Trump Never Hires Good People-- Never Has And Never Will

Yesterday, Face the Nation featured Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the nation's most trusted voice on the pandemic. Fauci told the audience that "this is going to be a bad week... unfortunately, if you look at the projection of the curves, of the kinetics of the curves, we're going to continue to see an escalation. Also, we should hope that within a week, maybe a little bit more, we'll start to see a flattening out of the curve and coming down. The mitigation that we're talking about that you just mentioned is absolutely key to the success of that. So on the one hand, things are going to get bad and we need to be prepared for that. It is going to be shocking to some. It certainly is-- is really disturbing to see that. But that's what's going to happen before it turns around. So we'll just buckle down, continue to mitigate, continue to do the physical separation because we got to get through this week that's coming up because it is going to be a bad week... I will not say we have it under control, Margaret. That would be a false statement. We are struggling to get it under control, and that's the issue that's at hand right now. The thing that's important is that what you see is increases in new cases, which then start to flatten out."

He added that "Unless we get this globally under control, there's a very good chance that it will assume a seasonal nature in the sense that even if we, and I-- and I hope it's not just if but when we get it down to the point where it really is at a very low level, we need to be prepared that since it unlikely will be completely eradicated from the planet, that as we get into next season, we may see the beginning of a resurgence. And that's the reason why we're pushing so hard and getting our preparedness much better than it was, but importantly, pushing on a vaccine and doing clinical trials for therapeutic interventions so that hopefully if in fact we do see that resurgence, we will have interventions that we did not have in the beginning of the situation that we're in right now."

CBS turned to Fauci. As Maureen Dowd pointed out in her column, the second dumbest man in government turned to the dumbest man in government. "Heaven help us," she wrote, "we’re at the mercy of the Slim Suit crowd." She began with a story illustrating how George W Bush was revealed as "a man who had been winging it for the first half of his life, playing and swaggering around while he relied on his daddy and daddy’s friends to prop him up... Now we have another pampered scion in the Oval, propped up by his daddy for half his life, accustomed to winging it and swaggering around. And he, too, is utterly unprepared to lead us through the storm. Like W., he is resorting to clinical states’ rights arguments, leaving the states to chaotically compete with one another and the federal government for precious medical equipment."

Donald Trump is trying to build a campaign message around his image as a wartime president. But as a commander in chief, Cadet Bone Spurs is bringing up the rear.

“I would leave it up to the governors,” Trump said Friday, when asked about his government’s sclerotic response. Trouble is, when you leave it to the governors, you have scenes like we did in Florida with the open beaches-- not to mention a swath in the middle of the country that, as of Friday night, still had not ordered residents to stay home.

The Los Angeles Times reported that two months before the virus spread through Wuhan, the Trump administration halted a $200 million early-warning program to train scientists in China and elsewhere to deal with a pandemic. The name of the program? “PREDICT.”

It is said that nature abhors a vacuum, but this virus loves it.

At Thursday’s briefing, Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, who barely two weeks ago became the head of the administration’s supply-chain task force, added to the confusion when he defended the government’s decision to send the supplies governors are pleading for to the private sector first.

“I’m not here to disrupt a supply chain,” the admiral said.

Trump was elected to disrupt things. So disrupt.

The president seems oblivious to the fact that his own clown car of an administration bungled the priceless lead time we had to get ready for the pandemic.

With the death toll in this country soaring past 7,000, Trump is focused on the same thing he is always focused on: himself. He proudly told reporters Wednesday, “Did you know I was No. 1 on Facebook? I just found out I was No. 1 on Facebook. I thought that was very nice for whatever it means.” Our doom, perhaps?

Trump’s most defining qualities have been on display in this fight: He has been mercurial, vindictive, deceptive, narcissistic, blame-shifting and nepotistic.

At the Thursday briefing, the president brought out another wealthy, uninformed man-child who loves to play boss: Jared Kushner. Where’s our Mideast peace deal, dude? Surely Trump did not think giving Kushner a lead role would inspire confidence. This is the very same adviser who told his father-in-law early on that the virus was being overplayed by the press and also urged him to tout a Google website guiding people to testing sites that turned out to be, um, still under construction.

Now he is leading a group, mocked within the government as “the Slim Suit crowd,” that is providing one more layer of confusion-- and inane consultant argot-- to the laggardly, disorganized response.

From the lectern, Kushner drilled down on his role as the annoying, spoiled kid in every teen movie ever made. “And the notion of the federal stockpile was, it’s supposed to be our stockpile,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be the states’ stockpiles that they then use.”

Our stockpile?

That’s the way the Trump-Kushner dynasty has approached this whole presidency, conflating what belongs to the people with what is theirs. Trump acts like he has the right to dole out “favors,” based on which governor is most assiduous about kissing up to him.

On Friday, the administration changed the wording on the Department of Health and Human Services website about the stockpile to be matchy-matchy with Kushner’s cavalier dismissal of the states.

It was typical of Trump’s muddled message that on Friday, as the C.D.C. issued new guidelines to wear masks, the president said: “You can wear ’em. You don’t have to wear ’em,” adding he had no intention of wearing one because “Somehow, sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute desk, the great Resolute desk, I think wearing a face mask” did not gel with his image of greeting “prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don’t know somehow, I don’t see it for myself.”

A couple of days earlier, another Times columnist I'm not a fan of, Michelle Goldberg, got there first: Putting Jared Kushner In Charge Is Utter Madness. Perhaps she's speaking for most Americans-- I think she is-- when she writes that "it’s hard to believe that someone with as little expertise as Kushner could be so arrogant... Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Most of his other endeavors-- his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians-- have been failures. Undeterred, he has now arrogated to himself a major role in fighting the epochal health crisis that’s brought America to its knees... This is dilettantism raised to the level of sociopathy."

People I know who have known Kushner at various times in his life-- some very well-- all agree with the assessment Dowd used author Andrea Bernstein to make. Bernstein told Goldberg that Kushner "really sees himself as a disrupter." Again and again, she said, people who’d dealt with Kushner told her that whatever he did, he "believed he could do it better than anybody else, and he had supreme confidence in his own abilities and his own judgment even when he didn’t know what he was talking about."

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which this confidence is unearned. Kushner was a reportedly mediocre student whose billionaire father appears to have bought him a place at Harvard. Taking over the family real estate company after his father was sent to prison, Kushner paid $1.8 billion-- a record, at the time-- for a Manhattan skyscraper at the very top of the real estate market in 2007. The debt from that project became a crushing burden for the family business. (Kushner was able to restructure the debt in 2011, and in 2018 the project was bailed out by a Canadian asset management company with links to the government of Qatar.) He gutted the once-great New York Observer, then made a failed attempt to create a national network of local politics websites.

His forays into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict-- for which he boasted of reading a whole 25 books-- have left the dream of a two-state solution on life support. Michael Koplow of the centrist Israel Policy Forum described Kushner’s plan for the Palestinian economy as “the Monty Python version of Israeli-Palestinian peace.”

Now, in our hour of existential horror, Kushner is making life-or-death decisions for all Americans, showing all the wisdom we’ve come to expect from him.

...Disaster response requires discipline and adherence to a clear chain of command, not the move-fast-and-break-things approach of start-up culture. Even if Kushner “were the most competent person in the world, which he clearly isn’t, introducing these kind of competing power centers into a crisis response structure is a guaranteed problem,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former U.S.A.I.D. official who helped manage the response to the Ebola crisis during Barack Obama’s administration, told me. “So you could have Trump and Kushner and Pence and the governors all be the smartest people in the room, but if there are multiple competing power centers trying to drive this response, it’s still going to be chaos.”

Competing power centers are a motif of this administration, and its approach to the pandemic is no exception. As the Washington Post reported, Kushner’s team added “another layer of confusion and conflicting signals within the White House’s disjointed response to the crisis.” Nor does his operation appear to be internally coherent. “Projects are so decentralized that one team often has little idea what others are doing-- outside of that they all report up to Kushner,” reported Politico.

Louisiana's Sordid Senate Contest Is Starting To Shape Up... Badly

There may be hope for Louisiana... but probably not

Yesterday one of the Senate's worst corporate money vacuums, Louisiana reactionary and DLC cupie doll, Mary Landrieu, reassured her allies at the Monroe Chamber of Commerce that she will work to defeat meaningful health care reform. She had gone to reassure them she would vigorously oppose climate change legislation but when someone asked her if there were any circumstances that would make her vote for the public option her reply was:

"Well if working families paid give me the kind of money I get from Insurance companies ($404,731) and the Medical-Industrial Complex ($1,299,372), I might consider throwing them a bone." “Very few, if any. I’d prefer a private market-based approach to any health care reform that would extend coverage.”

Louisiana's other senator, David Diapers Vitter, is at least as bad as Landrieu when it comes to supporting ordinary working families, even if he isn't as successful a whore to corporate interests as she is. He's gobbled up a mere $252,026 from the Insurance Industry and $1,089,530 from the Medical-Industrial Complex. Not many people can match Landrieu when it comes to extracting cash from corporations and lobbyists in return for her votes selling out Louisiana families' interests.

Vitter, because he's a sleazy sexual predator and serial liar, is in trouble with the state's voters and yesterday a very conservative Blue Dog, Charlie Melancon, announced he would take on Vitter. What a choice! They are both so wretched that I would never consider voting for either one of them under any circumstances. The independent candidate in the race, Bob Lang, appears to be even more of an extreme right-wing fool than Vitter, Landrieu or Melancon and he's flirting with secessionism in his whacky campaign.

"This country, in my opinion, is on the verge of a financial calamity and changing from a constitutional republic to a socialist/communist form of government. If the United States Congress and president continue to spend in such an insane manner and borrow at least half of everything we spend, that will be a guaranteed recipe for national suicide and nation failure.

Citizens who believe in a small and sovereign federal government, a strong sovereign state government and all of the power in the hands of the people have to come forward now to stop this out of control socialist train that is flying down the tracks at warp speed."

Louisiana's only hope: porno star Stormy Daniels, who hasn't made a decision yet whether or not to descend into the filth and much of Louisiana politics, but is considering a run against Vitter to help clean up government and raise the level of the state's morality-in-politics.

Melancon is a typical corrupt Blue Dog who sells his vote to whichever corporation pays the most. He vociferously opposes the kind of health care reform his hard-pressed congressional district's residents so desperately need-- medium income $34,463-- but he's taken in a sweet $164,435 from the Insurance Industry and another $284,452 from the Medical-Industrial Complex. Expect that to ramp up a bit now as he reiterates his adamant opposition to the kind of health care reform that would benefit his own constituents. The House Energy and Commerce Committee took a look at how their health care bill would effect LA-03, the folks who live in Houma and Cajun Country, as well as in the suburbs east of Lafayette and the report makes it clear that few Americans have more the gain than these folks in southern Louisiana-- especially the elderly and small businessmen.

America’s Affordable Health Choices Act would provide significant benefits in the 3rd Congressional District of Louisiana: up to 11,000 small businesses could receive tax credits to provide coverage to their employees; 3,000 seniors would avoid the donut hole in Medicare Part D; 350 families could escape bankruptcy each year due to unaffordable health care costs; health care providers would receive payment for $146 million in uncompensated care each year; and 115,000 uninsured individuals would gain access to high-quality, affordable health insurance. Congressman Charlie Melancon represents this district.

• Help for small businesses. Under the legislation, small businesses with 25 employees or less and average wages of less than $40,000 qualify for tax credits of up to 50% of the costs of providing health insurance. There are up to 11,000 small businesses in the district that could qualify for these credits.

• Help for seniors with drug costs in the Part D donut hole. Each year, 3,000 seniors in the district hit the donut hole and are forced to pay their full drug costs, despite having Part D drug coverage. The legislation would provide them with immediate relief, cutting brand name drug costs in the donut hole by 50%, and ultimately eliminate the donut hole.

• Health care and financial security. There were 350 health care-related bankruptcies in the district in 2008, caused primarily by health care costs not covered by insurance. The bill provides health insurance for almost every American and caps annual out-of-pocket costs at $10,000 per year, ensuring that no citizen will have to face financial ruin because of high health care costs.

• Relieving the burden of uncompensated care for hospitals and health care providers. In 2008, health care providers in the district provided $146 million worth of uncompensated care, care that was provided to individuals who lacked insurance coverage and were unable to pay their bills. Under the legislation, these costs of uncompensated care would be virtually eliminated.

• Coverage of the uninsured. There are 134,000 uninsured individuals in the district, 22% of the district. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that nationwide, 97% of all Americans will have insurance coverage when the bill takes effect. If this benchmark is reached in the district, 115,000 people who currently do not have health insurance will receive coverage.

• No deficit spending. The cost of health care reform under the legislation is fully paid for: half through making the Medicare and Medicaid program more efficient and half through a surtax on the income of the wealthiest individuals. This surtax would affect only 1,700 households in the district. The surtax would not affect 99.3% of taxpayers in the district.

Pray Stormy Daniels gets into the race, the only candidate with both a sensible head on her shoulders and a sense of ethics. In fact just pray for Louisiana in general.




UPDATE: Another Solution For Louisiana?

The Louisiana Weekly claims that General Russell Honoré, the hero of the Hurricane Katrina rescue operations, is considering a primary challenge to Vitter-- and that he's "more than 50% sure that he will run." BayouBuzz granted confidentiality to "one very senior Louisiana Republican" who predicted that Honoré would beat Vitter. "All he has to say is 'Stuck on Stupid', and Vitter is toast." 

UPDATED UPDATE

Honoré is denying he ever said anything about running and that he's not-- at least as of now. Stormy! Stormy! Stormy!