He wanted data to justify doing so
The Post tells the story of how Trump and Kushner put Trump’s continued grip on power ahead of the survival of X thousands of their fellow citizens.
In late March Trump was disgruntled about models that predicted deaths from the virus ranging from 100,000 to 240,000 Americans at best, but he was much more disgruntled about the economy and his prospects. What’s a quarter of a million people compared to the next four years of Donald Trump’s life?
Trump was apprehensive about so much carnage on his watch, yet also impatient to reopen the economy — and he wanted data to justify doing so.
He wanted data to justify doing what he wanted to do, as opposed to data to inform his decision about what to do. That’s Trump.
So the White House people made up their own models, which said everything would be fabulous, go back to work.
Although Hassett denied that he ever projected the number of dead, other senior administration officials said his presentations characterized the count as lower than commonly forecast — and that it was embraced inside the West Wing by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and other powerful aides helping to oversee the government’s pandemic response. It affirmed their own skepticism about the severity of the virus and bolstered their case to shift the focus to the economy, which they firmly believed would determine whether Trump wins a second term.
That is, they wanted the count to be lower, for their own selfish reasons, so they decided it was going to be lower, for their own selfish reasons. One the one hand hundreds of thousands of lives, on the other hand the continued power and self-enrichment of Trump and his callow fishbelly son-in-law. We’re called on to die of the virus so that Don and Jared can collar even more millions of corrupt $$$.
Trump directed his coronavirus task force to issue guidelines for reopening businesses, encouraged “LIBERATE” protests to apply pressure on governors and proclaimed that “the cure can’t be worse than the problem itself” — even as polls showed that Americans were far more concerned about their personal safety.
But our personal safety doesn’t matter compared to Trump’s personal opportunity to shout at us from the White House and inhale all the loose change in the world.
By the end of April — with more Americans dying in the month than in all of the Vietnam War — it became clear that the Hassett model was too good to be true. “A catastrophic miss,” as a former senior administration official briefed on the data described it. The president’s course would not be changed, however. Trump and Kushner began to declare a great victory against the virus, while urging America to start reopening businesses and schools.
“It’s going to go. It’s going to leave. It’s going to be gone. It’s going to be eradicated,” the president said Wednesday, hours after his son-in-law claimed the administration’s response had been “a great success story.”
…
Trump crowned himself “the king of ventilators” and boasted of his work shoring up supply chains, yet shamed governors for asking for too many supplies for besieged hospitals and health-care workers in their states. At one point, he seemed to suggest that hospitals were selling protective gear provided by the federal government on the black market.
Meanwhile he’s been stealing ventilators and PPE from states so that he can hand them out to governors who flatter him and withhold them from those who don’t. Our lives versus his vanity; an easy choice for him.
Fauci and Birx and others with medical degrees formed their own group that met daily.
Some in the “doctors group” were distressed by what one official dubbed the “voodoo” discussed within the broader task force.
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The doctors group strove to present a unified front to the president on various medical and scientific issues. They recently discussed how antibody tests, designed to identify people with possible immunity from the virus, are not a panacea to reopening the country because the results sometimes are inaccurate.
“There’s a little bit of a God complex,” one senior administration official said of the group. “They’re all about science, science, science, which is good, but sometimes there’s a little bit less of a consideration of politics when maybe there should be.”
That is, they focus on the disease, when they should be paying more attention to Trump’s desire to be re-elected.
Trump has peppered his new chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and other senior aides with phone calls “in almost every single hour of the day,” sometimes well after midnight, according to one senior official.
That’s so Trump. It’s a side issue but it’s so Trump. He’s awake, so what does he care that it’s 2 a.m. He’s awake, so other people have to talk to him. He’s awake, so other people don’t need sleep. Trump alone matters.
[B]y month’s end, as Trump cheered businesses reopening in Georgia, Texas and several other states “because we have to get our country back,” the total dead climbed past 63,000, with no sign of slowing down.
Never mind that, how is Trump doing?
get our [–] back seems to be a rallying cry. The corporate bigwig who wanted his life back after Deepwater Horizon led him to have to do things very differently, and possibly face charges. Never mind the workers that literally lost their lives; he wanted his back.
I hear it all the time from locals. “I want my life back”, usually in response to some totally reasonable, sensible policy (and we have few enough of those here in Nebraska) that caused them some minor inconvenience.
Well, guess what? I want my life back, too. I want to go to theatre again. I want to eat at the Parthenon. I want to visit the library. I want to drive to work watching the clouds and the sunrise, and talk about methods and best practices with my colleague in the office next door, leaning against his desk with a cup of coffee in my hand. Yeah. That would be nice. But I don’t want that at the expense of my, or anyone else’s life. I will wait this out, donate to the food bank, send money to Drs Without Borders, and do my work from home. I will wear masks to the grocery store, and gloves, and will wash my hands more often than usual. I will stay away from my neighbors, my friends, my family, until it is safe to be in contact with them again. Why? BECAUSE IT ISN’T ABOUT WHAT I WANT.
Oh, that’s obvious to Trump, too. It isn’t about what I, iknklast, wants. It’s about Trump, and what he wants. Because he is a great big man baby in a bad fitting suit with a bad combover and the worst ever bottled tan, and that makes him valuable while the rest of us can be cannon-fodder (or in this case, virus fodder) for his ambitions and wishes.
Wait. What does that mean coming from Trump? Exactly what “problem” was Trump really talking about? Certainly you don’t amputate an arm to “cure” a sliver in your finger. That would be an overreaction, a cure worse than the problem. In the case of a disease outbreak that could kill millions if left unchecked, an overreaction would be something that would kill even more people. There was no “cure” being proposed for the potential public health crisis that would have resulted in the same result, or worse, as doing nothing. Even the “herd immunity” approach, while likely resulting in higher mortality than a lockdown, would have been less deadly than doing nothing.
It seems clear now that the only “problem” Trump was thinking about was the economy. Millions of deaths would have been an ieconomic nconvenience. But it’s only thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands dead, then shutting down the economy to save people’s lives, for him, is worse than sacrificing those lives.
Excuse me? These guys are working for a man who thinks he can bend the course of a viral pandemic to his will, who is making decisions which will result in the pointless deaths of at least tens of thousands more people and the scientists trying to stop it are the ones with a God complex? Holy shit! It’s not the doctors they should be arguing with. The virus doesn’t give a fuck about poll numbers, doesn’t care about what Trump needs, doesn’t care about November. Plus, you can’t vote if you’re dead.
@Iknklast #1
Parthenon? Columbia, SC?
As I said on a thread on Nextdoor of all places, there’s this idea that it’s a stark choice. It isn’t. The choice is this: a) open up now for the “sake” of the economy and as hundreds of thousands die and millions get sick and are fired, guess what happens to the economy. After 657k died from the 1918 flu, the US went through a nasty recession (this was before the Depression, which was separate. The 1920s sucked.). When a disaster like this hits, people are more conservative about discretionary spending.
b) continue social distancing, and take the economic hit, but the reopening of the economy will be smoother and less deadly. More people will still die than where we stand right now but the rate of change should slow and start dropping. The economy actually has a better chance of a quick recovery because being stuck at home may boost consumer demand, especially in businesses that need foot traffic like bars and restaurants.
Having said all of that, the global economy is shrinking, so the US economy may well do badly regardless.
Once again I am frustrated that Trump’s vanity and ego have actually hurt him politically and we’re the collateral damage.
He could have stepped back, let the scientists lead policy, and soften the impact of the virus and the consequent hit. Then he could have basked in his own glory and genius, riding his way to reelection.
Now, he’ll get no roaring economy to add wind to his sails. And if the first wave of the virus passes, he’ll proclaim victory only to have it snatched away when the second wave hits.
Nobody wins. Not Democrats, not independents and not Republicans. And the MAGA crowd will still believe in their God-Emperor.
Colin Day – Parthenon, Lincoln, NE