “this is a pandemic,” and that “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” Having denied that the coronavirus was a major issue for months, the president sought to recast himself as an oracle, and conservative media followed suit, shifting their tone from downplaying the severity of the pandemic to praising the heroic efforts of the president to address it.
Wajahat Ali: Where are the masks?
Predictably, Trump drew praise from some cable-news personalities for doing a passable job of portraying a president on television, even as the administration’s failures continued to exacerbate the personal and economic toll of the pandemic. This is somewhat understandable; Americans want to believe that their leaders are competent, engaged, and concerned about their well-being. Recognizing that the presidency is occupied by an incompetent narcissist whose major life accomplishment is parlaying an inherited fortune into reality-show celebrity is rather less comforting, but it is the world we live in.
Yet the incentives for the president and the conservative media have not changed. All that has changed is that it is now in the president’s personal and political interest to cushion the terrible impact of the coronavirus pandemic. This is a positive development as far as it goes, in that, for the moment, the national interest and Trump’s interests are one and the same. But Trump’s authoritarian cult of personality persists, and where maintaining the image of the infallible leader conflicts with the needs of Americans affected by the pandemic, the former will take precedence. The president is a relentless scammer at heart, and even during a pandemic he will attempt to get what he wants while providing as little as possible in return, as though he were trying to save cash by stiffing a contractor.
Having failed to will the coronavirus pandemic into nonexistence, the president, his party, and his propaganda machine will seek to rewrite history to render the false impression that Trump was aware of the threat of the pandemic all along, and that he acted decisively to address it. The truth is that, in the weeks and months Trump and the conservative press were busy pumping stocks, juking stats, and misleading the public, valuable time to prepare for the pandemic was lost. Americans, both those who get sick and those whose workplaces and businesses will close as a result, will suffer dearly.
A global pandemic would have been a challenge for any administration, for any government. But the scale of this tragedy was not inevitable. America’s shuttered storefronts, overflowing emergency rooms, and shattered families are the toxic fruit of a political culture in which Donald Trump’s image, as the avatar of the will of the people, matters more than actual people do.
ADAM SERWER is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Copyright © 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved
{ But then again, the purpose of the purported coming cash outlays, probably rests more on political considerations then acts of human kindness, causing oh luv opinion turn on a whim}
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Another tirade against media;:
Trump viciously attacks NBC News reporter in extended rant after being asked for message to Americans worried about coronavirus
New York(CNN Business)In an extraordinary exchange on Friday, President Donald Trump viciously attacked an NBC News reporter who asked what his message would be to Americans who are frightened by the coronavirus pandemic that is spreading across the country.
The exchange, which occurred at the White House's daily coronavirus task force briefing, began when NBC News reporter Peter Alexander asked Trump whether he was giving Americans "false hope" by touting unproven coronavirus drugs.
Analysis: Trump acts like he wants the US press to be more like China's
Toward the end of the exchange, Alexander cited the latest pandemic statistics showing thousands of Americans are now infected and millions are scared.
Alexander asked, "What do you say to Americans who are scared?"
Trump, shaking his head, ripped into Alexander in response.
"I say that you are a terrible reporter," Trump replied. "That's what I say."
The President proceeded to launch into an extended rant against Alexander, saying he asked a "nasty question" and assailing NBC and its parent company, Comcast.
"You're doing sensationalism," Trump charged. "And the same with NBC and Comcast. I don't call it Comcast. I call it 'Con-Cast.'"
"Let me just tell you something," Trump added. "That's really bad reporting. And you ought to get back to reporting instead of sensationalism."
Moments later, Kaitlan Collins, a White House correspondent for CNN, asked Trump if it was appropriate to embark on tirades against members of the news media during a public health crisis.
"You see yourself as a wartime President right now, leading the country through a pandemic that we are experiencing," Collins noted. "Do you think going off on Peter, going off on a network is appropriate when the country is going through something like this?"
Trump defended his verbal assault on Alexander, saying he's "not a good journalist" and launching into another rant against him.
"Coming together is much harder when we have dishonest journalists," Trump said.
Alexander said in a statement that he was "trying to provide the president an opportunity to reassure the millions of Americans, members of my own family and my neighbors and my community and plenty of people sitting at home, this was his opportunity to do that, to provide a positive or uplifting message. Instead, you saw the president's answer to that question right now."
"The bottom line is, this is a president whose experiences in life are very different than most Americans across this country right now," Alexander said. "Not a person who likely worries about finances or had, not a person who in the course of his life is worried about his future, not a person who is worried about where to find a paycheck for his bills or for his rent and as evidenced by the president suggesting that an opportunity to provide for American some reassurance about how they should feel right now, the president instead took it out on me."
Alexander's NBC News colleague and host of "Meet the Press" weighed on the matter, praising him for his "professionalism."
"I wish people on the on the other side of the podium had the same professionalism as well, so thank you, Peter," Todd said.
After striking a somber tone earlier in the week, Trump in recent days has returned to his usual attacks against the press.
At Thursday's coronavirus press briefing, Trump smeared The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
"They're very dishonest," Trump claimed.
Trump then praised a far-right media outlet, saying it is "very good" and noting, "They treat me very nicely."
The right-wing personality from that media outlet falsely said major newsrooms had "teamed up" with the Chinese Communist Party to attack Trump.
The person then asked, "Is it alarming that major media players that just oppose you are consistently siding with foreign state propaganda, Islamic radicals and Latin gangs and cartels?"
Instead of rebuking the right-wing personality for the question, Trump on Thursday boasted that he had canceled the White House's subscriptions to the country's major newspapers.
"It amazes me when I read the things that I read," Trump said Thursday. "It amazes me when I read The Wall Street Journal which is so negative and The New York Times, I barely read it. We don't distribute it in the White House, and the same with The Washington Post.
© 2020 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Propaganda- the age old machine
The New York Times
Opinion
Call Trump’s News Conferences What They Are: Propaganda
Then contrast them with the leadership shown by Andrew Cuomo, Justin Trudeau and Angela Merkel.
President Trump at the coronavirus briefing at the White House on Friday.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
In a time of global emergency, we need calm, directness and, above all, hard facts. Only the opposite is on offer from the Trump White House. It is therefore time to call the president’s news conferences for what they are: propaganda.
We may as well be watching newsreels approved by the Soviet Politburo. We’re witnessing the falsification of history in real time. When Donald Trump, under the guise of social distancing, told the White House press corps on Thursday that he ought to get rid of 75 to 80 percent of them — reserving the privilege only for those he liked — it may have been chilling, but it wasn’t surprising. He wants to thin out their ranks until there’s only Pravda in the room.
Sometimes, I stare at Deborah Birx during these briefings and I wonder if she understands that this is the footage historians will be looking at 100 years from now — the president rambling on incoherently, vainly, angrily, deceitfully, while she watches, her face stiff with the strangled horror of a bride enduring an inappropriate toast.
If the public wants factual news briefings, they need to tune in to those who are giving them: Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, whose addresses appear with English subtitles on Deutsche Welle. They should start following the many civic-minded epidemiologists and virologists and contagion experts on Twitter, like Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch and Yale’s Nicholas Christakis, whose threads have been invaluable primers in a time of awful confusion.
These are people with a high tolerance for uncertainty. It’s the president’s incapacity to tolerate it — combined with his bottomless need to self-flatter and preserve his political power — that leads, so often, to his spectacular fits of deception and misdirection. At his Thursday news conference, a discussion of chloroquine and other experimental therapies formed the core of his remarks, when those drugs and therapies are untested and unproven and, in some cases, won’t be ready for several months, as NBC’s Peter Alexander pointed out the following day.
“What do you say to Americans who are scared?” Alexander pressed.
“I say that you’re a terrible reporter,” Trump answered.
Only a liar — and a weak man with delusions of competence — would be so unnerved by the facts.
Compare this to Cuomo, who takes questions at his news conferences calmly and systematically — and, more to the point, has a substantive response when asked the same questions about anxiety. He hears it. He relates to it. He says it’s real.
“People are in a small apartment, they’re in a house, they’re worried, they’re anxious. Just, be mindful of that,” the governor said Friday. “Those three-word sentences can make all the difference: ‘I miss you.’ ‘I love you.’ ‘I’m thinking about you.’ ‘I wish I was there with you.’ ‘I’m sorry you’re going through this.’ ‘I’m sorry we’re going through this.’”
On Friday, Cuomo said something else that was quite striking, as he was issuing his executive order for nonessential workers in New York to stay home, other than to run errands or exercise outside. “If someone wants to blame someone or complain about someone, blame me,” he said. “There is no one else who is responsible for this decision.”
Cuomo is nothing if not politically shrewd. He knows full well how this comment compares to Mr. Trump’s “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
But telling the media that they’re peddling fake news is straight from the playbook of the political gangsters of the last century. So many of Trump’s moves are.
Having each of his cabinet members fulsomely thank him for his leadership and congratulate him for his “farsightedness” before each of their remarks: Check. Making sure each one stays on a message, even if that message has nothing to do with his or her purview: Check.
(Alex Azar may have been the worst offender, speaking Friday to the urgency of closing the southern border. He’s the secretary of health and human services, not homeland security. Yet he was parroting Trump’s message about the coronavirus, one specifically tailored to the base: We’re keeping brown immigrants from spreading it.)
How about Orwellian doublespeak? Ooooooh, check. Trump and his team are continually deploying words and phrases that disguise a reality that suggests the opposite. Vice President Mike Pence talks about a “strong and seamless” partnership with the states, when at the same time Mr. Trump is trolling the states, telling Cuomo to get his own respirators.
Pence speaks relentlessly of a “whole-of-government approach,” when in fact the government is hollowed out — defunded to fight pandemics, denuded of experts — and broken in shards, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sidelined in this fight, and the president’s task force now mutely competing with a shadow group run by the president’s son-in-law.
On Friday, Trump said he cherished journalism, and his secretary of state complained about disinformation on Twitter. There are simply too many two-plus-two-is-five moments to count.
But most dangerous of all is Trump’s insistence that things are fine, or will be shortly, that they’ll be stronger and better and greater than ever. We don’t have any evidence that this is true, and the president finds any suggestion to the contrary quite rude. When a journalist pointed out to him on Thursday that the economy had all but ground to a halt, Trump cut him off.
“What’s the rest of your question?” he snapped. “We know that. Everybody in the room knows that.”
Here’s the truth: Things might be hard — unfathomably hard — for months, perhaps even north of a year. Anyone who’s reading or listening to other sources of news besides the president knows that. It takes sensitivity and strength and intelligence to speak truthfully to the public about imminent hardship, the prospect of enduring pain.
So I listen to Justin Trudeau, a sci-fi experience, a dispatch from an alternate universe that prioritizes the needs and anxieties of the middle class. He speaks about immediate concerns: The kids will be all right. There’ll be food. You won’t be booted out of your home. Not how our president is speaking right now, but it’s a road map for the Democratic presidential nominee in 2020 to follow.
And I listen to Cuomo, who says the same thing. His news conference on Friday was about the practical things, knowing the entire state — country, globe — had just taken a precipitous slide down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with food, shelter and safety now topmost on many people’s minds. No one can evict you for 90 days. We’re getting hospital beds. We’re recruiting doctors and nurses in training to fight this fight, and we’re coaxing medical professionals out of retirement.
Then he spoke from the heart. One of his daughters was in quarantine. “To tell you the truth, I had some of the best conversations with her that I’ve ever had,” Cuomo said. She was alone for two weeks. “We talked about things in depth that we didn’t have time to talk about in the past,” he continued, “or we didn’t have the courage or the strength to talk about in the past — feelings I had, about mistakes I had made along the way that I wanted to express my regret and talk through with her.”
He was expressing fallibility. Imagine that.
March 21, 2020
© 2020 The New York Times Company
{However he is only an actor playing a difficult script of catch-22. He is The Fall Guy, that is becoming more and more convincing.}
Those seeking to support Trump’s party line need an excuse for their months of denial and deception—and they’ve found it.
On the evening of June 21, 1941, American Communists went to bed subject to one party line. At the sun set, Britain was fighting an imperialist war against Germany, about which the United States must remain neutral.
American Communists awoke on June 22, 1941, to discover the party line abruptly changed. Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union. Now the war was a struggle between democracy and fascism, one the United States must immediately join.
The personalities on Fox News executed a similarly abrupt and total pivot on March 13, 2020. The Washington Post produced a stark before/after anthology of the same hosts saying precisely opposite things a few days apart.
Read: How to misinform yourself about the coronavirus
Yet the many weeks of denial have had their effect. An Economist poll released March 18 found that only 38 percent of Fox News viewers took the virus seriously, half as many as among MSNBC and CNN viewers. For Trump’s sake, Fox risked the lives of its own audience.
Like the old Moscow-line Communists, the upholders of the Trump party line now need an excuse for their long history of denial and deception. They insisted it was not Trump’s fault that he, and they, squandered precious weeks and that his administration is suddenly dithering and failing. No, no, Trump's failure was China’s fault! Did video evidence contradict the Trump party line? They accused anyone who recalled the truth of repeating Chinese propaganda.
The Trump party line swaps new lies for old. Whereas once the ideological enforcers called concern over the virus a hoax, now they say that it’s a hoax to remember they said it was a hoax.
Trump Is Counting on the Supreme Court to Save Him
The Atlantic has been pulled into the crosshairs of the new lies that replaced the old lies in a retweet by the president himself. In response to an article that documented how China’s official lying had aggravated the crisis in that country, and lamented that Trump’s official lying had done the same here, the president’s Twitter feed repeated a slur that The Atlantic “spews communist China’s propaganda.” This from a man who as a private citizen condoned the Tiananmen Square massacre, and who as president praised the mass-murdering Kim Jong Un as “one in 10,000.”
Trump wants Americans to call the novel coronavirus “the Chinese virus.” Trump’s new slogan aims at two goals.
Peter Wehner: The Trump presidency is over
The first goal is to shift blame away from Trump’s failures and onto China’s. This goal is very unlikely to succeed. We all saw Trump’s catastrophic misjudgments inflict their toll in real time. It was not the Chinese Communist Party that decided to host a cash-for-access party at Mar-a-Lago for Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend on the weekend of March 6–8, when a responsible president would have already begun modeling safe behavior. It was not the Chinese Communist Party that closed trans-Atlantic aviation and made no provision to receive throngs of returning Americans—exposing air travelers to hours of penned-in close contact with visibly sick people. It was not the Chinese Communist Party that urged Americans to buy stocks at the end of February, devastating the savings of anyone foolish enough to trust financial advice from Larry Kudlow, Eric Trump, or this president.
No, Trump won’t succeed in shifting blame.
It’s the second goal that could succeed. By revving up hate among their supporters against China, Trump and Fox can redirect those supporters’ rage from the dangerous target it might otherwise find: the trusted political and media figures who lied and lied and lied to them, exposing those supporters to disease and death for their own crass ends. Hate China, not me!
A president who sincerely mistrusted China would not have to resort to name-calling after the fact. He would have acted decisively, in good time. Instead, Trump relied on China to do his job for him. Trump tweeted on January 24: "China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!” It was Trump and Fox, not the independent media, who repeated Chinese propaganda and put Americans at risk.
A personal note: I was a target of one of Trump’s key media allies on Fox on Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson. Carlson has played an interestingly complex role on the Fox network. On the one hand, he was the first Fox host to speak some measure of truth about the virus, on Monday, March 9, two days after the infection-spreading birthday party at Mar-a-Lago. On the other hand, Carlson is the most explicit of Fox’s race-baiters, the Fox personality furthest from traditional conservatism and nearest to the new alt-right. Carlson is the main voice on Fox for Russian state propaganda, not only about Ukraine but even about such boutique issues as Montenegro. Carlson escapes the dilemma by attributing Trump-administration decisions to everybody except Trump himself, even blaming the Vanity Fair reporter who interviewed him instead of the president of the United States. “If you believe that the current paralysis is all Trump’s fault, you’re absolving an awful lot of guilty parties, maybe including yourself.”
Anyway, the personal bit:
China’s ambassadors are already spreading the lie that the Wuhan virus originated here in America, maybe created in a lab by the Pentagon. Don’t be shocked if at least one American media outlet promotes that idea. Many of them are already parroting the rest of the Chinese Communist Party line. A week ago, aging propagandist David Frum of The Atlantic suggested calling the coronavirus, quote, “The Trump plague” instead of the Wuhan virus.
What’s notable here is not the reference to me, but that Carlson builds his case against America’s independent media by citing something that has not happened: no reputable media organization has repeated China’s claim that the virus originated in the United States. When I tweeted March 9, “Wuhan virus or Trump plague?,” I was referencing not Carlson’s fantasy about what the media might say, but the hard fact that Trump had exposed Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel and other dignitaries to the coronavirus by proceeding with his weekend at Mar-a-Lago. Sadly, Carlson himself was one of those also exposed by Trump’s irresponsibility.
Read: This is how Donald Trump will be remembered
While Trump, Fox, and Carlson try to redirect the anger of the people they betrayed, it’s worth noticing something strikingly absent from the speeches and writings of this administration and its Trump-line network: a word of sympathy or compassion for the thousands of Americans getting sick and dying on this president’s watch, as a result of this president’s neglect of his duties. They’re not capable of such language. They gain power by targeting outsiders. A virus is the ultimate outsider, but it’s not a very satisfying target for rage. Only human beings will do, human beings marked in some way as different: by nationality, by ethnicity, by race.
After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush made an early visit to a Washington mosque. He spoke feelingly against bigotry, and helped curb the rash of hate crimes that erupted in the fall of 2001.
Trump and his party-line media do not do that. They cannot do that. That would take empathy—and empathy might dangerously remind Americans of the tragic cost of Trump’s mismanagement and absent leadership. Rage is all they feel, so rage is all they can express. Hatred fills their hearts, so hatred fills their mouths. The government and the government-line television network are, for the time being, in the charge of broken souls. Those broken souls are breaking a nation.
DAVID FRUM is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse .
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The New York Times
Opinion
Of Course Trump Deserves Blame for the Coronavirus Crisis
Last Friday, Representative Andy Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, wrote a letter signed by 56 colleagues urging Donald Trump to invoke a law called the Defense Production Act in the fight against coronavirus. Passed during the Korean War in 1950, the law lets the president direct manufacturers to make supplies necessary for national security. “It very clearly allows the president to use the same powers for a public health emergency,” Levin told me.
At a time when the coronavirus pandemic is leading to a critical shortage of tests, ventilators, respirators, I.C.U. beds and protective gear for medical professionals, it seemed like an obvious move. “He has the power to get what we need,” said Levin. “And this is tens and hundreds of thousands of lives at stake in real time here.”
Finally, on Wednesday, Trump invoked the law, and it briefly looked as if things were going to get moving. But later that day, he tweeted that he’s holding off on actually using the powers the law gives him: “I only signed the Defense Production Act to combat the Chinese Virus should we need to invoke it in a worst case scenario in the future. Hopefully there will be no need, but we are all in this TOGETHER!”
Levin was incredulous. “The worst-case scenario is right now,” he said, adding: “This is something that is completely beyond partisanship. It’s an all-hands-on-deck crisis.”
With the world plunged into the most terrifying emergency in living memory, some people, and not just right-wing hacks, are saying that now is not the time to talk about the malfeasance of Donald Trump.
Barack Obama’s former political guru David Axelrod, commenting on a planned Democratic ad blitz hitting Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, tweeted that “now doesn’t seem the moment for negative ads.” On Wednesday I appeared on MSNBC with Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, who acknowledged that Trump made a grave mistake in initially downplaying the severity of the coronavirus. But, Hogan said, “We can’t waste a lot of time, you know, finger-pointing and talking about what mistakes the president made or anybody made in Washington. Let’s talk about what we can do right now.”
I understand this impulse. Those in the trenches fighting the pandemic can’t afford to waste time inveighing against presidential inadequacy. The rest of us are dealing with extraordinary personal upheaval and ever-present fear. In the four years that Donald Trump has dominated the national conversation, he’s gnawed away at the sanity of those of us who see him for what he is. In this new, even more dystopian era of coronavirus, it would be nice to be furloughed from having to think about him.
But while the calamity we are experiencing is not Trump’s doing, his dishonesty and incompetence have exacerbated it, and continue to do so. To point this out is not to dwell on the past but to confront the scale of our present crisis. Trump has been giving daily televised briefings in which he overpromises and spreads misinformation. He makes bad decisions and reverses himself only under the pressure of bad press. That makes frankness about his catastrophic ineptitude imperative.
Listen to our podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt
Because of Trump’s disdain for expertise and his obsession with loyalty, we entered this crisis with a government from which many competent professionals have been purged, and whose political appointees tend to be lackeys and mediocrities.
As has been widely reported, Trump’s administration dissolved the National Security Council’s global health security office, which was responsible for planning for disease outbreaks. “Some of the people we cut, they haven’t been used for many, many years, and if we ever need them we can get them very quickly and rather than spending the money,” he said at a briefing last month.
On Thursday The Times reported that Trump’s own Department of Health and Human Services ran a series of simulations last year about a pandemic respiratory virus originating in China that ultimately infected 110 million Americans. The exercise “drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.” Yet there’s little evidence of a serious push to increase America’s readiness.
When this coronavirus emerged in China, Trump’s instinct was to treat it as a public relations problem, insisting repeatedly that it would “go away.” South Korea and the United States announced their first coronavirus cases at around the same time; while South Korea ramped up the production of tests, the United States dithered. As Reuters reported, South Korea, a country of around 51 million, has tested 290,000 people. In the United States, a country of 330 million, only 60,000 tests had been conducted as of Tuesday.
Trump’s decision to ban some travel from Europe might have made sense, but the mistake-ridden Oval Office address announcing the move caused mass panic among Americans abroad. No one made adequate preparations to get hordes of travelers returning from coronavirus hot zones through security quickly, leading to crowds of people waiting as long as seven hours at some airports, a situation that seemed bound to spread infections.
Steven Teles is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and a political science professor at Johns Hopkins, where he teaches a class on policy disasters. He points out that most government decisions never reach the president’s desk, but that people in the bureaucracy tend to respond to the president’s priorities.
“What an executive can do is to inject energy and a general sense of direction to people who are going to make decisions without them pushing them all the way up the chain of command,” Teles told me. He suspects that when books are finally written about this debacle, a big part of the story will be that much of “the government didn’t get sufficiently energized early enough because there wasn’t a signal from the top.”
There still isn’t. Trump spent his news conference on Thursday attacking the media and putting the onus on governors to acquire medical supplies. “The federal government’s not supposed to be out there buying vast amounts of items and then shipping, you know, we’re not a shipping clerk,” he said.
He also touted an anti-malarial drug, chloroquine, saying that it “was approved very, very quickly and it’s now approved by prescription.” In fact, the F.D.A. has not approved chloroquine for treating Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Though doctors can prescribe it off label, it’s not yet established that the drug works for this purpose.
It can become tedious to dwell on the fact that the president is a dangerous and ignorant narcissist who has utterly failed as an executive, leaving state governments on their own to confront a generational cataclysm. But no one should ever forget it.
Soon, even if the pandemic is still raging, there will be an election, and the public will be asked to render a verdict on Trump’s leadership. Being clear that people are suffering and dying needlessly because the president can’t do his job isn’t looking backward. It’s the only way to move forward.
© 2020 The New York Times Company
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{The ironic twist between the latest Gallup pole , finding a favorable view of Trump's handling of the epidemic, stands in stark contrast with the opposite descent opinion:}
IDEAS
Donald Trump’s Cult of Personality Did This
The autocratic political culture that has propped up the Trump administration has left the nation entirely unprepared for an economic and public-health calamity.
REUTERS
The president of the United States is a menace to public health.
I don’t mean that I disagree with him on policy, although I do. I don’t mean that I abhor the president’s expressed bigotry toward religious and ethnic minorities, although that is also true. I am not referring to Donald Trump’s efforts to corrupt the Justice Department, shield his criminal associates from legal peril, or funnel taxpayer money to his tacky hotels and golf courses, although all of these things are reason enough to oppose the president.
Peter Wehner: The Trump presidency is over
What I am referring to is the fact that, soon after the coronavirus outbreak emerged in China, the rest of the world began to regard it as a threat to public health, while Trump has seen it as a public-relations problem. Trump’s primary method of dealing with public-relations problems is to exert the full force of the authoritarian cult of personality that surrounds him to deny that a problem even exists. This approach has paid political dividends for the Republican Party, in the form of judicial appointments, tax cuts for the wealthy, and a rapid erosion of the rule of law. But applied to the deadly pandemic now sweeping the planet, all it has done is exacerbate the inevitable public-health crisis, while leaving both the federal government and the entire swath of the country that hangs on his every word unprepared for the catastrophe now unfolding in the United States. The cardinal belief of Trumpism is that loyalty to Trump is loyalty to the country, and that equation leaves no room for the public interest.
Neither the tide of pestilence sweeping the nation nor the economic calamity that will follow was inevitable. They are the predictable outcomes of the president’s authoritarian instincts, his obvious incompetence, and the propaganda apparatus that has shielded him from accountability by ensuring that the public is blinded to his role in the scale of this disaster.
Fear of a Counterrevolution
Trump’s first public remarks on the coronavirus came during an interview with the CNBC reporter Joe Kernen on January 22. Kernen asked, “Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?” To which Trump replied, “No. Not at all. And—we’re—we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s—going to be just fine.” In February, he falsely declared that “we are very close to a vaccine,” and that “within a couple of days [the number of cases] is going to be down to close to zero.” In early March, he was still urging Americans to ignore the issue, saying, “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”
One might argue in the president’s defense that panic serves no one. It is important, in fact, that political leaders urge calm in the face of a crisis, even as they prepare for the worst.
Kori Schake: The damage that ‘America First’ has done
Except Trump was not preparing. He was consciously contradicting his administration’s own public-health officials at the time. In February, while Trump was lying to the public about being “close to a vaccine” and that cases “were going to be down to close to zero,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official Nancy Messonnier was telling reporters that Americans should get ready for “significant disruption to our lives.” The day after Trump told the public that “it will go away,” Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified to Congress that “we will see more cases, and things will get worse than they are right now.” Trump wasn’t trying to maintain firm resolve in the face of a crisis. He was lying to the public about the dangers it was facing in order to preserve his public standing.
Nor were the president’s dismissals of the dangers posed by the coronavirus an attempt to buy time for the federal government to appropriately respond. Trump has dealt with the pandemic with all the competence you would expect from someone whose main experience is pretending to be a tough businessman on television. The administration failed to ramp up testing capacity in time to determine the scope of infections, while lying to the public that “millions of tests” were available; it failed to mobilize federal resources such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Disaster Medical System, or the Army Corps of Engineers. Trump declared a state of emergency only on March 13, reportedly concerned that doing so earlier “could hamper his narrative that the coronavirus is similar to the seasonal flu and could further agitate Wall Street.” As of Tuesday, according to The New York Times, the Army Corps of Engineers was “still awaiting orders.”
In the meantime, doctors, nurses, and EMTs are getting sick. Medical workers are running out of face masks and gloves. The United States does not have enough ventilators for critically ill patients who need them. States lack sufficient testing capacity to measure the scale of the outbreak. Emergency rooms are overwhelmed. Hospitals are running out of beds. The president is tweeting praise of himself.
Nor has the president’s party evinced any greater sense of civic obligation than the president himself. Instead, as Trump downplayed the potential consequences of an outbreak, did nothing to prepare the federal government to curtail one, lied to the public about the availability of coronavirus tests, falsely claimed that the number of cases was going down, and misled the public about measures being taken to contain new infections, Republicans were echoing the servile praise of conservative media outlets and Trump officials, even as they quietly understood that the nation was about to be overwhelmed by a global pandemic, having been briefed in late January about the seriousness of the contagion. But instead of informing their own constituents about the danger they were in, several allegedly attempted to profiteer off of a pandemic by selling stocks right before one of the biggest Wall Street market crashes in American history. Properly warning the public of impending catastrophe might have drawn condemnation from the president, so they watched the cataclysm silently while turning a profit.
Derek Thompson: The coronavirus will supercharge American inequality
Other nations not led by Trump have also struggled to restrain the spread of the coronavirus. But the United States had advance notice of how bad the pandemic would get not just from China, but from Italy, where the potential severity was apparent in late February. South Korea, whose first case of the coronavirus was detected in late January, around the same time as the first case in the United States, has already contained its own outbreak by rapidly developing and implementing a widespread testing regime. Trump spent the intervening weeks trying to pump stocks and lying to the public about having everything under control, while the conservative propaganda apparatus that surrounds him did the same. Even public-health officials were forced to serve two masters, having to juggle their responsibilities coping with the widening coronavirus pandemic while maintaining a Juche-like commitment to lavishing the president with praise.
The bizarre ritual of public-health officials fawning over the president during coronavirus briefings is not some trivial matter. In fact, it illustrates how democratic backsliding during the Trump administration has damaged the federal government’s ability to respond to emergencies and the credibility of its public statements on matters of life and death. Authoritarian leaders prize loyalty over expertise, and part of the way such leaders determine loyalty is through demanding sycophantic praise from underlings, smoking out those unwilling to bend the knee. This is how you end up with the president’s unqualified, pampered son-in-law, his foggy brain addled by Fox News propaganda, using his influence to undermine officials trying to turn back the outbreak.
A pandemic is precisely the kind of situation that shows why it is important to have a government staffed by qualified civil servants, rather than whimpering toadies who can’t deliver bad news to a mercurial president whose main priority is protecting himself. At least part of the federal government’s delayed response, Politico reported, is because Trump “rewards those underlings who tell him what he wants to hear while shunning those who deliver bad news.” The president’s fragile ego is proving deadly.
Trump is hardly the first politician to lie about the scope of a problem to preserve his public image. The distinction here is that, having decided that he would downplay the dangers of the coronavirus, the authoritarian cult of personality built up around the president and maintained by conservative media reverently amplified the president’s messaging. The conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, to whom Trump recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom, told his listeners that “this virus is the common cold.” The Fox News host Sean Hannity proclaimed that the president’s critics were attempting to “bludgeon Trump with this new hoax,” while his colleague Pete Hegseth told viewers, “I feel like the more I learn about this, the less there is to worry about.” The network aired a parade of medical experts offering bogus health advice about the coronavirus, including the claim that the “worst-case scenario” is that “it could be the flu.” Republican legislators appeared on the network urging Americans to defy federal health officials’ advice to avoid large public gatherings and work from home if possible, with Representative Devin Nunes of California telling Fox News on March 15, “It’s a great time to just go out, go to a local restaurant,” or “go to your local pub.”
Read: Red and blue America are experiencing the same pandemic
Trump and the conservative media apparatus have had the predictable impact of persuading audiences not to take health officials’ warnings seriously, viewing them as just another liberal “hoax.” One pastor in Arkansas told The Washington Post that “half of his church is ready to lick the floor, to prove there’s no actual virus,” adding that “in your more politically conservative regions, closing is not interpreted as caring for you. It’s interpreted as liberalism, or buying into the hype.”
Conservatives have argued that it is the mainstream media’s fault for being so relentlessly negative about the president. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tweeted that “one of the dangerous consequences of having a totally dishonest left wing news media was that most Americans discounted their hysteria as phony.” Gingrich’s attempted indictment of the mainstream press is a backhanded acknowledgement that the conservative media do not conceive of their job as informing the public.
It’s true that the media often make mistakes; they are, after all, made up of human beings. Media conventions can be subverted, facts can be misunderstood or misreported, sources can mislead, reporters can succumb to confirmation bias, and editors can fail to see the big picture. For the most part, though, these outlets are trying their best to inform the public.
Trumpist media outlets, by contrast, have created a bubble of unreality where nothing but the most effusive praise of Trump is acceptable, where anyone who disagrees with or criticizes the president is part of a grand conspiracy to destroy him, and where the only facts that exist are those that reflect well on the president. Many conservatives don’t distrust the mainstream media because they are biased; they distrust the media because the media do not tell them what they want to hear, and their own outlets have trained them to believe that the truth can only be exactly what they want to hear.
Nor can mainstream media bias explain why many Trumpist media outlets, supposedly so much more committed to the truth than their mainstream counterparts, consciously endangered their audience by disregarding and dismissing public-health warnings. Fox News told its audience that the coronavirus was a minor problem their heroic leader was quickly resolving, while quietly having its staff follow the very precautions its hosts were ridiculing on air. The mainstream press didn’t force Fox News to do that.
The coronavirus pandemic provides a rigorous case study in the priorities of most of the conservative press: Faced with a choice between informing their own audiences about dire threats to public health and propping up a Republican president, they chose the latter, because informing the public is not their job. The job of outlets like Fox News is to ensure that the conservative masses believe that their leader is infallible, even if it causes them tremendous personal harm.
As cases began flooding into hospitals and medical facilities all over the country, the president shifted his tone, finally recognizing the reality of the pandemic and the economic catastrophe that threatens both the health and livelihoods of millions of Americans. On Tuesday, Trump declared that “this is a pandemic,” and that “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” Having denied that the coronavirus was a major issue for months, the president sought to recast himself as an oracle, and conservative media followed suit, shifting their tone from downplaying the severity of the pandemic to praising the heroic efforts of the president to address it.
Wajahat Ali: Where are the masks?
Predictably, Trump drew praise from some cable-news personalities for doing a passable job of portraying a president on television, even as the administration’s failures continued to exacerbate the personal and economic toll of the pandemic. This is somewhat understandable; Americans want to believe that their leaders are competent, engaged, and concerned about their well-being. Recognizing that the presidency is occupied by an incompetent narcissist whose major life accomplishment is parlaying an inherited fortune into reality-show celebrity is rather less comforting, but it is the world we live in.
Yet the incentives for the president and the conservative media have not changed. All that has changed is that it is now in the president’s personal and political interest to cushion the terrible impact of the coronavirus pandemic. This is a positive development as far as it goes, in that, for the moment, the national interest and Trump’s interests are one and the same. But Trump’s authoritarian cult of personality persists, and where maintaining the image of the infallible leader conflicts with the needs of Americans affected by the pandemic, the former will take precedence. The president is a relentless scammer at heart, and even during a pandemic he will attempt to get what he wants while providing as little as possible in return, as though he were trying to save cash by stiffing a contractor.
Having failed to will the coronavirus pandemic into nonexistence, the president, his party, and his propaganda machine will seek to rewrite history to render the false impression that Trump was aware of the threat of the pandemic all along, and that he acted decisively to address it. The truth is that, in the weeks and months Trump and the conservative press were busy pumping stocks, juking stats, and misleading the public, valuable time to prepare for the pandemic was lost. Americans, both those who get sick and those whose workplaces and businesses will close as a result, will suffer dearly.
A global pandemic would have been a challenge for any administration, for any government. But the scale of this tragedy was not inevitable. America’s shuttered storefronts, overflowing emergency rooms, and shattered families are the toxic fruit of a political culture in which Donald Trump’s image, as the avatar of the will of the people, matters more than actual people do.
ADAM SERWER is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Copyright © 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved
{ But then again, the purpose of the purported coming cash outlays, probably rests more on political considerations then acts of human kindness, causing oh luv opinion turn on a whim}
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Another tirade against media;:
Trump viciously attacks NBC News reporter in extended rant after being asked for message to Americans worried about coronavirus
New York(CNN Business)In an extraordinary exchange on Friday, President Donald Trump viciously attacked an NBC News reporter who asked what his message would be to Americans who are frightened by the coronavirus pandemic that is spreading across the country.
The exchange, which occurred at the White House's daily coronavirus task force briefing, began when NBC News reporter Peter Alexander asked Trump whether he was giving Americans "false hope" by touting unproven coronavirus drugs.
Analysis: Trump acts like he wants the US press to be more like China's
Toward the end of the exchange, Alexander cited the latest pandemic statistics showing thousands of Americans are now infected and millions are scared.
Alexander asked, "What do you say to Americans who are scared?"
Trump, shaking his head, ripped into Alexander in response.
"I say that you are a terrible reporter," Trump replied. "That's what I say."
The President proceeded to launch into an extended rant against Alexander, saying he asked a "nasty question" and assailing NBC and its parent company, Comcast.
"You're doing sensationalism," Trump charged. "And the same with NBC and Comcast. I don't call it Comcast. I call it 'Con-Cast.'"
"Let me just tell you something," Trump added. "That's really bad reporting. And you ought to get back to reporting instead of sensationalism."
Moments later, Kaitlan Collins, a White House correspondent for CNN, asked Trump if it was appropriate to embark on tirades against members of the news media during a public health crisis.
"You see yourself as a wartime President right now, leading the country through a pandemic that we are experiencing," Collins noted. "Do you think going off on Peter, going off on a network is appropriate when the country is going through something like this?"
Trump defended his verbal assault on Alexander, saying he's "not a good journalist" and launching into another rant against him.
"Coming together is much harder when we have dishonest journalists," Trump said.
Alexander said in a statement that he was "trying to provide the president an opportunity to reassure the millions of Americans, members of my own family and my neighbors and my community and plenty of people sitting at home, this was his opportunity to do that, to provide a positive or uplifting message. Instead, you saw the president's answer to that question right now."
"The bottom line is, this is a president whose experiences in life are very different than most Americans across this country right now," Alexander said. "Not a person who likely worries about finances or had, not a person who in the course of his life is worried about his future, not a person who is worried about where to find a paycheck for his bills or for his rent and as evidenced by the president suggesting that an opportunity to provide for American some reassurance about how they should feel right now, the president instead took it out on me."
Alexander's NBC News colleague and host of "Meet the Press" weighed on the matter, praising him for his "professionalism."
"I wish people on the on the other side of the podium had the same professionalism as well, so thank you, Peter," Todd said.
After striking a somber tone earlier in the week, Trump in recent days has returned to his usual attacks against the press.
At Thursday's coronavirus press briefing, Trump smeared The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.
"They're very dishonest," Trump claimed.
Trump then praised a far-right media outlet, saying it is "very good" and noting, "They treat me very nicely."
The right-wing personality from that media outlet falsely said major newsrooms had "teamed up" with the Chinese Communist Party to attack Trump.
The person then asked, "Is it alarming that major media players that just oppose you are consistently siding with foreign state propaganda, Islamic radicals and Latin gangs and cartels?"
Instead of rebuking the right-wing personality for the question, Trump on Thursday boasted that he had canceled the White House's subscriptions to the country's major newspapers.
"It amazes me when I read the things that I read," Trump said Thursday. "It amazes me when I read The Wall Street Journal which is so negative and The New York Times, I barely read it. We don't distribute it in the White House, and the same with The Washington Post.
© 2020 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Propaganda- the age old machine
The New York Times
Opinion
Call Trump’s News Conferences What They Are: Propaganda
Then contrast them with the leadership shown by Andrew Cuomo, Justin Trudeau and Angela Merkel.
President Trump at the coronavirus briefing at the White House on Friday.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
In a time of global emergency, we need calm, directness and, above all, hard facts. Only the opposite is on offer from the Trump White House. It is therefore time to call the president’s news conferences for what they are: propaganda.
We may as well be watching newsreels approved by the Soviet Politburo. We’re witnessing the falsification of history in real time. When Donald Trump, under the guise of social distancing, told the White House press corps on Thursday that he ought to get rid of 75 to 80 percent of them — reserving the privilege only for those he liked — it may have been chilling, but it wasn’t surprising. He wants to thin out their ranks until there’s only Pravda in the room.
Sometimes, I stare at Deborah Birx during these briefings and I wonder if she understands that this is the footage historians will be looking at 100 years from now — the president rambling on incoherently, vainly, angrily, deceitfully, while she watches, her face stiff with the strangled horror of a bride enduring an inappropriate toast.
If the public wants factual news briefings, they need to tune in to those who are giving them: Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, whose addresses appear with English subtitles on Deutsche Welle. They should start following the many civic-minded epidemiologists and virologists and contagion experts on Twitter, like Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch and Yale’s Nicholas Christakis, whose threads have been invaluable primers in a time of awful confusion.
These are people with a high tolerance for uncertainty. It’s the president’s incapacity to tolerate it — combined with his bottomless need to self-flatter and preserve his political power — that leads, so often, to his spectacular fits of deception and misdirection. At his Thursday news conference, a discussion of chloroquine and other experimental therapies formed the core of his remarks, when those drugs and therapies are untested and unproven and, in some cases, won’t be ready for several months, as NBC’s Peter Alexander pointed out the following day.
“What do you say to Americans who are scared?” Alexander pressed.
“I say that you’re a terrible reporter,” Trump answered.
Only a liar — and a weak man with delusions of competence — would be so unnerved by the facts.
Compare this to Cuomo, who takes questions at his news conferences calmly and systematically — and, more to the point, has a substantive response when asked the same questions about anxiety. He hears it. He relates to it. He says it’s real.
“People are in a small apartment, they’re in a house, they’re worried, they’re anxious. Just, be mindful of that,” the governor said Friday. “Those three-word sentences can make all the difference: ‘I miss you.’ ‘I love you.’ ‘I’m thinking about you.’ ‘I wish I was there with you.’ ‘I’m sorry you’re going through this.’ ‘I’m sorry we’re going through this.’”
On Friday, Cuomo said something else that was quite striking, as he was issuing his executive order for nonessential workers in New York to stay home, other than to run errands or exercise outside. “If someone wants to blame someone or complain about someone, blame me,” he said. “There is no one else who is responsible for this decision.”
Cuomo is nothing if not politically shrewd. He knows full well how this comment compares to Mr. Trump’s “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
But telling the media that they’re peddling fake news is straight from the playbook of the political gangsters of the last century. So many of Trump’s moves are.
Having each of his cabinet members fulsomely thank him for his leadership and congratulate him for his “farsightedness” before each of their remarks: Check. Making sure each one stays on a message, even if that message has nothing to do with his or her purview: Check.
(Alex Azar may have been the worst offender, speaking Friday to the urgency of closing the southern border. He’s the secretary of health and human services, not homeland security. Yet he was parroting Trump’s message about the coronavirus, one specifically tailored to the base: We’re keeping brown immigrants from spreading it.)
How about Orwellian doublespeak? Ooooooh, check. Trump and his team are continually deploying words and phrases that disguise a reality that suggests the opposite. Vice President Mike Pence talks about a “strong and seamless” partnership with the states, when at the same time Mr. Trump is trolling the states, telling Cuomo to get his own respirators.
Pence speaks relentlessly of a “whole-of-government approach,” when in fact the government is hollowed out — defunded to fight pandemics, denuded of experts — and broken in shards, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sidelined in this fight, and the president’s task force now mutely competing with a shadow group run by the president’s son-in-law.
On Friday, Trump said he cherished journalism, and his secretary of state complained about disinformation on Twitter. There are simply too many two-plus-two-is-five moments to count.
But most dangerous of all is Trump’s insistence that things are fine, or will be shortly, that they’ll be stronger and better and greater than ever. We don’t have any evidence that this is true, and the president finds any suggestion to the contrary quite rude. When a journalist pointed out to him on Thursday that the economy had all but ground to a halt, Trump cut him off.
“What’s the rest of your question?” he snapped. “We know that. Everybody in the room knows that.”
Here’s the truth: Things might be hard — unfathomably hard — for months, perhaps even north of a year. Anyone who’s reading or listening to other sources of news besides the president knows that. It takes sensitivity and strength and intelligence to speak truthfully to the public about imminent hardship, the prospect of enduring pain.
So I listen to Justin Trudeau, a sci-fi experience, a dispatch from an alternate universe that prioritizes the needs and anxieties of the middle class. He speaks about immediate concerns: The kids will be all right. There’ll be food. You won’t be booted out of your home. Not how our president is speaking right now, but it’s a road map for the Democratic presidential nominee in 2020 to follow.
And I listen to Cuomo, who says the same thing. His news conference on Friday was about the practical things, knowing the entire state — country, globe — had just taken a precipitous slide down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with food, shelter and safety now topmost on many people’s minds. No one can evict you for 90 days. We’re getting hospital beds. We’re recruiting doctors and nurses in training to fight this fight, and we’re coaxing medical professionals out of retirement.
Then he spoke from the heart. One of his daughters was in quarantine. “To tell you the truth, I had some of the best conversations with her that I’ve ever had,” Cuomo said. She was alone for two weeks. “We talked about things in depth that we didn’t have time to talk about in the past,” he continued, “or we didn’t have the courage or the strength to talk about in the past — feelings I had, about mistakes I had made along the way that I wanted to express my regret and talk through with her.”
He was expressing fallibility. Imagine that.
March 21, 2020
© 2020 The New York Times Company
{However he is only an actor playing a difficult script of catch-22. He is The Fall Guy, that is becoming more and more convincing.}
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Re: Trump enters the stage-Depression or, Recession? That is
by Meno_ » Sat Mar 21, 2020 9:16 pm
LIVE UPDATES
Coronavirus spreads, raising threat of global economic depression
By Joshua Berlinger, Brett McKeehan, Jack Guy and Fernando Alfonso III, CNN
Updated 3:44 PM ET, Sat March 21, 2020
What you need to know
The numbers worldwide: More than 278,000 people have contracted the virus and at least 11,570 have died, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.
Threat of severe economic downturn: A global recession is on us and experts believe coronavirus could drag the world economy into a depression.
US death toll rises: More than 250 people have now died from the novel coronavirus in the United States.
From Pierre Bairin and Ya Chun Wang in Paris
France has seen a jump in deaths linked to coronavirus infections, according to new figures released by the Health Ministry on Saturday.
The number of people who have died in France since the beginning of the epidemic is now at 562, according to the Health Ministry.
The number of people testing positive is 14,459 as of Saturday.
According to the Health Ministry, 6,172 people have so far been hospitalized, with 1,525 in intensive care, 50% of whom are under 60 years of age.
4:03 p.m. ET, March 21, 2020
There are more than 5,000 coronavirus cases in the United Kingdom
From CNN’s Arnaud Siad and Simon Cullen
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United Kingdom has climbed to 5,018, according to an official update from the Department of Health and Social Care on Saturday.
The update also says 72,818 people have been tested so far in the UK, the department said.
In total, 233 people with coronavirus have died across the country, the department added.
3:52 p.m. ET, March 21, 2020
Turkey imposes partial curfew for people over 65 and those with chronic conditions
From CNN's Gul Tuysuz
Turkey announced a partial curfew for citizens older than 65 years old and for those who have chronic conditions starting at midnight on Saturday.
The partial curfew prohibits senior citizens and those with chronic illnesses from using public transportation, being in parks and leaving their homes, the Turkish interior ministry said in a statement.
For those who live alone and are covered by the curfew, social support will be available through provincial governorships, the statement said.
The conditions covered by the partial curfew include chronic pulmonary obstruction disease, asthma, chronic lung diseases, cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, liver disease and those taking immunosuppressants, the statement said.
Trump on China: "I wish they'd told us earlier" about coronavirus
From CNN’s Jason Hoffman
President Trump said he wished China had told him earlier about coronavirus, according to remarks he made at the White House on Saturday.
“I have great respect for China, I like China… I have a tremendous relationship with President XI. I wish they could have told us earlier about what was going on inside. We didn’t know about it until it started coming out publicly," Trump said.
Trump added that China “was very secretive and that’s unfortunate.”
The President went on to criticize China saying, “they knew they had a problem earlier, I wish they could have said that.”
Trump said that when he first realized how bad the virus could be he “started doing the closings.” The first travel restrictions related to coronavirus went into place on February 2.
Vermont governor announces business closures due to coronavirus
From CNN’s Jessica Jordan
Vermont Gov. Phil Scott issued an advisory today directing gymnasiums, fitness centers and similar exercise facilities to close all in-person operations no later than 8 p.m. ET on March 23.
The advisory also included hair salons and barbers, nail salons, spas and tattoo parlors.
3:04 p.m. ET, March 21, 2020
Trump continues to defer to others on whether the Olympics should be canceled
From CNN's Nicky Robertson
President Trump said the decision on whether to hold the Tokyo Olympics as planned this summer is “totally up to them,” referring to the Japanese government.
The President praised the “beautiful” venue that Japan has already built, and said he did not want to influence the decision being made.
"They have built one of the most beautiful venues I've ever seen. They are all ready to go. It's not late, not over budget, it was just done flawlessly and it is beautiful and they're sitting back and saying, you know, I told him, I said, that's your decision and it is his decision," Trump said Saturday during a press conference. "I know he is going to make it soon. I don't what it is going to be and I didn't think I should be influencing it at all."
Some context: The head of USA Swimming wants the Olympics to be postponed to 2021, calling it "the right and responsible thing to do" in a letter to the US Olympic & Paralympic Committee
Tim Hinchey III, the CEO of USA Swimming, asked the group to advocate for the change because "the right and responsible thing to do is to prioritize everyone's health and safety and appropriately recognize the toll this global pandemic is taking on athletic preparations."
2:48 p.m. ET, March 21, 2020
Trump defends his response to the coronavirus pandemic
From CNN's Kevin Bohn
 Patrick Semansky/AP
In response to concerns from some doctors complaining about shortage of supplies, President Trump defended the White House’s coronavirus response and placed part of the blame on previous administrations.
“So many administrations preceded me. For the most part, they did very little, in terms of what you're talking about. This is unprecedented…. this is unprecedented or just about unprecedented. As time goes by we're seeing it's really at a level that nobody would have believed. Nobody would have thought possible. That this could happen," Trump said Saturday at a press conference following a question from CNN.
Trump added: "And we are making much of this stuff now and much of it is being delivered now. We've also gotten tremendous reviews from a lot of people that can't believe how fast it's coming. When I hear they have an order of 55 million masks and that is just one order, that's one order, out of many, and there are many millions of masks beyond that, and I keep saying, how is it possible to use so much? But that's the way it is.”
2:58 p.m. ET, March 21, 2020
Coronavirus death toll in Italy rises by 793
From Valentina di Donato and Hada Messia in Rome
Coffins are unloaded from a military convoy at Ferrara cemetery in northern Italy on March 21. Massimo Paolone/LaPresse/AP
The death toll in Italy from coronavirus has risen by 793 in the past 24 hours to 4,825, according to the Italian Civil Protection Agency.
Overall, the number of confirmed cases in Italy is 53,578, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
2:11 p.m. ET, March 21, 2020
Texas governor is waiving regulations for nursing students to help expand medical workforce
From CNN's Melissa Alonso
Texas will issue temporary permits to "nurses who have yet to take the licensing exam" and suspend other regulations for students to assist with the state's response to Covid-19, Gov. Greg Abbott said in a press release Saturday.
Abbott is allowing "nurses with inactive licenses or retired nurses to reactivate their licenses," the release said.
Nursing students in their final year will be allowed to "meet their clinical objectives by exceeding the 50% limit on simulated experiences," the release added.
"In the coming weeks and months, Texas will continue to see a growing need for medical professionals to help us respond to these unique and challenging times," Abbott said.
© 2020 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
{ The eceno-politization of the chemo-biological insurgency} - { resulting a hyperbolic recession toward transcendental tourism, bypassing a material dialectic; strengthening the role of singular, dasein type intentional authoritarianism.}
No doubt!
Coronavirus spreads, raising threat of global economic depression
By Joshua Berlinger, Brett McKeehan, Jack Guy and Fernando Alfonso III, CNN
Updated 3:44 PM ET, Sat March 21, 2020
What you need to know
The numbers worldwide: More than 278,000 people have contracted the virus and at least 11,570 have died, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.
Threat of severe economic downturn: A global recession is on us and experts believe coronavirus could drag the world economy into a depression.
US death toll rises: More than 250 people have now died from the novel coronavirus in the United States.
From Pierre Bairin and Ya Chun Wang in Paris
France has seen a jump in deaths linked to coronavirus infections, according to new figures released by the Health Ministry on Saturday.
The number of people who have died in France since the beginning of the epidemic is now at 562, according to the Health Ministry.
The number of people testing positive is 14,459 as of Saturday.
According to the Health Ministry, 6,172 people have so far been hospitalized, with 1,525 in intensive care, 50% of whom are under 60 years of age.
4:03 p.m. ET, March 21, 2020
There are more than 5,000 coronavirus cases in the United Kingdom
From CNN’s Arnaud Siad and Simon Cullen
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United Kingdom has climbed to 5,018, according to an official update from the Department of Health and Social Care on Saturday.
The update also says 72,818 people have been tested so far in the UK, the department said.
In total, 233 people with coronavirus have died across the country, the department added.
3:52 p.m. ET, March 21, 2020
Turkey imposes partial curfew for people over 65 and those with chronic conditions
From CNN's Gul Tuysuz
Turkey announced a partial curfew for citizens older than 65 years old and for those who have chronic conditions starting at midnight on Saturday.
The partial curfew prohibits senior citizens and those with chronic illnesses from using public transportation, being in parks and leaving their homes, the Turkish interior ministry said in a statement.
For those who live alone and are covered by the curfew, social support will be available through provincial governorships, the statement said.
The conditions covered by the partial curfew include chronic pulmonary obstruction disease, asthma, chronic lung diseases, cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, liver disease and those taking immunosuppressants, the statement said.
Trump on China: "I wish they'd told us earlier" about coronavirus
From CNN’s Jason Hoffman
President Trump said he wished China had told him earlier about coronavirus, according to remarks he made at the White House on Saturday.
“I have great respect for China, I like China… I have a tremendous relationship with President XI. I wish they could have told us earlier about what was going on inside. We didn’t know about it until it started coming out publicly," Trump said.
Trump added that China “was very secretive and that’s unfortunate.”
The President went on to criticize China saying, “they knew they had a problem earlier, I wish they could have said that.”
Trump said that when he first realized how bad the virus could be he “started doing the closings.” The first travel restrictions related to coronavirus went into place on February 2.
Vermont governor announces business closures due to coronavirus
From CNN’s Jessica Jordan
Vermont Gov. Phil Scott issued an advisory today directing gymnasiums, fitness centers and similar exercise facilities to close all in-person operations no later than 8 p.m. ET on March 23.
The advisory also included hair salons and barbers, nail salons, spas and tattoo parlors.
3:04 p.m. ET, March 21, 2020
Trump continues to defer to others on whether the Olympics should be canceled
From CNN's Nicky Robertson
President Trump said the decision on whether to hold the Tokyo Olympics as planned this summer is “totally up to them,” referring to the Japanese government.
The President praised the “beautiful” venue that Japan has already built, and said he did not want to influence the decision being made.
"They have built one of the most beautiful venues I've ever seen. They are all ready to go. It's not late, not over budget, it was just done flawlessly and it is beautiful and they're sitting back and saying, you know, I told him, I said, that's your decision and it is his decision," Trump said Saturday during a press conference. "I know he is going to make it soon. I don't what it is going to be and I didn't think I should be influencing it at all."
Some context: The head of USA Swimming wants the Olympics to be postponed to 2021, calling it "the right and responsible thing to do" in a letter to the US Olympic & Paralympic Committee
Tim Hinchey III, the CEO of USA Swimming, asked the group to advocate for the change because "the right and responsible thing to do is to prioritize everyone's health and safety and appropriately recognize the toll this global pandemic is taking on athletic preparations."
2:48 p.m. ET, March 21, 2020
Trump defends his response to the coronavirus pandemic
From CNN's Kevin Bohn
 Patrick Semansky/AP
In response to concerns from some doctors complaining about shortage of supplies, President Trump defended the White House’s coronavirus response and placed part of the blame on previous administrations.
“So many administrations preceded me. For the most part, they did very little, in terms of what you're talking about. This is unprecedented…. this is unprecedented or just about unprecedented. As time goes by we're seeing it's really at a level that nobody would have believed. Nobody would have thought possible. That this could happen," Trump said Saturday at a press conference following a question from CNN.
Trump added: "And we are making much of this stuff now and much of it is being delivered now. We've also gotten tremendous reviews from a lot of people that can't believe how fast it's coming. When I hear they have an order of 55 million masks and that is just one order, that's one order, out of many, and there are many millions of masks beyond that, and I keep saying, how is it possible to use so much? But that's the way it is.”
2:58 p.m. ET, March 21, 2020
Coronavirus death toll in Italy rises by 793
From Valentina di Donato and Hada Messia in Rome
Coffins are unloaded from a military convoy at Ferrara cemetery in northern Italy on March 21. Massimo Paolone/LaPresse/AP
The death toll in Italy from coronavirus has risen by 793 in the past 24 hours to 4,825, according to the Italian Civil Protection Agency.
Overall, the number of confirmed cases in Italy is 53,578, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
2:11 p.m. ET, March 21, 2020
Texas governor is waiving regulations for nursing students to help expand medical workforce
From CNN's Melissa Alonso
Texas will issue temporary permits to "nurses who have yet to take the licensing exam" and suspend other regulations for students to assist with the state's response to Covid-19, Gov. Greg Abbott said in a press release Saturday.
Abbott is allowing "nurses with inactive licenses or retired nurses to reactivate their licenses," the release said.
Nursing students in their final year will be allowed to "meet their clinical objectives by exceeding the 50% limit on simulated experiences," the release added.
"In the coming weeks and months, Texas will continue to see a growing need for medical professionals to help us respond to these unique and challenging times," Abbott said.
© 2020 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
{ The eceno-politization of the chemo-biological insurgency} - { resulting a hyperbolic recession toward transcendental tourism, bypassing a material dialectic; strengthening the role of singular, dasein type intentional authoritarianism.}
No doubt!
Last edited by Meno_ on Sat Mar 21, 2020 9:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Trump enters the stage-calling Arminius !
by Meno_ » Sat Mar 21, 2020 9:28 pm
No doubt!
https://youtu.be/46oWyc4P_pw
{No wonder the narcisse vampiric soul of Socrates was condemned to suicide!}
https://youtu.be/46oWyc4P_pw
{No wonder the narcisse vampiric soul of Socrates was condemned to suicide!}
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Re: Trump enters the stage - Trump in his usual form
by Meno_ » Sun Mar 22, 2020 2:46 am
The New York Times
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Rolling Stone
HOME
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Trump’s Coronavirus Response Will Be His Toxic Legacy
There is no moment Trump can ever rise to, he only sinks to his most base nature
SEAN WOODS
MARCH 22, 2020 10:04AM ET
His handling of this pandemic is how history will remember Donald Trump. Fifty years from now historians will not spend much time on Russiagate, Robert Mueller or Dirty Dossiers and alleged pee tapes, nor will massive tax cuts for the rich or the endless petty insults and the litany of lies make much of a mark. In a time of national crisis, the president is failing the most basic tests of leadership. He spends his time in front of the camera attacking the media, spreading disinformation and sowing racism. His response should come as no surprise. These have been the signature moves of his presidency and in normal times, these actions were bad enough, in a pandemic they are destabilizing and destructive.
Who could doubt that Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama or George Bush I and II would have struck somber and fatherly tones in the crisis? They would have attempted to soothe a country in distress and ease the minds of the people — to be sure, much of this would have been bromides. But it turns out, that’s a big part of the job. Trump has from day one completely abdicated the moral authority of the office, perhaps knowing intuitively that his moral compass was so hopelessly bent that it was pointless to try. It would be hard to underestimate the unexpected and deleterious effects this has had on the presidency. As we all isolate and seek shelter, to not have someone who is of good character at the helm only adds to the extreme anxiety, anger and coming heartbreak.
Watch Neil Diamond Transform 'Sweet Caroline' Into Coronavirus PSA
Just When You Thought Things Couldn't Get Worse, Neo-Nazis Are Trying to Weaponize Coronavirus
There have already been so many stories of heroism and bravery. Doctors, nurses and first responders struggle against a rising tide of patients and are themselves at risk. Sanitation workers, pharmacists, and grocery store clerks are putting themselves in harm’s way. Everyday Americans are doing vital work, despite the commander-in-chief lowering the bar of the most important job in the world. Never forget, Trump played golf as the number of cases surged.
We have seen what real crisis leadership looks like from Gov. Jay Inslee and Gov. Andrew Cuomo — both have been honest, blunt and at times inspirational. Trump is never that. It turns out in a time of crisis a conman is not up for the task. We have had terrible presidents before and will again, but unlike those who came before, Trump has shown us the worst of ourselves. The reflection is not pretty. How people react in stressful situations can tell you a lot about them, for the president to be so ineffectual and dishonest is damning. After the last few weeks, what sane person would want Trump in their foxhole?
There is no moment Trump can ever rise to, he only sinks to his most base nature. The record of his mishandling and deceptions about the COVID-19 virus are clear as day and exactly like how he handles everything else — only this time the scale is so monumental and the threat so critical that it can’t be swept away by the news cycle. For more than three years we have seen him blunder and rage from one drama to the next, some serious and deadly like abandoning the Kurds in Syria, some foolish like the size the crowd at his inauguration. Through it all, Trump consistently displays a smallness of character, a signature brand of toxic narcissism and a nasty mean streak; his only gifts being an instinctual understanding of his supporters and a mediocre talent to work a crowd like some cheap Borscht Belt comedian. That will not be enough in the face of a pandemic.
Trump knows this is how he will be judged. That’s why he’s growing so unhinged in public. He’s going to his familiar playbook and trying all his tricks. But a virus is not something he can insult or lie his way out of. People are dying. Our economy, seemingly so strong, cratered in a mere ten days. The virus is not Trump’s fault of course, but the dismantling of the pandemic response team at the National Security Council surely is. Ignoring the threat for months also rests on his shoulders. The nation is now on the brink, and how he handles the crisis is his test. It should be clear to all, he’s failing miserably.
This country has been through a lot in the last 20 years. We have faced terror attacks, mass shootings, environmental disasters and a financial crisis to name a few, and somewhere along the way we grew more divided, to the point where we can’t even agree on facts. We will get through both this virus and the toxic presidency of Donald Trump — but the road forward is treacherous and full of peril and there is no doubt we will never be the same.
© 2020 PMC. All rights reserved.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& &&&&&
Donald Trump
Trump talks himself up as ‘wartime president’ to lead America through a crisis
The president initially scoffed at the coronavirus. Now he seems convinced he can lead – and secure four more years in November
Sun 22 Mar 2020 02.00 EDT
Bill Clinton used to lament that his time as US president was broadly peaceful, and lacked a historic test of his mettle. Donald Trump believes that his moment has arrived: a crisis on a par with leading a nation at war.
Lay off those war metaphors, world leaders. You could be the next casualty… | Simon Tisdall
“I view it as a, in a sense, a wartime president,” he said at the White House this week as he belatedly comprehended the epic scale of the coronavirus pandemic, which in the US alone has infected more than 19,000 people and killed more than 200. “I mean, that’s what we’re fighting.”
The world witnessed two Trumps in often jarring conflict last week, sometimes in the same breath. One was aspiring to be statesmanlike, reassuring an anguished public and mobilizing the awesome power of the American government. The other was more familiar: belligerent, anti-science, racially divisive, airing grievances and resentments and blaming everyone but himself.
Yet from the blur something else was coming into focus. Having procrastinated at the outbreak of the pandemic, this was the week Trump regained his footing and began to thread a narrative aimed at his re-election.
The bid for four more years of power includes muscular language, projecting himself as a wartime leader, a dose of nationalism in stricter border controls and references to the “Chinese virus”, and a blitzkrieg at his old foes in the media.
Although he can no longer hold rambunctious campaign rallies, Trump is instead relishing the medium he knows best by holding televised daily briefings from the White House. Whereas for a while he was forced to play second fiddle to the Democratic presidential primary, now rival Joe Biden is forced to host virtual campaign events – plagued by technical glitches - and Trump is back at the centre of events.
Steve Bannon, a former White House chief strategist, said: “We are at war, and now by necessity he is a ‘wartime’ president. Churchill rose to the occasion and secured his place in history. Trump’s moment is here, to grasp or to lose.”
So far there is little sign that even this trauma, which is shutting down much of the country, has shifted America’s political divide.
Democrats have eviscerated the president for downplaying the threat of the virus – Despite Trump’s vague and over-optimistic claims, America is still woefully lacking in testing kits and equipment , and its notoriously flawed healthcare system could soon be overwhelmed.
However, as in so many other political flashpoints over the past three years, Republicans remain loyal to Trump, and there is no evidence that his “base” is deserting him. An ABC News/Ipsos poll released on Friday found that 55% of respondents approve of the president’s management of the coronavirus crisis, while 43% disapprove. This represented a switch from a week earlier when only 43% approved 54% disapproved.
The finding may reflect a discernible change in Trump’s attitude, starting on Friday 13 March when he declared a national emergency. He then expanded travel restrictions on Europe, Canada and Mexico, issued guidelines against group gatherings of more than 10 people, signaled his support for sending cheques to affected Americans and invoked the Defense Production Act to mass produce equipment.
There was also a change in tone, as tried to sound more sombre and serious – with mixed success – and alluded to the fight against Hitler. “Every generation of Americans has been called to make shared sacrifices for the good of the nation,” he said on Wednesday, citing the teenage volunteers, factory workers and ship builders of the second world war.
“And now it’s our time. We must sacrifice together because we are all in this together and we’ll come through together. It’s the invisible enemy.”
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “It’s the sort of thing that will resonate with his supporters: strength, decisiveness and, let’s not forget, this came from a communist country.”
At first the concept of a microscopic “invisible enemy” did not fit the old Trump playbook that prefers to target people, often people of color. But in the past week he found a fix with some characteristic branding, “Chinese virus”, to constantly remind the public where the respiratory infection originated. On Thursday Trump even crossed out the word “corona” in his prepared remarks and hand wrote “Chinese” instead.
There was criticism of the term as a xenophobic ploy to fire up his “build the wall” support base.
Olsen said he would have awarded Trump a grade D two weeks ago but the president is now quickly waking up to reality. “This would be a test of any president and things can change as people rally round. We’ve got a test of the thesis of the anti-Trump and Never Trump crowd: they always told us when a true crisis came, he wouldn’t be able to handle it. Events will speak for themselves.”
If the number of deaths soars and the economy craters, Olsen noted, Trump is likely to lose in November. But if the opposite happens, “he’ll be able to say he was up to the test. In a sense, we’re at the roulette table and everything is on black and we don’t know where it’s going to land.”
The virus has scrambled Washington’s political order. The election has temporarily become a sideshow as Congress rushes through billions of dollars in stimulus to stave off a 1930s-style great depression. Senate Republicans, typically the party of small government, low taxes and rugged individualism, proposed a direct payment to Americans of up to $1,200.
Trump earned praise from Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governors of New York and California states respectively. Yet the president could not resist tweeting attacks at Cuomo and Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan. He played little part in negotiating with the Democratic-led House of Representatives, which impeached him a few months ago, dispatching treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin instead.
In the daily White House briefings the old Trump was never far away, with misleading claims, attempts to blame his predecessor and unhinged outbursts that likely had the career health professionals at his side inwardly cringing. On Friday a reporter asked the president for his message to Americans who are feeling scared. The reply was less than Churchillian: “I say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I say. I think it’s a very nasty question and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people.”
Leon Panetta, a former defense secretary and director of the CIA, said: “He’s still wrapped up in the political traps that he constantly gets bound by as to the press and the Democrats and whoever else is out there who he tweets about. He’s still caught in that paralysis that prevents him, frankly, from really exercising the leadership that the country needs.”
Regarding Trump’s use of the phrase “Chinese virus”, Panetta added: “I have to believe that he continues to use that term as a way to appeal to his base as opposed to trying to exercise what I think would be more responsible leadership in acknowledging that what we’re now dealing with, whether he likes it or not, is the American virus.”
Trump has generally found bad publicity to more useful than no publicity at all. The crisis has handed him a dominant national platform where Vice President Mike Pence and other officials lavish him with praise. Biden, meanwhile, marked his latest victories in the Democratic primary race in a streamed video from his home in Wilmington, Delaware, speaking for six minutes in front of a black curtain with no audience.
Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “It’s perfectly conceivable Trump survives this and wins the election. If he can keep the death toll down, sell the idea that it could have been worse and show he was a volatile character who turned the corner in a crisis, it’s going to be hard for Biden to unseat him.
“Showing minimal compassion in the case of Donald Trump may be all he has to do to win in 2020.”
Should the coronavirus kill thousands and wreak economic destruction, however, voters may well turn to Barack Obama’s vice-president for steadiness and wisdom. Schiller said: “Biden is the epitome of the opposite of Trump in a crisis. If people are going to turn away from Trump, Biden is exactly the person they will go for.”
Panetta, who has endorsed Biden for president, believes this latter scenario will come to pass. He said: “History is not going to be kind with the fact that they knew about this pandemic going back a number of months and did very little to prepare the country .
© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
Used to Meeting Challenges With Bluster and Force, Trump Confronts a Crisis Unlike Any Before
The ways he dealt with crises in his business, real estate and even his personal life prove jarring as he leads the government’s response to a pandemic.
“We’ve done a phenomenal job on this,” President Trump said at a news briefing in recent days, congratulating himself for how he has managed a crisis he only recently acknowledged.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
By Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman
March 21, 2020Updated 5:49 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — During his campaign for the White House in 2016, President Trump’s advisers briefly tried to run through with him how he would address a large-scale disaster if he won. What, for instance, would he have done during Hurricane Katrina?
“I would have fixed that,” Mr. Trump replied with certitude, referring to the government’s bungled rescue and recovery efforts, according to a campaign official who was present for the exchange. “I would have come up with a much better response.” How? He did not say. He just asserted it would have been better and advisers did not press him to elaborate.
Mr. Trump is no stranger to crisis. He has spent a lifetime grappling with bankruptcy, fending off creditors, evading tax collectors, defending lawsuits, deflecting regulators, spinning reporters and dueling with estranged wives, usually coming out ahead, at least as he defines it. But these were crises of his own creation involving human adversaries he knew how to confront. Nothing in his background in business, entertainment or multiple marriages prepared him for the coronavirus pandemic now threatening America’s health and wealth.
Mr. Trump’s performance on the national stage in recent weeks has put on display the traits that Democrats and some Republicans consider so jarring — the profound need for personal praise, the propensity to blame others, the lack of human empathy, the penchant for rewriting history, the disregard for expertise, the distortion of facts, the impatience with scrutiny or criticism. For years, skeptics expressed concern about how he would handle a genuine crisis threatening the nation, and now they know.
“When he’s faced a problem, he has sought to somehow cheat or fix the outcome ahead of time so that he could construct a narrative that showed him to be the winner,” said Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer. “And when it was all about feuds with other celebrities or contests over ratings or hotel branding, he could do that and no one cared enough to really check. And the bluster and bragging worked.”
“But in this case,” Mr. D’Antonio added, “he tried that in the beginning and you can’t brag or bluster your way out of people dying. And I think more than the suffering, the human suffering, it’s been the inexorable quality of the data that’s forced him to change.”
Only after viral projections grew more dire and markets began to tank did Mr. Trump shift tone and appear to take the threat more seriously, finally adopting a more aggressive set of policies to compel Americans to stay away from one another while trying to mitigate the economic damage.
The New York Stock Exchange this month as markets have plunged over worries about the coronavirus pandemic. Credit...John Taggart for The New York Times
Some in the public seem to have responded. Fifty-five percent of Americans approved of his handling of the crisis in a poll by ABC News and Ipsos released on Friday, up from 43 percent the previous week. A Reuters poll, also conducted with Ipsos, put approval of his handling of the pandemic at 48 percent, up from 38 percent a couple weeks earlier, while surveys by The Economist and YouGov showed a smaller rise, from 41 percent to 45 percent.
But even as he has seemed to take the crisis more seriously, Mr. Trump has continued to make statements that conflicted with the government’s own public health experts and focused energy on blaming China, quarreling with reporters, claiming he knew that the coronavirus would be a pandemic even when he was minimizing its threat only a few weeks ago and congratulating himself for how he has managed a crisis he only recently acknowledged.
“We’ve done a fantastic job from just about every standpoint,” he said Tuesday. “We’ve done a great job,” he said Wednesday. “We’ve done a phenomenal job on this,” he said Thursday.
The next day he grew irritated when Peter Alexander of NBC News asked if he was giving Americans a “false sense of hope” by promising immediate delivery of a drug that experts said is not proven. Mr. Trump said he disagreed with them. “Just a feeling,” he said. “You know, I’m a smart guy. I feel good about it.”
Mr. Alexander moved onto his next question, a “softball” by his own reckoning, asking what Mr. Trump would say to Americans who were at home watching and scared. Most presidents would use the opportunity to offer reassuring words. But Mr. Trump was still steamed and snapped, “I say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I say.”
Later in the same briefing, Yamiche Alcindor of PBS’s “NewsHour” asked when everyone who needed a coronavirus test would be able to get one, as he asserted two weeks ago that every person already could. “Nobody is even talking about it except for you, which doesn’t surprise me,” he said dismissively. How about people with symptoms who could not get a test, he was asked. “I’m not hearing it,” he replied.
The White House rejects any criticism of the president as illegitimate. “This great country has been faced with an unprecedented crisis, and while the Democrats and the media shamelessly try and destroy this president with a coordinated, relentless, biased political assault, President Trump has risen to fight this crisis head-on by taking aggressive historic action to protect the health, wealth and well-being of the American people,” Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, said in a statement.
Mr. Trump acted at the end of January to restrict travel from China, where the outbreak was first detected, and repeatedly points back to that decision, arguing that he saved lives as a result. But he resisted stronger action for weeks. Even as governors, mayors and businesses decided on their own to curb large gatherings and eventually close down schools, restaurants and workplaces, the president at first offered no guidance about whether to take such action.
He has repeatedly misrepresented the state of the response — promising a vaccine “soon” that will actually take at least a year to develop, insisting that tests were available while patients struggled to find any, boasting about the availability of millions of masks while health care workers took to stitching together homemade versions. And dismissing the threat for weeks may have led to complacency among some Americans who could have acted much sooner to take precautions.
Mr. Trump’s defensiveness over the pandemic has become a central dynamic inside the White House as officials wrestle with difficult policy choices. Aides have long understood that Mr. Trump needs to hear support for his decisions, preferably described in superlatives. He often second-guesses himself, prompting advisers to ask allies to tell him he made the right call or go on Fox News to make that point in case he might be watching.
Over the last week, as Mr. Trump has faced ever more draconian and expensive options, Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, sought to coax him into action by using bits of praise in news coverage or from other officials as a motivator, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Officials have learned that the president craves a constant diet of flattery, which they serve up during daily televised briefings. Vice President Mike Pence makes a point of repeating it day after day, sometimes repeatedly in the course of a single briefing. “Mr. President, from early on, you took decisive action,” he said during one.
Other advisers have followed suit. “Thank you, Mr. President, for gathering your public health experts here today and for your strong leadership in keeping America safe,” Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, told him at one point. “I want to thank you for your leadership during this coronavirus outbreak,” Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told him at another.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the infectious disease expert, is careful to maintain his viability within a political team.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Even Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the veteran infectious diseases expert known for his just-the-facts style, has sometimes joined in praise of the president, at one point referring to Mr. Trump’s “proactive, leaning-forward, aggressive, trying to stay ahead of the curve” approach. While Dr. Fauci does not hesitate to correct the president’s facts, as he did on Friday over the unproven drug, he does so politely, careful to maintain his viability within a political team. Still, many noticed that he put his hand to his face in seeming disbelief when Mr. Trump referred to his diplomats as the “Deep State Department.”
Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, said Mr. Trump had been unfairly criticized for his handling of the virus. “The media virtually ignore the president’s massive effort mobilizing the federal government, our industrial base and the scientific and medical community to combat this pandemic, rivaling F.D.R.’s arsenal of democracy,” he said.
Mr. King said that Mr. Trump was working with Democrats but the news media “prefer to dwell on initial failure of C.D.C. test kits and low inventory of masks and ventilators going back two administrations.” Still, he said of Mr. Trump, “He too often takes the bait.”
None of which comes as a surprise to those who dealt with Mr. Trump or studied his life before he became president. In real estate, he found he could overcome crises by bluffing his way past regulators, bullying the bankers and bamboozling the tabloids.
When banks came after him for overdue loans, he pushed back, arguing that it was in their interest that his brand not be harmed by calling him out. When contractors demanded to be paid, he found complaints about their work and refused, leading in part to more than 3,500 lawsuits. When his first two marriages fell apart, he took a scorched-earth approach against his wives, leaking to New York’s gossip columnists even if it meant his children watched ugly divorces play out in public.
“The typical modus operandi from him is to bluff, is to fake, is to deny,” said Jack O’Donnell, the former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City.
When Mr. Trump prepared to open the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City in 1990 and ran into trouble with the authorities, he summoned Mr. O’Donnell. “He told them I was an expert in operations and I could fix this,” Mr. O’Donnell recalled. “And they believed him. I was dumbfounded. He was completely bluffing them.”
A subway station in Brooklyn. The governor of New York on Friday urged people to stay home.Credit...Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times
To Mr. Trump, most of his crises were about paper and money, not people. The self-described “king of debt” treated loan repayments almost as if they were optional and made it a mantra never to back down. “I figured it was the bank’s problem, not mine,” he wrote in one of his books. “What the hell did I care? I actually told one bank, ‘I told you, you shouldn’t have loaned me that money.’”
Perhaps the only time before his presidency that the human toll of a crisis really struck Mr. Trump in a personal way came when three of his executives died in a helicopter crash heading to Atlantic City. He seemed genuinely shaken, visiting the widows to share in their grief.
“I actually think he handled that situation about as well as you could expect from him,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “It was such a shock to him. It was the first time I heard fear in his voice. It was the first time I saw empathy, that I saw emotion from him, because he realized the human loss there.”
Even then, Mr. Trump could not help inserting himself into the story, suggesting falsely that he almost boarded the helicopter himself. And within months, with his Taj project flailing, Mr. Trump began publicly attributing problems to the dead executives. In a crisis, “he always was more focused on who he could blame versus fixing the problem,” said Mr. O’Donnell, who quit in disgust.
Nor did Mr. Trump exhibit much empathy for the workers who lost their jobs when his casinos went bust. Instead, when asked about his failed Atlantic City ventures, he emphasizes his own ability to escape unharmed. “The money I took out of there was incredible,” he once told The New York Times.
The closest analog to the current situation may be the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, another national trauma. Mr. Trump tried to thrust himself into the news coverage, telling an interviewer by phone that day that with the destruction of the World Trade Center he now had the tallest building in New York City, a claim that was not even true. He also has said he spent extensive time around the site trying to help the cleanup, a claim that has never been verified.
With the airports closed at the time, Mr. Trump was asked to provide his private plane to fly Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gov. George E. Pataki to Washington for President George W. Bush’s address to Congress. Mr. Trump agreed — but in return asked for help getting permission to travel from Washington to another destination when others were grounded.
By his own account, Mr. Trump never imagined that he would be facing a pandemic, an invisible killer immune to bluster. “In every previous occasion, he was facing a human being or groups of human beings,” said Gwenda Blair, the author of a biography of the Trump family. “And obviously the coronavirus, it’s not a person, can’t be bullied.”
So Mr. Trump, with his recent descriptions of a war to be won over a “foreign enemy,” is seeking a dynamic that he is familiar with, personifying the virus as an opponent to be beaten, framing it as the kind of crisis he knows how to tackle. “He’s trying to make it into a win-lose situation,” she said. “That’s how he sees the world — winners, him, losers everybody else. He’s trying to make the coronavirus into a loser and himself the winner.”
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Trump’s Coronavirus Response Will Be His Toxic Legacy
There is no moment Trump can ever rise to, he only sinks to his most base nature
SEAN WOODS
MARCH 22, 2020 10:04AM ET
His handling of this pandemic is how history will remember Donald Trump. Fifty years from now historians will not spend much time on Russiagate, Robert Mueller or Dirty Dossiers and alleged pee tapes, nor will massive tax cuts for the rich or the endless petty insults and the litany of lies make much of a mark. In a time of national crisis, the president is failing the most basic tests of leadership. He spends his time in front of the camera attacking the media, spreading disinformation and sowing racism. His response should come as no surprise. These have been the signature moves of his presidency and in normal times, these actions were bad enough, in a pandemic they are destabilizing and destructive.
Who could doubt that Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama or George Bush I and II would have struck somber and fatherly tones in the crisis? They would have attempted to soothe a country in distress and ease the minds of the people — to be sure, much of this would have been bromides. But it turns out, that’s a big part of the job. Trump has from day one completely abdicated the moral authority of the office, perhaps knowing intuitively that his moral compass was so hopelessly bent that it was pointless to try. It would be hard to underestimate the unexpected and deleterious effects this has had on the presidency. As we all isolate and seek shelter, to not have someone who is of good character at the helm only adds to the extreme anxiety, anger and coming heartbreak.
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There have already been so many stories of heroism and bravery. Doctors, nurses and first responders struggle against a rising tide of patients and are themselves at risk. Sanitation workers, pharmacists, and grocery store clerks are putting themselves in harm’s way. Everyday Americans are doing vital work, despite the commander-in-chief lowering the bar of the most important job in the world. Never forget, Trump played golf as the number of cases surged.
We have seen what real crisis leadership looks like from Gov. Jay Inslee and Gov. Andrew Cuomo — both have been honest, blunt and at times inspirational. Trump is never that. It turns out in a time of crisis a conman is not up for the task. We have had terrible presidents before and will again, but unlike those who came before, Trump has shown us the worst of ourselves. The reflection is not pretty. How people react in stressful situations can tell you a lot about them, for the president to be so ineffectual and dishonest is damning. After the last few weeks, what sane person would want Trump in their foxhole?
There is no moment Trump can ever rise to, he only sinks to his most base nature. The record of his mishandling and deceptions about the COVID-19 virus are clear as day and exactly like how he handles everything else — only this time the scale is so monumental and the threat so critical that it can’t be swept away by the news cycle. For more than three years we have seen him blunder and rage from one drama to the next, some serious and deadly like abandoning the Kurds in Syria, some foolish like the size the crowd at his inauguration. Through it all, Trump consistently displays a smallness of character, a signature brand of toxic narcissism and a nasty mean streak; his only gifts being an instinctual understanding of his supporters and a mediocre talent to work a crowd like some cheap Borscht Belt comedian. That will not be enough in the face of a pandemic.
Trump knows this is how he will be judged. That’s why he’s growing so unhinged in public. He’s going to his familiar playbook and trying all his tricks. But a virus is not something he can insult or lie his way out of. People are dying. Our economy, seemingly so strong, cratered in a mere ten days. The virus is not Trump’s fault of course, but the dismantling of the pandemic response team at the National Security Council surely is. Ignoring the threat for months also rests on his shoulders. The nation is now on the brink, and how he handles the crisis is his test. It should be clear to all, he’s failing miserably.
This country has been through a lot in the last 20 years. We have faced terror attacks, mass shootings, environmental disasters and a financial crisis to name a few, and somewhere along the way we grew more divided, to the point where we can’t even agree on facts. We will get through both this virus and the toxic presidency of Donald Trump — but the road forward is treacherous and full of peril and there is no doubt we will never be the same.
© 2020 PMC. All rights reserved.
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Donald Trump
Trump talks himself up as ‘wartime president’ to lead America through a crisis
The president initially scoffed at the coronavirus. Now he seems convinced he can lead – and secure four more years in November
Sun 22 Mar 2020 02.00 EDT
Bill Clinton used to lament that his time as US president was broadly peaceful, and lacked a historic test of his mettle. Donald Trump believes that his moment has arrived: a crisis on a par with leading a nation at war.
Lay off those war metaphors, world leaders. You could be the next casualty… | Simon Tisdall
“I view it as a, in a sense, a wartime president,” he said at the White House this week as he belatedly comprehended the epic scale of the coronavirus pandemic, which in the US alone has infected more than 19,000 people and killed more than 200. “I mean, that’s what we’re fighting.”
The world witnessed two Trumps in often jarring conflict last week, sometimes in the same breath. One was aspiring to be statesmanlike, reassuring an anguished public and mobilizing the awesome power of the American government. The other was more familiar: belligerent, anti-science, racially divisive, airing grievances and resentments and blaming everyone but himself.
Yet from the blur something else was coming into focus. Having procrastinated at the outbreak of the pandemic, this was the week Trump regained his footing and began to thread a narrative aimed at his re-election.
The bid for four more years of power includes muscular language, projecting himself as a wartime leader, a dose of nationalism in stricter border controls and references to the “Chinese virus”, and a blitzkrieg at his old foes in the media.
Although he can no longer hold rambunctious campaign rallies, Trump is instead relishing the medium he knows best by holding televised daily briefings from the White House. Whereas for a while he was forced to play second fiddle to the Democratic presidential primary, now rival Joe Biden is forced to host virtual campaign events – plagued by technical glitches - and Trump is back at the centre of events.
Steve Bannon, a former White House chief strategist, said: “We are at war, and now by necessity he is a ‘wartime’ president. Churchill rose to the occasion and secured his place in history. Trump’s moment is here, to grasp or to lose.”
So far there is little sign that even this trauma, which is shutting down much of the country, has shifted America’s political divide.
Democrats have eviscerated the president for downplaying the threat of the virus – Despite Trump’s vague and over-optimistic claims, America is still woefully lacking in testing kits and equipment , and its notoriously flawed healthcare system could soon be overwhelmed.
However, as in so many other political flashpoints over the past three years, Republicans remain loyal to Trump, and there is no evidence that his “base” is deserting him. An ABC News/Ipsos poll released on Friday found that 55% of respondents approve of the president’s management of the coronavirus crisis, while 43% disapprove. This represented a switch from a week earlier when only 43% approved 54% disapproved.
The finding may reflect a discernible change in Trump’s attitude, starting on Friday 13 March when he declared a national emergency. He then expanded travel restrictions on Europe, Canada and Mexico, issued guidelines against group gatherings of more than 10 people, signaled his support for sending cheques to affected Americans and invoked the Defense Production Act to mass produce equipment.
There was also a change in tone, as tried to sound more sombre and serious – with mixed success – and alluded to the fight against Hitler. “Every generation of Americans has been called to make shared sacrifices for the good of the nation,” he said on Wednesday, citing the teenage volunteers, factory workers and ship builders of the second world war.
“And now it’s our time. We must sacrifice together because we are all in this together and we’ll come through together. It’s the invisible enemy.”
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “It’s the sort of thing that will resonate with his supporters: strength, decisiveness and, let’s not forget, this came from a communist country.”
At first the concept of a microscopic “invisible enemy” did not fit the old Trump playbook that prefers to target people, often people of color. But in the past week he found a fix with some characteristic branding, “Chinese virus”, to constantly remind the public where the respiratory infection originated. On Thursday Trump even crossed out the word “corona” in his prepared remarks and hand wrote “Chinese” instead.
There was criticism of the term as a xenophobic ploy to fire up his “build the wall” support base.
Olsen said he would have awarded Trump a grade D two weeks ago but the president is now quickly waking up to reality. “This would be a test of any president and things can change as people rally round. We’ve got a test of the thesis of the anti-Trump and Never Trump crowd: they always told us when a true crisis came, he wouldn’t be able to handle it. Events will speak for themselves.”
If the number of deaths soars and the economy craters, Olsen noted, Trump is likely to lose in November. But if the opposite happens, “he’ll be able to say he was up to the test. In a sense, we’re at the roulette table and everything is on black and we don’t know where it’s going to land.”
The virus has scrambled Washington’s political order. The election has temporarily become a sideshow as Congress rushes through billions of dollars in stimulus to stave off a 1930s-style great depression. Senate Republicans, typically the party of small government, low taxes and rugged individualism, proposed a direct payment to Americans of up to $1,200.
Trump earned praise from Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governors of New York and California states respectively. Yet the president could not resist tweeting attacks at Cuomo and Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan. He played little part in negotiating with the Democratic-led House of Representatives, which impeached him a few months ago, dispatching treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin instead.
In the daily White House briefings the old Trump was never far away, with misleading claims, attempts to blame his predecessor and unhinged outbursts that likely had the career health professionals at his side inwardly cringing. On Friday a reporter asked the president for his message to Americans who are feeling scared. The reply was less than Churchillian: “I say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I say. I think it’s a very nasty question and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people.”
Leon Panetta, a former defense secretary and director of the CIA, said: “He’s still wrapped up in the political traps that he constantly gets bound by as to the press and the Democrats and whoever else is out there who he tweets about. He’s still caught in that paralysis that prevents him, frankly, from really exercising the leadership that the country needs.”
Regarding Trump’s use of the phrase “Chinese virus”, Panetta added: “I have to believe that he continues to use that term as a way to appeal to his base as opposed to trying to exercise what I think would be more responsible leadership in acknowledging that what we’re now dealing with, whether he likes it or not, is the American virus.”
Trump has generally found bad publicity to more useful than no publicity at all. The crisis has handed him a dominant national platform where Vice President Mike Pence and other officials lavish him with praise. Biden, meanwhile, marked his latest victories in the Democratic primary race in a streamed video from his home in Wilmington, Delaware, speaking for six minutes in front of a black curtain with no audience.
Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “It’s perfectly conceivable Trump survives this and wins the election. If he can keep the death toll down, sell the idea that it could have been worse and show he was a volatile character who turned the corner in a crisis, it’s going to be hard for Biden to unseat him.
“Showing minimal compassion in the case of Donald Trump may be all he has to do to win in 2020.”
Should the coronavirus kill thousands and wreak economic destruction, however, voters may well turn to Barack Obama’s vice-president for steadiness and wisdom. Schiller said: “Biden is the epitome of the opposite of Trump in a crisis. If people are going to turn away from Trump, Biden is exactly the person they will go for.”
Panetta, who has endorsed Biden for president, believes this latter scenario will come to pass. He said: “History is not going to be kind with the fact that they knew about this pandemic going back a number of months and did very little to prepare the country .
© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
Used to Meeting Challenges With Bluster and Force, Trump Confronts a Crisis Unlike Any Before
The ways he dealt with crises in his business, real estate and even his personal life prove jarring as he leads the government’s response to a pandemic.
“We’ve done a phenomenal job on this,” President Trump said at a news briefing in recent days, congratulating himself for how he has managed a crisis he only recently acknowledged.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
By Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman
March 21, 2020Updated 5:49 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — During his campaign for the White House in 2016, President Trump’s advisers briefly tried to run through with him how he would address a large-scale disaster if he won. What, for instance, would he have done during Hurricane Katrina?
“I would have fixed that,” Mr. Trump replied with certitude, referring to the government’s bungled rescue and recovery efforts, according to a campaign official who was present for the exchange. “I would have come up with a much better response.” How? He did not say. He just asserted it would have been better and advisers did not press him to elaborate.
Mr. Trump is no stranger to crisis. He has spent a lifetime grappling with bankruptcy, fending off creditors, evading tax collectors, defending lawsuits, deflecting regulators, spinning reporters and dueling with estranged wives, usually coming out ahead, at least as he defines it. But these were crises of his own creation involving human adversaries he knew how to confront. Nothing in his background in business, entertainment or multiple marriages prepared him for the coronavirus pandemic now threatening America’s health and wealth.
Mr. Trump’s performance on the national stage in recent weeks has put on display the traits that Democrats and some Republicans consider so jarring — the profound need for personal praise, the propensity to blame others, the lack of human empathy, the penchant for rewriting history, the disregard for expertise, the distortion of facts, the impatience with scrutiny or criticism. For years, skeptics expressed concern about how he would handle a genuine crisis threatening the nation, and now they know.
“When he’s faced a problem, he has sought to somehow cheat or fix the outcome ahead of time so that he could construct a narrative that showed him to be the winner,” said Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer. “And when it was all about feuds with other celebrities or contests over ratings or hotel branding, he could do that and no one cared enough to really check. And the bluster and bragging worked.”
“But in this case,” Mr. D’Antonio added, “he tried that in the beginning and you can’t brag or bluster your way out of people dying. And I think more than the suffering, the human suffering, it’s been the inexorable quality of the data that’s forced him to change.”
Only after viral projections grew more dire and markets began to tank did Mr. Trump shift tone and appear to take the threat more seriously, finally adopting a more aggressive set of policies to compel Americans to stay away from one another while trying to mitigate the economic damage.
The New York Stock Exchange this month as markets have plunged over worries about the coronavirus pandemic. Credit...John Taggart for The New York Times
Some in the public seem to have responded. Fifty-five percent of Americans approved of his handling of the crisis in a poll by ABC News and Ipsos released on Friday, up from 43 percent the previous week. A Reuters poll, also conducted with Ipsos, put approval of his handling of the pandemic at 48 percent, up from 38 percent a couple weeks earlier, while surveys by The Economist and YouGov showed a smaller rise, from 41 percent to 45 percent.
But even as he has seemed to take the crisis more seriously, Mr. Trump has continued to make statements that conflicted with the government’s own public health experts and focused energy on blaming China, quarreling with reporters, claiming he knew that the coronavirus would be a pandemic even when he was minimizing its threat only a few weeks ago and congratulating himself for how he has managed a crisis he only recently acknowledged.
“We’ve done a fantastic job from just about every standpoint,” he said Tuesday. “We’ve done a great job,” he said Wednesday. “We’ve done a phenomenal job on this,” he said Thursday.
The next day he grew irritated when Peter Alexander of NBC News asked if he was giving Americans a “false sense of hope” by promising immediate delivery of a drug that experts said is not proven. Mr. Trump said he disagreed with them. “Just a feeling,” he said. “You know, I’m a smart guy. I feel good about it.”
Mr. Alexander moved onto his next question, a “softball” by his own reckoning, asking what Mr. Trump would say to Americans who were at home watching and scared. Most presidents would use the opportunity to offer reassuring words. But Mr. Trump was still steamed and snapped, “I say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I say.”
Later in the same briefing, Yamiche Alcindor of PBS’s “NewsHour” asked when everyone who needed a coronavirus test would be able to get one, as he asserted two weeks ago that every person already could. “Nobody is even talking about it except for you, which doesn’t surprise me,” he said dismissively. How about people with symptoms who could not get a test, he was asked. “I’m not hearing it,” he replied.
The White House rejects any criticism of the president as illegitimate. “This great country has been faced with an unprecedented crisis, and while the Democrats and the media shamelessly try and destroy this president with a coordinated, relentless, biased political assault, President Trump has risen to fight this crisis head-on by taking aggressive historic action to protect the health, wealth and well-being of the American people,” Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, said in a statement.
Mr. Trump acted at the end of January to restrict travel from China, where the outbreak was first detected, and repeatedly points back to that decision, arguing that he saved lives as a result. But he resisted stronger action for weeks. Even as governors, mayors and businesses decided on their own to curb large gatherings and eventually close down schools, restaurants and workplaces, the president at first offered no guidance about whether to take such action.
He has repeatedly misrepresented the state of the response — promising a vaccine “soon” that will actually take at least a year to develop, insisting that tests were available while patients struggled to find any, boasting about the availability of millions of masks while health care workers took to stitching together homemade versions. And dismissing the threat for weeks may have led to complacency among some Americans who could have acted much sooner to take precautions.
Mr. Trump’s defensiveness over the pandemic has become a central dynamic inside the White House as officials wrestle with difficult policy choices. Aides have long understood that Mr. Trump needs to hear support for his decisions, preferably described in superlatives. He often second-guesses himself, prompting advisers to ask allies to tell him he made the right call or go on Fox News to make that point in case he might be watching.
Over the last week, as Mr. Trump has faced ever more draconian and expensive options, Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, sought to coax him into action by using bits of praise in news coverage or from other officials as a motivator, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Officials have learned that the president craves a constant diet of flattery, which they serve up during daily televised briefings. Vice President Mike Pence makes a point of repeating it day after day, sometimes repeatedly in the course of a single briefing. “Mr. President, from early on, you took decisive action,” he said during one.
Other advisers have followed suit. “Thank you, Mr. President, for gathering your public health experts here today and for your strong leadership in keeping America safe,” Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, told him at one point. “I want to thank you for your leadership during this coronavirus outbreak,” Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told him at another.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the infectious disease expert, is careful to maintain his viability within a political team.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Even Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the veteran infectious diseases expert known for his just-the-facts style, has sometimes joined in praise of the president, at one point referring to Mr. Trump’s “proactive, leaning-forward, aggressive, trying to stay ahead of the curve” approach. While Dr. Fauci does not hesitate to correct the president’s facts, as he did on Friday over the unproven drug, he does so politely, careful to maintain his viability within a political team. Still, many noticed that he put his hand to his face in seeming disbelief when Mr. Trump referred to his diplomats as the “Deep State Department.”
Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, said Mr. Trump had been unfairly criticized for his handling of the virus. “The media virtually ignore the president’s massive effort mobilizing the federal government, our industrial base and the scientific and medical community to combat this pandemic, rivaling F.D.R.’s arsenal of democracy,” he said.
Mr. King said that Mr. Trump was working with Democrats but the news media “prefer to dwell on initial failure of C.D.C. test kits and low inventory of masks and ventilators going back two administrations.” Still, he said of Mr. Trump, “He too often takes the bait.”
None of which comes as a surprise to those who dealt with Mr. Trump or studied his life before he became president. In real estate, he found he could overcome crises by bluffing his way past regulators, bullying the bankers and bamboozling the tabloids.
When banks came after him for overdue loans, he pushed back, arguing that it was in their interest that his brand not be harmed by calling him out. When contractors demanded to be paid, he found complaints about their work and refused, leading in part to more than 3,500 lawsuits. When his first two marriages fell apart, he took a scorched-earth approach against his wives, leaking to New York’s gossip columnists even if it meant his children watched ugly divorces play out in public.
“The typical modus operandi from him is to bluff, is to fake, is to deny,” said Jack O’Donnell, the former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City.
When Mr. Trump prepared to open the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City in 1990 and ran into trouble with the authorities, he summoned Mr. O’Donnell. “He told them I was an expert in operations and I could fix this,” Mr. O’Donnell recalled. “And they believed him. I was dumbfounded. He was completely bluffing them.”
A subway station in Brooklyn. The governor of New York on Friday urged people to stay home.Credit...Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times
To Mr. Trump, most of his crises were about paper and money, not people. The self-described “king of debt” treated loan repayments almost as if they were optional and made it a mantra never to back down. “I figured it was the bank’s problem, not mine,” he wrote in one of his books. “What the hell did I care? I actually told one bank, ‘I told you, you shouldn’t have loaned me that money.’”
Perhaps the only time before his presidency that the human toll of a crisis really struck Mr. Trump in a personal way came when three of his executives died in a helicopter crash heading to Atlantic City. He seemed genuinely shaken, visiting the widows to share in their grief.
“I actually think he handled that situation about as well as you could expect from him,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “It was such a shock to him. It was the first time I heard fear in his voice. It was the first time I saw empathy, that I saw emotion from him, because he realized the human loss there.”
Even then, Mr. Trump could not help inserting himself into the story, suggesting falsely that he almost boarded the helicopter himself. And within months, with his Taj project flailing, Mr. Trump began publicly attributing problems to the dead executives. In a crisis, “he always was more focused on who he could blame versus fixing the problem,” said Mr. O’Donnell, who quit in disgust.
Nor did Mr. Trump exhibit much empathy for the workers who lost their jobs when his casinos went bust. Instead, when asked about his failed Atlantic City ventures, he emphasizes his own ability to escape unharmed. “The money I took out of there was incredible,” he once told The New York Times.
The closest analog to the current situation may be the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, another national trauma. Mr. Trump tried to thrust himself into the news coverage, telling an interviewer by phone that day that with the destruction of the World Trade Center he now had the tallest building in New York City, a claim that was not even true. He also has said he spent extensive time around the site trying to help the cleanup, a claim that has never been verified.
With the airports closed at the time, Mr. Trump was asked to provide his private plane to fly Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gov. George E. Pataki to Washington for President George W. Bush’s address to Congress. Mr. Trump agreed — but in return asked for help getting permission to travel from Washington to another destination when others were grounded.
By his own account, Mr. Trump never imagined that he would be facing a pandemic, an invisible killer immune to bluster. “In every previous occasion, he was facing a human being or groups of human beings,” said Gwenda Blair, the author of a biography of the Trump family. “And obviously the coronavirus, it’s not a person, can’t be bullied.”
So Mr. Trump, with his recent descriptions of a war to be won over a “foreign enemy,” is seeking a dynamic that he is familiar with, personifying the virus as an opponent to be beaten, framing it as the kind of crisis he knows how to tackle. “He’s trying to make it into a win-lose situation,” she said. “That’s how he sees the world — winners, him, losers everybody else. He’s trying to make the coronavirus into a loser and himself the winner.”
© 2020 The New York Times Company
Last edited by Meno_ on Sun Mar 22, 2020 9:03 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Trump enters the stage
by promethean75 » Sun Mar 22, 2020 3:33 pm
Wolff enters the stage; 5:40, nuff said.
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Re: Trump enters the stage
by iambiguous » Sun Mar 22, 2020 6:13 pm
promethean75 wrote:Wolff enters the stage; 5:40, nuff said.
Nuff said.
Except for the part where some suggest that any and all cures end up being worse than the disease. Historically, for example.
In other words, what if the modern industrial state -- the liberal welfare state as some call it -- really is the best of all possible worlds?
What does that tell us about "the human condition"?
And then all the shit that fascinates me.
Yeah, I'm profoundly cynical and pessimistic about the future. But at least I have less of it than most here.
He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles
Start here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
Then here: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296
And here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382
Start here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
Then here: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296
And here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194382
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Re: Trump enters the stage
by Meno_ » Sun Mar 22, 2020 8:26 pm
iambiguous wrote:promethean75 wrote:Wolff enters the stage; 5:40, nuff said.
Nuff said.
Except for the part where some suggest that any and all cures end up being worse than the disease. Historically, for example.
In other words, what if the modern industrial state -- the liberal welfare state as some call it -- really is the best of all possible worlds?
What does that tell us about "the human condition"?
And then all the shit that fascinates me.
Yeah, I'm profoundly cynical and pessimistic about the future. But at least I have less of it than most here.
Pls. don't generalize. Some here are incurable-hmmm- optimists.
Nice to meet tscha, how do You do!
Armenius warned me, way before the election that if Me. Clinton wins, we'll have real trouble like a nuke war, and I go, Yeah? Incredulously brought to a standstill.
But now the battle cry is, by Trump, of him being a war prez, not unlike FDR, and so merely conjecturing about how he (Arminius) would respond.
That is of, You voted in my above posted poll forum . I am inviting some kinds of credible response there.
My cousin's husband used to be Chief of Police, now living in Vegas, he thinks it almost an certainty. My fear is, once coming out of the closet of disillusionment, it will be a hard handed effort to silence media to keep it infer some kind of wrap, wolf or not.
I kind of feel, rather then hope You know the picture, and that is why i am an incurable romantic optimist.
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