Trump, Guilty Of Negligent Homicide, Has Succeeded In Spreading The Pandemic Into Rural America

 

On Tuesday, a dozen countries reported over 10,000 new cases. The U.S. led the way with 63,663. COVID-19 has found a very welcoming environment in Trumpistan. Rural America paid attention to Trump's self-serving bullshit and gaslighting-- and now they're starting to pay the price. The pandemic spread into rural America at what the Daily Yonder called "a record-breaking pace again last week, adding 160 counties to the red-zone list and bringing the total number of rural Americans who have tested positive for the coronavirus to more than 1 million. Nearly 70% of the nation’s 1,976 rural (nonmetropolitan) counties are now in the red zone, a term used by the White House Coronavirus Task Force to designate localities where the spread of the virus is out of control. Red-zone counties have a rate of at least 100 new infections per 100,000 in population. Rural America had 82,188 new infections last week, a 16% increase and the fourth consecutive week of record-breaking levels of new cases. With last week’s cases, the total number of rural residents who have tested positive for the coronavirus broke 1 million (1,068,949), according to data compiled by the nonprofit USA Facts."

That's Trumpistan: the Dakotas and all the states bordering on them that South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem-- homicidal maniac-- infected: Iowa, Nebraska Minnesota, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado.

Every single rural county in Wisconsin-- there are 46-- is in the COVID red zone now, In South Dakota 57 rural counties (out of a total of 58) are in the red zone, as are 58 of Minnesota's 60 rural counties, 75 of Iowa's 78 rural counties, 45 of North Dakota's 47 rural counties, 75 of Nebraska's 80 rural counties, 58 if Illinois' 62 rural counties, 49 of Tennessee's 53 rural counties, 54 of Oklahoma's 59 rural counties, 46 of Montana's 51 rural counties and 73 of Missouri's 81 rural counties. Those are the states where over 90% of the rural counties are in the COVID red zone, meaning the pandemic is out of control.

These were counties that voted, overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016 and will vote for him again a week from Tuesday. Rural Florence County, Wisconsin went for Trump with 71.6% of it's vote. Taylor County, Wisconsin went for Trump 70.0% to 25.5%. Haakon, Campbell, Perkins, Jones, Potter and Douglas counties in South Dakota went for Trump with over 80% of their votes in 2016. Harding County gave him a 90.2% to 4.9% win. These counties are where COVID is reaping a gruesome toll today. Sioux County was the Trumpiest in Iowa (82,1% to 12.7%) in 2016. In 2018, Sioux County, performing as an R+48 constituency gave Nazi congressman Steve King his biggest win. Two years later no one believed in masks or social distancing, just in Donald Trump.

The National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University released a paper that the folks in Sioux County, Iowa and the rural counties across America should turn off Fox and read. The paper is about COVID deaths and why most of them were avoidable. Between 130,000 and 210,000 peopler re dead now because of Trump and his Republican enablers. "With more than 217,000 lives lost," the 4 doctors who penned the report wrote, "and a proportional mortality rate twice that of neighboring Canada and more than fifty times that of Japan-- a country with a much older population than the U.S.-- the United States has turned a global crisis into a devastating tragedy... [T]he abject failures of U.S. government policies and crisis messaging persist. U.S. fatalities have remained disproportionately high throughout the pandemic when compared to even other high-mortality countries. The inability of the U.S. to mitigate the pandemic is especially stark when contrasted with the response of high- income nations, such as South Korea, Japan, Australia, Germany, France, and Canada, as well as low- and middle-income countries as varied as Thailand, Pakistan, Honduras, and Malaysia. All of these nations have had greater success in protecting their populations from the impact of the coronavirus.

Over the past nine months, the United States has witnessed an alarming jolt of vulnerability and anguish, as the novel coronavirus pandemic has wrought immense suffering and confusion in a country that only last year topped an international ranking of epidemic preparedness. This year, American exceptionalism has manifested in the worst way: 217,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID-19, the highest gross numerical toll of any country by more 65,000. Over eight million Americans have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, and millions more have been clinically diagnosed with COVID-19, without test confirmation.

Many of the underlying factors amplifying the pandemic’s deadly impact have existed long before the novel coronavirus first arrived in Washington state on January 20th-- a fractured healthcare system, inequitable access to care, and immense health, social and racial disparities among America’s most vulnerable groups. Compounding this is an Administration that has publicly denigrated its own public health officials-- and science more generally-- thereby hamstringing efforts by its vaunted public health service to curb the pandemic’s spread.

The result has been a tragedy: for a country with just 4% of the world’s population, U.S. citizens make up 20% of all global cases. More than 217,000 U.S. residents have lost their lives, accounting for one-fifth of all COVID-19 deaths worldwide.

...By contrasting the U.S. proportional mortality rate with that of six other high-income countries, this report highlights the stark reality that is the United States’ continued mismanagement of the pandemic response. Particularly, it is the inability or unwillingness of U.S. officials to adapt or improve the federal response over the course of the pandemic that has strongly contributed to the nation’s uniquely high Covid-19 fatality rate. The U.S. should have-- and could have-- done better to protect the nation, and particularly its most vulnerable populations, from a threat that was identified and recognized early in 2020.

The failure of the federal government to (a) create a rigorous national strategy for testing and contact tracing, (b) coordinate data collection and coordination among U.S. states, or (c) recognize the scientific validity of non-pharmaceutical interventions like face coverings and social distancing reflect a deeply inadequate national response when contrasted to other high-income countries. Our comparative analysis estimates that somewhere between 130,000 and 210,000 American deaths to date could have been avoided.

The weight of this enormous failure ultimately falls to the leadership at the White House-- and among a number of state governments-- which consistently undercut the efforts of top officials at the CDC and HHS. Further, there is little evidence to suggest that science-based policies will prevail going forward with DonaldTrump as President given his continued attacks on science and government scientists. A pandemic is not a time for a decentralized and combative national response. It requires strong leadership and coordination across states towards a common purpose of defeating the threat with the might of the whole nation. The cases of South Korea, Japan, Australia, Canada, Germany, and France demonstrate that the scope of the crisis and suffering did not need to reach the levels seen in the U.S.

Since the report was written, U.S. deaths from COVID have continued to rise exponentially. As of yesterday, U.S. deaths were closing in on 230,000, pushed higher by rapid growth in Texas, Florida, Georgia and Arizona, all states that Trump won in 2016 but all states that are reconsidering for 2020. Are the rural counties in Wisconsin, South Dakota and Iowa reconsidering? Maybe some people but the polling indicates that the worst-stricken COVID counties in rural America are sticking with the man who has infected their small towns.

Can Cookie Baking Grandmas In Rural Wisconsin Stop The Deadly Republican Political Machine In Madison? Meet Kriss Marion

 

-by Kriss Marion, candidate
Wisconsin Assembly district 51

As a wife, mom of four and a grandmother, I am fiercely committed to the well-being of my family, my neighbors, and Southwest Wisconsin. I run an award-winning bed and breakfast on our small farm in Blanchardville, and have long been involved in our village chamber of commerce and regional tourism promotion, including the Soil Sisters Tour. I have years of experience tackling tough issues, tight budgets and political disagreements as a Lafayette County Supervisor. I have a deep knowledge of the issues facing our region because of my service as a Southwestern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commissioner, and board member of Southwest Workforce Development, SWCAP, and the Community Leadership Alliance of Southwestern Wisconsin. I co-founded the Pecatonica Pride Watershed Association and Wisconsin Farmers Union South Central Chapter.

I’m running for state Assembly because I am so incredibly proud to live, work, and play in southwest Wisconsin and I want to protect our way of life for years to come. I’m tired of watching our legislators stay on the sidelines to fight with each other and the Governor, and refuse to show up to work while the rest of us wrestle with a world pandemic and a recession. I am ready to bring a civil, respectful, and tireless work ethic to Madison. I am ready to roll up my sleeves and show up.

I first learned that our Wisconsin state government was broken back in 2015, when some fellow farm women and I decided to approach our local legislators with a “Cookie Bill” proposal to make it legal to sell non-hazardous baked goods face to face. We had recently learned that it was illegal in Wisconsin to sell baked goods to your neighbors, even though a lot of people were doing it. Because we recognized that farm profits were in a tailspin, as they still are today, we wanted a legitimate way for farm families to add to their bottom line, without investing in an expensive certified kitchen. We wanted bigger and more successful farm markets in our small towns. And we know we needed more businesses in rural communities. Wisconsin was one of only two states in the nation that had such a ban.

We had great luck with our legislators, and with the legislature, and over the course of two years gathered the co-sponsors and the yes votes for an easy passage though the State Senate. Several dozen of us gathered at the Capitol for the Assembly vote, ready with cookies for our allies, and aprons for photo ops. We learned 15 minutes into the session that the bill was dead because the Speaker of the House didn’t like it and had simply omitted it from the agenda. He owned popcorn factories that required inspections, and he didn’t think it was fair for home bakers to go without expensive licensing. He hadn’t reach out to us with concerns, or tried to work with us. But that was it for our two years of work.

As we started through the process again in the next legislative session, this time getting a Republican to author the proposal, thinking we’d have more luck with the Republican Speaker. But after a year of work in committee, we knew that the Speaker continued to be opposed. With his limitless power, and no scruples about blocking a popular bill that had sailed through the committee process in two sessions, we accepted the offer of a non-profit law firm to take our case to court.

Two years later, we won and the Wisconsin ban on baked goods sales was overturned. Today, Wisconsin farmers markets are full of home bakers! But we still have no actual law on the books, and without legislative guidance, the Department of Ag, Trade and Consumer Protection is able to apply rules whimsically and, without reason, harass bakers here and there throughout the state.

While it’s by no means my only issue, Food Freedom is a big issue for me today. Now more than ever, farmers need more opportunities to make money, and when elected I’ll work to craft not just a Cookie Bill, but a whole package of legislation that makes it easier for farmers to sell goods directly to consumers.

But here are the other critical issues facing my state:

COVID: First and foremost, we’ve got to get COVID under control. Though we’ve been blessed as rural communities to not have the number of positives that urban areas have, we will continue to struggle to run our schools and businesses safely until we contain the spread. Science, technology, good leadership, and public cooperation are essential if we want to end this tragic disruption to our lives. COVID isn’t the new normal, but it’s here to stay for as long as we don’t address it wisely.

HEALTHCARE: In my conversations with voters, the top concern in most families right now is the uncertainty and expense of healthcare. Many people who have lost jobs because of COVID have also lost insurance coverage. The skyrocketing costs of health insurance and prescription drugs MUST be addressed. That’s why I’ve pledged to not take a dime of campaign contributions from pharmaceutical companies or health insurance lobbies. My opponent has taken thousands of dollars from these industries, and he has, predictably, voted NO to cap insulin prices. He has also refused to accept federal Medicaid dollars that would extend Badgercare benefits to thousands more Wisconsin families who are just one medical emergency away from financial ruin. I want to make the best policy choices for my constituents, rather than for corporate donors. We must also address the lack of access to mental health care.

FAMILY AGRICULTURE: Rural places are the soul of our state and the engine of our economy. The future of our families, schools, and small towns in SW Wisconsin is tied to the fortunes of our farmers. Western Wisconsin led the nation in farm bankruptcies before COVID and 2020 will likely see accelerated farm exits. The collapse of global supply chains during the beginning of the pandemic showed just how vulnerable commodity markets are, and we need to address that with policy. We absolutely MUST resolve as a state to keep small and medium-scale farmers on the land, and give them the means to be profitable, or we will lose Wisconsin as we know it. My team has developed a 10-point “Rural Routes to Wisconsin’s Post-Pandemic Recovery” which supports diversification, short supply chain development and local processing. We need to make clean energy generation a part of farm balance sheets, increase profits by reducing burdensome regulation on direct farm sales, and expand farm-to-institution infrastructure. I sued the state of Wisconsin and won so that home bakers could sell goods to neighbors, but that was just the beginning of a Food Freedom renaissance that could revitalize our rural economy.

EDUCATION: Now more than ever, we understand the important role public education plays in the life of every American, and certainly in the well-being of every American family. High quality early education, especially birth-to-three, is foundational to future academic and life success-- and we fail to address the childcare crisis at our peril. Excellent K-12 education, once a hallmark of the great state of Wisconsin, should be a privilege guaranteed to every child, regardless of zipcode. COLLEGE AND TRADE SCHOOLS. A state which fails to fairly pay its teachers and adequately fund the instruction of its children, its young adults, and its returning students, is a state suffering from a lack of hope and a tragic failure of imagination. I am proud to be endorsed by our Education Governor, Tony Evers, and I share his optimism about our future. We can rise up stronger, Wisconsin, together.

CLEAN WATER: Many people were skeptical during my last campaign when I campaigned on the issue of water contamination. In fact, one of the main reasons I ran against Howard Marklein for state Senate in 2018 is because he refused to take my concerns seriously. But then the SWIGG (Southwest Wisconsin Groundwater and Geology) study showed conclusively in 2019 that at certain times of the year,  42% of randomly tested wells in Iowa, Grant and Lafayette Counties were too contaminated to drink. As a result, the Governor declared 2019 the Year of Clean Drinking Water and Rep. Robin Vos initiated the year-long Speaker’s Task Force on Drinking Water. Unfortunately, that Task Force, led by my opponent, failed to pass any water protections, and the legislature blocked all of the Governor’s proposals. But groundwater testing in SW Wisconsin is ongoing and we learn more every day about how vulnerable our karst bedrock is to surface contamination and septic leakage.  I believe with new faces, the legislature will eventually produce water protection policy, based on science and not special interest lobbies.  We must make sure that our communities provide the clean water and quality of life that will attract and retain workers, farmers, families and businesses.

I know there are many good people, including my beloved father, who believe that the private sector can and will take care of the environment. That has been Jared Kushner’s response to COVID as head of the PPE procurement effort: “Free markets will solve this,” Kushner told business leaders looking for direction on how to get involved. “That is not the role of government.” We now know that approach has been tragically disastrous when it comes to COVID, and the same is true of our response to environmental protections. I’m a small government democrat, and in many sectors I have fought against government overreach - including suing the state over an unconstitutional ban on selling baked goods! But protection of the commons - the resources that we all rely on for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - is one of the highest, most sacred jobs of government. We are at a critical moment in world history and we absolutely must insist that our state government, and our federal government, collaborate with the governments of all nations to address environmental protections. I have led on this at the community level, as a Wisconsin Farmers Union chapter president, and at the local level as a Lafayette County Supervisor. I will continue to lead forcefully on environmental protections as a state legislature. Our world can’t wait.

The Republicans Can't Blame Trump For What They've Become-- Nor For What's About To Happen To Them

Murder/Suicide by Nancy Ohanian

Yesterday, The Hill reported that, in private, House Republicans see the tsunami coming for them and they are panic-stricken. Everything is working against them and there is "a growing sense of doom... House Republicans face numerous, almost insurmountable obstacles: a cash shortfall against the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, 27 retiring lawmakers and a Republican National Committee that is more focused on reelecting President Trump and protecting the Senate GOP majority. 'If the election were today, we would lose the House, the Senate and the White House,' said one Republican source. Several GOP lawmakers are warning that the party faces a landslide defeat on Election Day if Trump doesn’t start landing punches on former Vice President Joe Biden, who has a strong lead in the polls both nationally and in key battleground states. 'This is the problem: [Trump] continues to allow it to be a referendum on himself; you can’t do that in a competitive race,' one GOP lawmaker said."

Well... that turns out to be only partially true. It is a referendum on the Republican Party and on conservative governance. A new poll by David Binder Research of rural voters in Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin for Focus on Rural America shows Trump-- and the GOP-- up shit's creek without a paddle. Trump is even losing in Iowa, where Republicans claim he is solid.

And rural voters disapprove of Trump by large numbers and think Biden will do a better job than he has on issues that are specifically important to rural and small town voters. If those numbers represent rural voters in other parts of the country, this is going to be the biggest GOP ass-whooping since America decided Herbert Hoover didn't deserve a second term. In fact, these voters "give Biden the most significant advantage on understanding the values of rural America, and improving access to health care in rural areas. Majorities also believe that Biden would be better than Trump at supporting farmers and stabilizing markets for agriculture commodities, and being relatable to rural Americans."

My own calculations see between 2 and 3 dozen Republican House seats flipping blue-- with a possibility of Trump doing something between now and November than will increase those numbers significantly. And writing for The Atlantic yesterday, Norm Ornstein explained how the GOP has been so radically changed-- a change that culminated with the rise of Trump-- that he barely recognizes it. He wrote that over time "Nothing has been more striking or significant than the transformation of the Republican Party, from a moderately conservative party to a very conservative party to something else entirely."

One sign of this change? A five-term Republican congressman from Colorado, elected in the Tea Party wave in 2010 and now a Trump loyalist, was recently defeated in a primary by a candidate who runs Shooters Grill, where servers are encouraged to carry firearms, and who has indulged the QAnon conspiracy theories and who is now endorsed, not repudiated, by the National Republican Congressional Committee. Another? The current buzz surrounding Tucker Carlson as the party’s hope in 2024-- even as he takes sudden leave from his show to go fishing, after one of his writers was tied to racist and misogynistic posts on an internet message board.

Few of the dozens of Republicans in high office I have known and admired over five decades-- in a party not my own and holding views that, in many cases, I did not share-- would be represented in the Republican Party of today. While some of my friends and mentors were and are moderates, others were proud conservatives, who genuinely believed in fiscal discipline but also valued government, albeit in a limited form. But the radical and unconservative idea that all government should be disdained, that tax cuts that blow up the debt are just fine, would be anathema to them.

And the idea that the Republican Party would be a force for ethnic and anti-immigrant animus and racial division would appall them-- including my late friend Jack Kemp. The Republicans I knew best and worked most closely with were almost uniformly for civil rights-- they represented the party of Everett Dirksen and William McCullough, who were instrumental in passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

The individuals I knew, admired, and worked with were not the entirety of the Republican Party, even then. Plenty of lawmakers and others were quite content to exploit racism. They sought out the votes of segregationist former Southern Democrats, such as Strom Thurmond, to refill their party’s diminishing moderate ranks in the Northeast and the Midwest, and on the West Coast. Beginning with Barry Goldwater’s 1964 candidacy and Richard Nixon’s 1968 “law and order” campaign, some Republican politicians ran for office using rhetoric that, at best, cynically inflamed racial divisions.

But even as I opposed many of the initiatives and campaign tactics of that Republican Party, I appreciated its efforts to solve problems and work within the governing institutions. The party of Nixon, with all its pathologies, created the Environmental Protection Agency, proposed a health-care-reform plan as sweeping as the later Affordable Care Act, and considered offering Americans a guaranteed annual income on a par with Andrew Yang’s universal basic income. The party of Reagan, which tried to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and which slashed taxes in 1981, precipitating ballooning deficits, also cut deals with Democratic Representative Henry Waxman to bolster Medicare and Medicaid; championed bipartisan Social Security reform in 1983; and supported tax increases in 1982, 1983, 1985, and 1986 to offset the earlier cuts and reduce the deficits. The party responsible for Iran-Contra is also the party that championed democracy and moved in concert with Democrats to create the National Endowment for Democracy, the United States Institute of Peace, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute.




...The Republican Party’s slide away from those values preceded Donald Trump, providing the conditions for his rise. In recent years, the GOP has thrown away its guiding values and embraced its darkest instincts. It has blown up long-standing norms in the Senate, creating divisions that outstrip anything I have seen before; done nothing about rank corruption in the White House and the Cabinet; accepted the politicization of the Justice Department and lies from the attorney general; avoided any meaningful oversight of misconduct; and failed to curb attacks on the independence of inspectors general.

The GOP now distinguishes itself by inaction. It has stood and watched as this administration separated children from their parents at the border, mistreated asylum seekers, botched its response to a hurricane in Puerto Rico, attacked science, and opened new avenues for toxic materials in our air and water. It said and did nothing about Russian interference in the 2016 elections, and is actively blocking efforts to combat a recurrence in 2020. It has refused to pass a new Voting Rights Act after the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder eviscerated the legislation, which, reflecting the GOP of the past, had passed the House unanimously. It has refused to deal in any fashion with urgent problems such as climate change, immigration, global competition, hunger, and poverty. It confirmed nominees who lied to the Senate, who inflated résumés, and who failed to meet minimum qualifications for the job. It confirmed judges who were unanimously rated unqualified by the American Bar Association.

The party jammed through a tax cut at a time of low unemployment and low economic growth, making a mockery of modern economics and leaving little flexibility to deal with the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. It slashed the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, delivering an 80 percent cut to global-health programs designed to fight pandemics, and leaving the agency without the resources necessary to battle COVID-19. It has said almost nothing about the pitiful and reckless responses of the president to the pandemic, which has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths that should never have occurred. And now it is silent as we learn that Russia offered bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers, while the president said and did nothing.

...Plenty of the Republicans I dealt with in the past were fierce partisans, including Dole and John Rhodes. But when pushed, they put country first-- that was the basis on which they could forge bonds across the aisle. I had strong relationships in years past with a number of Republicans currently in the Senate. But none of them have, in recent years, behaved in a fashion that would meet the values of the party of Domenici, Steiger, or Dole.

The country obviously needs a major change in its politics, a purging of the status quo. It faces challenges both societal and structural that go beyond Trump and the two parties. The United States must recover from the pandemic and rebuild its economy, while confronting head-on the issue of racism. But we cannot long operate as a democracy without two problem-solving parties that aim to compete for genuine majorities in the country.

The Democratic Party is far from a paragon of virtue here; in politics, there are no angels. It faces its own deep challenges ahead. But America’s crisis of governance has been driven by a party that my colleague Tom Mann and I, long before Trump, described as an insurgent outlier in American politics. “It is ideologically extreme,” we wrote in 2012; “scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

I was reminded of that description recently by the comments of the Republican pollster Alex Castellanos. “Mask-wearing has become a totem, a secular religious symbol,” Castellanos told the Washington Post. “Christians wear crosses, Muslims wear a hijab, and members of the Church of Secular Science bow to the Gods of Data by wearing a mask as their symbol, demonstrating that they are the elite; smarter, more rational, and morally superior to everyone else.”

A reshaped GOP would be very conservative, but not radical. It would believe in limited government, but a government run by professionals, respecting data and science, and operating efficiently and fairly. It would believe in genuine fiscal discipline. It would try to apply free-market approaches to solving difficult problems, such as climate change. It would believe in the integrity of institutions and insist that those in office adhere to high ethical standards. It would respect the sanctity of alliances and the fundamental values of decency and equal treatment. It would work to broaden its base across racial and ethnic lines, not use division and voter suppression to cling to power.

Sadly, even if Donald Trump is defeated in November, there is no sign that such a party will return anytime soon. But restoring the Republican Party to its traditional values is absolutely essential to preserve the core of our system of governance.

Well... he's wrong about there being no sign that such a party will return anytime soon. In case anyone didn't notice, Ornstein just described the post-Bill Clinton Democratic Party-- the one so many Republicans seem to be very, very comfortable with these days. I predict that the Biden administration will be more like the Republican Party Ornstein just described than the Trump-Pence regime.

Reminder: Electing J.D. Scholten Will Make Congress-- Not To Mention Iowa-- A Much More Productive Body

J.D. is running to represent a huge, mostly rural Iowa congressional district currently held by the most bigoted and far right Republican in the House, Steve King. But J.D.'s campaign isn't just about a referendum on King. He's far more concerned about offering voters a positive platform they can relate to. A few days ago, he wrote an OpEd for one of the local newspapers, the Carroll Times Herald.

Carroll County hasn't exactly been Democrat-friendly in recent years. Trump beat Hillary there 6,627 (63.5%) to 3,305 (31.7%). And in the 2018 Blue Wave, the county gave 62.9% of its gubernatorial vote to reactionary Republican Kim Reynolds.

Carroll County, though, was much closer for J.D. than for either Hillary or gubernatorial candidate Fred Hubbell who took just 35.3% in Carroll County. On that same day Hubbell, the gubernatorial candidate at the top of the ticket, won 3,186 votes, the county gave J.D. 4,075 votes (45.7%). It's counties like Carroll where J.D. impressed voters and came so close to winning and it's counties like Carroll he's in the process of winning over even more people. Strong, Clear Antitrust Policy Saves Lives isn't the kind of Republican-lite messaging the DCCC pushes on Democrats running in red districts. Ignoring their advice is what got J.D. so much closer than most of their red-district candidates. He held King down to 50.4% in an R+11 district. J.D. was one of the two or three top-performing Democrats in any district in the country even close to that kind of PVI. If he wins in November-- which is looking increasingly likely-- it's because he's talking to people in places like Carroll County, not to people in DC.

Right now, the failures of our healthcare system are on full display. Hospitals and their healthcare workers are overwhelmed and strapped for resources. Patients are receiving bills for COVID-19 testing and treatment that reach into the tens of thousands of dollars. The death count in America just topped 25,000-- and it could reach a quarter million.

One part of this equation is the concentration of the healthcare industry that has created fewer hospital beds, higher prices, lower quality of care and fewer resources for doctors, nurses and healthcare workers. This undoubtedly has compromised our ability to treat patients during this crisis.

Waves of consolidations and closures have plagued our nation’s hospitals with more than 680 mergers over the past decade alone.

Additionally, the reduction of about 600,000 hospital beds over the last 30 years has left our national public health infrastructure woefully unprepared for a global pandemic. This has affected urban and rural America alike: 72 percent of big metropolitan areas have highly concentrated hospital markets, and 13 percent are very highly-concentrated. And in 2019, rural America saw a record number of rural hospital closures, and another 430 rural hospitals are on the brink of closure if their financial situations do not improve. All in all, our hospital bed capacity is more than 10,000 beds short of the current projected need to respond to the coronavirus crisis.

As resources dwindle, research has proven that hospital mergers also contribute to rising health care costs and likely are a major factor in declining healthcare quality. During this coronavirus crisis, uninsured Americans could face up to $75,000 in hospital bills, an exorbitant fee and even more outrageous considering that hospitals are charging whatever they can get away with because they have the monopoly power to do so. This fact holds true with all consolidated industries: when a few players own a large percentage of the market share, there’s little incentive to reduce costs or improve the quality. It’s also easy to either buy out smaller players or simply push them out of business altogether.

During these recent years of hospital consolidation, a series of mergers and acquisitions has also increased the risk of supply shortages. In 2019 alone, hospital mergers and acquisitions were valued at $91.2 billion. These mergers pushed “just-in-time” supply chains that minimized inventories and downgraded manufacturing capacity.

We recently learned how devastating these anticompetitive mergers can be. The New York Times and ProPublica reported that public officials created a plan to address a glaring hole in our medical system’s preparedness: a ventilator shortage. The federal government signed a contract with Newport Medical Instruments, a small company in California to produce cheap, mobile ventilators that could accelerate production in the event of a pandemic. The work started and the company was on schedule to file for market approval, when Covidien, a multi-billion dollar company, bought Newport to prevent them from building a cheaper product that would undermine Covidien’s profits.

Suddenly, the ventilator program was dead. It took years for the government to line up another contract, and as you can see from this pandemic, it’s been too little, too late. Now, we have states trying to fill the gap by finding their own ventilator supply and sending supplemental ones to other states. These policies and practices are not sustainable for consumers and completely unfair to the hardworking doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals who are working on the healthcare front lines. It’s a mess, and we must do better.

We need to reflect on these failures and have the foresight to make much-needed changes to our healthcare system. That starts with enforcing our antitrust laws in the healthcare industry and preventing the creation of these monopolies that can rake in profits at the expense of our health and well-being. Here are a couple of key steps we can take:

• Give the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice more funding and resources to review and monitor mergers in the healthcare industry and challenge anti-competitive conduct.
• Adopt stricter scrutiny on anti-competitive conduct in horizontal mergers between hospitals as well as vertical mergers between hospitals, drug manufacturers, pharmacies, insurers and more.
• Repeal state COPA statutes that protect healthcare organizations from federal antitrust scrutiny and lead to healthcare mergers.

Will enforcing our antitrust laws solve everything? Will it magically give every American affordable, quality healthcare? Of course not. But it is a strong step in the right direction to lower hospital costs, improve patient care and ensure the resources needed to fight the next pandemic.

Everyone in Carroll County and across Iowa and the country is worrying about the pandemic. J.D. is telling his neighbors that it has shined a bright and deadly light on the failures of our healthcare system, especially in rural Iowa. In particular, concentration in the healthcare industry has resulted in hospital closures and fewer hospital beds, higher costs, lower quality care, and limited resources to treat patients. The result is that Iowa has the 49th latest "peak date" in the nation of when we project the highest number of single-day deaths. Please consider chipping in to help J.D. fund his campaign by clicking on the Blue America 2020 congressional thermometer on the right.

This afternoon, he told me that "Steve King has continued to praise President Trump's response to the coronavirus and downplay the reality and seriousness of this pandemic. In Iowa, we continue to see dramatic jumps in confirmed COVID-19 cases, stressing our already-fragile and under-resourced hospitals. Our leaders need to have the foresight to anticipate problems and work to avert them before there are catastrophic consequences. Unfortunately, King's leadership style is memes, proving just how urgently we need new representation."

Will We Need To Build A Wall Between Red States And America To Protect Us From The Trump Plague?

Trumpists are on the march. Members of the GOP Death Cult have been holding noisy organized protests in Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Kentucky, demanding businesses be opened so they get to escape their horrid spouses and get back to their dull, unfulfilling meaningless jobs. Each of those states, other than Oklahoma, has a Democratic governor. Yesterday, on a video teleconference with governors, after another 5.2 million people filed for unemployment benefits, Trump encouraged them to start ending stay-at-home orders. If the unemployment rate hits 20% this month, which is likely, it will be the worst since the Great Depression. Trump's job approval-- according to Gallup, usually a lagging indicator-- has tumbled 6 points to 43% (his sharpest one-month decline since occupying the White House).

With conservatives and Trumpists demanding the reopening of schools and businesses, public health experts are warning that discarding social distancing restrictions-- in many cases, which need to be tightened not loosened-- will steepen, not flatten, the curve and will increase the infection and death rate. The U.S. has confirmed 638,111 cases and 30,844 deaths.

Every week seems to bring another Republican governor into the moron-of-the-week spot. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has held it for a record amount of time and was then edged out by murderous Kristi Noem (R-SD). Nebraska hereditary billionaire, Pete Ricketts, wants in on the action. Yesterday, he said, "If people want to wear masks, we certainly encourage that." Yesterday he said that wearing masks was not included in his "6 rules to keep Nebraskans healthy" because he didn’t want the rules to be too numerous. A team of Politico reporters wrote that "The only hospital in Grand Island, Nebraska, is full. The mayor has asked for a statewide stay-at-home order that [Ricketts] insists isn’t needed. More than one-third of those tested for coronavirus in the surrounding county are positive-- and there aren’t enough tests to go around. Grand Island is the fourth-biggest city in a state [Señor Trumpanzee] and his top health officials repeatedly name check for keeping the virus at bay without the strict lockdowns 42 other states have imposed. Except that new cases there and in Iowa, South Dakota and other parts of the heartland are starting to spike, raising concern about new hot spots that could quash Trump’s push to reopen the economy and extend the public health crisis well into the summer." Ricketts may have lost his mind entirely. "Nebraska’s case count has jumped nearly 30 percent in the last three days, according to the state health department," wrote the Politico team. "But even as cases grow in places like Grand Island and Douglas County, home to Omaha, Gov. Pete Ricketts is adamant his plan built around voluntary social distancing is working." It isn't.

Trump and red state governors for weeks have fairly bragged about how large parts of the farm belt have escaped the ravages of the virus without the enforced shelter-in-place policies common on both coasts. It’s still unclear whether the states actually “flattened the curve,” or if the virus just reached there later. But now, cases are erupting, threatening a local population that doesn’t always have easy access to the same health care as more urban areas. And the outbreaks are striking the heart of the nation’s farming and meatpacking industry, potentially disrupting the national distribution of food as meat processing plants close down and truckers who move food across the country are sidelined by illness.

Grand Island and surrounding Hall County have 214 confirmed cases of coronavirus, nearly a quarter of the state’s total. At least 28 workers at JBS USA beef plant, Grand Island’s largest employer, have tested positive.

“The concern is where we are going, not where we are today,” said Chuck Haase, a member of the Grand Island City Council.

There are 8 states whose governors-- all Republicans, obviously-- that are still daring the pandemic to come in and kill their residents-- these 8, in order of confirmed cases as of Thursday morning-- all up since Wednesday morning:

• Utah- 2,542
• Oklahoma- 2,263
• Iowa- 1,995
• Arkansas- 1,599
• South Dakota- 1,168
• Nebraska- 952
• North Dakota- 365
• Wyoming- 288

Face To Face by Nancy Ohanian

Extreme right-wing political ideology aside, most of these states have rapidly increasing numbers of infections. Charles Branas, the chair of the Epidemiology Department at Columbia University, who developed a model tracking hospital shortages and virus outbreaks around the country, told Politico that "Perhaps there are governors who believe they have the medical capacity to deal with this [without a lockdown order] but I don’t know if that is wise, because once it gets out it can spread unabated and overwhelm any medical system of any size. Every state is at risk and should have aggressive social distancing policies." South Dakota's infection rate has increased 260% in the last 5 days (not counting yesterday's big spike), compared to New York's 26%. Sioux Falls Council member Pat Starr, who is dealing with the biggest outbreak in South Dakota, said that "Whatever we were doing wasn’t working, and it’s taking off like crazy now... My concern is that we don’t flatten the curve and so we overwhelm our medical facilities. We are not to that point yet, but we’re approaching it very quickly. We’re gonna continue to see some really high numbers, and we’re going to see people that we can’t take care of."

Iowa on Tuesday reported its single largest daily jump in confirmed cases-- roughly half stemming from an outbreak at the Tyson Foods plant in Columbus Junction. Company officials closed the facility, one of the nation’s largest pork processing plants, earlier this month.

Meatpacking plants or the egg hatchery in Grand Island, which serves 10 percent of the U.S. egg market, are considered essential to the national food distribution network-- meaning workers would gather regardless of a stay-at-home order. And outbreaks at other big agricultural facilities have occurred even in states with lockdowns.

In his column for The Atlantic yesterday, Ron Brownstein began by reminding his readers that the pandemic "appears destined to widen the political divide between the nation’s big cities and the smaller places beyond them. And that could narrow Donald Trump’s possible pathways to reelection. In almost every state, the outbreak is spreading much more heavily in the largest metropolitan centers than in less densely populated areas, even when the figures are adjusted on a per capita basis... That pattern threatens to exacerbate one of Trump’s most conspicuous political vulnerabilities: his historical weakness in big metropolitan areas that are full of the minority and white-collar white voters most skeptical of him. From the Virginia governor’s race in 2017, to a sweep of suburban House districts in 2018, to the upset victory in Kentucky’s gubernatorial race last year, Democrats have consistently posted significant gains in these areas under Trump. The pattern continued in the unexpected Democratic victory this week in a highly contested state-supreme-court election in Wisconsin, a state that could be the tipping point in the 2020 presidential race. The question for Trump this fall will be whether he can offset that weakness by matching or building on his dominant advantage in exurban, small-town, and rural communities. In Wisconsin this week, the GOP lost ground with those voters too, but by and large, polling still shows Trump holding a strong position among them. And because most rural communities are facing fewer cases of the disease so far, they may be much more receptive than big-city leaders and voters to Trump’s calls to reopen the economy as quickly as possible.

Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, was the largest county in America that Trump won in 2016. But a new poll, released this week by the Republican firm OH Predictive Insights, found Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden there by 13 percentage points. The survey also found Biden leading by nine points statewide, even though Democrats haven’t won Arizona in a presidential race since 1996. These results track with Maricopa’s movement away from the GOP in 2018, when Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema won the ordinarily Republican-leaning county by about four points.

The results in Wisconsin this week offered an even more visceral measure of Trump’s continuing risk in major population centers. In the state’s supreme-court election-- whose timing was extremely controversial, given the pandemic-- the liberal Jill Karofsky decisively ousted the conservative incumbent Daniel Kelly.

Karofsky showed formidable strength across the state’s population centers, even though they are confronting the most serious outbreaks of the disease. Although the number of polling places in Milwaukee was limited to just five, Karofsky amassed a 70,000-vote advantage in that county. She also carried Dane County, which includes the state capital of Madison, by a crushing 62-percentage-point margin. That’s far larger than Hillary Clinton’s advantage there in 2016 (48 points) or the Democrat Tony Evers’s lead in the 2018 governor’s race (51 points).

“Dane County is the fastest-growing county in the state: massive electronic-medical-records [industry], plus biotech-- and that’s not even counting the big insurance-industry component, the University of Wisconsin, and state government,” said Charles Franklin, a law and public-policy professor at Marquette University’s law school and the director of its respected public poll. “Not only does [the county] grow, but its turnout rate goes up year after year, and it’s even more Democratic from race to race to race.”

Karofsky also posted notable gains in two sets of suburban counties that are closely watched during election season. The so-called WOW counties outside of Milwaukee-- Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington-- are perhaps the most Republican-leaning major suburban counties north of the Mason-Dixon line. But, as Franklin noted, Trump won them in 2016 by less than Mitt Romney did in 2012. More recently, former Republican Governor Scott Walker carried them by a smaller margin in his losing 2018 campaign than he did in his winning 2014 race.

This week, Karofsky significantly reduced the GOP’s margin in all three counties-- not only compared with Trump’s wins, but also compared with another state-supreme-court election last year. “In the WOW counties, I believe there is something systematically happening,” Franklin said. “Though it has not converted them from red to blue, it has converted them from deep red to less red.”

Just as strikingly, Karofsky won all three of the so-called BOW counties around Green Bay-- Brown, Outagamie, and Winnebago-- which Trump had carried comfortably in 2016, and Walker more narrowly in 2018.

...[T]hese results are consistent with one of the most powerful political through lines of the Trump era: a recoil from his vision of the Republican Party among urban and suburban voters. In 2016, Trump lost 87 of the 100 largest U.S. counties, by a combined nearly 15 million votes. That was significantly larger than Romney’s 11.6-million-vote deficit in the 100 largest counties. In 2018, Republicans were routed in suburban House districts not only in metropolitan areas that were already trending toward the Democrats-- including New Jersey and Northern Virginia and Chicago, Detroit, and Denver-- but also in places where the GOP had previously remained strong, such as Richmond, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and Orange County, California.

I'd like to remind these Republicans that healthcare workers are dying-- and far more than official data suggests. Kaiser Health News reports that "The number of health care workers who have tested positive for the coronavirus is likely far higher than the reported tally of 9,200, and U.S. officials say they have no comprehensive way to count those who lose their lives trying to save others. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the infection tally Tuesday and said 27 health worker deaths have been recorded, based on a small number of test-result reports. Officials stressed that the count was drawn from just 16% of the nation’s COVID-19 cases, so the true numbers of health care infections and deaths are certainly far higher. CDC officials said data provided by the states most closely tracking the occupations of people with the virus suggests that health care workers account for about 11% of COVID-19 infections... Some states, including Ohio, have reported rates of health care worker illness as high as 20%."

Rev John Pavlovitz reminded his blog's readers that opening America now is a slap in the face to healthcare workers. (And, for some, it will be a lot worse than a slap, including a death sentence... or maybe a death sentence for members of their families.) "Opening America, began Pavlovitz. "The President keeps teasing it in his daily propaganda, ego-stroke photo op. His sycophantic surrogates repeat the refrain on social media and in press releases. Soulless partisan television hosts pound us relentlessly with it. MAGA cult members protest mask-less and in close quarters for it. This united offensive to quickly get Americans back to work, is all happening on days when we are losing over two thousand people a day, when we’ve eclipsed 644,000 confirmed cases, when 29,000 have died in the span of eight weeks.

And every single life that is threatened by this vicious, insidious illness-- falls squarely on the shoulders of healthcare workers and first responders: doctors, nurses, EMTs, lab technicians, hospital staff, police officers, firefighters.

For weeks they have labored without sleep, without rest, without enough masks to protect themselves, without enough tests to identify the relentless flood of sick people in their midst, without enough ventilators to keep the gravely ill alive; continually stepping into harm’s way to attend to this unprecedented national emergency.

As a society, do we give a damn? Pavlovitz doesn't think so. "If we did," he wrote, "if we really grasped how overworked they are and how much trauma they’ve carried and how pushed to the brink they are, we wouldn’t be talking about re-opening America right now. People wouldn’t be pressed together at state capitol buildings and stopping traffic and parading around in middle-finger-defiance of stay-at-home orders, while giving the virus the greatest boost it could ask for. If we actually respected the people who take care of us when we are at our most vulnerable, and who stand between those we love and the brink of death-- we’d be doing all we could to stay at home, to abide restrictions, to demand more safeguards, not less-- and we certainly wouldn’t be rushing people back into frequent and large scale interactions, when millions of people can’t get tested and when a vaccine is months away."

What are we saying to the people who place their lives in peril to keep us alive, when we can’t be inconvenienced a few weeks?

When we complain about not being able to get our hair colored or go to the mall or the corner bar?

When we act as if we’re being persecuted, simply by being asked to stay home and allow the grievously ill and seriously injured to receive attention and allow this virus to abate?

Of course our leaders aren’t thinking about any of this.

This President has no working empathy, and his allegedly pro-life party has shown a steadfast commitment to the Stock Market over living, breathing human beings. They are not about humanity, but profitability. I fully expected this callous disregard for life from them.

But honestly, I expected more of America... It is a time we stopped talking about opening America, and started healing it.

Will The Pandemic Kill Trump's Catastrophic Political Career?

Americans are rapidly waking up to the fact that the Trump regime has done an abysmal job in responding to the pandemic. Even rural counties-- largely red, largely Trumpist-- are starting to see upticks in infection. "Many communities that watched the pandemic unfold in far-away places are now experiencing the crisis first hand. More than two-thirds of rural counties have confirmed at least one case." By late March, for example, Blaine County, Idaho "had the highest per capita infection rate in the nation, rural or urban."

Last night, in a Wall Street Journal podcast, Dr. Fauci talked about coming out of the pandemic. One of his suggestions was that we abandon the handshaking custom-- something I've personally been trying to avoid since the 1960s. Dr. F: "I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you. Not only would it be good to prevent coronavirus disease, it probably would decrease instances of influenza dramatically in this country."

"The town of Cynthiana in rural Harrison County appeared to be the epicenter of the crisis in Kentucky." 96% white, Harrison County is a typically Trumpist hellhole. In 2016 just 26.1% of the voters cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton. Last cycle, the blue wave didn't touch Harrison County. Thomas Massie's support in the county was recorded at R+33. "The coronavirus has officially reached more than two-thirds of the country’s rural counties, with one in 10 reporting at least one death. Doctors and elected officials are warning that a late-arriving wave of illness could overwhelm rural communities that are older, poorer and sicker than much of the country, and already dangerously short on medical help... In some places, the virus has rushed in so suddenly that even leaders are falling ill. In the tiny county of Early in southwest Georgia, five people have died. And the mayor and the police chief of the county seat, Blakely, are among the county’s 92 confirmed cases. It has been a shock for the rural county of fewer than 11,000 people." In 2016, Early County residents went for Trump for president and for Republican Johnny Isakson for the Senate. The county also missed the 2018 blue wave. It strongly backed Republican Brian Kemp over Democrat Stacey Abrams for Senate.

Magnum is the county seat of Greer County in southwest Oklahoma. Greer County has 1,546 registered Democrats and 890 registered Republicans. Bernie trounced Hillary in 2016-- 55.8% to 27.6% and got far more voters than Trump did that day-- 332 to Trump's 111. But in November Greer County was Trump country-- 78.2% to 17.0%. "In Mangum, Oklahoma, a town of 6,000 in the western part of the state, it all started with a visit. A pastor from Tulsa appeared at a local church, but got sick shortly thereafter and became the state’s first Covid-19 fatality. Then somebody at the local church started to feel unwell-- a person who eventually tested positive for coronavirus... Before realizing they were infected, several people who eventually tested positive for the virus had moved about widely through the city, including to the local nursing home, which now has a cluster of cases... Magnum now has an emergency shelter-in-place order and curfew-- just like larger towns and cities around the United States."

It is hard to imagine counties like Greer voting for Status Quo Joe against Trump. They would absolutely vote for Bernie against Trump though. A CNN national poll released yesterday, found that "A majority of Americans -- 55% -- now say the federal government has done a poor job preventing the spread of coronavirus in the United States, up eight points in about a week... A majority, 52%, say they disapprove of the way Trump is handling the coronavirus outbreak, and 45% approve. Both figures have risen since early March, when 41% approved, 48% disapproved and 11% weren't sure how they felt about the President's handling of the viral outbreak. Still, just 43% say the President is doing everything he could to fight the outbreak, while 55% say he could be doing more-- including 17% among those who approve of his handling of it so far and 18% of Republicans."

Not Alive-- But Smarter Than A Republican by Chip Proser

Daniel McGraw, writing for the conservative #NeverTrump website, The Bulwark took a look at how the response to the pandemic is impacting the politics of Nevada, Michigan and Georgia. He wrote that it's too early to know for sure if voters will see Trump as "an inept bungler who made a deadly crisis worse."

Nevada, which has an economy heavily dependent on travel and tourism, has had more than 170,000 new unemployment claims in the past three weeks, which is about one-third of the number of employees statewide in the hospitality industry. In Georgia, the number of new unemployment claims jumped from about 12,000 (for the week ending March 21) to about 134,000 (for the week ending March 28).

As for Michigan, the state now reports the third-highest number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the country, chiefly because of Detroit, which is currently a hotspot. The state has seen close to 450,000 in new unemployment claims in the last three weeks, adding to its unemployment rolls at rates that far exceed even the hardest stretches of the Great Recession of a dozen years ago.

Plus, Michigan is still wedded to the automobile industry. Industry observers expect auto sales to drop a lot from “demand shock,” meaning sales of cars will be down because economic uncertainty will lead the public to delay large purchases. This will have a huge effect on the economy in a state that is home to some 1,600 automotive-related manufacturing companies.

According to a recent analysis from the Brookings Institution, jobs in the leisure and hospitality sector are among those most at risk during the coronavirus outbreak. Combined, the three large cities in these three states-- Las Vegas, Atlanta, and Detroit-- have about 1.1 million people employed in leisure and hospitality, making up fairly big percentages of the workforce in those cities: Las Vegas at 33.8 percent, Atlanta at 18.8 percent, and Detroit at 15.4 percent.

These cities will likely suffer greater economic downsizing than will most big cities in the rest of the country. The electoral consequences are not clear, however. Although economic downturns are generally not good for incumbents, no one knows whether the poorer individuals who lose their jobs will show up and vote in November. Nor can we guess how many of these individuals who lost their jobs will still be living in the same states come November.

The health research done by the University of Washington (reportedly used as a model for White House policy decisions) predicts that by then end of May, all three states will have several times as many deaths as they have now: Michigan is projected to have nearly 3,000 deaths, Georgia about 3,400, and Nevada about 900. The researchers also expect that all three states will experience shortages of hospital beds: Michigan is projected to be short about 910 ICU beds, Georgia about 740, and Nevada about 300. These figures are in flux, however, as just last week the predicted hospital bed shortages were much higher.

One more part of the COVID-19 crisis that might have an impact in the election: Recent data suggests that the coronavirus is disproportionately affecting African Americans in some places. For example, African Americans make up 14 percent of the population of Michigan but over 40 percent of the state’s COVID-19 deaths so far. This could affect the election-- not just in Michigan but also in Nevada and Georgia, other states with higher-than-the-national-average minority populations-- if it comes to be seen as a racial issue that drives urban-area voter turnout.

...Because the city’s convention center is being converted into a field hospital, the huge annual Detroit auto show has been canceled, and the more than 700,000 attendees won’t be dropping any coin in the Motor City in June.

Meanwhile, Trump has been playing an odd game with Michigan citizens. In late March, he attacked GM CEO Mary Barra over how the company will be making ventilators and surgical masks at its plants. GM said it was waiting on directions from FEMA, and Trump said the company was been dragging its feet.

“Why is the president only attacking us? What are other automakers doing? Who else has a plant ready to go? Strange he is attacking us,” said a GM insider quoted anonymously in the Detroit Free Press. “We are, by far, ahead of anyone else. [Trump] is a master of diverting blame to others. We are not dragging our feet. And we are not negotiating with the government.”

But Trump’s insults to Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer go beyond his usual craziness. When Whitmer, a Democrat who won the 2018 governor’s race by more than 400,000 votes, began asking the feds for more masks, ventilators, test kits, and other aid, Trump insulted her at press conferences and on Twitter:

This set off a firestorm in the state. Longtime Detroit columnist Mitch Albom closed his scathing March 29 Free Press column this way:

We don’t need presidential name-calling. We don’t need disrespect. We don’t need the most powerful person in the nation, whom we helped elect to his job, refusing to return our governor’s calls and acting like a pouting child waiting to be asked nicely before he shares his toys.

Now is not the time to be a child, Mr. President. Now is the time to put away childish things. To be a man. You can begin by respecting a woman. Her name is Gretchen Whitmer. She is our governor. And like her or not, she represents us to you. She counts. We count. Please, at least act like you understand that.

Trump’s behavior toward Michigan is strange enough that it makes you wonder whether he fully understands that he needs to win the state to secure a second term.

In 2016, Trump narrowly bested Hillary in Michigan-- 2,279,543 (47.50%) to 2,268,839 (47.27%). Two year later, former state Senator Gretchen Whitmer beat Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette 2,266,193 (53.3%) to 1,859,534 (43.8%). Even Trump should be able to figure out what had happened to the GOP brand since he took the White House. Schuette was endorsed by Trump and Pence, while Whitmer was backed by Obama, Bernie, Biden and Hillary. Whitmer raised just over $7 million and Schuette raised a bit over $6 million. Democrats swept the state and also managed to win Schuette's old job as Attorney General and win the Secretary of State open job. The Morning Consult Trump tracker shows that by the end of December-- so pre-pandemic-- Trump's approval rating in Michigan had decreased by 18 points. In December his jon approval was 43%-- and his disapproval was 53%. His dreadful pandemic response and his vicious and misogynistic attacks on Gov. Whitmer is not going to help raise those numbers.

UPDATE: No Confidence

A SurveyUSA poll released this morning, is even worse for Trump and his Republican enablers. In summation, the pollster wrote that "After 3 weeks of listening to America's cheerleader-in-chief rant and ramble, the number of Americans who strongly disapprove of the way in which President Donald J. Trump is handling the COVID-19 Coronavirus crisis has jumped from 25% on 03/20/20 to 38% today... 3 weeks ago, Trump's Net Virus Approval was Plus 11. Then it dropped 2 weeks ago to Plus 9. Today it drops into negative territory for the 1st time: Minus 2 (48% approve, 50% disapprove), the lowest net score since SurveyUSA began tracking 03/13/20. America's growing impatience with the President is in stark contrast to how the nation views straight-shooters such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci's handling of the virus is today at Plus 59, up from Plus 51 2 weeks ago."

While Democratic governors Andrew Cuomo (+39) and Gavin Newsom (+36) are both also way into positive territory-- although the greasy Cuomo is beginning to slip-- Trump ally Ron DeSantis (FL) is underwater for his pandemic response (minus 5).

Extraordinarily in a time of crisis, Americans are split over whether to pay any attention to the so-called Leader of the Free World. 42% of Americans today say it's best to ignore Trump when he opens his mouth about the virus; another 42% say they listen when the President speaks. This is a 14-point turn for the worse over the past 2 weeks: then, 49% said it was better to listen, 35% said it was better to ignore. There is a 21-point gender gap on this question.

When all is said and done, 48% today say they have no confidence in President Trump's ability to lead the nation through these trying times; 43% say they do have confidence. This is another 14-point turn for the worse from 2 weeks ago, when 50% had confidence and 41% did not.