Category: 2020 Election

‘Fear is subsuming his presidency’: NYT reporter explains how Trump lost control of the pandemic

AlterNet logoWith more White House staffers getting infected with COVID-19 every day, President Donald Trump is having a hard time convincing Americans that it is safe for them to go back to work.

Appearing on CNN Monday, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman said that Trump has lost control of his pandemic messaging as even his own staffers are saying they’re scared to come to work.

“Fear is subsuming his presidency,” she said. “And it is fear within the public, fear among the public, fear within his White House. Those are not comments he generally wanted to hear. He wants people to suggest that this is, yes, this is bad, but we’re not afraid. He doesn’t like the optics of wearing a mask.” Continue reading.

After Three Years, Who Are We Now?

A week after Donald Trump was elected president, writer and scholar Sarah Kendzior, who had predicted in 2015 that he would win, wrote a public letter to the American public.

“My fellow Americans,” it began. “I have a favor to ask you. … I want you to write about who you are, what you have experienced, and what you have endured.”

She saw dark days coming, and, in the remaining time before Trump’s inauguration, she wanted Americans to take stock of themselves and document it for future reference. What and who did they believe in? What were their values and their beliefs, their hopes and dreams for themselves and for their children? What were their memories? Continue reading.

GOP senators worry Trump, COVID-19 could cost them their majority

The Hill logoSenate Republicans looking at polls showing GOP incumbents losing ground are concerned that President Trump‘s handling of the pandemic has put their majority in danger.

The two biggest criticisms of Trump that GOP lawmakers express privately are that his administration took too long to deploy coronavirus tests and that the president’s statements and demeanor have been too cavalier or flippant.

The biggest headwind Republicans face this fall is the faltering national economy, which now has a 14.7 percent unemployment rate, according to a Friday report by the Labor Department. Continue reading.

Trump Ad’s Misleading Use of CNN Interview

A Trump campaign ad misleadingly edits a CNN interview to suggest 2 million people would have died from the novel coronavirus were it not for President Donald Trump’s China travel restrictions.

In the one-minute ad, Wolf Blitzer, anchor of CNN’s “The Situation Room,” is heard asking chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, “Is it accurate that if these steps had not been put in place … it could’ve been 2 million people dead here in the United States?” While Blitzer speaks, the ad shows images of an Air China plane and signs saying airline flights had been canceled. “Yes,” Gupta is shown saying.

The impression is that Trump’s travel restrictions, which went into effect Feb. 2, were responsible for saving those lives. Continue reading.

Supreme Court grants Trump request to temporarily shield Mueller grand jury materials

The Hill logoThe Supreme Court on Friday granted a Trump administration request to temporarily shield redacted grand jury materials related to former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe from the Democratic-led House.

The order, signed by Chief Justice John Roberts, halts the disclosure of secret grand jury transcripts and exhibits that Democratic lawmakers had initially requested as part of the House impeachment inquiry into President Trump.

The move pushes back a lower court’s disclosure order on the materials, which was set to take effect Monday, while the justices consider the administration’s request for a longer delay.  Continue reading.

Trump Campaign Calls Itself The Death Star Because Of Course It Does

Twitter users are wondering if Team Trump has actually seen “Star Wars.”

If a planet-destroying death machine doesn’t inspire confidence in the American people, what will, right?

On Thursday, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale caused a great disturbance in the Force by tweeting about the president’s “juggernaut” of a reelection bid, calling the campaign the “Death Star.”

“For nearly three years we have been building a juggernaut campaign (Death Star). It is firing on all cylinders. Data, Digital, TV, Political, Surrogates, Coalitions, etc. In a few days we start pressing FIRE for the first time,” he wrote in the tweet. Continue reading.

Fact check: Trump falsely claims Obama left him ‘nothing’ in the national stockpile

Trump has repeatedly said an empty stockpile hampered his pandemic response. Budget cuts had affected it, but shelves weren’t bare, former officials said.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly complained that he inherited an empty national stockpile from the Obama administration, hamstringing his pandemic response because of a lack of emergency supplies.

“The cupboard was bare. The other administration, the last administration, left us nothing,” Trump told ABC News’ David Muir on Tuesday. “We didn’t have ventilators. We didn’t have medical equipment. The tests were broken — you saw that. We had broken tests. They left us nothing. We’ve taken it and we’ve built an incredible stockpile, a stockpile like we’ve never had before.”

It’s a sweeping claim Trump has made several times when faced with criticism that the government was slow to help states hit hard by the coronavirus and in dire need to supplies like personal protective equipment for front line workers and ventilators for an influx of patients — and one that former Obama administration and past news reports dispute. Continue reading.

Chris Cuomo Reveals ‘Ugly’ Reason Why Donald Trump Downplays Coronavirus Testing

It is dishonest and destructive and it is done by design.”

CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Wednesday night broke down why President Donald Trump and his allies routinely play down the importance of testing for the coronavirus, contrary to guidance from public health officials.

“It is dishonest and destructive and it is done by design,” Cuomo said.
For Trump, he continued, it was all about hiding the truth about the pandemic, which has so far killed more than 73,000 people nationwide. The United States has more confirmed cases than any other country in the world. Continue reading.

Arizona halts partnership with experts predicting coronavirus cases would continue to mount

Washington Post logoHours after Doug Ducey, the Republican governor of Arizona, accelerated plans to reopen businesses, saying the state was “headed in the right direction,” his administration halted the work of a team of experts projecting it was on a different — and much grimmer — course.

On Monday night, the eve of President Trump’s visit to the state, Ducey’s health department shut down the work of academic experts predicting the peak of the state’s coronavirus outbreak was still about two weeks away.

“We’ve been asked by Department leadership to ‘pause’ all current work on projections and modeling,” Steven Bailey, the bureau chief for public health statistics at the Arizona Department of Health Services, wrote to the modeling team, composed of professionals from Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, according to email correspondence reviewed by The Washington Post. Continue reading.

Azar faulted workers’ ‘home and social’ conditions for meatpacking outbreaks

On a call with members of Congress, health secretary defended conditions inside the meat plants, three participants say.

The country’s top health official downplayed concerns over the public health conditions inside meatpacking plants, suggesting on a call with lawmakers that workers were more likely to catch coronavirus based on their social interactions and group living situations, three participants said.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar told a bipartisan group that he believed infected employees were bringing the virus into processing plants where a rash of cases have killed at least 20 workers and forced nearly two-dozen plants to close, according to three people on the April 28 call.

Those infections, he said, were linked more to the “home and social” aspects of workers’ lives rather than the conditions inside the facilities, alarming some on the call who interpreted his remarks as faulting workers for the outbreaks, the people said. Continue reading.