DAMN!! How will HISTORY look back on Trump, Fox News & all his supporters during Coronavirus & AFTER he leaves office? UPDATE: Trump WON
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‘Grounds for a lawsuit’: MSNBC’s Mika calls for legal consequences for Fox News coronavirus ‘misinformation’
MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski suggested Fox News might be liable for the deaths of viewers who trusted their “misinformation” about the deadly coronavirus. Brzezinski and her “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough were shocked that President Donald Trump’s loyalists continue to downplay the outbreak —...
www.rawstory.com
Trump Is Hurting His Own Re-election Chances
Don’t be fooled by snapshot polls.
By David Leonhardt
Opinion Columnist
President Trump walking into the briefing room to take part in a coronavirus update at the White House last Monday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
The strangest part of President Trump’s coronavirus response is that it’s almost certainly damaging his chances of re-election.
I realize that may sound surprising, given that his approval rating has been rising. But when you look beyond day-to-day events — which Trump often struggles to do — you see that he is creating the conditions for a miserable summer and fall, with extended virus outbreaks and a deeper recession. The summer and fall, of course, are the crux of the presidential campaign.
Trump’s virus strategy revolves around trying to make the present seem as good as possible, without much concern for the future. He spent almost two months denying that the virus was a serious problem and falsely claiming that the number of cases was falling. He has spent the last two weeks alternately taking aggressive measures and refusing to do so, often against the advice of public-health experts. Some Republican governors, following Trump’s lead, are also rejecting those experts’ pleas: There are beaches open in Florida, restaurants open in Georgia and Missouri and many people out and about in Oklahoma and Texas.
Altogether, the United States seems to have engaged in the least aggressive response of any affected country. Sure enough, it also now has the world’s largest number of confirmed cases. The American caseload was initially following a similar path as the Chinese and Italian caseloads. But the number of American infections is now rising uniquely fast, with 96,000 new cases in the last week — more than twice as many as in any seven-day period in any other country.
This surge doesn’t cause only more short-term deaths and overwhelmed hospitals. It also leads to more cases in later months, by creating a larger group of infected people who can spread the virus to others. As Tom Frieden, a former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me, “The higher the peak, the longer it lasts.”
And the longer that the country is gripped by the virus, the deeper that the economic downturn will be. Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago professor, refers to this as the first rule of “virus economics”: The only way to resuscitate the economy is to stop the virus. Premature attempts to restart business activity will lead to further outbreaks, which will cause more fear and new shutdowns.
A bipartisan group of business executives, government officials and others, including former Federal Reserve chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen and four former Treasury secretaries, put it this way: “Saving lives and saving the economy are not in conflict right now; we will hasten the return to robust economic activity by taking steps to stem the spread of the virus and save lives.”
This idea isn’t just theoretical. There is now evidence, from places that have enacted a temporary shutdown of almost all non-essential activity. That’s how Wuhan, where the virus began, reduced new cases to nearly zero. It’s how the New York suburb of New Rochelle seems to have contained its outbreak.
Counterintuitively, these shutdowns also help the economy. A fascinating new study, from researchers at the Fed and M.I.T., has analyzed the social-distancing policies that various American cities enacted during the 1918 flu pandemic. Some cities, like Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis and Cleveland, closed schools and banned public gatherings earlier and for longer periods. Others, like San Francisco, Philadelphia and St. Paul, Minn., were less aggressive.
The first group of cities suffered fewer deaths — and also enjoyed higher average employment and manufacturing output, as well as stronger bank balance sheets, in the following year. The title of the paper — by Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck and Emil Verner — says it all: “Pandemics Depress the Economy, Public Health Interventions Do Not.”
The economic costs are still severe. Today, the most effective response would probably be a two-month national shutdown, accompanied by a modestly larger stimulus bill than Congress just passed, both to pay many Americans’ salaries and to bolster the health care system. When the two months were over, healthy people could go back to work, and any new cases could be quickly isolated. That second phase would be similar to the strategy in Singapore and Taiwan.
Had Trump taken this approach in late February, a full month after the first American fell ill, he could have vastly reduced the human and economic toll. Even if he took it now, he could probably get the country functioning close to normally by early summer. Instead, he is talking about normalcy by April — and making it likely that things will still be abnormal in July.
What explains his response? Trump lives in the moment. He is impetuous. He is like a day trader, not a long-term investor. A shutdown sounds miserable to him. He doesn’t have much respect for scientists and their data, but he does pay close attention to his poll numbers. And they’re rising (along with, it’s worth noting, the approval rating of other world leaders). Trump’s approach seems to be working, for now.
I can’t tell you exactly what the future will bring, especially during a crisis unlike any the world has confronted in a century. It’s possible that Trump could somehow luck out and the virus will end up being less gruesome for all of us. But that’s not the likely outcome. And nobody should forget that he is choosing a path that endangers lives and jobs mostly because it feels better to him in the moment.
Don’t be fooled by snapshot polls.
By David Leonhardt
Opinion Columnist
- March 29, 2020
President Trump walking into the briefing room to take part in a coronavirus update at the White House last Monday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
The strangest part of President Trump’s coronavirus response is that it’s almost certainly damaging his chances of re-election.
I realize that may sound surprising, given that his approval rating has been rising. But when you look beyond day-to-day events — which Trump often struggles to do — you see that he is creating the conditions for a miserable summer and fall, with extended virus outbreaks and a deeper recession. The summer and fall, of course, are the crux of the presidential campaign.
Trump’s virus strategy revolves around trying to make the present seem as good as possible, without much concern for the future. He spent almost two months denying that the virus was a serious problem and falsely claiming that the number of cases was falling. He has spent the last two weeks alternately taking aggressive measures and refusing to do so, often against the advice of public-health experts. Some Republican governors, following Trump’s lead, are also rejecting those experts’ pleas: There are beaches open in Florida, restaurants open in Georgia and Missouri and many people out and about in Oklahoma and Texas.
Altogether, the United States seems to have engaged in the least aggressive response of any affected country. Sure enough, it also now has the world’s largest number of confirmed cases. The American caseload was initially following a similar path as the Chinese and Italian caseloads. But the number of American infections is now rising uniquely fast, with 96,000 new cases in the last week — more than twice as many as in any seven-day period in any other country.
This surge doesn’t cause only more short-term deaths and overwhelmed hospitals. It also leads to more cases in later months, by creating a larger group of infected people who can spread the virus to others. As Tom Frieden, a former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me, “The higher the peak, the longer it lasts.”
And the longer that the country is gripped by the virus, the deeper that the economic downturn will be. Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago professor, refers to this as the first rule of “virus economics”: The only way to resuscitate the economy is to stop the virus. Premature attempts to restart business activity will lead to further outbreaks, which will cause more fear and new shutdowns.
A bipartisan group of business executives, government officials and others, including former Federal Reserve chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen and four former Treasury secretaries, put it this way: “Saving lives and saving the economy are not in conflict right now; we will hasten the return to robust economic activity by taking steps to stem the spread of the virus and save lives.”
This idea isn’t just theoretical. There is now evidence, from places that have enacted a temporary shutdown of almost all non-essential activity. That’s how Wuhan, where the virus began, reduced new cases to nearly zero. It’s how the New York suburb of New Rochelle seems to have contained its outbreak.
Counterintuitively, these shutdowns also help the economy. A fascinating new study, from researchers at the Fed and M.I.T., has analyzed the social-distancing policies that various American cities enacted during the 1918 flu pandemic. Some cities, like Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis and Cleveland, closed schools and banned public gatherings earlier and for longer periods. Others, like San Francisco, Philadelphia and St. Paul, Minn., were less aggressive.
The first group of cities suffered fewer deaths — and also enjoyed higher average employment and manufacturing output, as well as stronger bank balance sheets, in the following year. The title of the paper — by Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck and Emil Verner — says it all: “Pandemics Depress the Economy, Public Health Interventions Do Not.”
The economic costs are still severe. Today, the most effective response would probably be a two-month national shutdown, accompanied by a modestly larger stimulus bill than Congress just passed, both to pay many Americans’ salaries and to bolster the health care system. When the two months were over, healthy people could go back to work, and any new cases could be quickly isolated. That second phase would be similar to the strategy in Singapore and Taiwan.
Had Trump taken this approach in late February, a full month after the first American fell ill, he could have vastly reduced the human and economic toll. Even if he took it now, he could probably get the country functioning close to normally by early summer. Instead, he is talking about normalcy by April — and making it likely that things will still be abnormal in July.
What explains his response? Trump lives in the moment. He is impetuous. He is like a day trader, not a long-term investor. A shutdown sounds miserable to him. He doesn’t have much respect for scientists and their data, but he does pay close attention to his poll numbers. And they’re rising (along with, it’s worth noting, the approval rating of other world leaders). Trump’s approach seems to be working, for now.
I can’t tell you exactly what the future will bring, especially during a crisis unlike any the world has confronted in a century. It’s possible that Trump could somehow luck out and the virus will end up being less gruesome for all of us. But that’s not the likely outcome. And nobody should forget that he is choosing a path that endangers lives and jobs mostly because it feels better to him in the moment.
Jeanine Pirro, You’re Doing Amazing, Sweetie
She appeared disheveled and intoxicated during her Fox News show last night.
www.vulture.com
Trump Wants You to Know He's More Popular than 'The Bachelor'
As the U.S. coronavirus death toll exceeded 2,000 the president bragged about the ratings for his daily White House briefings.
www.rollingstone.com
Trump Wants You to Know He’s More Popular than ‘The Bachelor’
As the United States’ death toll from coronavirus surpassed 2,000 over the weekend, our reality show president took to Twitter on Sunday to inform everyone he was more popular than ABC’s The Bachelor
By
PETER WADE
President Donald Trump speaks during a press briefing on the coronavirus at the White House in Washington, D.C.
Yuri Gripas/POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
As the United States’ death toll from coronavirus surpassed 2,000 over the weekend, our reality show president took to Twitter on Sunday to inform everyone he was more popular than ABC’s The Bachelor.
Citing a report from the New York Times, Trump tweeted: “Because the ‘Ratings’ of my News Conferences etc. are so high, ‘Bachelor finale, Monday Night Football type numbers’ according to the @nytimes, the Lamestream Media is going CRAZY. ‘Trump is reaching too many people, we must stop him.’ said one lunatic. See you at 5:00 P.M.!”
Yes, America, our dear leader is more concerned about ratings than acknowledging the rising death toll. And instead of realizing that the viewing numbers for his briefings are indicative of the fear many citizens feel in the face of the pandemic, the president instead interpreted those numbers as a reflection of his own popularity.
In contrast, Dr. Anthony Fauci, a leading immunologist and head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the same day Trump bragged about his ratings that he expects the U.S. to have “millions” of COVID-19 cases and between 100,000 to 200,000 deaths.
Trump, whose administration previously avoided public press briefings like Americans are trying to avoid coronavirus, has been broadcasting daily briefings from the press room where the president spews lies and misinformation that have left many networks contemplating pulling the plug on broadcasting them. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow recently said on air that she would stop broadcasting the briefings, even though her channel continues to run them. “I would stop putting those briefings on live TV — not out of spite, but because it’s misinformation,” she said.
But misinformation sells, and since he began these briefings, Trump’s approval ratings have risen — showing just how desperate our country is for leadership, even if it’s poor leadership, in this time of crisis. Even so, continuing to give this egomaniac a platform is increasingly dangerous as he reassures Americans that he will lift social distancing restrictions by Easter and touts the unproven efficacy of dangerous drugs against the virus. The president’s lies have left at least one man dead and his wife in critical condition after they ingested anti-malarial drug chloroquine — which is also commonly used in fish tanks — believing it would prevent them from contracting the virus after Trump bragged the drug’s prospects against coronavirus on TV.
“I had [chloroquine] in the house because I used to have koi fish,” the woman who ingested the drug said, adding that she had seen the president talk about it in his briefings. “I saw it sitting on the back shelf and thought, ‘Hey, isn’t that the stuff they’re talking about on TV?'”
This leads to a good rule of thumb for Americans in the midst of a pandemic: Don’t believe everything you read on the internet or see on TV. Unless it’s coming from legitimate medical professionals like Anthony Fauci. Especially don’t believe it if it’s coming from the president or his favorite network, Fox News.
John Oliver Blasts Conservatives Touting Markets Over Lives During COVID-19 Pandemic
Last Week Tonight returns to break down Donald Trump’s handling of this crisis
www.rollingstone.com
Meghan and Harry Have Reportedly Moved to L.A.
By Claire Lampen@claire_lampen
Photo: Chris Jackson/Getty Images
It’s been a very big week for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex: Meghan Markle got a new job with Disney, and may also have moved back to Los Angeles with Harry and their son, Archie. That’s according to People, although the outlet didn’t say exactly when Harry and Meghan left Canada, just that it happened before the country closed its U.S. border on March 20. Per People, the couple are now “settled” and hunkering down in compliance with the state’s stay-at-home order. They had previously been staying on Vancouver Island, but are reportedly looking at houses in L.A., Meghan’s hometown. “Harry is looking straight ahead at his future with his family,” an unnamed source previously told People. “They will be spending time in California … He’s not looking back.” Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, lives in L.A. The couple’s last official day as working senior members of the British royal family is March 31.
Donald Trump, taking time out of his busy presidential coronavirus schedule, tweeted about the couple’s reported move on Sunday. He assured the nation that these royal moochers won’t be getting any funds. Bigly!
Trump has early onset dementia. If you know anyone that has been through it, you know how it goes.
Biden also has it and it is DANGEROUS for anyone to vote for either one of them.
You may be on to something...
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New York Gov. Cuomo issues nationwide call for doctors and nurses as state battles worst coronavirus outbreak in US
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said "what you see us going through here, you will see happening all across the country."
Cuomo gonna f around and be president
New York Gov. Cuomo issues nationwide call for doctors and nurses as state battles worst coronavirus outbreak in US
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said "what you see us going through here, you will see happening all across the country."www.cnbc.com
Cuomo gonna f around and be president
Governors are taking it upon themselves to act because clearly Drumpf won't.....he just wants the accolades and praise. ..yet won't step up and do something....this is fucking embarrassing Dems should be all over this
Repeating the Mistakes of 2016
Cable and broadcast outlets are covering Trump's daily briefings as they did the rallies of days gone by.
2020 Time Capsule #9: ‘The Woman in Michigan’
President Trump gives his pen to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell after signing the coronavirus relief package. Associated Press
Just before the 2016 election, and then again after its results became clear, I did a series of Atlantic items on a challenge I thought the press was not prepared for.
The challenge was dealing with a major political figure—Donald Trump—who fit no previous pattern of how presidents or other major figures conceived of “truth” versus “lies.”
All politicians, like all people, will lie about matters large and small. But most politicians, like most people, usually lie for a reason. They want to avoid blame or embarrassment. They want someone to like or treat them better. They want to paint themselves in a better light. They’ve talked themselves into “believing” a more comfortable version of perhaps-painful truths.
We all know examples from daily life. In the life of public figures, it means things like: Richard Nixon lying about Watergate (in hopes of not getting caught). Bill Clinton lying about his affairs (ditto). Lyndon Johnson concealing what he knew about the worsening situation in Vietnam (so as not to complicate his re-election chances). FDR concealing his physical limitations (so as not to have them complicate his political and policy goals).
So in dealing with the political universe as of the summer of 2015—the time when Donald Trump entered the presidential race—the press could start by asking: What’s the reason a certain statement might be a lie? What would a president — a mayor, a senator— have to gain by shading the truth? The related assumption was that people wouldn’t go to the trouble of crafting a lie without a reason to do so. Lies are harder to remember than the truth; they involve more work in getting people to back up your story; they involve the risk that you’ll be caught.
What made Donald Trump different was not how much more frequently he lies — though he does so at a prodigious rate. (As Daniel Dale and the Washington Post’s fact-check team, among others, have tirelessly chronicled.)
Rather the difference was that Trump so plainly recognized no distinction between true and false—between what the “facts” showed and what he wanted them to be, between what he wanted people to think and what they could see for themselves. Some public figures are unusually “willing” to lie; Trump seemed not even to notice he was doing so. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s famous book “On Bullshit” bears on this phenomenon—people who just talk, in a slurry of “true” and “false,” with no concern or even awareness of the difference between the two.
Larger-than-life-sized oil painting of Trump at Mar-a-Lago, as I saw it when attending a foreign-policy conference there a dozen years ago. (James Fallows)
In Trump’s case it became clear long ago that he lacked the mental filter that alerts most people to the boundary between true and false. He would probably sail through any lie-detector test. He does not care if his claim can be instantly disproved (eg, his “landslide” victory, actually one of the narrowest in history). He does not care if his lies contradict one another, as when he attributes the same “someone told me” story to different sources from one day to the next, or rolls out his ludicrous “Sir” anecdotes. He does not care if a lie does him any good—who believes, or cares, whether his uncle was “a great super genius” as a professor at MIT? He does not care that the Adonis-like heroic portrait that has hung for years at Mar-a-Lago would be a source of mirth for most viewers.
“The news media are not built for someone like this,” I wrote two months before Trump was sworn in:
I submit that these three-and-a-half years later, much of the press has still not rebuilt itself, to cope with a time or a person like this. Or with a political party like the subservient Trump-era GOP.
To choose only a small subset of examples, from only the past three days’ worth of history, here are some illustrations. These are words and deeds that, each on its own, would likely have been major black-mark news events in other eras. Now they are just part of the daily onrush.
1) Us, and them. Two days ago, on March 27, Donald Trump signed in the Oval Office the most expensive spending bill in American history. Getting it enacted required sustained, major efforts from Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House, and from Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, who got every one of his fellow Democrats to vote for the bill.
After Lyndon Johnson relied on Republican support to get his civil-rights and Medicare legislation through the Congress, he made sure that the Republican leaders from the House and Senate were with him for the signing ceremonies, to receive some of the first pens he used. (When Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in the Oval Office, he had only Democratic legislators around him—but that was because of near-unanimous Republican opposition to the bill.)
Structurally Trump’s situation this week was like LBJ’s: he was signing a bill the other party had played a crucial role in passing. But when Trump signed the bill yesterday, not a single Democratic legislator was present. Pelosi said she had not been invited.
Every other president has tried, at some point, to expand his support beyond those who originally voted for him (which is why all others have at some point had popularity ratings of 60 percent or 70 percent). Every other one has at some point tried to express the interests of the entire public, not just “the base.” Trump has never done either—and that failure is so baked-in that it barely registers now.
Obama used precious months in his first year trying to get GOP support for his medical plan; he failed; and a running press critique thereafter was that he should have been doing more to “reach out” to the other side. (Recall the whole “Have a drink with Mitch McConnell” motif.) I haven’t seen any columns fretting about Trump’s failure to “reach out” to Pelosi or Schumer. “That’s just Trump.”
2) “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call.” In this past Friday’s version of his marathon TV sessions—the supposed “health” briefings that have become daily hour-long substitutes for Trump’s campaign rallies—Trump said that most of the governors now requesting federal aid were friendly to him. But not all, and the ones who weren’t “appreciative” had better watch their step.
Trump was asked what he meant about being “appreciative.” His answer (as you can see starting at time 24:00 of this C-SPAN video):
3) Lies, lies, lies. I’ll leave to the other chroniclers a complete list of the several dozen lies in Trump’s live-broadcast appearances in the past few days. On Thursday, he went on at length about the bounty of tariff payments that the U.S. was receiving “from China”—which revealed either a black-is-white misunderstanding of how tariffs work, or a Harry Frankfurt-style indifference to the bullshit of what he was saying. (None of the White House reporters challenged him about his tariff claim.)
Here is just one consequential lie to stand for the rest: Trump repeatedly claims, and has done so every day this past week, that no one possibly could have seen this pandemic coming, and that everything was great until just a few weeks ago.
Of the countless reasons to know this is false, consider this Politico story on the detailed, 69-page playbook the National Security Council had prepared for coping with just this kind of emergency. The exact timing, origin, and biology of this new disease of course came as surprises. But the consequences and choices are ones any competent government would have foreseen.
Just a month before the 9/11 attacks, in which more than 3,000 people were killed, George W. Bush received a memo famously titled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Many years later, press analyses still pointed this out. For years after the attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, in which four Americans died, congressional Republicans held several dozen hearings, to determine whether the Obama administration should have been more prepared.
In the past few days’ papers, I see no followup on this NSC report. Press standards for covering Trump have already factored in, and thus implicitly forgiven, the corruption and incompetence.
4) Repeating the mistakes of 2015. Starting in the summer of 2015, cable channels began running live Trump rallies, because they were so “interesting.” People watched. Ratings went up. And by Election Day, Trump had received billions of dollars’ worth of free airtime. One calculation of the value was $5 billion; another, $2 billion. In either case, a lot.
Without this coverage—this decision by TV outlets, to improve their ratings by giving limitless free, live airtime to Trump—he could never have become the Republican nominee, let alone the president.
Trump himself clearly views the “briefings” about the “virus” — really, rallies about his greatness—as this year’s substitute for the live rallies he can no longer hold. But the cable and broadcast outlets, as if 2015 and 2016 had never occurred, are covering his daily briefings as they did the rallies of days gone by. For more on why this is a mistake, please see this suggestion from Jay Rosen of PressThink, about how the media could shift to “emergency setting”, and this from the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple on the problem of nonstop live coverage of Trump telling lies.
The media were not built for someone like this. That someone has not changed. The media must change.
Update: As confirmation of the bottomless amorality of Trump’s view of his duties, he tweeted this message this afternoon, as infection rates and death tolls soared across the country.
President Trump gives his pen to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell after signing the coronavirus relief package. Associated Press
Just before the 2016 election, and then again after its results became clear, I did a series of Atlantic items on a challenge I thought the press was not prepared for.
The challenge was dealing with a major political figure—Donald Trump—who fit no previous pattern of how presidents or other major figures conceived of “truth” versus “lies.”
All politicians, like all people, will lie about matters large and small. But most politicians, like most people, usually lie for a reason. They want to avoid blame or embarrassment. They want someone to like or treat them better. They want to paint themselves in a better light. They’ve talked themselves into “believing” a more comfortable version of perhaps-painful truths.
We all know examples from daily life. In the life of public figures, it means things like: Richard Nixon lying about Watergate (in hopes of not getting caught). Bill Clinton lying about his affairs (ditto). Lyndon Johnson concealing what he knew about the worsening situation in Vietnam (so as not to complicate his re-election chances). FDR concealing his physical limitations (so as not to have them complicate his political and policy goals).
So in dealing with the political universe as of the summer of 2015—the time when Donald Trump entered the presidential race—the press could start by asking: What’s the reason a certain statement might be a lie? What would a president — a mayor, a senator— have to gain by shading the truth? The related assumption was that people wouldn’t go to the trouble of crafting a lie without a reason to do so. Lies are harder to remember than the truth; they involve more work in getting people to back up your story; they involve the risk that you’ll be caught.
What made Donald Trump different was not how much more frequently he lies — though he does so at a prodigious rate. (As Daniel Dale and the Washington Post’s fact-check team, among others, have tirelessly chronicled.)
Rather the difference was that Trump so plainly recognized no distinction between true and false—between what the “facts” showed and what he wanted them to be, between what he wanted people to think and what they could see for themselves. Some public figures are unusually “willing” to lie; Trump seemed not even to notice he was doing so. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s famous book “On Bullshit” bears on this phenomenon—people who just talk, in a slurry of “true” and “false,” with no concern or even awareness of the difference between the two.
Larger-than-life-sized oil painting of Trump at Mar-a-Lago, as I saw it when attending a foreign-policy conference there a dozen years ago. (James Fallows)
In Trump’s case it became clear long ago that he lacked the mental filter that alerts most people to the boundary between true and false. He would probably sail through any lie-detector test. He does not care if his claim can be instantly disproved (eg, his “landslide” victory, actually one of the narrowest in history). He does not care if his lies contradict one another, as when he attributes the same “someone told me” story to different sources from one day to the next, or rolls out his ludicrous “Sir” anecdotes. He does not care if a lie does him any good—who believes, or cares, whether his uncle was “a great super genius” as a professor at MIT? He does not care that the Adonis-like heroic portrait that has hung for years at Mar-a-Lago would be a source of mirth for most viewers.
“The news media are not built for someone like this,” I wrote two months before Trump was sworn in:
In that item, “A Reflexive Liar in Command,” and then a follow-up, “Dealing with Trump’s Lies,” I set out press guidelines for the time ahead. The first one was:
It’s nearly three-and-a-half years later. Everything we saw about Trump on the campaign trail we have seen from him in the White House, including the limitless fantasy-lying.
I submit that these three-and-a-half years later, much of the press has still not rebuilt itself, to cope with a time or a person like this. Or with a political party like the subservient Trump-era GOP.
To choose only a small subset of examples, from only the past three days’ worth of history, here are some illustrations. These are words and deeds that, each on its own, would likely have been major black-mark news events in other eras. Now they are just part of the daily onrush.
1) Us, and them. Two days ago, on March 27, Donald Trump signed in the Oval Office the most expensive spending bill in American history. Getting it enacted required sustained, major efforts from Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House, and from Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, who got every one of his fellow Democrats to vote for the bill.
After Lyndon Johnson relied on Republican support to get his civil-rights and Medicare legislation through the Congress, he made sure that the Republican leaders from the House and Senate were with him for the signing ceremonies, to receive some of the first pens he used. (When Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in the Oval Office, he had only Democratic legislators around him—but that was because of near-unanimous Republican opposition to the bill.)
Structurally Trump’s situation this week was like LBJ’s: he was signing a bill the other party had played a crucial role in passing. But when Trump signed the bill yesterday, not a single Democratic legislator was present. Pelosi said she had not been invited.
Every other president has tried, at some point, to expand his support beyond those who originally voted for him (which is why all others have at some point had popularity ratings of 60 percent or 70 percent). Every other one has at some point tried to express the interests of the entire public, not just “the base.” Trump has never done either—and that failure is so baked-in that it barely registers now.
Obama used precious months in his first year trying to get GOP support for his medical plan; he failed; and a running press critique thereafter was that he should have been doing more to “reach out” to the other side. (Recall the whole “Have a drink with Mitch McConnell” motif.) I haven’t seen any columns fretting about Trump’s failure to “reach out” to Pelosi or Schumer. “That’s just Trump.”
2) “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call.” In this past Friday’s version of his marathon TV sessions—the supposed “health” briefings that have become daily hour-long substitutes for Trump’s campaign rallies—Trump said that most of the governors now requesting federal aid were friendly to him. But not all, and the ones who weren’t “appreciative” had better watch their step.
Trump was asked what he meant about being “appreciative.” His answer (as you can see starting at time 24:00 of this C-SPAN video):
What would have made news about this passage in any other era?
- First, the naked favor-trading: What Trump is saying about the states of Washington and Michigan is more or less what led the House to impeach him last year, regarding Ukraine. That is: threatened use of federal power and favors, to reward political friends and punish political enemies—and in this case for unconcealed, openly stated political reasons.
- Second, the crassness and cruelty, to leaders coping with life-and-death emergencies in their home states. “A failed presidential candidate.” “She has no idea what’s doing on.”
- Third, the misogyny: Repeatedly avoiding the name of Gretchen Whitmer, elected last year as governor of Michigan, and calling her “the woman in Michigan.” Check the C-SPAN video if you’re in doubt about the dismissive tone of these remarks, and recall Trump’s frequent references to “Crooked Hillary” and “Crazy Nancy Pelosi.”
3) Lies, lies, lies. I’ll leave to the other chroniclers a complete list of the several dozen lies in Trump’s live-broadcast appearances in the past few days. On Thursday, he went on at length about the bounty of tariff payments that the U.S. was receiving “from China”—which revealed either a black-is-white misunderstanding of how tariffs work, or a Harry Frankfurt-style indifference to the bullshit of what he was saying. (None of the White House reporters challenged him about his tariff claim.)
Here is just one consequential lie to stand for the rest: Trump repeatedly claims, and has done so every day this past week, that no one possibly could have seen this pandemic coming, and that everything was great until just a few weeks ago.
Of the countless reasons to know this is false, consider this Politico story on the detailed, 69-page playbook the National Security Council had prepared for coping with just this kind of emergency. The exact timing, origin, and biology of this new disease of course came as surprises. But the consequences and choices are ones any competent government would have foreseen.
Just a month before the 9/11 attacks, in which more than 3,000 people were killed, George W. Bush received a memo famously titled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” Many years later, press analyses still pointed this out. For years after the attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, in which four Americans died, congressional Republicans held several dozen hearings, to determine whether the Obama administration should have been more prepared.
In the past few days’ papers, I see no followup on this NSC report. Press standards for covering Trump have already factored in, and thus implicitly forgiven, the corruption and incompetence.
4) Repeating the mistakes of 2015. Starting in the summer of 2015, cable channels began running live Trump rallies, because they were so “interesting.” People watched. Ratings went up. And by Election Day, Trump had received billions of dollars’ worth of free airtime. One calculation of the value was $5 billion; another, $2 billion. In either case, a lot.
Without this coverage—this decision by TV outlets, to improve their ratings by giving limitless free, live airtime to Trump—he could never have become the Republican nominee, let alone the president.
Trump himself clearly views the “briefings” about the “virus” — really, rallies about his greatness—as this year’s substitute for the live rallies he can no longer hold. But the cable and broadcast outlets, as if 2015 and 2016 had never occurred, are covering his daily briefings as they did the rallies of days gone by. For more on why this is a mistake, please see this suggestion from Jay Rosen of PressThink, about how the media could shift to “emergency setting”, and this from the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple on the problem of nonstop live coverage of Trump telling lies.
The media were not built for someone like this. That someone has not changed. The media must change.
Update: As confirmation of the bottomless amorality of Trump’s view of his duties, he tweeted this message this afternoon, as infection rates and death tolls soared across the country.
'That governor is me': Gretchen Whitmer takes on Trump as coronavirus cases rise in Michigan
https://www.cnn.com/profiles/eric-bradner
By Eric Bradner, CNN
Updated 8:33 AM ET, Mon March 30, 2020
Trump admits telling Pence not to call governors 03:54
(CNN)President Donald Trump has lashed out at several Democratic governors who are responding to the coronavirus crisis, but his harshest words have been reserved for Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer.
Trump said Thursday he had a "big problem" with the "young, a woman governor" in Michigan, complaining that "all she does is sit there and blame the federal government." On Friday, he said that he told Vice President Mike Pence, "don't call the woman in Michigan," and later referred to her as "Gretchen 'Half' Whitmer" in a tweet and said she is "way in over her head" and "doesn't have a clue."
Those attacks -- and her direct response to them -- have thrust the first-term governor further into the national spotlight as she manages her state's efforts to slow the pandemic's spread, which includes seeking assistance from the Trump administration. Whitmer now finds herself among other Democratic governors, like Washington state's Jay Inslee and New York's Andrew Cuomo, who are navigating the deepening public health crisis in their states while also confronting the President's demand for public praise and appreciation.
Whitmer responded to Trump's Thursday attacks in a tweet that included a hand-waving emoji, writing, "Hi, my name is Gretchen Whitmer, and that governor is me."
Michigan governor says shipments of medical supplies 'canceled' or 'delayed' and sent to federal government
"I've asked repeatedly and respectfully for help. We need it. No more political attacks, just PPEs, ventilators, N95 masks, test kits. You said you stand with Michigan -- prove it," she wrote.
Asked on Sunday about the President's attacks during an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union," Whitmer said that she doesn't "have energy to respond to every slight."
"What I'm trying to do is work well with the federal government," she said. "We are all stressed because we have people that are dying right now. I need assistance and I need partnership."
As she put it to CNN's "New Day" a day later, "there's no such thing as partisanship right now."
Whitmer, 48, is popular in Michigan where she won the 2018 governor's race by 9.5 percentage points. She has emerged as a rising voice within the Democratic Party, delivering the State of the Union response this year, and is widely considered to be on former Vice President Joe Biden's list of potential running mates (Whitmer has said she will not be the pick).
Prior to becoming governor, Whitmer, a lawyer whose father was the president of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and whose mother was an assistant state attorney general, was a long-time member of the Michigan state legislature. She became a member of the House in 2001 and the Senate in 2006, rising to the rank of top Democrat in the chamber before term limits forced her out of the Senate in 2015.
Whitmer defeated Bernie Sanders-backed Abdul El-Sayed in a 2018 gubernatorial primary, and then cruised to victory in the swing state with a campaign focused on government fundamentals -- with the eye-catching slogan "fix the damn roads."
There are political ramifications for Trump making her a target: She is a co-chair of Biden's presidential campaign and oversees a state that was key to the President's victory in 2016 and will be a major battleground in 2020. Biden defended Whitmer in a statement on Friday, saying, Trump could "learn a thing or two from Governor Whitmer -- speed matters, details matter, and people matter."
But far more urgent is the reality of the pandemic in the state. Michigan had at least 4,659 confirmed coronavirus cases as of Saturday, with at least 111 dead. The state -- and particularly the Detroit area -- has emerged in recent days as a coronavirus hot spot.
"The only thing that matters is keeping people alive and then bringing back the economy. That should be sole focus of everyone, and if it's not, voters will get their say," said Jim Margolis, Whitmer's media consultant who made ads for former President Barack Obama's 2012 campaign that weaponized Mitt Romney's call to let Detroit auto-makers go bankrupt.
What triggered Trump's verbal assault on Whitmer appears to have been her criticism of the federal government last week week, when she said that "we're still not getting what we need from the federal government." Whitmer said the share of protective equipment for doctors and nurses that Michigan had received from the national stockpile was barely enough to cover one shift at one hospital.
On Thursday, Whitmer asked Trump to approve a federal major disaster declaration through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Trump told Fox News' Sean Hannity later that day that he had "to make a decision about that." Whitmer also offered broader criticism of the federal government's response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump in crisis mode uses Hannity interview to attack the media and Democratic governors
"I do still believe that we, as a nation, were not as prepared as we should have been. I think the cuts to the CDC, the attack on health care in general and the evisceration of the pandemic offices across the country have put us in a position where we are behind the eight ball," she said.
Whitmer said in an interview with CNN on Friday that her state is not getting the health and safety equipment needed to fight the spread of the novel coronavirus because contractors are sending their products to the federal government first.
Meanwhile, Michigan Republicans, without directly criticizing Trump, have signaled that Trump's criticism of Whitmer is ill-timed. Lee Chatfield, the Republican speaker of the Michigan House, tweeted Friday -- without addressing his comments to anyone in particular -- that people should "stop blaming" Trump and "stop blaming the governor."
"That goes for everybody," Chatfield said.
By Saturday morning, it appeared Trump's outburst at Whitmer wouldn't impede the federal government's response to the crisis in Michigan.
Whitmer tweeted she'd "had a good call" with Pence on Saturday morning, and that the federal government had approved her request for a disaster declaration and the state had just received 112,800 N95 masks.
"We're grateful to FEMA for that; grateful to the White House for the disaster declaration," Whitmer said, calling it "good news in the midst of a lot of really tough stuff that's going on."
This story has been updated with Whitmer's comments on CNN's "State of the Union" and "New Day."
CNN's Devan Cole contributed to this report.
www.cnn.com
https://www.cnn.com/profiles/eric-bradner
By Eric Bradner, CNN
Updated 8:33 AM ET, Mon March 30, 2020
Trump admits telling Pence not to call governors 03:54
(CNN)President Donald Trump has lashed out at several Democratic governors who are responding to the coronavirus crisis, but his harshest words have been reserved for Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer.
Trump said Thursday he had a "big problem" with the "young, a woman governor" in Michigan, complaining that "all she does is sit there and blame the federal government." On Friday, he said that he told Vice President Mike Pence, "don't call the woman in Michigan," and later referred to her as "Gretchen 'Half' Whitmer" in a tweet and said she is "way in over her head" and "doesn't have a clue."
Those attacks -- and her direct response to them -- have thrust the first-term governor further into the national spotlight as she manages her state's efforts to slow the pandemic's spread, which includes seeking assistance from the Trump administration. Whitmer now finds herself among other Democratic governors, like Washington state's Jay Inslee and New York's Andrew Cuomo, who are navigating the deepening public health crisis in their states while also confronting the President's demand for public praise and appreciation.
Whitmer responded to Trump's Thursday attacks in a tweet that included a hand-waving emoji, writing, "Hi, my name is Gretchen Whitmer, and that governor is me."
Michigan governor says shipments of medical supplies 'canceled' or 'delayed' and sent to federal government
"I've asked repeatedly and respectfully for help. We need it. No more political attacks, just PPEs, ventilators, N95 masks, test kits. You said you stand with Michigan -- prove it," she wrote.
Asked on Sunday about the President's attacks during an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union," Whitmer said that she doesn't "have energy to respond to every slight."
"What I'm trying to do is work well with the federal government," she said. "We are all stressed because we have people that are dying right now. I need assistance and I need partnership."
As she put it to CNN's "New Day" a day later, "there's no such thing as partisanship right now."
Whitmer, 48, is popular in Michigan where she won the 2018 governor's race by 9.5 percentage points. She has emerged as a rising voice within the Democratic Party, delivering the State of the Union response this year, and is widely considered to be on former Vice President Joe Biden's list of potential running mates (Whitmer has said she will not be the pick).
Prior to becoming governor, Whitmer, a lawyer whose father was the president of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and whose mother was an assistant state attorney general, was a long-time member of the Michigan state legislature. She became a member of the House in 2001 and the Senate in 2006, rising to the rank of top Democrat in the chamber before term limits forced her out of the Senate in 2015.
Whitmer defeated Bernie Sanders-backed Abdul El-Sayed in a 2018 gubernatorial primary, and then cruised to victory in the swing state with a campaign focused on government fundamentals -- with the eye-catching slogan "fix the damn roads."
There are political ramifications for Trump making her a target: She is a co-chair of Biden's presidential campaign and oversees a state that was key to the President's victory in 2016 and will be a major battleground in 2020. Biden defended Whitmer in a statement on Friday, saying, Trump could "learn a thing or two from Governor Whitmer -- speed matters, details matter, and people matter."
But far more urgent is the reality of the pandemic in the state. Michigan had at least 4,659 confirmed coronavirus cases as of Saturday, with at least 111 dead. The state -- and particularly the Detroit area -- has emerged in recent days as a coronavirus hot spot.
"The only thing that matters is keeping people alive and then bringing back the economy. That should be sole focus of everyone, and if it's not, voters will get their say," said Jim Margolis, Whitmer's media consultant who made ads for former President Barack Obama's 2012 campaign that weaponized Mitt Romney's call to let Detroit auto-makers go bankrupt.
What triggered Trump's verbal assault on Whitmer appears to have been her criticism of the federal government last week week, when she said that "we're still not getting what we need from the federal government." Whitmer said the share of protective equipment for doctors and nurses that Michigan had received from the national stockpile was barely enough to cover one shift at one hospital.
On Thursday, Whitmer asked Trump to approve a federal major disaster declaration through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Trump told Fox News' Sean Hannity later that day that he had "to make a decision about that." Whitmer also offered broader criticism of the federal government's response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump in crisis mode uses Hannity interview to attack the media and Democratic governors
"I do still believe that we, as a nation, were not as prepared as we should have been. I think the cuts to the CDC, the attack on health care in general and the evisceration of the pandemic offices across the country have put us in a position where we are behind the eight ball," she said.
Whitmer said in an interview with CNN on Friday that her state is not getting the health and safety equipment needed to fight the spread of the novel coronavirus because contractors are sending their products to the federal government first.
Meanwhile, Michigan Republicans, without directly criticizing Trump, have signaled that Trump's criticism of Whitmer is ill-timed. Lee Chatfield, the Republican speaker of the Michigan House, tweeted Friday -- without addressing his comments to anyone in particular -- that people should "stop blaming" Trump and "stop blaming the governor."
"That goes for everybody," Chatfield said.
By Saturday morning, it appeared Trump's outburst at Whitmer wouldn't impede the federal government's response to the crisis in Michigan.
Whitmer tweeted she'd "had a good call" with Pence on Saturday morning, and that the federal government had approved her request for a disaster declaration and the state had just received 112,800 N95 masks.
"We're grateful to FEMA for that; grateful to the White House for the disaster declaration," Whitmer said, calling it "good news in the midst of a lot of really tough stuff that's going on."
This story has been updated with Whitmer's comments on CNN's "State of the Union" and "New Day."
CNN's Devan Cole contributed to this report.
'That governor is me': Gretchen Whitmer takes on Trump as coronavirus cases rise in Michigan
President Donald Trump has lashed out at several Democratic governors who are responding to the coronavirus crisis, but his harshest words have been reserved for Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer.
www.cnn.com
Why That ‘Woman In Michigan’ Keeps Drawing Donald Trump’s Wrath
One governor is listening to public health experts on coronavirus; another isn’t. Guess which one Trump is trashing?
By Jonathan Cohn
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) isn’t.
Yet somehow it’s Whitmer that President Donald Trump has attacked as the one who is “in over her head” and “doesn’t have a clue.”
The difference in how Trump has treated the two says a lot about the way he has handled the coronavirus pandemic ― and why, in the view of so many people who work in public health, that approach is so dangerous.
Michigan is among the states where COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, is already having a big impact, with 5,486 confirmed cases and 132 deaths as of Sunday. Whitmer, now in her second year as governor, issued a stay-at-home order a week ago, after the number of documented cases in the state passed 1,000.
Although Michigan isn’t exactly under lockdown, with grocery stores, gas stations and other essential businesses still open, Whitmer has called for strict social distancing. And the population appears to be listening. When people walk in their neighborhoods, they keep apart from each other. Even busy city streets are mostly deserted and nonessential businesses really have shuttered.
The now-familiar goal of this strategy is to “flatten the curve” ― to avoid a sudden spike in cases that would overwhelm the hospital system. And it didn’t come a moment too soon.
DREW ANGERER VIA GETTY IMAGESPresident Donald Trump has criticized the “woman in Michigan,” by which he means the governor, Gretchen Whitmer. She has said she wants supplies for her state, not a fight with the federal government.
“Southeast Michigan is burning,” one doctor told the Detroit Free Press this week, and the region’s two large hospital systems, Beaumont and Henry Ford, are already near capacity with COVID-19 patients. Other hospitals, including the Detroit Medical Center downtown and the University of Michigan’s in Ann Arbor, aren’t far behind.
Shortages are a real concern in all of these places. The hospitals are going to need more ventilators, the machines that allow people with coronavirus-ravaged lungs to breathe. And they are already low on personal protective gear: gowns, gloves and, most crucially, the high-quality N95 masks that will reliably stop transmission of the virus, which can take aerosolized form.
Mahmoud Al-Hadidi, a pulmonary physician who works in the northern Detroit suburbs, saw the number of COVID-19 patients on life support in his hospital go from one to 15 in just one week ― and during that time, he told HuffPost, the protocol for using masks changed as hospitals across the region realized they would need to ration their limited supplies.
Normally workers would use a new mask with each new patient encounter. But with so many patients and so few masks, Al-Hadidi said, hospitals have been telling staff to use the same mask over and over again, with cleanings in between.
And the N95s are only for those who come in direct contract with patients who test positive for COVID-19, Al-Hadidi said, even though other workers face exposure through patients not yet showing symptoms or not yet tested.
“It’s really heartbreaking ― the doctors, nurses, the janitors too,” Al-Hadidi said.
He noted that infected workers could then spread the virus to their families and communities, while leaving hospitals dangerously short on staff when they are unable to work.
Whitmer Spoke Out, Trump Lashed Out
Whitmer and other governors have repeatedly sought federal help with acquiring supplies, and spoken out when those supplies have not arrived.
“We need tests, we need personal protective equipment,” she said during a CNN interview with Jake Tapper on March 20. “We need [a] regular, sustained national strategic plan here and solid clear communication, and these are all the pieces that are missing from the federal government.”
When Tapper pressed her on Trump’s rejection of pleas for the federal government to do more, including the president’s quip that it’s not his administration’s job to be a “shipping clerk” for medical supplies, Whitmer said, “I’m just frustrated. I don’t want to be in a sparring match with the federal government, but we are behind the eight ball because they didn’t do proper planning.”
The comments were sharp, but with those and other statements, Whitmer seemed to be going out of her way to avoid singling out Trump personally.
Trump has not returned the favor.
Appearing on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show Thursday, Trump said, “We’ve had a big problem with the young, a woman governor from … Michigan. We don’t like to see the complaints.”
SETH HERALD VIA GETTY IMAGESCustomers, keeping their distance from one another, wait to pick up food at the famous American Coney Island diner in Detroit. Under Whitmer’s order, restaurants can stay open, exclusively for take-out, but nonessential businesses must close.
At a White House briefing the next day, Trump said he had told Vice President Mike Pence, who is in charge of the administration’s COVID-19 response, “don’t call the woman in Michigan” because she wasn’t “appreciative” of Trump’s help. (He acknowledged that Pence was calling anyway and, later, said he never intended to prevent contact.)
Trump’s reference to the “woman governor” drew a more direct response from Whitmer, though she resisted saying anything about the gendered reference. “Hi, my name is Gretchen Whitmer, and that governor is me,” she wrote on Twitter, throwing in a waving hand emoji for good measure. “I’ve asked repeatedly and respectfully for help. We need it. No more political attacks, just PPEs, ventilators, N95 masks, test kits. You said you stand with Michigan — prove it.”
Hours later Trump responded, this time with some name-calling: “Gretchen ‘Half’ Whitmer is way in over her head, she doesn’t have a clue. Likes blaming everyone for her own ineptitude!,” Trump wrote Friday.
Those comments notwithstanding, Trump formally approved a national disaster declaration for Michigan on Saturday, right as a shipment of more than 100,000 N95 masks from a national stockpile were arriving. That was in addition to about 200,000 masks the state had gotten previously.
But delays in those previous shipments were one of the reasons Whitmer had taken her pleas public in the first place. And even with Saturday’s delivery, the state has just a fraction of what it needs.
In the face of a pandemic, a major hospital system like Beaumont or Henry Ford can easily go through more than 10,000 N95 masks in a single day. That means Michigan actually needs millions, as Whitmer’s team confirmed to the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent last week (and later to HuffPost directly).
Whitmer praised Trump’s Saturday announcement and the delivery as a “good start.” On Sunday, appearing on network political shows, Whitmer wore a Detroit-made sweatshirt that said “EVERYBODY VS COVID-19” and talked up unity, even as she warned the state needed more help because hospitals “would be in dire straits in a matter of days.”
“We’re not looking for a fight with this guy, we’re trying to bring the temperature down here,” one Whitmer administration official told HuffPost, noting that Whitmer had a good working relationship with Pence and support from Republicans as well as Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation. “It doesn’t change the fact that we still need more supplies here.”
Florida’s Governor Followed Trump’s Lead, Got Praise
Another state, Florida, hasn’t had to wait for its supply orders, according to a recent report in the Post. And while it’s not clear why Florida might be having an easier time, it’s obvious that the state’s governor, Republican Ron DeSantis, is getting nicer treatment from Trump than Whitmer has.
“He’s a very talented guy,” Trump said this week. “He’s a very good governor. Everyone loves him. He’s doing a fantastic job for Florida.”
But DeSantis’ response to the crisis has been far from fantastic, in the view of most public health experts.
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DeSantis resisted calls to shut down the beaches, even after college students from around the country descended on the state for spring break ― and public health experts warned that those students could become “super-spreaders” of the disease.
DeSantis did issue guidance to avoid large social gatherings, but the students ignored it, quite possibly taking the disease with them when they returned to their campuses. A video circulating on social media, which a firm called Tectonix GEO said it constructed from mobile phone tracking data, showed how a group of people on one small section of Fort Lauderdale beach in the middle of March dispersed across the eastern half of the U.S. in the following two weeks.
And while some individual counties eventually shut down beaches on their own, others did not. As recently as Saturday, in the Jacksonville area, the St. John’s County beaches, which officials had kept open, had crowds that went right up to the border of the Duval County beaches, which officials had closed.
Pleas for a shutdown of nonessential businesses, like the orders in Michigan and so many other states, have gotten a similar response from DeSantis: no.
“You simply cannot lock down our society with no end in sight,” DeSantis said last Monday, echoing statements by Trump, who spent the week pushing hard to ease up on social distancing and get the country back to work. (“We can’t have the cure be worse than the problem,” Trump said that same day.)
DeSantis has cited the low level of reported cases in northern, more rural parts of the state as reason to hold off on a statewide shutdown ― again, in much the same way Trump has talked about easing up on restrictions in parts of the country where confirmed cases are still relatively rare.
But those numbers of confirmed cases don’t mean much when testing is so haphazard and the disease incubation period is so long. Nobody really knows how far the disease has spread in Florida’s more rural sections ― or in the rest of the U.S., for that matter.
“One challenge for COVID-19 is that it typically takes about a week for someone who has been infected to become symptomatic and seek testing,” said Kathryn Jacobsen, an epidemiologist at George Mason University. “The week between infection and onset of symptoms means that cases detected this week are information about of the number of people who became infected last week or the week before.”
ORLANDO SENTINEL VIA GETTY IMAGESGov. Ron DeSantis (R) has spurned calls for a statewide stay-at-home order, saying the cost would be too high and that parts of the state don’t need it.
And although DeSantis is trying to impose a quarantine on visitors from the heavily impacted states of Louisiana, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, those efforts won’t do anything to stop the spread from other states bordering Florida’s northern border ― to say nothing of other parts of the state where caseloads are already rising quickly.
“It is impossible to stop people from Tallahassee from getting to Miami,” Howard Forman, a Yale professor of public health, told HuffPost. “It is a huge state with such incredibly variable social distancing measures in place. And it is a tinderbox. Elderly people heavily rely on young people for many of their services, etc. and the elderly live in smaller, concentrated communities.”
As of Sunday morning, Florida had 4,246 confirmed cases and 56 deaths, which on both counts is far more than what Michigan had when Whitmer declared her shutdown. And the numbers are growing rapidly, with cases doubling every three days and following a trajectory that looks like New York’s. One model suggests that hundreds of thousands of Floridians will need hospitalization unless serious social distancing starts within the next few days.
“Florida is at risk of becoming major epicenter of epidemic spread of #COVID19 in the coming weeks,” Scott Gottlieb, a physician who served in the Trump administration as director of the Food and Drug Administration, tweeted on Sunday. “The outbreaks were apparent there weeks ago. And the state was slow to implement mitigation steps, and probably exported a lot of its infection.”
Trump May Play Favorites, But Viruses Don’t
Trump keeps saying publicly that he pays close attention to which governors praise and criticize him, frequently implying that it will affect how he treats them.
“It’s a two-way street,” Trump said at a Fox Town Hall on Tuesday, discussing his relationships with the governors. “They have to treat us well.”
“All I want them to do, very simple ― I want them to be appreciative,” Trump said in the Friday briefing at the White House.
Such rhetoric is not unprecedented for Trump, in public or in private. In a now-notorious phone call with the president of Ukraine, Trump offered aid in the country’s fight against Russia but said “I would like you to do us a favor, though.” That statement became a key piece of evidence that the House of Representatives weighed when it impeached Trump late last year.
In that case, the issue was national security ― specifically, whether Trump was withholding aid to a strategically important nation in order to hurt a potential presidential rival in the U.S. This time, the issue is public health ― specifically, whether Trump is making it harder for states to fight COVID-19 because their governors have spoken out against him.
Maybe he is. Maybe he isn’t. Either way, the epidemiological facts of the coronavirus are clear.
The virus doesn’t distinguish among people based on their governor’s politics, and it doesn’t respect state borders. It’s going to be everywhere and probably already is. Just how many people die will depend a lot on decisions in state capitals like Lansing and Tallahassee, but maybe even more on what happens in Washington, D.C.
One governor is listening to public health experts on coronavirus; another isn’t. Guess which one Trump is trashing?
By Jonathan Cohn
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) isn’t.
Yet somehow it’s Whitmer that President Donald Trump has attacked as the one who is “in over her head” and “doesn’t have a clue.”
The difference in how Trump has treated the two says a lot about the way he has handled the coronavirus pandemic ― and why, in the view of so many people who work in public health, that approach is so dangerous.
Michigan is among the states where COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, is already having a big impact, with 5,486 confirmed cases and 132 deaths as of Sunday. Whitmer, now in her second year as governor, issued a stay-at-home order a week ago, after the number of documented cases in the state passed 1,000.
Although Michigan isn’t exactly under lockdown, with grocery stores, gas stations and other essential businesses still open, Whitmer has called for strict social distancing. And the population appears to be listening. When people walk in their neighborhoods, they keep apart from each other. Even busy city streets are mostly deserted and nonessential businesses really have shuttered.
The now-familiar goal of this strategy is to “flatten the curve” ― to avoid a sudden spike in cases that would overwhelm the hospital system. And it didn’t come a moment too soon.
DREW ANGERER VIA GETTY IMAGESPresident Donald Trump has criticized the “woman in Michigan,” by which he means the governor, Gretchen Whitmer. She has said she wants supplies for her state, not a fight with the federal government.
“Southeast Michigan is burning,” one doctor told the Detroit Free Press this week, and the region’s two large hospital systems, Beaumont and Henry Ford, are already near capacity with COVID-19 patients. Other hospitals, including the Detroit Medical Center downtown and the University of Michigan’s in Ann Arbor, aren’t far behind.
Shortages are a real concern in all of these places. The hospitals are going to need more ventilators, the machines that allow people with coronavirus-ravaged lungs to breathe. And they are already low on personal protective gear: gowns, gloves and, most crucially, the high-quality N95 masks that will reliably stop transmission of the virus, which can take aerosolized form.
Mahmoud Al-Hadidi, a pulmonary physician who works in the northern Detroit suburbs, saw the number of COVID-19 patients on life support in his hospital go from one to 15 in just one week ― and during that time, he told HuffPost, the protocol for using masks changed as hospitals across the region realized they would need to ration their limited supplies.
Normally workers would use a new mask with each new patient encounter. But with so many patients and so few masks, Al-Hadidi said, hospitals have been telling staff to use the same mask over and over again, with cleanings in between.
And the N95s are only for those who come in direct contract with patients who test positive for COVID-19, Al-Hadidi said, even though other workers face exposure through patients not yet showing symptoms or not yet tested.
“It’s really heartbreaking ― the doctors, nurses, the janitors too,” Al-Hadidi said.
He noted that infected workers could then spread the virus to their families and communities, while leaving hospitals dangerously short on staff when they are unable to work.
Whitmer Spoke Out, Trump Lashed Out
Whitmer and other governors have repeatedly sought federal help with acquiring supplies, and spoken out when those supplies have not arrived.
“We need tests, we need personal protective equipment,” she said during a CNN interview with Jake Tapper on March 20. “We need [a] regular, sustained national strategic plan here and solid clear communication, and these are all the pieces that are missing from the federal government.”
When Tapper pressed her on Trump’s rejection of pleas for the federal government to do more, including the president’s quip that it’s not his administration’s job to be a “shipping clerk” for medical supplies, Whitmer said, “I’m just frustrated. I don’t want to be in a sparring match with the federal government, but we are behind the eight ball because they didn’t do proper planning.”
The comments were sharp, but with those and other statements, Whitmer seemed to be going out of her way to avoid singling out Trump personally.
Trump has not returned the favor.
Appearing on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show Thursday, Trump said, “We’ve had a big problem with the young, a woman governor from … Michigan. We don’t like to see the complaints.”
SETH HERALD VIA GETTY IMAGESCustomers, keeping their distance from one another, wait to pick up food at the famous American Coney Island diner in Detroit. Under Whitmer’s order, restaurants can stay open, exclusively for take-out, but nonessential businesses must close.
At a White House briefing the next day, Trump said he had told Vice President Mike Pence, who is in charge of the administration’s COVID-19 response, “don’t call the woman in Michigan” because she wasn’t “appreciative” of Trump’s help. (He acknowledged that Pence was calling anyway and, later, said he never intended to prevent contact.)
Trump’s reference to the “woman governor” drew a more direct response from Whitmer, though she resisted saying anything about the gendered reference. “Hi, my name is Gretchen Whitmer, and that governor is me,” she wrote on Twitter, throwing in a waving hand emoji for good measure. “I’ve asked repeatedly and respectfully for help. We need it. No more political attacks, just PPEs, ventilators, N95 masks, test kits. You said you stand with Michigan — prove it.”
Hours later Trump responded, this time with some name-calling: “Gretchen ‘Half’ Whitmer is way in over her head, she doesn’t have a clue. Likes blaming everyone for her own ineptitude!,” Trump wrote Friday.
Those comments notwithstanding, Trump formally approved a national disaster declaration for Michigan on Saturday, right as a shipment of more than 100,000 N95 masks from a national stockpile were arriving. That was in addition to about 200,000 masks the state had gotten previously.
But delays in those previous shipments were one of the reasons Whitmer had taken her pleas public in the first place. And even with Saturday’s delivery, the state has just a fraction of what it needs.
In the face of a pandemic, a major hospital system like Beaumont or Henry Ford can easily go through more than 10,000 N95 masks in a single day. That means Michigan actually needs millions, as Whitmer’s team confirmed to the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent last week (and later to HuffPost directly).
Whitmer praised Trump’s Saturday announcement and the delivery as a “good start.” On Sunday, appearing on network political shows, Whitmer wore a Detroit-made sweatshirt that said “EVERYBODY VS COVID-19” and talked up unity, even as she warned the state needed more help because hospitals “would be in dire straits in a matter of days.”
“We’re not looking for a fight with this guy, we’re trying to bring the temperature down here,” one Whitmer administration official told HuffPost, noting that Whitmer had a good working relationship with Pence and support from Republicans as well as Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation. “It doesn’t change the fact that we still need more supplies here.”
Florida’s Governor Followed Trump’s Lead, Got Praise
Another state, Florida, hasn’t had to wait for its supply orders, according to a recent report in the Post. And while it’s not clear why Florida might be having an easier time, it’s obvious that the state’s governor, Republican Ron DeSantis, is getting nicer treatment from Trump than Whitmer has.
“He’s a very talented guy,” Trump said this week. “He’s a very good governor. Everyone loves him. He’s doing a fantastic job for Florida.”
But DeSantis’ response to the crisis has been far from fantastic, in the view of most public health experts.
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DeSantis resisted calls to shut down the beaches, even after college students from around the country descended on the state for spring break ― and public health experts warned that those students could become “super-spreaders” of the disease.
DeSantis did issue guidance to avoid large social gatherings, but the students ignored it, quite possibly taking the disease with them when they returned to their campuses. A video circulating on social media, which a firm called Tectonix GEO said it constructed from mobile phone tracking data, showed how a group of people on one small section of Fort Lauderdale beach in the middle of March dispersed across the eastern half of the U.S. in the following two weeks.
And while some individual counties eventually shut down beaches on their own, others did not. As recently as Saturday, in the Jacksonville area, the St. John’s County beaches, which officials had kept open, had crowds that went right up to the border of the Duval County beaches, which officials had closed.
Pleas for a shutdown of nonessential businesses, like the orders in Michigan and so many other states, have gotten a similar response from DeSantis: no.
“You simply cannot lock down our society with no end in sight,” DeSantis said last Monday, echoing statements by Trump, who spent the week pushing hard to ease up on social distancing and get the country back to work. (“We can’t have the cure be worse than the problem,” Trump said that same day.)
DeSantis has cited the low level of reported cases in northern, more rural parts of the state as reason to hold off on a statewide shutdown ― again, in much the same way Trump has talked about easing up on restrictions in parts of the country where confirmed cases are still relatively rare.
But those numbers of confirmed cases don’t mean much when testing is so haphazard and the disease incubation period is so long. Nobody really knows how far the disease has spread in Florida’s more rural sections ― or in the rest of the U.S., for that matter.
“One challenge for COVID-19 is that it typically takes about a week for someone who has been infected to become symptomatic and seek testing,” said Kathryn Jacobsen, an epidemiologist at George Mason University. “The week between infection and onset of symptoms means that cases detected this week are information about of the number of people who became infected last week or the week before.”
ORLANDO SENTINEL VIA GETTY IMAGESGov. Ron DeSantis (R) has spurned calls for a statewide stay-at-home order, saying the cost would be too high and that parts of the state don’t need it.
And although DeSantis is trying to impose a quarantine on visitors from the heavily impacted states of Louisiana, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, those efforts won’t do anything to stop the spread from other states bordering Florida’s northern border ― to say nothing of other parts of the state where caseloads are already rising quickly.
“It is impossible to stop people from Tallahassee from getting to Miami,” Howard Forman, a Yale professor of public health, told HuffPost. “It is a huge state with such incredibly variable social distancing measures in place. And it is a tinderbox. Elderly people heavily rely on young people for many of their services, etc. and the elderly live in smaller, concentrated communities.”
As of Sunday morning, Florida had 4,246 confirmed cases and 56 deaths, which on both counts is far more than what Michigan had when Whitmer declared her shutdown. And the numbers are growing rapidly, with cases doubling every three days and following a trajectory that looks like New York’s. One model suggests that hundreds of thousands of Floridians will need hospitalization unless serious social distancing starts within the next few days.
“Florida is at risk of becoming major epicenter of epidemic spread of #COVID19 in the coming weeks,” Scott Gottlieb, a physician who served in the Trump administration as director of the Food and Drug Administration, tweeted on Sunday. “The outbreaks were apparent there weeks ago. And the state was slow to implement mitigation steps, and probably exported a lot of its infection.”
Trump May Play Favorites, But Viruses Don’t
Trump keeps saying publicly that he pays close attention to which governors praise and criticize him, frequently implying that it will affect how he treats them.
“It’s a two-way street,” Trump said at a Fox Town Hall on Tuesday, discussing his relationships with the governors. “They have to treat us well.”
“All I want them to do, very simple ― I want them to be appreciative,” Trump said in the Friday briefing at the White House.
Such rhetoric is not unprecedented for Trump, in public or in private. In a now-notorious phone call with the president of Ukraine, Trump offered aid in the country’s fight against Russia but said “I would like you to do us a favor, though.” That statement became a key piece of evidence that the House of Representatives weighed when it impeached Trump late last year.
In that case, the issue was national security ― specifically, whether Trump was withholding aid to a strategically important nation in order to hurt a potential presidential rival in the U.S. This time, the issue is public health ― specifically, whether Trump is making it harder for states to fight COVID-19 because their governors have spoken out against him.
Maybe he is. Maybe he isn’t. Either way, the epidemiological facts of the coronavirus are clear.
The virus doesn’t distinguish among people based on their governor’s politics, and it doesn’t respect state borders. It’s going to be everywhere and probably already is. Just how many people die will depend a lot on decisions in state capitals like Lansing and Tallahassee, but maybe even more on what happens in Washington, D.C.
Fox already begging no to be sued over than Covid 19 lies but it’s too late.. That class action lawsuit is going to bankrupt them into oblivious.. Can’t wait
Fox News reportedly fears its early downplaying of COVID-19 leaves it open to lawsuits
Fox Business announced Friday that it has "parted ways" with Trish Regan, a prime time host who gained notoriety for suggesting on her March 9 show that the COVID-19 coronavirus was a politically motivated "scam." The decision "took some journalists and anchors at the network by surprise," The...
Fox News reportedly fears its early downplaying of COVID-19 leaves it open to lawsuits
Peter Weber
,
The Week•March 30, 2020
Fox Business announced Friday that it has "parted ways" with Trish Regan, a prime time host who gained notoriety for suggesting on her March 9 show that the COVID-19 coronavirus was a politically motivated "scam." The decision "took some journalists and anchors at the network by surprise," The New York Times reports, because "Fox executives are accustomed to withstanding public pressure, and rarely make personnel moves that can be construed as validating criticisms of the network."
Fox Business wished Regan the best and said the network "will continue our reduced live primetime schedule for the foreseeable future" to focus on "the coronavirus crisis." On MNSBC Sunday morning, Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman said ousting Regan appears to be part of a larger effort to limit legal liability tied to the disconnect between Fox's public and private responses to the pandemic.
In early March, "Fox News tried to do their original playbook, which was dismiss it as a hoax, say that this is another partisan attempt by Democrats to hurt Donald Trump, and this was the case where they could not prevent reality," Sherman said. "Fox News is a very powerful media organization, but it cannot stop people from dropping dead." He added:
Fam they about to get cleaned out on that class action lawsuit
Fox News reportedly fears its early downplaying of COVID-19 leaves it open to lawsuits
Fox Business announced Friday that it has "parted ways" with Trish Regan, a prime time host who gained notoriety for suggesting on her March 9 show that the COVID-19 coronavirus was a politically motivated "scam." The decision "took some journalists and anchors at the network by surprise," The...news.yahoo.com
Fox News reportedly fears its early downplaying of COVID-19 leaves it open to lawsuits
Peter Weber
,
The Week•March 30, 2020
Fox Business announced Friday that it has "parted ways" with Trish Regan, a prime time host who gained notoriety for suggesting on her March 9 show that the COVID-19 coronavirus was a politically motivated "scam." The decision "took some journalists and anchors at the network by surprise," The New York Times reports, because "Fox executives are accustomed to withstanding public pressure, and rarely make personnel moves that can be construed as validating criticisms of the network."
Fox Business wished Regan the best and said the network "will continue our reduced live primetime schedule for the foreseeable future" to focus on "the coronavirus crisis." On MNSBC Sunday morning, Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman said ousting Regan appears to be part of a larger effort to limit legal liability tied to the disconnect between Fox's public and private responses to the pandemic.
In early March, "Fox News tried to do their original playbook, which was dismiss it as a hoax, say that this is another partisan attempt by Democrats to hurt Donald Trump, and this was the case where they could not prevent reality," Sherman said. "Fox News is a very powerful media organization, but it cannot stop people from dropping dead." He added:
"It's almost a miracle how it all came together. ".....
This narcissistic delusional dimwit.....
No, the miracle was all those companies came together on their own..WITHOUT YOU. They made a plan and actually did something while all you did was blow hot air up your base's ass.....
Damn this dude is terrible
CNN, MSNBC Hosts Speak Out Against Airing Donald Trump’s Press Briefings Live
By Ted Johnson
Ted Johnson
More Stories By Ted
March 31, 2020 8:16am
46COMMENTS
Photo by MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock (10597782ar) US President Donald J. Trump speaks during the Coronavirus Task Force press briefing on the coronavirus.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and CNN’s Don Lemon each spoke out against their networks decision to run Donald Trump’s coronavirus press briefings live, as critics contend that they have provided a platform for the president to trumpet dubious claims about his response and even to spread misinformation as a time of crisis.
“They have morphed into something akin to Trump rallies without the crowds,” Hayes said. “The briefings are where he casts his failures in the most positive light. Yesterday the man who initially dismissed the coronavirus threat — remember we have all heard it time and time again — said that if 100,000 persons died from the virus, he and his team have done a quote, very good job.”
RELATED STORY
Chris Cuomo Says He's Tested Positive For The Coronavirus
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow already has said that if it were up to her, she would stop carrying the briefings live.
Later, CNN’s Don Lemon said, “I am not sure, if you want to be honest, that we should carry that live. I think we should run snippets. I think we should do it afterward and get the pertinent points to the American people, because he’s never, ever going to tell you the truth.” He said that the briefings have become Trump’s new Apprentice, where he “wants his base to think the media’s being mean to him and they’re attacking him.”
Both networks, along with Fox News, have been carrying the press briefings almost in their entirety, while broadcast networks have occasionally done special reports. But CNN and MSNBC have cut away at certain moments of the briefings. CNN turned to its own anchors on Monday when Trump brought a succession of CEOs to the stage to offer him praise and outline what they have been doing to assist in the response to the pandemic. Among those who spoke was longtime Trump supporter Michael Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, which is making face masks.
“It’s obviously above my pay grade. I don’t make the call that we take them or not,” Hayes said. “But it seems crazy to me that everyone’s still taking them when you got the MyPillow guy getting up there, talking about reading the Bible.”
White House officials have criticized outlets that have declined to carry the briefing live. Last week, spokesman Judd Deere called it “pretty disgraceful” that CNN and MSNBC cut away from the briefing, which also feature Vice President Mike Pence and members of the president’s coronavirus task force.
By Ted Johnson
Ted Johnson
More Stories By Ted
- “This Is Going To Be A Very, Very Painful Two Weeks”: White House Projects 100,000-240,000 Coronavirus Deaths
- Chris Cuomo Says He’s Tested Positive For The Coronavirus; Brother Andrew Cuomo Talks About Diagnosis Of “My Best Friend”
- CNN, MSNBC Hosts Speak Out Against Airing Donald Trump’s Press Briefings Live
March 31, 2020 8:16am
46COMMENTS
Photo by MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock (10597782ar) US President Donald J. Trump speaks during the Coronavirus Task Force press briefing on the coronavirus.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and CNN’s Don Lemon each spoke out against their networks decision to run Donald Trump’s coronavirus press briefings live, as critics contend that they have provided a platform for the president to trumpet dubious claims about his response and even to spread misinformation as a time of crisis.
“They have morphed into something akin to Trump rallies without the crowds,” Hayes said. “The briefings are where he casts his failures in the most positive light. Yesterday the man who initially dismissed the coronavirus threat — remember we have all heard it time and time again — said that if 100,000 persons died from the virus, he and his team have done a quote, very good job.”
RELATED STORY
Chris Cuomo Says He's Tested Positive For The Coronavirus
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow already has said that if it were up to her, she would stop carrying the briefings live.
Later, CNN’s Don Lemon said, “I am not sure, if you want to be honest, that we should carry that live. I think we should run snippets. I think we should do it afterward and get the pertinent points to the American people, because he’s never, ever going to tell you the truth.” He said that the briefings have become Trump’s new Apprentice, where he “wants his base to think the media’s being mean to him and they’re attacking him.”
Both networks, along with Fox News, have been carrying the press briefings almost in their entirety, while broadcast networks have occasionally done special reports. But CNN and MSNBC have cut away at certain moments of the briefings. CNN turned to its own anchors on Monday when Trump brought a succession of CEOs to the stage to offer him praise and outline what they have been doing to assist in the response to the pandemic. Among those who spoke was longtime Trump supporter Michael Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, which is making face masks.
“It’s obviously above my pay grade. I don’t make the call that we take them or not,” Hayes said. “But it seems crazy to me that everyone’s still taking them when you got the MyPillow guy getting up there, talking about reading the Bible.”
White House officials have criticized outlets that have declined to carry the briefing live. Last week, spokesman Judd Deere called it “pretty disgraceful” that CNN and MSNBC cut away from the briefing, which also feature Vice President Mike Pence and members of the president’s coronavirus task force.
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