Category: 2020 Election

Trump: Without Coronavirus Testing ‘We Would Have Very Few Cases,’ Here Is The Reaction

In a speech on Thursday at Owens and Minor, a medical supply distributor located in Allentown, PA, President Donald Trump wondered whether testing for Covid-19 coronavirus is “overrated.” He then proceeded to say, “And don’t forget, we have more cases than anybody in the world. But why? Because we do more testing.”

Next, he clarified: “When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.”

Whoa, is that how it works? That would change everything. The sound that you are hearing might be that of minds blown around the country. Perhaps, it’s sort of like when you first heard that Santa Claus is not the one who delivered those presents to your living room. Although you knew that the chimney in your house led to the furnace, it took a little time for you to put two-and-two together. Continue reading.

Acting DNI Deploys Pseudo-Document To Promote ‘Obamagate’ Melodrama

Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, a former Fox News contributor and Republican Party stalwart who was appointed to lead the U.S. intelligence community because of his loyalty to President Donald Trump, provided a document of his own devising to Congress on Wednesday. It promptly leaked to the press. Republicans, including Trump himself, immediately seized on the content in the document as evidence of vast Obama administration malfeasance. Fox hosts spent the next two days incessantly declaring that it vindicated their conspiracy theories, turning their attention away from the coronavirus pandemic. And more credible media outlets, buffeted by the partisan claims, responded with a flurry of stories, at times failing to properly contextualize the story.

Trumpists have declared Grenell’s document a smoking gun showing that disgraced former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI about his calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, was a victim of an Obama administration conspiracy, and Fox is hyping that narrative with wall-to-wall coverage. In reality, the document provides almost no information whatsoever. It is simply a list of senior Obama administration officials who received Flynn’s name after they followed the National Security Agency’s standard process and asked the agency to unmask the identity of an individual generically referenced in an NSA report they were authorized to read. It does nothing to establish that any of the individuals named acted improperly in any way — or even how many unmaskings were related to the Kislyak calls.

We’ve seen misinformation campaigns, where false or deceptive information is distributed, and disinformation campaigns, when that distribution is done with the full knowledge of its inaccuracy. Grenell is engaged in a noninformation campaign. He deliberately crafted and propagated a data point so vague that it is virtually meaningless on its own. But pro-Trump partisans — particularly at Fox — have easily picked up, misread (deliberately or not), and promoted the point, aligining it with their wild assumptions. Those furious misinterpretations have in turn spurred attention from the mainstream press, driving the conspiratorial thinking into the broader public. Continue reading.

A Sitting President, Riling the Nation During a Crisis

New York Times logoBy smearing his opponents, championing conspiracy theories and pursuing vendettas, President Tru​mp has reverted to his darkest political tactics in spite of a pandemic hurting millions of Americans.

Even by President Trump’s standards, it was a rampage: He attacked a government whistle-blower who was telling Congressthat the coronavirus pandemic had been mismanaged. He criticized the governor of Pennsylvania, who has resisted reopening businesses. He railed against former President Barack Obama, linking him to a conspiracy theory and demanding he answer questions before the Senate about the federal investigation of Michael T. Flynn.

And Mr. Trump lashed out at Joseph R. Biden Jr., his Democratic challenger. In an interview with a sympathetic columnist, Mr. Trump smeared him as a doddering candidate who “doesn’t know he’s alive.” The caustic attack coincided with a barrage of digital ads from Mr. Trump’s campaign mocking Mr. Biden for verbal miscues and implying that he is in mental decline.

That was all on Thursday. Continue reading.

Trump Claimed Truckers in D.C. Are Honking in a ‘Sign of Love’ for Him. Drivers Say They’re There to Protest

WASHINGTON, DC — President Donald Trump says the sound of truck horns just south of the White House is a “sign of love” for him from truckers. But the truckers are actually honking their opposition to low shipping rates.

“They’re protesting in favor of President Trump,” the president claimed in the Rose Garden on Friday during an announcement about vaccine development. The blaring of truck horns wafted across the Ellipse and into the sun-splashed garden during that event and a ceremony Trump held in the afternoon to recognize good deeds during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Those are truckers that are with us all the way,” he said at the earlier event.

But the drivers who have lined Constitution Avenue with their big rigs didn’t come to Washington for Trump. They’re in the nation’s capital to protest low shipping rates that they say could force many of them out of business. Continue reading.

Trump thinks he can bluff his way to victory

AlterNet logoA few weeks ago, in one of his many branding brainstorms during this COVID-19 crisis, President Trump started calling himself a “wartime” president who was valiantly leading the country in the battle against “the invisible enemy.” This was rolled out like a campaign slogan, indicating that it was part of a planned strategy to put Trump at the center of the response to the pandemic.

In remarks obviously prepared by someone else, he evoked World War II and said:

Every generation of Americans has been called to make shared sacrifices for the good of the nation. … Now it’s our time. We must sacrifice together, because we are all in this together, and we will come through together. It’s the invisible enemy. That’s always the toughest enemy, the invisible enemy.

Not bad. This was in mid-March, during the period when he was appearing at the task force briefings and pretending to be in charge, before he realized that everything had gone awry and that he was being blamed for the failures. In fact, it was just a day later that he started passing the buck to the governors for failing to save their states, explaining that the federal government is simply “back-up” and not a “shipping clerk.”

Kushner tries to clean up mess after suggesting Trump could delay election

The decision to delay an election is not up to Kushner, nor the White House.

Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, a senior White House adviser, said he is not ruling out the possibility that the November general election could be postponed due to the coronavirus.

“I’m not sure I can commit one way or the other, but right now that’s the plan,” Kushner said in an interview with Time published Tuesday night.

Kushner’s comments confirmed fears from Democrats that Trump may try to unilaterally move the election if he fears he may lose. Continue reading.

Reviving the US CDC

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to worsen in the USA with 1·3 million cases and an estimated death toll of 80 684 as of May 12. States that were initially the hardest hit, such as New York and New Jersey, have decelerated the rate of infections and deaths after the implementation of 2 months of lockdown. However, the emergence of new outbreaks in Minnesota, where the stay-at-home order is set to lift in mid-May, and Iowa, which did not enact any restrictions on movement or commerce, has prompted pointed new questions about the inconsistent and incoherent national response to the COVID-19 crisis.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the flagship agency for the nation’s public health, has seen its role minimised and become an ineffective and nominal adviser in the response to contain the spread of the virus. The strained relationship between the CDC and the federal government was further laid bare when, according to The Washington Post, Deborah Birx, the head of the US COVID-19 Task Force and a former director of the CDC’s Global HIV/AIDS Division, cast doubt on the CDC’s COVID-19 mortality and case data by reportedly saying: “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust”. This is an unhelpful statement, but also a shocking indictment of an agency that was once regarded as the gold standard for global disease detection and control. How did an agency that was the first point of contact for many national health authorities facing a public health threat become so ill-prepared to protect the public’s health?

In the decades following its founding in 1946, the CDC became a national pillar of public health and globally respected. It trained cadres of applied epidemiologists to be deployed in the USA and abroad. CDC scientists have helped to discover new viruses and develop accurate tests for them. CDC support was instrumental in helping WHO to eradicate smallpox. However, funding to the CDC for a long time has been subject to conservative politics that have increasingly eroded the agency’s ability to mount effective, evidence-based public health responses. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration resisted providing the sufficient budget that the CDC needed to fight the HIV/AIDS crisis. The George W Bush administration put restrictions on global and domestic HIV prevention and reproductive health programming.

States Should Embrace Vote by Mail and Early Voting To Protect Higher-Risk Populations From Coronavirus

NOTE: No excuse early voting either by mail or in person is available in the State of Minnesota. More information here.

Center for American Progress logoThe COVID-19 pandemic poses a substantial threat to U.S. elections, as described in previous reports by the Center for American Progress. Unless officials make significant changes to state election systems before November, Americans who vote or serve as election workers will be forced to put their lives at risk in order to participate in the democratic process. And it is not just voters or election personnel who have good cause for concern. Even those who cannot cast a ballot could become ill by coming into contact with a family member, caregiver, or neighbor who contracts the coronavirus through the voting process.

Although COVID-19 affects people from all backgrounds and communities, some groups are at higher risk of contracting and becoming seriously ill from the virus, including:

  • People ages 65 or older
  • People with preexisting conditions
  • Veterans
  • People of color
  • People with disabilities

In considering best practices for administering elections during a pandemic, lawmakers must take into account the health and safety of not just those involved in the voting process but also members of entire state populations who could be negatively affected if proper precautions are not taken. In order to keep voters, poll workers, and especially populations at risk of COVID-19 safe, state and national leaders must take immediate action to fortify the voting process and protect voters and nonvoters alike.

Trump touts accelerated push on coronavirus vaccines

The Hill logoPresident Trump on Friday unveiled the team leading a federal effort that he hopes will produce a coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year, an accelerated timeline that has been met with skepticism from health experts.

“When I say quickly, we’re looking to get it by the end of the year if we can, maybe before,” Trump said in remarks from the White House Rose Garden, officially laying out the objectives of “Operation Warp Speed,” a public-private partnership to accelerate the development of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.

Trump described the project as “a massive scientific industrial and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project.” He said the project would begin to manufacture vaccines as they go through trials so that a proven vaccine would be ready to distribute once trials are completed. Continue reading.

“Obamagate” Is Niche Programming for Trump Superfans

Donald Trump will not shut up about Barack Obama—not now, not ever. On Thursday morning, amid the gravest economic crisis in a century and a deadly pandemic that will have killed more than a hundred thousand Americans by the end of this month, Trump yet again accused his predecessor of culpability in “the biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the USA.” Obama, he said, should be hauled before the Senate to testify. “He knew EVERYTHING,” Trump added in his tweet, one of dozens of attacks in the past few days in which he has targeted “Obamagate.” What crime, exactly, was Trump accusing Obama of? What should he testify about? Trump never said, and it’s a safe bet that he never will.

On Monday afternoon, at a press conference on the White House lawn, Trump made that clear, in a memorable exchange with Phil Rucker, of the Washington Post, that echoed the paranoid fulminations of Trump’s hero Joseph McCarthy at his worst. “What crime, exactly, are you accusing President Obama of committing?” Rucker asked. “Obamagate,” Trump replied. “It’s been going on for a long time,” he added, without offering specifics. “What is the crime, exactly, that you’re accusing him of?” Rucker asked again. “You know what the crime is,” Trump answered. “The crime is very obvious to everybody.” Days later, that is still where we are: Trump is accusing Obama of a grave crime but refusing even to say what Obama allegedly did, while repeating over and over that the former President is guilty of something, a technique of political agitprop that recalls not only McCarthy but every wannabe dictator for whom the rule of law has little or nothing to do with accusations of illegality. Continue reading ““Obamagate” Is Niche Programming for Trump Superfans”