Tag: Trump mishandling pandemic crisis

Trump Lies About March Rallies — And PBS Reporter Nails Him

PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor called out President Donald Trump for falsely claiming he hasn’t left the White House “in months” at a press briefing on Monday evening.

Trump was attacking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has criticized the administration’s slow and negligent response to the coronavirus crisis. In response, critics have pointed out that, as late as Feb. 24, Pelosi told people to go to Chinatown in an effort to mollify the growing fears of the coronavirus. While in retrospect, any advice to go out at this time was likely a mistake, the Trump administration itself was weeks away from issuing any guidance discouraging public gatherings. And, as Alcindor pointed out, Trump was holding campaign rallies throughout February and into March, which potentially could have served to spread the virus.

“You held rallies in February and March,” Alcindor said. Continue reading.

Trump’s bizarre effort to tag Obama’s swine flu response as ‘a disaster’

Washington Post logo“Biden/Obama were a disaster in handling the H1N1 Swine Flu. Polling at the time showed disastrous approval numbers. 17,000 people died unnecessarily and through incompetence! Also, don’t forget their 5 Billion Dollar Obamacare website that should have cost close to nothing!”

— President Trump, in a tweet, April 17

As the coronavirus pandemic emerged, President Trump quickly sought to compare his performance to the pandemic that appeared in 2009 under the watch of his predecessor, Barack Obama. He called it a “big failure” and a “debacle,” compounded by “horrific mistakes.” He railed about the death toll, often inflating the figures to 17,000, as he did in this recent tweet.

These criticism might have had some resonance back when there appeared to be relatively few cases in the United States. On March 4, when Trump first attacked Obama’s handling of the swine flu, there were only about 100 reported cases of covid-19 in the United States.

But as of April 17, there were more than 700,000 cases reported in the United States and nearly 40,000 deaths, more than double than what supposedly took place under Obama. One would think Trump would drop this talking point, but apparently he thinks it still works for him. Continue reading.

Trump Airs Another Campaign Ad At Briefing, Produced By White House Staff

Donald Trump used time during his regular COVID-19 briefing on Monday to play a campaign ad for himself. Trump said that the video had been put together by White House staff — a possible violation of federal law regulating the election activities of federal employees.

Under fire for downplaying the coronavirus’ risk and doing little to prepare for the pandemic, Trump made reporters watch what was effectively a campaign ad. “We have a few clips that we’re just going to put up,” he said, before playing a video containing clips organized and edited to blame the media for minimizing the threat of the pandemic and tout Trump’s response.

After the video was over, ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl asked about its origins. Continue reading.

‘We’re beyond angered’: Fed-up nurses file lawsuits, plan protest at White House over lack of coronavirus protections

Washington Post logoFor Pamella Brown-Richardson, a nurse practitioner in New York, the fever and cough came in mid-March. Soon after, her fever worsened, and she began experiencing shortness of breath and body aches — telltale symptoms of the novel coronavirus. By early April, Brown-Richardson was in the emergency room with double-lobe pneumonia caused by covid-19.

As Brown-Richardson tells it, there is probably only one place where she could have been exposed to the virus: the primary care clinic in the Bronx, where she says she spent days caring for people suffering from covid-19 symptoms with just a flimsy surgical mask as protection.

Brown-Richardson is one of more than a dozen nurses in New York, the epicenter of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak, who detailed their experiences on the front lines in affidavits corroborating three lawsuits filed Monday against the state health department and two area hospitals. The complaints, which were lodged by New York’s largest nurses union, allege that inadequate protective equipment, among other failures, contributed to “compromising the health and safety of the nurses,” according to a news release from the union. Continue reading.

Most rate Trump’s coronavirus response negatively and expect crowds will be unsafe until summer, Post-U. Md. poll finds

Washington Post logoMost Americans expect no immediate easing of the health risks associated with the coronavirus pandemic, despite calls by President Trump and others to begin reopening the economy quickly. A majority say it could be June or later before it will be safe for larger gatherings to take place again, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.

Most Americans — 54 percent — give the president negative marks for his handling of the outbreak in this country and offer mixed reviews for the federal government as a whole. By contrast, 72 percent of Americans give positive ratings to the governors of their states for the way they have dealt with the crisis, with workers also rating their employers positively.

Partisan allegiances shape perceptions of when it will be safe to have gatherings of 10 or more people and of the president’s performance during the pandemic. But governors win praise across the political spectrum for their leadership, which has sometimes put them sharply at odds with Trump and his administration.

Trump wants to lift lockdowns. Other countries’ attempts show why the U.S. isn’t ready.

Washington Post logoHere’s the already iconic image of a divided America in the middle of a pandemic. In one of a smattering of protests over the weekend against coronavirus lockdowns, a supporter of President Trump in Denver jeered at a counterprotesting medical worker from a silver Ram truck. “This is a free country,” she said, before telling the medical worker to “go back to China.”

Trump later defended these scenes, arguing that the protesters — some of whom were mobilized by far-right, pro-gun groups on Facebook and assembled near city halls or other public buildings in mostly small numbers over the past few days — were agitating against governors who “have gone too far” in their imposition of restrictions on daily life. A recent poll found that a majority of Americans fear that the government is moving too quickly to lift restrictions. But Trump may pull at this seam in the coming weeks, hoping to focus his base’s ire on domestic opponents even as he finds it impossible to dispel the scrutiny of his own missteps in the early stages of the crisis.

Still, the economic anxiety in the United States, as is the case elsewhere in the world, is all too real. New projections from Columbia University researchers suggest that a coronavirus-provoked recession could spike U.S. job losses — and poverty — to five-decade highs. Far from U.S. state capitals, protests are building against lockdowns in poorer countries. About 2 billion people around the world depend on day work and live in countries whose governments are mostly unable to compensate for their loss of wages. Continue reading.

Trump blames testing criticism on politics

The Hill logoPresident Trump on Monday lashed out at governors who have clamored for more widespread coronavirus testing, accusing them of playing politics or simply being ignorant of resources in their own states.

Trump and other administration officials devoted a significant portion of the daily coronavirus press briefing to outlining efforts to scale up the production of testing materials as governors across the country warn more federal help is needed to increase capacity.

The briefing at times appeared intended to rebuke the criticism directly, with Trump insisting his administration had already done a commendable job and that those who disagreed were trying to score political points. Continue reading.

Pressure builds on White House to increase tests

The Hill logoPressure is building on the Trump administration to further increase the nation’s production of coronavirus tests, as experts say the country is still nowhere near the level it needs to be to safely reopen the economy.

Several recent leading estimates say the United States needs to at least triple its testing capacity.

Harvard researchers said Friday that the country needs between 500,000 and 700,000 tests per day, up from about 150,000 currently. Scott Gottlieb, President Trump’s former Food and Drug Administration chief, said Monday that the country needs a similar figure or about 3 million tests per week. Continue reading.

Senate sets up Tuesday session to try to pass coronavirus relief deal

The Hill logoThe Senate will try to pass a forthcoming agreement on coronavirus aid as soon as Tuesday if negotiators are able to reach a deal.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) amended the Senate schedule to set up the Tuesday meeting; the chamber had previously only been expected to meet this week on Monday and Thursday.

The Tuesday meeting will give the chamber another chance to pass a deal on an “interim” coronavirus relief bill, and keep the House on track with Majority Leader Steny Hoyer‘s timeline of voting as soon as Wednesday. Continue reading.

‘A failed state’: Columnist slams Trump’s ‘dysfunctional’ administration for being ‘too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering’

AlterNet logoSome of the best political reporting and analysis looks at the big picture, which is what journalist George Packer does in a think piece for The Atlantic that slams President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Packer is hardly the only person who is critical of Trump’s COVID-19 response, but Packer’s article goes way beyond being simply anti-Trump — coronavirus, as Packer sees it, is simply underscoring dysfunction in the federal government that was already there to begin with.

Before the pandemic, Packer asserts, the U.S. was already plagued by “a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public.” Those problems, according to Packer, “had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity — to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.”

The Trump Administration, Packer laments, responded to the coronavirus pandemic like a developing country “with shoddy infrastructure and a dys­func­tional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.” And he believes that Americans are living in a failed state. Continue reading.