For Trump The Pandemic-- Which Is Infecting Americans In Great Numbers-- Is Over

 

Friday's new COVID reports were grim worldwide. I saw numbers of cases growing rapidly across the globe-- other than in mask-savvy east Asia. 15 countries stood out with eye-popping new cases (and, in some, horrifying numbers of cases per million residents):

• India +73,196 (5,042 cases per million residents)
• U.S.A. +60,558 (23,812 cases per million residents)
• Brazil +27,651 (23,746 cases per million residents)
• France +20,339 (10,595 cases per million residents)
• Argentina +15,099 (19,234 cases per million residents)
• U.K. +13,864 (8,468 cases per million residents)
• Russia +12,126 (8,717 cases per million residents)
• Czechia +8,617 (10,208 cases per million residents)
• Colombia +8,121 (17,525 cases per million residents)
• Spain +5,986 (19,041 cases per million residents)
• Netherlands +5,971 (9,436 cases per million residents)
• Ukraine +5,804 (5,738 cases per million residents)
• Belgium +5,728 (12,375 cases per million residents)
• Italy +5,372 (5,688 cases per million residents)
• Mexico +5,300 (6,222 cases per million residents)

Ten countries are in catastrophic conditions with over 20,000 cases per million residents. These are the countries that have mishandled the pandemic most egregiously and incompetently:

• Qatar- 45,445 cases per million residents
• Bahrain- 43,598 cases per million residents
• Israel- 31,297 cases per million residents
• Panama- 27,426 cases per million residents
• Kuwait- 25,672 cases per million residents
• Peru- 25,482 cases per million residents
• Chile- 24,934 cases per million residents
• U.S.A.- 23,812 cases per million residents
• Brazil- 23,746 cases per million residents
• Oman- 20,254 cases per million residents

Some time next week, Argentina and Spain will also slip above the 20,000 cases per million residents mark. There are already 30 America states above that mark! In fact, there are an even dozen America states above the catastrophic 30,000 cases per million residents mark, a mark that points to uncontrollable situations and cascading future deaths. Every single state that has crossed the 30,000 cases per million residents mark is a state that Trump won in 2016-- no exceptions. All are anti-mask states and most are voting for Trump again next month, even as they almost willfully, insanely increase their caseloads.

• Lousiana- 36,757 cases per million residents
• Mississippi- 34,837
• North Dakota- 34,170
• Florida- 33,938
• Alabama- 33,339
• Georgia- 30,990
• Tennessee- 30,897
• Iowa- 30,895
• Arizona- 30,786
• South Dakota- 30,763
• Arkansas- 30,258
• South Carolina- 30,236 (does not include Lindsey Graham, who refuses to be tested)

Reuters reported that "New cases of COVID-19 in the United States hit a two-month high on Friday... [with] hospitalizations in the Midwest at record levels for a fifth day in a row. Ten of the 50 states reported record one-day rises in cases on Friday, including the Midwestern states of Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri and Ohio. Wisconsin and Illinois recorded over 3,000 new cases for a second day in a row-- a two-day trend not seen even during the height of the previous outbreak in the spring, according to Reuters data. The Western states of Montana, New Mexico and Wyoming also reported their biggest one-day jumps in cases, as did Oklahoma and West Virginia. Nineteen states have seen record increases in new cases so far in October. Amid the resurgence in cases across the nation, President Donald Trump, who recently contracted COVID-19, is set to resume his re-election campaign on Saturday by addressing supporters from the balcony of the White House."

Trump, who canceled rallies in Pennsylvania and Florida over the weekend, says he's doing one in Florida's Seminole County tomorrow. Yesterday, Washington Post reporters Toluse Olorunnipa, Josh Dawsey and Ashley Parker wrote that Trump "has brushed aside his advisers’ calls for caution, instead embracing a political strategy built on playing down the virus and using his own battle with it to argue that the nation has already overcome the pandemic. 'People are going to get immediately better like I did. I mean, I feel better now than I did two weeks ago. It’s crazy,' Trump told Rush Limbaugh on his talk radio show Friday, a day when more than 850 Americans died of the coronavirus. 'And I recovered immediately, almost immediately. I might not have recovered at all from covid.' Isolated in the White House for a fifth straight day as his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, campaigned in Nevada, Trump spent several hours Friday venting to friendly media hosts and plotting his swift return to the campaign trail even as the status of his coronavirus infection remained unclear... In the Fox News interview late Friday, Trump said he had been retested for the virus but did not know the results."

[Trump] has claimed to be immune, called his infection with the virus a “blessing from God” and falsely claimed that a cure exists for a disease that continues to kill thousands of Americans each week. His campaign has continued to hold large indoor events with surrogates, shunning social distancing. It has made little effort to engage in contact tracing after dozens of White House officials and campaign surrogates contracted the disease.

...Minnesota Department of Health infectious-disease director Kris Ehresmann told reporters Friday that nine people who had attended Trump’s Sept. 18 rally in Bemidji, Minn., had tested positive for the coronavirus. One case involved a person who was known to be infectious at the rally, she said. Two attendees were later hospitalized after testing positive, including one who was in intensive care.

He spent 2 hours on Rush Limbaugh's show Friday mostly talking nonsense about Hillary's e-mails and criticizing Barr for not... arresting her or whatever bullshit he expects "his" Attorney General to do. Eventually, Limbaugh hustled him off the show. New York Magazine super-star writer Olivia Nuzzi analyzes how the entire Trump Regime has turned into the world's worst super-spreader. She reported that last weekend "Trump was on the phone, and he was talking about dying... and while his doctor had told the outside world that the president’s symptoms were nothing to worry about, Trump, cocooned in his suite at Walter Reed... was telling those close to him something very different. 'I could be one of the diers,' he said," always the drama queen. "Contagious and isolated from his family and closest aides, he was accompanied by Dan Scavino, the social-media director who had first been his caddie and had survived at his side longer than anyone who wasn’t blood, and Mark Meadows, his highly emotional chief of staff, who slept in a room nearby, and was attended to by a team of camera-conscious doctors. In this sterilized confinement, he tried to distract himself from his illness. He plotted his escape, planned public-relations stunts, watched TV, and took calls from friends, members of his staff, and Republican lawmakers. But he remained consumed by what the doctors told him about his chances of survival. It wasn’t a sure thing."

Statistically, the coronavirus is more likely to cost Donald Trump the White House than his life, though the threat to the latter isn’t helping the former. A little more than three weeks before the election, potentially contagious and freaking everybody out, Trump faces what looks like the end of his presidency. “He’s mishandled the coronavirus, he’s never been popular, and he’s gonna lose badly. I think it’s pretty simple,” a senior Republican official said. “Of course he was going to say, ‘Oh look, I feel great! Look how badly I beat this puny little virus!’ Meanwhile, it touches every American’s life every day in multiple different ways, and he’s handled it badly and people don’t forget that.” Or, as ex–Trump adviser Sam Nunberg put it, “Everything has just completely gone to shit.”

The polls suggest not just that the president will lose to Joe Biden but that he might lose bigly, in a landslide.

...And the circumstances have grown less pickable each day. “I think some of this is sad to watch,” Nunberg said. “It’s getting to the point where he’s almost turning into a laughingstock. What I’m worried about is whether he wants to completely self-destruct and take everything down with him vis-à-vis the election and the Republican Party.” He added, “This is a guy who’s not gonna lose joyfully.”

It does appear at times as though self-destruction may be the point. How else could you explain the Plague Parade circling Walter Reed, in which a very sick Trump boarded a tightly sealed SUV with his Secret Service agents so he could wave at the supporters who had come to fly their flags on the street? Or the Evita-inspired return to the White House, in which a still very sick Trump ascended the staircase to the balcony, ripped off his face mask, and saluted to no one as his photographer snapped away? Or calling in to the Fox Business Channel to suggest his infection may be the fault of the Gold Star military families, since they were always asking to hug him? This is what it looks like when the president knows he’s losing, but it’s also close to what it looked like when he won-- after all, he thought he was losing in 2016, too. We all did. “You’re never as smart as you look when you win, and never as dumb as you look when you lose,” according to David Axelrod. In Trump’s case, it may be more like this: What seems like genius when he manages to survive is the very madness that threatens his survival in the first place.





A senior White House official told me there has been an ongoing effort to persuade the president not to do any of this, as there always is during his episodes of advanced mania. Asked what the effort looked like this time, with Trump physically removed from most of the people who might try to calm him down, the official said, “Well, for starters, it’s unsuccessful.”

One former White House official said that stopping Trump from doing something stupid that he really wants to do is possible only if you’re “actually sitting in front of him.” Sick themselves or trying to avoid a sick president, “the people he trusts and respects who would be barriers to that behavior don’t seem to be around,” this person said. “It just looks so chaotic. Duh.”

A second former White House official said the problem is “now people are so broken down, to the point where everyone’s been in ‘Jesus, take the wheel’ mode for the last couple years, and fighting against him is only gonna get them burned. Why even try?” The president’s staff, this person said, have no ability to think strategically because the president’s behavior poses new threats to survival every five minutes. “I don’t think they’re even considering what happens if he’s back in the White House and he needs oxygen or a ventilator. Their view is ‘If it happens, well, we’ll fucking figure it out when it happens!’”

One theory of Trump’s self-immolation campaign is that it’s about gaining a sense of control. “I don’t think he wants to lose. I think he wants to have excuses for why he did lose,” a third former White House official said. “If it’s the ballot, the China virus, if it’s Nancy Pelosi. I just think he wants an excuse.”

...Mary Trump is the president’s niece as well as a psychologist, whose best seller, Too Much and Never Enough, analyzes her uncle through the dysfunctional family he came from. In her view, the president is best understood as a self-unaware Tin Man, abandoned as a small child by his sick mother and rejected by his sociopath father until he became useful to him, whose endless search for love and approval plays out as mental warfare on the Free World he improbably represents. “In order to deal with the terror and the loneliness he experienced, he developed these defense mechanisms that essentially made him unlovable,” Mary said. “Over time, they hardened into character traits that my grandfather came to value. When you’re somebody who craves love but doesn’t understand what it means-- he just knows he misses it and needs it, but he’ll never have it because he’s somebody nobody loves-- that’s fucking tragic. He still needs to go to prison for the rest of his life. It’s not a defense. But it’s sad.”

...[Trump's] unwillingness to admit human frailty has led the White House and its doctors to keep information about his illness not only from the public and the press (three members of which have, so far, been infected at the White House too) but from his own staff. After Hope Hicks began experiencing symptoms at the Minnesota MAGA rally on Wednesday, forcing her to isolate in the back of the plane on the trip home, officials with whom she’d had contact remained in the dark. After she tested positive on Thursday afternoon, the White House failed to notify others who would soon test positive themselves. They learned about it when the world did, not with an official disclosure but with a leak to the media. “The president could’ve given it to her,” one of those people told me, in fairness, but “I would’ve done things different that day, had I known.”

Trump did know, but he didn’t change his plans. At 1 p.m. on Thursday, he flew to his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, for a fund-raiser with hundreds of his supporters, some of whom he spoke with indoors. Later that night, he tweeted about Hicks being sick. “Terrible!” he said. “The First Lady and I are waiting for our test results. In the meantime, we will begin our quarantining process.”

Reading the message, the person said, “I assumed he must’ve had a preliminary positive one.” The lack of transparency, this person added, is “symptomatic about how people I work with always keep the wrong things secret.” Suicidal in all senses, this is the Trumpian madness that threatens the president’s political and earthly future as it puts at risk everyone around him.

As one White House official put it, "Everybody at the top should be fired."

The public seems to agree wholeheartedly and is preparing to do just that. In fact, Catherine Lucey and Michael Bender noted in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that Trump is at his lowest point in the polls in months, behind in ad spending and has spent the past week off the campaign trail after a positive Covid-19 diagnosis." The current Real Clear Politics polling average has Trump down by 9.6 points-- 51.6% to 42.0%. The most recent poll, by YouGov for The Economist mirrors the average.

Trump Can't Dance