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‘It’s an exhausting story’: Jonathan Karl on his up-close view of Trump

ABC’s chief White House correspondent on his new book Front Row at the Trump Show, fake news, coronavirus and why the Trump presidency is a matter of life and deathm

Sat 4 Apr 2020 01.00 EDT

At a White House briefing late last month, Jonathan Karl asked what he regarded as the fundamental question that day, about the coronavirus pandemic. “And everybody who needs one will be able to get a ventilator?”

Donald Trump’s reply was probably the strangest ABC News’ chief White House correspondent has ever had from a US president.

“Look,” he said. “Don’t be a cutie pie. OK?”

Trump went on. Karl, he said, was “a wise guy” too.

What viewers may not have known is that the two men go way back.

They first met in 1994 when Karl was a cub reporter at the New York Post and Trump, a millionaire property developer, gave him a tour of Trump Tower, where newly married couple Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley were staying. The result was a front-page scoop: “Inside Michael’s Honeymoon Hideaway”.

Now president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, Karl recounts the episode both at the start of his new book, Front Row at the Trump Show, and in a phone interview with the Guardian.

“The thing that blew me away about that moment, my first real introduction to Donald Trump, was the way he understood exactly what my job was and how to make a compelling story, and the way he operated so quickly,” he says.

“It wasn’t going through handlers and PR advisers and spokespeople. It was Donald Trump: ‘Come on over, let me show you what I got.’ There was no filter. It was him and he was incredibly, in a way, charming and we had a great story and he was willing to break rules to tell it.

“There was intense security all around, keeping the press at bay, and here’s Donald Trump bringing me right up to Michael’s apartment, showing me their secret vehicle to get in and out of the place. He didn’t play it the way it’s normally played.”

Karl, 52, adds: “I knew that I could call him from that point on whenever I wanted to and he would be accessible and willing to play along and loved to be in the mix. The idea that I would go on to become a White House reporter, president of the White House Correspondents Association, and he would be the president is kind of mind-blowing.”

Trump’s gut instinct for publicity and reptilian genius for making media weather would be evident in his 2016 election campaign and throughout his presidency. The White House press secretary’s daily briefing was killed off and replaced by “chopper talk”, before Trump boarded Marine One on the South Lawn. He has turned the daily coronavirus updates into a new form of campaign rally.

Karl reflects: “We’ve had three White House press secretaries, we’ve had – I guess depends on how you count – three or four communications directors in the Trump White House, but in reality we’ve really only had one. Donald Trump has always been the press secretary, the spokesperson, the communications director for Donald Trump. That was true in 1994 when I first encountered him and it’s absolutely true in 2020.”

Karl finds himself promoting a book in the middle of a pandemic. He has been doing TV interviews from remote locations. Stephen Colbert teased him for speaking from a home office where his Emmy awards were prominently displayed.

One of Karl’s most memorable anecdotes is about 10 November 2016. It has become a commonplace to quote the musical Hamilton’s song The Room Where It Happens but Karl was genuinely in there, witnessing the Oval Office meeting between President Barack Obama and President-elect Trump (and snapping a few photos from 5ft away). And this collision of matter and anti-matter produced a surprise.

“It was the first time that I saw what seemed to be a humbled Donald Trump,” Karl recalls. “He seemed to be taken with the moment. I was almost imagining he’s like, ‘Oh, my God, what did I get myself into?’

“Nobody thought he was going to win. I don’t think he really thought he was going to win and here he was in the Oval Office, a place where he was gonna be returning in just a short period of time as the president and all the weight of all that meant and the problems he was gonna be dealing with and the responsibility he was going to have.

“He seemed humbled. He seemed a little bit freaked out. Now, that didn’t last: we never saw that look again, really. That was a fleeting moment but it really struck me.”

When Trump was asked if he intended to ask Obama or any of his other predecessors for advice on dealing with the coronavirus crisis, he replied: “I don’t want to disturb them, bother them. I don’t think I’m going to learn much. And, you know, I guess you could say that there’s probably a natural inclination not to call.”

‘Enemy of the people’

For more than three years, Karl has been on Trump’s trail, even receiving a hug from Kanye West in the Oval Office. He has also witnessed Trump’s war on the media with barbs such as “the enemy of the people” – a phrase which, Karl notes, the Nazis used in 1934. So what message does it send to the rest of the world?

“I think it is deeply disturbing that you have authoritarian leaders around the world who shut down a free press, jail reporters and potentially even worse and do so invoking the words of the American president. So you see Erdoğan and Putin. You see it’s been documented in Kazakhstan and in Egypt. You see authoritarian leaders echoing the precise words of Donald Trump, talking about ‘fake news’ as reporters are thrown in jail.

The Enemy of the People review: CNN’s Jim Acosta takes Trump’s bait again

“The other thing that I think is really troubling is when the president calls real news ‘fake news’, when he suggests that the act of being an aggressive reporter is ‘treasonous’, it has undermined the faith in an independent free press among a significant segment of the population. That’s a big problem. I do worry about that a lot.”

Trump’s use of the bully pulpit for his daily coronavirus briefings has led to renewed calls for the press corps to be more combative. In his book, however, Karl cautions against reporters behaving like a political opposition or the anti-Trump “resistance”.

He explains: “There is a breathlessly negative tone to a lot of the news coverage of Trump and Trump’s provided ample material to fuel that, but what happens is a segment of the population sees it and tunes it all out. It all becomes noise and everything is the outrage of the day and then it’s hard to differentiate between a real outrage and an outrage that is maybe not as important.

“I mention the case of one CNN reporter literally getting up on live television and saying reporters should be protesting the president in Lafayette Square. We are not protesters. We are not the resistance. We need to report on a president fairly and objectively and a lot of that’s going to end up being negative.”

He adds: “Your north star is to provide objective and balanced news and let’s remember that this president has branded the news media as the opposition party, so when those working for mainstream news organisations act like the opposition party, you’re actually playing right into his media strategy.”

Karl’s book draws on fresh research and interviews, including with John Kelly, the former White House chief of staff. In 2017, Karl writes, Kelly had to talk the national security adviser, HR McMaster, out of passing on the president’s order for a Venezuela war plan to the Pentagon.

Now, however, as Trump faces the biggest test of his life, most voices of restraint are gone.

Karl says: “Up until this moment he’s had a series of people in the White House who have tried to steer him or put some guardrails up. John Kelly made the most aggressive effort to try to protect Donald Trump from his most destructive tendencies.

“It is all Donald Trump right now and I think that’s potentially dangerous. Any president, no matter how competent, needs to have strong advisers. He’s got the medical people that are advising him on this, sure, but those are not on his West Wing staff there.

“This is truly Donald Trump calling all the shots and doing it by his gut instinct. So I think that is potentially worrisome, as is the way the truth has been undermined, the credibility of the White House and also the credibility of the press corps that he’s tried so hard to undermine. Both of those things make this crisis harder to deal with day to day.”

‘An exhausting story’

As the title of his book implies, Karl already had a front-row seat to history, reporting on the most peculiar president of this or any other age. Now there is a once-in-a-century global pandemic added to the mix. What a time to be alive. Is a part of him secretly enjoying the daily adrenaline rush?

Trump speaks during the daily briefing on the novel coronavirus in the Brady Briefing Room at the White House. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

“It’s an exhausting story,” he says, suddenly sounding weary. “Yes, there is something rewarding about people wanting to know the story and the interest and the fascination in it, but it’s exhausting and some of it’s truly been troubling.”

A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump review: dispatches from a time before the virus

He elaborates: “I think, especially in light of what we’re seeing with this pandemic, there is something very dangerous that is unfolding here.

“We’re at a point where nearly half the country doesn’t believe what this president and White House says and we have nearly half the rest of the country that’s been told not to believe what they see in a newspaper or see in television news or any other form of mainstream news.

“That’s a deeply troubling, deeply dangerous place to be where there isn’t a shared agreement and sense of some basic facts, especially now where reliable information, and believing you have reliable information, can literally be a matter of life and death.

© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

{ The above accentuates the triple danger the world is facing: a deathly viral toll, a dialectical struggle, and a dangerous man. Who ever said such bad mix couldn’t happen here, the very source of intellectual enlightenment, and social reality the world has ever known since the Golden Ages of Greece and Rome.}

{ Or, does a semi successful acting career guarantee a smooth transition to politics? } :

CORONAVIRUS

Two months in, Trump’s coronavirus response creates more chaos

Analysis: Amid America’s biggest crisis in generations, the president’s actions have often complicated problems rather than resolved them.

April 5, 2020, 9:45 AM EDT

By Jonathan Allen

WASHINGTON — More than two months into what President Donald Trump calls a “war” against COVID-19, his administration’s efforts to combat the deadly disease, along with its disastrous effects on the U.S. economy, are often creating more problems than they solve.

Bidding wars for life-saving equipment, a power struggle between Trump’s son-in-law and the vice president, political gamesmanship, the centralization of authority and decentralization of accountability, and the creation of new government programs while standing bureaucracies are ignored, have all contributed to chaos within the political, economic and health care systems.

Banks haven’t been able to process loan applications for a new Small Business Administration relief program, companies trying to produce personal protective equipment for medical professionals can’t get the Federal Emergency Management Administration’s attention, and doctors and ventilators at ambulatory surgery centers idled by a soft moratorium on elective operations are on the sidelines.

Those problems are minor compared to the crunch of rising coronavirus cases, the scarcity of ventilators and the possibility that trillions of dollars in aid won’t be enough — or well-directed enough — to prevent a catastrophic economic collapse.

Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

It all adds up to a sense that no one is really in charge in the midst of the most daunting crisis the nation has faced in generations.

“This country is re-learning what it understood during the Cold War — we don’t elect presidents for the good days, we elect them to handle the bad days,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif. “Donald Trump is incapable of handling a bad day, let alone a protracted pandemic.”

The composite sketch drawn from interviews NBC conducted in recent days with more than a dozen individuals involved in various aspects of the crisis reveals a fight for mortal and economic survival in which men and women, states and cities, and hospitals and businesses of all kinds have been left without sufficient support. The absence of national leadership comes even at a time when Congress and the Federal Reserve are pumping cash into the system and many businesses who want to provide assistance have found they can’t connect with federal agencies.

Many of those interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering the president, or because they weren’t authorized by their employers to talk publicly, and some only provided details on small pieces of the puzzle. Their slices of the world represent Democratic and Republican politics, federal, state and local governments, large and small businesses, the health care system and various parts of supply chains that have been broken or bent under the weight of tremendous financial strain and wildly variant demand for an array of goods and services.

Some praised aspects of the president’s efforts, including cracking down on hoarding and price-gouging, encouraging Americans to stay at home to prevent the spread of the disease, and using some of his hard and soft power to procure medical equipment from private companies.

But taken together, their stories reveal that poor preparation for the pandemic has been compounded both by policies that have been implemented and by the Trump administration’s inability to coordinate the distribution of health care assets — equipment like ventilators, masks and gloves, and trained medical personnel — and the effort to backstop an economy suddenly thrust into reverse.

More than three years into his tenure, Trump has blamed his predecessor, Barack Obama, for a barren national stockpile of needed medical equipment and at the same time said that the federal government should not be relied upon as a supplier.

“The states should have been building their stockpiles,” he said at a White House press briefing this week. “We’re a backup. We’re not an ordering clerk.”

He also invited his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to speak about the response for the first time, acknowledging the prominent behind-the-scenes role Kushner has taken in recent days on a task force that had been the domain of Vice President Mike Pence.

“I’ve been serving really at the direction of the vice president and he’s asked me to get involved in different projects,” Kushner said in response to a question about reports that he is running a “shadow” task force parallel to Pence’s effort.

The biggest issue on the front lines of the coronavirus fight is scarcity. On its own, that’s not a problem of Trump’s making, but it has been exacerbated by his insistence that states and cities compete with the federal government and private-sector buyers, including deeper-pocketed hospitals, for test kits, ventilators, masks, gowns and other items.

The truth is, there’s not much equipment out there to be had. Much of the personal protective gear used in the United States is manufactured in China, where the coronavirus devastated production months ago.

On top of that, rising demand and the waiver of some federal rules for protective gear has inspired the development of a very hot “gray market” for the goods. That market means less quality control, buyers who are often unfamiliar with sellers or brokers as they are inundated with solicitations, prices that have skyrocketed, and orders that are frequently canceled at the last minute, according to several people involved in bidding for the equipment.

That can mean losses in terms of the opportunity cost of bidding teams’ time, money thrown away or, even worse, the risk of outfitting emergency medical personnel with substandard equipment.

“The demand curve is far exceeding the supply curve … which is resulting in unvetted and uncertified suppliers entering the marketplace,” said Chaun Powell, vice president for strategic supplier engagement at the health care consulting firm Premier.

Of course, any president would have been challenged by the enormity of this crisis, and Trump has found ways to show glimmers of creativity with the resources available to him.

For example, the federal government is now underwriting the cost of flying personal protective equipment in from overseas to deliver them to private buyers in exchange for the right to identify which counties get 50 percent of the materials first, a Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesman said in an email exchange about the “Project Airbridge” program.

If he chose to, Trump could invoke the Defense Production Act to take and allocate 100 percent.

Facing pressure, he issued an order Friday designed to get 3M, the Minnesota-based manufacturer of the N-95 face mask, to ship protective gear made in foreign countries to the U.S. and stop sending U.S.-made goods to other countries. The order states that when it comes to equipment needed in the COVID-19 fight, “it is the policy of the United States to prevent domestic brokers, distributors, and other intermediaries from diverting such material overseas.”

Often, the president chooses to highlight how he has convinced personal friends, political allies or people with business before the federal government to pitch in. On March 30, he held a Rose Garden news conference in which several CEOs spoke about their efforts to provide tranches of personal protective equipment. One of them, MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, has donated more than $200,000 to Trump’s campaigns and affiliated committees.

Another CEO, Greg Hayes of United Technologies Corporation, announced the donation of 1.1 million pieces of personal protective equipment to FEMA, some of which was originally designated the previous week. UTC’s long-pending merger with the defense contractor Raytheon had been approved by Trump’s Justice Department four days before the Rose Garden event.

More often than not, reports from around the country and across sectors of the economy show inefficiency from the federal government at best and incompetence at worst. In some cases, the administration’s actions may have had unanticipated downsides.

U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams’ admonition to limit elective surgeries was the right call but has hammered ambulatory surgery centers, just as stay-at-home guidelines have had a painful effect on health care providers who are not involved in the coronavirus fight more broadly, according to Jim Rechtin, CEO of Envision.

His company, which operates more than 250 ambulatory surgery centers and employs 27,000 clinicians, including 11,000 who work in emergency rooms, has ventilators on hand and doctors who are able to travel to work with coronavirus patients. He’s looking for ways to get ventilators to hospitals — despite his concern that they won’t be replenished — and clinicians need to be paid.

“It’s a mismatch of supply and demand — part of that is coordination and part of it’s the financial support to make it happen,” he said, adding that there are “signs that there is early activity in this area but we could use more, faster.”

Two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that FEMA isn’t responding to requests from companies looking to supply goods for the coronavirus fight. The emergency management bureau’s regional offices are well-schooled in disaster response, but the White House has basically thrown that organizational structure out the window in favor of centralizing power. Trump has also chosen not to use established logistics chains at other agencies, preferring a task-force model that has yet to wrangle the towering management challenge.

VIEW THIS GRAPHIC ON NBCNEWS.COM

Outside the health system, businesses are closing up shop and laying off workers at a record pace. Ten million people have filed new unemployment claims in the last two weeks alone, and even industries that were expected to hum through the coronavirus crisis are witnessing severe slow-downs. Across the country, big trucks are parked for days on end with nothing to haul, according to multiple sources familiar with the industry.

“The food factories are reducing our shipments,” said Dan Eberhart, who owns trucking and oil companies. “They’re doing this because the employees showing up at the factories are shrinking” in number.

Eberhart, who is a major fundraiser for GOP candidates, said Trump needs to get on the ball on the Small Business Administration relief program that has been overwhelmed by applications but unable to get off the ground.

“I have several industrial businesses seeking these SBA loans, and the banks won’t even take the applications yet and/or haven’t been able to submit them to the SBA,” he said in a text message late Saturday night. “If President Trump doesn’t speed this up, the U.S. is going to have an economy the size of the Cayman Islands.”

Right now, he appears to be having trouble proving he can manage a government bigger than that.

Jonathan Allen is a senior political analyst for NBC News, based in Washington.

© 2020 NBC UNIVERSAL

Fox News

DONALD TRUMP

Published April 06, 2020

Last Update 2 hrs ago

Dem lawmaker wants Trump prosecuted at international court for ‘crimes against humanity’

By Ronn Blitzer | Fox News

A Democratic state representative in Ohio said she “can’t take it anymore” and vowed to refer President Trump to the International Criminal Court for “crimes against humanity” over Trump’s promotion of a drug that has not been conclusively proven to fight the coronavirus.

State Rep. Tavia Galonski tweeted Sunday after President Trump spoke about hydroxychloroquine at his daily press briefing. The drug, normally used to treat malaria, is one of several that the president has pointed to as showing promise in the fight against COVID-19, but its effectiveness has been a subject of debate.

GIULIANI SAYS DOCTORS, NOT ‘NATIONAL BUREAUCRACY,’ SHOULD DECIDE WHETHER TO USE HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE FOR CORONAVIRUS

“I can’t take it anymore. I’ve been to The Hague. I’m making a referral for crimes against humanity tomorrow,” Galonski said. “Today’s press conference was the last straw. I know the need for a prosecution referral when I see one.”

The Hague is the site of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which boasts 123 state parties. The United States is not one of them. Only member states or non-members who accept the ICC’s jurisdiction can make referrals. Alternatively, the United Nations Security Council can also refer a matter for investigation.

“Crimes against humanity” is a category of offense that the ICC handles. The court provides a list of crimes that fall under this, including murder, extermination, enslavement, torture, and “other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering or serious bodily or mental injury.”

Fox News asked Rep. Galonski if there is a specific crime she is accusing Trump of committing, and how she plans on pursuing charges given the United States’ non-member status. She did not immediately respond.

Galonski is not the only one to question Trump’s promotion of hydroxychloroquine, given that the FDA has not approved it – or any other drugs – specifically for treating COVID-19.

Many governors, public-health officials, and others have warned that the drug has shown major side effects and its efficacy still remained unproven as a treatment for COVID-19. Some experts have expressed concern that widespread use of the drug could lead to complicating access for people who need them for rheumatoid arthritis or lupus.

There have been instances of doctors saying they have had success with it, but Dr. Antony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the data is “at best suggestive.”

Fauci said he does not think “we could definitely say it works,” noting that in some cases there has been “no effect,” and in others it may have been effective.

When Fauci was asked about the drug at Sunday’s press briefing, Trump said, “He’s answered that question 15 times.”

Despite the apparent inconclusiveness one way or the other about the drug, Galonski appears confident that she has grounds to bring a case against the president, and is calling on attorneys with international experience to reach out and help her.

Fox News’ Andrew O’Reilly contributed to this report.

2020 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved.

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‘A Really Chilling Moment’: Trump Refuses to Allow Dr. Fauci to Answer Question on Dangers of Hydroxychloroquine

“This is unacceptable. Dr. Fauci, one of the world’s top infectious disease scientists, was just censored live at a White House press conference.”

by

Jake Johnson, staff writer

on

Monday, April 06, 2020

Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci as President Donald Trump dismisses a question during an unscheduled briefing after a Coronavirus Task Force meeting at the White House on April 5, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

During a press briefing Sunday night purportedly aimed at providing the U.S. public with crucial information amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump refused to allow the nation’s top infectious disease expert to answer a reporter’s question about the efficacy of an anti-malaria drug that the president has recklessly touted as a possible COVID-19 treatment despite warnings from medical professionals.

Before Dr. Anthony Fauci could respond to the question about hydroxychloroquine, Trump—who was standing back and off to the side of the podium—complained that Fauci had already spoken about the drug “15 times.”

“You don’t have to ask the question again,” said Trump, stepping forward and moving closer to Fauci as another reporter began asking a separate question.

“This is a really chilling moment from a science standpoint, with Trump having just pushed an unproven COVID treatment and Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the U.S., getting muzzled on live TV,” tweeted Andrew Freedman, a climate reporter for the Washington Post. “Was clear Trump didn’t want to be contradicted.”

Dr. Lucky Tran, a biologist, said Trump’s interruption was “unacceptable.”

“Dr. Fauci, one of the world’s top infectious disease scientists, was just censored live at a White House press conference,” tweeted Tran.

The exchange came just hours after Fauci, in an appearance on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday morning, said that “in terms of science, I don’t think we could definitively say [hydroxychloroquine] works.”

“The data are really just at best suggestive,” said Fauci. “There have been cases that show there may be an effect and there are others to show there’s no effect.”

During a press briefing Saturday evening, Trump said “I really think they should they should take it,” referring to coronavirus patients and hydroxychloroquine. Three people in Nigeria overdosed on the drug last month after the president said, without evidence, that the drug may be able to combat the novel coronavirus.

In a joint statement on March 25, the American Medical Association, American Pharmacists Association, and American Society of Health-System Pharmacists said “there is no incontrovertible evidence to support off-label use of medications for COVID-19.”

“What do I know?” Trump asked during the press briefing Sunday night. “I’m not a doctor.”

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Has Anyone Found Trump’s Soul? Anyone?

He’s not rising to the challenge of the coronavirus pandemic. He’s shriveling into nothingness.

By Frank Bruni

Opinion Columnist

April 6, 2020

Do you remember President George W. Bush’s remarks at Ground Zero in Manhattan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks? I can still hear him speaking of national grief and national pride. This was before all the awful judgment calls and fatal mistakes, and it doesn’t excuse them. But it mattered, because it reassured us that our country’s leader was navigating some of the same emotional currents that we were.

Do you remember President Barack Obama’s news conference after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., that left 28 people, including 20 children, dead? I do. Freshest in my memory is how he fought back tears. He was hurting. He cared. And while we couldn’t bank on new laws to prevent the next massacre, we could at least hold on to that.

One more question: Do you remember the moment when President Trump’s bearing and words made clear that he grasped not only the magnitude of this rapidly metastasizing pandemic but also our terror in the face of it?

It passed me by, maybe because it never happened.

In Trump’s predecessors, for all their imperfections, I could sense the beat of a heart and see the glimmer of a soul. In him I can’t, and that fills me with a sorrow and a rage that I quite frankly don’t know what to do with.

During these extraordinary times, Opinion columnists and writers will be going live on Twitter every weekday at 1 p.m. Eastern to chat with viewers. Join Frank Bruni for a conversation on Wednesday, April 8: @FrankBruni.

Americans are dying by the thousands, and he gloats about what a huge, rapt television audience he has. They’re confronting financial ruin and not sure how they’ll continue to pay for food and shelter, and he reprimands governors for not treating him with adequate adulation.

He’s not rising to the challenge before him, not even a millimeter. He’s shriveling into nothingness.

On Friday, when Trump relayed a new recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that all Americans wear face masks in public places, he went so far out of his way to stress that the coverings were voluntary and that he himself wouldn’t be going anywhere near one that he might as well have branded them Apparel for Skittish Losers. I’ve finally settled on his epitaph: “Donald J. Trump, too cool for the coronavirus.”

This is more than a failure of empathy, which is how many observers have described his deficiency. It’s more than a failure of decency, which has been my go-to lament. It’s a failure of basic humanity.

In The Washington Post a few days ago, Michael Gerson, a conservative who worked in Bush’s White House, wrote that Trump’s spirit is “a vast, trackless wasteland.” Not exactly trackless. There are gaudy outposts of ego all along the horizon.

When the direness of this global health crisis began to be apparent, I was braced for the falsehoods and misinformation that are Trump’s trademarks. I was girded for the incompetence that defines an administration with such contempt for proper procedure and for true expertise.

But what has taken me by surprise and torn me up inside are the aloofness, arrogance, pettiness, meanness, narcissism and solipsism that persist in Trump — that flourish in him — even during a once-in-a-lifetime emergency that demands something nobler. Under normal circumstances, these traits are galling. Under the current ones, they’re gutting.

“I don’t take responsibility at all.” “Did you know I was number one on Facebook?” To bother with just one of those sentences while a nation trembles is disgusting. To bother with both, as Trump did, is perverse.

He continues to bash the media, as if the virus were cooked up in the bowels of CNN. He continues to play blame games and to lord his station over those of a lesser political caste, turning governors into grovelers and suggesting that they’re whiny piggies at the federal trough.

He continues his one-man orgy of self-congratulation, so that in the same breath recently he speculated about a toll of 100,000 deaths in America from Covid-19 and crowed about what a great job he’s doing.

And he continues to taunt and smear his perceived political adversaries. Last week, on Fox News, he called Nancy Pelosi “a sick puppy.” This is how he chooses to spend his time and energy?

At those beloved daily briefings of his, where he talks and talks and talks, he sometimes seems to regard what’s happening less as a devastating scourge than as a star-studded event. Just look at the nifty degree of prominence it’s conferring on everyone and everything involved! He has mused aloud about how well known Anthony Fauci has become. He has marveled at the disease’s celebrity profile.

“Become a very famous term — C-O-V-I-D,” he said on Thursday. Was that envy in his voice?

He leaps from tone deafness to some realm of complete sensory and moral deprivation.

“I want to come way under the models,” he said on Friday, referring to casualty projections. “The professionals did the models. I was never involved in a model.”

“At least this kind of model,” he added. No context like a pandemic for X-rated humor.

It’s an extraordinary thing: to fill the air with so many words and have none of them carry any genuine sadness or stirring resolve.

I can hear his admirers grumble that he doesn’t do camera-perfect emotions, that Obama was just a better actor, that Trump is the more authentic man.

To which I answer: What’s the point of having a showman for a president if he can’t put on the right kind of show? Performances count, even if they’re just performances. And Trump clearly isn’t averse to artifice. Just look at his hair.

A cheap shot? I’m feeling cheap. A loss of life and livelihoods on this scale will do that to you.

As of this writing, at least 9,600 people with the coronavirus have died in the United States. That’s more than three times the number killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. New York State alone reported 630 new deaths on Saturday . No school shooting has taken even a small faction of as many lives.

And while I’m not looking to Trump for any panacea, is it too much to ask for some sign that the dying has made an impression on him, that the crying has penetrated his carapace and that he’s thinking about something other than his ratings? I watch. I wait. I suspect I’ll be doing that forever.

Health Care Workers Are Begging for Masks. Is the President Listening?

Trump Is Gutting Our Democracy While We’re Dealing with Coronavirus

April 6, 2020

© 2020 The New York Times Company

'To which I answer: What’s the point of having a showman for a president if he can’t put on the right kind of show? Performances count, even if they’re just performances. And Trump clearly isn’t averse to artifice. Just look at his hair.

A cheap shot? ’

youtu.be/9eawJyEuyQc

Hardly.

The Guardian - Back to home

Coronavirus US live: Trump says US will stop funding World Heath Organization, then backtracks
President claims WHO ‘blew it’ after downplaying crisis himself

Acting navy secretary resigns after comments on ousted captain
New York has now lost 5,489 residents to coronavirus
Trump was warned in January of devastating impact, memos reveal
Wisconsin voters go to the polls in controversial election

Live global updates

Tue 7 Apr 2020 19.16 ED

Key events
19:10 EDT

Dr Anthony Fauci added that “health disparities have always existed for the African American community but here, again, with this crisis, it’s shining a bright light on how unacceptable that is.”

Although “we will get over coronavirus,” he added, “there will still be health disparities.”

Updated at 19:16 EDT
19:07 EDT
Dr Deborah Birx clarified that African Americans are not more “susceptible” to coronavirus. “What our data suggests is that they are more susceptible to more difficult and severe disease and poorer outcomes,” she said.

Data from cities including Chicago and Philadelphia show stark racial disparities in coronavirus patients and fatalities. White House official Seema Verma said that Medicare data will be looking at race and underlying conditions, and the president earlier promised that more statistics on racial disparities will be revealed in the next week.

Updated at 19:13 EDT
18:58 EDT
Fact check: coronavirus deaths

“I think they’re pretty accurate on the death counts,” Trump told reporters. But doctors disagree. Delays in reporting and a continuing lack of widespread testing mean that more people have died of coronavirus than the official count. Doctors also believe that deaths in February and early March — before the coronavirus was recognized as an epidemic in the US — that were attributed to influenza or pneumonia, were likely due to Covid-19.

Updated at 18:58 EDT
18:52 EDT
Fact check: vote-by-mail

The president has left the briefing room, leaving it to Mike Pence and health officials to answer the remaining questions. Before he exited, he once again falsely claimed that recent elections were marred by voter fraud, insisting that millions of people voted illegally in 2016 which cost him the popular vote.

But extensive research has found that voter fraud is rare and virtually nonexistent.

Trump zeroed in on mail-in ballots, claiming the process is “corrupt” and susceptible to widespread fraud. “You get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room, signing somebody’s ballot,” he said. I

n the 5 states that have moved to an entirely vote-by-mail systems, there has been no evidence of widespread fraud. More states are considering expanding their vote-by-mail systems amid the coronavirus pandemic as a way to keep voters and poll workers safe. But the moves are widely opposed by Republicans, as was the case in Wisconsin, which held its primary election on Tuesday despite calls and legal challenges to postpone the election.

It should be noted, once again, that Trump voted by mail-in ballot in Florida last month. Additionally, the most significant episode of mail-in ballot fraud in recent years involved a Republican congressional candidate in North Carolina. The election was overturned.

Wisconsin voters go to the polls in controversial election

Updated at 18:52 EDT
18:45 EDT
Fact check: hydroxychloroquine

Trump loves to tout hydroxychloroquine. Last week the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) provided the drug with an “emergency use authorization” to use on coronavirus patients in some circumstances. State officials in New York have said that about 4,000 seriously ill patients are now being treated with the drug. But experts say it’s too early to call it a cure.

What is hydroxychloroquine?

Hydroxychloroquine, also known by its brand name, Plaquenil, is a drug used to treat malaria. It is a less toxic version of chloroquine, another malaria drug, which itself is related to quinine, an ingredient in tonic water.

It is also readily available to Americans – already approved as a malaria and anti-inflammation treatment by the FDA – where it is an off-the-shelf drug with various low-cost generic versions. Despite the emergency use order, the FDA has not conducted clinical trials to fully ascertain whether the drug is an effective treatment for Covid-19.

Why is Trump touting it?

Trump was influenced by a widely publicized study in France where 40 coronavirus patients were given hydroxychloroquine, with more than half experiencing the clearing of their airways within three to six days. This apparent improvement is important as it would curtail the timeframe in which infected people could spread Covid-19 to others.

However, experts have warned that the study is small and lacks sufficient rigor to be classed as evidence of a potential treatment. The French health ministry has warned against the use of hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19, with Olivier Véran, France’s health minister, saying that it shouldn’t be used by anyone with the exception of “serious forms of hospitalization and on the collegial decision of doctors and under strict medical supervision”.

Updated at 18:45 EDT

18:37 EDT

Trump is again touting hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, which has not yet been proven effective against the coronavirus.

The repeated a story about a Democratic state lawmaker who credits hydroxychloroquine and Trump for her recovery from Covid-19. “I really think it’s a great thing to try, just based on what I know,” he said. “Again, I’m not a doctor. Get a physician’s approval.”

Here’s more on that state representative, from the Detroit Free Press:

State Rep. Karen Whitsett, who learned Monday she has tested positive for COVID-19, said she started taking hydroxychloroquine on March 31, prescribed by her doctor, after both she and her husband sought treatment for a range of symptoms on March 18.

“It was less than two hours” before she started to feel relief, said Whitsett, who had experienced shortness of breath, swollen lymph nodes, and what felt like a sinus infection. She is still experiencing headaches, she said.

Whitsett said she was familiar with “the wonders” of hydroxychloroquine from an earlier bout with Lyme disease, but does not believe she would have thought to ask for it, or her doctor would have prescribed it, had Trump not been touting it as a possible treatment for COVID-19.

Updated at 18:37 EDT
18:29 EDT

“Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country,” the president said. The ballots are “forgeries in many cases - it’s a horrible thing,” he added, citing no evidence to back the claim.

Trump himself voted by mail — in March.

Updated at 18:30 EDT
18:20 EDT
Fact check: Travel restrictions

Trump took credit for “closing down the borders” to China, and then later to Europe. In fact, he placed restrictions on travel from China but did not totally close it down, as he has repeatedly claimed. Trump also touted his decision to restrict travel from Europe to the US, but the initial order included only 26 countries that are part of the Schengen Area. He later added Ireland the UK but the restrictions still excluded a number of European countries.

Updated at 18:20 EDT
18:18 EDT

Contradicting what he said just minutes ago, Trump is now denying that he’s saying the US will strop funding the WHO. “No I didn’t say it,” he said. “I said I’d look at it.

“They did give us some pretty bad play-calling,” Trump said of the WHO. “They’re taking a lot of heat.” Moreover, “social media” suggested to him that the organization was biased toward China, the president claimed.

Updated at 18:19 EDT
18:15 EDT

Trump said he had “no role” in Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly’s resignation. “I would not have asked him,” the president said. “He didn’t have to resign but he felt it would be better for the country.”

Modly resigned after leaked audio revealed he called the former commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt “too naive or too stupid” to be in charge, in an address to the ship’s crew.

Captain Brett Crozier, the former commanding officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, had sent a memo warning that coronavirus spreading among the crew. After the memo leaked, Modly fired Crozier.

Trump’s take? Crozier shouldn’t have written a letter, because “he’s not Ernest Hemingway”.

Updated at 18:15 EDT

18:07 EDT

Trump says US will stop sending money to WHO
The president announced that the US will stop sending money to the World Health Organization, even as the coronavirus pandemic continues. Finding a scapegoat, the president blamed the WHO for the crisis, noting that they “blew it”.

“They called it wrong. They called it wrong,” Trump said. “They missed the call. They could’ve called it months earlier.”

Trump repeatedly downplayed the crisis even after the WHO “called it” a pandemic.

Updated at 18:12 EDT
18:04 EDT
Fact check: Governors

Trump claimed that he’s getting along swimmingly with the nation’s governors. But that is a rosy read of the relationship.

For weeks, governors have pleaded with the administration to do more, walking a fine line as they criticize what the view is a chaotic federal response while also trying not to alienate the famously prickly president. “If they had started in February building ventilators, getting ready for this pandemic, we would not have the problems we are having today and, frankly, very many fewer people would die,” Illinois governor JB Pritzker, a Democrat, said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday

Context: Coronavirus and racial disparities

Addressing the impact of coronavirus on Black communities, Dr. Anthony Fauci said that “we’ve known literally forever that diseases like diabetes, hypertension, obesity and asthma are disproportionately affecting minority populations, especially the African Americans.”

Those underlying conditions put people at greater risk for complications from coronavirus. “There’s nothing we can do about it right now,” Fauci said.

What the top health official didn’t get into were the reasons why people of color are at greater risk - which include a lack of access to health care, especially preventative care, and the “weathering” effect of facing racism. Federal officials could, of course, make it easier for people to access healthcare, right now. But the Trump administration has resisted reopening the public health exchanges to allow the uninsured to get health insurance.

Donald Trump said he knows “for a fact” that other countries have more coronavirus cases, but are reporting misleading or wrong numbers, without providing any evidence to back up the claim.

“When you look at some of these large countries, I know for a fact they have more cases than we do but they don’t report them,” Trump said

“There’s been great coordination, especially over the last little while” between the federal government and states, Trump said. But, he added, “if you have a governor that’s failing, we’re going to protect you.”

© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

The New York Times

President Trump at his daily briefing on Monday.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

Opinion

Drop the Curtain on the Trump Follies

Why does the nation need to be subjected to the president’s daily carnival of misinformation, preening and political venom?

April 7, 2020

Even as the Trump administration slowly finds its footing in the war against Covid-19, one high-profile element of its response remains stubbornly awful: President Trump’s performance in the daily news briefings on the pandemic.

Early on, Mr. Trump discovered that he could use the briefings to satisfy his need for everything to be all about him. As the death toll rises, that imperative has not changed. Most nights, he comes before an uneasy public, typically for an hour or more, to spew a thick fog of self-congratulation, political attacks, misinformation and nonsense.

Since Mr. Trump took office, a debate has raged among the news media about how to cover a man-child apparently untethered from reality. But with a lethal pandemic on the prowl, the president’s insistence on grabbing center stage and deceiving the public isn’t merely endangering the metaphorical health of the Republic. It is risking the health — and lives — of millions of Americans. A better leader would curb his baser instincts in the face of this crisis. Since Mr. Trump is not wired that way, it falls to the media to serve the public interest by no longer airing his briefings live.

For those who have managed to avoid these nightly spectacles, it is hard to convey their tragic absurdity. Mr. Trump typically starts by reading a somber statement that he seems to have never seen before. Next come remarks from other administration officials or corporate executives involved in the relief effort, generally laden with praise for the president’s peerless leadership. Vice President Mike Pence is particularly gifted at this.

After the testimonials comes the Q. and A., which is where the president lets his id off the leash. His constant goal seems to be to stress that he is in no way responsible for this nightmare — including any glitches in his administration’s response. All failures he assigns to past administrations, Democrats, governors, the media and so on.

Some of Mr. Trump’s misleading claims are fairy tales about his perfect response to this crisis. On March 15, he reassured the public that his administration had “tremendous control over” the virus. (No.) On March 17, he claimed to have “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” (Really?)

Other fabrications are more specific. On April 1, he assured people that safeguards were in place for travelers. “They’re doing tests on airlines — very strong tests — for getting on, getting off. They’re doing tests on trains — getting on, getting off,” he said. (No.)

Testing is a particularly touchy issue. Mr. Trump has claimed that, starting out, his team was burdened by “old, obsolete” tests inherited from the Obama administration. (No.) In ducking a question about the United States’ rate of per capita testing, he asserted that Seoul, South Korea, has a population of 38 million. (Try less than 10 million.) He continues to deny reports of testing problems in hard-hit states.

At Monday’s briefing, two journalists asked about a new report by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services indicating that many hospitals were still grappling with testing delays. Mr. Trump first dismissed anyone with the job of inspector general. “Did I hear the word ‘inspector general’? Really?” Suggesting the report was politically motivated, he demanded to know the official’s name (Christi Grimm), when she had been appointed (this January) and how long she had served in government. When told she had served in the inspector general’s office since 1999, he erupted as if he’d uncovered a coup.

“You’re a third-rate reporter, and what you just said is a disgrace!” he ranted at Jonathan Karl of ABC News, pronouncing, “You will never make it!”

The closest the president came to addressing the original question was to assert that testing isn’t really his problem: “We’re the federal government! We’re not supposed to stand on street corners testing!”

He then lectured Fox News’s Kristin Fisher for being so negative. “You should say, ‘Congratulations! Great job!’ Instead of being so horrid in the way you ask the question!”

Such scoldings are a staple of the briefings, with Mr. Trump denouncing inquiries he dislikes as “gotcha,” “nasty,” “threatening” or “snarky.” He tells reporters they should be “ashamed” for not taking a more positive approach — as if they were on hand to flatter.

Public officials critical of the administration are mocked as ungrateful whiners with “insatiable appetites.” At one briefing, Mr. Trump said he’d told the vice president not to call Washington State’s Jay Inslee or “the woman in Michigan,” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call,” he said. He has made sneering reference to one Republican-in-name-only malcontent (presumably Maryland’s Gov. Larry Hogan); called Senator Chuck Schumer of New York “a disgrace”; and accused Illinois’s governor, J.B. Pritzker, of “always complaining.” He has also repeatedly claimed that New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo “had a chance to get 16,000 ventilators a few years ago, and they turned it down.” (No.)

Critics of the president may be appalled to witness such behavior. But those inclined to trust him — and to view the media as illegitimate — may well wind up believing his spin.

Mr. Trump basically acknowledged as much on Monday. The public is “starting to find out” what an amazing job we’re doing, he bragged. “One of the reasons I do these news conferences, because, if I didn’t, they would believe Fake News. And we can’t let them believe Fake News.”

The president has a captive audience, and he has no intention of missing an opportunity to preen. On March 29, he boasted on Twitter about the terrific TV ratings his briefings were enjoying.

If the cameras were taken away, perhaps Mr. Trump would worry less about putting on a show. Better still, perhaps he would leave the briefings to the officials who have useful information to impart. The daily briefings should be covered — consistently, aggressively and accurately. But coverage is not the same as running a live, raw feed of Mr. Trump disgorging whatever he feels in the moment. The events could continue to air on a public service channel, such as C-SPAN, to alleviate concerns about censorship or transparency.

In using his platform to mislead the public, the president is not serving any interest but his own. In facilitating this farce, neither is the media

Opinion | Frank Bruni: Has Anyone Found Trump’s Soul? Anyone?

April 6, 2020

Ignoring Expert Opinion, Trump Again Promotes Use of Hydroxychloroquine

April 5, 2020

Opinion | Jennifer Senior: This Is What Happens When a Narcissist Runs a Crisis

April 8, 2020

© 2020 The New York Times Company

   >>>>>>>  >>>

Coming dictatorship?

OPINION

Oversight erased, Supreme Court hijacked: Trump turns the presidency into a dictatorship

Trump has stripped away the levers of independent oversight until there’s nothing left. Our democracy is in the midst of a three-alarm fire.

When former Vice President Joe Biden entered the Democratic presidential race a year ago, he introduced the now familiar theme that the “soul of this nation” was at stake in the 2020 election. Judging by what we’ve seen from President Donald Trump over the past few days, Biden is right.

It began Friday night, when Trump informed Congress that he was firing MIchael Atkinson, the Intelligence Community’s inspector general. This was nothing more than a vile act of political retribution that had been months in the making. Atkinson fulfilled his legal responsibilities by informing Congress about a whistleblower complaint that exposed Trump’s impeachable crimes. What everyone else recognizes as following the letter of the law, the president views as cause for termination.

On Monday, Trump turned his attention to the inspector general who oversees the Department of Health and Human Services, who had just released a report revealing the extent to which hospitals were struggling to meet the health care demands associated with treating COVID-19 patients. The thorough review included interviews from 323 hospitals across 46 states and stood in stark contrast with the rhetoric coming from the president. Naturally, Trump labeled the report a “Fake Dossier” and suggested “politics” influenced it.

Irony is alive, oversight is dead

On Tuesday, the president removed Pentagon Inspector General Glenn Fine. He had just been designated to oversee the newly created Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, a watchdog panel authorized by Congress to conduct oversight of the $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief bill. The same day, Trump said he had seven IGs in his sights — prompting Sen. Chris Murphy to announce he would draft a bill to “give all Inspectors General protected 7 year terms.”

The irony here is that Republicans once cautioned about this exact thing before Trump infected them and they abandoned every principle they once proclaimed to stand for. There was a time when oversight over massive government spending was the centerpiece of the Republican oversight agenda. My former boss and House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa actually declared that “This money, at the American people’s expense, going through the hands of political leaders, in in fact corrupting the process.” He literally called the Obama administration “the most corrupt government in history.” Where are those Republicans now?

President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, D.C., on April 8, 2020 .

In the course of three days, Trump fired an IG for telling the truth, attacked another for exposing the totality of a health care pandemic, and removed another in a brazen effort to avoid being held accountable for how trillions of taxpayer dollars will be allocated. The sum of these actions is nothing short of blatant corruption in plain sight. Free from the limitations of accountability, there is nothing stopping the president from turning the so-called “Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act” (CARES Act) into a $2 trillion personal slush fund.

Coronavirus hypocrisy: From masks to mail voting, Trump’s special and we’re not.

Trump feels empowered to obliterate the guardrails of checks and balances. Bit by bit, he has stripped away the levers of oversight until there’s nothing left. It started by ignoring congressional subpoenas for his financial records. It continued as Trump refused to cooperate with the House impeachment investigation, stonewalling Congress’ attempts to hear witness testimony and conduct depositions with administration officials close to the president. And now he is leading a purge of the final remaining frontier of oversight — the inspectors general.

Supreme Court’s dangerous path

For anyone hoping the Supreme Court will assert its role as the third branch of government, it has delayed hearing cases, including three lawsuits involving Trump’s tax returns and financial dealings. And yet, somehow, the Supreme Court managed to reverse a federal judge’s order to extend absentee voting by a week in Wisconsin’s primary on Tuesday. The result was that voters had to choose between their health and their civic duty.

The court’s refusal to move forward with cases that impact the president, coupled with its willingness to interfere with the Wisconsin election, foreshadows a very dangerous path as we look ahead to the November elections. In essence, the court’s conservative majority is just another political instrument for Trump to wield.

End of oversight: Trump’s unfettered attacks on accountability are a life-and-death crisis for democracy

It may be hard to see the forest through the trees in this time of social distancing, but make no mistake about it, our democracy is in the midst of a three-alarm fire. The highest court in the land has effectively been hijacked — serving only the interests of Donald Trump. Congress is no longer a co-equal branch of government, a result of Trump’s toxic brand of obstruction.

By taking a wrecking ball to independent oversight, Trump has made the presidency into a dictatorship. At this point, the only recourse we will have left to save our democracy, repair the institutions of government, and restore accountability to the American people, is to vote in November to save “the soul of this nation.” That is, assuming Trump, the Republicans and the Supreme Court let us.

© Copyright Gannett 2020

BUSINESS

Farmers Dump Milk, Break Eggs as Coronavirus Restaurant Closings Destroy Demand

Producers are throttling back as the virus erases sales to restaurants, hotels and cafeterias; ‘It was heart-wrenching’

Producers now have more milk than can be used. Dave Wolfskill of Mar-Anne Farms in Pennsylvania watched 5,500 gallons of milk go down the drain.PHOTO: BILL UHRICH/MEDIANEWS GROUP/GETTY IMAGES

April 9, 2020 9:42 am ET

It was still dark outside at four o’clock on a recent morning when a tanker truck poured 6,000 gallons of milk into a manure pit on Nancy Mueller’s Wisconsin dairy farm.

The milk, collected from Mueller Dairy Farm’s 1,000 cows, should have been hauled to dairy processors across the state for bottling or to be turned into cheese. But the coronavirus pandemic is disrupting all that, closing restaurants and schools that buy the nation’s dairy products—and forcing hard choices for farmers like Mrs. Mueller.

…

©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
All Rights Reserve

The Wall Street Journal

{No, it’s not merely a shame, it is a sin!}

Democrats want to drop Joe Biden for Andrew Cuomo, poll finds
By Steven Nelson

April 10, 2020 | 6:00am

A majority of Democrats want to nominate New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for president instead of Joe Biden, according to poll results shared exclusively with The Post.

The national poll found 56 percent of Democrats prefer Cuomo, with 44 percent wanting to stick with presumptive nominee Biden — a 12-point margin well outside the 4.8 percent margin of error for the Democratic sample.

Hispanic voters, young people, women and self-identified liberals are most likely to favor dumping the former vice president for Cuomo.

The poll, conducted April 3-6, was commissioned by the conservative pro-market Club for Growth, which generally supports Republican candidates.

Cuomo denied last month that he wanted to run for president, but some Democrats still are clamoring for an alternative to Biden, who faded from public view during the coronavirus outbreak, which elevated Cuomo in daily press conferences.

Club for Growth vice president of communications Joe Kildea told The Post that the results highlight Biden’s weakness as a candidate.

“With every major news event, Democrats realize more and more how bad of a candidate Joe Biden is, and Democrats now preferring Cuomo is just another example,” Kildea said.

The poll was conducted online among a representative sample of 1,000 people by WPAi, one of the top three polling firms used by Republicans.

Bryon Allen, chief research officer of WPAi, told The Post the firm uses commercial respondent panels matched to voter files. Poll sampling was done to be representative of different races, geographic locations, genders, educational levels and ages, he said.

Respondents were asked: “Based on what you know today, do you agree or disagree that Democrats should nominate Governor Andrew Cuomo for president instead of Joe Biden?”

There were 361 Democratic respondents, 349 Republican respondents and 262 independents.

Cuomo vs. Cuomo: Gov grilled by bro on possibility of White House run
Among people of any party — including independents — who voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, the percentage favoring Cuomo increased to 57 percent.

Of those who voted for President Trump in 2016, 53 percent wanted Democrats to keep Biden.

Cuomo was also backed by core Democratic constituencies. Among black voters — who helped Biden defeat Democratic primary rival Sen. Bernie Sanders — 55 percent favored Cuomo, with just 45 percent wanting to keep Biden.

Among voters age 25 to 34 of any party, preference for Cuomo hit 67 percent. Fifty-seven percent of all women and 58 percent of Hispanic voters preferred Cuomo.

Among whites and people with college and graduate school degrees, there was a near-even split in preference.

The results build on the findings of a Rasmussen Reports poll conducted April 2-5, which found 46 percent of Democratic voters preferred Biden and 45 percent wanted Cuomo.

Poll results shared with The Post also rated approval or disapproval of how Biden and Cuomo are handling the coronavirus outbreak. For Cuomo, 54 percent of all respondents approved and 20 percent disapproved of his job. For Biden, 32 percent approved, 35 percent disapproved and 34 percent were unsure.

© 2020 NYP Holdings, Inc. All Rights

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Barr rebounds-retaliation:

Fox News

MEDIA

Published April 10, 2020

Last Update 8 hrs ago

AG William Barr on the Russia investigation: ‘There’s something far more troubling here’

By Victor Garcia | Fox New

The Russia investigation into President Trump’s 2016 campaign was “one of the greatest travesties in American history,” Attorney General William Barr said Thursday during an appearance on “The Ingraham Angle.”

Barr said he has seen troubling signs from U.S. Attorney John Durham’s ongoing probe into the origins of the two-year probe, which resulted in no allegations of wrongdoing against the president.

“My own view is that the evidence shows that we’re not dealing with just the mistakes or sloppiness,” Barr told host Laura Ingraham. “There was something far more troubling here. We’re going to get to the bottom of it. And if people broke the law and we can establish that with the evidence, they will be prosecuted.”

DOJ’S RUSSIA PROBE REVIW FOCUSING ON ‘SMOKING GUN’ TAPES OF MEETING WITH TRUMP AIDE: SOURCES

Trump “has every right to be frustrated” by the investigation, Barr added.

“What happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history – without any basis,” Barr said. “They started this investigation of his campaign. And even more concerning, actually, is what happened after the campaign. A whole pattern of events while he was president … to sabotage the presidency … or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency.”

Barr appointed Durham to review the events leading up to the 2016 presidential election and the origins of the Russia probe, through Trump’s Jan. 20, 2017, inauguration.

During Thursday’s show Barr also addressed what he described as abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), saying he believed “safeguards” would “enable us to go forward with this important tool.”

" I think it’s very sad and the people who abused FISA have a lot to answer for," he said, "because this was an important tool to protect the American people.

“They abused it. They undercut public confidence in FISA but also the FBI is an institution and we have to rebuild that.”

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz last year said the FBI made repeated errors and misrepresentations before the FISA Court in an effort to obtain the warrants against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The court later found those warrants “lacked probable cause.”

©2020 FOX News Network, LLC.

You only love twice: 007

Trump tweets about ratings for his coronavirus press briefings for the 3rd day in a row as US death toll surpasses 18,000 and unemployment nears 17 million

Apr 10, 2020, 4:23 PM

President Donald Trump reads from prepared remarks at the start of the daily coronavirus task force briefing as Vice President Mike Pence listens at the White House in Washington, DC, April 9, 2020. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

President Donald Trump has repeatedly bragged about high TV ratings for his daily coronavirus press briefings.

Trump has tweeted about ratings three days in a row this week, suggesting they’re proof that critics of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic are wrong.

As Trump focuses on ratings, the US surpassed 18,000 deaths from coronavirus as of Friday afternoon.

Almost 17 million Americans have also filed for unemployment in recent weeks as a consequence of the pandemic.

President Donald Trump has taken to Twitter three days in a row this week to boast about TV ratings for the daily coronavirus press briefings.

Meanwhile, nearly 17 million Americans have filed for unemployment in the past few weeks, and the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic in the US surpassed 18,000 as of Friday afternoon.

The president has been broadly criticized over his handling of coronavirus. A CNN poll released earlier this week found a majority of Americans (55%) feel the government has done a poor job responding to the crisis, and 52% said they disapprove of the job Trump has done in handling the pandemic.

But Trump seemingly feels that the strong ratings for the press conferences, which have attracted an average audience of 8.5 million on cable news, are proof that his critics are wrong — even as top Republicans express concern that the president’s performances at the daily briefings are hurting him politically.

The president has also taken issue with major TV networks cutting away from the briefings or refusing to air them altogether, which is linked to Trump’s tendency to spread false information.

On Wednesday, Trump tweeted: “The Radical Left Democrats have gone absolutely crazy that I am doing daily Presidential News Conferences. They actually want me to STOP! They used to complain that I am not doing enough of them, now they complain that I ‘shouldn’t be allowed to do them.’ They tried to shame the Fake News Media into not covering them, but that effort failed because the ratings are through the roof according to, of all sources, the Failing New York Times, ‘Monday Night Football, Bachelor Finale’ type numbers (& sadly, they get it $FREE). Trump Derangement Syndrome!”

He followed up on this with another tweet on Thursday, going after the conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal after the paper’s editorial board excoriated Trump over his behavior at the daily briefings in an editorial.

The president tweeted: “The Wall Street Journal always ‘forgets’ to mention that the ratings for the White House Press Briefings are ‘through the roof’ (Monday Night Football, Bachelor Finale, according to @nytimes) & is only way for me to escape the Fake News & get my views across. WSJ is Fake News!”

Though Trump slammed the Journal over the editorial rebuking his press briefings, the president was praising the paper on Twitter as recently as late January.

And on Friday Trump tweeted: “Because the T.V. Ratings for the White House News Conference’s are the highest, the Opposition Party (Lamestream Media), the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats &, of course, the few remaining RINO’S, are doing everything in their power to disparage & end them. The People’s Voice!”

By “RINOS” Trump was referring to people who are “Republican in Name Only.” But some of Trump’s closest GOP allies in Congress, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, have even been critical of how he’s approached the briefings. Graham this week told The New York Times that Trump “sometimes drowns out his own message.”

Trump has essentially used the daily press conferences as a substitute for campaign rallies, which can’t safely take place because of the coronavirus. At nearly every briefing, Trump has berated reporters for asking questions regarding the ongoing shortages in testing for coronavirus, as well as nationwide concerns over the lack of vital medical supplies. The president has also gone after governors who’ve criticized or questioned his handling of the crisis.

Republicans, among others, have urged Trump to take a step back and let experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci lead the daily briefings. Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, of West Virginia, for example, told The Times the president should “let the health professionals guide where we’re going to go,” saying that the briefings have gone “off the rails a little bit.”

But the ratings-obsessed president appears unlikely to follow this advice.

• Copyright © 2020 Insider Inc.

pleading with him to reopen the country as soon as possible, while medical experts beg for more time to curb the coronavirus.

Tens of thousands more people could die. Millions more could lose their jobs. And his handling of the crisis appears to be hurting his political support in the run-up to November’s election. Yet the decision on when and how to reopen is not entirely his. The stay-at-home edicts keeping most Americans indoors were issued by governors state by state

From New York Times .

{ The same type of failure of a neo-Kantian conflict may have larger implications here, that became the seat knoll of the previous national socialism, and the next follow up: the material dialectic}

&&&&&&& sooo. &&&&&&& sooo?

Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which he once dismissed as a hoax, has been fiercely criticised at home as woefully inadequate to the point of irresponsibility.

Yet also thanks largely to Trump, a parallel disaster is unfolding across the world: the ruination of America’s reputation as a safe, trustworthy, competent international leader and partner.

Call it the Trump double-whammy. Diplomatically speaking, the US is on life support.

“The Trump administration’s self-centred, haphazard, and tone-deaf response [to Covid-19] will end up costing Americans trillions of dollars and thousands of otherwise preventable deaths,” wrote Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard.

“But that’s not the only damage the United States will suffer. Far from ‘making America great again’, this epic policy failure will further tarnish [its] reputation as a country that knows how to do things effectively.”

This adverse shift could be permanent, Walt warned. Since taking office in 2017, Trump has insulted America’s friends, undermined multilateral alliances and chosen confrontation over cooperation. Sanctions, embargoes and boycotts aimed at China, Iran and Europe have been globally divisive.

Angela Merkel and Donald Trump at a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House in March 2017. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

For the most part, oft-maligned foreign leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel have listened politely, turning the other cheek in the interests of preserving the broader relationship.

But Trump’s ineptitude and dishonesty in handling the pandemic, which has left foreign observers as well as Americans gasping in disbelief, is proving a bridge too far.

Erratic behaviour, tolerated in the past, is now seen as downright dangerous. It’s long been plain, at least to many in Europe, that Trump could not be trusted. Now he is seen as a threat. It is not just about failed leadership. It’s about openly hostile, reckless actions.

The furious reaction in Germany after 200,000 protective masks destined for Berlin mysteriously went missing in Thailand and were allegedly redirected to the US is a case in point. There is no solid proof Trump approved the heist. But it’s the sort of thing he would do – or so people believe.

“We consider this to be an act of modern piracy. This is no way to treat transatlantic partners. Even in times of global crisis, we shouldn’t resort to the tactics of the wild west,” said Andreas Geisel, a leading Berlin politician. Significantly, Merkel has refused to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.

Europeans were already outraged by Trump’s reported efforts to acquire monopoly rights to a coronavirus vaccine under development in Germany. This latest example of nationalistic self-interest compounded anger across the EU over Trump’s travel ban, imposed last month without consultation or scientific justification.

US reputational damage is not confined to Europe. There was dismay among the G7 countries that a joint statement on tackling the pandemic could not be agreed because Trump insisted on calling it the “Wuhan virus” – his crude way of pinning sole blame on China.

Melania Trump kisses Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, at the G7 summit in Biarritz last August. Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters

International action has also been hampered at the UN security council by US objections over terminology.

Trump has ignored impassioned calls to create a Covid-19 global taskforce or coalition. He appears oblivious to the catastrophe bearing down on millions of people in the developing world.

“Trump’s battle against multilateralism has made it so that even formats like the G7 are no longer working,” commented Christoph Schult in Der Spiegel. “It appears the coronavirus is destroying the last vestiges of a world order.”

Trump’s surreal televised Covid-19 briefings are further undermining respect for US leadership. Trump regularly propagates false or misleading information, bets on hunches, argues with reporters and contradicts scientific and medical experts.

While publicly rejecting foreign help, Trump has privately asked European and Asian allies for aid – even those, such as South Korea, that he previously berated. And he continues to smear the World Health Organization in a transparent quest for scapegoats.

Politicising Covid-19 like playing with fire, WHO director general says after Trump attack – video

© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

So bad !!!

Zzzzz. Zzz zzz. Zzz zzz. Zzz zzz

Blame game again predictable viral political gestures going nowhere fast:

Trump retweets post calling for firing of Dr. Anthony Fauc

President Trump on Sunday night retweeted a post that called for the ousting of Dr. Anthony Fauci after the infectious disease specialist appeared on CNN.

The tweet from DeAnna Lorraine, a former GOP candidate for Congress, included the hashtag #FireFauci and referred to Fauci’s concession that more lives could have been saved if the US had acted sooner to stop the spread of coronavirus.

“Sorry Fake News, it’s all on tape,” Trump wrote, insisting his travel ban was the action needed to stem the virus. “I banned China long before people spoke up.”

Earlier on Sunday, Fauci appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” and he acknowledged the country “could’ve saved lives” if we had started mitigation efforts earlier.

“You know, Jake, as I have said many times, we look at it from a pure health standpoint,” Fauci told host Jake Tapper.

“We make a recommendation. Often, the recommendation is taken. Sometimes it’s not. But we — it is what it is. We are where we are right now.”

Lorraine’s tweet was critical of Fauci’s cable news appearance and used the hashtag #FireFauci to encourage Trump’s fanbase to add the medical expert to the president’s list of perceived enemies.

“Fauci is now saying that had Trump listened to the medical experts earlier he could’ve saved more lives,” wrote Lorraine.

“Fauci was telling people on February 29th that there was nothing to worry about and it posed no threat to the US public at large,” she continued. “Time to #FireFauci.”

© 2020 NYP Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Economy & Politics

Opinion: Trump is odd man out as approval ratings soar for world leaders’ handling of the coronavirus pandemic

Published: Apr 14, 2020 1:58 pm ET

Heads of state are getting strong support by their citizens. Trump, on the other hand, is being panned for his lack of leadership

President Trump

History reveals patterns. During a crisis, Americans typically rally around the flag — and their president. During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, George H.W. Bush’s approval soared 30 percentage points in six weeks to 89%. His son’s rocketed 40 points — in 10 days to 90% — following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Numbers like these — clearly bipartisan and nearly unanimous — tell us that while Americans are always hungry for leadership, that hunger is never so great as when it counts most: When lives are on the line, when there has been a shock to the system, when we are scared and need reassurance that all will be OK.

Yet such approval has eluded President Trump. Two poll of polls — Real Clear Politics and FiveThirtyEight — show his overall approval at 45.2% and 44.3%, respectively, right about where they were before the you-know-what hit the fan earlier this year.

To the president and his supporters, such disagreeable data — data that don’t support their chosen narrative — can be dismissed as “fake news” or the product of the “corrupt media.”

And yet there is one poll that the president himself has always called fair and accurate, one poll that has always treated him well: Rasmussen. What does it show?

On Feb. 27, U.S. stock indexes SPX+3.06% were just days off all-time highs, and the first coronavirus death in this country had yet to occur. Rasmussen’s daily “Trump Approval Index” showed the president’s total approval at 52% and total disapproval at 47%.

As of Monday (April 13), however, Trump’s approval has slid nine points to 43%, while his disapproval has jumped nine points to 56%. That’s an 18-point swing against the president in about six weeks.

Again, this is the one poll that Trump has always heaped praise on for being fair and accurate. He’s certainly entitled to now label it as “biased” and “fake,” as he does the others (he has yet to do so), yet even a president as delusional as this one should be able to understand that when 16 million people are thrown out of work, a savage bear market wipes out the gains of his entire presidency and a terrifying virus sweeps across the land, that citizens just might be a little peeved.

And yet, how to explain why the very same crisis — a pandemic, bear market and deep economic troubles — has resulted in sharply higher ratings for other world leaders?

Approvals rise abroad

In Italy, ravaged by coronavirus, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s approval has rallied from 46% to 71%, according to local polling.

In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has won raves for her quick and focused response to the pandemic, has seen her approval (which was high to begin with) jump 11 more points to 79%.

And French President Emmanuel Macron has seen a 15-point jump to 51%. Believe me, in France, where citizens grumble about as much as Americans do, that’s high.

Beyond those leaders, I suspect that the president is especially irritated that Andrew Cuomo is soaring. The New York governor — a Democrat who has been front-and-center for weeks now, micromanaging the pandemic that has hit Gotham harder than anywhere else — saw his approval jump 27 points to 71%, with 87% saying they approve of his handling of the crisis.

Why has a similar rise in the polls eluded Trump? You can’t blame the hyper-polarized electorate, given the huge jump George W. Bush, who like Trump, also won the presidency despite losing the popular vote in a deeply divided election.

Failure to take responsibility

Clearly, the reason lies almost exclusively with Trump himself. Unlike the above-mentioned leaders, the president has very publicly insisted that he’s not responsible for anything that has gone wrong, and has said the blame lies elsewhere. The governors, the media, Dr. Anthony Fauci — anyone other than the person he sees in the mirror every morning.

Read Rex Nutting: Trump is wrong about who’s in charge — the coronavirus is still calling the shots

This is not how responsible leaders act in perilous times. We all remember George W. Bush standing amid the rubble of Ground Zero with his bullhorn. We remember his father, as Operation Desert Storm began in 1991, speaking humbly about the responsibility of sending Americans into harms way. We remember John F. Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt and others, speaking firmly and with conviction during the Cuban Missile Crisis, after Pearl Harbor and during the depths of the Great Depression. Trump has never shown the ability to walk in their shoes.

Sadly, his thin-skinned, don’t-blame-me behavior cuts against the grain of the very image he tried to project as a private citizen and CEO:

That 2013 tweet — three years to the day before he was elected — was correct. Leaders accept responsibility. “The Buck Stops Here,” as the sign Harry Truman famously kept on his desk proclaimed.

With Trump, when the news is bad, it stops elsewhere, always elsewhere.

MARKETS

America should be ready for 18 months of shutdowns in ‘long, hard road’ ahead, warns the Fed’s Neel Kashkari

Copyright ©2020 MarketWatch, Inc. All rights reserved.

nytimes.com/2020/04/14/us/c … e=Homepage

The search for scapegoats begins in earnest.

{ Another earnest unprecedented affront against democracy as we know it: who needs scapegoats if one attains near absolute power ?
Really?}

Trump threatens to invoke constitutional power to adjourn Congress because of hold-up over nominees

President Donald Trump turned a coronavirus White House briefing into a defense of his response actions to the deadly pandemic and confronted media.

USA TODAY, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened to invoke his constitutional authority to adjourn both chambers of Congress in order to confirm nominations to his administration he said are needed to deal with the coronavirus crisis.

“The Senate should either fulfill its duty and vote on my nominees or it should formally adjourn so that I can make recess appointments,” Trump said during a Rose Garden press conference. “If the House will not agree to that adjournment I will exercise my constitutional authority to adjourn both chambers.”

According to Article II, Section 3, a president may, “on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper.”

The Republican-controlled Senate and the Democratic-controlled House would have to disagree on when to adjourn in order for Trump to intervene.

Trump’s ire seems to be directed at the Senate, which has the power to confirm appointments.

The Senate, which is not due back in Washington until May 4, has been holding pro forma sessions, in which the upper chamber convenes briefly. Trump called on the Senate to stop holding these sessions or formally adjourn so he can make recess appointments, which he said are crucial to his administration’s response to the spread of COVID-19.

He called the extended recess during the coronavirus pandemic “a dereliction of duty.”

“The current practice of leaving town while conducting phony pro-forma sessions is a dereliction of duty that the American people cannot afford during this crisis,” he continued. “It’s a scam and everybody knows it, and it’s been that way for a long time.”

If the Senate is in recess, the president could then appoint some officials who would otherwise require Senate confirmation, which is why the upper chamber holds “pro forma” sessions in order to block the president from making recess appointments.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2014 that then-President Barack Obama’s recess appointments made in 2012 were invalid because he made them while the Senate was holding pro-forma sessions.

Trump acknowledged such an action would get a legal challenge.

“If they don’t approve it, we will go this route. And we’ll probably be challenged in court and we’ll see who wins,” he said.

“Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke with the president to discuss Senate Democrats’ unprecedented obstruction of the president’s well-qualified nominees and shared his continued frustration with the process,” a spokesman for the Kentucky Republican said. "The Leader pledged to find ways to confirm nominees considered mission-critical to the COVID-19 pandemic, but under Senate rules that will take consent from Leader Schumer.”

Jonathan Turley, a constitutional lawyer who argued against Trump’s impeachment last year, said the power has never been used before “and should not be used now.”

“Senators of both parties should vote to support the congressional control over adjournment. Absent a ‘disagreement’ there is no presidential power to adjourn under Article II. A pandemic should not be an invitation for pandemonium,” he tweeted.

Barb McQuade, a former federal prosecutor and University of Michigan law professor, questioned whether Trump really has the power to dismiss Congress.

“No and no. Trump has no authority over a separate and co-equal branch of government. It is odd that he keeps boasting of authority he lacks, while rejecting responsibility he has," she said.

During the press conference, the president railed against Democrats for holding up long-pending appointments, including the undersecretary of agriculture who is responsible for food security programs, two members of the Federal Reserve Board and the director of national intelligence.

“Perhaps it’s never been done before, nobody’s even sure if it has,” he said. “But we’re going to do it. We need these people here. We need people for this crisis, and we don’t want to play any more political games.”

When asked about states’ rights to decide when to reopen schools and businesses, Trump said, “The president of the United States calls the shots.”

USA TODAY

© Copyright Gannett 2020

{Trump uses free media coverage of coronavirus for

political push toward election.}

The New York Times

Opinion

Stop Airing Trump’s Briefings!

The media is allowing disinformation to appear as news.

April 19, 2020, 8:30 p.m. ET

Around this time four years ago, the media world was all abuzz over an analysis by mediaQuant, a company that tracks what is known as “earned media” coverage of political candidates. Earned media is free media.

The firm computed that Donald Trump had “earned” a whopping $2 billion of coverage, dwarfing the value earned by all other candidates, Republican and Democrat, even as he had only purchased about $10 million of paid advertising.

As The New York Times reported at the time, the company’s chief analytics officer, Paul Senatori, explained: “The mediaQuant model collects positive, neutral and negative media mentions alike. Mr. Senatori said negative media mentions are given somewhat less weight.”

This wasn’t the first analysis that found that something was askew.

In December 2015 CNN quoted the publisher of The Tyndall Report, which also tracks media coverage, saying Trump was “by far the most newsworthy story line of campaign 2016, accounting alone for more than a quarter of all coverage’ on NBC, CBS and ABC’s evening newscasts.”

Simply put, the media was complicit in Trump’s rise. Trump was macabre theater, a man self-immolating in real time, one who was destined to lose, but who could provide entertainment, content and yes, profits while he lasted.

The Hollywood Reporter in February of 2016 quoted CBS’s C.E.O. as saying, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” because as The Reporter put it, “He likes the ad money Trump and his competitors are bringing to the network.”

I fear that history is repeating itself.

For over a month now, the White House has been holding its daily coronavirus briefings, and most networks, cable news channels and major news websites have been carrying all or parts of them live, as millions of people, trapped inside and anxious, have tuned in.

The briefings are marked by Trump’s own misinformation, deceptions, rage, blaming and boasting. He takes no responsibility at all for his abysmal handling of the crisis, while each day he seems to find another person to blame, like a child frantically flinging spaghetti at a wall to see which one sticks.

He delivers his disinformation flanked by scientists and officials, whose presence only serves to convey credibility to propagandistic performances that have simply become a replacement for his political rallies.

We are in the middle of a pandemic, but we are also in the middle of a presidential campaign, and I shudder to think how much “earned media” the media is simply shoveling Trump’s way by airing these briefings, which can last up to two hours a day.

Let me be clear: Under no circumstance should these briefings be carried live. Doing so is a mistake bordering on journalistic malpractice. Everything a president does or says should be documented but airing all of it, unfiltered, is lazy and irresponsible.

As the veteran anchor Ted Koppel told The New York Times last month, “Training a camera on a live event, and just letting it play out, is technology, not journalism; journalism requires editing and context.” He continued, “The question, clearly, is whether his status as president of the United States obliges us to broadcast his every briefing live.” His answer was “no.”

We have trained the American television audience to understand that regular programs are only interrupted for live events when they are truly important, things that the viewers need to see now, in real time. These briefings simply don’t reach that threshold. In fact, some of what Trump has said has been dangerous, like when he pushed an unproven and potentially harmful drug as a treatment for the virus.

No amount of fact checkers, balancing with the briefings of governors, or even occasionally cutting away, can justify carrying these briefings live. The scant amount of new information that these rallies produce could be edited into a short segment for a show. The major headlines from these briefings are often Trump’s clashes with reporters, the differences he has with scientists and the lies he tells. Just like in 2016, it’s all theater.

Donald Trump doesn’t care about being caught in a lie. Donald Trump doesn’t care about the truth.

Donald Trump is a bare-knuckled politician with imperial impulses, falsely claiming that, “When somebody’s the president of the U.S., the authority is total,” encouraging protesters bristling about social distancing policies to “liberate” swings states, and saying that Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be “overthrown, either by inside or out.”

Trump has completely politicized this pandemic and the briefings have become a tool of that politicization. He is standing on top of nearly 40,000 dead bodies and using the media to distract attention away from them and instead brag about what a great job he’s done.

In 2016, Trump stormed the castle by outwitting the media gatekeepers, exploiting their need for content and access, their intense hunger for ratings and clicks, their economic hardships and overconfidence.

It’s all happening again. The media has learned nothing.

© 2020 The New York Times Co.

Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr, R-NC, released the fourth volume of his panel’s investigative report on Russian election interference. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Russia interfered in 2016 election to back Trump, not Clinton, new Senate intelligence report confirms

Tuesday’s bipartisan Senate Intelligence report keeps Republicans in the Senate and House at odds over whether Russia backed Trump over his Democratic rival in 2016

Griffin ConnollyWashington

A new bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee reasserts the panel’s position that Russia launched an “unprecedented” election interference campaign in 2016 to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is chaired by Republican Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina.

The 158-page, heavily redacted fourth volume of the Senate Intelligence panel’s ongoing investigation into Russian election interference and the US government’s response to it undermines the president’s years-long campaign to frame the intelligence community’s 2017 assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to aid Mr Trump as a “hoax” perpetrated by career US intelligence officials who do not like him.

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Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

The 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) is “a sound intelligence product,” the Senate report concludes.

Tuesday’s report also keeps Mr Burr’s committee at odds with Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, who concluded in their own 253-page report in 2018 that intelligence officials exhibited “tradecraft failings” during their investigation and assessment of Russian election interference and Mr Putin’s motives.

Trump blasts governor for buying coronavirus tests from South Korea

Trump boasts of ‘great ratings’ as US coronavirus deaths near 43,00o

The 2017 ICA “reflects strong tradecraft, sound analytical reasoning, and proper justification of disagreement in the one analytical line where it occurred,” the report concludes.

The Senate report also states that it found no evidence the US intelligence officials who compiled the 2017 ICA that found Russia interfered in 2016 to back Mr Trump were operating under political pressures or otherwise politically motivated.

“In all the interviews of those who drafted and prepared the ICA, the Committee heard consistently that analysts were under no politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions,” the report states. “All analysts expressed that they were free to debate, object to content, and assess confidence levels, as is normal and proper for the analytic process.”

In a statement on Tuesday, Mr Burr commended the intelligence community’s work in 2017 and echoed its warning that Americans should be on guard for repeat efforts by the Kremlin in 2020 to spread misinformation before the presidential election on 3 November.

“One of the ICA’s most important conclusions was that Russia’s aggressive interference efforts should be considered ‘the new normal," Mr Burr said.

“That warning has been borne out by the events of the last three years, as Russia and its imitators increasingly use information warfare to sow societal chaos and discord. With the 2020 presidential election approaching, it’s more important than ever that we remain vigilant against the threat of interference from hostile foreign actors,” he said.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has not announced when it will release the fifth and final volume of its report, which, in total, is expected to be nearly 1,000 pages.

That final volume of the report could be the most politically sensitive one yet, as it will focus on US counterintelligence efforts in 2016, when Russia was trying to make contact with advisers on the Trump campaign, including the president’s son Donald Trump Jr, his campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller reported last year that his team found “evidence of numerous links” between members of the Trump campaign and people with ties — or who claimed to have ties — to the Russian government.

Mr Mueller, however, declined to bring any charges against Mr Manafort, Mr Kushner, Mr Trump, or any others on the campaign for their contacts with purported Russian agents over concerns that it would be difficult to prove to a jury they willfully broke campaign laws prohibiting such behaviour.

New York Times

<<<<>>>><<<<>>>>>>>><<<<>>><<<<>>
<<>><<

Again? Say what?

The Guardian - Back to home

Joe Biden

Joe Biden warns that Donald Trump may try to delay November election

‘I think he is going to try to kick back the election somehow’

Democrat also expect Russia and others to interfere

Published onFri 24 Apr 2020 09.15 EDT

Former vice-president Joe Biden said he is concerned Donald Trump will try to delay the November presidential election, during remarks at an online fundraiser.

“Mark my words, I think he is going to try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held,” Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, said on Thursday night.

Under the law, no president has the power to postpone the presidential election. To change the date, Congress has to intervene.

The US presidential election is frozen in time – can it survive?

Trump has not announced plans to delay the 3 November election, but it is a concern people in both political parties have raised. The president has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of understanding about the limits on executive power, particularly when it comes to his own self-preservation.

The Covid-19 outbreak has also increased concerns about how to conduct in-person voting safely. In response, many are pushing for an expansion of voting by mail.

Trump has used Covid-19 press briefings to make false claims about voting by mail, calling it “corrupt” and “dangerous”. Earlier this month, Trump also urged Republicans to fight efforts to expand voting by mail.

“Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting,” Trump tweeted. “Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”

At the fundraiser, Biden also referenced reporting by the Washington Post which revealed Trump’s reluctance to fund the US postal service and efforts to force changes to its financial structure, which could harm voting by mail.

“Imagine threatening not to fund the post office. Now, what in God’s name is that about? Other than trying to let the word out that he’s going to do all he can to make it very hard for people to vote,” Biden said. “That’s the only way he thinks he can possibly win.”

The Covid-19 outbreak has already reshaped the 2020 campaign. The candidates are campaigning from home and at a stage in the cycle when the election tends to dominate news coverage, reporters are instead focused on Covid-19.

Biden also shared a broader concern about interference in the presidential election by Russia and two unnamed “major actors”.

“I promise you the Russians did interfere in our [2016] election and I guarantee you they are doing it again with two other major actors,” Biden said. “You can be assured between [Trump] and the Russians there is going to be an attempt to interfere.”

© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. (beta)

Why Mitch McConnell Wants States to Go Bankrupt
The Senate majority leader is prioritizing the Republican Party rather than the American people during this crisis.

A profile view of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
American states are abruptly facing their worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that more than 25 percent of state revenues have evaporated because of the pandemic. Demands on state health-care budgets, state unemployment systems, and state social-welfare benefits are surging. By the summer of 2022, the state budget gap could total half a trillion dollars.

States need help. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell does not want to provide it. On The Hugh Hewitt Show on April 23, McConnell proposed another idea. Instead of more federal aid, states should cut their spending by declaring bankruptcy:

I would certainly be in favor of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route. It saves some cities. And there’s no good reason for it not to be available. My guess is their first choice would be for the federal government to borrow money from future generations to send it down to them now so they don’t have to do that. That’s not something I’m going to be in favor of.”

McConnell expanded on the state-bankruptcy concept later that same day in a phone interview with Fox News’s Bill Hemmer:

We’re not interested in solving their pension problems for them. We’re not interested in rescuing them from bad decisions they’ve made in the past, we’re not going to let them take advantage of this pandemic to solve a lot of problems that they created themselves [with] bad decisions in the past.

McConnell’s words instantly attracted attention, criticism, even some derision. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo blasted the idea as “dumb,” “irresponsible,” and “petty”:

How do you think this is going to work? And then to suggest we’re concerned about the economy, states should declare bankruptcy. That’s how you’re going to bring this national economy back? By states declaring bankruptcy? You want to see that market fall through the cellar? … I mean, if there’s ever a time for humanity and decency, now is the time.

Cuomo’s fervent rebuttal grabbed the cameras. It did not settle the issue. State bankruptcy is not some passing fancy. Republicans have been advancing the idea for more than a decade. Back in 2011, Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich published a jointly bylined op-ed advocating state bankruptcy as a solution for the state of California. The Tea Party Congress elected in 2010 explored the idea of state bankruptcy in House hearings and Senate debates. Newt Gingrich promoted it in his run for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

Read: Red and blue America aren’t experiencing the same pandemic

To understand why Republicans want state bankruptcy, it’s necessary to understand what bankruptcy is—and what it is not.

A bankruptcy is not a default. States have defaulted on their debts before; that is not new. Arkansas defaulted in the depression year of 1933. Eight states defaulted on canal and railway debt within a single year, 1841. The Fourteenth Amendment required former Confederate states to repudiate their Civil War debts.

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A default is a sovereign act. A defaulting sovereign can decide for itself which—if any—debts to pay in full, which to repay in part, which debts to not pay at all.

Bankruptcy, by contrast, is a legal process in which a judge decides which debts will be paid, in what order, and in what amount. Under the Constitution, bankruptcy is a power entirely reserved to the federal government. An American bankruptcy is overseen in federal court, by a federal judge, according to federal law. That’s why federal law can allow U.S. cities to go bankrupt, as many have done over the years. That’s why the financial restructuring of Puerto Rico can be overseen by a federal control board. Cities and territories are not sovereigns. Under the U.S. Constitution, U.S. states are.

Understand that, and you begin to understand the appeal of state bankruptcy to Republican legislators in the post-2010 era.

Since 2010, American fiscal federalism has been defined by three overwhelming facts.

First, the country’s wealthiest and most productive states are overwhelmingly blue. Of the 15 states least reliant on federal transfers, 11 are led by Democratic governors. Of the 15 states most reliant on federal transfers, 11 have Republican governors.

Second, Congress is dominated by Republicans. Republicans controlled the House for eight of the last 10 years; the Senate for six. Because of the Republican hold on the Senate, the federal judiciary has likewise shifted in conservative and Republican directions.

A state bankruptcy process would thus enable a Republican Party based in the poorer states to use its federal ascendancy to impose its priorities upon the budgets of the richer states.

Read: It pays to be rich during a pandemic

When Cuomo protested McConnell’s bankruptcy idea, the New York governor raised the risk of chaos in financial markets. But McConnell does not advocate state bankruptcy in order to subject state bondholders to hardship. Obviously not! When McConnell spoke to Hewitt about fiscally troubled states, he did not address their bond debt. He addressed their pension debt. State bankruptcy is a project to shift hardship onto pensioners while protecting bondholders—and, even more than bondholders, taxpayers.

Republican plans for state bankruptcy sedulously protect state taxpayers. The Bush-Gingrich op-ed of 2011 was explicit on this point. A federal law of state bankruptcy “must explicitly forbid any federal judge from mandating a tax hike,” they wrote. You might wonder: Why? If a Republican Senate majority leader from Kentucky is willing to squeeze Illinois state pensioners, why would he care about shielding Illinois state taxpayers? The answer is found in the third of the three facts of American fiscal federalism:

United States senators from smaller, poorer red states do not only represent their states. Often, they do not even primarily represent their states. They represent, more often, the richest people in bigger, richer blue States who find it more economical to invest in less expensive small-state races. The biggest contributor to Mitch McConnell’s 2020 campaign and leadership committee is a PAC headquartered in Englewood, New Jersey. The second is a conduit for funds from real-estate investors. The third is the tobacco company Altria. The fourth is the parcel delivery service UPS. The fifth is the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical corporation. The sixth is the home health-care company, LHC Group. The seventh is the Blackstone hedge fund. And so on and on.

A federal bankruptcy process for state finances could thus enable wealthy individuals and interest groups in rich states to leverage their clout in the anti-majoritarian federal system to reverse political defeats in the more majoritarian political systems of big, rich states like California, New York, and Illinois.

No question, many states face serious problems with their unfunded liabilities to state retirees. Illinois’s liability nears $140 billion, and its municipalities are liable for additional billions. California’s state and local unfunded liabilities amount to $1.5 trillion.

Those liabilities are often described as “pension” liabilities, but they are driven above all by faster-than-expected increases in retiree health-care costs. They need to be addressed, and addressing them will be a tough policy challenge. It will be a tough legal challenge, too, since those liabilities are often—as in Illinois—inscribed into the state’s constitution.

Difficult and important as these problems are, they are not urgent problems. They existed 24 months ago; they will remain 24 months from now. From a strictly economic point of view, McConnell’s schemes for state bankruptcy are utterly irrelevant to the present crisis. Reducing future pension liabilities will not replenish lost revenues or reduce suddenly crushing social-welfare burdens.

But McConnell seems to be following the rule “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” He’s realist enough to recognize that the pandemic probably means the end not only of the Trump presidency, but of his own majority leadership. He’s got until January to refashion the federal government in ways that will constrain his successors. That’s what the state-bankruptcy plan is all about.

McConnell gets it. Now you do, too.

DAVID FRUM is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020).

Copyright © 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

{Note: incidentally, I believe, that at 222,222 views, something extraordinary will happen, since 22 is a powerful Angel Number, and two sets of 222 is hyperbolically more so}

I’m not joshing!

Something must have happened , without notice.

From the N.Y. Times today;

"Hassett separately said during an interview on ABC that he thought the country is going to see an unemployment rate comparable to the Great Depression.

“This is the biggest negative shock that our economy, I think, has ever seen. We’re going to be looking at an unemployment rate that approaches rates that we saw during the Great Depression,” Hassett said

{ is this a preparatory signal to expect a new ‘Great’ depression ? -Bassett is the economic advisor to Mr. Trump.}

Some more . Is Trump a genius or a disgruntled neurotic ?

Fox News

CELEBRITY NEWS

Published April 27, 2020

Last Update a day ago

Bryan Cranston questions sanity of ‘deeply troubled’ Donald Trump and his supporters

By Tyler McCarthy | Fox News

Get all the latest news on coronavirus and more delivered daily to your inbox. Sign up here.

Bryan Cranston questioned the sanity of both President Trump and his supporters in a fiery tweet presented with little context over the weekend.

The “Breaking Bad” actor became the latest Hollywood star to criticize Trump and his administration as they respond to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Clearly not happy with the way that Trump is guiding the country through this unprecedented time, Cranston took to Twitter on Saturday to take a jab at both the president and those that support him.

“I’ve stopped worrying about the president’s sanity. He’s not sane,” the 64-year-old actor wrote. “And the realization of his illness doesn’t fill me with anger, but with profound sadness. What I now worry about is the sanity of anyone who can still support this deeply troubled man to lead our country.”

While the actor didn’t say what prompted this rebuke of the president and his supporters, the tweet came as the news cycle was dominated by remarks Trump made during a recent coronavirus press briefing in which he seemed to imply injecting light and/or disinfectants like household cleaners into the body could act as a treatment for the coronavirus.

"And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets on the lungs and it does a tremendous number, so it will be interesting to check that. So that you’re going to have to use medical doctors. But it sounds, it sounds interesting to me. So we’ll see,” Trump said at the time. “But the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute, that’s, that’s pretty powerful.”

Bryan Cranston criticized the sanity of Donald Trump and his supporters in a recent tweet. (Reuters)

On Friday, after the comments caught severe backlash from the public and medical experts alike, Trump clarified his remarks, explaining that he was simply asking sarcastic questions to reporters.

“I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you,” Trump said. “Disinfectant for doing this, maybe on the hands, would work. I was asking…when they use disinfectant it goes away in less than a minute.”

He added: “I was asking a very sarcastic question to reporters in the room about disinfectants on the inside…that was done in a sarcastic way.”

©2020 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved.

Opinion

Trump is unravelling – even his supporters can’t ignore it now

The president is leaning heavily on sarcasm to excuse a range of blunders, but US conservatives are unimpressed

I don’t know what kind of disinfectant Donald Trump has been injecting, but the man does not appear to be well. The president’s lethal medical musing has turned him into (even more of) a global laughing stock and the widespread ridicule has clearly bruised his fragile ego. While Trump has never been a paradigm of calmness or competence, he has become increasingly irate and erratic in recent days. Now even his diehard supporters seem to be cooling towards him. Is the “very stable genius” starting to unravel?

Let’s start with the president’s weekend tweetstorm, which, even by Trumpian standards, was spectacularly unhinged. On Sunday, Trump lashed out at what he called a “phony story” in the New York Times that claimed he spends his days eating junk food and watching TV. “I will often be in the Oval Office late into the night & read & see [in the Times] that I am angrily eating a hamberger & Diet Coke in my bedroom,” he tweeted. “People with me are always stunned.” He then deleted the tweet and replaced it with one in which hamburger was spelled correctly. (This was clearly a challenge for him: he has previously misspelled hamburgers “hamberders”.)

It turned out that the hambergers were just an appetiser. A rant about the “Noble” prize, which Trump seems to have confused with the Pulitzer prize, followed. This was subsequently deleted and replaced with a tweet stating it had all been an exercise in sarcasm. He is a master of sarcasm, as we all know.

While none of Trump’s aides seem able to shut down his Twitter account, they are trying to tone down his daily press briefings. Trump didn’t hold a briefing over the weekend as he normally does, while Monday’s event was cancelled and then reinstated. “We like to keep reporters on their toes,” the White House director of strategic communications, Alyssa Farah, tweeted with a winking emoji. She then deleted the tweet – presumably to keep reporters on their toes. Monday’s briefing was notable for the briefness of Trump’s remarks; instead of treating it like a political rally, he ceded the floor to a number of CEOs.

Trump enjoyed a bump in his ratings last month when he stopped downplaying coronavirus and announced a 15-day plan to slow the virus’s spread. During his brief experiment with coherence, 55% of Americans said they approved of the way he was handling the crisis and CNN’s chief political correspondent, Dana Bash, told viewers Trump “is being the kind of leader that people need”.

The tide now seems to have turned. Recent polls show that most Americans are unimpressed with Trump’s handling of the crisis. This includes conservatives: a Siena College poll released on Monday found that 56% of Republican voters in New York say they trust Andrew Cuomo, the state’s Democratic governor, to decide how to reopen the state over Trump. Even Fox News seems to have cooled towards Trumpism; the network has just cut ties with Diamond & Silk, a pair of rightwing social-media stars who have been two of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders, after they promoted conspiracy theories and disinformation.

Perhaps the only people more incompetent than Trump are the ragtag team of sycophants he has surrounded himself with. According to Politico, Trump is leaning heavily on Hope Hicks, who he reportedly calls “Hopey”, to steer him through the coronavirus crisis. Hicks, 31, who was formerly the White House communications director, is one of Trump’s most-trusted aides; according to one tell-all book, her duties used to include steaming his trousers – while he wore them. It turns out Hopey is the mastermind who urged Trump to “act as a frontman” during the crisis instead of deferring to health experts. Now that plan has backfired, Hicks – who officially works under boy genius Jared Kushner – is apparently developing a new strategy for Trump. He had better Hopey this one is a little more effective.

© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

POLITICO

CORONAVIRUS

Trump faces the risk of a coronavirus cliff

Unemployed Americans will lose a federal safety net long before the economy fully recovers — potentially creating a messy Election Day for the GOP.

Republicans are trying to pull off a high-wire act over the next three months: Reopen the economy enough to get most jobless Americans back to work and off the public dole, while resisting another giant stimulus package.

If they fail, they’ll face a coronavirus cliff — an even deeper collapse in spending and sky-high unemployment in the months before Election Day. That could both damage President Donald Trump’s reelection prospects and put the party’s Senate majority at serious risk.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has suggested that states be allowed to seek bankruptcy protection and questioned the need for a big new stimulus, said Monday that the Senate would return next Monday along with the House. He indicated he would consider additional coronavirus relief funding, but that any aid to states would continue to come with strings attached. And he told POLITICO last week that he was leery of adding much more to the deficit, joining other conservatives who are growing concerned about the GOP record of racking up a mountain of debt after railing against it for a decade before Trump.

Republicans are currently betting that efforts to reopen states will be successful and the nearly $3 trillion already allocated by lawmakers — the largest federal rescue in American history — will be at least close to enough to start bringing the unemployment rate down and sending economic growth back up.

But it remains far from clear that it will be anywhere near enough to restore the tens of millions of jobs lost in recent weeks. A provision of the enhanced unemployment benefits enacted under the CARES Act added $600 per week to jobless benefits offered by states — but only through July 31.

And risks remain high that quick reopenings could lead to fresh virus breakouts, shutting down the economy again.

If that happens and the rescue programs aren’t expanded for individuals, businesses and state and local governments, the political toll could be enormous.

“Trump in 2016 won quite a few voters who traditionally back Democrats, the so-called ‘forgotten voters’ in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan,” said Michael Weber, a University of Chicago economist. “So it’s very risky to think about austerity right now because it would hit many Trump voters the hardest. Trump realizes his reelection depends on the economy and that’s why he is pushing to reopen states, even though that creates a very big risk of a second wave of the virus.”

There are complex political calculations in play over a potential successor to the $2.3 trillion CARES Act. Some close McConnell observers say despite recent remarks urging states to consider bankruptcy and warning of any more big spending, the Kentucky Republican knows another significant injection of federal funds will be required to boost the economy heading toward Election Day. Blocking one could wreck the prospects for numerous GOP candidates in November.

These people say McConnell is simply trying to start negotiations on a footing more friendly to the Senate GOP caucus while holding off other recent Democratic demands on mandating states to allow mail-in voting, clean energy, food stamp benefits and other wish list items. They say there will likely be another coronavirus relief bill, but that it will be significantly smaller than the CARES Act and only passed with both chambers in session in Washington.

McConnell on Monday acknowledged the need for at least some added funding. But he suggested it would have to be coupled with more liability protection for corporate America and would not amount to bailouts for states. “I’m open to additional assistance. It’s not just going to be a check, though, you get my point?” McConnell said in an interview. “We’re not writing a check to send down to states to allow them to, in effect, finance mistakes they’ve made unrelated to the coronavirus.”

But others warn that McConnell’s stance and general Republican pressure not to add much more to federal deficits could wind up delaying or even killing another big stimulus package, an outcome that could curtail any chance for a fast recovery and slam marginal Trump voters in critical swing states.

It could also give Democrats an even better shot at flipping the three or four seats they will need to control the Senate. They would need three if Joe Biden wins the White House and his vice president controls the deciding vote in a 50-50 Senate.

The question of additional assistance on top of the roughly $3 trillion already allocated — on top of trillions in additional support from the Federal Reserve — comes as grim economic data continues to pile up.

The first read on economic growth in the first quarter of the year, due out Wednesday morning, is expected to show an annualized decline of around 4 percent. The second quarter, which covers most of the Covid-19 shock thus far, will be far worse with estimates ranging up to an annualized decline of 30 to 40 percent.

Already, over 26 million Americans have filed for first-time unemployment benefits during the crisis, suggesting a jobless rate of up to 20 percent, nearing the Great Depression high of 24.9 percent. The number is expected to leap over 30 million new jobless claims when fresh numbers come out on Thursday.

These numbers help explain why Trump — who regularly boasts about how great the economy was before the virus hit — wants states to start opening up as soon as they possibly can.

The president on Monday evening said he did not know how bad the economy might tank in the second quarter, but that “the third and the fourth quarter in particular are going to be I think spectacular.” He added that it would be a “tremendous comeback.”

But he is not in charge of the reopening process, which is likely to unfold quite slowly until the U.S. has far more effective virus testing and tracking capabilities. New outbreaks of the virus caused by rapid reopenings could also force fresh lockdowns and further damage the economy.

Party strategists are worried the GOP isn’t prepared for the coming spike in voting by mail.

The Trump campaign is furious over a strategy memo on coronavirus circulated by the Senate Republican campaign arm.

President Trump said the estimated death toll for coronavirus is higher than he recently predicted.

California’s plans for contact tracing could serve as a national model.

And plenty of gaps could open up by summer if the GOP sticks to its current approach.

The Paycheck Protection Program, intended to help small businesses stay afloat, has been beset by problems from the start and already ran out of money once. It may do so again this week.

Economists suggest there is only a limited chance that most who lost jobs during the initial wave of the crisis — largely lower-paid service industry workers — will be reemployed by the summer. The jobless rate is likely to remain well into the double digits into the fall.

If the added benefits are not extended and more money is not pushed into the small business program, dreams that the economy could snap back to rapid growth heading into the November elections could be vaporized.

“There is a time and place to have these discussions about spending and debt, but now is certainly not the time,” said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics. “I do think Republicans will have to relent here because the number of unemployed we are seeing is just horrendous. A lot of businesses have already gone under and more will follow.”

Farooqi added that “the unemployment rate is going to stay high through the end of the year. We will need extended help and it’s inappropriate to be having these discussions and saying things like states should be allowed to go bankrupt.”

McConnell brought up the state bankruptcy possibility last week on conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt’s radio show. “I would certainly be in favor of allowing states to use the bankruptcy route,” he said. “My guess is their first choice would be for the federal government to borrow money from future generations to send it down to them now so they don’t have to do that. That’s not something I’m going to be in favor of.”

The comments drew howls of rebuke from Democratic governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo, who noted that his state pays far more into federal coffers each year than it takes out. Some Republicans, including Maryland governor Larry Hogan, also slammed McConnell’s remarks.

In an interview last week with POLITICO, McConnell also staked out a hardline position on another stimulus package. He expressed little appetite for adding much more to a federal deficit that the Congressional Budget Office now says could nearly quadruple this year to nearly $4 trillion. And he is leery of the federal government bailing out state pension funds. Any further aid to states is likely to feature the same restrictions included in the CARES Act that the money only go to offset losses directly attributable to the virus.

“You’ve seen the talk from both sides about acting, but my goal from the beginning of this, given the extraordinary numbers that we’re racking up to the national debt, is that we need to be as cautious as we can be,” McConnell told POLITICO last week. “We need to see how things are working, see what needs to be corrected, and I do think that the next time we pass a coronavirus rescue bill, we need to have everyone here and everyone engaged.”

Trump weighed in on the aid to states argument on Twitter Monday, basically echoing McConnell’s approach. “Why should the people and taxpayers of America be bailing out poorly run states (like Illinois, as example) and cities, in all cases Democrat run and managed, when most of the other states are not looking for bailout help?” Trump wrote.

Many economists, meanwhile, argue that it is not yet time to be “cautious” when considering further economic assistance for individuals, small businesses and cash-strapped state and local governments that have seen tax receipts crash. State and local governments employ around 13 percent of the American workforce. And huge layoffs in the sector helped worsen the 2008-09 recession and slowed the recovery, according to some analysts.

There may not be enough time to see if current federal assistance is working — as McConnell wants to do — before Congress needs to act again. It takes significant time for fiscal stimulus, including direct payments to individuals and businesses, to show up in economic data.

While the deficit is breaching historic levels, interest rates remain close to zero, meaning the cost of borrowing is historically low. And the old economic consensus that debt begins to get dangerous when it outstrips the overall size of a country’s economy, as is likely to happen to the U.S. this year, no longer really holds, especially for such a large nation that controls the most widely used currency in the world.

“In the next year or two, the more they do in terms of fiscal stimulus, the quicker the economy will recover. This is a very big whole the economy has to dig out of,” said Jim O’Sullivan, chief U.S. macro strategist at TD Securities. “There is going to have to be more aid for states.”

“One caveat to all this would be if markets get spooked by deficits and interest rates rise,” he said. “But we just aren’t seeing any of that at this point. I’m not saying something like that couldn’t happen in 10 years’ time, but right now, it’s pretty clear the U.S. needs more fiscal help.”

© 2020 POLITICO LLC

POLITICO

LEGAL

Judges worry Trump position on McGahn testimony could force Congress into extreme measures

The fight centers on one of the most urgent political and legal issues of Trump’s presidency.

Don McGahn in Trump Tower in 2016. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

04/28/2020 11:47 AM EDT

Updated: 04/28/2020 02:53 PM EDT

Barring Congress from enforcing its subpoenas in court could push lawmakers toward arresting senior Trump administration officials or pursuing even more extreme measures, several appeals court judges suggested Tuesday.

It was the second time in recent months that the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has openly mulled the bizarre and unnerving prospect of armed conflict between the House sergeant-at-arms and FBI agents if other, more peaceful options for the House to obtain information from the executive branch are closed off.

The discussion occurred as lawyers for the House and Justice Department sparred over efforts by Democrats to force former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify about his knowledge of alleged wrongdoing by President Donald Trump.

Most of the nine judges who joined in the rare en banc session Tuesday seemed receptive to the House’s concerns, with one judge musing the Trump administration was so intent on sidelining the courts that the public would be left only with “revolution” as an alternative.

A lawyer representing the Trump administration offered a sweeping argument that Congress has no authority to take legal action to enforce its subpoenas because that power lies solely with the president. Rather, lawmakers must rely on a set of political tools — from choking off funding to blocking presidential nominations to impeachment — to bend a stonewalling president to the Congressional will.

“Issuing subpoenas — that’s a prerogative of Congress. Enforcing subpoenas and enforcing laws — that’s a prerogative of the president,” Justice Department attorney Hashim Mooppan said.

The House’s top lawyer, Doug Letter, said DOJ’s position would upend decades of practice in congressional investigations and effectively leave lawmakers powerless to stand up to an obstructive administration.

“If the court goes with the Justice Department arguments … congressional oversight as it has been known for this country for years is going to change and be very, very different,” Letter said.

House Democrats are hopeful for a victory from the full appeals court, which is heavy with appointees of President Barack Obama and generally seen as more favorable to the House’s arguments than the three-judge panel which ruled against them 2-1 in February.

Most of the judges taking part in Tuesday’s arguments signaled early and often that they viewed DOJ’s stance with skepticism, repeatedly referencing the extreme notion of the House having to resort to arresting McGahn to get its questions answered or even a judicial resolution of Trump’s claims of executive privilege.

Judge Nina Pillard, an Obama appointee, said DOJ’s stance would leave the House with little but “huge, blunt, disproportionate nuclear options” to try to procure information.

The high-stakes battle over the House’s demand for testimony from McGahn could decide one of the most urgent political issues of Trump’s presidency — whether the White House can block Congress from using the legal system to force crucial witnesses to testify about alleged obstruction of justice by the president himself.

But it also has the potential to reshape the relationship between presidents and Congress for generations to come.

A decision by the courts seems increasingly unlikely to come in any definitive way on a timeline that would produce testimony from McGahn or other witnesses in advance of the November presidential election.

That reality, as some congressional Democrats feared, represents a win for Trump, whom they accused of tying up their case in unending litigation to prevent McGahn from publicly testifying about presidential wrongdoing. McGahn was a central witness in the two-year investigation led by former special counsel Robert Mueller into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russians in 2016. He ultimately provided damning evidence that Trump repeatedly sought to obstruct the probe, though he declined to recommend criminal charges, citing a Justice Department prohibition on moving against a sitting president.

But even if the D.C. Circuit ultimately orders McGahn to testify, Justice Department lawyers are expected to ask the Supreme Court to step in. The justices may well decide to freeze the status quo, putting potential high court arguments in the case off until the fall or winter and pushing off a final decision until well after Trump is sworn in for a second term as president or Joe Biden is sworn in for a first.

The appeals court heard the case Tuesday by teleconference due to the coronavirus pandemic. In addition, it considered the McGahn dispute in tandem with another legal fight between the House and the Trump administration: a suit seeking to block officials from spending money on Trump’s border wall project.

Mooppan pleaded with the judges to steer clear of both fights. He accused the House of making a “radical break” with history by seeking to enmesh the judiciary in the interbranch battles.

“Disputes between the political branches about their institutional prerogatives have occurred since the founding, but lawsuits between them are a novel and unsanctioned tactic,” Mooppan said.

But Judge Merrick Garland said foreclosing all suits by Congress could allow a rogue president to spend wildly, like by paying for health insurance for every American even if Congress never authorized such a program.

“Does Congress have standing to challenge that?” asked Garland, an appointee of President Bill Clinton.

“No,” Mooppan replied.

There were a few technical glitches early in the roughly three-and-a-half hours of arguments, as Mooppan’s voice disappeared at times amid a combination of rustling noises and outright silence. At another point, one judge could be heard talking to someone else as another sought to ask a question. The questioning was also more stilted than usual since the judges went one-by-one in order of seniority to ask questions, with little repartee among the jurists.

House Democrats, who took power in 2019, quickly sought to secure McGahn’s testimony, but Trump directed him to refuse cooperation and McGahn deferred. The White House asserted that McGahn was “absolutely immune” to testifying, a position that seemed at odds with an earlier court rulings requiring executive branch officials to appear before Congress and provide records that are not legally privileged. The standoff led to a string of legal battles last fall that included a resounding win for the House at the District Court level, where Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson excoriated the Trump administration’s posture toward Congress.

But in February, a three-judge D.C. Circuit panel swept aside Jackson’s ruling and determined that the courts have no role settling disputes between the White House and Congress — a sweeping decision that would reshape Congress’ ability to wrest information out of reluctant administrations.

The appeals court panel suggested that Congress could use other political tools, short of court intervention, to force an administration to provide information: from cutting off funds to holding officials in contempt to impeaching the president — and in extreme cases, detaining or jailing administration officials. House lawyers emphasized that they had pursued all of those tools short of physical detentions that they said would provoke an almost comical level of hostility between the branches, imagining gun battles between the House sergeant at arms and the FBI.

Judge David Tatel returned to those issues Tuesday, asking Mooppan if the dispute he urged the court to step aside from couldn’t come right back to the court if the House chose to arrest McGahn.

Mooppan insisted the courts would have to free McGahn, even without wading into the merits of the subpoena fight.

“That is beyond the scope of Congress’ power,” the Justice Department lawyer said about the prospect of such an arrest. “Congress doesn’t have any express authority to go around arresting people…There is simply no historical support for the notion that they can arrest an executive branch official for following executive branch directives.”

McGahn in a Cabinet meeting in 2018.

Writing for the majority in the February decision in the McGahn case, Judge Thomas Griffith said that allowing the courts to adjudicate such subpoenas would result in Congress abandoning the usual process of negotiation.

“The walk from the Capitol to our courthouse is a short one, and if we resolve this case today, we can expect Congress’s lawyers to make the trip often,” wrote Griffith, an appointee of President George W. Bush.

The victory for the president was short-lived, however, as just two weeks later the D.C. Circuit announced it was accepting the House’s request that a rare “en banc” court convene to re-hear the case.

Strikingly, during Tuesday’s arguments, no judge offered vigorous public support for the administration’s stand.

While Griffith sided with the Justice Department in February and wrote the ruling saying the courts should butt out of the McGahn fight, he expressed sympathy Tuesday for the House, saying it has faced extraordinary obstructionism from the Trump administration.

“How is Congress to conduct its constitutional duty of oversight in the face of the type of utter disregard this administration has shown for that oversight?” the George W. Bush appointee asked Mooppan. “Hasn’t this administration eschewed the traditional norms of compromise and negotiations that you rely on in your arguments so heavily?”

The judge who joined with Griffith in that opinion, fellow Bush appointee Karen Henderson, was on the call Tuesday but passed up the chance to question the lawyers or discuss her own views on the disputes.

The lineup of nine judges who heard the McGahn appeal Tuesday is starkly different ideologically from the increasingly conservative, nine-justice Supreme Court that could eventually resolve the case.

The active D.C. Circuit bench leans toward Democratic appointees, 7-4, but the two judges nominated by Trump recused themselves, leaving the court with only two GOP appointees among the nine judges hearing Tuesday’s cases.

Trump appointee Greg Katsas, who served in the White House counsel’s office early in Trump’s term, indicated during his confirmation hearings that he would likely recuse from cases stemming from the Mueller probe. It’s less clear why the D.C. Circuit’s newest member, Judge Neomi Rao, stepped aside, but from 2017 to 2019 she held a top position at the Office of Management and Budget, which is part of the White House.

For more than a decade, presidents and lawmakers from both parties have shied away from the sort of showdown that took place Monday before the powerful Washington-based appeals court. While Congress occasionally took such battles to court, both sides typically pulled back from the brink before the D.C. Circuit could issue a precedent-setting ruling.

The impulse to leave unresolved the question of the courts’ role in enforcing Congressional subpoenas directed to the executive branch led to negotiated settlements in two high profile disputes in the last dozen years.

In 2009, President Barack Obama’s new White House helped broker a compromise in a lingering battle over House Democrats’ demands for testimony and documents from aides to former President George W. Bush about his firing of eight U.S. attorneys after the 2006 election.

U.S. District Court Judge John Bates — a Bush appointee — rejected the Justice Department’s claim of absolute immunity, insisting that the Bush aides could not ignore the House subpoenas. But Bates never waded into the issue of what specific questions had to be answered or what specific documents had to be forked over.

Under the 2009 deal, former White House counsel Harriet Miers and political strategist Karl Rove gave transcribed interviews to the House Judiciary Committee, while the Justice Department dropped its appeal of Bates’ ruling.

A similar fight broke out in 2012 as the GOP-led House sought documents from the Justice Department and White House pertaining to the fall-out from Operation Fast and Furious, a federal gunrunning investigation that allowed as many as two thousand weapons to be purchased illegally with many ending up in Mexico.

U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee, echoed Bates’ decision and turned down the Justice Department’s call for the courts to butt out of the case. The legal battle bogged down for years as Justice tried to appeal while the White House also sought a compromise.

Ultimately, Obama turned over most of the documents the House sought but the House appealed to get even more. The legal saga lingered into the Trump administration before it was finally settled last year, after both sides made an unsuccessful bid to wipe out Jackson’s decision.

© 2020 POLITICO LLC

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&__&&&

Very high intellect?

."… increasingly ridiculed Mr. Trump of late — were greeted with a doctored image of “Clorox Chewables.” “Trump Recommended,” "
the tagline read. “Don’t Die Maybe!”

For Mr. Trump, such mockery tends to singe…

from Drodge report.

& this from Faucci:

“Fauci: US could have ‘a bad fall and a bad winter’
A second wave of the new coronavirus is “inevitable,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Tuesday. But how the U.S. the responds before it comes will determine how the country fares.”

!!! !!! !!! !!!

Some good news: Gilead Pharm., the same with the HIB cocktail successful treatment, came up with a preliminary cure:

Trump, Fauci tout ‘good news’ from remdesivir drug trial in treating COVID-19

“What it has proven is that a drug can block this virus,” Anthony Fauci said.

April 29, 2020, 3:10 PM ET

Remdesivir coronavirus drug trial shows ‘quite good news’: FauciDr. Anthony Fauci touted the potential promise of the drug remdesivir, which may reduce recovery time for COVID-19 patients.Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci on Wednesday touted the results of trial examining an experimental drug treatment for the novel coronavirus, calling it “good news” as he spoke in the Oval Office alongside President Donald Trump.

A randomized, international trial of the drug remdesivir had resulted in “quite good news,” shortening the period patients experienced symptoms and potentially slightly reducing the mortality rate, according to Fauci, a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which sponsored the trial.

“What it has proven is that a drug can block this virus,” Fauci said, calling the development “very optimistic.”

Tune into ABC at 1 p.m. ET and ABC News Live at 4 p.m. ET every weekday for special coverage of the novel coronavirus with the full ABC News team, including the latest news, context and analysis.

The trial had 1,063 patients spread across 22 countries, including the U.S., and the first participant was an American who had been quarantined on the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship wracked by the virus that was docked in Japan earlier this year, according to the NIAID.

It had not yet been peer-reviewed but was being submitted to a journal for review, Fauci said as he previewed the results. Experts interviewed by ABC News urged caution until the full data was released.

One vial of the drug Remdesivir is viewed at the University Hospital Eppendorf (UKE) in Hamburg, northern Germany on April 8, 2020, amidst the new coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic.POOL/AFP via Getty Images, FILE

Fauci said the data so far showed the drug, made by the biotech company Gilead Sciences, had “a clear-cut, significant positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery.”

MORE: Remdesivir could be promising drug candidate to treat coronavirus

For those who took the drug, Fauci said, it took less time to recover, averaging 11 days compared to 15 days for those in a control group who received a placebo.

Fauci said the data represented “a very important proof of concept” – showing that a drug could, in fact, “block” COVID-19.

He also said the mortality rate trended lower for those who took the drug – 8% compared to 11% for those who did not – although he noted that trend was not yet statistically significant, and the results will undergo further analysis.

Announcing the results was accelerated because of the ethical obligation to let patients in trial control groups know about this drug “so that they can have access,” Fauci said.

Moving forward, he said, "this will be the standard of care.

The president, who in the past repeatedly encouraged COVID-19 patients to seek out a different, anti-malarial drug despite no strong evidence it helped, said that the results of the remdesivir trial were “good news.” Trump has praised remdesivir in the past, too.

“It’s a beginning, it means you build on it,” Trump said Wednesday. “I love that as a building block – you know, just as a building block, I love that. But certainly it’s a positive, it’s a very positive event from that standpoint.”

Remdesivir, which is delivered through an intravenous infusion, was initially developed by Gilead to treat Ebola. Although initially promising, it didn’t prove as effective as other Ebola treatments, so research was halted.

However, laboratory studies found remdesivir might work against SARS, a close cousin to the virus that has caused the current COVID-19 pandemic. Because of its promise, governments around the world acted quickly to set up formal studies to answer the question: Does remdesivir help patients with COVID-19 get better faster?

Experts said today’s results were hopeful but that more study was needed.

“The news about remdesivir might get us jumping for joy today but we need to see the data and continue to study this for a definitive answer," Jay Bhatt, an ABC News contributor who was until recently the chief medical officer of the American Hospital Association, noting the “rigor” of the study did give him “hope.”

MORE: Democrats question accuracy of new coronavirus antibody tests

William Schaffner, a professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University and expert on infectious diseases, told ABC News the results were “very encouraging.”

“These are the first data from a controlled trial,” he said. "Even though the trial had to be truncated, this data would indicate we have a drug that can benefit patients. It’s not a miracle drug, but seems to reduce hospitalization duration and death rates. These are very, very important.”

Copyright © 2020 ABC News Internet Ventures. All rights reserved

The real reason Trump treats meatpacking workers as disposable

Opinion by Raul A. Reyes

Updated 7:34 AM EDT, Thu April 30, 2020

(CNN)Get back to work, says President Trump. He might as well add: even if it might kill you.

Tuesday, he used the Defense Production Act to order meat and poultry processing plants to stay open, despite the coronavirus pandemic. He declared them “critical infrastructure” in an executive order designed to avoid shortages of beef, pork and chicken.

“We’re working very hard,” Trump said, “to make sure our food supply chain is sound and plentiful.”

Given that meat processing plants are Covid-19 hotspots, this order is the height of irresponsibility and cruelty. It endangers the health of some of America’s most vulnerable workers, many of whom are Latino, African American and immigrants. It prioritizes corporate interests over workers’ lives.

Sadly, to this President, immigrant labor is clearly disposable – and always useful for political gain.

Across the country, meatpacking plants have been closing as their employees have gotten sick. Smithfield Foods closed its pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, this month after more than 600 workers tested positive for coronavirus. Last week, Tyson Farms shut down its biggest pork processing plant in Waterloo, Iowa, after more than 180 workers tested positive.

Other plants across the country have similarly closed, with reports of coronavirus-related illness and deaths.

The employees at such plants work under extremely difficult, hazardous conditions. They often work shoulder to shoulder, receiving and killing animals and butchering them for sale. It is grueling, repetitive work that many Americans would shudder at doing, especially given the risk of injury and the low pay.

In 2017, employees at meat plants earned on average about $15 an hour plus benefits, while employees at chicken plants earned on average about a dollar less per hour. The think tank New American Economy estimates that nearly half of this workforce is made up of immigrants, and many are people of color.

Trump’s order may well amount to a death sentence for workers in meatpacking plants, who have little choice but to continue to work to provide for their families. In Iowa, for example, citing Iowa state data, The Gazette reports that African Americans and Latinos have disproportionately high rates of coronavirus as a result of their work in meatpacking plants when compared with US Census Bureau figures on their relative representation in the state: While Latinos are 6% of Iowa’s population, they account for 17% of the state’s confirmed coronavirus cases. African Americans are 3% of the state’s population, yet they are 9% of the state’s coronavirus cases.

These are the people the President wants to continue working for the benefit of American consumers. How unsurprising that the President, who has shown unprecedented cruelty and disdain for immigrants and minorities, now expects them to risk their lives so we all can have an uninterrupted food supply.

Recall, for one example, that last year, Trump ordered massive sweeps of food processing plants in Mississippi, resulting in hundreds of arrests of undocumented workers, as well as devastated communities.

The way Trump rolled out this executive order is especially telling. He told reporters he was working with Tyson Foods – as opposed to health and workplace safety experts. The order was developed in consultation with corporate industry leaders.

“We’re going to sign an executive order today, I believe, and that’ll solve any liability problems,” Trump said on Tuesday.

While his executive order states that employers will follow guidelines from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, his main concern seems to be for corporate bosses, not for employees or public health. And does anyone think that the President would be comfortable ordering white-collar professionals to stay at work, despite significant health risks of Covid-19 transmission?

That Trump was reluctant to invoke the Defense Production Act to expedite the production of personal protection equipment (PPE) for health care workers, and is now invoking the act in a manner that could truly harm meat plant workers, speaks volumes.

The president and CEO of the North American Meat Institute told the website Vox that meat processing plants are completely disinfected every night after the last shift, and that workers are required to wear masks and face shields when the plants can obtain them.

Separately, Dean Banks, the head of Tyson Foods, told CNN’s Erin Burnett that “we’re doing everything we can to make sure we take care of our team members.” Banks said that his company was “extremely early in providing as many protective measures as we could possibly imagine.”

Yet if conditions were safe, employees would not be staging walkouts and protesting at meat plants over working conditions.

There is no doubt that the meat processing sector is facing a serious threat from the coronavirus pandemic. The United Food and Commercial Workers international Union noted that plant closures have resulted in a 25% decline in pork slaughter capacity and a 10% reduction in beef slaughter capacity.

Black America must wake up to this viral threat

But the union also estimated that 20 meatpacking and food processing union workers have died from the virus so far, and that 6,500 union workers are sick or have been exposed to the virus. So safeguarding our food supply needs to begin with safeguarding workers on the food supply chain. A thoughtful response to this situation would be to prioritize worker safety, not corporate input.

Trump should be ordering the meat processing industry to comply with the highest standards of social distancing and safety, or else face fines and criminal liability. Instead he is protecting the industry at the expense of its workers.

Like so many other aspects of his administration’s coronavirus response, Trump’s latest executive order is profoundly misguided and negligent. Meat processing plant employees are not expendable – and should not be forced back into dangerous working conditions.

© 2020 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.

POLITICO

WHITE HOUSE

Trump says blame China. His supporters are listening.

At rallies, one protester yelled, “Go to China.” In state legislatures, anti-China bills are being proposed. On conservative radio, callers want to punish China over the coronavirus.

Polls conducted for the Trump campaign and Republican senators show China will be an effective issue for Republicans in November. | Evan Vucci, File/AP Photo

The strategy to blame China for the coronavirus outbreak began weeks ago in Washington, D.C. Now it’s spread to the rest of the country.

In Wisconsin, a state senator introduced a bill criticizing “the negligence and hostile actions” of the Chinese government. In Virginia, a conservative talk radio host debated ways the Trump administration could punish China for inflicting a pandemic on the world. And in Colorado, an activist protesting stay-at-home orders confronted a health care worker on a busy street. “Go to China if you want communism!" she yelled. “Go to China.”

President Donald Trump’s decision to focus his coronavirus anger on China, America’s top economic rival, is part of a pivot for Trump’s reelection team as it scrambles to revise a campaign message that had been focused on financial prosperity. Now, with the economy in a coronavirus-induced coma, Trump’s team is working to instead make the 2020 race a referendum on who will be tougher on China — Trump or Joe Biden. In recent days, Trump’s campaign has even dubbed the president’s likely Democrat opponent “Beijing Biden."

The message appears to be resonating. John Fredericks, the Virginia talk radio host and Trump supporter, said his callers, many out of work in rural areas, trust Trump to retaliate against China.

“My callers know what China has done,” he said. “There’s blood on their hands.”

But while Republican pollster Frank Luntz predicted China will be the biggest issue in the presidential campaign, second only to the coronavirus itself, he said it’s not clear the issue will benefit Trump.

Trump’s evangelical supporters want China to pay a price for coronavirus

“The question pollsters can’t answer right now is whether this helps Trump or Biden,” Luntz said “More precisely, both candidates will be criticized for past and current comments they’ve made. It’s not clear which candidate will be hurt more by China.”

Indeed, both the Trump and Biden camps seem to think they have a winning hand on China.

Polls conducted for the Trump campaign and Republican senators show China will be an effective issue for Republicans in November, according to three people who have seen the numbers, leading the GOP to buy a flurry of TV and Facebook ads, dash off emails to supporters and increase their tough rhetoric.

“Unlike Sleepy Joe Biden and the rest of the Crooked Democrats, President Trump keeps his promises, which is why we’re not letting China get away with using America as a scapegoat,” one Trump campaign Facebook ad read.

But Biden and the Democrats, too, think focusing on China will lift their chances in November. They’re criticizing Trump for initially praising the country’s response to the pandemic and accusing him of caring more about his trade deal with China than American lives. The Democratic group American Bridge just launched an ad accusing Trump of trusting China.

Both candidates also have perceived weaknesses on the issue.

Biden last year appeared to downplay China as a geopolitical competitor and is fighting claims that the business partners of his son, Hunter, landed a $1.5 billion deal days after they traveled to China on official business when he was vice president, even though there’s no direct evidence of impropriety.

For his part, Trump has wavered repeatedly on China’s culpability for the pandemic. He initially praised the country and its leader, President Xi Jinping, more than a dozen times in the early days of the outbreak, often stressing the recent trade deal the two countries had signed.

Trump later reversed course, though, and started excoriating the country for its handling of the virus. The pivot came as Trump faced criticism that he initially downplayed the outbreak and failed to quickly produce and ship tests and medical supplies to states. America has now passed 1 million coronavirus cases, with more than 60,000 people dying from the disease.

“He understands his presidency rises and falls on the very pandemic he denied was a pandemic and he is desperate to try to counteract the narrative that has set in that he wasn’t up to the job,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who cited coronavirus when he endorsed Biden last month. “That’s a devastating critique. You don’t get re-elected with that narrative.”

In response, Trump has touted the narrative that China, not him, is at fault. It’s a message that plays into American’s current feelings about China. About two-thirds of the country has an unfavorable view of China, the highest number in 15 years, according to a poll by Pew Research Center. That figure is also up nearly 20 percentage points since Trump was inaugurated in 2017.

“The desire for China to be held accountable for the spread of Covid-19 is no longer limited to Trump supporters,” said Brian Swenson, a Republican strategist in Florida who worked for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), referencing the disease that results from the coronavirus. “There is a growing bipartisan call at the local level for China to be held accountable for their lack of transparency with the world community, their spreading of propaganda and misinformation and for failing to diminish the spread of Covid-19.”

15 times Trump praised China as coronavirus was spreading across the globe

Kyle Hupfer, chairman of the Republican party in the red state of Indiana, said residents expect Trump to get to the bottom of the pandemic. “There’s certainly a level of distrust related to what China has done and how they’re approached this,” he said.

In recent weeks, Trump has tried to take advantage of those growing feelings of animosity — nicknaming the virus the “Chinese virus,” accusing China of lying about its number of cases and boasting he contained the outbreak by restricting travel from China in January, even though many public health experts say the ban merely bought the U.S. time that Trump did not use to prepare adequately.

This week, Trump said his administration was investigating whether China covered up what it knew about the early spread of coronavirus. His aides are discussing ways to penalize the country.

“We are not happy with China,” Trump told reporters Monday. “We are not happy with that whole situation because we believe it could have been stopped at the source, it could have been stopped quickly, and it wouldn’t have spread all over the world. And we think that should have happened.”

Peter Navarro, Trump’s economic adviser, has pushed the president to reduce the government’s dependency on imports from China when it comes to medical supplies and drugs. Trump supporters around the country have latched onto Navarro’s efforts.

“To make America great again, we need to be dependent on ourselves,” said Ralph King, a Trump supporter in Bedford, Ohio, who co-founded the conservative group Main Street Patriots. “We should not be dependent on other countries.”

One side effect of the pandemic: Disabled and elderly people are going without their in-home caregivers.

Confirmed U.S. Cases: 1,133,069 | U.S. Deaths: 66,385

How coronavirus will change the world permanently

TOP DEVELOPMENTS

Supporters of President Trump are taking up his call when it comes to blaming China.

Will President Trump set off a global fight over a vaccine?

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson says he came very close to dying.

Trump’s allies say going after China is a particularly compelling issue for the president because he constantly criticized Beijing while on the campaign trail in 2016, accusing the country of taking U.S. jobs, spying on U.S. businesses and stealing U.S. technology.

“He should stay on the message he has had for many years,” said a Republican who speaks to Trump.

So far, Trump’s surrogates and aides have stayed on that message, talking about China daily in online campaign events. America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC, released a new TV ad attacking Biden on China Friday in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania

In the coming weeks, Trump’s campaign is expected to launch a similar ad blitz.

“Our internal data shows that Joe Biden’s softness on China is a major vulnerability, among many,” said Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh, though he declined to release the polling numbers.

There are growing signs Trump’s strategy is working.

Last week, Missouri became the first state to sue the Chinese government for its role in the pandemic, accusing it of failing to warn other nations of the virus and allowing people to travel outside the country, among other things. Mississippi followed with its own suit.

Legislators in other states are considering their own actions while some conservative activists protesting stay-at-home orders are mentioning China.

Some Republican senators, including Rubio, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, have pushed for additional actions to hit China. Rubio wants to halt China’s hold on the pharmaceutical supply chain. Hawley wants to prove the virus started in Wuhan, China. And Cotton wants to ensure Americans can sue Chinese officials for the pandemic.

Senate Republican strategists also recently distributed a memo advising GOP candidates to focus on China and blame the country for covering up the virus, accuse Democrats of being “soft on China” and stress that Republicans will push to sanction Beijing.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis is encouraging medical companies to stop doing business with China and has explored divesting the state’s interests out of China. He wants everyone to know he’s tough on China — just like Trump.

“I have not forgotten about China,” DeSantis told reporters recently. “In fact, some of you guys may want to look this up, but there was a Chinese Communist Party think tank that did a report in February, and they analyzed the governors in the United States — who was hardline, who was friendly and who was unknown. There were five governors that were hardline against China. Where do you think I was?”

Arek Sarkissian contributed to this report.

Europe has been ’naive’ about China, EU official says

© 2020 POLITICO LLC

May 3, 2020Updated 9:08 a.m. ET

BRUSSELS — Australia has called for an inquiry into the origin of the virus. Germany and Britain are hesitating anew about inviting in the Chinese tech giant Huawei. President Trump has blamed China for the contagion and is seeking to punish it. Some governments want to sue Beijing for damages and reparations.

Across the globe a backlash is building against China for its initial mishandling of the crisis that helped loose the coronavirus on the world, creating a deeply polarizing battle of narratives and setting back China’s ambition to fill the leadership vacuum left by the United States.

China, never receptive to outside criticism and wary of damage to its domestic control and long economic reach, has responded aggressively, combining medical aid to other countries with harsh nationalist rhetoric, and mixing demands for gratitude with economic threats.

The result has only added momentum to the blowback and the growing mistrust of China in Europe and Africa, undermining China’s desired image as a generous global actor.

A group of Chinese doctors inspecting a makeshift hospital in Belgrade. China has been showering European countries with millions of masks, test kits and other aid, recasting itself as the hero in the battle against the coronavirus.Credit…Oliver Bunic/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Even before the virus, Beijing displayed a fierce approach to public relations, an aggressive style called “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy, named after two ultrapatriotic Chinese films featuring the evil plots and fiery demise of American-led foreign mercenaries.

With clear encouragement from President Xi Jinping and the powerful Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party, a younger generation of Chinese diplomats have been proving their loyalty with defiantly nationalist and sometimes threatening messages in the countries where they are based.

A video screen in Beijing in March showing President Xi Jinping of China with army officers and other officials.Credit…Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times

“You have a new brand of Chinese diplomats who seem to compete with each other to be more radical and eventually insulting to the country where they happen to be posted,” said François Godement, a senior adviser for Asia at the Paris-based Institut Montaigne. “They’ve gotten into fights with every northern European country with whom they should have an interest, and they’ve alienated every one of them.”

Since the virus, the tone has only toughened, a measure of just how serious a danger China’s leaders consider the virus to their standing at home, where it has fueled anger and destroyed economic growth, as well as abroad.

In the past several weeks, at least seven Chinese ambassadors — to France, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana and the African Union — have been summoned by their hosts to answer accusations ranging from spreading misinformation to the “racist mistreatment” of Africans in Guangzhou.

Chinese flags lining a street in Guangzhou, where Africans say they have been evicted and forced into quarantine.Credit…Alex Plavevski/EPA, via Shutterstock

Just last week, China threatened to withhold medical aid from the Netherlands for changing the name of its representative office in Taiwan to include the word Taipei. And before that, the Chinese Embassy in Berlin sparred publicly with the German newspaper Bild after the tabloid demanded $160 billion in compensation from China for damages to Germany from the virus.

Mr. Trump said last week that his administration was conducting “serious investigations” into Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak.

He has pressed American intelligence agencies to find the source of the virus, suggesting it might have emerged accidentally from a Wuhan weapons lab, although most intelligence agencies remain skeptical. And he has expressed interest in trying to sue Beijing for damages, with the United States seeking $10 million for every American death.

Republicans in the United States have moved to support Mr. Trump’s attacks on China. Missouri’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to hold Beijing responsible for the outbreak.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Geng Shuang, called the suit “frivolous,” adding that it had “no factual and legal basis’’ and “only invites ridicule.”

Attorney General Eric Schmitt of Missouri has filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to hold Beijing responsible for the coronavirus outbreak.Credit…Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press

The suit seems to aim less at securing victory in court, which is unlikely, than at prodding Congress to pass legislation to make it easier for U.S. citizens to sue foreign states for damages.

“From Beijing’s point of view, this contemporary call is a historic echo of the reparations paid after the Boxer Rebellion,” said Theresa Fallon, director of the Centre for Russia Europe Asia Studies, referring to the anti-imperialist, anti-Christian and ultranationalist uprising around 1899-1901 in China that ended in defeat, with huge reparations for eight nations over the next decades. “The party’s cultivation of the humiliation narrative makes it politically impossible for Xi to ever agree to pay any reparations.”

Instead, it has been imperative for Mr. Xi to turn the narrative around, steering it from a story of incompetence and failure — including the suppression of early warnings about the virus — into one of victory over the illness, a victory achieved through the unity of the party.

In the latest iteration of the new Chinese narrative, the enemy — the virus — did not even come from China, but from the U.S. military, an unsubstantiated accusation made by China’s combative Foreign Ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian.

Chinese diplomats are encouraged to be combative by Beijing, said Susan Shirk, a China scholar and director of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego. The promotion of Mr. Zhao to spokesman and his statement about the U.S. Army “signals to everyone in China that this is the official line, so you get this megaphone effect,” she said, adding that it makes any negotiations more difficult.

But in the longer run, China is seeding mistrust and damaging its own interests, said Ms. Shirk, who is working on a book called “Overreach,” about how China’s domestic politics have derailed its ambitions for a peaceful rise as a global superpower.

“As China started getting control over the virus and started this health diplomacy, it could have been the opportunity for China to emphasize its compassionate side and rebuild trust and its reputation as a responsible global power,” she said. “But that diplomatic effort got hijacked by the Propaganda Department of the party, with a much more assertive effort to leverage their assistance to get praise for China as a country and a system and its performance in stopping the spread of the virus.”

In recent days, Chinese state media has run numerous inflammatory statements, saying that Australia, after announcing its desire for an inquiry into the virus, was “gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe.” Beijing warned that Australia risked long-term damage to its trading partnership with China, which takes a third of Australia’s exports.

“Maybe the ordinary people will say, ‘Why should we drink Australian wine? Eat Australian beef?’” China’s ambassador, Cheng Jingye, told The Australian Financial Review. Australia’s foreign minister, Marise Payne, dismissed China’s attempt as “economic coercion.”

The Sydney waterfront. Chinese state media recently assailed Australia, after it announced its desire for an inquiry into the virus.Credit…Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

Even in European countries like Germany, “the mistrust of China has accelerated so quickly with the virus that no ministry knows how to deal with it,” said Angela Stanzel, a China expert with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

In Germany, as in Britain, in addition to new questions about the advisability of using Huawei for new 5G systems, worries have also grown about dependency on China for vital materials and pharmaceuticals.

France, which traditionally has good relations with Beijing, has also been angered by critical statements by Chinese diplomats, including a charge that the French had deliberately left their older residents to die in nursing homes. That prompted a rebuke from France’s foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, and anger from legislators, despite an early reciprocal exchange of medical aid like masks.

Recently, the German government complained that Chinese diplomats were soliciting letters of support and gratitude for Beijing’s aid and efforts against the virus from government officials and the heads of major German companies.

The same has been true in Poland, said the U.S. ambassador to Warsaw, Georgette Mosbacher, in an interview, describing Chinese pressure on President Andrzej Duda to call Mr. Xi and thank him for aid, a call the Chinese heralded at home.

“Poland wasn’t going to get this stuff unless the phone call was made, so they could use that phone call” for propaganda, Ms. Mosbacher said.

There is some unhappiness in China with the current diplomatic rhetoric. In a recent essay, Zi Zhongyun, now 89, a longtime expert on America at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, sees parallels in the harsh nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric of the Wolf Warriors of today with the period around the Boxer Rebellion against Western influence in China.

Ms. Zi said such reactions risked getting out of hand.

“I can say without a doubt,” she concluded, “that as long as Boxer-like activities are given the official stamp of approval as being ‘patriotic,’” and as long as “generation after generation of our fellow Chinese are educated and inculcated with a Boxer-like mentality, it will be impossible for China to take its place among the modern civilized nations of the world.”

Isabella Kwai contributed reporting from Sydney, Australia. Monika Pronczuk contributed research from Brussels.

China and the Pandemic

Pressured by China, E.U. Softens Report on Covid-19 Disinformation

April 24, 2020

As Virus Spreads, China and Russia See Openings for Disinformation

March 28, 2020

China’s Coronavirus Battle Is Waning. Its Propaganda Fight Is Not

{Note : the same old story : }

The Guardian - Back to home

Trump gives up on virus fight to focus on economic recovery – and re-election

With Covid-19 deaths set to almost double this month, the president is putting the stock market before lives, critics say

Tue 5 May 2020 09.03 EDT

Donald Trump is effectively abandoning a public health strategy for the coronavirus pandemic and showing “clear willingness to trade lives for the Dow Jones”, critics say.

Will Americans ever forgive Trump for his heartless lack of compassion? | Francine Prose

A leaked internal White House report predicts the daily death toll from the virus will reach about 3,000 on 1 June, almost double the current tally of about 1,750, the New York Times revealed on Monday.

Yet at the same time, Trump has scrapped daily coronavirus taskforce briefings and marginalized his medical experts in favour of economic officials flooding the airwaves to urge states to reopen for business – even amid rising infection rates.

“They’ve decided in a very utilitarian kind of way that the political damage from a collapsed economy is greater than the political damage from losing as many as 90,000 more Americans just in June,” said Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist. “We’re witnessing the full-scale application of a kind of grisly realpolitik that is a clear willingness to trade lives for the Dow Jones.”

In a sign of the shift, the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie told CNN that increased deaths could be worth it if the economy reopens. “Of course, everybody wants to save every life they can – but the question is, towards what end, ultimately?” said Christie, a Republican who led Donald Trump’s presidential transition team in 2016. He added: “Are there ways that we can … thread the middle here to allow that there are going to be deaths, and there are going to be deaths no matter what?”

When Trump declared a national emergency in the White House rose garden on 13 March, hopes rose that, for all the early downplaying and missed testing opportunities, the federal government was finally ready to attack the crisis with full force.

Trump quickly branded himself a “wartime president” and, on 31 March, somberly braced Americans for a “very, very painful two weeks” ahead. His daily White House coronavirus taskforce briefings earned comparisons with campaign rallies, sometimes running for more than two hours, but also featured respected experts, Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, armed with graphics and science.

On 23 April, however, Trump pontificated about injecting disinfectant into coronavirus patients, prompting worldwide disbelief and derision. The briefings would never be the same again and over the past week have been replaced by set-piece events touting an economic comeback.

On Sunday, tellingly, when Trump held a Fox News virtual town hall entitled “America Together: Returning to Work” at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, he was accompanied not by Birx and Fauci but Vice-President Mike Pence and the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin.

Vice-President Mike Pence and the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, with phone, watch as Donald Trump participates in a Fox News virtual town hall. Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters

The president has been egged on by Fox News hosts who question whether the virus is any worse than the common flu, doubt the value of physical distancing and contend that the economic shutdown, which has cost at least 30m jobs, shows the cure is worse than the problem.

On Saturday, a Washington Post report suggested Trump had been encouraged to pivot from the health crisis to the economic fightback by an internal White House analysis that suggested the daily death toll would peak in mid-April then fall away significantly. His “decision-making has been guided largely by his re-election prospects”, the Post added.

But death toll predictions from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a model favored by the White House, were raised on Monday from 72,000 to 134,000 by the start of August because, it said, states are relaxing physical distancing too soon.

Now, critics say, Trump seems ready to shrug at the losses as collateral damage, paying greater heed to his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, than Birx or Fauci.

Wilson, author of Everything Trump Touches Dies, warned: “They may end up making the situation so bad with a second wave in the summer and a third wave in the fall that we end up with a much worse set of economic challenges than if we’d taken our bitter medicine and stayed shut down until we were through the early part of this crisis.”

The grim news remains inescapable but the administration hopes its economic message will offer at least some counter-programming.

Joe Lockhart, a former White House press secretary, said: “Almost by necessity, they are changing their strategy. They are pinning all of their hopes on getting the economy reopened, using their economic spokespeople and hoping that the American public has a high toleration for the death count moving up. It sounds terrible to say and even worse to do.

“I think you won’t be seeing much from the scientists any more – the news is that bad – and they’re just going to turn a blind eye to the fact that what they’re doing is going to kill more people, because ultimately the way the president makes decisions is what’s good for his re-election.”

© 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

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Break down?

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IDEAS

The President Is Unraveling

The country is witnessing the steady, uninterrupted intellectual and psychological decomposition of Donald Trump.

In case there was any doubt, the past dozen days have proved we’re at the point in his presidency where Donald Trump has become his own caricature, a figure impossible to parody, a man whose words and actions are indistinguishable from an Alec Baldwin skit on Saturday Night Live.

President Trump’s pièce de résistance came during a late April coronavirus task-force briefing, when he floated using “just very powerful light” inside the body as a potential treatment for COVID-19 and then, for good measure, contemplated injecting disinfectant as a way to combat the effects of the virus “because you see it gets in the lungs and does a tremendous number on them, so it’d be interesting to check that.”

Anne Applebaum: The rest of the world is laughing at Trump

But the burlesque show just keeps rolling on.

Take this past weekend, when former President George W. Bush delivered a three-minute video as part of The Call to Unite, a 24-hour live-stream benefiting COVID-19 relief.

Bush joined other past presidents, spiritual and community leaders, frontline workers, artists, musicians, psychologists, and Academy Award winning actors. They offered advice, stories, and meditations, poetry, prayers, and performances. The purpose of The Call to Unite (which I played a very minor role in helping organize) was to offer practical ways to support others, to provide hope, encouragement, empathy, and unity.

In his video, which went viral, Bush—in whose White House I worked—never mentioned Trump. Instead, he expressed gratitude to health-care workers, encouraged Americans to abide by social-distancing rules, and reminded his fellow Americans that we have faced trying times before.

The President Is Trapped

“I have no doubt, none at all, that this spirit of service and sacrifice is alive and well in America,” Bush said. He emphasized that “empathy and simple kindness are essential, powerful tools of national recovery.” And America’s 43rd president asked us to “remember how small our differences are in the face of this shared threat.”

“In the final analysis,” he said, “we are not partisan combatants; we are human beings, equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of God.” Bush concluded, “We rise or fall together, and we are determined to rise.”

That was too much for Trump, who attacked his Republican predecessor on (where else?) Twitter: “[Bush] was nowhere to be found in speaking up against the greatest Hoax in American history!”

Yascha Mounk: The problem isn’t Twitter. It’s that you care about Twitter.

So think about that for a minute. George W. Bush made a moving, eloquent plea for empathy and national unity, which enraged Donald Trump enough that he felt the need to go on the attack.

But there’s more. On the same weekend that he attacked Bush for making an appeal to national unity, Trump said this about Kim Jong Un, one of the most brutal leaders in the world: “I, for one, am glad to see he is back, and well!”

Then, Sunday night, sitting at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial for a town-hall interview with Fox News, Trump complained that he is “treated worse” than President Abraham Lincoln. “I am greeted with a hostile press, the likes of which no president has ever seen,” Trump said.

By Monday morning, the president was peddling a cruel and bizarre conspiracy theory aimed at MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, a Trump critic, with Trump suggesting in his tweet that a “cold case” be opened to look into the death of an intern in 2001.

I could have picked a dozen other examples over the past 10 days, but these five will suffice. They illustrate some of the essential traits of Donald Trump: the shocking ignorance, ineptitude, and misinformation; his constant need to divide Americans and attack those who are trying to promote social solidarity; his narcissism, deep insecurity, utter lack of empathy, and desperate need to be loved; his feelings of victimization and grievance; his affinity for ruthless leaders; and his fondness for conspiracy theories.

George T. Conway III: Unfit for office

None of these traits are new in Trump; they are part of the reason why some of us were warning about him long before he won the presidency, even going back to 2011. But, more and more, those traits are defining his presidency, producing a kind of creeping paralysis. We are witnessing the steady, uninterrupted intellectual and psychological decomposition of an American president. It’s something the Trump White House cannot hide—indeed, it doesn’t even try to hide it anymore. There is not even the slightest hint of normalcy.

This will have ongoing ramifications for the remainder of Trump’s first term and for his reelection strategy. More than ever, Trump will try to convince Americans that “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” to quote his own words in 2018.

That won’t be easy in a pandemic, as the death toll mounts and the economy collapses and the failures of the president multiply. But that doesn’t mean Trump won’t try. It’s all he has left, so Americans have to prepare for it.

Trump and his apparatchiks will not only step up their propaganda; they will increase their efforts to exhaust our critical thinking and to annihilate truth, in the words of the Russian dissident Garry Kasparov. We will see even more “alternative facts.” We will see even more brazen attempts to rewrite history. We will hear even more crazy conspiracy theories. We will witness even more lashing out at reporters, more rage, and more lies.

George Packer: We are living in a failed state

“The real opposition is the media,” Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, once told the journalist Michael Lewis. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

We will see more extreme appeals to the fringe base of Trump’s party, including right-wing militias. For example, after hundreds of protesters, many of them carrying guns, descended on the capitol in Lansing, Michigan, to protest Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order, Trump, summoning the ghosts of Charlottesville, described the protesters as “very good people.” Some of these “very good people” carried signs saying tyrants get the rope and tyrant bitch and comparing the governor to Hitler.

We will see a more prominent role played by One America News, a pro-Trump network that the president has praised dozens of times. And we will see the right-wing media complex go to even more bizarre places—not just people such as InfoWar’s Alex Jones, who literally threatened to eat his own neighbors if the lockdown continued, but more mainstream figures such as Salem Radio Network’s Dennis Prager, who declared the other day that the lockdown was “the greatest mistake in the history of humanity.”

Watching formerly serious individuals on the right, including the Christian right, become Trump courtiers has been a painful and dispiriting thing for many of us to witness. In the process, they have reconfigured their own character, intellect, and moral sensibilities to align with the disordered mind and deformed ethical world of Donald Trump.

And we will see, as we have for the entire Trump presidency, the national Republican Party fall in line. Many are speaking out in defense of Trump while other timid souls who know better have gone sotto voce out of fear and cowardice that they have justified to themselves, and tried less successfully to justify to others.

Read: I have seen the future—and it’s not the life we knew

What this means is that Americans are facing not just a conventional presidential election in 2020 but also, and most important, a referendum on reality and epistemology. Donald Trump is asking us to enter even further into his house of mirrors. He is asking us to live within a lie, to live within his lie, for four more years. The duty of citizenship in America today is to refuse to live within that lie.

“The simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions,” Alexandr Solzhenitsyn said in his mesmerizing 1970 Nobel lecture. “Let that enter the world, let it even reign in the world—but not with my help.”

Solzhenitsyn went on to say that writers and artists can achieve more; they can conquer falsehoods. “Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art,” he said.

But art, as powerful as it is, is not the only instrument with which to fight falsehoods. There are also the daily acts of integrity of common men and women who will not believe the lies or spread the lies, who will not allow the foundation of truth—factual truth, moral truth—to be destroyed, and who, in standing for truth, will help heal this broken land.

PETER WEHNER is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Egan visiting professor at Duke University. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.

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