Everywhere, around the world:

As the death toll rises, Trump’s claims to global leadership have became more far-fetched. He told Republicans last week that he had had a round of phone calls with Angela Merkel, Shinzo Abe and other unnamed world leaders and insisted “so many of them, almost all of them, I would say all of them” believe the US is leading the way.

None of the leaders he mentioned has said anything to suggest that was true. At each milestone of the crisis, European leaders have been taken aback by Trump’s lack of consultation with them – when he suspended travel to the US from Europe on 12 March without warning Brussels, for example. A week later, politicians in Berlin accused Trump of an “unfriendly act” for offering “large sums of money” to get a German company developing a vaccine to move its research wing to the US.

But he said he would say all of them. That has to mean it’s true.

A poll in France last week found Merkel to be far and away the most trusted world leader. Just 2% had confidence Trump was leading the world in the right direction. Only Boris Johnson and Xi Jinping inspired less faith.

A survey this week by the British Foreign Policy Group found 28% of Britons trusted the US to act responsibly on the world stage, a drop of 13 percentage points since January, with the biggest drop in confidence coming among Conservative voters.

Surprisingly high.

But hey, at least he’s providing a useful distraction from the point of view of the bosses in China:

There is a palpable sense of relief among Chinese state commentators that the US president’s antics have diverted some of the anger that would otherwise have been aimed at Beijing.

“Only by making Americans hate China can they make sure that the public might overlook the fact that Trump’s team is stained with the blood of Americans,” said an English-language Global Times editorial late last month.

…

China’s failure to cooperate fully with the WHO and its heavy-handed diplomacy has won Beijing few friends, despite its dispatch of medical assistance around the world. But the German news weekly Der Spiegel argued that Trump had single-handedly managed to spare Beijing the worst of the global consequences for its failings.

You’re welcome.

If the numbers are bad, here’s what you do: lie about the numbers.

Top Trump officials, huddled in the White House, itself the subject of a coronavirus outbreak, have according to reports begun questioning the number of deaths – and the president is among the skeptics.

He has a lot of practice being a “skeptic” about numbers. When he’s selling a thing, the value goes way up. When he’s reporting that thing to the tax people, the value goes way down. It’s magic.

One common claim is that hospitals receive more money from Medicare if they are treating a patient with the coronavirus compared with other illnesses, and so are inflating their numbers. Scott Jensen, a Minnesota state senator and family physician, began hawking this theory in early April, leading to an appearance on [Laura] Ingraham’s show.

“Right now Medicare has determined that if you have a Covid-19 admission to the hospital, you’ll get paid $13,000,” Jensen said.

“If that Covid-19 patient goes on a ventilator, you get $39,000, three times as much. Nobody can tell me after 35 years in the world of medicine that sometimes those kinds of things [don’t] impact on what we do.”

…

Factcheckers have found no evidence to support Jensen’s claims – in fact, some hospital revenues are expected to be down, due to the cancellation of elective procedures – but the idea of labeling illnesses as coronavirus for cash became a talking point on rightwing Facebook groups and beyond.

Worryingly, the disinformation push seems to be working. An Axios-Ipsos poll found that the death toll has become a political issue, 40% of Republicans believing fewer Americans are dying from coronavirus than the official toll says.

A separate study, published at the end of April, revealed the stark consequences of prominent figures underplaying the impact of Covid-19. A group of researchers tracked the spread of coronavirus among viewers of Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, after Hannity spent weeks downplaying the threat.

So Sean Hannity’s lies are killing people. I bet he still sleeps well at night.

More from le jardin des roses:

“We’ll fight through it,” he says repeatedly, in his dopy clogged voice. Send me in, coach! We coulda beena contenda. Fight fight fight!

“Wheya hadda problem come in, iddl go away, it may flare up, it may not flare up, wll hafta see wut happens but if it does flare up wir gunna pudout the fire, and we’ll pudit out quickly and efficiently, we’ve learned a lot Steve you have a question.”

Trump is in the Rose Garden right now, taking his idiocy out for an airing.

He can mean “we wouldn’t have the stats” – which would suit him just fine. He’d love it if we had no clue how bad the pandemic is.

Of course he may also think that not having the stats is the same thing as not having the cases.

No stats no cases! It would make a nice sign for the MAGAs to carry.

That’s showbiz, folks!

The Lancet has an editorial on Trump and the CDC:

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?

Right-wing politics is how.

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.

The Trump administration further chipped away at the CDC’s capacity to combat infectious diseases. CDC staff in China were cut back with the last remaining CDC officer recalled home from the China CDC in July, 2019, leaving an intelligence vacuum when COVID-19 began to emerge. In a press conference on Feb 25, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned US citizens to prepare for major disruptions to movement and everyday life. Messonnier subsequently no longer appeared at White House briefings on COVID-19. More recently, the Trump administration has questioned guidelines that the CDC has provided. These actions have undermined the CDC’s leadership and its work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Call me crazy but I think public health shouldn’t be a political issue. Rich people can get sick too, plus they suffer torments when they can’t shop for gold-plated running shoes and platinum caviar.

The Administration is obsessed with magic bullets—vaccines, new medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear. But only a steadfast reliance on basic public health principles, like test, trace, and isolate, will see the emergency brought to an end, and this requires an effective national public health agency. The CDC needs a director who can provide leadership without the threat of being silenced and who has the technical capacity to lead today’s complicated effort.

But a person like that would be a threat to Trump, at least in Trump’s eyes, so no dice.

Hold the phone – women can get periods!

Who knew?

Yes, we know, because “trans guys” are women, and “non-binary people” are people and some people are women.

Maybe this whole thing is just a movement of people who long to be teachers but don’t want the grind of teaching second grade, so they make shit up in order to “teach” us it.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Trump decided to try to demonstrate that he’s smarter than Anthony Fauci.

[I]t’s becoming clearer and clearer that reopening the country is Trump’s only plan for reviving the economy. The new stimulus package is, as Trump accurately declared, dead on arrival. The Federal Reserve is low on options. The White House has now essentially bet everything that states loosening restrictions will spur growth in time for November’s election. Fauci’s words of caution are an obstacle at a moment when the economic outlook is grim.

Has anyone bothered to tell Trump that rolling out the red carpet for a pandemic and waiting for the applause as tens of thousands more people die is not a winner either? Just saying “Fauci’s wrong Fauci’s wrong Fauci’s wrong” isn’t going to kneecap the virus. And you know what else? Causing another surge of the virus isn’t going to bring the economy back; rather the reverse.

Plus there’s that whole thing of risking thousands or tens of thousands of lives for the sake of his personal greed for attention. It’s not a great look.

Trump is frustrated that Fauci is eclipsing him in surveys on public trust, most recently the CNN/SSRS poll this week. Officials say Trump has long held out some resentment that Fauci is respected and liked by people he has struggled to convert.

Diddums. It’s so unfair that we trust Fauci more on issues to do with contagious diseases and how to manage them than we do Trump. Trump knows how to con people into buying crap condos! All Fauci knows is a lot of stuff about diseases and contagion and treatments. It should be no contest!

Trump’s irritation at being publicly undermined has been evident in conversations with his friends and aides, when he’s complained that Fauci doesn’t seem to be on his side.

Waaaah, my side, me me me me me me me, waaaaah, he should be kissing my ass, waaaaah, everything is about me.

The busy busy president who is working so hard found time to do a long interview with Fox News this morning, in which he told an exciting story about Obama something something something.

With such bad news on the human and economic fronts, perhaps it’s not surprising that Trump seemed to be most excited about pushing his new “Obamagate” conspiracy theory about his predecessor, Barack Obama. While Trump himself hasn’t been able to explain what exactly “Obamagate” is, the general idea is that Obama was part of a conspiracy to use an FBI counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia to undermine his presidency before it even began.

…

“If I were a Democrat instead of a Republican, I think everybody would’ve been in jail a long time ago, and I’m talking with 50-year sentences,” Trump claimed. “People should be going to jail for this stuff … this was all Obama. This was all Biden.”

What stuff though? What stuff? He never says. This what? What this? He never says.

He also said Russia longed for Clinton and didn’t want Trump.

This claim is at odds with the consensus conclusion of the US intelligence community, a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, and even the words of Vladimir Putin himself — all of them affirming that Russia wanted Trump to win. But if viewers were hoping that Bartiromo would push back by pointing out the obvious, they were disappointed.

Because Fox is allied with…Russia?

It doesn’t make any sense except as pure unsullied My Team versus Their Team.

No more talk? That’ll be the day.

Rick Bright is testifying before the House today.

The tone of Dr Bright’s testimony during this hearing is one of urgency.

Just now he warned that “The window is closing to address this pandemic because we still do not have a standardized coordinated plan to take our nation through this response.”

…

Bright, during this hearing, said that his increasingly urgent warnings about the coronavirus spread caused a “commotion” and he was pushed out of meetings as a result.

The Guardian has more up close reporting on the Michigan dramatics:

Despite a thunderstorm with heavy rains, dozens of protesters are on the Michigan State Capitol steps and lawn calling for an end to Michigan’s stay-at-home order, and demanding governor Gretchen Whitmer’s resignation.

The protest is organized by Michigan United For Liberty, a militia group that’s suing Whitmer over her orders.

The demonstrators include a small number of militiamen carrying assault rifles, and the protest is part of a high-tension week in Lansing.

It’s very banality of evil though, isn’t it. Geezers in chunky white trainers and rain jackets – they don’t look very scary. But it’s a mistake to think that appearances matter in that way. Not all murderous fascists look like Timothy McVeigh.

After armed militia members glared and shouted at the legislature on April 30 during a heated debate over extending Whitmer’s stay-at-home order through the end of May, Democrats called for a ban on guns in the State Capitol building.

They charge that the protests are no longer about the stay-at-home orders, but a forum for intimidating Democrats in the legislature.

The two seem to be basically intertwined. The connection doesn’t seem necessary or inherent, but it’s there.

The Michigan fascisti are at it again.

Despite heavy rain, armed protesters gathered Thursday at the State Capitol in Michigan in what the organizing group, Michigan United for Liberty, a militia group, has branded “judgment day.”

It’s their third gun-toting tantrum over the lockdown and the fact that the governor is a woman and a Democrat.

Ahead of Thursday’s protest, comments were made in private Facebook groups threatening Gov. Whitmer and lawmakers with violence, according to reporting by the Detroit Metro Times.

But hey by all means let them carry their assault weapons into the capitol.

Concern about Thursday’s gathering was higher than previous protests. But rain and an interruption in planning — Facebook reportedly removed the organizers’ private group from their platform for inciting violence — may have curbed the crowed which seemed substantially smaller than two weeks ago. That was when armed protesters brought signs that compared Gov. Whitmer to Hitler, showed nooses and confederate flags. Some signs read, “Tyrants Get The Rope.”

It’s judgement day! But it’s also raining so…meh…I’m staying home and watching tv.

Meanwhile guns guns guns GUNS.

After the second protest, state Democratic lawmakers requested that the Michigan Capitol Commission ban guns on the premises. On Monday, the Democratic attorney general issued an opinion saying the appointed body had the authority to do so, warning against a “powder keg dynamic” created by heavily armed protesters.

But the commission said nah let’s do a study instead.

The Republican Senate Majority Leader, Mike Shirkey, later called the notion of a gun-ban “cowardly” in a floor speech, calling for protesters who are threatening on Thursday to be arrested by state police.

It’s “cowardly” to want not to be gunned down for being a Democratic legislator? It’s easy for a Republican to say, isn’t it, because the gun lunatics aren’t threatening Republicans. Basically the disagreement is over whether or not it’s ok to kill/threaten to kill Democrats inside the capitol, and Republicans are saying hell yes it’s ok.

“This is a terribly concerning development in that we have legislators who are showing up to work wearing bulletproof vests. That is disenfranchising thousands of people in our state if their legislator doesn’t feel safe enough to go to work and to do what their job is,” said Whitmer in her interview on The View.

And it’s true on a national level. We’re being steadily trained to fear that right-wing lunatics will perform an armed coup. Such things do happen, and it’s getting more and more obvious that we’re now the kind of place where such things happen.

Pray for rain, I guess.

Speaking of magical thinking and reckless behavior – the Wisconsin Supreme Court has thrown out the stay home order.

In a 4-3 decision, the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down the state’s stay at home order, handing a defeat to Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in his administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

And consigning who knows how many hundreds or thousands of people to a hideous death, and more to a horrible illness that can take weeks to recover from and leave permanent damage to the heart, brain, blood vessels, kidneys, lungs – pretty much everything.

In its order, the Supreme Court said Evers’ stay at home order is “invalid, and therefore, unenforceable,” so some businesses and restaurants presumably may open immediately. But some counties, such as Dane, have already issued replacement orders enforcing the elements of the governor’s order, and therefore must remain closed.

The virus will probably take note of this show of defiance and decide to leave Wisconsin entirely alone. Right?

I keep wandering into magical thinking myself – I see more people out and about and think “Oh it must be getting bet – NO, stupid, people are getting more reckless.” I’m betting we all do that, not least because it’s normally a pretty good indicator. “Lots of people around here, probably not many tigers.” Normally pretty good, but then there can be the unexpected tiger.

The WHO warns us not to think all the tigers will go somewhere else.

Speaking at a briefing on Wednesday, WHO emergencies director Dr Mike Ryan warned against trying to predict when the virus would disappear.

He added that even if a vaccine is found, controlling the virus will require a “massive effort”.

…

“It is important to put this on the table: this virus may become just another endemic virus in our communities, and this virus may never go away,” Dr Ryan told the virtual press conference from Geneva.

“HIV has not gone away – but we have come to terms with the virus.”

And, as Fauci reminded us at one of the early briefings, there is effective treatment for HIV.

Their stark remarks come as several countries began to gradually ease lockdown measures, and leaders consider the issue of how and when to reopen their economies.

I think the gradually easing idea is magical thinking too. “If we just walk very carefully over the chasm we’ll be fine.” That doesn’t appear to be the case with this virus.

Dr Tedros warned that there was no guaranteed way of easing restrictions without triggering a second wave of infections.

“Many countries would like to get out of the different measures,” the WHO boss said. “But our recommendation is still the alert at any country should be at the highest level possible.”

Dr Ryan added: “There is some magical thinking going on that lockdowns work perfectly and that unlocking lockdowns will go great. Both are fraught with dangers.”

I’m finding magical thinking quite hard to avoid. I keep thinking stupid things like we’ve waited it out, we’ve diluted it, we’ve spread it so thinly that it won’t get us, etc etc – and then I slap myself up the head. I’ll be thinking the same thing an hour later though.

Remember on Monday Trump shouted that the numbers were coming down all over the country? The hell they are.

At a fraught press briefing on Monday, the president declared: “All throughout the country, the numbers are coming down rapidly.”

Yet county-specific figures show a surge in infection rates in towns and rural communities in red states such as Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky and North and South Dakota, according to data tracking by the New York Times.

…

In a 7 May report, obtained by NBC News, the list of top 10 surge areas included Nashville, Tennessee; Des Moines, Iowa; Amarillo, Texas; Racine, Wisconsin; Garden City, Kansas, and Central City, Kentucky – a predominantly white town of 6,000 people which saw a 650% week-on-week increase. Muhlenberg county, where Central City is located, has voted Republican in every presidential election since 2004, with Trump winning 72% of votes in 2016 – the biggest ever victory for the party.

Yet he failed to protect them from the virus. Sad.

Many of the new emerging hotspots, both rural and urban, are in states where governors refused to issue stay-at-home orders, or are following Trump’s advice to relax lockdown restrictions despite public health warnings about the dangers of doing so too soon.

Fake news?

They’re going after Fauci, because of course they are.

Yesterday, Fauci said during the Senate’s hearing that there are serious consequences if cities or states in the United States reopen too quickly: “There is a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you may not be able to control,” he said.

Fauci’s warning contradicts the stance of Trump and Republicans who have been gunning for* a swift reopening to save the economy and took Fauci’s statement as a personal attack.

[*not “gunning for” but advocating for – I can’t offhand think of a parallel metaphor for that]

Rand Paul, a Republican senator from Kentucky, sparred with Fauci during the hearing yesterday when asking the epidemiologist why schools can’t reopen if children are seeing low virus-related death rate.

“As much as I respect you, Dr. Fauci, I don’t think you’re the end-all,” Paul said. “I don’t think you’re the one person that gets to make the decision.”

Rude piece of crap. Of course he’s not, nor does he claim to be. He gets to give the government the best possible medical advice, because that’s his job.

Later, on Fox News, host Tucker Carlson repeated Paul’s criticism of Fauci, saying: “He is not, and no one is, the one person who should be in charge when it comes to making long-term recommendations. This guy, Fauci, may be even more off-base than your average epidemiologist.”

This guy, Tucker Carlson, may be and is an ignorant hack who will say anything, no matter how crazed and mendacious, to prop up Bad Orange Man.

On deck tomorrow:

Rick Bright, former director of a key office in the Department of Health and Human Services, will testify in front of the Senate tomorrow that the Trump administration was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic and there will be dramatic consequences if the US fails to develop a national coordinated response, reports CNN.

Documents of the prepared testimony indicate that Bright plans to tell Congress that he fears “the pandemic will get far worse and be prolonged” without a response “based in science”.

“Without clear planning and implementation of the steps that I and other experts have outlined, 2020 will be [the] darkest winter in modern history,” Bright is expected to warn.

Let’s not do that. Can we not do that? I’d rather not do that.

Some people think so:

The sun had not been up for an hour when the president of the United States, in his ninth tweet of the day, said MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough might be a murderer.

His exact words?

“When will they open a Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida. Did he get away with murder? Some people think so. Why did he leave Congress so quietly and quickly? Isn’t it obvious? What’s happening now? A total nut job!”

This isn’t random person making noise on Twitter, this is a head of state, a head of an all-too-powerful nuclear-armed state.

Many of the 18,000 false and misleading claims in our Trump database feature overheated rhetoric. Few of them rise to these vicious heights.

…

Trump first lobbed this conspiratorial charge at Scarborough in November 2017. The president is referring to the 2001 death of Lori Klausutis, a 28-year-old aide who worked for Scarborough when he was a Republican member of Congress representing Florida’s 1st Congressional District.

The circumstances of Klausutis’s death have spawned conspiracy theories, but authorities never suspected foul play. Her death is not an unsolved mystery or a cold case waiting for answers. Klausutis’s death on July 20, 2001, was ruled accidental and the police concluded there was no reason to further investigate. A police investigator told The Post in 2017 that authorities had left “no stone unturned.”

The Post gives it 4 Pinocchios and wishes it had more to give. The White House has refused to comment.

Henning Schroeder at The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota:

Before the trophy went to Adolf Hitler, German Emperor and King of Prussia Wilhelm II held the award for Most Hated Man on Earth. And while Hitler’s Third Reich has become the ultimate go-to place for much journalistic handwringing about the horrible times we are living in, in reality it feels like we are still stuck in Wilhelm’s Second Reich — it’s Kaiserzeit in America. Donald Trump and the last German Emperor have a lot in common, the vanity, insecurity, the penchant for bombast and persönliches Regiment (personal rule), to name just a few. In Wilhelm’s case the brakes on his impulsive and egotistical personality came off after he fired Bismarck, the experienced chancellor he inherited from his father, and surrounded himself with sycophantic generals and noble toadies who went along with his imperial fantasies and straight into World War I.

We had a little conversation about that exact parallel a couple of days ago at the Miscellany Room, via What a Maroon:

This popped up in my Facebook memories from two years ago. No one even tried to guess who it was referring to. Any guesses here?

“He believed in force, and the ‘survival of the fittest’ in domestic as well as foreign politics… [He] was not lacking in intelligence, but he did lack stability, disguising his deep insecurities by swagger and tough talk. He frequently fell into depressions and hysterics… [His] personal instability was reflected in vacillations of policy. His actions, at home as well as abroad, lacked guidance, and therefore often bewildered or infuriated public opinion. He was not so much concerned with gaining specific objectives…, as with asserting his will.”

It was that very Kaiser, child of Queen Victoria’s firstborn Vicky.

I am reminded of those spineless Wilhelmine characters every time I am watching a White House press briefing. It’s not so much the bumbling fool at the microphone who advertises Clorox for healing the nation. That’s to be expected from someone who has been in sales all his life. What’s truly troubling is the backdrop of supposedly educated advisors and cabinet members who gaze at the president nodding their heads like bobble toys every time he opens his mouth. Not much different from Wilhelm’s bootlicking court jesters.

The boot in the face, the brute   
Brute heart of a brute like you.

The Globe and Mail reports:

Organizations across Canada that work to help sexually exploited women and girls say the Liberal government has decided not to renew federal funding they rely on, forcing them to close programs.

Megan Walker, executive director of the London Abused Women’s Centre, said her organization will have to close its federally funded anti-sex-trafficking program. The program operated for five years and served more than 3,000 trafficked, prostituted, sexually exploited and at-risk women and girls.

So Trudeau is pro-trafficking then?

Under the program, women and girls could access their services immediately, Ms. Walker said. They could drop in to the centre when they needed clothing or to be some place warm, and staff members helped them access health facilities and education. The federal funding also helped public awareness initiatives, with members of LAWC visiting schools and teaching students about the tactics of traffickers, such as luring.

Pro-trafficking and anti-providing services for trafficked women and girls. Sweet.

Sex trafficking has not slowed down because of the pandemic, according to Ms. Walker. She said her agency has received six phone calls from parents whose daughters were lured online to “remove their clothes and masturbate.” The girls’ actions were videotaped and posted on the Internet.

“Trafficking will never slow down,” Ms. Walker said.

But funding will always disappear.