When Will People Start Calling It What It Is-- Trump Genocide?

Poof! into thin air- by Nancy Ohanian

There are a lot of ways to interpret the data Worldometers puts out on the pandemic. One that I find useful is to look at daily new cases, which generally track future mortality. Cases per million residents is also important since it's otherwise pointless to compare a state with very few people to a state with many millions of people. But however you look at it, when it comes to U.S. states, the ones that have followed Trump's denialism are generally the ones in the worst shape.

Yesterday, for example, 16 states had more than a thousand new cases. Eleven have Republican governors and of the 5 with Democratic governors, two-- North Carolina and Louisiana-- have Trumpist state legislatures that have interfered with their ability to protect the state from the pandemic.

• Texas +9,750 (15,279 cases per million Texans)
• Florida +9,007 (21,901 cases per million Floridians)
• California +7,878 (12,703 cases per million Californians
• Georgia +4,066 (17,552 cases per million Georgians)
• Arizona +3,212 (23,907 cases per million Arizonans)
• Tennessee +3,088 (15,516 cases per million Tennesseans)
• North Carolina +2,012 (11,691 cases per million North Carolinians)
• Illinois +1,980 (14,214 cases per million Illinoians)
• Alabama +1,961 (17,891 cases per million Alabamans)
• Louisiana +1,799 (25,013 cases per million Lousianans)
• Missouri +1,547 (8,295 cases per million Missourans)
• Ohio +1,531 (7,800 cases per million Buckeyes)
• South Carolina +1,444 (17,289 cases per million South Carolinians)
• Nevada +1,264 (15,612 cases per million Nevadans)
• Maryland +1,169 (14,613 cases per million Marylanders)
• Mississippi +1,168 (19,739 cases per million Mississipans)

Most Americans blame Trump and knee-jerk Trumpist governors, particularly Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Greg Abbott (R-TX), Doug Ducey (R-AZ), Brain Kemp (R-GA) and Bill Lee (R-TN). But there were actual plans-- or semi-plans-- within the Trump White House that could have averted the catastrophe... and were sabotaged because some didn't want to see the catastrophe averted. Huh? Yep... there were some with genocidal thoughts dancing in their twisted brains. On the face, it looks like the person who needs to be tried is Jared Kushner-- and maybe he does; but not by himself.

Kushner headed "a secret project to devise a comprehensive plan that would have massively ramped up and coordinated testing for COVID-19 at the federal level," wrote Katherine Eban. He did a terrible job, but it can't all be chalked up to the incompetence that is his trademark.

Six months into the pandemic, the United States continues to suffer the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the developed world. Considerable blame belongs to a federal response that offloaded responsibility for the crucial task of testing to the states. The irony is that, after assembling the team that came up with an aggressive and ambitious national testing plan, Kushner then appears to have decided, for reasons that remain murky, to scrap its proposal. Today, as governors and mayors scramble to stamp out epidemics plaguing their populations, philanthropists at the Rockefeller Foundation are working to fill the void and organize enough testing to bring the nationwide epidemic under control.

Inside the White House, over much of March and early April, Kushner’s handpicked group of young business associates, which included a former college roommate, teamed up with several top experts from the diagnostic-testing industry. Together, they hammered out the outline of a national testing strategy. The group-- working night and day, using the encrypted platform WhatsApp-- emerged with a detailed plan obtained by Vanity Fair.

Rather than have states fight each other for scarce diagnostic tests and limited lab capacity, the plan would have set up a system of national oversight and coordination to surge supplies, allocate test kits, lift regulatory and contractual roadblocks, and establish a widespread virus surveillance system by the fall, to help pinpoint subsequent outbreaks.

The solutions it proposed weren’t rocket science-- or even comparable to the dauntingly complex undertaking of developing a new vaccine. Any national plan to address testing deficits would likely be more on the level of “replicating UPS for an industry,” said Dr. Mike Pellini, the managing partner of Section 32, a technology and health care venture capital fund. “Imagine if UPS or FedEx didn’t have infrastructure to connect all the dots. It would be complete chaos.”

The plan crafted at the White House, then, set out to connect the dots. Some of those who worked on the plan were told that it would be presented to President Trump and likely announced in the Rose Garden in early April. “I was beyond optimistic,” said one participant. “My understanding was that the final document would make its way to the president over that weekend” and would result in a “significant announcement.”

But no nationally coordinated testing strategy was ever announced. The plan, according to the participant, “just went poof into thin air.”

The White House did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request to interview Mr. Kushner or to a detailed list of questions.

This summer has illustrated in devastating detail the human and economic cost of not launching a system of national testing, which most every other industrialized nation has done. South Korea serves as the gold standard, with innovative “phone booth” and drive-through testing sites, results that get returned within 24 hours, and supportive isolation for those who test positive, including food drop-offs.

In the U.S., by contrast, cable news and front pages have been dominated by images of miles-long lines of cars in scorching Arizona and Texas heat, their drivers waiting hours for scarce diagnostic tests, and desperate Sunbelt mayors pleading in vain for federal help to expand testing capacity. In short, a “freaking debacle,” as one top public health expert put it.

We are just weeks away from dangerous and controversial school reopenings and the looming fall flu season, which the aborted plan had accounted for as a critical deadline for establishing a national system for quickly identifying new outbreaks and hot spots.

Without systematic testing, “We might as well put duct tape over our eyes, cotton in our ears, and hide under the bed,” said Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux, research director for the Harvard Medical School Program in Global Public Policy.

Though President Trump likes to trumpet America’s sheer number of tests, that metric does not account for the speed of results or the response to them, said Dr. June-Ho Kim, a public health researcher at Ariadne Labs, a collaboration between Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who leads a team studying outlier countries with successful COVID-19 responses. “If you’re pedaling really hard and not going anywhere, it’s all for naught.”

With no bankable national plan, the effort to create one has fallen to a network of high-level civilians and nongovernmental organizations. The most visible effort is led by the Rockefeller Foundation and its soft-spoken president, Dr. Rajiv Shah. Focused and determinedly apolitical, Shah, 47, is now steering a widening and bipartisan coalition that includes three former FDA commissioners, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, a movie star, and 27 American cities, states, and tribal nations, all toward the far-reaching goal of getting to 30 million COVID-19 tests a week by autumn, up from the current rate of roughly 5.5 million a week.

“We know what has to be done: broad and ubiquitous testing tied to broad and effective contact tracing,” until a vaccine can be widely administered, Shah told Vanity Fair. “It takes about five minutes for anyone to understand that is the only path forward to reopening and recovering.” Without that, he said, “Our country is going to be stuck facing a series of rebound epidemics that are highly consequential in a really deleterious way.”

Countries that have successfully contained their outbreaks have empowered scientists to lead the response. But when Jared Kushner set out in March to solve the diagnostic-testing crisis, his efforts began not with public health experts but with bankers and billionaires. They saw themselves as the “A-team of people who get shit done,” as one participant proclaimed in a March Politico article.

Kushner’s brain trust included Adam Boehler, his summer college roommate who now serves as chief executive officer of the newly created U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, a government development bank that makes loans overseas. Other group members included Nat Turner, the cofounder and CEO of Flatiron Health, which works to improve cancer treatment and research.

A Morgan Stanley banker with no notable health care experience, Jason Yeung took a leave of absence to join the task force. Along the way, the group reached out for advice to billionaires, such as Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen.

The group’s collective lack of relevant experience was far from the only challenge it faced. The obstacles arrayed against any effective national testing effort included: limited laboratory capacity, supply shortages, huge discrepancies in employers’ abilities to cover testing costs for their employees, an enormous number of uninsured Americans, and a fragmented diagnostic-testing marketplace.

According to one participant, the group did not coordinate its work with a diagnostic-testing team at Health and Human Services, working under Admiral Brett Giroir, who was appointed as the nation’s “testing czar” on March 12. Kushner’s group was “in their own bubble,” said the participant. “Other agencies were in their own bubbles. The circles never overlapped.”

As it evolved, Kushner’s group called on the help of several top diagnostic-testing experts. Together, they worked around the clock, and through a forest of WhatsApp messages. The effort of the White House team was “apolitical,” said the participant, and undertaken “with the nation’s best interests in mind.”

And for all Kushner's tragic flaws, the plan was a good one, with the federal government coordinating distribution of test kits, overseeing a national contact-tracing infrastructure, blowing out contracts with laboratories and incompetent companies that couldn't deliver testing results but, wrote Eban, "the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it-- efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically-- and erroneously, it would turn out-- predicted the virus would soon fade away. Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

Eban wrote that "that logic may have swayed Kushner. Her expert source told her that 'It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out.'" Trump never delivered any part of the plan and instead shifted the problem of diagnostic testing almost entirely to individual states, abrogating all responsibility and telling each of the 50 states that they were on their own-- "a recipe for disaster," wrote Eban, "not just in Democratic-governed areas but across the country."

Second Spike by Nancy Ohanian

There's no doubt the decision was ultimately made by Trump with the advise of Stephen Miller, his Minister of Genocide. They thought they were smart and that lots of dead folks in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Connecticut would be a plus, especially since the pandemic was hitting minority communities hardest. But today, none of those states are being hit with large numbers of new cases or large numbers of new deaths. Trump was probably going to lose reelection anyway but he's going to drag the GOP down with him because of the way they all handled the pandemic, especially in the states where his brain trust thought it wouldn't speed to. And the most new deaths on Thursday and Friday?

• Texas- 617
• Florida- 508
• California- 305
• Arizona- 240
• Georgia- 110
• Mississippi- 100
• South Carolina- 97

Thursday and Friday saw 29 new deaths in Massachusetts, 28 in New York, 31 in New Jersey, 15 in Maryland and 7 in Connecticut. The death rates are rapidly declining in those states-- and rapidly increasing in the 6 Trump states (+ California) above.

Trump, Hoping To Get People's Mind Off His Economic Disaster, Floated The Idea Of Postponing The Elections

Maybe he just wanted to get peoples' minds off the worst economic report in American history, but Trump's tweet (above) about postponing the election didn't go over well. Now every Republican running in November is being asked if they support Trump's call for postponing the election.

Meanwhile, back in the Senate, the Trumpist dysfunction has caused a breakdown in government's ability to meet the most basic needs of the American people. Late Wednesday evening, before the dire economic news broke, Washington Post reporters Erica Werner, Jeff Stein, Seung Min Kim and Rachel Bade wrote that "Negotiations on a new coronavirus relief bill hit an impasse on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, leaving no clear path forward even as millions of Americans face a sudden drop in unemployment benefits, and the economy teeters on the brink. A meeting between top White House officials and Democratic leaders ended with no agreement on extending emergency unemployment benefits that expire Friday or on reviving a moratorium on evictions that lapsed last week. That means some 20 million jobless Americans will lose $600 weekly enhanced unemployment benefits that Congress approved in March, which could send the economy reeling."

That, as much as anything, defines Trumpism for us... or against us. Though the House Democrats passed a $3 trillion package that would avert the coming catastrophe Trump and McConnell are leading the country into, "Each side," wrote The Post team, "said the other was to blame for the failure. Paying the price will be the unemployed at a moment of deep uncertainty and fear, with coronavirus cases spiking and states pulling back on reopening as deaths near 150,000 in the United States. The talks could get back on track in coming days, but the signs Wednesday were not promising. 'I don’t know that there is another plan, other than no deal,' said White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. 'Which will allow unemployment, enhanced unemployment, I might add, to expire... No deal certainly becomes a greater possibility the longer these negotiations go... We are nowhere close to a deal.'"

“Our Republican friends don’t seem to come close to meeting the moment. … They’ve put us up against the wall. We have two cliffs because they wouldn’t negotiate for months,” Schumer said.

“They’re tied in a total knot because of the disunity in their caucus, because of their inability to gather votes, because the president says one thing one day, he says another thing the other day,” Schumer added. "We want to come back and keep talking to them. But they don’t have anything to say.”

...Earlier Wednesday Trump had called for a quick fix to address the unemployment benefits and eviction moratorium, saying other issues could wait.

“The rest of it, we’re so far apart, we don’t care, we really don’t care,” Trump told reporters outside the White House, referring to divisions between the two parties.

But Democrats called that approach wholly inadequate.

“We don’t know why the Republicans come around here with a skinny bill that does nothing to address really what’s happening with the virus, and has a little of this and a little of that. We’re not accepting that," Pelosi said. "We have to have the comprehensive full bill.”

McConnell has not embraced the piecemeal approach either, insisting any bill must include a five-year liability shield for businesses, healthcare providers and others-- a non-starter for Democrats.

More than 20 million Americans remain unemployed and have been receiving a $600 weekly emergency unemployment payment that Congress approved in March, on top of whatever benefit their state offers. That extra federal benefit runs out Friday.

Democrats want to extend the extra jobless payment at its current level. The Senate GOP bill released Monday proposes cutting it to $200 weekly until states can phase in a new system that would aim to replace 70 percent of a worker’s wages before unemployment.

Underscoring the continued need, the head of the Federal Reserve said Wednesday that rising coronavirus cases since mid-June are beginning to weigh on the economy, based on consumer credit card spending and hotel occupancy data as well as some labor market indicators.

“On balance, it looks like the data are pointing to a slowing in the pace of the recovery," Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said during a news conference Wednesday. "I want to stress it’s too early to say both how large that is and how sustained it will be.”

Powell said funding from the $2 trillion Cares Act passed in March was key to keeping people in their homes and jobs. He pointed to the success of the small-business Paycheck Protection Program for getting money directly to businesses that couldn’t necessarily have been saved through a Fed lending program.

“Lending is a particular tool, and we’re using it very aggressively, but fiscal policy is essential here," Powell said. “As I’ve said, more will be needed from all of us, and I see Congress is negotiating now over a new package, and I think that’s a good thing."

...Some Republicans don’t want to spend any more money at all, and there are deep divisions over the $1 trillion bill McConnell released Monday, which proposes to send a new round of $1,200 stimulus checks to individual Americans and inject more money into the Paycheck Protection Program, among other provisions. McConnell said in his PBS interview that there are about 20 GOP senators who would prefer to take no additional action because of deficit concerns.

Trump's only concerns seem to be personal-- legislating a 100% deduction for fat cat restaurant meals, which would result in millions of dollars added to his hotels' and restaurants' bottom lines, and a $1.8 billion fund that would keep the FBI in a building Trump fears would otherwise become a hotel that competes with his own. This guy should be tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail-- and then brought back for a trial. And the pandemic that most of the world has gotten a handle on and that Trump has made into one of the worst catastrophe's to ever hit America... just keeps rolling on. Yesterday there were 68,569 more confirmed cases reported nationwide, bringing the U.S. total cases to 4,634,985. Most of the states with the worst daily reports, once again, are state with Trumpist governors who have followed his insane denialism and who seem to have embraced his tragic incompetence as though it was a policy-- while their constituents continue contracting the disease more rapidly than anyplace else on earth. These were the dozen governors-- actually 10 governors and 2 state legislatures-- who gave their states the worst one day new cases yesterday:

• Ron DeSantis (R-FL) +9,956 (21,482 cases per million Floridians)
• Greg Abbott (R-TX) +8,843 (14,943 cases per million Texans)
• Gavin Newsom (D-CA) +8,174 (12,503 cases per million Californians)
• Brian Kemp (R-GA) +3,963 (17,169 cases per million Georgians)
• Doug Ducey (R-AZ) +2,525 (23,465 cases per million Arizonans)
• The North Carolina Republican legislature +2,588 (11,499 cases per million North Carolinians)
• Bill Lee (R-TN) +2,049 (15,063 cases per million Tennesseans)
• Kay Ivey (R-AL) +1,980 (17,491 cases per million Alabamans)
• Tate Reeves (R-MS) +1,775 (19,347 cases per million Mississippians)
• Henry McMaster (R-SC) +1,726 (17,009 cases per million South Carolinians)
• The Louisiana Republican legislature +1,708 (24,626 cases per million Louisianans)
• Mike Parson (R-MO) +1,712 (8,043 cases per million Missourans)

I'd Wager That You Live In A State Where Most People Know Trump Is Doing A Bad Job Confronting The Pandemic

Badge of Honor by Nancy Ohanian

You almost definitely live in a state where most people are dissatisfied with Trump's handling of the pandemic. How can I be so certain? The odds are with me-- overwhelmingly. Majorities of people in only 9 small-population states-- Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska (which has one of the worst outbreaks in the country due to Trumpist policies), North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming-- think the Trumpist regime is doing a good job. The first number represents satisfaction and the second number, dissatisfaction:

• Alabama- 46% to 52% (2,710 cases per million)
• Alaska- 39% to 59% (550 cases per million)
• Arizona- 38% to 61% (2,104 cases per million)
• Arkansas- 51% to 47% (1,809 cases per million)
• California- 25% to 73% (2,232 cases per million)
• Colorado- 35% to 63% (4,027 cases per million)
• Connecticut- 32% to 67% (10,977 cases per million)
• Delaware- 32% to 67% (8,612 cases per million)
• Florida- 42% to 56% (2,266 cases per million) [fake statistics]
• Georgia- 43% to 54% (3,830 cases per million)
• Hawaii- 28% to 70% (457 cases per million)
• Idaho- 46% to 52% (1,418 cases per million)
• Illinois- 35% to 54% (8,103 cases per million)
• Indiana- 45% to 53% (4,477 cases per million)
• Iowa- 40% to 58% (5,125 cases per million)
• Kansas- 47% to 49% (2,977 cases per million)
• Kentucky- 52% to 46% (1,855 cases per million)
• Louisiana- 44% to 54% (7,852 cases per million)
• Maine- 40% to 58% (1,396 cases per million)
• Maryland- 27% to 70% (7,200 cases per million)
• Massachusetts- 26% to 73% (13,070 cases per million)
• Michigan- 39% to 59% (5,358 cases per million)
• Minnesota- 39% to 63% (3,227 cases per million)
• Mississippi- 49% to 48% (4,107 cases per million)
• Missouri- 45% to 53% (1,899 cases per million)
• Montana- 46% to 52% (448 cases per million)
• Nebraska- 51% to 46% (5,906 cases per million)
• Nevada- 36% to 62% (2,355 cases per million)
• New Hampshire- 37% to 62% (2,894 cases per million)
• New Jersey- 33% to 65% (17,275 cases per million)
• New Mexico- 39% to 60% (3,087 cases per million)
• New York- 31% to 67% (18,832 cases per million)
• North Carolina- 41% to 58% (2,923 cases per million)
• North Dakota- 53% to 45% (2,925 cases per million)
• Ohio- 43% to 55% (2,585 cases per million)
• Oklahoma- 52% to 46% (1,435 cases per million)
• Oregon- 32% to 65% (905 cases per million)
• Pennsylvania- 37% to 62% (5,419 cases per million)
• Rhode Island- 27% to 72% (12,811 cases per million)
• South Carolina- 44% to 54% (1,822 cases per million)
• South Dakota- 46% to 51% (4,804 cases per million)
• Tennessee- 50% to 48% (2,776 cases per million)
• Texas- 43% to 56% (1,845 cases per million)
• Utah- 43% to 55% (2,456 cases per million)
• Vermont- 28% to 70% (1,522 cases per million)
• Virginia- 36% to 62% (3,999 cases per million)
• Washington- 29% to 69% (2,630 cases per million)
• West Virginia- 60% to 38% (894 cases per million)
• Wisconsin- 38% to 59% (2,385 cases per million)
• Wyoming- 52% to 46% (1,384 cases per million)

Associated Press reporters Jonathan Lemire and Zeke Miller explored how Trump can pose as an incumbent president while running as an outsider-- and against his own administrations stated policies! They wrote that the genocide-by-dysfunction-cum-psychosis Señor Trumpanzee "is running against himself. With his cries to 'Reopen our country!' and his rebukes of the federal bureaucracy and health regulations amid the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has tried to tap into the same populist, anti-Washington anger he rode to victory in 2016. The difference: He is now, by definition, the face of government. Positioning himself as the outsider despite being the incumbent, Trump has feuded with governors, pushed back against government restrictions and, this week, said he was taking an unproven anti-malarial drug against the coronavirus despite warnings from his own health experts. Aiming to energize his base less than six months before he stands for reelection, the president has drawn a cultural link between the disaffected who voted for him four years ago and those who want to quickly restart the nation’s economy. Amplified by conservative media commentators, Trump has leaned into the pandemic’s partisan divide and urged states to reopen regardless of whether they meet the benchmarks set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

Two polls that came out yesterday both show the majority of Americans oppose Trump's refusal to take the pandemic seriously and oppose his rush to reopen before it is safe. AP's poll finds that 83% of Americans said they are "very" (54%) or "somewhat" (29%) concerned that lifting restrictions will lead to a rise in infections.

Most Americans continue to view local restrictions imposed in response to the coronavirus outbreak as appropriate, and a majority are  concerned that lifting restrictions will result in additional infections. A number of requirements like quarantining people who have been exposed to the virus, face masks, widespread testing, and physical distancing are seen as essential conditions for safely reopening their area.

Overall, 54% say the restrictions put in place in their area are about right to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, down from 61% last month. Eighteen percent think they go too far and 27% say they don’t go far enough. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to regard the restrictions as excessive, but a majority in both parties still feel they are appropriate.

  Many are concerned that removing these restrictions would lead to increased infection rates. Overall, 54% are extremely or very concerned that lifting restrictions in their area will result in more people being infected, while 29% are somewhat concerned, and 16% are not very or not at all concerned. Democrats are particularly worried about the effect of canceling restrictions, while Republicans express lower levels of concern.

  The public sees a number of actions and policies as essential before limits on social and economic activities can be safely lifted. Processes for the mandatory quarantine of exposed individuals tops the list of essential actions needed for the public to feel comfortable.

The other poll, Marist's for NPR found that 77% of Americans are concerned that a second wave of coronavirus cases will emerge. Marist director Lee Miringoff noted that "There's a great sense that normalcy is not around the corner" and pointed out "a real disconnect between public opinion and public policy."





These findings were released just as the James Glanz and Campbell Robertson analysis of data showing how at least 36,000 lives were needlessly lost while incompetent, self-absorbed, non-leader politicians-- from Señor Trumpanzee to Andrew Cuomo-- fretted about what to do and, instead, did nothing-- as precious days ticked by. "If the United States had begun imposing social distancing measures one week earlier than it did in March," they reported, "about 36,000 fewer people would have died in the coronavirus outbreak, according to new estimates from Columbia University disease modelers. And if the country had begun locking down cities and limiting social contact on March 1, two weeks earlier than most people started staying home, the vast majority of the nation’s deaths-- about 83 percent-- would have been avoided, the researchers estimated. Under that scenario, about 54,000 fewer people would have died by early May. The enormous cost of waiting to take action reflects the unforgiving dynamics of the outbreak that swept through American cities in early March. Even small differences in timing would have prevented the worst exponential growth, which by April had subsumed New York City, New Orleans and other major cities, the researchers found."

“It’s a big, big difference. That small moment in time, catching it in that growth phase, is incredibly critical in reducing the number of deaths,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia and the leader of the research team.

...The results show that as states reopen, outbreaks can easily get out of control unless officials closely monitor infections and immediately clamp down on new flare-ups. And they show that each day that officials waited to impose restrictions in early March came at a great cost.

After Italy and South Korea had started aggressively responding to the virus, President Trump resisted canceling campaign rallies or telling people to stay home or avoid crowds. The risk of the virus to most Americans was very low, he said.

“Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on,” Mr. Trump tweeted on March 9, suggesting that the flu was worse than the coronavirus. “At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”

In fact, tens of thousands of people had already been infected by that point, researchers later estimated. But a lack of widespread testing allowed those infections to go undetected, hiding the urgency of an outbreak that most Americans still identified as a foreign threat.

The End Of America's International Prestige And Leadership? What Did You Expect When That Thing Was Put In The White House?

Queens, New York

Last week Edward Luce, writing for the Financial Times, made it abundantly clear who's to blame for the out-sized U.S. pandemic death rate. His piece is the best document about what happened so far. It's a shame the Financial Times has so few readers in America, and virtually none in Trump country. I suppose the steepening of the curve in Trump states will speak for itself, at least to some-- if not to the Ann Retzlaffs of the world. These are swing states Trump won in 2016 and may well lose in 2020 because of-- at least in part-- the pandemic.

• Pennsylvania- 5,186 cases per million
• Michigan- 5,198 cases per million
• Iowa- 4,740 cases per million
• Georgia- 3,587 cases per million
• Ohio- 2,435 cases per million
• Florida- 2,162 cases per million-- likely manipulated statistics
• Wisconsin- 2,179 cases per million
• Arizona- 1,947 cases per million
• North Carolina- 1,823 cases per million

It's becoming clearer and clearer to everyone except the die-hard idiots that Trump has, at every single interval, made the absolute worst possible decisions, and always for the worst possible reasons. Let Ed Luce make the case:

When the history is written of how America handled the global era's first real pandemic, March 6 will leap out of the timeline. That was the day Donald Trump visited the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. His foray to the world's best disease research body was meant to showcase that America had everything under control. It came midway between the time he was still denying the coronavirus posed a threat and the moment he said he had always known it could ravage America.

Shortly before the CDC visit, Trump said "within a couple of days, [infections are] going to be down to close to zero." The US then had 15 cases. "One day, it's like a miracle, it will disappear." A few days afterwards, he claimed: "I've felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic." That afternoon at the CDC provides an X-ray into Trump's mind at the halfway point between denial and acceptance.

We now know that Covid-19 had already passed the breakout point in the US. The contagion had been spreading for weeks in New York, Washington state and other clusters. The curve was pointing sharply upwards. Trump's goal in Atlanta was to assert the opposite.

Wearing his "Keep America Great" baseball cap, the US president was flanked by Robert Redfield, head of the CDC, Alex Azar, the US secretary of health and human services, and Brian Kemp, governor of Georgia. In his 47-minute interaction with the press, Trump rattled through his greatest hits.

COVID-Kemp

He dismissed CNN as fake news, boasted about his high Fox News viewership, cited the US stock market's recent highs, called Washington state's Democratic governor a "snake" and admitted he hadn't known that large numbers of people could die from ordinary flu. He also misunderstood a question on whether he should cancel campaign rallies for public health reasons. "I haven't had any problems filling [the stadiums]," Trump said.

What caught the media's attention were two comments he made about the disease. There would be four million testing kits available within a week. "The tests are beautiful," he said. "Anybody that needs a test gets a test."

Ten weeks later, that is still not close to being true. Fewer than 3 per cent of  Americans had been tested by mid-May. Trump also boasted about his grasp of science. He cited a "super genius" uncle, John Trump, who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and implied he inherited his intellect. "I really get it," he said. "Every one of these doctors said, 'How do you know so much about this?' Maybe I have a natural ability." Historians might linger on that observation too.

What the headlines missed was a boast that posterity will take more seriously than Trump's self-estimated IQ, or the exaggerated test numbers (the true number of CDC kits by March was 75,000). Trump proclaimed that America was leading the world. South Korea had its first infection on January 20, the same day as America's first case, and was, he said, calling America for help. "They have a lot of people that are infected; we don't... All I say is, 'Be calm,'" said the president. "Everyone is relying on us. The world is relying on us."

He could just as well have said baseball is popular or foreigners love New York. American leadership in any disaster, whether a tsunami or an Ebola outbreak, has been a truism for decades. The US is renowned for helping others in an emergency.

In hindsight, Trump's claim to global leadership leaps out. History will mark Covid-19 as the first time that ceased to be true. US airlifts have been missing in action. America cannot even supply itself.

South Korea, which has a population density nearly 15 times greater and is next door to China, has lost a total of 259 lives to the disease. There have been days when America has lost 10 times that number. The US death toll is now approaching 90,000.

What has gone wrong? I interviewed dozens of people, including outsiders who Trump consults regularly, former senior advisers, World Health Organization officials, leading scientists and diplomats, and figures inside the White House. Some spoke off the record.

Again and again, the story that emerged is of a president who ignored increasingly urgent intelligence warnings from January, dismisses anyone who claims to know more than him and trusts no one outside a tiny coterie, led by his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner-- the property developer who Trump has empowered to sideline the best-funded disaster response bureaucracy in the world.

People often observed during Trump's first three years that he had yet to be tested in a true crisis. Covid-19 is way bigger than that. "Trump's handling of the pandemic at home and abroad has exposed more painfully than anything since he took office the meaning of America First," says William Burns, who was the most senior US diplomat, and is now head of the Carnegie Endowment.

"America is first in the world in deaths, first in the world in infections and we stand out as an emblem of global incompetence. The damage to America's influence and reputation will be very hard to undo."

The psychology behind Trump's inaction on Covid-19 was on display that afternoon at the CDC. The unemployment number had come out that morning. The US had added 273,000 jobs in February, bringing the jobless rate down to a near record low of 3.5 per cent. Trump's re-election chances were looking 50:50 or better. The previous Saturday, Joe Biden had won the South Carolina primary. But the Democratic contest still seemed to have miles to go. Nothing could be allowed to frighten the Dow Jones.

Any signal that the US was bracing for a pandemic-- including taking actual steps to prepare for it-- was discouraged.

"Jared [Kushner] had been arguing that testing too many people, or ordering too many ventilators, would spook the markets and so we just shouldn't do it," says a Trump confidant who speaks to the president frequently. "That advice worked far more powerfully on him than what the scientists were saying. He thinks they always exaggerate."

Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, who talks regularly to Trump and is a campaign adviser, says the mood was borderline ecstatic in early March. "The economy was just steaming along, the stock market was firing on all cylinders and that jobs report was fantastic," says Moore."It was almost too perfect. Nobody expected this virus. It hit us like a meteor or a terrorist attack."

People in Trump's orbit are fond of comparing coronavirus to the 9/11 attacks. George W Bush missed red flags in the build-up to al-Qaeda's Twin Towers attacks. But he was only once explicitly warned of a possible plot a few weeks before it happened. "All right, you've covered your ass," Bush reportedly told the briefer.

At some point, Congress is likely to establish a body like the 9/11 Commission to investigate Trump's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. The inquiry would find that Trump was warned countless times of the epidemic threat in his presidential daily briefings, by federal scientists, the health secretary Alex Azar, Peter Navarro, his trade adviser, Matt Pottinger, his Asia adviser, by business friends and the world at large. Any report would probably conclude that tens of thousands of deaths could have been prevented-- even now as Trump pushes to "liberate" states from lockdown.

"It is as though we knew for a fact that 9/11 was going to happen for months, did nothing to prepare for it and then shrugged a few days later and said, 'Oh well, there's not much we can do about it,'" says Gregg Gonsalves, a public health scholar at Yale University. "Trump could have prevented mass deaths and he didn't."

In fairness, other democracies, notably the UK, Italy and Spain, also wasted time failing to prepare for the approaching onslaught. Whoever was America's president might have been equally ill-served by Washington infighting. The CDC has been plagued by mishap and error throughout the crisis. The agency spent weeks trying to develop a jinxed test when it could simply have imported WHO-approved kits from Germany, which has been making them since late January. "The CDC has been missing in action," says a former senior adviser in the Trump White House. "Because of the CDC's errors, we did not have a true picture of the spread of the disease." Here again, though, Trump's stamp is clear. It was Trump who chose Robert Redfield to head the CDC in spite of widespread warnings about the former military officer's controversial record. Redfield led the Pentagon's response to HIV-Aids in the 1980s. It involved isolating suspected soldiers in so-called HIV Hotels. Many who tested positive were dishonourably discharged. Some committed suicide.

A devout catholic, Redfield saw Aids as the product of an immoral society. For many years, he championed a much-hyped remedy that was discredited in tests. That debacle led to his removal from the job in 1994.

"Redfield is about the worst person you could think of to be heading the CDC at this time," says Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist who has reported on epidemics. "He lets his prejudices interfere with the science, which you cannot afford during a pandemic."

One of the CDC's constraints was to insist on developing its own test rather than import a foreign one. Dr Anthony Fauci-- the infectious disease expert and now household name-- is widely known to loathe Redfield, and vice versa. That meant the CDC and Fauci's National Institutes of Health were not on the same page. "The last thing you need is scientists fighting with each other in the middle of an epidemic," says Dr Kenneth Bernard, who set up a previous White House pandemic unit in 2004, which was scrapped under Barack Obama and later revived after Ebola struck in 2014.

The scarcity of kits meant that the scientists lacked a picture of America's rapidly spreading infections. The CDC was forced to ration tests to "persons under investigation"-- people who had come within 6ft of someone who had either visited China or been infected with Covid-19 in the previous 14 days. Most were denied. Few could prove that they had met either criterion. This was at a time when several countries, notably Germany, Taiwan and South Korea, gave access to on-the-spot tests, including at drive-through centres-- an option most Americans still lack.

"You've been commuting by train or subway into New York every day, you show up sick in the clinic and they refuse to test you because you can't prove you've been within 6ft of someone with Covid-19," says the former adviser."You've probably been close to half a million people in the previous two weeks."

Restrictions on testing narrow the options. "Once you get to one per cent prevalence in any community, it is too late for non-pharmaceutical interventions to work," says Tom Bossert, who led the since-disbanded White House pandemic office before he was ejected in 2018 by John Bolton, Trump's then national security adviser.

By March 11, just five days after Trump's CDC visit, the reality was beginning to seep through. In an Oval Office broadcast, Trump banned travel from most of Europe, which expanded the partial ban he put on China in February. Two days later, he declared a national emergency. Even then, however, he insisted America was leading the world. We've done a great job because we acted quickly," he said. "We acted early."

Over the next 48 hours, however, something snapped in Trump's mind. Citing a call with one of his sons, Trump said on March 16: "It's bad. It's bad... They think August [before the disease peaks]. Could be July. Could be longer than that."

Eleven days later, Boris Johnson, Britain's prime minister, contracted Covid-19. The disease nearly killed him. That was Johnson's road-to-Damascus. Many hoped Trump had had a similar conversion. If so, it did not last long. The next week, he was saying that America should reopen by Easter on April 12. "I was one of the ones advising him to make it 'Resurrection Sunday,'" says Moore. "I told him then what I think now, that this lockdown is causing more deaths and misery than the disease itself."

Trump's mindset became increasingly surreal. He began to tout hydroxychloroquine as a cure for Covid-19. On March 19, at a regular televised briefing, which he conducted daily for five weeks, often rambling for more than two hours, he depicted the antimalarial drug as a potential magic bullet. It could be "one of the biggest game-changers in the history of medicine," he later tweeted.

The president's leap of faith, which was inspired by Fox News anchors, notably Laura Ingraham, and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, none of whom have a medical background, turned Washington's bureaucracy upside down. Scientists who demurred were punished. In April, Rick Bright, the federal scientist in charge of developing a vaccine-- arguably the most urgent role in government-- was removed after blocking efforts to promote hydroxychloroquine.

Most clinical trials have shown the drug has no positive impact on Covid-19 patients and can harm people with heart problems. "I was pressured to let politics and cronyism drive decisions over the opinions of the best scientists we have in government," Bright said in a statement.

In a whistleblower complaint, he said he was pressured to send millions of dollars worth of contracts to a company controlled by a friend of Jared Kushner. When he refused, he was fired. The US Department of Health and Human Services denied Bright's allegations.

Other scientists have taken note of Bright's fate. During the Ebola outbreak in 2014, when Obama's administration sent 3,000 US military personnel to Africa to fight the epidemic, the CDC held a daily briefing about the state of progress. It has not held one since early March. Scientists across Washington are terrified of saying anything that contradicts Trump.

"The way to keep your job is to out-loyal everyone else, which means you have to tolerate quackery," says Anthony Scaramucci, an estranged former Trump adviser, who was briefly his White House head of communications. "You have to flatter him in public and flatter him in private. Above all, you must never make him feel ignorant."

An administration official says advising Trump is like "bringing fruits to the volcano"-- Trump being the lava source. "You're trying to appease a great force that's impervious to reason," says the official.

When Trump suggested in late April that people could stop Covid-19, or even cure themselves, by injecting disinfectant, such as Lysol or Dettol, his chief scientist, Deborah Birx, did not dare contradict him. The leading bleach companies issued statements urging customers not to inject or ingest disinfectant because it could be fatal. The CDC only issued a cryptic tweet advising Americans to: "Follow the instructions on the product label."

"I can't even get my calls returned," says Garrett. "The CDC has led the response to every disease for decades. Now it has vanished from view." A former senior Trump official says: "People turn into wusses around Trump. If you stand up to him, you'll never get back in. What you see in public is what you get in private. He is exactly the same."

America's foreign partners have had an equally sharp reminder of Trump's way of doing business. Few western leaders are as ideologically aligned with Trump as Scott Morrison, Australia's prime minister. Early into the epidemic, Morrison created a national cabinet that meets at least once a week. It includes every state premier of the two main parties. Morrison's unity cabinet projects an air of bipartisan resolve in a country that has lost just under 100 people to coronavirus in three months. Some days, America has lost more people to it every hour.

Trump, by contrast, plays US state governors against each other, much as he does with his staff. Republican states have received considerably more ventilators and personal protective equipment per capita than Democratic states, in spite of having far lower rates of hospitalisation. Trump says America is fighting a war against Covid-19. In practice, he is stoking national disunity. "It's like saying to the governors that each state has to produce its own tanks and bullets," says Bernard. "You're on your own. It's not my responsibility."

Trump's dog-eat-dog instinct has been just as strong abroad as at home. A meeting of G7 foreign ministers in March failed to agree on a statement after Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, insisted they brand it the "Wuhan virus." America declined to participate in a recent summit hosted by Emmanuel Macron, France's president, to collaborate on a vaccine.

Most dramatically, Trump has suspended US funding of the WHO, which he says covered up for China's lying. The WHO confirms that Trump met the then director-general designate, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in the Oval Office in June 2017, shortly before he took up the role. Trump supported his candidacy.

Other critics say the Geneva-based body was too ready to take Beijing's word at face value. There is some truth to that claim. "They were too scared of offending China," says Bernard, who was America's WHO director for two years. But its bureaucratic timidity did not stop other countries from taking early precautions.

Trump alleged the WHO's negligence had increased the world's death rate "twenty-fold." In practice, the body must always abide by member state limits, especially the big ones, notably the US and China. That is the reality for all multilateral bodies. The WHO nevertheless declared an international emergency six weeks before Trump's US announcement. WHO officials say Trump's move has badly hindered its operations.

"You don't turn off the hose in the middle of the fire, even if you dislike the fireman," says Bernhard Schwartlander, chief of staff at the WHO. "This virus threatens every country in the world and will exploit any crack in our resolve." The body, in other words, has fallen victim to US-China hostility.

...So where does the American chapter of the plague go from here? Early into his partial about-turn, Trump said scientists told him that up to 2.5 million Americans could die of the disease. The most recent estimates suggest 135,000 Americans will die by late July. That means two things.

First, Trump will tell voters that he has saved millions of lives. Second, he will continue to push aggressively for US states to lift their lockdowns. His overriding goal is to revive the economy before the general election. Both Trump and Kushner have all but declared mission accomplished on the pandemic. "This is a great success story," said Kushner in late April. "We have prevailed," said Trump on Monday.

Economists say a V-shaped recovery is unlikely. Even then it could be two Vs stuck together-- a W, in other words. The social mingling resulting from any short-term economic reopening would probably come at the price of a second contagious outburst. As long as the second V began only after November, Trump might just be re-elected.

"From Trump's point of view, there is no choice," says Charlie Black, a senior Republican consultant and lobbyist. "It is the economy or nothing. He can't exactly run on his personality." Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist, had a slightly different emphasis: "Trump's campaign will be about China, China, China," he says. "And hopefully the fact that he rebooted the economy."

In the meantime, Trump will probably continue to dangle the prospect of miracle cures. Every week since the start of the outbreak, he has said a vaccine is just around the corner. His latest estimate is that it will be ready by July. Scientists say it will take a year at best to produce an inoculation. Most say 18 months would be lucky. Even that would break all records. The previous fastest development was four years for mumps in the 1960s.

For the time being, Trump has been persuaded to cease his daily briefings. The White House internal polling shows that his once double-digit lead over Biden among Americans over 65 has been wiped out. It turns out retirees are no fans of herd immunity.

Friends of the president are trying to figure out how to return life to normal without provoking a new death toll. After an initial rally in March, Trump's poll numbers have been steadily dropping over the last month. For the next six months, America's microbial fate will be in the hands of its president's erratic re-election strategy. There is more than a whiff of rising desperation.

"Trump is caught in a box which keeps getting smaller," says George Conway, a Republican lawyer who is married to Kellyanne Conway, Trump's senior counsellor. "In my view he is a sociopath and a malignant narcissist. When a person suffering from these disorders feels the world closing in on them, their tendencies get worse. They lash out and fantasise and lose any ability to think rationally." Conway is known for taunting Trump on Twitter (to great effect, it should be added: Trump often retaliates).

Yet without exception, everyone I interviewed, including the most ardent Trump loyalists, made a similar point to Conway. Trump is deaf to advice, said one. He is his own worst enemy, said another. He only listens to family, said a third. He is mentally imbalanced, said a fourth. America, in other words, should brace itself for a turbulent six months ahead-- with no assurance of a safe landing."