Trump Has Given Up On The Pandemic-- The World Has Given Up On Trump

Opposition Research by Nancy Ohanian

Señor Trumpanzee has officially reached out to crazy right-wing governor Kristi Noem (R-SD) to find out what the process is for getting his likeness added onto Mount Rushmore. I'm not joking. I wonder how long it would take to dynamite it. Trump, apparently, doesn't understand it is supposed to represent the greatest and more admired American presidents, not the worst and most despised president.

Last week, the U.S. breezed through the 5 million confirmed cases mark. Because of Trump and his enablers another 63,246 cases were confirmed on Friday, 54,199 more cases on Saturday, and another 47,849 yesterday, bringing the total to 5,199,444-- about 2 million more than all of Europe combined (including Russia). The population of the U.S. is 331,002,651, while the population of Europe is 747,678,099. So why does Europe have 3,035,997 cases and the U.S. 5,199,444 cases? Donald J. Trumpanzee is the simple answer. A more complex answer-- though not a lot more complex-- would be that there are millions of people in the U.S. who freely voted to make Trumpanzee their leader, many of whom planning on voting for him again, despite the last 3 year of catastrophe. Toxic brew.

Over the weekend 4 Washington Post reporters, Philip Rucker, Yasmeen Abutaleb, Robert Costa, Josh Dawsey, collaborated on a piece, The Lost Days Of Summer: How Trump Fell Short In Containing The Virus, that shows how the Trumpist Regime has just given up on the pandemic. Former radical right psychopath North Carolina Congressman Mark Meadows-- current radical right psychopath Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is in charge of coordinating the executive branch, including its coronavirus response. "But," wrote The Post quarter, "in closed-door meetings, he has revealed his skepticism of the two physicians guiding the anti-pandemic effort, Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, routinely questioning their expertise. Meadows no longer holds a daily 8 a.m. meeting that includes health professionals to discuss the raging pandemic. Instead, aides said, he huddles in the mornings with a half-dozen politically oriented aides-- and when the virus comes up, their focus is more on how to convince the public that President Trump has the crisis under control, rather than on methodically planning ways to contain it. During coronavirus meetings, Meadows has repeatedly questioned the scientific consensus that wearing masks helps contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, officials said. He has regularly raised with Fauci and others a range of issues on which he thinks Fauci has been wrong, and he personally monitors the infectious-disease expert’s media appearances. When he catches Fauci sounding out of sync with Trump, the chief of staff admonishes the doctor to 'stay on message,' officials said-- and he has impressed upon Fauci, Birx and other public health professionals that they should not opine on restrictions or make policy in the media."

If the administration’s initial response to the coronavirus was denial, its failure to control the pandemic since then was driven by dysfunction and resulted in a lost summer, according to the portrait that emerges from interviews with 41 senior administration officials and other people directly involved in or briefed on the response efforts. Many of them spoke only on the condition of anonymity to reveal confidential discussions or to offer candid assessments without retribution.

“Right now, we’re flying blind,” said Thomas Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Public health is not getting in the way of economic recovery and schools reopening. Public health is the means to economic recovery and schools reopening. You don’t have to believe me. Look all over the world. The U.S. is a laggard.”

Under mounting pressure to improve the president’s reelection chances as his poll numbers declined, the White House had what was described as a stand-down order on engaging publicly on the virus through the month of June, part of a deliberate strategy to spotlight other issues even as the contagion spread wildly across the country. A senior administration official said there was a desire to focus on the economy in June.

It was only in July, when case counts began soaring in a trio of populous, Republican-leaning states-- Arizona, Florida and Texas-- and polls showed a majority of Americans disapproving of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, that the president and his top aides renewed their public activity related to the virus.

...Trump and many of his top aides talk about the virus not as a contagion that must be controlled through social behavior but rather as a plague that eventually will dissipate on its own. Aides view the coronavirus task force-- which includes Fauci, Birx and relevant agency heads-- as a burden that has to be managed, officials said.

...[I]n recent interviews, several governors and mayors in some of the nation’s hardest-hit areas questioned the president’s credibility and the value of his presentations.

“You can be out front, but if you’re not providing accurate and truthful information, it can hurt rather than help,” said Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner (D), whose city has been a major hot spot. “Correct information is vital. People are listening, and they will respond based on what they’re hearing. And they look to their leaders at all levels of government... That trust factor is critical. If you lose that, it’s very difficult to govern.”

Jack Chow, a U.S. ambassador for global HIV/AIDS during the George W. Bush administration and a former World Health Organization assistant director general, said, “It’s extraordinary that a country that helped eradicate smallpox, promoted HIV/AIDS treatment worldwide and suppressed Ebola-- we were the world’s leader in public health and medicine, and now we can’t even protect our own people from the most devastating epidemic in decades.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Trump’s push for a speedy return to normal had deadly consequences. Asked who was to blame for the pandemic’s dark summer turn, Pelosi said, “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“The delay, the denial... the hoax that it’s going to go away magically, a miracle is going to happen, we’ll be in church together by Easter, caused death,” Pelosi added.

...Although Fauci, Birx and other medical professionals sit on the coronavirus task force, many of the more pressing decisions lately have been made by the smaller group that huddles in the morning and mostly prioritizes politics. The cadre includes Meadows, senior adviser Jared Kushner and strategic communications director Alyssa Farah.

The policy process has fallen apart around Meadows, according to four White House officials, with the chief of staff fixated on preventing leaks and therefore unwilling to expand meetings to include experts or to share documents with senior staffers who had been excluded from discussions. This breakdown in order, for instance, has given room for trade adviser Peter Navarro to push his ideas directly with Trump and to submit an opinion piece to USA Today attacking Fauci.

...Health officials said they have been dismayed that there is no consistent message from the White House advising what people should be doing to help stem the tide of coronavirus infections, such as wearing masks and social distancing. Some internal administration models suggest that full adherence to those measures could yield the same result as the shutdown, and officials recognize that it would be better for the public health and psyche of the nation and the economy if the country could avoid another full shutdown.

Luciana Borio, a director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council during the first two years of the Trump administration, decried “a response in disarray hampered by a lack of clear, consistent public health-oriented guidance to the public.”

“It’s very difficult to know who to trust,” Borio said. “To expect the public to sort out the facts in a time of tremendous stress leads to inconsistent and disparate actions, and that really hurts our collective effort to fight the virus.”

What also has frustrated a number of the president’s allies and former aides is that he simply seems uninterested in asserting full leadership over the crisis, instead deferring to state leaders to make the more difficult decisions while using his presidential bully pulpit to critique their performances. He deputizes Pence to handle much of the actual communication with states and other stakeholders in the fight against the virus.

Since the start of the pandemic, the U.S. response has been plagued by a chronic shortage of diagnostic tests, the supplies needed to run them and the lab capacity to process them in a reasonable time to maximize their effectiveness, according to state officials.

The Trump administration has resisted devising a national testing program and instead ceded the task to state governments, even as cases of infection average more than 60,000 a day and some people wait 10 days or longer for test results, delays that render the results essentially useless.

State officials, leaders of the American Medical Association and other medical groups as well as some officials in the administration have pushed for a stronger federal solution to the problems of testing.

...Despite repeated calls to invoke the Defense Production Act to help resolve testing-supply shortages, the administration has resisted doing so. Trump and several White House aides have instead continued to think that it is politically advantageous to cede the issue to the states to avoid taking ownership or blame for the issue, even though testing shortages are largely seen as a federal failure.

“The thing that disturbs me is I think the public has to know it doesn’t have to be this way,” said Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ) said. “Other countries have taken this virus seriously, trusted their public health officials and scientists, and now they’ve flattened the curve,” he said. “Meanwhile, our situation gets worse and worse every day and some Americans think, ‘Oh, that’s just the way it is.’ But that isn’t how it has to be.”

Even Trump has taken to sounding defeatist at times, as if he had given up trying to save lives. When the president claimed in a recent interview for HBO that the virus was “under control,” Axios reporter Jonathan Swan interjected.

“How?” Swan asked. “A thousand Americans are dying a day.”

“They are dying, that’s true,” Trump said. “It is what it is.”

Some people familiar with Trump’s thinking said the president is preternaturally averse to difficult challenges that don’t produce immediate results.

“He’s just not oriented towards things that even in the short term look like they’re involving something that’s hard or negative or that involves sacrifice or pain,” a former senior administration official explained. “He is always anxious to get to a place of touting achievements and being the messenger for good news.”

The Associated Press noted on Sunday that "the failure of the most powerful nation in the world to contain the scourge has been met with astonishment and alarm in Europe. Italy was hit first and hit hard, but "after a strict nationwide, 10-week lockdown, vigilant tracing of new clusters and general acceptance of mask mandates and social distancing, Italy has become a model of virus containment... Much of the incredulity in Europe stems from the fact that America had the benefit of time, European experience and medical know-how to treat the virus that the continent itself didn’t have when the first COVID-19 patients started filling intensive care units. Yet, more than four months into a sustained outbreak, the U.S. reached the 5 million mark... Health officials believe the actual number is perhaps 10 times higher, or closer to 50 million, given testing limitations and the fact that as many as 40% of all those who are infected have no symptoms.

With America’s world’s-highest death toll of more than 160,000, its politicized resistance to masks and its rising caseload, European nations have barred American tourists and visitors from other countries with growing cases from freely traveling to the bloc.

France and Germany are now imposing tests on arrival for travelers from “at risk” countries, the U.S. included.

...When the virus first appeared in the United States, Trump and his supporters quickly dismissed it as either a “hoax” or a virus that would quickly disappear once warmer weather arrived. At one point, Trump suggested that ultraviolet light or injecting disinfectants would eradicate the virus. (He later said he was being facetious).

Trump’s frequent complaints about Dr. Anthony Fauci have regularly made headlines in Europe, where the U.S. infectious-disease expert is a respected figure. Italy’s leading COVID-19 hospital offered Fauci a job if Trump fired him.

Trump has defended the U.S. response, blaming China, where the virus was first detected, for America’s problems and saying the U.S. numbers are so high because there is so much testing. Trump supporters and Americans who have refused to wear masks against all medical advice back that line.

“There’s no reason to fear any sickness that’s out there,” said Julia Ferjo, a mother of three in Alpine, Texas, who is “vehemently” against wearing a mask. Ferjo, 35, teaches fitness classes in a large gym with open doors. She doesn’t allow participants to wear masks.

“When you’re breathing that hard, I would pass out,” she said. “I do not want people just dropping like flies.”

And health officials watched with alarm as thousands of bikers gathered Friday in the small South Dakota city of Sturgis for an annual 10-day motorcycle rally. The state has no mask mandates, and many bikers expressed defiance of measures meant to prevent the virus’s spread.

Dr. David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, who is leading a team seeking treatments for COVID-19, decried such behavior, as well as the country’s handling of the virus.

“There’s no national strategy, no national leadership, and there’s no urging for the public to act in unison and carry out the measures together,” he said. “That’s what it takes, and we have completely abandoned that as a nation.”

When he gets on Zoom calls with counterparts from around the globe, “everyone cannot believe what they’re seeing in the U.S. and they cannot believe the words coming out of the leadership,” he said.

...Many Europeans point proudly to their national health care systems that not only test but treat COVID-19 for free, unlike the American system, where the virus crisis has only exacerbated income and racial inequalities in obtaining health care.

“The coronavirus has brutally stripped bare the vulnerability of a country that has been sliding for years,” wrote Italian author Massimo Gaggi in his new book Crack America (Broken America), about U.S. problems that long predated COVID-19.

Gaggi said he started writing the book last year and thought then that the title would be taken as a provocative wake-up call. Then the virus hit.

“By March the title wasn’t a provocation any longer,” he said. “It was obvious.”

At the same time, Rebecca Falconer reported at Axios that New Zealand also has a COVID election coming up, but a very different one for Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern than Trump's November reckoning. "New Zealand," wrote Falconer, "has now gone 100 days with no detected community spread of COVID-19... New Zealanders are going to the polls on Sept. 19. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been widely praised for her leadership that saw NZ lock down hard for several weeks before all domestic restrictions were lifted in June. She sees her government's response to and recovery from the coronavirus outbreak as key to her Labour Party being re-elected. Ardern announced at a briefing Saturday that Labour's re-election campaign that is heavily focused on continuing with the economic recovery, pledging NZ$311 million ($205.32m) for a 'Flexi-wage' subsidy scheme to help businesses give jobs to some 40,000 Kiwis. Labour is well ahead in the polls of its nearest rival, the National Party, led by Judith Collins. But conservative Collins told RNZ Saturday she's still confident of winning under her party's platform 'Strong team, More Jobs, Better Economy.' Collins is the third leader to be appointed by the National Party this year. New Zealand has 23 active coronavirus cases. All are NZ residents newly returned from abroad, who are staying in managed isolation facilities. The border remains closed to non-residents and all newly returned Kiwis must undergo a two-week isolation program managed by the country's defense force. All travelers tested three times before they leave. Police are stationed outside hotels where travelers are in quarantine. Officers have taken prosecutorial action against several returned travelers who've breached these rules by fleeing the facilities under the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act."

Reporting solo for the Washington Post yesterday, Ashley Parker wrote that many people have just stopped caring what Trump says because everyone knows he's full of crap and nothing that comes out of his mouth is ever anything but attempted manipulation. "More than 3½ years into his presidency," wrote Parker, "Trump increasingly finds himself minimized and ignored-- as many of his more outlandish or false statements are briefly considered and then, just as quickly, dismissed. The slide into partial irrelevance could make it even more difficult for Trump as he seeks reelection as the nation’s leader amid a pandemic and economic collapse. In battling the coronavirus crisis, which has left more than 158,000 Americans dead, many of the nation’s governors have disregarded the president’s nebulous recommendations, instead opting for what they believe is best for their residents. So have the nation’s schools, with many of the country’s largest districts preparing for distance learning when they reopen this fall, despite Trump’s repeated calls for kids to return to classrooms in person. And the president’s own top public health officials are routinely contradicting him in public-- offering grim, fact-based assessments of the raging virus in contrast to his own frequently rosy proclamations."