More than 1,500 people in the US died from the coronavirus on Monday, bringing America’s death toll to nearly 43,000, according to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker. But you wouldn’t know that from looking at President Donald Trump’s tweets Tuesday morning.
In a string of posts that began a bit after 6 am Eastern time, Trump lambasted MSNBC in particular, and the “Lamestream Media” in general, ghoulishly bragged about his “great ‘ratings’” during daily press briefings ostensibly about a pandemic, fudged polling numbers to inflate his popularity, and promised to bail out the US energy industry. To close out the morning, he retweeted posts from someone with the handle @SexCounseling.
It’s interesting that he doesn’t even have the self-interested smarts to realize that his preening vanity at this moment in history doesn’t look great. He has no censor, no filter, no inner inspector who checks his thoughts before he spits them out.
The president’s only reference to the coronavirus was to brag in passing about the purportedly great job he’s doing handling it. He didn’t have a single word to say to Americans with loved ones who are ill or who have died, or who are worried about getting sick themselves.
He never does. I suppose if he tried we wouldn’t believe him…but all the same it’s disgusting that he doesn’t try. Disgusting and weird and unfathomable.
Trump’s tweets are certainly not reflective of a well-adjusted adult operating with a basic sense of empathy for others. They’re ugly, and it’s tempting to ignore them. It’d be easier to do that if there [were] a presidency going on beyond the tweets. But in Trump’s case there really isn’t.
There isn’t a presidency and there isn’t even a decent human being – there’s only a kind of howling tornado of vanity and rage.
The Justice Department will consider taking legal action against governors who continue to impose stringent rules for dealing with the coronavirus that infringe on constitutional rights once the crisis subsides in their states, Attorney General William Barr said.
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“We have to give businesses more freedom to operate in a way that’s reasonably safe,” Barr said. “To the extent that governors don’t and impinge on either civil rights or on the national commerce — our common market that we have here — then we’ll have to address that.”
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Trump tweeted over the weekend that his supporters should “liberate” Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia — three states with Democratic governors and strict stay-at-home orders.
And now here’s Barr backing him up, in less inflammatory language.
“These are very, very burdensome impingements on liberty, and we adopted them, we have to remember, for the limited purpose of slowing down the spread, that is bending the curve,” Barr said. “We didn’t adopt them as the comprehensive way of dealing with this disease.”
They are very burdensome impingements on liberty, but you know what else is a very burdensome impingement on liberty? Death. You know another very burdensome impingement on liberty? Being on a ventilator. You know another? Reduced lung capacity, which is one outcome of the virus.
There’s a pandemic raging, and what is the president of the US thinking about? Himself. Himself, his glory, his fame, his awesomeitude, his adoring fans who adore him.
Watched the first 5 minutes of poorly rated Morning Psycho on MSDNC just to see if he is as “nuts” as people are saying. He’s worse. Such hatred and contempt! I used to do his show all the time before the 2016 election, then cut him off. Wasn’t worth the effort, his mind is shot!
Such hatred and contempt, shouts Donald Trump, who spits hatred and contempt at everyone who doesn’t grovel to him, including the person he just called Morning Psycho. His mind is shot, shouts Donald Trump, who barely has a mind at all.
It is amazing that I became President of the United States with such a totally corrupt and dishonest Lamestream Media going after me all day, and all night. Either I’m really good, far better than the Fake News wants to admit, or they don’t have nearly the power as once thought!
No, it’s because way too many people like the kind of evil he is. The more evil he is the more they like him. They vote for him because he’s a mean bully.
I’ve had great “ratings” my whole life, there’s nothing unusual about that for me. The White House News Conference ratings are “through the roof”(Monday Night Football, Bachelor Finale , @nytimes) but I don’t care about that. I care about going around the Fake News to the PEOPLE!
He doesn’t care about ratings, and that’s why he cites a New York Times article about his ratings from three weeks ago, during a raging pandemic.
96% Approval Rating in the Republican Party. Thank you! This must also mean that, most importantly, we are doing a good (great) job in the handling of the Pandemic.
He doesn’t know who they are, yet he knows they are sinister. How does that work?
Note that he’s not just an MP, he’s also a journalist. Is that how journalists operate? Call people sinister and then say you don’t know who they are?
Also “fear of intimidation” forsooth – what about the intimidation of an MP calling you “sinister” on Twitter? Who is the intimidator and who is the intimidated here?
Around this time four years ago, the media world was all abuzz over an analysis by mediaQuant, a company that tracks what is known as “earned media” coverage of political candidates. Earned media is free media.
The firm computed that Donald Trump had “earned” a whopping $2 billion of coverage, dwarfing the value earned by all other candidates, Republican and Democrat, even as he had only purchased about $10 million of paid advertising.
How does he do it? By being so grotesque we can’t ignore him. He’s “newsworthy” in that sense…so, he gets free advertising that less grotesque candidates don’t get. I think there’s a bit of a downside to this.
Simply put, the media was complicit in Trump’s rise. Trump was macabre theater, a man self-immolating in real time, one who was destined to lose, but who could provide entertainment, content and yes, profits while he lasted.
Just one tiny flaw…
And now it’s happening again.
For over a month now, the White House has been holding its daily coronavirus briefings, and most networks, cable news channels and major news websites have been carrying all or parts of them live, as millions of people, trapped inside and anxious, have tuned in.
The briefings are marked by Trump’s own misinformation, deceptions, rage, blaming and boasting. He takes no responsibility at all for his abysmal handling of the crisis, while each day he seems to find another person to blame, like a child frantically flinging spaghetti at a wall to see which one sticks.
And he does it with functioning adults standing next to him, which makes him look more like a functioning adult (until he starts talking, at least).
As the veteran anchor Ted Koppel told The New York Times last month, “Training a camera on a live event, and just letting it play out, is technology, not journalism; journalism requires editing and context.” He continued, “The question, clearly, is whether his status as president of the United States obliges us to broadcast his every briefing live.” His answer was “no.”
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Trump has completely politicized this pandemic and the briefings have become a tool of that politicization. He is standing on top of nearly 40,000 dead bodies and using the media to distract attention away from them and instead brag about what a great job he’s done.
This is Trump’s unfathomable narcissism captured in 48 seconds – in fact not even the full 48, he says it in the first 25. It’s not that we hear about ventilators a lot because people die without them, it’s not that we hear about testing a lot because without it we don’t know if the curve is flattening or rising; none of this is about the pandemic and survival and mass casualties, it’s all about unfairly criticizing Trump for not being able to find his own ass in a brightly lit prison cell.
Trump suggests that demands for more testing, just like requests for ventilators, are part of a political conspiracy meant to take him down — not necessary measures to respond to a virus that has killed more than 40,000 Americans pic.twitter.com/uFFBnqwgQP
When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.
Not all Americans, it didn’t. Trump’s reign of terror has done wonders in that direction. A country that can elect a Donald Trump (with more than three million fewer votes than the other candidate) and then be unable to remove him from power despite his long string of crimes and outrages and failures and assaults is a very broken country indeed.
The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.
Which makes sense because that’s what we are. The infrastructure was already shaky and Trump has made it much worse, and as for the government…dysfunctional would be several steps up.
Trump wants us to call him a wartime president, but Packer points out that he’s another Pétain.
Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader.
It sort of has to be larger and deeper, because if it weren’t, a Trump could never have been nominated, let alone elected.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp announced Monday that certain businesses in the state would be able to reopen this week in a “small step forward” out of the social distancing measures meant to mitigate the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Kemp, a Republican, said specifically that fitness centers, bowling alleys, body art studios, barbers, hair and nail salons, and massage therapy businesses can reopen as early Friday, April 24.
Because gyms and bowling and hair/nail salons are such vital industries.
Notably, no local ordinance can restrict the openings, which will be implemented statewide.
Goodness, yes, that is notable. It means those pesky big-city liberals in Atlanta can’t have their own stupid Let’s Not Spread Death rules, they have to soak up the death-spreading like everyone else.
“In the same way that we carefully closed businesses and urged operations to end to mitigate the virus’ spread, today we’re announcing plans to incrementally and safely reopen sectors of our economy,” Kemp told reporters.
The move comes alongside similar announcements from the Republican governors of South Carolina and Tennessee after President Donald Trump unveiled new guidelines last week meant to help states loosen their social distancing restrictions.
All very nice except that the virus isn’t using the same rulebook. It doesn’t care that you call it “incrementally,” it just infects anyone it can.
Citing the White House guidance Monday, Kemp said, “We appreciate their leadership and share in the President’s desire to reopen the economy and get Americans back to work.”
In those vital industries gyms and bowling alleys and nail salons.
While the incremental reopenings align with the President’s push, public health experts have repeatedly stressed the dangers of relaxing social distancing measures too early.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, told CNN last month, “You don’t make the timeline, the virus makes the timeline.”
Men have been starved for the joy of calling women germs, viruses, insects, plagues, for decades, so naturally they greeted the advent of Trans Activism with sobs of joy and relief. At last at last it’s ok again to call women garbage and a virus in one sentence.
There is ample evidence (and in some quarters acknowledgement) that the US is undercounting deaths in retirement homes, amongst the homeless and especially just deaths at home. NYC acknowledged they simply stopped counting those because they were not testing bodies, yet the home death rate went from around 25 per day to 250 per day. Do the maths on that one.
So far NZ has had 12 fatalities. One at home, 10 in hospital of which I think 9 were associated with rest home clusters (7 from a dementia care facility in my city), which just shows how awful the disease is when it hits such places.
We have been very fortunate in that NZ was well set up to observe what was happening overseas and we have an early defended border for quarantine purposes. More to the point we have had political leaders that were united in their decision to rely on scientific and medical advice and the clarity and effectiveness of communication has been nothing short of brilliant. We’ve also done something like 85K tests (17k per million of population). Considering our health systems and government have nothing like the resources and wealth of the US or many other western nations — and that we were on an Italy-like trajectory — that decision making and communication from our politicians is what has made the difference between a health disaster and economic disruption.
That said, we have had at least two deaths resulting from non-covid harm that can be attributed to the pandemic. One was an elderly man who was physically well but suffered severe anxiety as a result of the lockdown and the inability to see friends and loved ones. I understand the anti-anxiety drugs killed him. The other was a young man who disappeared the day the Lockdown was announced. Again prone to depression and anxiety.
All tragic. Where do you begin and end counting victims. In Japan hospitals are turning away people suffering from strokes and heart attacks because they are overwhelmed with Covid-19 cases.
Conservative activists are demanding governors lift orders designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus, despite the recommendations of public health officials. Trump, who has clashed with Democratic governors over how soon to reopen the US economy, tweeted his support on Friday, in an unprecedented endorsement of civil disobedience by a sitting president.
Civil disobedience and violence. Unprecedented indeed.
Yet while organisers claim the protests are grassroots- and people-driven, a closer look reveals a movement driven by traditional rightwing groups, including one funded by the family of Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos.
The rallies have drawn comparisons to the Tea Party movement, which sprang into life in 2009 following the election of Barack Obama and was driven in part by Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by rightwing donors Charles and David Koch.
Wouldn’t you think we’re already right-wing enough for them? Wouldn’t you think they already get a big enough portion of the national wealth without needing even more? Wouldn’t you, even, think they would prefer to live in a country of people who don’t live in terror of a medical bill that puts them on the street?
Fox News ran favorable coverage of the Michigan rally and hosts including Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro endorsed the protest.
“Fox gave the Tea Party a phenomenal amount of attention and promotion,” Gertz said. “It really sort of boot-strapped it to another level, and made it a political force, and we see something similar happening with these anti-stay-at-home order movements.”
Because…yay pandemic? I guess? Right-wingers are big fans of mass die-offs?
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker organized secret flights bringing millions of masks and gloves to the state from China on charter jets in an effort to bypass potential Trump administration efforts to seize the products, The Chicago Sun-Times reported.
Trump not only doesn’t help governors (Democratic governors at least) get needed PPE, he actually steals it from them after they’ve procured it.
The Sun-Times cited a source familiar with the purchases, who said the details were kept secret “because we’ve heard reports of Trump trying to take PPE in China and when it gets to the United States.”
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“The supply chain has been likened to the Wild West, and once you have purchased supplies, ensuring they get to the state is another herculean feat,” press secretary Jordan Abudayyeh told the Sun-Times. “These flights are carrying millions of masks and gloves our workers need. They’re scheduled to land in Illinois in the coming weeks and the state is working to ensure these much-needed supplies are protected and ready for distribution around the state.”
A number of reports have documented federal efforts to seize ventilators, masks, and other PPE for the national stockpile, even intercepting and diverting orders without explanation.
On March 6, at 2:43 p.m., the health officer for Public Health — Seattle & King County, the hardest-hit region in the first state to be slammed by COVID-19, sent an email to a half-dozen colleagues, saying, “I want to cancel large group gatherings now.”
The county’s numbers — 10 known deaths and nearly 60 confirmed cases as of late morning — were bad and getting worse. Many local events had already been called off for fear of spreading the coronavirus. Oyster Fest. The Puget Sound Puppetry Festival. A Women’s Day speaker series at the Gates Foundation. King County had ordered a stop to in-person government meetings unless they were considered essential.
Duchin had the authority under state law to make it an order.
But.
Duchin sent his email 28 hours before the Seattle Sounders, defending MLS champions and one of the league’s biggest draws, were to host a match at CenturyLink Field. No event in the coming days would generate a gathering to compare. The game would draw people from across the Puget Sound area, and maybe beyond.
In the end, the match went on. Two days after the public health department wrote on Facebook, “We are making a recommendation to postpone or cancel events greater than 10-50 people,” officials in King County allowed a soccer match to be held with 33,000 fans, squeezed together.
I live in that county. I wish officials hadn’t done that.
How that happened is captured in hundreds of pages of emails exchanged among federal, state and local officials, as well as executives from the Sounders, Seahawks, Mariners and XFL Dragons. Those records, obtained by ProPublica and The Seattle Times, show how one meeting would beget another, one email would beget a dozen more, all while the virus was taking rapid hold.
“Which side should we err on? Public health and safety, or a football match?”
A vendor at CenturyLink Field had tested positive. A Sounders executive wrote that once the public knew that, the Sounders execs would need every “positive talking point” they could get.
The records show how county officials struggled to send the public a clear, consistent message. They also reflect the extolling of sport, even in a time of contagion. In one email sent to the county officials after the match, a Sounders executive lauded the power of Sounders matches to provide “catharsis and community.”
Which is totally worth spreading disease and death, closing all the schools, putting thousands of people out of work. Yay catharsis and community!
Reporters made interview requests for this story to five Sounders executives and two Seahawks officials who also work with the company that operates CenturyLink Field. All seven either didn’t respond or declined to be interviewed.
But that match was played before the country’s first confirmed case of locally transmitted COVID-19. In Washington, community spread had been recognized at least a week before the Sounders match. The governor declared a state of emergency on Feb. 29, the King County executive on March 1.
It was that Kirkland outbreak. (Kirkland is a suburb across Lake Washington from Seattle.) I remember it all too well. It’s pretty stunning that they chose a football match over public health after that.
On the evening of March 7, a Saturday, hundreds gathered in Occidental Park for their traditional March to the Match. They stood shoulder to shoulder and marched three blocks down Occidental Avenue to CenturyLink Field.
Fans, tens of thousands of them, streamed into the stadium, using, if they wished, extra hand-sanitizing stations scattered about the concourses. The fans waved scarves, as they always do. The lower bowl stood for most of the match, as it always does. The crowd, in blue and green, chanted and cheered. In the 12th minute, they sang Woody Guthrie’s “Roll on Columbia.” Everyone was mere inches apart.
Some forms of catharsis and community can, shall we say, have a dark side.
Sounders fans’ March to the Match before the game on March 7. A police officer said there were 500 people marching shoulder to shoulder. (Ellen M. Banner/The Seattle Times)
Saturday night, after the match, Sounders general manager Garth Lagerwey said at a news conference, “We were really, really grateful to have the support of our fans.” He described various precautions the team had taken: “The kids didn’t walk out with the players today. We didn’t do a ceremonial handshake.”
Peter Tomozawa, the president of business operations and a former partner at Goldman Sachs, said the crowd was bigger than he had expected, adding, “Seattle turns out.” He described walking around before the match, talking with fans: “A really cool comment that was made to me was: ‘Thank you for hosting this event tonight. It gave us and our city something to cheer about.’”
Yes, spreading the virus around; definitely something to cheer about. Rah.
On March 15, the Sounders announced that a member of the club’s support staff had tested positive for COVID-19. The staff member had worked the March 7 match but “did not have access to the general public,” the announcement said. The individual fell ill four days after the match but was now recovering and “in good spirits,” the announcement said.
King County now has more than 4,800 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and at least 320 deaths, according to its data dashboard on the virus’ spread.
There’s your community; I’m not so sure about the catharsis.
I’ve been meaning for days to find a source for per capita stats as well as totals, and a certain annoying drive-by commenter gave me the prod to do it. Here’s one that gives deaths per 1 million people as of now:
Spain 440
Italy 391
France 302
Germany 55
UK 237
US 122
On the other hand it gives China 3, which doesn’t seem very plausible.
Anyway…per capita we seem on the low side, which is worth knowing but not something to give Trump credit for.
I read somewhere the other day that Sweden went for the “herd immunity” approach and that’s why its numbers are twice Norway’s.
If only he wouldn’t ad lib. It wouldn’t change anything or fix anything of importance, but still – if only he would stop doing that.
Starting at 27 seconds:
The US has the most coronavirus deaths in the world, but Trump begins the April 18 #TrumpPressConf by claiming America "has produced better health outcomes than any other country, with the possible exception of Germany." pic.twitter.com/puRZgsvIeh
Trump has been screeching that the WHO failed to warn us, but the reality is that there were US health people at the WHO who did warn us. The Post reports:
More than a dozen U.S. researchers, physicians and public health experts, many of them from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were working full time at the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization as the novel coronavirus emerged late last year and transmitted real-time information about its discovery and spread in China to the Trump administration, according to U.S. and international officials.
A number of CDC staffers are regularly detailed to work at WHO in Geneva as part of a rotation that has operated for years. Senior Trump-appointed health officials also consulted regularly at the highest levels with the WHO as the crisis unfolded, the officials said.
So all that “the WHO covered it up!!” nonsense is nonsense.
Not unexpectedly, the #COVID19#ReopenAmerica deniers are now uniting with antivaxxers ands even appropriating their language (“I do not consent”/“I do not comply”). Add to that conspiracy theories, including antisemitic ones, and it’s truly a toxic alliance, a death cult. https://t.co/i0UEE7YTj8
As a chief physician executive, I rarely get involved in my health system’s supply-chain activities. The Covid-19 pandemic has changed that. Protecting our caregivers is essential so that these talented professionals can safely provide compassionate care to our patients. Yet we continue to be stymied by a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), and the cavalry does not appear to be coming.
Our supply-chain group has worked around the clock to secure gowns, gloves, face masks, goggles, face shields, and N95 respirators. These employees have adapted to a new normal, exploring every lead, no matter how unusual.
They put together a very convoluted deal to get a large shipment of three-ply face masks and N95 respirators. They put together the funds to buy it, at 5 times the normal rate. They sent a team of three to check the shipment.
I arrived by car to make the final call on whether to execute the deal. Two semi-trailer trucks, cleverly marked as food-service vehicles, met us at the warehouse. When fully loaded, the trucks would take two distinct routes back to Massachusetts to minimize the chances that their contents would be detained or redirected.
They got there, they opened some boxes to check and hoped they were representative.
Before we could send the funds by wire transfer, two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived, showed their badges, and started questioning me. No, this shipment was not headed for resale or the black market. The agents checked my credentials, and I tried to convince them that the shipment of PPE was bound for hospitals. After receiving my assurances and hearing about our health system’s urgent needs, the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks. But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure.
This is what a fabulous job Trump is doing of managing the pandemic.
Did I foresee, as a health-system leader working in a rich, highly developed country with state-of-the-art science and technology and incredible talent, that my organization would ever be faced with such a set of circumstances? Of course not. Yet when encountering the severe constraints that attend this pandemic, we must leave no stone unturned to give our health care teams and our patients a fighting chance. This is the unfortunate reality we face in the time of Covid-19.
