If McConnell Thwarts Trump's Plans For A Pandemic Relief Package, Trump Can Thwart McConnell's Reelection Plans

 

2028 by Chip Proser

In her Sunday NY Times column, Maureen Dowd decided it was time to dunk McConnell into the Potomac, pointing out that he appears to have ditched Donald. It's not too late for Trump to cut a spot for Kentucky television endorsing Amy McGrath. She seems to be saying more nice things about Trump these days than McConnell is. And all Trump would have to do is give a signal to voters in backward bastions of Trumpism, hellholes like Jackson, Casey, Monroe, Leslie, Carlisle, Green, Whitley, Bell, Rockcastle, Harlan, Pike, Adair, Knox, Lewis, Allen, Laurel, Butler, Russell, Owsley, Martin, Clinton, McCreary, Crittenden, Lee, Cumberland, Johnson, Pulaski, Clay... all counties where Trump got more than 80% of the vote and is far more popular than McConnell. That would shake up the zeitgeist!





Maybe Trump is angry that McConnell implied he had cooties, but, as Dowd wrote, "McConnell did more than physically distance himself from Trump. He politically distanced himself as well, throwing cold water on the president’s whiplash-inducing reversal on a stimulus bill. After torpedoing negotiations in a tweet on Tuesday because he thought the Democrats wanted too much, the steroid-pumped president did a triple axel and tweeted to Congress to 'Go Big! I would like to see a bigger stimulus package, frankly, than either Democrats or Republicans are offering,' he told Rush Limbaugh in a manic two-hour call on Friday (during which he dropped the F bomb about Iran). I’m going the exact opposite now.' Clearly, McConnell does not want to invest whatever capital he has left in reviving Trump when the guy seems doomed. Why bring up an issue that really divides his Republican members weeks before an election that might be a wipeout-- with the Senate in the balance?"

McConnell is all about winning. He knows a loser when he sees one.

As Alex Conant, a Republican strategist, told The Times Trumpworld is at a dangerous pass: “The knives come out, the donors flee and the candidate throws embarrassing Hail Marys.”

Proving once more that there’s no bottom to how low he’ll go, McConnell explained to reporters in Kentucky that he wasn’t ready to push a stimulus deal because “the situation is kind of murky, and I think the murkiness is a result of the proximity to the election and everybody kind of trying to elbow for political advantage.”

So it’s fine to elbow for political advantage and push to replace R.B.G. with an arch conservative who would threaten health care and abortion rights in proximity to the election. But a bill that would help millions of suffering Americans as the economy goes down the tubes? Nah. That’s too murky.

As for helping the public-- and the economy-- through this phase of the pandemic... McConnell feels he's politically bullet-proof and doesn't care what Trump, the Democrats or anyone else has to say about it. He actually appears to be behaving more irrationally than Trump for a change.

Politico reporters Jake Sherman and Burgess Everett wrote that "a significant and important chunk of Senate Republicans hate everything about the package that Mnuchin is negotiating with Pelosi... Republicans aren’t taking issue with a policy or two, they’re taking issue with the entire package, the number, the scope and the policies. There doesn’t appear to be a middle ground here." The two reporters were blunt in their assessment: If Pelosi and Mnuchin come up with something, McConnell will give it-- and Trump-- the same treatment he's been giving everything that comes out of the House: "at this juncture, it has absolutely no chance of even getting brought up" in the Senate!

On CNN’s State of the Union, drug-addled Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow said he doesn't "think it’s dead at all. I spoke to Secretary Mnuchin last evening. Look, don’t forget-- Republicans in the Senate put up their own bill a few weeks ago and got 53 votes, I think it was… I think if an agreement can be reached they will go along with it."

Earth To Larry!: That bill was $300 billion and was a very heavy lift for GOP leadership. This bill is six times that. That was also a very different time in the life of this virus, Republicans say.

Ya Can't Make It Up! As Republicans freak out about the high price tag, Kudlow says Republicans are willing to go higher than their current offer!!! “He may. He may. Secretary Mnuchin is up to $1.8 trillion. So, the bid and the offer is narrowing somewhat between the two sides. President Trump actually has always said-- I mean, I have heard him say it in the Oval-- as far as the key elements are concerned, the checks, the unemployment assistance, the small business assistance-- we have got to help airlines out-- he would go further. He’s always said that. He knows that we need as much power for economic recovery as possible. It’s not just recovery in three weeks. It’s recovery to the end of the year and beyond in a possible second term. So, I think Secretary Mnuchin, who is a very good negotiator, will be carrying the president’s message.”

By the end of the day, Mnuchin and Meadows (basically, Trump) were calling on Congress to pass a relief bill using leftover funds from the paycheck protection program as negotiations on a more comprehensive package continue. They sent a letter to Pelosi and McConnell demanding that Congress "immediately vote on a bill" that would enable the use of unused Paycheck Protection Program funds while working toward a bigger package. "The all or nothing approach is an unacceptable response to the American people," they wrote.

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.

Who Would Be Less Horrible As The Nominee (And President), Biden Or Cuomo?

In her exhausting Cuomo column yesterday, Maureen Dowd quoted a conversation she had with Bill Maher who said to her "I see Cuomo as the Democratic nominee this year. If we could switch Biden out for him, that’s the winner... He’s unlikable, which I really like." Yes, very unlikable, which normal people don't like, even if he and Dowd do. Dowd is aware that people dislike Cuomo. "Progressives still have problems with Cuomo’s stances on Medicaid and the criminal justice system," she wrote. "And some people thought that he waited too long to totally button up New York, although the governor maintains that his systematic rolling closure was designed to prevent panic in the streets... Often in the past, when people called Cuomo patriarchal, it was not meant as a compliment. It was a way to describe his maniacally controlling behavior, his dark zeal to muscle past people and obstacles to get his way. The Times’ Adam Nagourney dubbed him the 'human bulldozer,' and a former adviser once put it this way: 'The governor thinks he’s a hammer. So everyone looks like a nail.' But now, the darker the zeal, the better, if it secures you a mask or ventilator. Given the White House’s deathly delays and the president’s childish rants, America is yearning for a trustworthy parental figure-- and a hammer." No doubt Dowd and Maher are. But New York, for all his bluster, is still short 6,949 intensive care unit beds and 4,141 ventilators, and Cuomo has clumsily backed the narcissist into a corner where his psyche won't allow him to give New York the ventilators.

The Trump family is a model of bad nepotism-- noblesse oblige in reverse. Such is their reputation as scammers that congressional Democrats felt the need to put a provision in the coronavirus rescue bill to try to prevent Trump-and-Kushner Inc. from carving out a treat of their own.

Cuomo-style nepotism at least has better values. Donald Trump got his start with his father discriminating against black tenants in their housing complexes; Andrew Cuomo left his job as a political enforcer for his father, Mario Cuomo, also a three-term governor of New York, and created a national program to provide housing for the homeless.

At Wednesday’s briefing, he displayed a picture of Mario Cuomo, who died in 2015, amid all the graphs on infections.

“He’s not here anymore for you,” he said, but “He’s still here for me.”

He offered a quote from his dad about what government should be: “The idea of family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another’s pain, sharing one another’s blessings-- reasonably, honestly, fairly, without respect to race or sex or geography or political affiliation.”

The quote was obviously meant to draw an odious comparison with the Republican in the White House who seems immune to feeling others’ pain.

The two men go back. According to the Trump biographer Tim O’Brien, Fred Trump was a regular customer at Andrea Cuomo’s grocery store in Queens. Andrew and Donald knew each other as they rose in Gotham. They were never friends, but Donald Trump donated to Mario Cuomo’s campaigns and made a tape for Andrew’s bachelor party, warning him, “Whatever you do, Andrew, don’t ever, ever fool around.”

Both men have often had the twin designation of charming and ruthless. The president is pure id, and when the governor was his father’s consigliere, he was known as “Mario Cuomo’s id.” Over the years, both have been called manipulative, expedient, bullying, vindictive, arrogant wheeler-dealers. They have both been described as obsessed with their press, thin-skinned and quick to belittle or intimidate critics.

But, as Lis Smith, the Democratic strategist who rumbled in New York politics before becoming Mayor Pete’s Pygmalion, said, “Trump is selfishly ruthless for his own personal gain while Cuomo is more benevolently ruthless.”

She continued: “It also helps that Cuomo knows intimately how to bend the different levers of government to his will. It’s where you see having been at HUD, having been an attorney general of New York, having been a governor for 10 years-- all that pays off. Ruthlessness is good, if it’s for a good purpose. F.D.R. was ruthless.”

...Trump, who is always alert to great performances by people who look perfectly cast, is well aware of the potency of Cuomo’s briefings. He veers between acting like Cuomo is ungrateful and should “do more” and acting like they are working together very well, depending on how thankful the governor seems for the president’s efforts.

It was clear that Trump did not appreciate Cuomo pushing aggressively and publicly for the president to utilize the Defense Production Act so that New York could get 30,000 ventilators. On Thursday night Trump told Sean Hannity that he had “a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be. I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.” But then he added, “I’m getting along very well with Governor Cuomo.”

On Friday, the governor hit back. “Well, look, I don’t have a crystal ball,” he said. “Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion. But I don’t operate here on opinion. I operate on facts and on data and on numbers and on projections.” He implicitly mocked Trump’s tendency to rely on his feelings rather than data. “I hope some natural weather change happens overnight and kills the virus globally,” he said. “That’s what I hope. But that’s my hope. That’s my emotion. That’s my thought.”

Bizarrely, Trump tweeted Friday that the governor had simply misplaced the ventilators: “Thousand of Federal Government (delivered) Ventilators found in New York storage. N.Y. must distribute NOW!” To which Cuomo responded that the president was wrong and “grossly uninformed.”

The back-to-back daily press conferences of the governor and the president showcase some primal differences about how they see the role of government and the identity of the country.

With President Trump on a Darwinian tear, I ask Andrew Cuomo how this crisis will change the way people look at government and how it will affect the 2020 election.

He says that, in this era where personalities and celebrities rule politics, the pandemic “changes the lens on government and you’re going to now inquire about experience and capacity and your past performance, almost like the normal hiring process. We got to a place in government where credentials didn’t matter and performance didn’t matter.” This, he said, would never happen “if you were interviewing a lawyer or a doctor or a nanny.”

I ask him if all this has revived his dreams of a presidential run.

After a long pause, he answers: “No. I know presidential politics. I was there in the White House with Clinton. I was there with Gore. No, I’m at peace with who I am and what I’m doing.”

His friends say that he will be loyal to Joe Biden. But if Trump is re-elected, they speculate, Cuomo could jump in in 2024, following his 2022 fourth-term re-election in New York. Or if Biden is elected and steps down after one term, Cuomo might get in. But that would mean he’d be up against whichever woman Biden chooses as his veep.

“He’ll get criticized with the same B.S. about ‘ambition’ for going against ‘the woman candidate,’ much in the same way he did going against Carl McCall in New York, but so what?” said one Cuomo ally, referring to his unsuccessful campaign for governor in 2002. “It’s hardly a clean, wholesome game. And someday soon, don’t we really need to return to what leadership actually is, as opposed to symbolism?”

...Mario Cuomo was known as Hamlet on the Hudson. He analyzed his worthiness so much, he left the field to the privileged, pampered preppies who never analyzed their worthiness-- George H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle.

When Mario was doing a Socratic striptease about whether to challenge Bill Clinton for the presidency in 1991, one woman got so impatient with his dithering, she mailed him a needlepoint pillow with the message “Carpe Diem.”

Now Andrew Cuomo is trying to wrest the lifesaving materials he needs from another privileged, pampered guy in the White House who never worries about his worthiness.

But this Cuomo doesn’t need a pillow. Carpe diem is in his bones.

Remember, Cuomo, an odious corporate whore from head to toe, may be beloved by the Maureen Dowds and Bill Maher's of the world-- both multimillionaires-- but he has only won elections in counties where grotesquely corrupt political machines determine the outcomes. Most New York State counties reject him. Meanwhile, Team Biden is desperately-- if quietly-- trying to win over progressives and young voters who are committed to not vote for the lesser of two evils. Writing for Politico, Holly Otterbein and Laura Barrón-López reported that "Biden’s advisers have engaged in talks with a range of top progressive groups, including some that endorsed his chief rival, Bernie Sanders... The outreach to left-wing organizations and individuals-- representing causes from climate change and immigrant rights to gun control and mobilizing underserved black and brown communities-- is focused on young activists. Broadly speaking, they viewed Biden as one of the least-inspiring candidates in the sprawling Democratic primary field. It’s a delicate dance for both sides. For one, Sanders is still in the race. Plus, the progressives recognize that their time and leverage to influence Biden is limited since he’s all but wrapped up the nomination. Still, Biden needs to fix his enthusiasm deficit, which was partly masked by his wins this month, and it’s far from certain that antipathy toward President Donald Trump alone will do the job."

Biden's people are primarily talking to people who identify as Democrats first and progressives second, not to people who identify as progressives and justice the corrupt Democratic Party as a possible vehicle to achieve their goals. Actual progressives wouldn't consider voting for a corporate whore and racist pig like Status Quo Joe. But plenty of Democrats who lean leftish have very little problem with that. The Biden people are pursuing groups that aren't especially progressive like Indivisible and Planned Parenthood, which can be counted on to back anyone with a "D" next to his or her name. A group like Sunrise Movement might be more difficult for them.

The activists are seeking commitments from the Biden campaign on their issues, knowing that any headway is likely to be on the margins; Biden, for instance, will never come close to Sanders on policies like “Medicare for All.” It’s a distinct letdown for them after coming tantalizingly close to getting Sanders as the nominee. To win the nomination now, Sanders would need to win more than 60 percent of the remaining delegates.

“The dirty little secret is everyone’s talking to Biden’s campaign,” said Sean McElwee, co-founder of the liberal think tank Data for Progress. “There will be fights, but at the end of the day, progressives still hold votes in the Senate and increasingly Democratic voters stand behind our views. I expect we’ll see Biden embracing key planks of the ambitious agenda progressives have outlined on issues like climate and pharmaceutical policy.”

Biden’s team is treating the project like a minicampaign. It has formed an internal working group dedicated to outreach to progressives, which met this week, and is crafting a timeline of engagement over the next few weeks. Senior Biden advisers Symone Sanders and Cristóbal Alex, along with policy director Stef Feldman, are leading the effort.

...Several progressives who’ve spoken with the Biden campaign said they see room to mold Biden’s policies on gun control, climate change and immigration. They are watching whom the campaign brings on to craft Biden’s policy platforms, hoping to see personnel changes.

On March 11, the day after Biden bested Sanders in five out of six states, his campaign spoke to ex-aides to Jay Inslee and outside advisers to Warren, as well as staffers with Data for Progress about climate change policy. A week later, the former Inslee aides followed up with Biden's campaign.

The group shared a memo with Biden’s aides that recommended he adopt Inslee’s clean energy standards and proposal to end fossil fuel subsidies, among other climate-related ideas. Biden himself also spoke with Inslee this week, though the conversation focused on the coronavirus pandemic.

Progressives believe they have leverage because Biden has lost badly among young people to Sanders, and largely trailed among Latinos, too. They also argue that aggressive action on climate change action and Medicare for All poll well among Democrats.

None of the groups is threatening to sit out the election if Biden doesn’t embrace its positions. For instance, Justice Democrats, which made a name for itself backing primary left-wing challengers against more moderate Democratic incumbents-- including several with ideological profiles similar to Biden-- said in a statement it is “definitely going to support whoever the nominee is.”

But the discussions with the campaign could determine the degree to which they and their members go to bat for the likely nominee.

The Sunrise Movement will work to defeat Trump “no matter what,” said Evan Weber, national political director of the organization, by registering and turning out voters in key battleground states. But whether Sunrise does “broad anti-Trump campaigning” or “explicitly back[s] Vice President Joe Biden” if he becomes the nominee, Weber added, depends on what Biden’s campaign does to “demonstrate that they are taking the climate crisis seriously.”

Progressives across the board contend they can apply pressure on Biden to embrace progressive policies at the same time they help him campaign against Trump.

“If we're serious about changing what happens in the White House in 2020, it is all hands on deck,” added Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter. But Garza added that “we need to stop talking about Obama and we need to start talking about Joe Biden.”

Garza, who endorsed Warren, said Democrats, with the help of the Biden campaign, have to “start painting a picture” of what a country under Biden looks like. Biden’s team said it has yet to reach out to black activists such as Garza and Black Womxn For, an activist group inclusive of transgender and gender nonconforming people that backed Warren. The campaign wants to give them space after Warren's exit, a move that highlights the sensitive nature of the talks between his team and progressives.

Some groups that are particularly close to Sanders' campaign, such as Center for Popular Democracy and People's Action, also said Biden’s team had not reached out to them.

Alexis Confer, executive director of March For Our Lives, a group led by the Parkland school shooting survivors in Florida, said the Biden campaign has work to do to energize the Democratic base for the general election.

“There has to be an urgency in courting young voters and really making sure their voices are heard in all the planning,” Confer said, adding that March For Our Lives is eager to talk to Biden's campaign to help expand his gun control platform.

Those voters were excited about the possibility of a nominee with an unapologetically progressive agenda, favoring either Sanders or Warren. Instead, she said, as the primary looks to be coming to a close, “There is a lack of enthusiasm and inspiration right now.”

One sunny, always optimistic former elected official told me that that he thinks "it's really important that progressives who are negotiating with Biden seek to extract concessions around personnel determinations (including on the transition team). Concessions around policy alone are nearly impossible to enforce. We'd need to have people we really trust in such an administration in order to think there was a chance of good faith efforts to drive forward the implementation of policies that we care about that are at tension with Biden's baseline tendencies. Personnel promises are more discrete, enforceable, and structural. And in addition to promoting good folks, we also need to make sure that the administration is not stacked with the likes of Dimon, Bloomberg, and other corporatists." I'm far less sanguine.

In fact, there's nothing Biden could do-- short of getting into a time machine and re-doing his entire political career-- that would convince me to even vote for him, let alone contribute to his campaign or urge others to do so. Trump's the worst president in American history. Biden would likely be the second worst. I haven't given up on Bernie winning the nomination-- meaning, at this point, Biden self-destructing, something he's always a hair's breadth away from when he gets in front of a microphone-- or refuses to. If he does, though, Bernie will still have to fight the DNC's intention of putting in some monstrosity like Hillary or Cuomo.

Trump Did NOT Cause COVID-19... But He Is Responsible For The Way The U.S. Is Botching The Response

The last thing in the world Trump wants to see are headlines like this one from Politico yesterday: Trump's mismanagement helped fuel coronavirus crisis. And once large numbers of people start dying, Trump will get really desperate, desperate that voters don't blame him, though they should. "For six weeks behind the scenes, and now increasingly in public, Trump has undermined his administration’s own efforts to fight the coronavirus outbreak-- resisting attempts to plan for worst-case scenarios, overturning a public-health plan upon request from political allies and repeating only the warnings that he chose to hear. Members of Congress have grilled top officials like Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield over the government’s biggest mistake: failing to secure enough testing to head off a coronavirus outbreak in the United States. But many current and former Trump administration officials say the true management failure was Trump’s... Interviews with 13 current and former officials, as well as individuals close to the White House, painted a picture of a president who rewards those underlings who tell him what he wants to hear while shunning those who deliver bad news... 'If this sort of dysfunction exists as part of the everyday operations-- then, yes, during a true crisis the problems are magnified and exacerbated,' said a former Trump HHS official. 'And with extremely detrimental consequences.'" Ironically, it's his own moron supporters who will pay the most dearly, since that 30-some-odd percent of Americans are the only people who believe a word that comes out of his filthy mouth.

Something like 20,000 people went to Fascistpalooza-- they refer to it as CPAC-- last week and speakers included many of the leaders of the far right of American politics including Señor Trumpanzee, Coronavirus Czar Pence, Jared Kushner-in-law + Ivanka, Don Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle, Kellyanne Conway, Betsy DeVos, Mike Pompeo, Lawrence Kudlow, Alex Azar, Mark Meadows, the U.S. psychopathic ambassador to Israel, David Friedman (suspected by some of being the Typhoid Mary of the far right), Richard Grenell, Ken Cuccinnelli, Sam Brownback, Nikki Haley, hate talk radio host Mark Levin, Ronna Romney McDaniel, Sebastian Gorka, Ted Cruz (who announced on Sunday evening that he will be self-quarantining at home in Texas after learning that he had a "brief conversation and a handshake" with the guy who tested positive for COVID-19), Joni Ernst, Marsha Blackburn, Dan Sullivan, Paul Gosar (also quarantined now), Gym Jordan, Liz Cheney, Devin Nunes, Andy Biggs (one of the 2 members of Congress who voted against coronavirus funding), Louie Gohmert, Matt Gaetz, Doug Collins, Paul Gosar, Steve Scalise, Roger Williams, Glenn Beck, James O'Keefe (the Project Veritas guy) and dozens of other neo-fascists only known inside the movement. They-- and all the attendees-- were exposed to COVID-19.

Glenn Beck's propaganda website announced over the weekend that "one of the attendees at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, the country's largest annual gathering of conservatives, has tested positive for the coronavirus. While the identity of the patient is unknown, the American Conservative Union confirmed the patient tested positive for the disease in a New Jersey hospital and was exposed to the virus before attending CPAC. The Hill reported that the patient is currently being quarantined.

The American Conservative Union also announced that the person with coronavirus did not shake hands with Trump or Pence, although some people may recall that at a Florida fundraiser for Vern Buchanan, Pence shook hands with a cadet who is now quarantined.

The big annual AIPAC convention nearly had as many attendees as CPAC. And so far 3 people have tested positive for coronavirus. Speakers included Coronavirus Czar Pence, Status Quo Joe, Michael Bloomberg, Austrian neo-fascist Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, Joe Trippi, Mike Pompeo, Miss McConnell (R-KY), Steny Hoyer, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Michael McCaul (R-TX), Steve Scalise (R-LA), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), Liz Cheney (R-WY), Lee Zeldin (R-NY), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Blue Dogs Josh Gottheimer (NJ), Abigail Spanberger (VA) and Mike Sherrill (NJ), Senator Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Chuck Schumer and top Schumer operative J.B. Poersch, Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Lois Frankel (D-FL), Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Juan Vargas (D-CA), Ann Wagnwer (R-MO), Eliot Engel (D-NY), Virginia Foxx (R-NC), David Kustoff (R-TN), Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Adam Smith (D-WA), Brad Sherman (D-CA), Angie Craig (D-MN), and Félix Antoine Tshisekedi-Tshilombo, President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Top political leaders in Italy and Iran have tested positive for coronavirus and members of the Iranian parliament have begun dying. Pelosi has discussed shutting down Congress to avoid spreading the disease among members-- who, remember, go home (i.e., everywhere) every weekend and shake hands with their constituents and then come back to Congress. It's too late to down anything about it now. As Buzzflash editor Mark Karlin noted, "Richard Hatchett, the doctor leading efforts to find a vaccine for Coronavirus, says it is 'much more lethal than normal flu... This is the most frightening disease I've ever encountered in my career.'"

Amidst the news reports on Coronavirus, there is a steady flow of warnings from epidemiologists that the Coronavirus presents a tsunami pandemic. Although it may be an outlier estimate, according to a CBS Evening News interview with a top Harvard epidemiologist, he predicts 40-70% of every adult in the world over the age of 35 will be infected with Coronavirus, “with millions of people dying.” That may be alarmist, but if you watch the interview with this solemn, low-key Harvard expert, you are left shaken not only by the gravity of what might face us, but by the willful denial of the potential catastrophe led by Trump.

Trump’s visit to the CDC on Friday was surreal, typical of his deranged preoccupation with and perpetuation of an alternative universe that is grounded in a Fox News fantasy that is aimed at controlling his base, while consolidating power and attempting to steal the 2020 election to assert “unitary executive authority” over the US. His indefatigable propaganda, that conflicts with epidemiological experts in regards to the Coronavirus, will not be modified by any concessions to reality if they detract from his pernicious fantasy world that he has constructed largely with the input of Fox News TV personalities, particularly with the ongoing advice of Sean Hannity.

In the unhinged news conference at the CDC, Trump appeared as if he had slept in his golfing clothes and wore a red campaign cap as he made pronouncements that had more to do with spreading deadly disinformation on the Coronavirus than in limiting its wildfire expansion.

“Anybody that needs a test gets a test…. the tests are all perfect,” Trump said from behind a CDC lab desk. “like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”

He couldn’t resist trying to again claim that his call to Ukrainian President Zelensky on July 24, 2019, was “perfect,” even though he was impeached over it. But, of course, as with his violation of asking for a foreign power to assist him in the 2020 election, he was equally guilty of promising universal testing when the kits are, as of today, still in extremely short supply. Less than 2000 people in the entire US had been tested as of Thursday.

He boasted the demented falsehood, “People are really surprised I understand this stuff [the Coronavirus]. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.’”

He managed to squeeze in his usual barb at one of his self-perceived “enemies,” in this case Democratic Washington Governor Jay Inslee whose state is currently at the initial epicenter of the Coronavirus outbreak in the US, and has just declared an emergency in the state. Trump called him a “snake” and a bad man because when Mike “HIV Epidemic and Smoking Doesn’t Cause Cancer” Pence called Inslee to offer federal help, Inslee recounted, “I told him [Pence] our work would be more successful if the Trump administration stuck to science and told the truth.” It was like a dagger through Trump’s vampire heart, striking at the very gaslighting that the DC press has generally faithfully reported. There was so much more of Trump’s vast array of unabashed lying during the “briefing,” but one particular exchange sticks out more than the other dangerous lies, in part because it was the frightening truth. He was asked when the passengers on the stricken Grand Princess, moored off of San Francisco with no one allowed to leave, would be discharged to quarantine on the mainland (only a small percentage have been tested thus far), and Trump said he has been against letting them off because it would hurt “my numbers.”

What did he mean? He was just publicly, as he is wont to do, revealing his con. He didn’t officially include any passengers on the ship who have contracted the Coronavirus as being among Americans who have been infected (the number of whom have the virus is not trustworthy as revealed by the CDC). The infections appear to be vastly under reported because there are, as noted above, not enough test kits to determine, even roughly, how many people are affected, and Trump wants to keep “his numbers” low to reinforce his lie that the Coronavirus is a Democratic “hoax” and “will disappear some day like magic.”

But no reporter followed up on this despicable statement on his part. The Grand Princess, given that the Coronavirus is transmitted at up to 6 feet, is Trump's Voyage of the Damned. He is facilitating infection of passengers by not letting them off the ship, because he doesn't want known US infection numbers to ratchet up. Couldn’t one reporter call him out on how he is indifferent to the passengers confined and destined to be infected?

There was so much more inanity to the briefing filled with lies, bombast, name-calling and even a Trump digression to ask a Fox reporter how his ratings were for a recent town hall appearance. In short, if was vintage unhinged Trump.

However, we are facing a catastrophic pandemic being managed by a mentally incompetent faux president, and lives are on the line-- many lives, as he and his anti-science Sancho Panza, Mike Pence, run havoc through efforts to mitigate the virus’s spread, not to mention handling the devastating economic fallout, the stress on the US public health system, social disruption, the uninsured, and honest recommendations about avoiding the virus.

In short, Trump needs to be restrained in a mental health facility, not to be “governing” the nation. His handling of the Coronavirus is beyond incompetent. He is offering "advice" that will actually accelerate the spread of the virus. If the DC press corps didn't treat his lunacy with such deference, we might see the virus spread at a lower rate (and its exponential spread is just starting), but they are incapable-- for the most part-- of doing anything other than transcribing his lies and false assurances aimed, in large part, at trying to stop the stock market from plunging even further.

Some cable news stations have become more critical of his pronouncements and tweets, and are starting to interview actual medical experts, but, for the most part, the media continues to treat the travesty of the likes of his CDC press briefing as standard practice. They normalize Trump’s pathology.

Don't these "reporters" have families they cherish and now face Coronavirus unchecked by a lunatic? How can they still act as if Trump is suited for office? The virus is closing in on DC-- and it will inevitably start to infect the DC media, members of Congress and staffers, and even likely the White House. That is because unlike Trump’s other enemies, a virus does not care about a person’s status in life. It can’t be stopped by bullying, deceit and power.

Part of the problem, as explained before on BuzzFlash, is that the major media is owned by corporations, who are concerned with profits, who have wealthy people on their boards, and rely on conservative advertisers. The interest of the publishers filters down to reporters to treat Trump as an actual president and not to demand the truth from him. This is what Noam Chomsky famously called the “manufactured consent” guard rails of the media.

This epidemic is going to get worse, far worse, and the infections and deaths are on Trump's hands. He is a toxic contagion of misinformation and a sociopathic, cruel demagogue, who only values creating a spectacle for the media, chaos and grifting. Meanwhile, we will all suffer from his evil.

The media, particularly the DC White House “reporters,” are Trump’s enablers as the Coronavirus will take a larger toll than it would otherwise if Trump’s cons were challenged. Our lives are at risk, and many many reporters still assist Trump by making excuses for, what one news outlet euphemistically called, his “freewheeling style."

What Trump needs is not servile scriveners. He needs a mental health intervention.

The media is largely inured to a mentally impaired impostor presiden and treat him as though he merits his authority.

Let's hope that the 2020 election isn't canceled due to a "national emergency" declared by Trump as the Coronavirus pandemic explodes out of control due to Trump's ineptitude and political cynicism. Our economy may have imploded by then too. Is the media prepared for this, or will they just again report Trump’s rants rather than ferret out the truth as we enter into full-fledged fascism?

That the DC press corps is still normalizing Trump when he is making preposterous claims about his "ability" to contain the virus when he is worsening the pandemic, that he is endangering our lives, is mind boggling. Aren't these journalists supposed to take a deep dive into the truth?

Under Trump, the US has become the epitome of ignorance. We are purveyors, under Trump's macabre "hunches," of a primitive denial of reality.

Trump is frustrated because he can't give the Coronavirus a nickname and mock it. However, the Coronavirus cannot be intimidated by the rantings of a carnival barker con man. Death and disease have an agenda that can't be bullied.

Journalist Nancy LeTourneau, in a March 5 article in the Washington Monthly straight forwardly charges that the “media still won’t address Trump’s unfitness for office”:

The unwillingness of the news media to discuss Trump’s unfitness for office keeps the public from grappling with the fact that his response to this crisis has been a disaster. That will also shield the president from accountability when this particular crisis gets much worse-- which most experts assume is just a matter of time...

Since shortly after Trump was inaugurated, I have been saying that we need to talk about his mental health issues. To anyone who has been paying attention, he has only deteriorated since that time...

It is becoming more clear every day that none of us are safe as long as Donald Trump is president. That is why all of us have to talk about the elephant in the room that the media wants to avoid: this president is not well.

...[Trump] is clearly mentally unbalanced, narcissistic, cruel and preoccupied with his role both as the master entertainer and creator of diversionary spectacle. Add to that his role as a demagogue seeking to become a dictator and his functioning as a mafia don who only values personal loyalty to him over loyalty to the United States, and you have a clear and present danger in the White House.

...Tourneau concludes: “The unwillingness of the news media to discuss Trump’s unfitness for office keeps the public from grappling with the fact that his response to this crisis has been a disaster. That will also shield the president from accountability when this particular crisis gets much worse-- which most experts assume is just a matter of time.”

...Journalism should be a noble calling, but for the most part it functions now as a fluffer for Trump’s ruinous shortfalls.

Some fault lines are starting to show, as some journalists realize the disastrous future that awaits us as a “normalized” Trump leads us over a cliff. It may be too late, and many of the White House reporters are still treating Trump with deference and recording his misinformation as though it were true, but all we can hope for is that the crack in the dam of the corporate press will widen as DC journalists realize that their lives and the lives of their families are on the line too.

UPDATE: Just one extraordinary example of how Trump is endangering US citizens and urging exposure to the virus, and why he must be removed from control of the strategy to manage the pandemic:

TRUMP: “A lot of people will have this [the Coronavirus], and it’s very mild. They will get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor ... So, if we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work-- some of them go to work, but they get better.” – Fox News interview Wednesday.

Remember, "The White House overruled health officials who wanted to recommend that elderly and physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines because of the new coronavirus, a federal official told The Associated Press. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention submitted the plan this week as a way of trying to control the virus, but White House officials ordered the air travel recommendation be removed, said the official who had direct knowledge of the plan. Trump administration officials have since suggested certain people should consider not traveling, but they have stopped short of the stronger guidance sought by the CDC."

All along the way, Trump has made every possible wrong decision on how to handle Covid-19. "From the beginning," reported Michael Shear at the NY Times "the Trump administration’s attempts to forestall an outbreak of a virus now spreading rapidly across the globe was marked by a raging internal debate about how far to go in telling Americans the truth. Even as the government’s scientists and leading health experts raised the alarm early and pushed for aggressive action, they faced resistance and doubt at the White House-- especially from the president-- about spooking financial markets and inciting panic. 'It’s going to all work out,' Mr. Trump said as recently as Thursday night. 'Everybody has to be calm. It’s going to work out.' … But from Mr. Trump’s first comments on the virus in January to rambling remarks at the C.D.C. on Friday, health experts say the administration has struggled to strike an effective balance between encouraging calm, providing key information and leading an assertive response. The confused signals from the Trump administration, they say, left Americans unprepared for a public health crisis and delayed their understanding of a virus that has reached at least 28 states, infected more than 300 people and killed at least 17."

Business Insider reported that "Hospitals are bracing for what could be millions of admissions nationwide as the virus spreads." How are American businesses responding?

• Apple is recommending employees at its Silicon Valley headquarters work from home.
• Google is letting its tens of thousands of Bay Area employees work from home.
• Cisco is closing a building at its massive Silicon Valley campus after a worker was exposed to the coronavirus.
• Sequoia Capital, the prestigious VC firm that famously warned startups about the 2008 financial crisis, published a memo urging startup founders to prepare for business disruptions.
• Bank of America is splitting up its Wall Street traders and sending some to Stamford amid concern over coronavirus.
• An employee at investment giant TIAA has contracted coronavirus, and the Manhattan WeWork office where they were working has been closed for cleaning.
• Goldman Sachs switched a 400-person conference at the last minute to an audio-only webcast.
• Morgan Stanley is moving about half of its Wall Street traders to its disaster-recovery site outside NYC.

Yesterday, I suggested looking at Maureen Dowd's NY Times column, Trump's Crazy Fantasy World in regard to his mental illness. Today I want to bring up something else from the same column: "Trump," she wrote, "is continuing his Panglossian handling of the coronavirus. 'The tests are beautiful!' he said as he toured the C.D.C. Friday evening, after a kerfuffle over delays in testing. 'The tests are all perfect, like the letter was perfect, the transcription was perfect,' he added, referring to his communication with the president of Ukraine. 'This is the highest-level test anywhere.' 'I like this stuff, I really get it,' he said, adding that maybe he should have become a scientist, like his uncle the 'super genius,' instead of running for president. Meanwhile, the stock market is still freaking out and financial angst is spreading from boardrooms to kitchen tables. We can vividly see in this crisis how close to the surface Trump’s id is and how easily he cleaves to delusions. He personalizes everything so much that when things go bad, he can only see it as an attack on him by the forces out to get him. He seems psychologically incapable of dealing with a virus that is complex and uncertain. The virus will be in every community and needs truth, honesty and intelligence-- all absent from the unstable Trump, who at his core is a frightened boy and pretender."

If Biden Is The Democratic Nominee... The Presidency Will Hinge Not On Policy But On Comparisons Between His And Trump's Dishonesty, Family Members And Dementia

I'm no clairvoyant but it didn't take much insight to figure out that if the Democrats nominate Biden, Trump will make the race into one that asks each voter to grapple not with pressing issues-- especially since Biden, like hillary before him, doesn't really for anything other than anti-Trump-- but with who has a more repulsive corrupt family, who lies more and whose dementia is further advanced. Democrats who vote for Biden in primaries and caucuses deserve that kind of a campaign... and the pre-ordained results.

Tucker Carlson's propaganda website was on the dementia aspect on Friday. "Republicans are preparing a full court press on former Vice President Joe Biden’s mental fitness for office in the event that he wins the Democratic presidential nomination, GOP sources told the Daily Caller News Foundation." They referred to debate comments by Cory Booker, Tim Ryan and Julian Castro about Biden's lack of mental fitness, while noting that Democrats have by and large, "been hesitant to press the issue beyond making passing comments."

Republicans, meanwhile, are preparing to highlight questions about Biden’s fitness if he becomes the Democratic nominee.

A Trump campaign official told the DCNF that Biden’s “capacity” will be an issue in a potential general election matchup, echoing language used by Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly taken shots at Biden, saying the former vice president is “not playing with a full deck” and “has lost his fastball.” Trump’s campaign has already churned out videos highlighting Biden’s struggles.

Is "but Trump is even more senile" the campaign you want to see? The GOP has been keeping track of the examples that seem to prove that the flood of Biden's gaffes is more about deteriorating brain function than anything else. Here's the list the Daily Caller put together:

Biden trailed off Monday while citing the Declaration of Independence, telling a crowd: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created by the, you know, you know the thing.”

He told a South Carolina crowd on Feb. 25 that he’s “a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate” and that they should “vote for the other Biden” if they don’t like him. He also told a South Carolina crowd he is “looking forward to appointing the first African-American woman to the United States Senate.”

“We have to choose truth over facts,” Biden said in August 2019.

He claimed in the Feb. 25 debate that gun violence killed 150 million people-- roughly half the U.S. population-- in a decade.

Biden also said in a debate last September that he is “the vice president of the United States” and called Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders “the president” of the country.

Biden, whose campaign didn’t return a request for comment, has also struggled with places and dates.

“I love this place. Look, what’s not to like about Vermont in terms of the beauty of it?” he asked a New Hampshire crowd in August 2019. Biden said in December that the Obama administration took place in 1976, before correcting himself. He appeared to confuse the 2016 and 2010 elections in a Feb. 20 town hall. He has also confused both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former British Prime Minister Theresa May with Margaret Thatcher, who passed away in 2013 and whose reign as British prime minister ended in 1990.

John Harris took the whole senility question up for Politico Magazine readers over the weekend: 2020 becomes the dementia campaign. He points out as a starter that both Trump and Biden are "facing pervasive public speculation that they are becoming senile... Trump himself-- seemingly indifferent to the glass-houses maxim-- in recent days has upped the ante in what is becoming the senility sweepstakes. On Monday he said if Biden is elected, 'They are going to put him in a home and other people are going to be running the country.' At a town hall on Fox Thursday, Trump cited verbal stumbles by Biden and asserted, 'There’s something going on there.' Friday morning on Twitter he said Biden would destroy Medicare and Social Security 'and not even know he’s doing it.'"

Concerns about the physical and mental frailties of older presidents are far from a new phenomenon. Ronald Reagan faced questions about potential metal decline in 1984, when in a general election debate he recited an anecdote that wandered off to nowhere, a full decade before he announced he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Dwight Eisenhower in 1955 suffered a massive heart attack that sidelined him for weeks. Eager to show that they were not repeating deceptions of declining health that marked the late presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ike’s physicians gave medical updates that included reports of his bowel movements.

But discussions of presidential health in those earlier times were made with a kind of hushed solemnity that now seems eons away. Modern media often takes the sort of conversations that political operatives and reporters have always had and loudly amplifies them for a mass audience.

In the case of both Biden and Trump, as their public appearances often vary widely in crispness and command of detail, the reporter-operative conversation increasingly sounds something like the way family members discuss an elderly relative, trying to distinguish normal aging from something more troubling.

“I’m becoming worried, Dad really seemed lost at dinner.” “No, no, that’s just because all the ambient noise makes it hard for him to hear. One-on-one he’s as sharp as you or me.” “I don’t know, sis, I don’t think you are facing facts.” “Oh, so now this is about me?!”

Even in his early days in the Senate, where he arrived at age 30 in 1972, Biden was known for a garrulous and sometimes discursive style. In the context of a presidential campaign, however, this can cause raised eyebrows.

At the most recent Democratic debate, which was generally praised as a forceful performance by Biden, his answer on whether he would allow Chinese firms to build U.S. critical infrastructure was, arguably, cumulatively coherent even though many individual sentences were not: “No, I would not. And I spent more time with [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping than any world leader had by the time we left office. This is a guy who is, who doesn't have a democratic, with a small ‘d,’ bone in his body. This is a guy who is a thug, who in fact has a million Uighurs in ‘reconstruction camps,’ meaning concentration camps. This is a guy who you see what's happening right now in-- in Hong Kong, and this is a guy who I was able to convince should join the international agreement at the Paris agreement because, guess what, they need to be involved. You can cooperate and you can also dictate exactly what they are, when in fact they said, ‘We're going to set up a no-fly zone, that you can't fly through our zone.’ He said, ‘What do you expect me to do?’ when I was over there. I said, ‘We're going to fly right through it.’ We flew B-1 bombers through it. We've got to make it clear. They must play by the rules. Period, period, period.”

Trump partisans eager to exploit Biden’s circuitous words may wish first to review the large anthology of Trump classics. These include the president’s remarks to the National Republican Campaign Committee last April, when he free-associated about Democrats’ promotion of alternative energy: “Hillary wanted to put up wind. Wind. If you-- if you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations: Your house just went down 75 percent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, OK? ‘Rrrrr, rrrrr’ you know the thing that makes the-- it’s so noisy. And of course it’s like a graveyard for birds. If you love birds, you’d never want to walk under a windmill because it’s a very sad, sad sight. It’s like a cemetery.”

He continued in this vein, then his mind moved vagrantly to North Korea negotiations, before returning to windmills with a lurch, by invoking a hypothetical couple who can’t watch TV because there is no wind: ”No, wind’s not so good. And you know, you have no idea how expensive it is to make those things. They’re all made in China and Germany, but the way, just in case you’re-- we don’t make ’em here, essentially. We don’t make ’em here. And by the way, the carbon, and all those things flying up in the air, you know the carbon footprint? President Obama used to talk about the carbon footprint, and then he’d hop on Air Force One, a big 747 with very old engines, and he’d fly to Hawaii to play a round of golf. You tell me, the carbon footprint.”

The strangeness of these remarks got ample news coverage at the time, but not much from conservative commentators. In recent days, however, many of these people gleefully have trained fire on Biden. Examples from recent days, compiled by my colleague Rishika Dugyala, suggest at least a loosely coordinated campaign on the right.

Fox News’ Sean Hannity, who often speaks with Trump, said it is “a legitimate question” whether the former vice president has “the stamina and the strength, the mental acumen and the focus required to serve in what is the most difficult job in the world, period … without a doubt, Biden is struggling.” Carlson, who also speaks informally with Trump, said Biden has “clearly lost it,” and “is noticeably more confused now than he was even last spring when he entered the race.” Radio host and author Ann Coulter said that “no Republican with that level of senile dementia that Biden has” could run for president because they would be savaged by the media.

The problem for “the media,” like for voters generally, is that there is no solid consensus about how to assess cognitive health, what types of medical records should be in the public domain especially for aging candidates, and no way to enforce that consensus if it existed. The issue is especially acute now that so much power in American government is held by people over age 65. While rates of dementia are going down gradually in the United States, 65 is the age at which geriatric researcher Kenneth Langa at the University of Michigan found that 20 to 25 percent of people have mild cognitive impairment and 10 percent have dementia. Six members of the Supreme Court are over 65, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will turn 80 on March 26, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell last month turned 78.

In Trump’s case, he has often gotten lost rhetorically in precisely the same ways for which he mocks Biden. He once referred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “Betanyahu.” In December, more than 700 psychiatrists and other mental-health professionals submitted a petition to Congress during the impeachment inquiry warning that President Donald Trump's mental health was rapidly deteriorating. MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough, who has known Trump for years, said comments the president made speculating that if Andrew Jackson had come later he might have prevented the Civil War reminded Scarborough of his mother’s struggles with dementia. The Morning Joe host also told his audience in 2018, “It's getting worse, and not a single person who works for him doesn’t know he has early signs of dementia.”

Accusations that politicians may be drifting toward non compos mentis typically can’t be divorced from political differences that don’t concern age.

Glenn Greenwald, publisher of The Intercept, who is backing Sanders, said on Twitter: “The steadfast, willful refusal of Dem political & media elites to address what is increasingly visible to the naked eye-- Biden’s serious cognitive decline-- is frightening indeed, not only for what it portends for 2020 but what it says about the ease of snapping them into line...” He was responding to one of his reporters saying that Biden is “sundowning.”

Matt Stoller, another voice on the left and Sanders backer, said on Twitter: "Democratic insiders know Biden has cognitive decline issues. They joke about it. They don’t care."

In fact, a kind of ghoulish gallows humor about the issue is widespread in political circles in both parties, in part because people simply don’t see much of alternative. My colleague Marc Caputo said on Twitter that a Democratic operative with presidential campaign experience described the likely 2020 race like this: “the nice old guy with Alzheimer’s against the mean old man with dementia.”

In her column-- Trump's Crazy Fantasy World-- this morning, Maureen Dowd noted that though "the cruel insults to Joe Biden’s mental acuity are flying fast and ferocious on Fox News," those closest to Trump understand exactly how impaired his brain is from his severe malignant narcissism.

In his new book, Front Row at the Trump Show, Jonathan Karl, the chief White House correspondent for ABC News, reports the surprising fact that one of those calls on Trump derangement came from inside the White House.

Karl recounts that when Mick Mulvaney became acting chief of staff, he took senior White House staffers to Camp David for a weekend retreat. He recommended they read a 2011 book, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness, by Nassir Ghaemi, director of the mood disorders program at Tufts Medical Center.

...As Karl writes: “The new acting chief of staff seemed to be saying President Trump was mentally ill-- and that this was a good thing. The corollary to that theory: Don’t try to control the man in the Oval Office. What you think is madness is actually genius.”

In his book, Ghaemi says of people with mental disorder mania: “Decisions seem easy; no guilt, no doubt, just do it. The trouble is not in starting things, but in finishing them; with so much to do and little time, it’s easy to get distracted … affairs are common; divorce is the norm… Mania is like a galloping horse… In Freudian terms, one might say that mania enhances the id, for better or worse.”

When Karl reached out to Ghaemi to ask how Trump would fit into his thesis, Ghaemi replied “perfectly,” noting that the president has “mild manic symptoms all the time.” Ghaemi also concedes in his book that extreme forms of mania can be highly disabling and dangerous.

Trump is continuing his Panglossian handling of the coronavirus. “The tests are beautiful!” he said as he toured the C.D.C. Friday evening, after a kerfuffle over delays in testing. “The tests are all perfect, like the letter was perfect, the transcription was perfect,” he added, referring to his communication with the president of Ukraine. “This is the highest-level test anywhere.” “I like this stuff, I really get it,” he said, adding that maybe he should have become a scientist, like his uncle the “super genius,” instead of running for president.