Trump insists on continuing to tell us he’s got this whole thing under control. He has nothing under control.

America’s top infectious diseases expert is warning that hundreds of thousands of Americans could die unless every citizen joins an effort to blunt the coronavirus pandemic — only to be contradicted by President Donald Trump, who insists the virus is under “tremendous” control.

Fauci knows what he’s talking about, and Trump knows how to flap his lips.

Amid calls for a stronger federal response, Trump urged the nation’s governors late Monday morning to try to secure additional medical equipment on their own without waiting for the federal government to intervene, though he did say they would try to help.

“We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves,” Trump said on the call…

So they’ve got it totally under control, but try to get the necessary medical equipment yourselves. Not because they haven’t got it totally under control, you understand, but because…because…as a lesson in self-reliance, yes, that’s it. Stand on your own two feet like a good Amurrikan.

Trump flagrantly contradicted Fauci’s warnings at a White House briefing Sunday at which he celebrated the Federal Reserve’s decision to cut interest rates to 0% to help the shocked economy.

“It’s a very contagious virus, it’s incredible, but it’s something we have tremendous control of,” the President said.

Well. You know. If you asked him what he actually meant by “tremendous control,” he would babble helplessly. He doesn’t mean anything he says, he just cranks out words. Dangerous words.

In a possible indication of how Trump’s repeated misinformation is having an impact, a new poll by NBC and the Wall Street Journal Sunday showed that while seven in 10 Democrats are worried that they or someone in their family may catch the coronavirus, only 40% of Republicans, who are more likely to believe what they hear from the President and in conservative media, feel the same.

If they keep that up the Democrats will swiftly outnumber them, in the most literal sense. Maybe think again.

Another one of these “we’re safe because we’re on Team God” fools:

Asif Ashraf Jilali is failing to take into account that God could very well want people to do the right thing, pay attention to medical advice, have a care for other people, and the like. The Koran is full of a whole lot of instructions for how people are to act, right? So the God in question seems to pay attention to what people do, and to judge them for it. Isn’t it blasphemous to think God wants people to be so stubborn and reckless that they insist on gathering in crowds to talk about God instead of being sensible?

One issue:

Another issue: prisons.

Why Trump’s lies matter:

It’s bad enough that President Trump has relentlessly minimized the coronavirus threat for nakedly political reasons, disastrously hampering the federal government response to the crisis, with untold consequences that we can only guess at.

Determined not to be outdone by his own malice and depravity, Trump is taking new steps that threaten to make all of it worse. He’s telling millions of Americans to entirely shut out any and all correctives to his falsehoods. He’s insisting they must plug their ears to any criticism designed to hold his government accountable for the failures we’re seeing, even though such criticism could nudge the response in a more constructive direction.

And even though getting it wrong means death. He’s actively, openly telling lies to get people killed – not in a war or a rescue mission or a space flight but simply to soothe his own throbbing ego.

He’s on a tear about news media corrections of his Google nonsense.

note Trump’s declaration that in a larger sense, the media is not being truthful at a time of crisis. Trump is using his megaphone to tell the American people not to trust an institution they must rely on for information amid an ongoing public health emergency, all because that institution held him accountable for his own failures on this front.

His wounded vanity up against the survival of millions of people? No contest.

Early on, Trump raged at the media for supposedly hyping coronavirus to rattle the markets and hurt him politically. Here, too, Trump told the American people not to believe the press even as it accurately informed them about a severe public danger that Trump himself was busy misleading them about.

…

The big story here is that we’re now seeing just how catastrophically unsuited Trump’s brand of autocracy truly is in the face of a crisis like this one. As Anne Applebaum details, Trump’s enforcement of a loyalty code against civil service professionals, and his retaliation against them for exposing inconvenient truths, paved the way for Trump’s pathologies to hamper the response, because “Trump has very few truth-tellers around him anymore.”

As the pandemic spreads. Awesome.

Jesus won’t let you get the COVID-19 because you’re not pansies.

Oh look, now Chase Strangio is just plain grooming kids.

The quarantined people of Italy are singing to each other from balconies or windows.

Tenor Maurizio Marchini did just this, taking to his balcony to serenade the rooftops of his hometown, Florence.

Marchini sings Puccini’s impassioned aria from his opera Turandot, ‘Nessun Dorma’, or ‘None shall sleep’. After the aria’s climax with a high B, Maurizio picks up his son and repeats the line Vincerò!, or ‘I will be victorious.’

At full from-the-rooftops volume, which makes the little guy try to cover his ears, but it’s great for the rest of us.

Pandemic? What pandemic?

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos…

When progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders say “now is the time for solidarity” amid the coronavirus outbreak, they likely do not mean that employees of Whole Foods—owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos—should be asked to give their own accrued paid sick days to their co-workers who have either contracted the deadly virus or been forced to take time out of work because of what is now a global pandemic.

But that is exactly what executives with the grocery chain are asking its employers to do, even though Bezos could effectively give them unlimited paid sick leave during the current national emergency without barely a scratch in his bank account.

In a letter sent to employees earlier this week, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey explained that one of the options available to workers was for them to “donate” their “paid time off” (pto) days to a pool that other workers could draw from.

In other words one of the options available to workers is to have fellow workers give up their pto. For the workers giving up the pto it’s not an option but a sacrifice.

Journalist Lauren Kaori Gurley, who broke the story with reporting for Motherboard, notes that “as a subsidiary of Amazon, the world’s biggest company, Whole Foods could easily afford to pay its hourly employees for sick days taken during the coronavirus outbreak without breaking the bank. Instead, the company has put the onus back on workers, and they’re not happy about it.”

In Mackey’s letter reviewed by Motherboard, the executive stated: “Team Members who have a medical emergency or death in their immediate family can receive donated PTO hours, not only from Team Members in their own location, but also from Team Members across the country.”

Though such labor practices are not unusual—with workers in various sectors and industries pooling accumulated sick leave for a colleague experiencing a long-term illness—doing so in the face of a global pandemic, in which all members of society are equally at heightened risk, the move was seen by critics as shortsighted, tone deaf, and cruel. The fabulous wealth of Bezos only increased the ire for many.

They’re just sore losers.

Meanwhile Devin Nunes is going on Fox News to tell people to go out and mingle with crowds.

Reuters has more:

Berlin is trying to stop Washington from persuading a German company seeking a coronavirus vaccine to move its research to the United States, prompting German politicians to insist no country should have a monopoly on any future vaccine.

Germany’s Health Ministry confirmed a report in newspaper Welt am Sonntag, which said President Donald Trump had offered funds to lure the company CureVac to the United States, and the German government was making counter-offers to tempt it to stay.

“The German government is very interested in ensuring that vaccines and active substances against the new coronavirus are also developed in Germany and Europe,” the newspaper quoted a Health Ministry official as saying. “In this regard, the government is in intensive exchange with the company CureVac.”

Contacted by Reuters, a spokeswoman for the German Health Ministry said: “We confirm the report in the Welt am Sonntag.”

The German government probably suspects, probably correctly, that if Trump did succeed in luring CureVac here he would surround it with marines and small nuclear weapons, and demand a hefty percentage of the sales.

Karl Lauterbach, a professor of health economics and epidemiology who is also a senior lawmaker with the Social Democrats, junior partners in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition, tweeted in reaction to the Welt am Sonntag report: “The exclusive sale of a possible vaccine to the USA must be prevented by all means. Capitalism has limits.”

Not in Trump world it doesn’t. Just think of all the billions he could make from a vaccine!

Trump has been trying to monopolize a COVID-19 vaccine.

The Trump administration has offered a German medical company “large sums of money” for exclusive access to a Covid-19 vaccine, German media have reported.

As one might offer the officer in charge of the lifeboat “large sums of money” to push everyone but the briber and the briber’s friends over the side. If one were a festering piece of shit.

The German government is trying to fight off what it sees as an aggressive takeover bid by the US, the broadsheet Die Welt reports, citing German government circles. The US president had offered the Tübingen-based biopharmaceutical company CureVac “large sums of money” to gain exclusive access to their work, wrote Die Welt.

According to an anonymous source quoted in the newspaper, Trump was doing everything to secure a vaccine against the coronavirus for the US, “but for the US only”.

The Guardian asked the German government for comment but

the German health ministry would only confirm the accuracy of the quotes attributed to one of its spokespersons in the article.

“The federal government is very interested in vaccines and antiviral agents against the novel coronavirus being developed in Germany and Europe,” the spokesperson quoted in the original article had said. “In this regard the government is in an intensive exchange with the company CureVac.”

The German health ministry spokesperson declined the opportunity to correct any inaccuracies in Die Welt’s account.

Which is a broad hint that there are no inaccuracies to correct.

H/t Omar

Of course they did.

After it was widely reported that Tom Hanks and his wife were able to simply walk into a clinic in Australia with the symptoms of a common cold and instantly get a coronavirus test – which was positive – Americans are beginning to ask out loud, “Why can’t we get tested?“

Because $$$, that’s why. Which is more important, people’s survival or more money for Trump and his goons?

Silly question.

According to President Obama‘s Ebola Czar (last night on Rachel Maddow‘s show), Ron Klain, Trump “privatized“ the testing here in the United States. Instead of taking the World Health Organization (WHO) test kits which are cheap and widely available all over the planet, and having them distributed across the country back in December, or January, or February when we knew this disease was spreading in the United States, Klain said that Trump has outsourced the testing to two big American companies, Quest and Labcorp. Trump’s head of HHS, Alex Azar, is the guy who doubled the price of insulin when he was CEO of Eli Lily company. Do he and Trump owns stock in these testing companies? Why are we refusing to accept the WHO test that the entire rest of the world is using?

Because there is money to be made. Nothing can be allowed to interfere with that.

Cool, this is helpful – the Surgeon General of the US tells us to stop bickering and focus on this health crisis problem.

Right, because we’re the ones who’ve been doing all that, as opposed to the bloated ignorant orange menace he works for.

If the results are positive are they going to tell us?

We can’t believe anything they say. We’re on our own.

The White House doctor also says Trump doesn’t need to quarantine…which is even more bonkers.

On Friday evening, Conley said the White House became aware that another individual who Trump had contact with had tested positive for coronavirus. That individual is Nestor Forster, Brazil’s chargé d’affaires in Washington, who tested positive on Friday, according to the Brazilian Embassy.

Conley said Trump had spent more time in closer proximity to Forster, but “all interactions occurred before any symptom onset.”

But the virus can be spread before symptom onset.

“These interactions would be categorized as LOW risk for transmission per CDC guidelines, and as such, there is no indication for home quarantine at this time,” Conley wrote.

Which, again, is exactly not the advice the CDC is giving the rest of us. On the contrary we’re being told to stay the fuck away from people.

Conley’s ruling for the President runs counter to actions some of Trump’s close allies in Congress have taken after interacting with people who tested positive for the coronavirus. Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Reps. Doug Collins of Georgia, Mark Meadows of North Carolina and Matt Gaetz of Florida each put themselves into self-quarantine after interacting with someone at the Conservative Political Action Conference who tested positive for coronavirus.

But Trump is president so there’s a magic force-field around him that shields him from low-risk infection. Or something.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people who are 60 and older, such as the President, stay at home as much as possible. Trump has also ignored guidance from health officials to stop shaking hands.

…

Medical professionals and others on Friday questioned why Trump had not already been tested.

“It is really inconceivable that they haven’t been tested. I can tell you that the White House Medical Unit has a very proactive response to biohazard threats after 9/11,” said a source familiar with medical procedures at the White House.

A second doctor who advises and has advised the White House doctors for years told CNN, “Yes, they should absolutely get tested especially given their numerous and repeated exposures.”

Nothing hinky about this, not at all. Trump’s doctor says No Need For A Test, nosirree.

The president does not need to take a test to determine if he’s positive for coronavirus because two interactions he had with known patients were “low risk,” a White House doctor said in a memo released Friday.

That’s not a thing. Interactions with people known to have the virus are not “low risk.” That doctor must have a gun to his head.

Physician to the president, Sean P. Conley, argued that because Trump’s interaction was minimal, including a handshake, and because Wajngarten and another patient were not exhibiting symptoms at the time they socialized with the president, Trump’s unlikely to get the virus.

Funny because that’s absolutely not the advice they’re giving to all the rest of us.

“All interactions occurred before any symptom onset,” Conley wrote. “These interactions would be categorized as LOW risk for transmission per CDC (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) guidelines, and as such, there is no indication for home quarantine at this time.”

I don’t think that’s true.

“Additionally, given the President himself is without symptoms, testing for COVID-19 is not currently indicated,” he wrote.

But people can be without symptoms for days before getting ill.

This is lying to us to help Trump lie to us, and it’s also undercutting all the government health advice we’ve been getting for the past couple of weeks. The CDC has not been telling us “Don’t worry if you’ve had contact with a person who tests positive for the virus, you’ll be fine, don’t do anything.”

The CDC has published reports recommending testing for those who have had “close contact with a confirmed or suspected case of COVID-19” or have experienced “potential exposure through attendance at events or spending time in specific settings where COVID-19 cases have been reported.”

Like, for instance, Mar-a-Lago last weekend.

The White House physician detailed that Trump also shared a table last weekend at his resort with a person who later tested positive.

But hey, the table was 10 miles long and they were at opposite ends, right?

Because Saturday, and pandemic, and toilet paper is sold out everywhere, and Wegmans is promoting homeopathic “meds,” and the US president can’t read.

Children’s excellent fine not at all bonkers reasons for crying.

There are many more. I can’t read them all at once because my abs start to hurt.

The White House has a transcript of yesterday’s car crash in the rose garden, the one where Trump was unable to read a particular word in his prepared Remarks. Here is that passage:

To unleash the full power of the federal government in this effort, today I am officially declaring a national emergency.  Two very big words.  The action I am taking will open up access to up to $50 billion of very importantly — very important and a large amount of money for states and territories and localities in our shared fight against this disease.

The glitch is clear but the transcript still tidies it up a little. How it actually went was:

of…very importantly…very important anttf…a very large amount…

Each ellipse is a pause where he struggles to figure out what to say when he can’t read the word and isn’t sure how to improvise. The transcript represents “very important anttf…a very large amount” as the smoother (but still incoherent) “very important and a very large amount” but it really was the first and not the second. It was an extraordinary breakdown of basic function.

I still want to know what the impossible word was.

He’s a virus bomb.

He fingered the microphone and put his lips up close. He shook hands with everyone he could. Donald Trump, who promised you’re going to win so much you’ll get sick of winning, might also just make you sick.

In the White House rose garden on Friday, the US president defied the advice of medical experts standing behind him and behaved like a one-man coronavirus cannon.

Reporters wanted to know whether this 73-year-old man with a [bad] diet – his former doctor reportedly hid cauliflower in his mashed potatoes – is putting himself and others at risk. Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s press secretary tested positive for coronavirus days after taking part in meetings with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

And two more people who were at Mar-a-Lago have now tested positive.

Should Trump therefore self-isolate? “Well, I don’t know that I had exposure, but I don’t have any of the symptoms,” he replied. “And we do have a White House doctor and, I should say, many White House doctors, frankly. And I asked them that same question, and they said, ‘You don’t have any symptoms whatsoever.’ And we don’t want people without symptoms to go and do the test. The test is not insignificant.”

That’s completely wrong. People can transmit the virus days before they show any symptoms. That’s a major reason tests are urgent: so that people who don’t know they have the virus can quarantine.

He has to be lying about what the doctors told him.

When the celebrity businessman has his back to the wall, he calls for the cavalry of corporate America. At Friday’s press conference he rolled in business titans to save the day, treating them to plenty of handshakes and little social distancing.

I hope they’re sweating.