Tag: Mike Pence

Vice President Pence defends Fauci as White House sends mixed messages on health expert

WASHINGTON – Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday defended Dr. Anthony Fauci in public comments made soon after he tweeted out a photo of the two of them at the White House.

“Dr. Fauci is a valued member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force,” Pence said on a campaign call with reporters when asked about recent attacks on Fauci by others in the administration. “We just completed our latest meeting today and we couldn’t be more grateful for his steady counsel.”

The photo he tweeted showed Fauci sitting at Pence’s right hand during the meeting. Continue reading.

CDC feels pressure from Trump as rift grows over coronavirus response

Washington Post logoThe June 28 email to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was ominous: A senior adviser to a top Health and Human Services Department official accused the CDC of “undermining the President” by putting out a report about the potential risks of the coronavirusto pregnant women.

The adviser, Paul Alexander, criticized the agency’s methods and said its warning to pregnant women “reads in a way to frighten women . . . as if the President and his administration can’t fix this and it is getting worse.”

As the country enters a frightening phase of the pandemic with new daily cases surpassing 57,000 on Thursday, the CDC, the nation’s top public health agency, is coming under intense pressure from President Trump and his allies, who are downplaying the dangers in a bid to revive the economy ahead of the Nov. 3 presidential election. In a White House guided by the president’s instincts, rather than by evidence-based policy, the CDC finds itself forced constantly to backtrack or sidelined from pivotal decisions. Continue reading.

CDC will issue new guidance on school openings, Pence says, after criticism from Trump

Washington Post logoThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will issue new guidance on school openings, Vice President Pence said Wednesday, hours after President Trump criticized earlier recommendations as “very impractical” and vowed to meet with the agency himself.

Citing Trump’s concern that the guidance might be “too tough,” Pence said that the CDC would issue additional recommendations starting next week that would provide “more clarity” and stressed that the guidelines should not supplant the judgment of local officials.

“We don’t want the guidance from CDC to be a reason why schools don’t open,” Pence said. “I think that every American, every American knows that we can safely reopen our schools. . . . We want, as the president said this morning, to make sure that what we’re doing doesn’t stand in the way of doing that.” Continued reading.

Trump and Pence are fine with their evangelical base dying — so long as the photo ops continue

AlterNet logoSing for dear leader; die for dear leader.

On Sunday, Politico posted a story speculating on whether or not Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and the rest of the White House team would have to “reassess” their demands that churches be allowed to hold unrestricted services during the COVID-19 pandemic despite numerous “super-spreader” events now demonstrating that it. Is. Not. Safe.

Politico needn’t have bothered. Only hours afterwards, Mike Pence was the guest of honor at a Dallas, Texas megachurch rally that featured a choir of 100 unmasked singers and a packed audienceeven as Texas reeled from skyrocketing new COVID-19 cases. There’s your answer, everyone who wasted their time wondering whether Trump and Pence would continue to risk the lives of their most fervent evangelical supporters in exchange for the visuals of crowds cheering them. They genuinely don’t care if evangelicals live or die as long as they can squeeze a bit of footage out of each event. Continue reading.

Secret Service agents preparing for Pence Arizona trip contracted coronavirus

Washington Post logoVice President Pence’s trip to Arizona this week had to be postponed by a day after several Secret Service agents who helped organize the visit either tested positive for the coronavirus or were showing symptoms of being infected.

Pence was scheduled to go to Phoenix on Tuesday but went on Wednesday instead so that healthy agents could be deployed for his visit, according to two senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private details of the trip.

Arizona has seen a spike in cases in recent weeks, and Pence scaled back the trip before the delay because of the growing amount of infections in the state. Continue reading.

‘All life matters — born and unborn’: Pence invokes MLK to defend refusal to say ‘Black lives matter’

AlterNet logoVice President Mike Pence on Sunday invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and his anti-abortion views as he sought to defend his refusal to say “Black lives matter.”

CBS News host John Dickerson pressed Pence on his refusal to say the words “Black lives matter” amid weeks of protests over police brutality in the wake of the death of George Floyd.

“One thing protesters would like to hear is leaders say, ‘Black lives matter.’ You won’t say that,” Dickerson said. “Why?” Continue reading.

A new dilemma for Trump’s team: Preventing super-spreader churches

Courting religious voters, the president fought for churches to open up quickly after the shutdowns. The consequences include coronavirus clusters tied to churches.

One month after President Donald Trump ordered the nation’s governors to immediately reopen churches, his administration is facing a difficult dilemma.

Clusters of Covid-19 cases are surfacing in counties across the U.S. where in-person religious services have resumed, triggering questions about whether his administration should reassess its campaign to treat houses of worship the same as other essential businesses, or leave them alone and risk additional transmission of the deadly coronavirus — including in communities that are largely supportive of the president.

An outbreak at a Pentecostal church in Oregon, where hundreds of worshipers resumed gathering over Memorial Day weekend, forced an entire county to return to phase one of its reopening after local officials traced 258 cases of Covid-19 back to the facility. In West Virginia, six health departments across the state have reported coronavirus outbreaks linked to churches. One of them, a Baptist church in Greenbrier County, had 34 congregants test positive for the virus. And in Texas, which hit an all-time high of new cases last week, health officials have received numerous reports of church-related exposures. Continue reading.

Pence postpones Florida, Arizona campaign events as coronavirus cases spike

Florida reported 9,585 new infections while Arizona recorded 3,591.

Vice President Mike Pence has postponed campaign events in Florida and Arizona “out of an abundance of caution” as both states experience a spike in coronavirus cases, a Trump campaign spokesperson confirmed Saturday.

Pence was set to make stops in each state this coming week as a part of his “Faith in America” tour, and will also not appear at an additional Florida event Thursday organized by pro-Trump group America First Policies.

The White House confirmed Pence will still travel to both states to meet with governors and their health care teams, as well as travel to Texas on Sunday where he is scheduled to speak at a Dallas church led by Pastor Robert Jeffress, an ally of President Donald Trump and a member of Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board. Continue reading.

Pence tries to put positive spin on pandemic despite surging cases in South and West

Washington Post logoThe Trump administration on Friday claimed “remarkable progress” in fighting the coronavirus pandemic, despite a surge of cases in the South and West and as several Republican governors allied with President Trump are under pressure to impose stricter public health restrictions to gain control of outbreaks in their states.

Vice President Pence held the first public briefing of the coronavirus task force in nearly two months and sought to deliver an upbeat message that is at odds with warnings from public health experts. The vice president also dodged the question of whether people should wear masks in public, as his own administration recommends, and said campaign rallies that pack people together in violation of public health guidance will continue.

Pence offered no new strategies to combat the rapidly spreading virus and minimized record daily case counts in several states as “outbreaks in specific counties.” Continue reading.

What Bolton’s Memoir Really Tells Us About Trump – And Him

What can we learn from John Bolton’s new memoir? History will not absolve him, his execrable ex-boss Donald Trump or the Republican political apparatus that has enabled the toxic Trump regime.

Well before Bolton’s book arrived, we already knew the single most important fact about the Trump presidency and Trump himself: He and the Republicans who surround him are willing to sacrifice tens of thousands of American lives if their deaths might somehow promote his reelection.

The latest attempts by Trump and Vice President Mike Pence to pretend that the deadly coronavirus is now, as the president said, “fading away,” only provide fresh evidence of their bloody perfidy. If the present infection trends continue — intensified by events like Trump’s Tulsa rally — then we will have buried more than 200,000 Americans before Election Day. Continue reading.