The Trump Legacy

 

Trump campaigned against "the Swamp." The second he settled into the Oval Office, he turned it into a sewer. And for those in top positions in the Regime who haven't been quite sewery enough... he plans fire them all after the election. Nancy cook reported how the huge sacking he and his top cronies are planning "would amount to a purge of any Cabinet member who has crossed the president, refused to mount investigations he has demanded, or urged him to take a different, more strict tack on the coronavirus response. The evictions could run the gamut from senior health officials to much of the national security leadership. Already, the White House and administration officials have started to vet names of health care experts who could take over the agencies running many elements of the government’s pandemic response and overseeing the country’s health insurance system, according to two Republicans close to the White House. And the president is eying a remake of leadership at the FBI, CIA and Pentagon, exasperated with what he perceives as unwillingness to investigate his preferred subjects or take on the government’s 'deep state.'" Yeah... so the worst presidential administration in history could actually get even worse!

Few rational people could disagree with NY Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker's headline from Sunday: Dishonesty Has Defined the Trump Presidency. The scary second part of the headline predicts that the consequences could go on long after Trump is defeated, imprisoned or even dead, his corpse fed to ravenous dogs, sharks or alligators.

Baker began by reminding his readers that the Sewer Regime was "born amid made-up crowd size claims and 'alternative facts,' a factory of falsehood from the start, churning out distortions, conspiracy theories and brazen lies at an assembly-line pace that has challenged fact-checkers and defied historical analogy. But now, with the election just days away, the consequences of four years of fabulism are coming into focus as President Trump argues that the vote itself is inherently 'rigged,' tearing at the credibility of the system. Should the contest go into extra innings through legal challenges after Tuesday, it may leave a public with little faith in the outcome-- and in its own democracy."

On Sunday morning, the RealClearPolitical polling averages showed Trump losing 15 (186 electoral votes) of the 17 battleground states (230 electoral votes in total):

• Florida- down 1.3%
• Pennsylvania- down 4.0%
• Wisconsin- down 6.0%
• North Carolina- down 2.3%
• Michigan- down 6.6%
• Ohio- down 0.2%
• Minnesota- down 4.7%
• Iowa- up 0.7%
• Arizona- down 1.0%
• Nevada- down 4.0%
• Texas- up 2.3%
• Georgia- down 0.8%
• Virginia- down by double digits
• New Hampshire- down by double digits
• Maine- down by double digits
• Colorado- down by double digits
• New Mexico- down by double digits

In other words, if these polls are correct, Trump has no chance to win and no chance to escape a massive landslide against him, a national referendum on his 4 years of chaos, dishonesty, corruption and failure. And the 2 states-- Texas and Iowa-- he still has in his column (44 electoral votes) aren't firm at all.





But Baker continued with a grim scenario that "The nightmarish scenario of widespread doubt and denial of the legitimacy of the election would cap a period in American history when truth itself has seemed at stake under a president who has strayed so far from the normal bounds that he creates what allies call his own reality. Even if the election ends with a clear victory or defeat for Mr. Trump, scholars and players alike say the very concept of public trust in an established set of facts necessary for the operation of a democratic society has eroded during his tenure with potentially long-term ramifications."

“You can mitigate the damage, but you can’t bring it back to 100 percent the way it was before,” said Lee McIntyre, the author of Post-Truth and a philosopher at Boston University. “And I think that’s going to be Trump’s legacy. I think there’s going to be lingering damage to the processes by which we vet truths for decades. People are going to be saying, ‘Oh, that’s fake news.’ The confusion between skepticism and denialism, the idea that if you don’t want to believe something, you don’t have to believe it, that’s really damaging and that’s going to last.”

Indeed, the very idea of truth is increasingly a fungible commodity in a political environment that seems to reward the loudest voices, not the most honest. In a recent poll for Newsweek, 54 percent of Americans agreed that lying has become more acceptable in American politics in recent years, while only 13 percent said it was less acceptable and the rest said it was about the same or did not have a view.

Nancy L. Rosenblum, a Harvard University professor emerita who wrote A Lot of People Are Saying with Russell Muirhead, said that may not change even if Mr. Trump leaves office after one term because he proved the advantages of truth-bending politics and helped build up an information infrastructure where reality is like an à la carte menu from which Americans can pick their favorite variant.





“Conspiracy charges and a certain amount of lying have proved to be good weapons in political fighting where you have deep, deep divisions, and there’s no reason to think other parties won’t take it up under desperate circumstances,” she said. “So we can expect it to go on but without the same effect.”

The lasting impact may be most evident in terms of the coronavirus pandemic that has already killed more than 230,000 in the United States. Even as the outbreak surges to new peaks, Mr. Trump has been falsely insisting that it is “rounding the corner” to an end, telling Americans not to worry rather than urging them to take precautions.

The disconnect has tangible consequences. Republicans who support Mr. Trump are more likely to dismiss the threat of the virus in surveys and less likely to wear masks or maintain social distance. A poll last week by Axios and Ipsos found only half of Americans could correctly respond to six factual questions about the virus, indicating how far misinformation linked to reckless behavior has pervaded the public.

Scientists have concluded that 130,000 lives could be saved in the United States in the coming months if there was universal mask wearing. But Mr. Trump mocks facial coverings and disparages medical experts, undercutting their credibility with the public, most notably Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s chief epidemiologist who now has to have a security detail after vilification by the president and his allies. With views of the virus increasingly falling along party lines, many Americans express distrust over a possible new vaccine, which could lead to widespread resistance to inoculation.

Beyond the health crisis, Mr. Trump’s successor, whether next year or in five years, could face a broader crisis in faith, challenged to re-establish credibility with overseas allies and adversaries, while presiding over a country where truth has been broken down into tribes and much of the public has been conditioned to distrust institutions of all sorts.

Mr. Trump has spent four years telling Americans not to trust anyone other than him, whether it be public health experts, scientists, journalists, judges, career government officials, investigators, generals, intelligence agencies, election officials and even mail carriers. “Just remember,” he told a crowd one summer, “what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening.”

Trust, once lost, is hard to restore. “We know a lot about the delegitimation of democratic institutions over the last two centuries,” Ms. Rosenblum said. “But we know nothing about how you relegitimate institutions that have lost their main value and authority for an awful lot of people. That’s the real question.”

Dishonesty has been a defining hallmark of the Trump presidency. The sheer volume of untruths, both petty and profound, has been cataloged and quantified time and again, the subject of a shelf full of books and endless hand-wringing over the “post-truth” world.

This is a president who casually accused a television anchor of murder, who spread the claim that Osama bin Laden is not actually dead and that President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 killed, who literally took a Sharpie to a map to create his own fake weather forecast and reprimanded meteorologists who dared to correct him.

Campaign rallies have been chock-full of specious claims and fan-fiction narratives. He has renewed his assertion that Mexico is paying for his border wall, declared that he won the women’s vote in 2016 and claimed credit for restoring order in Minneapolis, none of which is true. The New York Times tabulated 131 false or misleading statements in a single rally in Janesville, Wis. The Washington Post counted more than 22,000 false or misleading statements over nearly four years, including 189 on a single day in August.

When challenged, Mr. Trump simply brushes it off. After a reporter in August asked “do you regret at all, all the lying you’ve done to the American people,” the president sought to clarify the question and then once he understood it called on another reporter without replying.

It is often left to aides to try to re-engineer what he says to fit the facts or dismiss facts altogether, often simply turning the tables by complaining about biased nit-picking by the news media.

...But as with so many things, Mr. Trump takes matters to his own Trumpian extremes. Many of his falsehoods may be minor, but others would have created days of headlines under any other president. And when other presidents got caught, there were corrections or consequences or at least an effort to avoid repeating the misstatements. Not so with Mr. Trump.

The American system has never figured out quite how to respond to a president who gives the conspiracy theorists of QAnon a hearing at the White House. For four years, a cottage industry of debate has raged about postmodernist theory and whether Trumpian truth is simply the most extreme manifestation of an American tendency to write our own reality, that there is no universal truth, only individual experiences with it.

Publishers have pumped out books with titles like The Death of Truth, Truth Decay and Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth, while newsrooms wrestled with the question of when to use the word “lie” and social media giants began applying warning labels to the president of the United States lest Americans actually believe what he says.





...Trump’s disregard for facts long predates the White House, of course. His penchant for “truthful hyperbole,” as he put it in his first memoir, meant faking work at a construction site to fool business partners or advertising Trump Tower as a 68-floor building when it actually has 58. He propelled himself into politics with the lie that Mr. Obama may have been born in Africa.

Where Mr. Trump is oddly most honest, it often seems, is in explaining his own motivations. He openly admits self-interested calculations that other presidents would at the very least shroud behind high-minded, gauzy justifications. He told a crowd in Erie, Pa., recently that he would not have bothered to visit if he were doing better in the polls. He leaves no doubt that he wants his attorney general to investigate his opponents in order to help his campaign and that he wanted his nominee confirmed to the Supreme Court before the election to gain another vote in case the justices decide the result.

Many supporters acknowledge that some of what he says is not literally true but consider him more honest than typical politicians because he seems to say what he actually thinks, rather than sticking to safe, poll-tested, milquetoast talking points. His bracing, hold-nothing-back performances strike admirers as more real and, yes, more authentic, a word that is gold to the political class.

“How can it be that someone we all know is such a liar is also seen as authentic?” asked David Greenberg, a professor at Rutgers University and author of Republic of Spin, a history of White House image-making that preceded Mr. Trump. “It’s because authenticity isn’t exactly the same thing as truthfulness. It’s also about a truthful presentation of yourself and what yourself is-- and it may be that his authentic self is a liar.”

Trading Away Lives For Economic Well-Being... But Whose Lives?

MAGA by Chip Proser

Many people woke up this morning and read Peter Bakers' NY Times column, The Cold Calculations America’s Leaders Will Have to Make Before Reopening in the context of Georgia's crackpot governor's decision to start reopening mostly businesses catering to and operated by minorities. First the numbers: Georgia's confirmed case-load increased by 846 from Tuesday to Wednesday to bring the state's total to 21,512. Georgia is now over 2,000 cases per million people. That's bad and has been getting worse everyday. And that's a manifestation of a steepening curve, not a flattening curve. "How many deaths," asked Baker, "are acceptable to reopen the country before the coronavirus is completely eradicated? 'One is too many,' President Trump insists, a politically safe formulation that any leader would instinctively articulate." Kemp might add that 'one white death is too many but let's see what opening up does in black communities because, who cares.'"

The politically safe formulation made by Trump is unrelated to his reopen-soon approach. "Nor for that matter will it be the bottom line for even those governors who want to go slower. Until there is a vaccine or a cure for the coronavirus, the macabre truth is that any plan to begin restoring public life invariably means trading away some lives. The question is how far will leaders go to keep it to a minimum. Some of the more provocative voices on the political right say that with tens of millions of Americans out of work and businesses collapsing, some people must be sacrificed for the greater good of restoring the economy quickly. To many, that sounds unthinkable, but less inflammatory experts and policymakers also acknowledge that there are enormous costs to keeping so much of the work force idle, with many of the unemployed struggling to pay for food, shelter or medical care for other health challenges."

Kemp was the first to act-- and Trump both praised him on a private call to America's most racist governor while castigating him-- wink, wink-- publicly.

Baker went on that "the nation’s leaders are left with the excruciating dilemma of figuring out how to balance life and livelihood on a scale unseen in generations. 'Every governor in the nation is asking that,' Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, where 2,700 have died and more than 1 million have lost jobs, said this week. 'There’s no such thing as zero risk in the world in which we’re living. But we know that not taking measures to control the spread means that’s going to translate into lives lost.'" Kemp-- opening barber shops, hair and nails salons first-- sees it as an opportunity for a mini-genocide... or at least some ethnic cleansing of voters who opposed him politically.

With no cure available for the coronavirus and no vaccine likely for another year or more, governors in hard-hit states are seeking ways to minimize the number of additional deaths by staging and structuring any reopening. Time and testing are key, according to public health experts. The longer a quarantine can be extended the better, they say, and the more testing made available, the easier it would be to properly calibrate a reopening and respond to any new outbreak.

Pushing to restore business sooner rather than later, Mr. Trump has dismissed waiting until comprehensive testing provides a better map of where the infection has spread. Instead, the federal government’s guidelines envision “sentinel surveillance” testing of vulnerable places like nursing homes and inner-city health centers, while gradually reopening businesses, schools and other venues in stages with precautions like masks, gloves and social distancing.

All of which could mitigate future infections but would not halt them. The reason the death toll projection may be closer to 60,000 rather than the 2 million of one estimate was because society largely shut down. One recent study said that the 60,000 deaths would have been 6,000 had quarantine measures been imposed just two weeks earlier. So easing measures means the death toll will go up even with safeguards.

But remaining closed is not without a cost either. In just four weeks, a staggering 22 million Americans have lost their jobs, the equivalent of the entire labor force of 23 states.

The question divides not only the nation but even families. Rahm Emanuel, the former mayor of Chicago and White House chief of staff, and his brother, Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a prominent medical ethicist and vice provost of global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, have engaged in a running quarrel about how soon society should reopen.

Rahm Emanuel considers it untenable to keep most of the country closed until the virus is completely under control, while Ezekiel Emanuel maintains that the pandemic is too much of a threat to rush back to life as usual.

...The trade-offs have stirred angry exchanges since the start of the lockdowns. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas, who is 70, said last month that older people like himself should be ready to risk death to save the economy for their grandchildren, comments he defended on Fox News on Monday night. In a separate appearance on Fox last week, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the television host, cited a study to argue that reopening schools “may only cost us 2 to 3 percent in terms of total mortality,” calling it “a trade-off some folks would consider.” After a backlash, he said he “misspoke” and expressed regret that he “confused and upset people.”

...Government makes money-versus-lives trade-offs all the time. When a regulatory agency weighs a new safety rule, it measures the cost to industry or consumers against the gain by assigning a dollar value to each life that might be saved. If a new rule costs billions of dollars but would only prevent a few dozen deaths, it likely would not be adopted-- even though someone would die as a result.

The idea that the government translates life to dollars and cents may sound bloodless but it is not unusual. A White House report from 2017, for instance, estimated the cost of 41,000 deaths attributed to opioid overdoses in 2015 at $431.7 billion, an average of $10.5 million per person.

By that calculation, the 60,000 deaths projected from the coronavirus would be valued at $631.8 billion-- while the roughly 2 million lives theoretically saved by lockdowns would be worth about $21 trillion, or nearly eight times the $2.7 trillion in relief spending brokered by Congress and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

But James H. Stock, a Harvard economist who served on President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said this crisis goes beyond such ordinary calculations because a shuttered economy represents an almost existential threat to the very idea of America.

“We really have to be talking not just about our reduction in consumption in the short run but what this is going to be doing to the economy and the republic in the long run,” he said. “It’s those big issues that we’ve been afraid to talk about. A year of this and we would just see an unrecognizable transformation of what America would look like coming out of it.”

Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who serves on Mr. Trump’s reopening committee, said those advocating restarting the economy are caricatured as putting profits over lives.

“I reject this idea that the people who are for keeping the economy shut down are the angels because they’re the ones who care about human life,” said Mr. Moore, who has coordinated with lockdown protesters. “What about the poverty? What about the suicides? What about the child abuse cases and the alcoholism and the drug overdoses and the depression and all of the negative effects to health and well-being that are associated with an economy in recession?”

Studies show that depression, drug use and suicides spike during economic hardship, including after the last recession, and the all-consuming focus of the medical system on the coronavirus in certain areas has delayed other medical care. Yet that might be offset by falling violent crime, car crashes, workplace accidents and air pollution. Vehicle collisions in California decreased by half after its stay-at-home order went into effect while murder and air pollution are each down 25 percent in New York City.

Some scholars argue that reopening too quickly would actually hurt the economy, particularly if it resulted in a second wave that destroyed public confidence. A study of the 1918 influenza pandemic found that cities that closed schools and banned public gatherings earlier and kept them shut longer not only had fewer deaths but emerged better economically.

Governor Murphy said resuming public life would not succeed if people did not feel certain that the virus had been contained. Indeed, 76 percent of Americans said social distancing should continue as long as needed to curb the virus even if it meant continued damage to the economy, according to a new poll by Politico and Morning Consult, while just 14 percent favored an end to restrictions to stimulate the economy even if it meant spreading the virus.

“If you opened every restaurant in New Jersey tomorrow, I don’t think anybody would show up,” Governor Murphy said. “It’s not like we’re holding back some pent-up demand. I don’t blame them-- there are folks out there who are frustrated, who have cabin fever, who want to break free. So do I, by the way. But I think folks also want to have confidence that they’re not going to get sick and die.”

We'll see what happens on Monday, when Georgia does open up restaurants, "even as many public health experts warn that the approach could trigger a new outbreak. Trump’s top health advisers have repeatedly criticized Kemp’s strategy. Fauci-- who didn't address the racist nature of Kemp's moves: "There is a danger of a rebound. Going ahead and leapfrogging into phases where you should not be, I would advise him, as a health official and a physician, not to do that."

Georgia Democrats, who strongly opposed Kemp’s pandemic policies, quickly highlighted the rift between the president and the governor.

“You know it’s a serious failure when Donald Trump, whose failed leadership is responsible for how badly this crisis is hitting America, distances himself from his crony Brian Kemp, who is endlessly determined to make this crisis as painful as possible for Georgians,” said Nikema Williams, chairwoman of the state Democratic Party.

...The governor has come under increasing pressure from local leaders, particularly in dense urban areas, who are upset that his statewide order barred them from enacting more severe restrictions.

“We need to, as government leaders, step up and give people an incentive to stay home,” said Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. “But there’s nothing essential about going to a bowling alley in the middle of a pandemic.”

The governor also faced criticism from members of the state coronavirus task force he formed to help guide his response strategy who are upset they were left in the dark by his decision to roll back restrictions.

  Kemp defended his policy on a conference call Wednesday with U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, one of his top allies, saying that efforts to contain the coronavirus were paying off.

  “I know this is a different world. But we have to continue living in it for a few more weeks, or possibly just a few more months,” he said. “There are a lot of people financially hurting, and we’ve got to do our best to help them out.”

It was a surprising turnaround for the president. A day earlier, Trump expressed confidence in Kemp’s response even as federal health officials took a different tack.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the federal coronavirus response coordinator, seemed to endorse calls by local Georgia officials who have urged residents to stay home despite Kemp’s directive.

  “I believe people in Atlanta would understand if their cases are not going down, they need to continue to do everything we said: social distancing, washing your hands, wearing a mask in public,” said Birx. 

Mar-A-Lago, One Of The World's Deadliest Places, Is Spreading Coronavirus Via Fecal Contamination

A few days ago I predicted that Trump, almost definitely infected with the coronavirus, would be dead by before the election. I wasn't wishing it on him, just predicting the likely result of his behavior. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported the Florida's GOP congressional delegation is mostly in quarantine, suspected of having gotten coronavirus at Trump's West Palm Beach disease-ridden fecal swamp, "as the number of people who visited Mar-a-Lago last weekend and later tested positive for the virus climbed to three. The latest is a Brazilian ambassador who sat at President Trump’s table during a dinner. Meanwhile, Trump has declined to self-isolate or be tested for the novel coronavirus, according to a letter from his White House doctor, after the president said at a news conference Friday he might be tested."

Though Apple has shut down all their retail stores and the Pentagon has "announced new domestic travel restrictions for service members and their families to help contain the outbreak, saying in a memo that virtually all trips must be put on hold through May 11," Trump continues "breaking every rule in the CDC's 450-page playbook" for the pandemic. The clownish "White House doctor said in a memo that Trump would not be tested for the virus, despite his interaction with the two people with confirmed infections and that others who interacted with the same individuals had voluntarily self-quarantined."

At his news conference Friday afternoon, Trump, after being asked several times, relented to say he’d “most likely” get tested “fairly soon.” But a memo later came from Sean P. Conley, the White House doctor, who wrote: “The President’s exposure to the first individual was extremely limited (photograph, handshake), and though he spent more time in close proximity to the second case, all interactions occurred before any symptom onset.

“These interactions would be categorized as LOW risk for transmission per CDC guidelines, and as such, there is no indication for home quarantine at this time,” Conley added.

The doctor said he would be monitoring Trump, but unless the president exhibits symptoms he will not need to be tested.

Conley’s advice is in direct conflict with that of Anthony S. Fauci, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director, who has said if anyone who comes in contact with an infected person, they should isolate themselves.

On Saturday morning, Trump tweeted: “SOCIAL DISTANCING,” after backslapping and handshaking people during his televised news conference the day before.

Friday night Guatemala announced that it is fighting the spread of the coronavirus by banning Americans. President Alejandro Giammattei: "We have made the decision that citizens of the United States and Canada cannot enter the country" as of Monday. There's some irony there in that last year, more than 250,000 Guatemalans were detained at the U.S. border, more than from any other country.

The Times' Peter Baker and Katie Rogers went into how Mar-A-Lago has become a Coronavirus Hot Spot. It started becoming apparent after the 51st birthday party for Don Jr's girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle (the former wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom). "It was," they wrote, "a lavish, festive, carefree evening at Mar-a-Lago a week ago Saturday in what in hindsight now seems like a last hurrah for the end of one era and the beginning of another. In the days since then, the presidential estate in Florida has become something of a coronavirus hot zone. At least four Mar-a-Lago guests from last weekend have said they are infected and others have put themselves into quarantine." All the Trumps are refusing to get tested and are likely spreading the disease to everyone they come in contact with and "the Mar-a-Lago petri dish has become a kind of metaphor for the perils of group gatherings in the age of coronavirus, demonstrating how quickly and silently the virus can spread. No one is necessarily safe from encountering it, not senators or diplomats or even the most powerful person on the planet seemingly secure in a veritable fortress surrounded by Secret Service agents."

Some of last weekend’s guests worried it may be a sign of the times and the last party of its sort for a while at Mar-a-Lago. “I hope not,” Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, wrote in a text message. “Humans interacting with one another are typically happier and more productive in my experience.”

Mr. Gaetz’s experience is a cautionary tale. He attended events at Mar-a-Lago on both Friday and Saturday nights of that first weekend in March, not realizing that he had already been exposed to someone infected with the coronavirus at an earlier political event. Only last Monday, as he rode with Mr. Trump on Air Force One back to Washington was he told of the encounter, at which point he was separated from the president and other passengers on the plane and later went into self-quarantine. He has since tested negative and reports feeling fine.

At least four others at Mar-a-Lago that weekend have since tested positive, including three who accompanied President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil for a dinner with Mr. Trump before Ms. Guilfoyle’s birthday party that Saturday night: Fabio Wajngarten, his press secretary, Nestor Forster, his top diplomat in Washington, and Nelsinho Trad, a senator. A fourth member of the Brazilian delegation, Karina Kufa, a lawyer, also tested positive but she had not been at Mar-a-Lago. Another unidentified person at Mar-a-Lago the next day for a fund-raising brunch with the president has also tested positive.

Mr. Bolsonaro said Friday that he tested negative, but the health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, later said the president would be tested again as a precaution. Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami, who met with Mr. Bolsonaro while he was in town, reported on Friday that he had tested positive.

While he has been described as nervous in private, Mr. Trump has publicly insisted he had no concerns even after a photograph emerged on social media showing him with Mr. Wajngarten.

“I have no idea who he is, but I take pictures and it lasts for, literally, seconds,” Mr. Trump told reporters Friday. “I take sometimes hundreds of pictures a day,” he added, “and that night I was taking hundreds of pictures. So I just don’t know. Now I did sit with the president for probably two hours, but he has tested negative. So that’s good.”

Only afterward did the report about Mr. Forster emerge. Mr. Forster had sat at the table with Mr. Trump, suggesting a more prolonged exposure. In the statement released by the White House shortly before midnight on Friday, Cmdr. Sean P. Conley, the president’s physician, said he would monitor the president after his encounters with the infected Brazilians.

“The president’s exposure to the first individual was extremely limited (photograph, handshake), and though he spent more time in closer proximity to the second case, all interactions occurred before any symptom onset,” Commander Conley wrote. “These interactions would be categorized as LOW risk for transmission per C.D.C. guidelines, and as such, there is no indication for home quarantine at this time.

“Additionally,” he added, “given the president himself remains without symptoms, testing for COVID-19 is not currently indicated.”

Hours later, Trump and his doctor made up a lie that Trump has already tested negative for  COVID-19

Since the start of Mr. Trump’s presidency, supporters and hanger-ons have gravitated to Mar-a-Lago, paying up to $200,000 for membership in the club-- and for proximity to the president. Mr. Trump frequently holds court on the patio at dinnertime, shaking hands with members and waving them over to his table.

But the club has been criticized for lax security practices. Last year, a Chinese woman carrying a malware-laced device made it onto the grounds before she was arrested, prompting a rare admonishment from the Secret Service, which effectively blamed the club for porous admission policies.

Despite the coronavirus, the president has not changed his practice of greeting guests at the club, according to a member. Mr. Trump believes his willingness to shake hands and connect with supporters helped propel him into office and the club’s unwritten rule is that those who love him or trade on connections with him can come into contact with him.

This rule was on display last weekend in the club’s ballroom, when the president hosted both Mr. Bolsonaro for dinner and the extended Trump family for Ms. Guilfoyle’s birthday, the two events overlapping to some extent. As Mr. Trump escorted Mr. Bolsonaro into the club, a reporter asked if newly reported coronavirus cases in the Washington area made him worry that it was getting closer to the White House.

“No,” he said with Mr. Bolsonaro at his side, “I’m not concerned at all.”

And then the two went inside.

Among the guests on hand was a who’s who of Mr. Trump’s world, according to pictures and video posted on social media, including Vice President Mike Pence, the president’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York police commissioner recently pardoned by Mr. Trump.

In addition to Donald Trump Jr. and Ms. Guilfoyle, there were other family members on hand, including Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Eric Trump and his wife, Lara Trump, and Tiffany Trump. Melania Trump did not make the trip to Florida.

Mr. Bolsonaro took photos with the president and others, including Mr. Pence and Mr. Giuliani. “We’re going to have a nice dinner,” Mr. Trump said as he introduced the Brazilian president to Ivanka Trump and Mr. Carlson.

As it happens, Mr. Carlson was concerned that the president was not taking the coronavirus seriously enough and talked with him about it during the evening, according to a person informed about the conversation. Two days later, on his Fox show, Mr. Carlson warned viewers: “People you trust, people you probably voted for, have spent weeks minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem.”

But the mood otherwise that Saturday night was light. Ms. Guilfoyle, wearing a thigh-hugging gold sequin dress and set to turn 50 two days later, was toasted by one member of the Trump family after another amid purple and pink lighting suffusing the room.

“You work so hard for the president,” Ivanka Trump told her. “It’s been amazing to get to know you,” Mr. Kushner added. Mr. Graham told her that “you represent everything Bernie Sanders hates” and promised to get her a tax cut. With a D.J. playing music, the guests danced a conga line and enjoyed the evening.

Melania, likeliest to live through the Trump Pandemic

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.

What Happens When Elderly Officials In The U.S. Start Dying From COVID-19, The Way They Are In Iran?

CoronavirusCzar Pence by Nancy Ohanian

CNN reported that Trumpanzee is "dodging responsibility as the coronavirus outbreak morphs into a global pandemic swiftly spreading across America and stock markets tank. He's instead accusing Democrats and the media of inflaming the crisis. The deflection campaign is a fresh example of Trump deploying his trusted method for winning his battles: flinging disinformation, alternative facts and biting attacks at his enemies. But the President's efforts to create an alternative reality are being badly outpaced by the facts of an emergency that defies political pressure."

So... the mainstream media is finally starting to recognize-- in this case Peter Baker of the NY Times that Señor Trumpanzee can't tweet away-- or gaslight into oblivion-- COVID-19. "Defending against criticism of his handling of the coronavirus, President Trump suggested the other day that he could hardly have been expected to be ready for such an unexpected crisis. 'Who would have thought?' he asked during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nerve center for the government’s response to the outbreak. 'Who would have thought we would even be having the subject?' Actually, quite a few people would have thought, and did-- including the officials in his own White House who were in charge of preparing for just such a pandemic only to have their office shut down in a reorganization in 2018. 'The threat of pandemic flu is the No. 1 health security concern,' one of the officials said the day before that happened two years ago. 'Are we ready to respond? I fear the answer is no.' For a president who lives in the moment, rarely planning too far ahead, the coronavirus has proved to be a leadership challenge he was not prepared for either. The outbreak that has rattled the nation does not respond to Mr. Trump’s favorite instruments of power: It cannot be cowed by Twitter posts, it cannot be shot down by drones, it cannot be overcome by party solidarity, it cannot be overpowered by campaign rally chants."

Baker noted that Trump, "who is at his strongest politically when he has a human enemy to attack, has seemed less certain of how to take on an invisible killer. The role of calming natural leader is not one that has come easily as he struggles to find the balance between public reassurance and Panglossian dismissiveness. He has predicted that the virus will 'miraculously' disappear on its own with warmer weather, suggested a vaccine will be available soon and insisted anyone who wants to be tested can be-- all overstated or inaccurate."

He has expressed an astonishing lack of knowledge while at the same time claiming to be a medical savant. He has treated the crisis as a partisan battle, wearing his red Keep America Great campaign cap to the C.D.C. and calling the governor presiding over the state with the highest death toll a “snake.” He even admitted that he wanted to leave passengers stranded on a cruise ship rather than see statistics for the number of cases on American soil go up because it would look bad.

“If we really want to talk about what is going to potentially create panic in this country, it’s an administration that’s just not being straight with the American public about the extent of this epidemic and the real-life consequences that could be put upon Americans,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said Sunday on Face the Nation on CBS.

Dr. Jonathan S. Reiner, a prominent cardiologist who treated former Vice President Dick Cheney and wrote a book with him, said he was convinced that the Trump administration failed to move more quickly to test for the virus after it emerged in China because the White House did not want to admit the scope of the threat.

“When the story is finally written,” he said on Sunday, “we’ll come to understand that tens of thousands of lives were placed at risk because of a political decision made by the president.”

Not millions? We'll see. Trump is continuing to make light of the pandemic with a schedule that has included nothing but fundraisers and golfing and with tweets like this one Monday morning:

As if exposure of the top echelons of his government to COVID-19 at CPAC and AIPAC wasn't bad enough, many of the ones who need to be watched closely, were at a lavish birthday party at Mar-A-Lago for for Don, Jr's girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, including Trump cronies Mike Pence, Lindsey Graham, Rudy Giuliani, Tucker Carlson and Matt Gaetz, although we have no confirmation that Gaetz was wearing his gas-mask.

[Trumpanzee] has also taken a business-as-usual approach to the rest of his schedule, refusing to cancel campaign rallies, fund-raisers or social events even as other large gatherings of Americans are scrubbed. Asked by a reporter on Saturday night if he was worried that infections were getting closer to the White House, Mr. Trump said, “No, I’m not concerned at all.”

...Trump happily introduced his visitor, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, to Mr. Carlson and other guests in a video shared on social media, boasting that he “gave him a good gift” by not imposing tariffs on Brazil and “that made him much more popular.” Mr. Bolsonaro laughed and agreed. A smiling Mr. Pence turned to the camera and playfully said, “Sí.”

The first lady did not make the trip to Florida, but she faced a fiddling-while-Rome-burns blowback of her own over the weekend after posting online photographs of herself in a hard hat overseeing the privately financed construction of a new tennis pavilion at the White House.

“I encourage everyone who chooses to be negative & question my work at the @WhiteHouse to take time and contribute something good & productive in their own communities,” she wrote on Twitter on Saturday, adding her anti-bullying slogan, “#BeBest.”

By the president’s own account, the coronavirus has been an education for him. He has acknowledged that “I didn’t know people died from the flu”-- tens of thousands, in fact, each year in the United States-- even though, as the Washington Post pointed out, his own grandfather died of influenza during the 1918 epidemic.

But he has credited himself with instinctive understanding of the science. “I like this stuff. I really get it,” he said at the C.D.C. on Friday. “People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

Mr. Trump rejected criticism of the slow distribution of test kits, framing it in terms evoking his battle against impeachment. “The tests are all perfect,” he told reporters, “like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect, right?”-- a reference to the rough transcript of his telephone call with Ukraine’s president that led to his own impeachment for abuse of power.

The president’s less-than-perfect pronouncements, however, left public health officials straining to reconcile them on the Sunday talk shows. Asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” about a White House aide’s assertion that the coronavirus had been “contained,” Dr. Jerome M. Adams, the surgeon general, said: “Well, this is a novel virus. It’s a new situation. And the messaging, quite frankly, is hard.”

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also appeared to walk back the president’s claim that “anyone who wants a test can get a test,” saying on Fox News Sunday that it would actually be up to a doctor.

Mr. Trump has become such a polarizing figure that even when he is not necessarily wrong, many do not trust him. On Sean Hannity’s Fox News show last week, he called the World Health Organization’s estimated fatality rate of 3.4 percent “a false number,” saying “my hunch” was that it would be under 1 percent. It sounded as if he were substituting his uneducated “hunch” for the judgment of professionals.

But in fact, he was reflecting what he had been told by health experts, including Dr. Fauci and Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the C.D.C. director, who have concluded that once the full scope of unreported infections is known, the number of deaths will most likely represent a smaller share, possibly “considerably less than” 1 percent. The W.H.O. has also said the rate may fall.

Still, at his appearance at the C.D.C., Mr. Trump had no explanation for why his White House shut down the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense established at the National Security Council in 2016 by President Barack Obama after the 2014 Ebola outbreak, stammering to suggest the coronavirus had been a surprise.

“Well, I just don’t think-- I just don’t think that somebody is going to-- without seeing something, like we saw something happening in China,” Mr. Trump said. “As soon as they saw that happening, they essentially-- not from the White House. I mean, you know, we don’t need a lab in the White House. But they saw something happening.”

Elizabeth Cameron set up the global health security directorate at the White House for Mr. Obama before turning it over to Rear Adm. R. Timothy Ziemer, who ran it for Mr. Trump until May 2018, when he was pushed out and the directorate folded into other parts of the National Security Council. Had it still been around, it would have been charged with preparing for exactly the situation now facing the country.

“I think it would have made a difference,” Ms. Cameron said on Sunday. “Monitoring and preparing for every eventuality and having a person and a directorate accountable for that is really important and could have been important in this case.”

Politico's Nancy Cook noted that some on Team Trumpanzee "are talking up the opportunity to finally achieve stricter border security, wider tax cuts and reduced reliance on Chinese manufacturing amid the spread of the coronavirus throughout the U.S. Some officials see it as a narrow opening to offset the political damage from the coronavirus outbreak and deliver-- or at least, talk about-- some of the president’s longstanding promises... Shutting down borders or cutting taxes would not halt the spread of the virus, which is now being spread person-to-person within the U.S. and which scientists are still struggling to understand. The ideas, however, are central to Trump’s popularity with his base heading his 2020 re-election race, and the outbreak gives both the president and his top aides a new space to re-introduce their favorite approaches amid the uncertainty." And, right on cue, the banksters-- may they all catch it and die-- are demanding deregulation to fight coronavirus. "As coronavirus panic hits the U.S., a financial lobbying group is attempting to use the crisis to push through the deregulation of its industry. The Bank Policy Institute (BPI), a Washington-based lobbying organization representing many of the nation’s largest banks, released a set of proposals this week, the most important of which recommends that the Federal Reserve lower capital requirements to zero. This would mean banks could lend an unlimited amount without having any assets or wealth to back it up. It also advocated relaxing the so-called 'stress tests' that force banks to show that they can withstand economic shocks. This, it claims, would help America fight the COVID-19 virus. The report’s lead author was BPI CEO Greg Baer, former Managing Director of JP Morgan Chase. The recommendations have been condemned as incoherent and 'transparently opportunistic' by Jeremy Krass of the University of Michigan School of Business. 'The whole idea of capital requirements and stress-testing banks is to make sure they have enough cushion to absorb losses' in a period of economic crisis, Kress told the Washington Post. Now that the economy has gone into a sudden shock, Wall Street wants those regulations lifted."

Rumors are rampant in Iran that all the top mullahs and ayatollahs have flown to Kish, a remote island in the Persian Gulf, and that all commercial flights to the island have been cancelled. Washington Post reporters Felicia Sonmez, Kim Bellware and Juliet Eilperin wrote about the worldwide freakout, noting that "uncertainty continued to permeate the response effort, amid muddled directives from the Trump administration and reports of some patients unable to access testing.

"The government of Iran is being as dishonest-- and incompetent-- about the pandemic as Trump is. And now Iran's government is reaping what it was sewn. The Atlantic reported yesterday that the coronavirus is killing members of the government, including higher-ups. "Soon we learned of three other senior officials who not only contracted the virus but were killed by it: Mohammad Mirmohammadi, a member of a senior advisory council to Iran's supreme leader, and Hossein Sheikholeslam and Hadi Khosrowshahi, both former high-level diplomats. Mohammad Sadr, another member of the council, announced his infection last week, as did Ebtekar’s fellow cabinet member Reza Rahmani. Recently, the speaker of parliament said 23 of his fellow members of parliament had tested positive. Two of them, Mohammad Ali Ramezani (February 29) and Fatemeh Rehber (March 7), have died."

I'm assuming that the Iranian officials dying are old. You know were else there are tons of deadwood old officials? THat's right, DC. And it's isn't just AIPAC and CPAC members who are scared out of their wits. I'm hearing that Pelosi is looking for consensus to shut down Congress, maybe as soon as this week. (Why bother? It's already too late.) NBC's Kasie Hunt and Alex Moe reported over the weekend on personal congressional anxiety. "'Members are very nervous,' a senior Democratic leadership aide said. 'There's a lot of concern that members could bring it home.' Another source said members from districts and states where the virus is spreading are also concerned about being able to remain at home to help handle the crisis."

NBC reported that members are pressuring Pelosi about a recess but I was told by one of Pelosi's congressional allies two weeks ago, that Pelosi had been working on a recess in late February, although "some members were urging Congress to stay the course to "show leadership in a time of great anxiety" and conduct oversight of the Trump administration's response.

Members should "follow the very advice we're giving the country: wash our hands, avoid contact with anyone exhibiting symptoms, stay home if we're sick and ensure our staffs are doing the same," one lawmaker told NBC News.

But the virus is spreading rapidly, and the first case in Washington, D.C., was announced Saturday night.

The Capitol building is open to scheduled public tours-- tourists travel from all over the world to visit, and the Capitol Hill office buildings are open to members of the public, who can freely walk the hallways as long as they pass through a basic magnetometer screening.

Pelosi so far has been careful not to sound alarmist and has continued to rely on the advice of the Capitol physician in making decisions about the grounds. The top four congressional leaders in both parties-- Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) Pelosi and Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)-- met with top Capitol building staff to discuss the coronavirus last week.

Pelosi told reporters Thursday: "You cannot test everybody who comes in the front door of the Capitol. [You actually can-- and should.]

"It is unreasonable and probably in some ways not focused enough on what needs to be focused on," she said, adding that the office of the Capitol physician would be making the decisions on protocols.

Congress as a whole could be more susceptible to dangerous symptoms of the coronavirus than the public in general. Sixty-six senators are over age 60-- two-thirds of the body-- with more than a quarter over 70. The average age of House members is 57.6 years, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Many members "are concerned, particularly older members and a number who have conditions that make them more susceptible," a source said.

The stock market opening was scary yesterday-- down 7%-- but imagine how much scarier it will be when announcements are made that some elderly famous people have died-- especially politicians. 37 members of Congress were born before 1945, making them over 75 years old. Here are the half dozen oldest:

• Don Young (R-AK)- 87
• Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)- 87
• Chuck Grassley (R-IA)- 87
• Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI)- 87
• Richard Shelby (R-AL)- 86
• James Inhofe (R-OK)- 86

How would Congress go on without them? I asked a few of the sharpest minds running for Congress this cycle. Lauren Ashcraft, the New York City progressive taking on Carolyn Maloney in a district that spans parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens told me that "Coronavirus exposes all of the holes in our system that risk our lives for profit.  Only 10 states have sick leave laws. People work through illnesses so they don’t lose their homes. Uninsured people seeking testing or treatment for coronavirus will get massive hospital bills. We don’t have enough care providers, because people are afraid of accumulating 6 figures of student debt. We deserve better, and in order to get there, we need to elect people-powered representatives who fight and advocate for us rather than just co-sponsor bills."

She's right-- and she's going to get nothing but support from Arizona progressive Eva Putzova. "In the face of the coronavirus threat," Eva told me this morning, "it is clearer than ever that we need universal healthcare like the expanded Medicare for All. People need to have full access to medical care without having to worry about cost. We also need universal paid sick leave for all workers so they can stay at home without fear of losing their jobs. Otherwise people will go to work even if they are infected and spread the virus to others. Finally, we need a new President and a new Congress that believes in science, fully funds public health research, and does not cater to corporate interests who are only concerned with profit at the expense of human lives."

McKayla Wilkes, the progressive taking on Steny Hoyer in southern Maryland, has been talking with voters about this pandemic and how badly the Trump regime has responded-- but its a symptom of a systemic problem as well. "While Trump has certainly botched the COVID-19 virus response," she told me today, "the slow devolution of our healthcare system has been a multi-decade project. Insurance industry, pharmaceutical companies, and private hospitals run on razor-thin profit margins, and are in a position to deny care if there is no financial incentive to do so. Unfortunately politicians like my opponent Steny Hoyer have, over time, given these companies the keys to our healthcare system. Vaccines, protective wear, and even hand sanitizer, is rationed to those who can afford it, as opposed to those who need it."

Rachel Ventura also feels that the outbreak "exemplifies why the U.S. needs a Medicare for All system so those who get sick can go to the doctor and receive the treatment they need, or be quarantined so as not to infect others. Additionally, it illustrates why we need paid medical leave or standardized sick days so people who get sick can afford to take a few days off of work. Under the current system a person could contract the coronavirus and go to work in the fast food industry or a clerk position and potentially infect hundreds of other people before their 8-hour work shift is over. Often times the short-sighted conservative mindset is one that worries about self interest without worrying about the good of the community as a whole. The COVID-19 outbreak demonstrates why it is important to consider the community as a whole and the health of our community. If one of us gets sick, we could all get sick. Lastly, Congress has allocated 8 billion dollars now toward the disease. Over $300 million will be used to make a vaccine. Moderna, Johnson and Johnson, and Inovio race to create a vaccine and rake in profits, whereas Bernie Sanders has called for the vaccine to be free to the public. If tax dollars are subsidizing the vaccine then it should be available at no cost. We must have a system to incentivizes being healthy and not one that focuses on profits from the sick." She continued:

It is unfortunate that Donald Trump has categorized the two most serious modern crises, the climate crisis and now the COVID-19 outbreak as hoaxes. Scientists have been warning about the outbreak for over a month now and a recent report shows that we won’t have the facilities or staff to handle the crisis. The 700 vacancies at the CDC from Trump’s hiring freeze only worsen the situation.

According to Dr. Specht, a biologist and engineer who serves as the director of science and technology for The Good Food Institute, we could be out of hospital beds and protective masks by May 8th. This outbreak if not contained could turn into a large-scale pandemic that puts Americans from all walks of life at risk. With an adequately funded Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Medicare for All System, the United States would be better suited to combat the growing epidemic.

Jim Harper, a progressive Democrat running in the blue district near Chicago, noted that "At every turn, Trump works to undermine confidence in government and handcuff government's ability to confront big problems. This crisis shows why we need strong institutions and leadership, and, of course, the President and his enablers in Congress are derelict in their duties. Lives are at stake, but Trump is far more concerned with the stock market than supporting our public health infrastructure. His behavior is immoral and shameful."

Shahid Buttar, the progressive who emerged from California's jungle primary as the alternative to Pelosi, told us that "Trump’s approach to the coronavirus has been to bury his head in the sand and continue his habit of answering any question with lies. Rather than blithely dismiss its potential impacts, a responsible leader would have started by ensuring that immigrants could access healthcare without fearing ICE deportation-- to prevent accelerating contagion, if not to advance civil rights. Short of universal healthcare, the administration could also make emergency funds available to ensure that Americans suffering symptoms can get tested. Supporting paid family and sick leave would also help protect public health by keeping sick people out of the workplace, and settings where their dedication to feed their families currently places their neighbors at risk."

Queens New Dem Greg Meeks doesn't rock any boats as long as his payoffs keep coming in. His progressive opponent, Shaniyat Chowdhury, is the opposite-- no corruption/lots of boat shaking. "While Trump continues to ignore the pandemic of the coronavirus," he told us this morning, "we should be talking about this being all the reason why Medicare for All is very important. It costs thousands of dollars to even get tested for the virus. The people who are most likely to get the virus are seniors. Joe Biden was on MSNBC last night, saying he would veto Medicare for All even with bipartisan support. Both him and Trump want to cut Social Security. They do not want seniors to have health care covered for vision, hearing, or dental. The only candidate who wants to guarantee health care so everyone can see a doctor, is Bernie Sanders. We need to elect someone who will work in the interest of the American people and not the health insurance CEO’s."