The Chaotic Rule Of Donald J Trump Hurtles Towards A Final Denouement... Chaotically

 

Active Shooter by Nancy Ohanian

Based on a national voter survey released yesterday, the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) reported that Trump will lose by 14 points (54% to 40%), unless voter turnout is extremely high-- which looks likely-- in which case Trump will lose by 18 points (56% to 38%).

Some of the most interesting findings show an extremely bifurcated America-- with normal people basing their stands on reality, while Republicans live in a Fox/Hate Talk Radio bubble in an alternative reality.

• About three in four Americans (76%) think that shutdowns, mask mandates, and other steps taken by state and local governments since the coronavirus pandemic began are reasonable measures to protect people, including majorities of Republicans, independents, and Democrats (56%, 71%, and 94%, respectively).
• Nine in ten Democrats (90%), 78% of independents, and 65% of Republicans say they always wear masks in public places. White evangelical Protestants stand out among religious groups as less likely than others to report wearing a mask all the time in public (63% vs. 77% and higher among all other groups).
• White evangelical Protestants are the only religious group who are more likely to say that Trump rather than Biden has strong religious beliefs (43% vs. 18%) and best models religious values with his actions and leadership (49% vs. 18%).
• A majority of Americans (55%), including 24% of Republicans and 77% of Democrats, say they are not at all confident that President Trump will concede defeat if Biden is declared the winner of the election. One-third of Americans (36%), including 26% of Republicans and 46% of Democrats, are not at all confident that Republican leaders in Congress would demand Trump leave office if he refuses to concede an election loss.
• Two-thirds of Americans (66%) say the winner of the popular vote rather than the Electoral College should determine the next president.
• Partisan views of the other party are harsh.

◦ Eight in ten Republicans (81%) say the Democratic Party has been taken over by socialists, compared to 17% who say the Democratic Party is trying to make capitalism work for average Americans.
◦ Eight in ten Democrats (78%) say the Republican Party has been taken over by racists, compared to 20% who say the Republican Party is trying to protect the country against outside threats.

• Democrats (17%) are significantly less likely than they were in both 2018 (26%) and 2015 (32%) to believe that police killings of Black men are isolated incidents, as white Democrats’ views have become more aligned with those of African Americans over the last five years. By contrast, Republican views that police killings of African Americans are isolated incidents (79%) have not changed significantly since 2015 (82%).
• Majorities of all religious groups, including 58% of white evangelical Protestants, say immigrants living in the U.S. illegally should be allowed a way to become citizens, provided they meet certain requirements.
• Majorities of Democrats (91%), independents (79%), and Republicans (53%) oppose an immigration border policy that separates children from their parents and charges parents as criminals when they enter the country without permission.
• Democrats (76%) and independents (61%) are about twice as likely as Republicans (31%) to think that climate change will cause them harm.
• Majorities of Democrats, independents, and Republicans favor guaranteeing all Americans access to affordable childcare (95%, 85%, and 71%, respectively) and guaranteeing all Americans a minimum income (88%, 69%, and 52%, respectively).

On Sunday, NY Times reporters tried Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns explaining why Trump's campaign seems so dysfunctional and is flailing so badly. "Away from their candidate and the television cameras," wrote Haberman and Burns, "some of Mr. Trump’s aides are quietly conceding just how dire his political predicament appears to be, and his inner circle has returned to a state of recriminations and backbiting. Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, is drawing furious blame from the president and some political advisers for his handling of Mr. Trump’s recent hospitalization, and he is seen as unlikely to hold onto his job past Election Day. Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, has maintained to senior Republicans that the president has a path forward in the race but at times has conceded it is narrow. Some midlevel aides on the campaign have even begun inquiring about employment on Capitol Hill after the election, apparently under the assumption that there will not be a second Trump administration for them to serve in. (It is not clear how appealing the Trump campaign might be as a résumé line for private-sector employers.)... Among some of Mr. Trump’s lieutenants, there is an attitude of grit mixed with resignation: a sense that the best they can do for the final stretch is to keep the president occupied, happy and off Twitter as much as possible, rather than producing a major shift in strategy. Often, their biggest obstacle is Mr. Trump himself."

Instead of delivering a focused closing message aimed at changing people’s perceptions about his handling of the coronavirus, or making a case for why he can revive the economy better than Mr. Biden can, Mr. Trump is spending the remaining days on a familiar mix of personal grievances, attacks on his opponents and obfuscations. He has portrayed himself as a victim, dodged questions about his own coronavirus testing, attacked his attorney general and the F.B.I. director and equivocated on the benefits of mask-wearing.

Rather than drawing a consistent contrast with Mr. Biden on the economy, strategists say, the president’s preference is to attack Mr. Biden’s son Hunter over his business dealings and to hurl personal insults like “Sleepy Joe” against a candidate whose favorability ratings are much higher than Mr. Trump’s.

[S]ome prominent Republicans have noted in newly direct language the possibility-- and even the likelihood-- of defeat for the president. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close ally, said this week that Democrats had “a good chance of winning the White House,” while Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska said his party might be facing a “blood bath.”

Though fear of retaliation by Mr. Trump has muzzled most members of the party, strategists are deeply concerned that Mr. Trump might spend the final weeks of the campaign entertaining and energizing his existing supporters while eschewing any concerted effort to find new ones-- an approach that could cripple other Republicans running for office.

And that retaliation theme against Republicans was highlighted by Sam Stein and Asawin Suebsaeng at the Daily Beast yesterday where they reported on a virtual game of chicken about who is going to throw who under the bus sooner-- Trump going nuts on Republicans in Congress or Republicans in Congress claiming they never heard of anyone named Trump.

Under The Bus by Nancy Ohanian

"That sense of paranoia," wrote Suebsaeng and Stein, "has been fed by the president’s aides and confidants, who have flagged news coverage for him of Republican politicians either openly criticizing his conduct or else trying to distance themselves from a looming possible electoral bloodbath. According to one of the sources with direct knowledge, the president is already contemplating retribution... Some of the coverage that has been bookmarked for Trump includes recent stories on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has not only split with the president on coronavirus-related stimulus legislation but made a point of saying he hadn’t been to the White House in weeks because of its cavalier approach to the pandemic. Trump’s frictions with Republican senators don’t stop there. This past week, the president attacked Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) on Twitter over 'a nasty rumor' that she was going to oppose his Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett. He said of the endangered incumbent: 'Not worth the work!'... Beyond that, there is strong suspicion within Trump’s inner sanctum that Sen. Ben Sasse’s (R-NE) office leaked the contents of a call he held with constituents in which he chastised the president for embracing dictators and not condemning conspiracists. Trump’s anger with the call boiled over on Saturday with yet another Twitter attack."

Back to Haberman and Burns who wrote that "There is also growing frustration among congressional Republicans that the White House has not driven a strong positive message about Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination-- a confirmation battle that Republicans until recently regarded as their best chance for a political turnaround. Republicans and allies of the president have trained their ire specifically on Mr. Meadows, viewing some of his actions, like showing up at Ms. Barrett’s hearings, as a form of personal brand-building.

In some respects, the trajectory of Mr. Trump’s campaign in its final weeks reflects longstanding structural weaknesses and internal divisions.

...For much of the past four years, Mr. Kushner [basically a moron] had cast himself as the chief executive of the re-election effort, but he pulled back from that role during the summer and in September, when the political environment had clearly soured. Instead, he thrust himself into a number of diplomatic negotiations in the Middle East that have little evident salience in the election. He has become more engaged in recent weeks, officials said.

...Many Republicans have resorted to hoping that the president might be disciplined enough for the remaining 16 days to narrow the gap with Mr. Biden and salvage the party’s House and Senate candidates.

But few people close to Mr. Trump present the path ahead to him in those terms, Republicans say. They recognize that the president knows he outpolls most G.O.P. candidates in their own districts or states and that suggesting to him that he is on track to lose would be unlikely to produce constructive results.

Early Monday morning, Paul Kane wrote in his Post column that "In competitive Senate races across the country, including states where Trump remains popular, Republican incumbents are facing a conundrum: how to prove their pro-Trump bona fides to a MAGA movement that sees many longtime Republicans as insufficiently pure while stopping the hemorrhaging among suburban moderates who wonder why they have enabled the president... The result for [Joni] Ernst and as many as a half-dozen of her GOP colleagues may be the worst of both worlds, in which they risk alienating energized Trump backers if they criticize the president but then, if they stick with him, lose some centrist voters who have soured on Trump and are open to voting for a Democrat."

The same is happening in House races, of course. I asked Audrey Denney how her Trump-loving opponent Doug LaMalfa is walking that tight-rope. "LaMalfa isn’t walking the tight rope," she told me. "He has let his extremist obstructionist flag fly with zero regard to facts or science. That is leaving all of the more moderate Republicans and conservative NPP voters up for grabs! We’re going to pull this off."

I also asked Michigan state Rep. Jon Hoadley the same question about the Trump enabler he's running against."Time and time again, Fred Upton has failed to stand up to President Trump. Just as with all other decisions in his 34-year career, Upton considers political expediency first and foremost before weighing the interests of the district he's been elected to represent. As Donald Trump continues to stoke the flames of domestic terrorism and incite violence amongst his supporters, Upton remains unsurprisingly silent. Our district deserves better, and it's past time we change our Representative."

Trumpanzee-- Still The Worst White House Occupant In History

The 25th Amendment needs to be rewritten

On Sunday, our mentally ill sociopath excuse for a president told reporters that "Some have gone too far. Some governors have gone too far. Some of the things that happened are maybe not so appropriate. And I think in the end it’s not going to matter because we're starting to open up our states, and I think they're going to open up very well. As far as protesters, you know, I see protesters for all sorts of things. And I’m with everybody. I'm with everybody." Except governors Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) and Ralph Northam (D-VA) who he singled out for his insane vitriol. "If you take Michigan, there were things in Michigan that I don’t think they were necessary or appropriate. Everyone knows that. I think the governor of Michigan-- we’re getting along very well-- but I think the governor of Michigan probably knows that." The functioning of a diseased mind is amazing... and like train wreck or car pileup on the highway, it's hard to turn away.

The Boston Globe's right-wing columnist, Jeff Jacoby, thinks he may have found another president as bad as Trump: Woodrow Wilson. He wrote a column whose title everyone would have thought was about Señor Trumpanzee: The pandemic raged. The president said nothing. He wrote that in his research about the Spanish flue pandemic of 1917-18 he "hadn’t seen anything at all about the conduct of the U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson-- a striking lacuna, not only because of Wilson’s preeminence in national and world affairs at the time, but also in comparison with Donald’s Trump volubility on the current pandemic. Trump’s pronouncements are an inescapable part of the daily coverage of the Covid-19 crisis. Wilson’s, I should have thought, must have been as well. Not so."

From Eric Felten’s fascinating historical essay at RealClear Investigations, I learned that Wilson-- widely regarded as an outstanding president by many (though decidedly not all) historians-- had nothing to say about the influenza pandemic that raged during his second term. He apparently did nothing to try and mitigate it. This despite the fact that Wilson was an ardent exponent of expanded federal power, who believed that the president should be the preeminent figure in American politics.

According to historian Sandra Opdycke’s 2014 book, The Flu Epidemic of 1918, Wilson was “extraordinarily close-mouthed about the epidemic from the first-- so much so that historians have been unable to find a single occasion on which he mentioned it in public.” His unvarying focus was on the world war, and a key priority was to speed American troop ships to the battlefields of Europe, even if that condemned U.S. soldiers to getting infected with influenza-- and, in many cases, to dying from it.

“There’s no arguing that President Wilson was somehow unaware of the unfolding catastrophe,” writes Felten. “He knew very well the price that was being paid in sickness and death.” His advisers spoke to him about the toll the epidemic would take on soldiers forced to cross the Atlantic in crowded transports, but Wilson didn’t budge-- and he was backed in that decision by at least one military commander with whom he consulted.

In early October 1918, Wilson met with Gen. Peyton March at the White House. The president said, “General March, I have had representations sent to me by men whose ability and patriotism are unquestioned that I should stop the shipment of men to France until the epidemic of influenza is under control.”

The general responded, “Every such soldier who has died [of influenza] just as surely played his part as his comrade who died in France.”

That may not have been the soundest military practice. For every soldier who showed up in France debilitated by the flu, others had to care for him. Sending more troops when many of those troops were sick only reduced the power and readiness of American forces in Europe. The epidemic “rendered hundreds of thousands of military personnel non-effective,” Carol R. Byerly wrote in the journal Public Health Reports . “During the American Expeditionary Forces' campaign at Meuse-Argonne, the epidemic diverted urgently needed resources from combat support to transporting and caring for the sick and the dead.”

An estimated 16,000 American troops died of influenza during their deployment in Europe. An additional 30,000 died of the pandemic in stateside training camps.

Wilson’s seeming indifference to the virus’s devastation among the troops was matched by a comparable reticence when it came to civilian deaths. “The great advocate for federal power,” Felten recounts, “neither involved himself nor said a word about the rampant deaths in major American cities such as Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Philadelphia.”

Far more than today, state governments a century ago were expected to handle disasters and disease. And yet Wilson’s silence on the influenza pandemic remains strange given his belief that public rhetoric is at the heart of presidential power and influence. The president “is the only national voice in affairs,” Wilson wrote. “If he rightly interpret the national thought and boldly insist upon it, he is irresistible.” Where was Wilson’s “oratorical presidency” when the nation needed the sort of “unified action” it promised?

Previous wartime presidents had shown a greater awareness of the threat posed by infection to troops. Felten cites the example of George Washington, who, as soon as he took command of the Continental Army in 1775, imposed social-distancing restrictions to contain a smallpox outbreak. One of Washington’s first orders was to ban soldiers from congregating at Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Mass., which was near the site of a quarantined hospital. “No person is to be allowed to go . . . a-fishing or on any other occasion,” he directed, “as there may be a danger of introducing the smallpox into the army.”

But Wilson had other priorities than trying to slow the spread of a deadly disease. His foremost aims were, first, to win the war, and then to bring about the League of Nations, which he hoped would shape the postwar world. He never grasped just how much that world would be shaped by “the disease his decisions did so much to ship abroad,” Felten observes. “In the face of such epic suffering, President Woodrow Wilson-- erudite rhetorician, progressive statesman, and eminent world leader-- had no comment.”

The more I learn about Wilson, the more firmly I root myself in the camp of those who consider him one of America’s least admirable presidents. From resegregating the federal government to arresting thousands of left-wing immigrants and labor activists, from prosecuting antiwar editors to reviving the monarchical State of the Union speech, from opposing female suffrage to supporting sterilization of the disabled, from championing a federal income tax to nationalizing private industries , the sanctimonious 28th president left a terrible legacy. I hadn’t previous known about his callous apathy during the most lethal pandemic of the 20th century, but it comes as no surprise.

Of course Jacoby is outraged that Wilson backed a federal income tax; it's who Jeff Jacoby is.

Thankfully, NY Times reporter, Maggie Haberman isn't Jeff Jacoby. She noted yesterday that most Americans aren't amused by Trump's decision to stoke up civil discord based on the pandemic. She wrote that "First he was the self-described 'wartime president.' Then he trumpeted the 'total' authority of the federal government. But in the past few days, President Trump has nurtured protests against state-issued stay-at-home orders aimed at curtailing the spread of the coronavirus. Hurtling from one position to another is consistent with Mr. Trump’s approach to the presidency over the past three years. Even when external pressures and stresses appear to change the dynamics that the country is facing, Mr. Trump remains unbowed, altering his approach for a day or two, only to return to nursing grievances... Now, with Mr. Trump’s poll numbers falling after a rally-around-the-leader bump, he is road-testing a new turn on a familiar theme-- veering into messages aimed at appealing to Americans whose lives have been disrupted by the stay-at-home orders... just 36 percent of voters said they generally trusted what Mr. Trump says about the coronavirus."

But the president, who ran as an insurgent in 2016, is most comfortable raging against the machine of government, even when he is the one running the country. And while the coronavirus is in every state in the union, it is heavily affecting minority and low-income communities.

So when Mr. Trump on Friday tweeted “LIBERATE,” his all-capitalized exhortations against strict orders in specific states-- including Michigan-- were in keeping with how he ran in 2016: saying things that seem contradictory, like pledging to work with governors and then urging people to “liberate” their states, and leaving it to his audiences to hear what they want to hear in his words.

...“These are people expressing their views,” Mr. Trump said. “They seem to be very responsible people to me.” But he said he thought the protesters had been treated “rough.”

...So far, the protests have been relatively small and scattershot, organized by conservative-leaning groups with some organic attendance. It remains to be seen if they will be durable.

But Mr. Trump’s show of affinity for such actions is in keeping with his fomenting of voter anger at the establishment in 2016, a key to his success then-- and his fallback position during uncertain moments ever since.

In the case of the state-issued orders, Mr. Trump’s advisers say his criticism of certain places is appropriate.

Stephen Moore, a former adviser to Mr. Trump and an economist with FreedomWorks, an organization that promotes limited government, said he thought protesters ought to be wearing masks and protecting themselves. But, he added, “the people who are doing the protest, for the most part, these are the ‘deplorables,’ they’re largely Trump supporters, but not only Trump supporters.”

On Sunday, Mr. Trump again praised the protesters. “I have never seen so many American flags,” he said.

But Mr. Trump’s advisers are divided about the wisdom of encouraging the protests. At some of them, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat, has been compared to Adolf Hitler. At least one protester had a sign featuring a swastika.

One adviser said privately that if someone were to be injured at the protests-- or if anyone contracted the coronavirus at large events where people were not wearing masks-- there would be potential political risk for the president.

But two other people close to the president, who asked for anonymity in order to speak candidly, said they thought the protests could be politically helpful to Mr. Trump, while acknowledging there might be public health risks.

One of those people said that in much of the country, where the numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths are not as high as in places like New York, New Jersey, California and Washington State, anger is growing over the economic losses that have come with the stringent social-distancing restrictions.

Crackpot Gov. Kristi Noem wouldn't be any more guilty of causing the 1,635 cases of COVID-19 in South Dakota if she injected the virus into each of the patients herself

...[A]s Mr. Trump did throughout 2016, as when he said “torture works” and then walked back that statement a short time later, or when he advocated bombing the Middle East while denouncing lengthy foreign engagements, he has long taken various sides of the same issue.

Mobilizing anger and mistrust toward the government was a crucial factor for Mr. Trump in the last presidential election. And for many months he has been looking for ways to contrast himself with former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and a Washington lifer.

The problem? Mr. Trump is now president, and disowning responsibility for his administration’s slow and problem-plagued response to the coronavirus could prove difficult. And protests can be an unpredictable factor, particularly at a moment of economic unrest.

Vice President Mike Pence, asked on NBC’s Meet the Press about the president’s tweets urging people to “liberate” states, demurred.

“The American people know that no one in America wants to reopen this country more than President Donald Trump,” Mr. Pence said, “and on Thursday the president directed us to lay out guidelines for when and how states could responsibly do that.”

“And in the president’s tweets and public statements, I can assure you, he’s going to continue to encourage governors to find ways to safely and responsibly let America go back to work,” he said.

With the political campaign halted, Mr. Trump’s advisers have seen an advantage in the frozen-in-time state of the race. Mr. Biden has struggled to fund-raise or even to get daily attention in the news cycle.

But Mr. Trump himself has seemed at sea, according to people close to him, uncertain of how to proceed. His approval numbers in his campaign polling have settled back to a level consistent with before the coronavirus, according to multiple people familiar with the data.

His campaign polling has shown that focusing on criticizing China, in contrast with Mr. Biden, moves voters toward Mr. Trump, according to a Republican who has seen it.

“Trump finally fired the first shot” with his more aggressive stance toward the Chinese government and its leader, Xi Jinping, said Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist. “Xi is put on notice that the death, economic carnage and agony is his and his alone,” Mr. Bannon said. “Only question now: What is America’s president prepared to do about it?”

Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, has advocated messages that contrast Mr. Trump with Mr. Biden on a number of fronts, including China.

But inside and outside the White House, other advisers to Mr. Trump see an advantage in focusing attention on the presidency.

Kellyanne Conway, the White House counselor, has argued in West Wing discussions that there is a time to focus on China, but that for now, the president should embrace commander-in-chief moments amid the crisis.

Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and a friend of Mr. Trump’s, said on ABC’s This Week that he did not think ads criticizing Mr. Biden on China were the right approach for now.

Ultimately, Mr. Trump’s advisers said, most of his team is aware that it can try to drive down Mr. Biden’s poll numbers, but that no matter what tactics it deploys now, the president’s future will most likely depend on whether the economy is improving in the fall and whether the virus’s spread has been mitigated. Those things will remain unknown for months.

“This is going to be a referendum,” Mr. Christie said, “on whether people think, when we get to October, whether or not he handled this crisis in a way that helped the American people, protected lives and moved us forward.”

We're NOT All Gonna Die-- But Far More Of Us Than Need To Will-- Unless Trump Gets It First

Americans' instincts would be to rally around the president in a time of crisis. Yesterday Digby warned that the exception to that rule is when the president is an incompetent, self-serving sociopath. "Some feel," she wrote, "that one should fall in line behind the president when something like this happens, just as a matter of principle. Others think it’s wrong to cast doubt on his abilities and make members of the public even more nervous than they already are. And then there’s the view that criticizing him may backfire politically on the Democrats because the public doesn’t want to see partisanship during a time of crisis." Digby feels that all those arguments are wrong.

Holding an elected official accountable at any time is the right thing to do in a democracy, and pointing out that he is doing a terrible job-- when he is obviously doing a terrible job-- makes people less nervous. Of course the president’s allies will complain about partisanship if their political opponents point out his failures. But unfortunately, they will refuse to hold him accountable themselves no matter what he does.

In any case, we have enough lies in our political culture already. We are drowning in them. If we can do nothing else in this surreal situation, we must strive to adhere to the truth as we see it or we’ll lose all sense of reason. And the reality, of course, is that President Trump is making things worse.

This should come as no surprise. As Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker of the New York Times put it:

Trump’s performance on the national stage in recent weeks has put on display the traits that Democrats and some Republicans consider so jarring-- the profound need for personal praise, the propensity to blame others, the lack of human empathy, the penchant for rewriting history, the disregard for expertise, the distortion of facts, the impatience with scrutiny or criticism. For years, skeptics expressed concern about how he would handle a genuine crisis threatening the nation, and now they know.

... His now-daily press conferences have become an anxiety-producing cacophony of lies and confusion, exactly the opposite of their intended purpose. To pretend that this president is behaving normally, or is even vaguely trustworthy, so that people won’t be nervous, or won’t think one is being partisan, would only make this terrifying crisis worse. Telling the truth is all we’ve got.

And not just anxiety-producing. Even worse is that they are producing bad policy-- bad as in policy that will kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans who do not need to die. 2.2 million and ten million are figures that are being tossed around now as the number of deaths if Trump follows through with the back-to-work agenda he and Kushner have cooked up.

Let me make this really simple. It takes 8 weeks (minimum) after a total-- as in mandatory and enforced-- shutdown/lockdown before the curve gets flattened enough so that the pandemic is under control. At this point, the U.S.-- entirely because of T.R.U.M.P. hasn't even started that countdown. Here in California, one of the "best" states fighting this, there are more loopholes than shutdowns. At my local grocery stores, about half the customers and half the cashiers are not wearing masks-- meaning they are part of the chain spreading the pandemic.

You know when you'll know the just-eight-more-weeks kicks in? When it is mandatory that anyone out of their house is wearing a mask. Mandatory means that if they don't wear a mask there is social retribution. Now people give them the evil eye. I witnessed a fight on a supermarket line on Monday when a guy with no mask got online behind a guy with a mask and the guy with the mask forced him to stand 6 feet away from him. In Europe, people without masks get steep fines. At some point, people may have to be arrested. In Trump states, where the response so far is to have Corona beer parties and laugh at the liberals, people will start dying in large numbers. At that point, the Corona beer partiers will probably start enforcing a mask policy with their guns.

Yesterday NY Times reporters Jim Tankersley, Maggie Haberman and Roni Caryn Rabin wrote that Trump is hankerin' to re-open the (not yet even sufficiently shut down) economy, despite his own medical experts' advice. Instead of his medical experts, he's consulting fake epidemiologist Jared Kushner, a handful of craven Wall Street cronies and some conservative pseudo-economists. "Consensus," they wrote, "continues to grow among government leaders and health officials that the best way to defeat the virus is to order nonessential businesses to close and residents to confine themselves at home. Britain, after initially resisting such measures, essentially locked down its economy on Monday, as did the governors of Virginia, Michigan and Oregon. More than 100 million Americans will soon be subject to stay-at-home orders. Relaxing those restrictions could significantly increase the death toll from the virus, public health officials warn... resuming normal activity prematurely would only strain hospitals and result in even more deaths, while exacerbating a recession that has most likely already arrived."

The Trumpist Regime announced on Monday that it is "reassessing" the shutdown that he never had the political will or the personal guts to even put in place. Clown: "Our country wasn’t built to be shut down. America will, again, and soon, be open for business. Very soon. A lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting. Lot sooner. We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself." Corporate America and conservative politicians are cheering him on.

Any push to loosen the new limits on commerce and movement would contradict the consensus advice of public health officials, risking a surge in infections and deaths from the virus. Many economists warn that abruptly reopening the economy could backfire, overwhelming an already stressed health care system, sowing uncertainty among consumers, and ultimately dealing deeper, longer-lasting damage to growth.

The recent rise of cases in Hong Kong, after there had been an easing of the spread of the virus, is something of an object lesson about how ending strict measures too soon can have dangerous consequences. Yet places like China, which took the idea of lockdown to the extreme, have managed to flatten the curve.

“You can’t call off the best weapon we have, which is social isolation, even out of economic desperation, unless you’re willing to be responsible for a mountain of deaths,” said Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at NYU Langone Medical Center. “Thirty days makes more sense than 15 days. Can’t we try to put people’s lives first for at least a month?”

For the last four days, some White House officials, including those working for Vice President Mike Pence, who leads the coronavirus task force, have been raising questions about when the government should start easing restrictions.

Among the options being discussed are narrowing restrictions on economic activity to target specific age groups or locations, as well as increasing the numbers of people who can be together in groups, said one official, who cautioned that the discussions were preliminary.

Health officials inside the administration have mostly opposed that idea, including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, an infectious diseases expert and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, who has said in interviews that he believes it will be “at least” several more weeks until people can start going about their lives in a more normal fashion.

Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said the United States had learned from other countries like China and South Korea, which were able to control the spread of the virus through strict measures and widespread testing.

“Those were eight- to 10-week curves,” she said on Monday, adding that “each state and each hot spot in the United States is going to be its own curve because the seeds came in at different times.”

Dr. Birx added that the response “has to be very tailored geographically and it may have to be tailored by age group, really understanding who’s at the greatest risk and understanding how to protect them.”

Other advisers, including members of Mr. Trump’s economic team, have said repeatedly in recent months that the virus does not itself pose an extraordinary threat to Americans’ lives or the economy, likening it to a common flu season. Some advisers believe the White House overreacted to criticism of Mr. Trump’s muted actions to deal with the emerging pandemic and gave health experts too large a sway in policymaking.

On Monday, Mr. Trump echoed those concerns, saying that things like the flu or car accidents posed as much of a threat to Americans as the coronavirus and that the response to those was far less draconian.

“We have a very active flu season, more active than most. It’s looking like it’s heading to 50,000 or more deaths,” he said, adding: “That’s a lot. And you look at automobile accidents, which are far greater than any numbers we’re talking about. That doesn’t mean we’re going to tell everybody no more driving of cars. So we have to do things to get our country open.”

Mr. Trump has watched as a record economic expansion and booming stock market that served as the basis of his re-election campaign evaporated in a matter of weeks. The president became engaged with the discussion on Sunday evening, after watching television reports and hearing from various business officials and outside advisers who were agitating for an end to the shutdown.

Casey Mulligan, a University of Chicago professor who served as chief economist for Mr. Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, said on Monday that efforts to shut down economic activity to slow the virus would be more damaging than doing nothing at all. He suggested a middle ground, one that weighs the costs and benefits of saving additional lives.

“It’s a little bit like, when you discover sex can be dangerous, you don’t come out and say, there should be no more sex,” Mr. Mulligan said. “You should give people guidance on how to have sex less dangerously.”

Many other economists say the restrictions in activity now are helping the economy in the long run, by beginning to suppress the infection rate.

“The idea that there’s a trade-off between health and economics right now is likely badly mistaken,” said Jason Furman of Harvard University, a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama. “The thing damaging our economy is a virus. Everyone who is trying to stop that virus is working to limit the damage it does to our economy and help our eventual rebound. The choice may well be taking pretty extreme steps now or taking very extreme steps later.”

Mr. Furman and other economists have pushed Mr. Trump and Congress to ease the economic pain by offering trillions of dollars in government assistance to affected workers and businesses. As lawmakers tried to negotiate an agreement on such a bill Monday, an influential business lobbying group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said it supported restrictions on the economy to slow the virus.

“Our view is, when it comes to how you contain the virus, you do everything the public health professionals say to contain the virus,” said Neil Bradley, the chamber’s executive vice president and chief policy officer.

...Dan Patrick, Texas’ lieutenant governor, said Monday on Fox News that he was in the “high-risk pool” but would be willing to risk his life to preserve the country for his children and grandchildren.

“We are going to be in a total collapse, recession, depression, collapse in our society,” said Mr. Patrick, who turns 70 next week. “If this goes on another several months, there won’t be any jobs to come back to for many people.”

But public health officials stress that there would be consequences to ending the measures too quickly. In a tweet on Monday morning, Thomas P. Bossert, the former homeland security adviser who for weeks has been vocal about the need for the U.S. government to take stricter measures, said: “Sadly, the numbers now suggest the U.S. is poised to take the lead in #coronavirus cases. It’s reasonable to plan for the US to top the list of countries with the most cases in approximately 1 week. This does NOT make social intervention futile. It makes it imperative!”

Mr. Trump’s interest in potentially easing some of the restrictions met with pushback from one of his close allies, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who himself self-quarantined after a potential exposure. “President Trump’s best decision was stopping travel from China early on,” Mr. Graham tweeted on Monday. “I hope we will not undercut that decision by suggesting we back off aggressive containment policies within the United States.”

Health officials remain largely united in defense of sustaining the restrictions.

“There is a way to think through how and when to start reopening our economy and society, and it’s important to get this right,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Tom Inglesby, the director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, pointed to the experience of countries like Italy, which did not institute aggressive measures to stop the spread of the virus and saw infection rates and deaths soar as a result.

The United States will need “a couple weeks” to see positive effects from its measures, Dr. Inglesby said, and abandoning them would mean “patients will get sick in extraordinary numbers all over the country, far beyond what the U.S. health care system will bear.”

I know I ran this Chris Martenson video yesterday but it's one everyone really needs to watch. I wish Trump and Kushner and all the people giving them such bad-- usually self-serving-- advice would take a half hour to listen to it as well. Señor Trumpanzee's foolish plan to prematurely end the fight against the pandemic and declare "victory" won't flatten the curve, it will make the curve much steeper, meaning more and more deaths, regardless of his incredibly moronic, manipulative tweets.

Saturday Morning COVID-19 Update: Dazed, Confused and Kushner

The NY Times reported yesterday that between "160 million and 214 million people in the U.S. could be infected over the course of the epidemic [and] as many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die." The U.S. has 925,000 hospital beds but between 2.4 million and 21 million Americans could require hospitalization. The solution? Jared Kushner? It could be worse... Don, Jr.? Eric, Barron?

A friend of mine was Jared Kushner's private tutor when he was in high school. She told me he was a C Student and she worked to turn him into a B student. Although she failed-- she was astounded when he was accepted by Harvard, as was the entire faculty at the Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey. A few years later, in 2006, Daniel Golden wrote a book, The Price of Admission-- about how the rich buy their under-achieving children’s way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations-- that just happened to focus, in part, on her student. Jared's dad, a Trump crony and notoriously crooked New Jersey real estate developer destined for prison, Charles Kushner, had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard in 1998-- resulting in two unqualified songs, Jared and Joshua being admitted to the nation's most prestigious university. That was how C student Jared-- who my friend says was actually a moron with virtually no capacity for intellectual endeavor-- got into Harvard, something that greatly impressed-- and still impresses-- his father-in-law, Señor Trumpanzee, whose own family finagled his way into Wharton Business School, which is affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania-- a lesser Ivy League school-- after he flunked out of Fordham.

In his book, Golden quoted a former Frisch School official about Jared: "There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard. His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought for sure, there was no way this was going to happen. Then, lo and behold, Jared was accepted. It was a little bit disappointing because there were at the time other kids we thought should really get in on the merits, and they did not." Golden has no doubt that Harvard had an unspoken policy of "easing its standards" for the offspring of generous donors.

Did you watch the horrific speech Trump tried reading from a teleprompter on Wednesday? It was written by the dynamic team of Jared and White House Nazi Stephen Miller. Yesterday, Phil Rucker, Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey, writing about the disastrous speech, noted that Trump ad-libbed a bit and "his errors triggered a market meltdown, panicked travelers overseas and crystallized for his critics just how dangerously he has fumbled his management of the coronavirus." They wrote that "Even Trump-- a man practically allergic to admitting mistakes-- knew he’d screwed up by declaring Wednesday night that his ban on travel from Europe would include cargo and trade, and acknowledged as much to aides in the Oval Office as soon as he’d finished speaking, according to one senior administration official and a second person, both with knowledge of the episode." Jared and other White House staffers went to work to immediately correct Trump's fuck-ups over trade and the status of Americans currently in Europe.

But Jared's and Miller's 10 minute speech itself, wrote The Post team "reflected not only [Trump's] handling of the coronavirus crisis but, in some ways, much of his presidency. It was riddled with errors, nationalist and xenophobic in tone, limited in its empathy, and boastful of both his own decisions and the supremacy of the nation he leads. Futures for the Dow Jones industrial average fell in real time with virtually each word Trump uttered, signaling a lack of confidence among investors that he had control of the crisis and previewing another bloodbath once the markets opened Thursday morning."

Trump-- who believed that by giving the speech he would appear in command and that his remarks would reassure financial markets and the country-- was in “an unusually foul mood” and sounded at times “apoplectic” on Thursday as he watched stocks tumble and digested widespread criticism of his speech, according to a former senior administration official briefed on his private conversations.

...Ben Rhodes, who served as a senior White House aide and helped former president Barack Obama script and manage his responses to numerous crises, predicted that Wednesday night’s address will stand as “the moment people associate with the fact that Donald Trump failed the biggest test of his presidency.”

“I think we’ll look back on this as a defining moment of the Trump presidency because it speaks to larger concerns that people already had about Trump-- that he can’t tell the truth, that he doesn’t value expertise, that he doesn’t take the presidency seriously enough,” Rhodes said.

As often is the case after Trump gives a major speech, his Republican allies offered a chorus of praise on television and social media for his “fantastic speech” and “decisive actions” and “unique strength.”

Inside the White House, however, aides and advisers privately acknowledged that Trump failed to accomplish the primary goal of his speech-- reassuring the nation-- and described it as disappointing and far from his best performance.

Trump’s speech contained at least two errors and a significant omission. He said the travel ban would apply to cargo; it did not. He said health insurance companies would waive patients’ co-payments for coronavirus testing and treatment; industry officials later clarified that they would waive payments for testing only. And he did not fully explain the details of his travel restrictions, leaving out the fact that U.S. citizens would be exempt.

The president’s remarks were devoid of much substantive information on other matters. Trump provided no update for citizens on the spread of the virus, nor on the availability and results of testing.

Public health experts have said testing citizens for the coronavirus is essential for identifying new cases and limiting its spread, but the nation has experienced a chronic shortage of test kits after weeks of missteps by the government. Trump devoted only two short sentences to the topic, and they were vague: “Testing and testing capabilities are expanding rapidly, day by day. We are moving very quickly.”

Stylistically, the president himself seemed ill at ease in the formal setting, offering a labored, monotone delivery from behind the Resolute Desk, twiddling his thumbs and even, in moments, struggling to read words on the teleprompter. One senior administration official said Trump’s heart was not in the speech.

“It was jolting,” said Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University. “People are naturally scared. People want to see a leader who has a commanding presence. In some ways, the country is worse off after a message like that.”

The speech itself was rushed. After weeks of playing down the coronavirus’s threat to the United States, Trump was reluctant to appreciate the full scope of the crisis on his hands. But with the markets in free fall, he decided early Wednesday that he wanted to give the televised speech that night, administration officials said. This startled some of his aides and set off a frantic scramble to arrange airtime on television networks, iron out logistics for his delivery and prepare a draft of what he would say, the officials said.

“This was a real missed opportunity to not just have a couple of sentences in there about how other people need to put partisanship aside and come together, but to really show it,” the former senior administration official said, noting that Trump could have sought to rise above the politics of the moment to convey a sense of unity and common purpose.

“The speech almost writes itself in a way,” this person added. “It can be kind of formulaic. It’s not rocket science.”

The speech was largely written by Kushner and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, who were still making tweaks to the text until moments before Trump delivered it, according to people familiar with the process. Thirty minutes before Trump appeared live on camera, a final draft of his remarks still had not circulated widely within the White House, one of those people said. And senior health experts in the administration did not review a final draft of the remarks, according to a senior administration official.

While Kushner and Miller crafted the remarks, a coterie of other officials were involved in the process and joined Trump in the Oval Office to watch his delivery. One person with knowledge of the speech said they included Vice President Pence, Ivanka Trump, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and a sizable group of White House aides: Christopher Liddell, Eric Ueland, Dan Scavino, Hogan Gidley, Judd Deere, John McEntee, Anthony Ornato and Nick Luna.

Some officials faulted the rushed timeline for the messy speech, which they said could have been delivered even sooner, as it became clear the virus was well on its way to becoming a global pandemic-- a designation the World Health Organization officially bestowed upon the coronavirus Wednesday.

“Everyone usually gets [Trump] where he needs to be within a couple of days,” one official said. “The problem is we don’t have a couple of days.”

Kushner only recently became involved with the administration’s virus response, beginning to attend meetings in his capacity as a senior adviser, according to officials, but inserted himself more fully as he became increasingly convinced that more tangible action was needed. He supported Trump’s decision to ban most travel from Europe for 30 days and has pushed for further concrete steps, some of which are expected to be announced in the coming days, officials said.

There was some frustration among other White House aides at the sudden involvement by Kushner, who they viewed as simply parachuting in and whose vast portfolio-- including Middle East peace negotiations, immigration and the reelection campaign-- has been the subject of mockery in some circles.

Yesterday, after being beaten up by members of Congress from both parties, the regime announced what Trump should have said on Wednesday, namely that they are working to speed testing. Maybe in another week or two they'll actually mention social distancing too.

Still, the L.A. Times reported that "Despite mounting pleas from California and other states, the Trump administration isn’t allowing states to use Medicaid more freely to respond to the coronavirus crisis by expanding medical services. In previous emergencies, including the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Hurricane Katrina and the H1N1 flu outbreak, both Republican and Democratic administrations loosened Medicaid rules to empower states to meet surging needs. But months into the current global disease outbreak, the White House and senior federal health officials haven’t taken the necessary steps to give states simple pathways to fully leverage the mammoth safety net program to prevent a wider epidemic.

The New York Times' Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman latest was pretty much inevitable: The President As Bystander: Trump Struggles To Unify A Nation On Edge. "School superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners have taken it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president." Trump, they wrote "has been more follower than leader... For weeks, he resisted telling Americans to cancel or stay away from large gatherings, reluctant even on Thursday to call off his own campaign rallies even as he grudgingly acknowledged he would probably have to. Instead, it fell to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s most famous scientist, to say publicly what the president would not, leading the nation’s basketball, hockey, soccer and baseball leagues in just 24 hours to suspend play and call off tournaments... Beyond travel limits and wash-your-hands reminders, Mr. Trump has left it to others to set the course in combating the pandemic and has indicated he was in no rush to take further action."

Among the advisers who share the president’s more jaundiced view is his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who considers the problem more about public psychology than a health reality, according to people who have spoken with him. Mr. Kushner has gotten more involved in the response in recent days, according to three White House advisers. A person close to Mr. Kushner said his views were being misinterpreted, and that he was focused on trying to find answers to the most immediate measures to mitigate the virus’s spread.

...“Real leadership in this crisis is going to have to come from governors, from public health officials and from institutional leaders,” Rod Dreher wrote on the American Conservative's website. “We saw tonight that even when Trump is trying to be on his best behavior, he just doesn’t have much of a clue about the nature of the crisis, or how it can best be fought.”

...Republicans close to the White House privately laid blame at the feet of Mr. Kushner. A person close to Mr. Kushner described that as unfair, saying that he was merely helping out and that it becomes easier to blame him when things are difficult. And in any case, a partial travel ban on Europe was a bold move that may have been bound to rattle the markets rather than calm them no matter what.

A Disturbed Liar-- A Clinical Sociopath... And He'd Rather Destroy Us All Than Leave Us "Unprotected" By His Wall

Wikipedia has a simple explanation for projection-- one of the most obvious and clearest cornerstones of Trump's psychological makeup: "a defence mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. For example, a person who is habitually rude may constantly accuse other people of being rude. It incorporates blame shifting." Yesterday, Trump had been up and tweeting his nonsense about his vanity wall and his government shutdown for a couple of hours when he suddenly let this seemingly random one loose:

I wondered what brought that one on. And then I ran into a twitter thread by a long-time Trump foil from his days at the NY Times, Kurt Eichenwald. The thread began just before noon on Sunday and ended-- with the word "end"-- at 12:25... so half an hour's worth. Eichenwald, who's 57, began working for the Times, primarily covering Wall Street-related topics, in 1986. He's also a best-selling author of 4 books, primarily about financial and corporate fraud, such as Conspiracy of Fools about the Enron scandal investigation.

I'm just guessing, but I have a feeling that Eichenwald's Sunday noon-time thread is what triggered Trump's pre-dawn projectionist-tweet.

1. I have known Donald Trump since 1987. Like everyone else who knows him well, before he became a politician, I know he is liar, a narcissist, and eventually I knew he was mentally ill. At that time, he professed to be a Democrat. This had nothing to do with politics...

2...so, how long did it take to conclude all this about Trump? Three phone calls for everything but the mental illness. That took three years. But let's talk about those four experiences. About October 7, 1987, I began working on a tryout as a reporter at the New York Times...

3...in the business section. My first story was about Trump filing with the SEC to buy more of than 5% of the stock in Alexander's Dept Store. I am wrong on the date-- this call was October 1, 1987. I called Trump Corp to ask a question of spokesman. Trump himself picked up...

4....I identified myself and the first words out of his mouth were, "Oh, Kurt, I love your stuff." That surprised me, since I had never written anything for him to love. But I figured this was a business guy sucking up to a Times reporter. I asked him some questions, and he...

5...asked me to go on background. He began to wax on about the prospects of Alexanders, how mismanaged it was, how he could save it. He talked about how strong the stock market was, how he believed that Alexnaders was missing out on this continued strength and that he wanted...

6...to load up on Alexanders shares partly because of that. He then told me to identify him as an analyst to explain something about his intent. I made the huge error of doing so. Problem of first day at work. I was later told, no one at the NYT allowed Trump to state...

7...something in the paper anonymously because when he asked, it was his sign he was about to lie.

A week later, my phone rings. It's Trump. "Kurt, did you see that article about me in the metro section today?" I hadn't but I had the paper next to me, and began looking for it...

8...it was on the front. It was a glowing article about Trump by a reporter named Fox Butterfield. Before we were able to discuss anything else, for his second sentence, Trump said, "Fox Butterfield is the greatest reporter in America." He then went on and on about how this...

9...story really captured who he is, and bragged about himself in a way that seemed bizarre. I couldn't understand why he had called me. I was just some reporter on a try out. And it was clear, he was behaving like a kindergartner showing daddy his crayon picture. He wanted...

10...me to reiterate how great he was, he kept asking, "Don't you think that really captures who I am? I do. He really knows me." I was not sure what to say, but I figured I would take this opportunity to do some real reporting. After five minutes of his spiel about how great...

11...he is, I said, "I was wondering about the Alexander's buy..." and he said, "Ok, well, gotta go.." and hung up. It would prove to be the strangest call of my career.

A week later, the stock market crashed, losing more than 20% of its value in a single day. Work went into...

12...overload. One day about a week in, an article appeared in the New York Post. Trump proclaimed that, he was so great, he had known the crash was coming and had already sold all of his stock. I found out he had called the Wall Street Journal and another reporter at the NYT...

13...to say this. None of them would print it because...even if it was true...who cares? But no one believed it was true.

I KNEW it was false. He had been buying up Alexander's stock. There was no new SEC filing (and there never would be) showing he had been selling his shares...

What Would Freud say? by Nancy Ohanian

14...I couldn't understand it. Why would this man be calling around to brag how smart he was by claiming he did something that was provably false? I decided, this was an interesting story. I went to the deputy editor of the business section and spelled out what I knew...

15...and said it would be an interesting story that Trump was purposely calling people to pretend brilliance in a lie. The editor did not even look up from his computer and said the words I remember to this day: "Dog bits man. Donald Trump lies." In other words, everyone in...

17...so why am I saying all of this? Because lots of people-- particularly Cult45-- think these portrayals of Trump as a disturbed liar are new. No, this is stuff that people who have covered him have known for decades. Look at the people who go on TV to discuss him. Many have...

18...worked with him. Many have covered him, know him as "Donald." We knew he was a liar and unbalanced when he was a Democrat, when he was a Reform Party, when he was a Republican. Our position never changed. We did not engage in situational ethics...

19...an end point. A person who did business with Trump over the years told me in 2016, "If you asked him, Donald would tell you I'm his best friend." This struck me as odd, so I said, "And what would you say HE is?" A pause, then the man replied: "A clinical sociopath."

end

Or was it Maggie Haberman's appearance on CNN on Friday that triggered Trump. (Friday... Monday? Does Trump have that long an attention span?) Haberman, a top Trump-watcher for the NY Times, told New Day Friday host John Berman that "the number of conservatives who I have talked to in the last day, who worked on the campaign, who supported the president, who now say, 'you know, I regret doing that; this was a mistake, this administration is off the rails, all of these investigations that are coming to a head are gonna be a huge problem.' They are disgusted... with what they have seen of the details that have come out of Michael Cohen's plea deal... That's going to intensify... and it takes 20 Republican senators to vote in favor of impeachment. This could be a critical moment." That kind of talk-- let alone on television-- drives the media-obsessed Trump up the wall!