Oops.

One of President Donald Trump’s personal valets, who works in the West Wing serving the president his meals among other duties, has tested positive for coronavirus, the closest the virus is known to have come to the president, said a White House official.

But Trump has since tested negative, Hogan Gidley hastens to assure us.

The White House did not say when the person developed symptoms or when the president was last exposed to the individual, who[m] Gidley described as a military official. It can sometimes take several days for the virus to appear on a test once a person has been infected.

…

“This guy is close” to the president throughout the day in terms of proximity, said a second source familiar with the matter. A White House official said the president was “not happy” when he was informed of the development.

In other words he had a screaming fit.

Staffers who come into close contact with the president have said they are tested regularly for coronavirus, but very few aides have been seen wearing masks around the West Wing, including when Trump traveled recently to Phoenix where he said he only wore a mask for a brief period of time. Everyone entering the White House grounds has their temperature checked.

But checking temperature is not testing for the virus. Rachel Maddow made this point a couple of days ago while discussing the recklessness and worker-endangerment of Trump’s order to re-open meatpacking plants.

I hope Trump’s valet has a mild case and recovers well.

Oh of course they are. Trump and his goons are “questioning” the stats. Naturally.

President Trump has complained to advisers about the way coronavirus deaths are being calculated, suggesting the real numbers are actually lower — and a number of his senior aides share this view, according to sources with direct knowledge.

It’s actually about 30 deaths total, and a few hundred cases. Way less than the flu, and less than falling off the barn while taking a selfie.

A senior administration official said he expects the president to begin publicly questioning the death toll as it closes in on his predictions for the final death count and damages him politically.

In other words someone in Trump’s gang expects him to start lying about the death toll for his personal political gain.

Reality check: There is no evidence the death rate has been exaggerated, and experts believe coronavirus deaths in the U.S. are being undercounted — not overcounted.

And cases are being way undercounted because there’s so little testing.

The number of people dying over the past few weeks, in many parts of the country, is a lot higher than average, suggesting that the official count of coronavirus-related deaths is still missing tens of thousands of people.

But Trump is going to say there are tens of thousands too many as opposed to too few. Because he’s a lying thieving cheat.

No disgruntled people allowed.

Trump said Dr Rick Bright, the vaccine expert who has said he was demoted for refusing to promote hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus treatment, is a “disgruntled guy.”

“I never met him, I know nothing about him, but he’s a disgruntled guy,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office.

If he never met him how can he know he’s a disgruntled guy?

“I never met him, I know nothing about him, but he’s a disgruntled guy,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office. “And I don’t think disgruntled people should be working for a certain administration.”

But everyone who works for Trump is disgruntled. They’re all disgruntled at Democrats, uppity women, uppity workers, uppity brown people, uppity journalists, uppity medical experts, uppity governors, uppity rivers and streams, uppity clean air…the list goes on longer than we have life spans to recite it in.

These are not peace-loving or genial or friendly people. These are angry racists and misogynists who want to be dominant. Disgruntlement is their Weltanschauung.

Bright filed a whistleblower complaint with the office of special counsel yesterday after he was removed from his post as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.

…

He said he was moved to a smaller role after he “made clear that BARDA would only invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic in safe and scientifically vetted solutions and it would not succumb to the pressure of politics or cronyism.”

And Trump is disgruntled about it.

It’s a tough job but other people have to do it.

President Donald Trump fixed his course on reopening the nation for business, acknowledging that the move would cause more illness and death from the pandemic but insisting it’s a cost he’s willing to pay to get the economy back on track.

Because he’s confident that he won’t be the one paying it. (He has no reason to be confident of that, especially given the way he keeps gathering people around him with not a mask in sight, but he doesn’t bother with reasons.)

On his visit to a Phoenix Honeywell International Inc. factory producing medical masks, Trump encouraged Americans to think of themselves as “warriors” as they consider leaving their homes, a tacit acknowledgment of deep public reservations about reopening the country too soon. Twenty states have begun to reopen without first meeting criteria Trump himself outlined last month, including a sustained decline in the number of infections they’ve reported, according to an analysis by Bloomberg News.

We have to be “warriors” but there are no Nazis who can surrender.

Speaking separately in an ABC News interview broadcast on Tuesday evening, Trump said closing down the nation was “the biggest decision I’ve ever had to make.”

By which he means: check out how important I am.

“There’ll be more death,” he said. “The virus will pass, with or without a vaccine. And I think we’re doing very well on the vaccines but, with or without a vaccine, it’s going to pass, and we’re going to be back to normal.”

But it’s not going to “pass” – i.e. just disappear of its own accord. That’s just Trump’s verbal magic-summoning, and it won’t work.

Meanwhile he bounced around the factory wearing safety goggles but no mask.

Senior White House officials also did not don the masks, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend when social distancing isn’t possible. Factory workers, members of the press and other support staff did. Trump also lamented that he had to stand six feet apart from two supporters during his speech…

Masks are for pussies and socialists and Mexicans and people of Paris and other such LOSERS.

Here he is in the goggles and the no-mask, with the usual upper-body tilt to hide his gut, which causes his hands to dangle feebly in front of him.

Sigh.

Sounds good! But wait.

So it’s open to men, so bang goes yet another award intended for women.

One Texas boss is telling the workers: no masks allowed.

That’s what a back-of-the-house employee at a Hillstone Restaurant Group establishment in Dallas was told last week, as restaurants prepared to reopen at 25% capacity, according to CBS Dallas.

That employee, who did not want to be identified publicly, expressed discomfort and was told to think about it—and then was removed from the schedule, the employee told CBS Dallas’ Brooke Rogers.

If you’re not willing to die on the job, you’re fired.

The employee said management also told her that face masks don’t complement the restaurant group’s style or level of hospitality.

Oddly enough that’s true of pretty much all restaurants, as well as shops, bars, theaters, offices, schools – lots of workplaces. They’re usual and undisturbing in medical settings, dentists’ offices, many factories, farms, construction sites and the like. I’ve worn dust masks on the job plenty of times. The public areas of restaurants naturally tend not to be full of people with masks in normal times, but these aren’t normal times.

Infectious disease epidemiologist Dr. Diana Cervantes called Hillstone’s decision concerning.

“It is really important to be able to wear those face coverings, especially if you can’t keep that six-foot social distancing, which of course when you go to a restaurant, that it very hard to maintain,” Cervantes, of UNT Health Science Center, said.

In fact impossible. There’s no way to put people’s food in front of them from six feet away.

She points to Governor Greg Abbott’s minimum standard health protocols for restaurants, which encourages social distancing first. But if that’s not feasible, it says measures such as face coverings should be rigorously practiced.

Which protects the customers as well as the workers, after all.

Hillstone management also points to the law, writing on its website: “Current orders do not require our staff or guests to wear face masks. If you are concerned about your safety in this respect, we hope you will join us a later date.”

Or how about never; never’s good for me.

Wut?

So…he wore one somewhere behind the scenes where no reporters could see him, but not in the plant he was there to visit.

I’m gonna call that a brazen lie, on the grounds that what the fuck would be the point of wearing it “backstage” and not wearing it in the plant where he could infect the workers or vice versa or both? Nothing. Nothing would be the point of that. He didn’t wear it “backstage” and the Honeywell chief didn’t tell him that. He just didn’t wear a mask, because he didn’t want to.

Trump is ok with it if lots more people die because he tries to “re-open” the economy.

President Donald Trump said in an exclusive interview with ABC “World News Tonight” Anchor and Managing Editor David Muir on Tuesday that “it’s possible there will be some” deaths as states roll back restrictions aimed at stopping the spread of the novel coronavirus, acknowledging that it was the choice the country faces to reopen and jumpstart the economy.

…

In addition to the president’s acknowledgement directly to Muir that it’s “possible there will be some” deaths as a cost of reopening the country, the president also acknowledged during his visit to Arizona that there will be some who are “affected badly” by the decision.

“Will some people be affected? Yes. Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country open and we have to get it open soon,” Trump said, directly acknowledging there will be a real, negative human cost in prioritizing an economic revival over a more cautious approach in favor of public health. But even as the president advocates for a return to normal economic business, the nation’s governors remain in control of decision-making for their respective states.

The president’s cost-benefit analysis is exemplified in his decision to move forward with disbanding the task force of medical experts in the weeks ahead, as he declares that “our country is now in the next stage of the battle.”

Except that it’s not. Nothing has changed. There is no effective treatment, there is no vaccine. This is not the next stage, this is the same stage – the one with a virus that we can neither prevent nor treat, that spreads with shocking ease, that kills some of its victims and leaves some with permanent damage to lungs and other useful bits. The only “next stage” here is the next stage in Trump’s stunted attention span.

Even as the president sought to prepare Americans that “more death” is ahead, he expressed optimism that the virus will go away, regardless of whether a vaccine is achieved.

“There’ll be more death, th[en] the virus will pass, with or without a vaccine. And I think we’re doing very well on the vaccines but, with or without a vaccine, it’s going to pass, and we’re going to be back to normal. But it’s been a rough process. There is no question about it,” Trump said.

That’s not “optimism,” it’s just making shit up. It’s just childish assertion. “It’s going to pass because I want it to, the end, by Donnie Trump age 4.”

The president’s optimistic outlook stands in contrast to the consensus of opinion among public health experts in warning that the virus will continue to pose a major risk until the time that there is effective treatment and vaccination.

It’s not an “optimistic outlook”; it’s heedless reckless lying for the sake of his own desire to hold rallies and win the next election.

Also, he’s still insisting that anyone who needs a test can get one. That’s not true. At all.

The president was dismissive of two new analyses that offered cautionary tales against a premature reopening, one from Johns Hopkins University that warned the daily death rate could nearly double by June and a model from the University of Washington model that warned the U.S. death toll could increase to nearly 135,000 by Aug. 4.

“These models have been so wrong from day one. Both on the low side and the upside. They’ve been so wrong, they’ve been so out of whack. And they keep making new models, new models and they’re wrong,” the president said.

Again: this is just Trump making shit up.

Urgent matters:

How can anyone be dim enough to think that because Jane Wellmeaning from Accounting signs herself “Jane Wellmeaning she/her” therefore the organization is “trans-inclusive”? What do the two even have to do with each other?

Nothing really; rather, it’s a shibboleth, a hoop to jump through, a symbol, a test, a genuflection, a self-advertisement, a blockade, a display of heightened sensitivity and (much as I hate to say it) virtue. Yes, it’s that stale trope virtue-signaling. It’s not a trope I love because it’s applied way too broadly and often, and in my view not always fairly. But this? It’s such a crappy and stupid idea in the first place, and so irrelevant to pretty much everything in the second place, that I don’t see what it can be other than virtue-signaling. Maybe it’s also meant to be signaling “inclusivity” and compassion and solidarity, but the more frantically the People of Pronoun signal with the Pronoun Flag the less able I am to take any of it seriously. On the one hand centuries of oppression, poverty, exploitation, and on the other hand…Delia here was assigned male at birth so please make her feel welcome.

Not to mention the plain absurdity of it. We might as well add our favorite conjunctions to our email signatures. Betty Benevolent, if/because/when. Putting your pronouns in an email signature makes no sense because people aren’t going to hit reply and say “Dear Her.” There’s no call for pronoun-identification in correspondence, because the subject doesn’t come up. Unsolicited irrelevant pointless information about The Self is not desirable in work correspondence, and applying social pressure to use them is just…I lack the words to say what it is.

Originally a comment by Freemage on But he’s the second Lincoln.

I went to The Lincoln Project’s website:

OUR MISSION

Defeat President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box.

We do not undertake this task lightly nor from ideological preference. Our many policy differences with national Democrats remain. However, the priority for all patriotic Americans must be a shared fidelity to the Constitution and a commitment to defeat those candidates who have abandoned their constitutional oaths, regardless of party. Electing Democrats who support the Constitution over Republicans who do not is a worthy effort.

I have two issues with them.

1: Too little, too late. This group should’ve been paying for ads and stirring up conflict with the Orange One during the 2016 primaries. And, of course, they’re a handful of voices, none of them in real positions of power. Maybe if they could get Romney to sign up.

2: That river in Egypt. They fail to acknowledge that Trump was not a barbarian who stormed into the GOP castle, but rather the monster they stitched together in the castle basement–a body built of income inequality and lassez-faire economics, a brain rotted by racism and sexism, stitched together with some kowtowing to the Religious Right, and then electrified by the right-wing media machine of which Faux News is only the most public face. Anyone who was in the GOP during Dubya’s reign was part of that creation process.

Trump thinks it’s time to put this whole pandemic thing to bed.

Trump administration officials are telling members and staff of the coronavirus task force that the White House plans to wind down the operation in coming weeks despite growing evidence that the crisis is raging on, Maggie Haberman reports.

Ok it’s raging on but it’s boring, all right? Trump has tv to watch and lies to tell, and this whole “task force” caper is a big yawn now.

A top adviser to Vice President Mike Pence who has helped oversee the task force, Olivia Troye, has told senior officials involved in the task force to expect the group to wind down within weeks, a notice echoed by other top White House officials. While the task force met Tuesday at the White House, Monday’s meeting was canceled, and a Saturday session, a staple of recent months, was never held.

…

While the rate of new infections and deaths has been falling in New York, it has continued to rise in much of the rest of the country, and a number of projections suggest that deaths will remain at elevated levels for months to come and could increase as states ease their stay-at-home orders. One document circulating inside the administration raised the possibility of a rise in coronavirus infections and deaths this month, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1 — nearly double the current level.

The normal daily death rate is around 8000, so 1000 is not a trivial increase, let alone 3000.

Remember when Trump removed Rick Bright as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority? And we were told he was working on a whistleblower report? He’s filed the report.

A federal scientist who says he was ousted from his job amid a dispute over an unproven malaria drug promoted by President Trump said on Tuesday that a top official at the Department of Health and Human Services repeatedly pressured him to steer millions of dollars in contracts to the clients of a well-connected lobbyist, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports.

It’s marketing again. Marketing über alles. Yes yes yes pandemic we know we know but steer the $$$ to the LOBBYIST.

Dr. Rick Bright, who was the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority until his removal in April, said in a formal whistle-blower complaint that since 2017 he has been protesting “cronyism and award of contracts to companies with political connections to the administration,” including a drug company executive who is close to Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser.

Filth all the way down. Give the money to me, give the money to my daughter’s husband, give the money to my lobbyist friends who will help me get elected again so that I can direct more money to my bank account.

Francine Prose has thoughts on Trump’s cult of callous brutalism:

[U]ltimately our president’s failure of empathy is less disturbing than the ways in which it appears to resonate with his supporters. He and his allies have framed our response to the crisis in terms of partisan politics, to imply (incorrectly, as the polls suggest) that tough conservatives are eager to get back to work sooner than scaredy-cat, stay-at-home progressives.

The flag-waving, gun-toting, defiantly unmasked protesters storming the capitol buildings in Michigan and Wisconsin would seem to support that view.

Indeed they would, and isn’t that bizarre. A virus isn’t political. It’s not “liberal” or “hard left” or even “socialist” to want to avoid a lethal virus and to avoid giving it to others. It’s bizarre that so many on the right seem to be happy to claim that it is.

It may be that the deepening polarization in our country – the suspicion, grievance and rage that the president is spouting and encouraging – is less political than spiritual. These divides go deeper than how we vote; they express our core beliefs about our responsibility to those with whom we share this brief span on this damaged planet. As Slate editor Tom Scocca posted on Twitter: “Conservatives have by now been conditioned to believe that thinking about other people ‘s needs or interests in any way is tyranny by definition,” a sentiment echoed by Emily Raboteau in the Huffington Post: “I can’t debate someone into caring about what happens to our fellow human beings.”

That is why I keep disputing people like Neil deGrasse Tyson when they say reason and evidence are not just necessary but also sufficient. They’re not sufficient. The instinct to give a damn has to be there too.

Apparently Trump is livid about a Republican campaign ad:

President Trump lashed out after an ad titled Mourning in America criticized his response to the coronavirus pandemic. The ad was released by The Lincoln Project, a super-PAC launched by a handful of Republicans including George Conway, a prominent lawyer and husband to White House counselor Kellyanne Conway.

Show us the ad then.

Owen Jones is well known for being…what to call it…officious is perhaps the best word. For poking into stuff that’s not really his concern, for seeking out people to prod and scold and censure, for being tooth-grindingly self-righteous and smug. He is of course a devoted Trans Ally and policer of women who don’t think Gender Indenniny is the most important cause of all time.

His latest exercise in policing other people is a WHAT IS THAT ON HIS BOOKSHELF.

Never mind that, why does he have a copy of Atlas Shrugged? Why a book about cold cream? Why the Oxford Dictionary of Scottish History? So many mysteries, so little time.

But seriously. We have books for a lot of reasons. It’s not necessarily a matter of love, much less of endorsement. We can have some books for purposes of research or curiosity. Politicians probably have an unusually wide range of reasons for hanging on to particular books. But more than that it’s just so…peering, prying, snooping, sniffing, sneering. It’s so intrusive. I’m enjoying seeing people’s bookshelves as they do broadcasts from home; I wish Chris Cuomo had a bookshelf behind him in his basement instead of those two dull white armchairs. I look to see what books they have out of curiosity but I hope it wouldn’t occur to me to ask the world why Don Lemon or Jake Tapper or Rachel Maddow has THAT book.

Andy Lewis shared his. I have some of those too.

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.

…

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?

A virtual vaccine summit:

World leaders came together in a virtual online summit Monday to pledge billions of dollars to quickly develop vaccines and drugs to fight the coronavirus.

Missing from the roster was the Trump administration, which declined to participate, but highlighted from Washington what one official called its “whole-of-America” efforts in the United States and its generosity to global health efforts.

Why did the Trump administration decline to participate? Is Trump too busy fantasizing that he’s the new Lincoln?

The conference, led by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a half-dozen countries, was set to raise $8.2 billion from governments, philanthropies and the private sector to fund research and mass-produce drugs, vaccines and testing kits to combat the virus that has killed nearly 250,000 people worldwide.

With the money came soaring rhetoric about international solidarity, and a good bit of boasting about each country’s efforts and achievements, live and prerecorded, by Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s Boris Johnson, Japan’s Shinzo Abe — alongside Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Turkey’s Recep Erdogan.

Trump skipped a chance to boast about his non-existent achievements. Weird. The administration is not saying why Trump refused to participate.

“It’s the first time that I can think of where you have had a major international pledging conference for a global crisis of this kind of importance and the U.S. is just absent,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, who worked on the Ebola response in the Obama administration.

“Just absent” sums us up right now.

What went wrong? No battery in the smoke alarm:

The disastrously tardy, inadequate, confused, and (for many citizens) confusing response of the federal government to covid-19, both before and after the first case, derives from too many factors to list here, but I’ll mention two: failure to appreciate the sars and mers warnings, both delivered by other coronaviruses; and loss of capacity at high government levels, within recent years, to understand the gravity and immediacy of pandemic threats. The result of that loss is what Ali Khan means by lack of imagination. Beth Cameron, a former head of the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense on the National Security Council staff, calls it the absence of “the smoke alarm.” Those in power who are charged with “keeping watch to get ahead of emergencies” need to smell the smoke and smother the fire while it’s small, Cameron told me. “You’re not going to stop outbreaks from happening. But you can stop outbreaks from becoming epidemics or pandemics.” She led the directorate from its establishment, following the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, until March, 2017. It survived under her successor for a little more than a year, and then, after John Bolton became the national-security adviser, it was dissolved. A smoke alarm doesn’t work when the battery has been removed.

Dennis Carroll, a former research virologist, led a pandemic-threats unit at the U.S. Agency for International Development for almost fifteen years. In 2009, he created a large program called predict, dispersing about two hundred million dollars in grants to support discovery of potentially dangerous new viruses before they spill over into humans. That program is ending, due to “the ascension of risk averse bureaucrats,” he told the Times, last October. He mentioned the White House closure of the N.S.C. health directorate as a parallel instance, and said that both Congress and the Administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama were “enormously supportive,” but then came the current chill winds.

“Chill winds” is a very emollient substitute for “brainless greedy crook who understands nothing but money that flows to him.”