Tag: pandemic

New Woodward audio is the starkest illustration yet of how Trump misled about coronavirus

Trump in an April 10 tweet: “The Invisible Enemy is in full retreat!” Trump three days later: “This thing is a killer.”

Newly released audio of a conversation President Donald Trump had with Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward on April 13 reveals more starkly than ever how Trump misled the American public about the threat posed by Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

Trump told Woodward that “this thing is a killer if it gets you. If you’re the wrong person, you don’t have a chance.”

“So this rips you apart,” Trump added. “It is the plague.” Continue reading and listen to the audio here.

Bipartisan House group unveils $1.5 trillion coronavirus relief plan

Problem Solvers Caucus offers compromise on unemployment, state and local aid sticking points, but leaders may not embrace

The 50-member, bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus on Tuesday released a $1.5 trillion COVID-19 aid package that they hope will help push congressional leaders and the White House toward a similar compromise.

The measure also gives the caucus members, many of whom are considered vulnerable for reelection this cycle, an opportunity to tell voters they offered a compromise and deflect blame for potential inaction on a new aid bill before the elections.

In arriving at $1.5 trillion, the Problem Solvers plan is almost exactly halfway between the $3.4 trillion bill the House passed in May and a $300 billion proposal Senate Republicans offered on the floor last week. Their proposal, however, includes automatic triggers based on hospitalization rates and progress towards vaccine development that could increase the cost by as much as $400 billion or reduce it by up to $200 billion. Continue reading.

Pelosi: House will stay in session until agreement is reached on coronavirus relief

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Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Tuesday announced that the House will remain in session until the parties have an agreement on another round of emergency coronavirus relief. 

In a conference call with the House Democratic Caucus — the first since the chamber returned from a long summer recess — Pelosi indicated she isn’t willing to accept a “skinny” legislative package, but told her troops the chamber’s calendar will be extended until an agreement is sealed, according to sources on the call. 

“We have to stay here until we have a bill,” Pelosi told lawmakers. Continue reading.

Trump facing ‘internal backlash’ from his own campaign over indoor Vegas rally: report

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President Donald Trump’s defiant decision to hold an indoor rally in Las Vegas during the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t just anger the president’s usual critics, but also some of his own campaign staff.

The New York Times reports that Trump’s indoor rally over the weekend sparked “a wave of internal backlash, including from a top Trump adviser who said the president was playing a game of Russian roulette in holding the indoor rally.”

The Trump adviser, who wished to remain anonymous, told the Times that Trump could hurt himself politically if there’s a surge in COVID-19 cases in Las Vegas over the next several weeks. Continue reading.

The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That’s Made the U.S. Less Secure

Like many of the virus’s hardest hit victims, the United States went into the COVID-19 pandemic wracked by preexisting conditions. A fraying public health infrastructure, inadequate medical supplies, an employer-based health insurance system perversely unsuited to the moment—these and other afflictions are surely contributing to the death toll. But in addressing the causes and consequences of this pandemic—and its cruelly uneven impact—the elephant in the room is extreme income inequality.

How big is this elephant? A staggering $50 trillion. That is how much the upward redistribution of income has cost American workers over the past several decades.

This is not some back-of-the-napkin approximation. According to a groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP—enough to more than double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year. Continue reading.

White House blocks Navarro from testifying to House panel about ventilator deal

Michael Purpura, deputy counsel to President Donald Trump, wrote to Krishnamoorthi on Sept. 9 that the White House would not make Navarro available.

The White House has blocked trade adviser Peter Navarro from testifying at a House oversight hearing Wednesday about a partially canceled Defense Production Act contract to manufacture ventilators.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), who heads the Oversight Economic and Consumer Policy Subcommittee, issued a staff report in late July that argued the administration vastly overpaid Philips Respironics, agreeing to a $646.7 million deal without even trying to negotiate a lower price.

“Despite the astonishing scale of this waste, the loss of more than 190,000 lives and his willingness to appear on the cable news shows of his choice—Mr. Navarro refuses to appear before Congress to answer for his actions,” Krishnamoorthi said in a statement. Continue reading.

Bob Woodward Reveals New Tape of Trump’s Shocking COVID Comments

“It’s so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it,” the president can be heard telling Bob Woodward on the new recording.

The hits keep coming from Rage author Bob Woodward, who premiered a new exclusive audio recording of President Donald Trump admitting behind closed doors how dangerous he knew the coronavirus to be long before he started taking it remotely seriously in public. 

“Bob, it’s so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it,” Trump can be heard saying on the tape, which Woodward recorded on April 13th, 2020, and shared with Stephen Colbert for Monday night’s episode of The Late Show. The president goes on to tell what he apparently thought was a hilarious story about being in the Oval Office with a group of advisers when one of them let out a sneeze.

“A guy sneezed, innocently,” Trump says. “Not a horrible—just a sneeze. The entire room bailed out, OK? Including me, by the way.”  Continue reading.

‘He’s only concerned about himself’: Governor slams Trump after his revealing comments about coronavirus risk

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When thousands of Trump supporters attended an indoor MAGA rally in Las Vegas over the weekend, social distancing was not encouraged — and protective face masks were few and far between in the crowd. Critics of President Donald Trump have slammed the rally as blatantly irresponsible, including Democratic Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak — who didn’t hold back during an appearance on MSNBC on Monday.

In an interview, Trump had dismissed concerns about contracting the virus at the rally, saying: “I’m on a stage and it’s very far away.” He added: “And so I’m not at all concerned.”

Of course, his supporters in the audience were packed in tightly against each other, many of them not wearing masks. Continue reading.

Phillips-led bipartisan group offers COVID framework to break impasse

WASHINGTON, DC – Yesterday, the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus – 25 Democrats and 25 Republicans – unveiled its “March To Common Ground” framework to help break the gridlock on the latest COVID-19 relief package and encourage negotiators to get back to the table. 

The 50-member bipartisan Caucus, led by policy working group leaders Reps. Dean Phillips (D-MN) and Dusty Johnson (R-SD) along with Problem Solvers Caucus members Reps. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH), and Co-Chairs Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Tom Reed (R-NY), came together to develop the framework after extensive listening to constituents and outreach to stakeholders over the past six weeks.

The package addresses key areas of need, including COVID-19 testing, unemployment insurance, direct stimulus, worker and liability protection, small business and non-profit support, food security, schools and child care, housing, election support, and state and local aid.

Continue reading “Phillips-led bipartisan group offers COVID framework to break impasse”

Measuring Trump’s Pandemic Malfeasance By Comparison With Other World Leaders

Donald Trump’s response to handling COVID-19 is the worst in the world. The United States both tops the charts in the number of cases, and before Trump can claim that this is because there’s “too much testing,” it worth noting that the U.S. also beats all comers when it comes to deaths. With the U.S. sadly set to cross the 200,000 deaths line in the coming week, it’s far ahead of even Brazil, where would-be Trump Jair Bolsonaro has done seeming everything possible to spread the disease.

As we learned over the past week, Trump’s failures to address COVID-19 were not a matter of ignorance and incompetence—though Trump has plenty of both. Instead he deliberately withheld facts from the public, downplayed the threat of the virus, and encouraged people to return to normal activities even though he absolutely knew his words were putting people at risk. This information only compounds the crime first identified back in July, when it was made clear Trump had purposely halted plans for a national network of testing centers under the belief that more people would died in states with Democratic governors so he “could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.”

What Trump has done with COVID-19 isn’t incompetence, it’s malfeasance. And it’s something that absolutely, positively, did not have to happen. So what would it be like if the United States had been managed competently? How many people might really have been saved? Continue reading.