Another press briefing campaign rally, perhaps the weirdest yet.

At this stage of the rally, the early stage, he comes across as drunk, exhausted, sick, something – gabbling, slurring, and seeming to talk through a gallon or two of his own drool.

“…when thee brunt of it comes, which is coming quickly, you see it, you see it as sure as you can see it” [rising hand gesture to illustrate “brunt”]

Lots of drunk – slurring – weaving – struggling in this one:

No, people with expertise in researching and testing new medications are going to have to do that.

That one is particularly disgusting. He goes on and on about who stroked his ego enough and who didn’t, as if that were the whole point. It makes me wish I could bash his head in myself.

Yes, “inappropriate” to go public to save the lives of his crew.

It’s true about the bizarre hushed tones. He’s doing the creepy-daddy whisper at this point, and it makes one want to run for the hills.

The long haul:

“I think this idea … that if you close schools and shut restaurants for a couple of weeks, you solve the problem and get back to normal life — that’s not what’s going to happen,” says Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and author of The Rules of Contagion, a book on how outbreaks spread. “The main message that isn’t getting across to a lot of people is just how long we might be in this for.”

Predictions are that a vaccine will take 12 to 18 months, so that’s probably how long.

Long.

Very long.

Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, agrees that the social distancing measures might need to be in place for at least months. “I don’t think people are prepared for that and I am not certain we can bear it,” she writes in an email. “I have no idea what political leaders will decide to do. To me, even if this is needed, it seems unsustainable.” She adds that she might just be feeling pessimistic, but “it’s really hard for me to imagine this country staying home for months.”

It’s really hard for me to imagine how that can even work, given how many people have zero margin. Robert Reich says 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, so…??????

It’s okay to be upset by all of this. And there are still a lot of unknowns about this virus, and how it will all play out. Perhaps the worst will spare us. But we still need to prepare for it and tap into our resiliency. Life may feel very hard and very stressful over the next several months. It’s a real burden, and you don’t have to like it. But know: This pandemic will end eventually. What we don’t yet know is when.

Yes but hard and stressful aren’t really the issue, nor is resiliency. Eviction and starvation are the issue. The Vox article, bizarrely, never addresses that.

To the surprise of no one:

JARED KUSHNER’S family real estate company, which owns and manages thousands of apartment units, continued its aggressive eviction practices and debt collection lawsuits as Americans wait for government relief. Well into the coronavirus crisis, which has led to skyrocketing unemployment, court records show properties owned by Kushner Companies are still filing new eviction lawsuits.

No shit. Did anyone think Jared Kushner is any kind of humane or decent person?

At least 15 tenants in New Jersey and Maryland have been on the receiving end of lawsuits from Kushner-owned properties even after both states declared states of emergency. Gov. Phil Murphy, D-N.J., and Gov. Larry Hogan, R-Md., have both called for a moratorium on evictions and courts have been closed, postponing hearing dates for a range of debt collection-related activities.

Blah blah blah; Prince Jared wants his money, pal, so pay up or gtfo.

On March 25, Westminster Management, a unit of Kushner Companies, filed a lawsuit requesting sheriff services to enforce an eviction against a man residing at the company’s Harbor Point Estate apartment in Essex, Maryland. Days later, on March 30, Kushner’s company filed a collection lawsuit against another man in the same complex.

The previous week, on March 19, Oxford Arms, a Kushner-owned apartment complex in Edison, New Jersey, filed six lawsuits against tenants. Other lawsuits have been filed in recent weeks against tenants by legal entities tied to the Whispering Woods complex in Middle River, Maryland; the Cove Village complex in Essex, Maryland; and the Pier Village building in Long Branch, New Jersey — all of which are owned by Kushner.

They didn’t get where they are by not being ruthless.

Kushner, whose estimated net worth is around $800 million, has said in the past that he has stepped away from day-to-day management of the real estate firm, though he has not relinquished his ownership stake. Ethics disclosures show that he still receives millions of dollars a year in income from rent collected by his assorted real estate portfolio, including the chain of apartment buildings.

At the same time as he meddles in government activities, because his psychopath daddy-in-law lets him.

Kushner Companies owns a vast array of commercial and residential real estate units around the country. The firm, founded by Kushner’s father, has come under fire for predatory business practices. Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, in a lawsuit filed last year, accused the company of failing to address rodent infestations while forcing tenants to pay illegitimate fees.

The real estate firm’s debt collection practices, which involve hundreds of lawsuits pursuing tenants often for small amounts of debt, have been detailed in reporting in ProPublica and the Baltimore Sun. In the past, Kushner’s attorneys have gone so far as to pursue civil arrest warrants for at least 105 tenants over unpaid fees and rent.

Even if you justify all that by saying landlords need their income like anyone else, it’s still not a good fit with government work, especially not government work in the White House.

Last month, Netflix released “Slumlord Millionaire,” a mini-documentary about the abusive practices of Kushner’s real estate companies. The feature describes Kushner as a “tier one predator,” who has used harassment tactics to drive tenants out of rent-stabilized apartments in New York, while systematically imposing hefty fees on tenants in Maryland. The feature shows tenants dealing with debt collection letters, eviction notices, water damage, mold, fire code violations and shoddy maintenance.

Some prince.

Oh really?

Tests for a virus that didn’t exist until 3 years after Obama’s term expired.

This is an incredible display.

Another campaign rally:

Meaning, he wants it to have some good results.

Yeah the banks. Let’s talk up the banks. They’re the real heroes here.

Also: no we’re not. We’re going to be in a deep deep hole that will take years to climb out of, assuming conditions then allow us to climb.

This is not ending. It will not end for a long time. It for sure won’t end until there’s a vaccine, and that’s projected to take 12 to 18 months. You won’t see any really good things out of this pandemic. Some good things despite it, maybe, but don’t count on it. Trump’s musings are not worth a roll of toilet paper.

Well he is very handsome, wouldn’t want to cover that up.

There he is making the same mistake all over again – thinking that because there are no cases in state X now there never will be.

Still pushing that lie.

No, because then Kushner wouldn’t have contrasted “our” with “the states.”

DARVO again. He’s the one who ought to be in a permanent state of scalding shame.

Daniel Drezner on Trump as toddler:

Trump’s toddler traits have significantly hampered America’s response to the pandemic. They aren’t new, either. In the first three years of his term, I’ve collected 1,300 instances when a Trump staffer, subordinate or ally — in other words, someone with a rooting interest in the success of Trump’s presidency — nonetheless described him the way most of us might describe a petulant 2-year-old. Trump offers the greatest example of pervasive developmental delay in American political history.

Or delay combined with deterioration. He’s always been stupid and ignorant, but word is he hasn’t always been this stupid.

[T]he Trump White House’s inadequate handling of the outbreak highlights his every toddler-like instinct. The most obvious one is his predilection for temper tantrums. Some advisers describe an angry Trump as a whistling teapot that needs to either let off steam or explode. Politico has reported on the myriad triggers for his tantrums: “if he’s caught by surprise, if someone criticizes him, or if someone stops him from trying to do something or seeks to control him.”

Like a toddler’s, Trump’s temper has flared repeatedly as the pandemic has worsened and the stock market has tanked. Multiple reports confirm that Trump was irate with prescient statements in late February by Nancy Messonnier, a senior official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who warned that a coronavirus outbreak in the United States was inevitable at a time when Trump was insisting he’d prevented one by banning travel from China. A report in Vanity Fair quoted “a person close to the administration” saying that Trump was “melting down” over the pandemic. He pitched a fit after his Oval Office address in early March was widely panned. His temper has acted as an obvious deterrent for other officials to contradict Trump’s happy talk about the pandemic: In early March, Defense Secretary Mark Esper ordered his overseas commanders not to take any action mitigating the coronavirus that might surprise the president. For Trump’s staff, crisis management revolves around managing the president’s temper, not managing the actual problem.

Let’s read that penultimate sentence again.

In early March, Defense Secretary Mark Esper ordered his overseas commanders not to take any action mitigating the coronavirus that might surprise the president.

So more people will die because the Secretary of Defense is afraid of Trump’s tantrums.

Trump, like most toddlers, also has poor impulse control. Some White House advisers reportedly refer to it as the “shiny-object phenomenon” — his tendency to react to breaking news rather than focusing on more important issues.

He does it in the middle of his own sentences, even (or perhaps especially) when he’s on camera. His own words remind him of something so he veers off, mid-sentence, to say something he’s said 40 thousand times already and is irrelevant to the subject at hand.

Trump’s short, toddler-like attention span has been a problem throughout his administration. One former high-ranking government official told me that a 45-minute meeting with the president was really 45 different one-minute meetings, in which Trump would ask disconnected, rapid-fire questions such as “What do you think of NATO?” and “How big is an aircraft carrier?”

I know one or two people like that. Fortunately, they are not presidents of the United States.

That inability to focus laid the groundwork for the bad pandemic response. During the transition, the Obama administration prepared a tabletop exercise to brief the incoming Trump team about how to handle an influenza pandemic. The president-elect did not participate, and a former senior official acknowledged that “to get the president to be focused on something like this would be quite hard.”

Oh well at least he’s only the president; not much need to focus on something.

Trump’s inability to sit still has been on display recently. His aides have questioned whether he has the capacity to focus on what will be a months-long emergency. White House staffers acknowledged that the one time he tried to read a prepared speech from the Oval Office was an unmitigated disaster. Multiple reports confirm that he has grown restless while confined on the White House grounds. He has crashed staff meetings because he does not know what else to do.

He could always hold a two hour press briefing/campaign rally.

Ok this one shocked me. One keeps thinking shock has become impossible but they pull the football away again.

The official government webpage for the Strategic National Stockpile was altered Friday to seemingly reflect a controversial description of the emergency repository that White House adviser Jared Kushner offered at a news conference Thursday evening.

According to a brief online summary on the Department of Health and Human Services website, the stockpile’s role “is to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies. Many states have products stockpiled, as well.”

But just hours earlier, the text characterized the stockpile as the “nation’s largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out.”

So the feds are changing wording and policy to keep up with the ignorant and abusive claims of Jared fucking Kushner.

The previous language stated that when “state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency.”

Also stripped from the new summary is sentence that affirmed the stockpile “contains enough supplies to respond to multiple large-scale emergencies simultaneously.”

In other words it’s not (or it wasn’t) a matter of “these are ours and we don’t have to share them if you don’t ask nicely,” it was a matter of “these are all of ours, for use in emergencies.” They’ve changed it now to agree with the selfish petulant remarks of a sleazy landlord.

The revisions come after Kushner argued at the White House coronavirus task force press briefing Thursday that the stockpile’s reserves are the property of the federal government.

“The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use,” he said. “So we’re encouraging the states to make sure that they’re assessing the needs, they’re getting the data from their local situations, and then trying to fill it with the supplies that we’ve given them.”

That “we’ve” is interesting – Kushner framing himself as the federal government. He shouldn’t even have a job in his wife’s father’s administration, because Congress passed a law against that kind of nepotism after Kennedy made his brother Attorney General. Furthermore he has zero qualifications for any such job. Robert Kennedy was at least a lawyer.

Congress authorized the creation of the national stockpile in the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness Response Act, which passed in 2002, nine months after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11.

The legislation orders the Secretary of Health and Human Services to “maintain a stockpile or stockpiles of drugs, vaccines and other biological products, medical devices, and other supplies … to provide for the emergency health security of the United States.”

The secretary, the law says, must also “devise plans for the effective and timely supply-chain management of the stockpile, in consultation with appropriate Federal, State and local agencies, and the public and private health care infrastructure.”

This doesn’t translate to “fight with governors and accuse them of stealing supplies.”

Let’s go through The Letter.

Dear Senator Schumer:

Thank you for your Democrat public relations letter and incorrect sound bites, which are wrong in every way.

He manages to dictate the first three words as an adult would, but then the enraged toddler breaks through. The adjective is “Democratic.” The letter was a request to expedite the provision of supplies IN A PANDEMIC – one that threatens the lives of millions or billions of people. It was not a public relations letter, it was a doing government work letter in a dire emergency. Imagine Franklin Roosevelt sending rude childish letters to Republican Senators a few hours after Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t “sound bites,” it wasn’t “incorrect,” it wasn’t “wrong in every way.” That’s a stupid spiteful child talking, not an adult head of state in a dire emergency.

As you are aware, Vice President Pence is in charge of the Task Force. By almost all accounts, he has done a spectacular job.

By most of the accounts Trump is aware of, possibly, but what Trump is aware of is an infinitesimal fraction of what there is to be aware of. In the real world hardly anyone gives an account in which Pence has done a spectacular job. If Pence had done a spectacular job, medical workers wouldn’t be wearing garbage bags and hospitals wouldn’t be desperate for ventilators.

The Defense Production Act (DPA) has been consistently used by my team and me for the purchase of billions of dollars’ worth of equipment, medical supplies, ventilators, and other related items. It has been powerful leverage, so powerful that companies generally do whatever we are asking, without even a formal notice. They know something is coming, and that’s all they need to know.

He sounds like his ridiculous son-in-law prattling about “the best things.”

We have given New York many things, including hospitals, medical centers, medical supplies, record numbers of ventilators, and more.

He talks as if he were the king and the states were his peasants. He’s not “giving” anyone anything; he doesn’t own the “many things” so they’re not his to “give.” He’s not our boss. We’re not his humble petitioners. We don’t have to kiss his ass for providing (let alone for not providing) emergency medical supplies.

You should have had New York much better prepared than you did, and as Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx said yesterday, New York was very late in its fight against the virus. As you are aware, the Federal Government is merely a back-up for state governments. Unfortunately, your state needed far more of a back-up than most others.

Says the petulant childish brat who spent weeks telling us COVID-19 was going to disappear quickly and doing nothing to prepare for it.

If you spent less time on your ridiculous impeachment hoax, which went haplessly on forever and ended up going nowhere (except increasing my poll numbers)

People are dying. He needs to shut up about his poll numbers.

and instead focused on helping the people of New York, then New York would not have been so completely unprepared for the “invisible enemy.” No wonder AOC and others are thinking about running against you in the primary. If they did, they would likely win.

Focus. The subject is a lethal pandemic and thousands of deaths.

Fortunately, we have been working with your state and city governments, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill DeBlasio, to get the job done.

Is screaming insults for weeks on end “working with”?

You have been missing in action, except when it comes to the “press.” While you have stated that you don’t like Andrew Cuomo, you ought to start working alongside him for the good of all New Yorkers.

DARVO. Trump is the one who refuses to work with people he doesn’t like, and he certainly has not been working alongside anyone for the good of all New Yorkers.

I’ve known you for many years, but I never knew how bad a Senator you are for the state of New York, until I became President.

Most of us neither knew nor cared what a terrible human being Donald Trump is until he became president.

Could someone drop a piano on him now?

Pinocchio-lookalike Jared Kushner takes the stage at a pandemic press briefing to say: “The President wanted to make sure that we had the best people doing the best jobs and making sure we had the right people focused on all of the things that needed to happen to make sure that we can deliver” while Anthony Fauci has to have a security detail.

The government’s top infectious disease doctor, Anthony Fauci, is now receiving security protection after becoming the face of the nation’s coronavirus response — and a target of some supporters of President Donald Trump.

…

HHS Secretary Alex Azar had grown concerned about the growing online attacks against Fauci — whose profile has soared since he started regularly flanking Trump at White House coronavirus briefings, where he occasionally corrects the president — and asked the department to conduct a threat assessment. The decision was then conveyed to the Justice Department, which approved the request to deputize security for Fauci.

Because the kind of people who love Trump are the kind of people who threaten Fauci.

Did anyone ever have to have a security detail because supporters of Obama were issuing threats?

Some of Trump’s most zealous far-right supporters have targeted Fauci online, arguing that he’s worked to undermine Trump by publicly disagreeing with the president, and have begun spreading conspiracy theories about Fauci’s role.

Following that link…

But to a vocal minority of right-wing blogs and pro-Trump pundits, Fauci is the embodiment of the establishment forces that have been arrayed against the president since he came to Washington. And those voices are getting louder amid rumblings about Fauci’s standing with Trump as the president itches to get the economy restarted in the coming weeks.

“A Deep-State Hillary Clinton-loving stooge,” read a Saturday headline on the American Thinker, a far-right website, latching on to a WikiLeaks-released email that showed Fauci praising Clinton for her Benghazi testimony as secretary of State.

[I]t’s the right-wing fringe that has been going after Fauci, largely due to the fact that he tamps down Trump’s excitement over quick-fix solutions, such as the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, his desire for stringent restrictions on gatherings and his publicly dire predictions about the potential death toll that are at odds with Trump’s more optimistic outlook.

And it’s all about the outlook. The virus is watching, and if it sees everyone perking up and saying “We can do it!!!!” it will shrivel up and disappear. No wonder the fringe-right are mad at Fauci!

Reaction to Jared Kushner’s new role as replacement for Anthony Fauci is not universally ecstatic.

The president has been very hands on the microphone, the podium, other people, but he has not been busy responding to the pandemic.

Very hands on, but only starting 13 days ago. And not very hands on.

And did he come across as an empty suit? Yes he did.

Oh wait, it turns out Kushner is totally qualified to save us from the pandemic.

Data, models, decisions, informed, people, focused, things, deliver, teams, barriers, lines of effort.

It’s a fucking pep talk. From Howdy Doody.

You’re fired.

The Navy announced it has relieved the captain who sounded the alarm about an outbreak of COVID-19 aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt.

Capt. Brett Crozier, who commands the Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier with a crew of nearly 5,000, was relieved of his command on Thursday, but he will keep his rank and remain in the Navy.

Crozier raised the alarm earlier this week that sailors on the ship need to be quarantined to stop the spread of the virus. His plea for assistance quickly made headlines.

And we can’t have people stopping the spread of the virus, so get him out of that command.

The move was announced in a briefing by Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly Thursday evening. The official reason for Crozier’s relief of duty is a loss of trust and confidence, according to the officials who spoke to NBC News

I have zero trust and confidence in the people who did this.

Nancy LeTourneau explains why many journalists were suckered into thinking Trump had changed simply because he managed to pretend to be serious for a few minutes on Tuesday.

It is infuriating to watch political reporters get sucked into the nonsense delivered by this president over and over again. But David Roberts recently described why that happens.

Ask someone who’s been in an abusive relationship with a malignant narcissist. One reason they’re able to maintain appearances/jobs/etc. is that they are relatively rare & unusual & the normal people around them simply can’t absorb that they are what they are…They try again and again, thinking there must be normal human intentions & emotions in there somewhere. It’s just remarkable how far someone w/out shame or conscience can get by exploiting this cognitive/emotional blindspot.

I do it myself. I can’t help continuing to think – despite knowing better – that if someone sat him down and explained to him (there would have to be a gag in his mouth) what an evil monstrosity he is, he would get it. That’s ludicrous, but it seems to be deeply wedged into my thinking process.

When Roberts writes about how we keep trying to see normal human intentions and emotions in someone who has never exhibited them before, it is because projection isn’t merely a matter of assuming that others are capable of our worst instincts. In general, we tend to project all of our responses onto others in an attempt to understand their actions. Since most of us aren’t malignant narcissists, it is difficult for us to grasp the levels of depravity exhibited by those who are.

It is. I can’t seem to do it despite knowing it. I know it and I don’t know it. If I really knew it, knew it all the way down, I would just ignore him. I can’t just ignore him, so clearly I don’t know it in that way. I want him to realize what a shit he is, and I guess wanting that makes it impossible for me to internalize the awareness that he never will because he’s not made that way.

Juxtaposition.

Six hours ago:

Soon after tweeting that, he retweeted this:

On the one hand he calls the Democratic Senate minorily leader “Cryin’ Chuck” and accuses him of complaining, and on the other hand he shares someone claiming that he doesn’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican.

I beg to differ.

Well then we’re all doomed.

Dozens of Trump administration officials have trooped to the White House podium over the last two months to brief the public on their effort to combat coronavirus, but one person who hasn’t — Jared Kushner — has emerged as perhaps the most pivotal figure in the national fight against the fast-growing pandemic.

Jared Kushner is not a person you want as the pivotal figure in a pandemic.

I put that with careful, jaw-clenching restraint.

What started two-and-a-half weeks ago as an effort to utilize the private sector to fix early testing failures has become an all-encompassing portfolio for Kushner, who, alongside a kitchen cabinet of outside experts including his former roommate and a suite of McKinsey consultants, has taken charge of the most important challenges facing the federal government: Expanding test access, ramping up industry production of needed medical supplies, and figuring out how to get those supplies to key locations.

How are we defining “experts” here? Are they experts in what’s needed in a pandemic, or in extracting profit from whatever situation they find themselves in? We need the former more than we need the latter.

Kushner’s group, which some have characterized as an “all-of-private-sector” operation in contrast to Vice President Mike Pence’s “all-of-government” task force, has had its successes – including airlifting emergency medical supplies to the United States, crowdsourcing mask and glove donations, and rapidly devising a last-ditch plan for hospitals to maximize ventilators.

But the behind-the-scenes working group has also duplicated existing federal teams and operations, and its focus on rapid, short-term decisions has created concern among some health-agency officials, according to interviews with 11 people involved in Kushner’s effort, including senior government officials, outside advisers and volunteers on the projects, as well as other health department and White House officials.

…

“You can’t have enough good smart people working on a problem of this scale,” said Andy Slavitt, who helped lead the Obama administration’s 2013-2014 HealthCare.gov repair effort and is now advising on Kushner’s coronavirus response. “But they have to be organized with a clear chain of command.”

And they have to be good smart people. What reason is there to think Kushner is either good or smart?

[T]he effort’s makeshift nature has unnerved even some recruited to aid Kushner’s team, who described it as a process unlike any other traditional disaster response. Kushner’s team has stepped in to coordinate decision-making at agencies including the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the scope of his authority now exceeds that of Health Secretary Alex Azar, the one-time leader of Trump’s coronavirus response.

He’s the criminal and corrupt president’s son-in-law. Before that he was a slum landlord. None of this bodes well.

About those naughty medical workers with their “insatiable appetites” for the tools to save our lives – Politico has a jolting story:

Last week, a Trump administration official working to secure much-needed protective gear for doctors and nurses in the United States had a startling encounter with counterparts in Thailand.

The official asked the Thais for help—only to be informed by the puzzled voices on the other side of the line that a U.S. shipment of the same supplies, the second of two so far, was already on its way to Bangkok.

Oops. The shipment was put on hold (which I guess means told to bob around in the ocean) while the geniuses in the Trump administration figured out how to cover their asses aka “what went wrong.”

The heightened scrutiny comes as American health care workers complain of severe shortages of masks, goggles and gloves amid a nationwide spike in coronavirus cases, and as Democrats rip the administration for shipping aid to other countries while vastly underestimating America’s own needs.

Foreign aid is a good thing, both inherently and instrumentally, but at the same time it’s more than a little pointless to send supplies Over There while ordering in supplies from Over There. Cut the duplication of effort, I would suggest. Also…talk to each other. Find out who is sending what where, and co-ordinate.

There is bipartisan agreement on the need to resupply American hospitals and take care of domestic shortages first. But the issue is tricky: Other countries’ ability to fight the virus directly affects the U.S.—an infected man from Wuhan, the sprawling capital of Hubei province in China, is believed to be the first to bring the novel coronavirus to American shores in January—and millions of Americans work, serve, and study overseas in countries that have been hard hit.

Point taken, but at least co-ordinate, and also tell Trump to shut the fuck up with the blaming medical workers for needing equipment.

H/t What a Maroon