Trump on hospital workers suiting up and going in: "It's like no different than you watch the war movies or you watch the old clips of war, running up hills. To me, it's the same thing."
Yes. That’s right. It’s like movies. War isn’t actually a real thing, with real bullets and explosions and death and mutilation, it’s a thing you watch, with suited up guys running up hills. Then you have cookies and milk and go to bed.
Trump: "Even governor Pritzker from Illinois is happy." He adds that Pritzker may not be happy when he talks to the press, but in reality, he's happy, he's a happy man.
Trump on the drug companies and Boris Johnson: "They have everything with them, should it be needed." It remains unclear what exactly he is talking about.
Trump demands a reporter soften her language in a question about the functioning of a federal program. He says she's incapable of doing so. (Really not her job to do so.) Trump: "I wish we had a fair media…we really don't."
The inspector general report Trump summarily dismissed because it's from an inspector general was based on accounts from 323 hospitals in 46 states. https://t.co/hdzBa3IOBq
Trump says he believes in the Constitution more than most people, and he wants to let states without stay-home orders do as they wish, and their governors are doing a great job.
This is significant not only because the president is saying things that aren't true but because he's using this imaginary testing to justify not taking action to limit plane travel. https://t.co/zw7uB7WpOh
Trump calls a reporter "horrid" for asking a question about testing. He then falsely claims, as he did three times last week, that the initial tests were old and obsolete. That is completely nonsensical. They were developed in 2020. This is a new virus.
Trump says the Democrats "shouldn't be allowed to win" the election because of how good a job he's done. He says they were "artificially stopped" by the virus.
Trump said at this briefing that, before him, "China never spent money in our country."
That is beyond a lie — it's just bonkers. Even ignoring FDI, China has spent more than $100B on US goods every year since 2011. https://t.co/WARcFVzxiX
There was a rumor on Thursday that he was on the point of going into hospital, but they denied it.
Johnson’s aides were emphatic. His condition had not deteriorated, he still had only “mild symptoms”, he hoped to be at work from Friday when his coronavirus isolation period was up – and he had not been admitted to St Thomas’ hospital for treatment. When on Monday evening it emerged that contrary to reassurances about him getting on with his red box, he was being admitted to intensive care, the denials were coming under increasing scrutiny.
FDR and polio. Kennedy’s extremely bad health and addiction to uppers. Reagan’s dementia. Woodrow Wilson’s stroke. They keep doing this.
Thursday lunchtime, having denied the first round of rumours about St Thomas’, Downing Street floated the idea that Johnson might not be back at work on Friday as planned if his temperature remained high.
A cough was not mentioned, but his official spokesman told a daily briefing with journalists that he would only go back to work the next day if his temperature came down.
That evening at 8pm, despite his isolation, the prime minister appeared at the door of No 10 to applaud the work of NHS workers. Despite the appearance, the health rumours did not go away: St Thomas’ was on standby because Johnson’s condition had worsened, the first source insisted – only for Downing Street, when pressed, to deny that he was about to be admitted that night.
On Friday lunchtime, the situation began to unravel. An unkempt, gravelly-voiced and clearly unwell Johnson released a video in which he said, somewhat implausibly, “I’m feeling better,” before conceding he could not fully return to work. “Alas, I still have one of the symptoms, a minor symptom, I still have a temperature,” he insisted.
That’s ok, it’s none of our business if heads of government are dropping like flies, we just work here.
Shortly before 8.30pm on Monday, further news came: the prime minister had been admitted to intensive care at St Thomas’ 90 minutes earlier.
Several sources say Johnson has required oxygen to help with his breathing following his admission to hospital – an assertion that was not denied by Downing Street – although his official spokesman said that Russian reports that he was on a ventilator were “disinformation”.
He’s not on a ventilator yet.
Some Conservative MPs are worried that Downing Street’s evasiveness on the seriousness of the prime minister’s condition will undermine trust in what they say going forward.
NHS workers could do worse than examine the experience of another London hospital during the Spanish influenza pandemic just over 100 years ago. Today, that hospital is named St Charles and offers walk-in care at the northern end of Ladbroke Grove, Kensington. But in 1918 it was known as St Marylebone Infirmary and had 744 beds for the “sick poor”, many of whom had tuberculosis and other chronic lung conditions.
In October 1918, as a second wave of Spanish influenza spread across Britain, its wards were inundated with pneumonia cases…
“All training, and indeed every sort of trimming, went by the board,” Hood recalled in his notebook 30 years later. “The staff fought like Trojans to feed the patients, scramble as best they could through the most elementary nursing and keep the delirious in bed!”
The timing was bad because around half of all trained nurses were in military service.
“Each day the difficulties became more pronounced as the patients increased and the nurses decreased, going down like ninepins themselves,” Hood wrote. “Sad to relate some of these gallant girls lost their lives in this never-to-be-forgotten scourge and as I write I can see some of them now literally fighting to save their friends then going down and dying themselves.”
Hood made the nurses wear lint masks and advised them “not to interpose their faces too near the blast of those coughing”. But when it came to tending to a fellow nurse, many refused to wear the masks for fear of distressing their colleague.
In the case of one nurse, Hood noted: “Nothing I could do or say had the slightest effect in influencing her to diminish the risks to herself. She was consumed with a burning desire to save her … inevitably, the nurse developed a lung infection, dying soon after the woman she had been nursing.”
By December, Hood was exhausted and went on sick leave. When he returned in February, the epidemic was still raging and two more nurses had died, bringing the fatalities to nine.
“One poor nurse, I remember, with a terribly acute influenzal pneumonia, became so distressed she could not stay in bed and insisted on being propped up against the wall by her bed until she was finally drowned in her profuse, thin blood-stained sputum.”
CNN: British PM Boris Johnson is being moved to intensive care as a spokesperson for the PM says his condition "has worsened and, on the advice of his medical team, he has been moved to the Intensive Care Unit at the hospital."
NEW: Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly says, “I stand by every word,” after reportedly calling Captain Crozier "too naive or too stupid” to be in command. pic.twitter.com/Qcbf3JQKqb
The Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly blasted the now ousted commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt as “stupid” in an address to the ship’s crew Monday morning, in remarks obtained by CNN.
Modly told the crew that their former commander, Capt. Brett Crozier, was either “too naive or too stupid” to be in command or that he intentionally leaked to the media a memo in which he warned about coronavirus spreading aboard the aircraft carrier and urged action to save his sailors.
Who is Thomas Modly? A businessman who has served as Acting United States Secretary of the Navy since November 24, 2019. A whopping four months in the job and the highly relevant qualification of being a businessdude.
“It was a betrayal. And I can tell you one other thing: because he did that he put it in the public’s forum and it is now a big controversy in Washington, DC,” Modly said, according to a transcript of remarks Modly made to the crew, copies of which have been provided to CNN by multiple Navy officials.
I suspect those multiple Navy officials are the real kind as opposed to the businessdude until ten minutes ago kind, and I suspect they are pissed.
In remarks that were piped over the vessel’s PA system, Modly suggested Crozier leaked the memo on purpose or was “too naive or too stupid” to be in command if he didn’t think that sending it to over 20 people would not result in it getting out to the public.
“If he didn’t think, in my opinion, that this information wasn’t going to get out to the public, in this day and information age that we live in, then he was either A, too naïve or too stupid to be a commanding officer of a ship like this,” Modly said. “The alternative is that he did this on purpose.”
Modly went on to say it was a “betrayal of trust, with me, with his chain of command.”
That’s an interesting thing to say to that audience in that situation. He’s talking to the people whose lives were at risk because of a massive virus outbreak on the ship, and he’s whining about a betrayal of his trust. Crozier put his crew’s lives first, and Modly is telling that crew how naughty that was. I bet the applause was light and scattered.
A defense official familiar with Modly’s remarks offered his opinion of Modly’s address, saying the acting secretary “should be fired. I don’t know how he survives this day.”
Let’s hope so.
Several senior military officials, including the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Mike Gilday, recommended against Modly’s decision to fire Crozier before an investigation into the matter was complete and in the midst of an evacuation, two US officials tell CNN.
Watch Trump physically prevent Fauci from answering a question about hydroxychloroquine.
"I answered this 15 times. You don't have to answer." — Trump prevents Dr Fauci from answering a question about hydroxychloroquine pic.twitter.com/8R1K1hDsaX
Trump is still insisting on noisily promoting a drug that’s untested for use against the virus.
With millions of citizens desperate for safe information and trustworthy medical orientations, the President of the #UnitedStates continues to sell medical drugs with unknown consequences on prime time. Beyond surreal. Follow @atrupar's thread. #COVID19#COVID19Pandemichttps://t.co/xxGUYRNLUF
Ooh ooh ooh I know the answer to that one. Sometimes the powerful drugs kill things you DO want living within your body and you wind up dead.
Trump on why he's giving medical advice even though he's not a doctor: "What really do we have to lose? … we don't have time to go and say, 'gee, let's take a couple of years and test it out' … it doesn't kill people." (This last point re: hydroxychloroquine is not true.) pic.twitter.com/zE0aN4iSFW
Interesting how Trump keeps singling out Yamiche Alcindor to disparage and snarl at her. I wonder why that could be.
Mr. President, @realDonaldTrump, I’ve asked you fair & relevant questions on your evolving approach & rhetoric regarding coronavirus. For example, last Sun., I asked: You've said some governors don't need the equipment they're requesting. How might that impact your decisions? 1/3 https://t.co/vJWH2tk4Ch
Now, there are more than 328,000 confirmed U.S. coronavirus cases & more than 9,300 people have died. You have said the next two weeks will be the toughest. I welcome you to come on PBS NewsHour for an interview on your administration's response & how Americans can stay safe. 3/3
Recently I heard a rant by Ben Shapiro. I generally avoid Shapiro, because I don’t like disingenuous little shits who think being captain of the debate club equals having an education, but still, I heard it.
Shapiro was going on about how workers who went on strike were just as bad as price gougers right now, and it struck me.
For years the US has had the most expensive medicine in the world. It has gotten so bad that prior to the lockdown, Americans were going to Mexico to buy diabetes medication.
So when it was not a pandemic, and people will die from lack of medication, Shapiro was absolutely fine with corporations doing the same thing he condemns workers for doing now.
And America has always been kind of stupid when it comes to healthcare. It has always treated healthcare as if it is a privilege, not a social necessity.
One of the things I watched as my country went into lockdown was Pandemic on Netflix, and part of what it went into was efforts to vaccinate migrants.
In December the New York Times reported that several doctors had been arrested during a protest – after they had been refused permission to vaccinate migrants.
In other words, Americans hate the idea of “illegals” benefiting from their tax dollars so much, they’re willing to compromise their own herd immunity over it. Hell, another character highlighted by the documentary was an awful anti-vaxer, who seemed to be a complete narcissistic idiot so focused on her bullshit idea of personal autonomy that she couldn’t fathom the idea of individuals having responsibilities to their communities.
For most of the series, it followed another woman working a 72 hour shift in a rural hospital where she was the only doctor on call. It struck me, they also showed doctors fighting Ebola in the Congo – and there was more than one doctor on duty over there.
American healthcare has been badly neglected for years, so I’m not sure that we can say that an outbreak like Covid-19 wasn’t inevitable. While prior presidents have put together response teams, those rural hospitals kept closing.
Having a response team sounds good and all, but they can’t magic up more hospitals on the spot. The basic infrastructure has been allowed to collapse.
Donald Trump is not only a bad president in and of himself, but an end point to bad decisions going back decades. Decisions driven by the constant need to try and cut taxes, as inflation meant that the stuff government needed to be doing became more expensive.
Everything where the impact wouldn’t be felt immediately, has been neglected and that is something I think somebody is going to have to address. In a lot of ways Donald Trump is everything wrong with American politics on steroids, including the tendency to ignore consequences in favour of short term electoral gains.
Trump is the mudslide at the end of years of erosion, when he leaves office, whether it is after this election or the next one, he is going to be leaving behind a mess. Whether Trump goes down as the worst president in US history is going to depend heavily on whether the next president is willing to go to the expense cleaning that mess up is going to entail.
The longer Trump remains, the worse it is going to be, and the more extreme the action required to fix it is going to be. Can the Democratic Party provide the radical course correction required? And can such a course correction win at the ballot box?
Boris Johnson has been admitted to hospital with coronavirus after suffering persistent symptoms for 10 days.
Downing Street insisted it was just a precautionary measure but Johnson’s admission on a Sunday evening comes after days of rumours that his condition has been worsening.
…
The Guardian was told last week that Johnson was more seriously ill than either he or his officials were prepared to admit, and that he was being seen by doctors who were concerned about his breathing.
But Downing Street flatly denied that the prime minister’s health had seriously deteriorated, and insisted there were no plans at that point for him to be admitted to hospital.
And Downing Street would never lie to the Guardian I’m sure.
A California megachurch has found itself at the center of a coronavirus outbreak after public health officials connected it to 71 cases , even as church leaders say they have been unfairly blamed for failing to take action to stop the spread among church members.
County health officials have put Bethany Slavic Missionary church, a Pentecostal house of worship in a suburb of Sacramento, at the heart of one of the largest outbreak clusters in the country. The church is reported to be the largest Slavic congregation in the US, with 3,500 members and a total attendance at some services of up to 10,000.
The county’s public health director said that a third of all coronavirus cases in Sacramento county have been linked to places of worship. As of Thursday, health officials tallied the number of county cases at 350, with 10 deaths.
The pursuit of the phantom god is lethal. Religious wars in the 16th and 17th centuries, megachurches and “Liberty University” in the 21st.
Seventy-one of the members who tested positive live in Sacramento county, and members who live in other counties may also be infected. One parishioner has died, officials said, and a pastor indicated in an online sermon the church’s senior pastor has been hospitalized and two others are critically ill.
All for a god that doesn’t exist. Tinkerbell doesn’t exist and the god that collects people in groups to infect them with a lethal virus doesn’t exist.
Health officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but the Sacramento county public health director, Peter Beilenson, told the Los Angeles Times it is “outrageous this is happening”, adding that public health guidelines trump the freedom of religious expression.
Beilenson said Thursday that in-person services at the Slavic megachurch have now ceased.
But he said church leaders rebuffed previous attempts to discuss the cases. “They’ve basically told us to leave them alone,” Beilenson told the Sacramento Bee. “This is extremely irresponsible and dangerous for the community.”
Public health officials can’t leave them alone, any more than the fire department could if they were building huge bonfires during fire season. They’re not leaving the people of Sacramento County alone by spreading infection, so the health department can’t leave them alone.
Faith Presbyterian church, also in Sacramento, has had two parishioners die from the virus and a total of five people test positive for the virus, the Sacramento Bee reported.
Forty minutes south, in Lodi, church leaders sent the city a “cease and desist” letter after police entered the church during a service on 25 March, telling authorities the church “intends to continue to meet this Sunday and all future Wednesdays and Sundays”.
One doesn’t want to rush into calling Trump the worst president ever, because time has a way of changing our minds, but Max Boot says it’s safe to call it now.
With his catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus, Trump has established himself as the worst president in U.S. history.
His one major competitor for that dubious distinction remains Buchanan, whose dithering helped lead us into the Civil War — the deadliest conflict in U.S. history. Buchanan may still be the biggest loser. But there is good reason to think that the Civil War would have broken out no matter what. By contrast, there is nothing inevitable about the scale of the disaster we now confront.
The situation is so dire, it is hard to wrap your mind around it. The Atlantic notes: “During the Great Recession of 2007–2009, the economy suffered a net loss of approximately 9 million jobs. The pandemic recession has seen nearly 10 million unemployment claims in just two weeks.” The New York Times estimates that the unemployment rate is now about 13 percent, the highest since the Great Depression ended 80 years ago.
And it’s going to keep going up, not down.
Far worse is the human carnage. We already have more confirmed coronavirus cases than any other country. Trump claimed on Feb. 26 that the outbreak would soon be “down to close to zero.” Now he argues that if the death toll is 100,000 to 200,000 — higher than the U.S. fatalities in all of our wars combined since 1945 — it will be proof that he’s done “a very good job.”
If he herded 200,000 of us into concrete bunkers and gassed us to death, would that be proof that he’s done a very good job?
Trump was told, emphatically, what would happen if we didn’t act.
A team of Post reporters wrote on Saturday: “The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak of the coronavirus in China on Jan. 3. Within days, U.S. spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat to Trump by including a warning about the coronavirus —the first of many—in the President’s Daily Brief.” But Trump wasn’t listening.
He doesn’t read the PDB, and if he did he wouldn’t understand what he was reading, and if he did he wouldn’t remember it, and if he did he wouldn’t do anything about it. It’s not in his wheelhouse. In his wheelhouse is shunting money to his hotels and golf resorts, bragging, extorting flattery, insulting his betters, shouting, and firing people.
Trump was first briefed on the coronavirus by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on Jan. 18. But, The Post writes, “Azar told several associates that the president believed he was ‘alarmist’ and Azar struggled to get Trump’s attention to focus on the issue.” When Trump was first asked publicly about the virus, on Jan. 22, he said, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.”
In the days and weeks after Azar alerted him about the virus, Trump spoke at eight rallies and golfed six times as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Which he didn’t, because he paid no attention and wouldn’t have cared if he had. He doesn’t have enough brain left to have a care in the world.
South Korea and the United States discovered their first cases on the same day. South Korea now has 183 dead — or 4 deaths per 1 million people. The U.S. death ratio (25 per 1 million) is six times worse — and rising quickly.
I continue to wish someone would drop a piano on him.
Maureen Dowd starts with Bush 2 and his helpless incompetence in emergencies.
The same blend of arrogance and incompetence informed the Bush administration’s handling of Katrina — the earlier lash of nature that exposed the lethal fault line between the haves and have-nots. W. retreated to clinical states’ rights arguments as a beloved city drowned.
Now we have another pampered scion in the Oval, propped up by his daddy for half his life, accustomed to winging it and swaggering around. And he, too, is utterly unprepared to lead us through the storm. Like W., he is resorting to clinical states’ rights arguments, leaving the states to chaotically compete with one another and the federal government for precious medical equipment.
It’s so bizarre about the pampered scions. Part of our self-image is all about own-bootstraps-lifting-by, is about going your own way and carving your own path and making it to the top with bleeding hands – yet we keep electing stupid little rich boys who then trash the place. Y we do that?
The president seems oblivious to the fact that his own clown car of an administration bungled the priceless lead time we had to get ready for the pandemic.
With the death toll in this country soaring past 7,000, Trump is focused on the same thing he is always focused on: himself. He proudly told reporters Wednesday, “Did you know I was No. 1 on Facebook? I just found out I was No. 1 on Facebook. I thought that was very nice for whatever it means.”
It’s almost funny. It’s like going to visit your closest friend in the hospital, who is mangled and near death from a car crash that killed her children and husband and parents and dog, and happily telling her about the likes you got on Facebook that day. “I thought that was very nice for whatever it means.”
Trump’s most defining qualities have been on display in this fight: He has been mercurial, vindictive, deceptive, narcissistic, blame-shifting and nepotistic.
And stupid and childish and clueless and incompetent. It’s a long long list.
At the Thursday briefing, the president brought out another wealthy, uninformed man-child who loves to play boss: Jared Kushner.
Never mind uninformed or man-child, he’s married to a princess. That’s all you need to know.
From the lectern, Kushner drilled down on his role as the annoying, spoiled kid in every teen movie ever made. “And the notion of the federal stockpile was, it’s supposed to be our stockpile,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be the states’ stockpiles that they then use.”
Our stockpile?
That’s the way the Trump-Kushner dynasty has approached this whole presidency, conflating what belongs to the people with what is theirs. Trump acts like he has the right to dole out “favors,” based on which governor is most assiduous about kissing up to him.
And, more to the point, the right to refuse “favors” based on which governor doesn’t kiss up to him.
At least we won’t make the same mistake again. There won’t be a next time.
Another press briefing campaign rally, perhaps the weirdest yet.
Trump criticizes New York for asking for tens of thousands of ventilators: "When they know they do not need it, they want it anyway. It gives them that extra feeling of satisfaction, but we cannot do that. It is not even possible. We are a backup." pic.twitter.com/h4g8LOinH9
At this stage of the rally, the early stage, he comes across as drunk, exhausted, sick, something – gabbling, slurring, and seeming to talk through a gallon or two of his own drool.
“…when thee brunt of it comes, which is coming quickly, you see it, you see it as sure as you can see it” [rising hand gesture to illustrate “brunt”]
Lots of drunk – slurring – weaving – struggling in this one:
Trump pushes unproven drugs that he thinks could treat coronavirus: "There's a study out that people with lupus aren't catching this horrible virus … maybe that's correct, maybe that's false. You're gonna have to check it out." pic.twitter.com/cu4XdbQFkG
No, people with expertise in researching and testing new medications are going to have to do that.
"We have to open our country. I had an expression: The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself." — Trump's tone has reverted back to wanting to get the economy back up and running as soon as possible pic.twitter.com/SAET9020gi
That one is particularly disgusting. He goes on and on about who stroked his ego enough and who didn’t, as if that were the whole point. It makes me wish I could bash his head in myself.
Trump justifies firing of Captain Crozier, captain who sounded alarm about coronavirus on his ship, because only about 10 percent of people aboard had the virus. Trump also claims it was "inappropriate" for Crozier to publicize the situation. pic.twitter.com/lt2S4IWx2Z
“I think this idea … that if you close schools and shut restaurants for a couple of weeks, you solve the problem and get back to normal life — that’s not what’s going to happen,” says Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and author of The Rules of Contagion, a book on how outbreaks spread. “The main message that isn’t getting across to a lot of people is just how long we might be in this for.”
Predictions are that a vaccine will take 12 to 18 months, so that’s probably how long.
Long.
Very long.
Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, agrees that the social distancing measures might need to be in place for at least months. “I don’t think people are prepared for that and I am not certain we can bear it,” she writes in an email. “I have no idea what political leaders will decide to do. To me, even if this is needed, it seems unsustainable.” She adds that she might just be feeling pessimistic, but “it’s really hard for me to imagine this country staying home for months.”
It’s really hard for me to imagine how that can even work, given how many people have zero margin. Robert Reich says 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, so…??????
It’s okay to be upset by all of this. And there are still a lot of unknowns about this virus, and how it will all play out. Perhaps the worst will spare us. But we still need to prepare for it and tap into our resiliency. Life may feel very hard and very stressful over the next several months. It’s a real burden, and you don’t have to like it. But know: This pandemic will end eventually. What we don’t yet know is when.
Yes but hard and stressful aren’t really the issue, nor is resiliency. Eviction and starvation are the issue. The Vox article, bizarrely, never addresses that.
JARED KUSHNER’S family real estate company, which owns and manages thousands of apartment units, continued its aggressive eviction practices and debt collection lawsuits as Americans wait for government relief. Well into the coronavirus crisis, which has led to skyrocketing unemployment, court records show properties owned by Kushner Companies are still filing new eviction lawsuits.
No shit. Did anyone think Jared Kushner is any kind of humane or decent person?
At least 15 tenants in New Jersey and Maryland have been on the receiving end of lawsuits from Kushner-owned properties even after both states declared states of emergency. Gov. Phil Murphy, D-N.J., and Gov. Larry Hogan, R-Md., have both called for a moratorium on evictions and courts have been closed, postponing hearing dates for a range of debt collection-related activities.
Blah blah blah; Prince Jared wants his money, pal, so pay up or gtfo.
On March 25, Westminster Management, a unit of Kushner Companies, filed a lawsuit requesting sheriff services to enforce an eviction against a man residing at the company’s Harbor Point Estate apartment in Essex, Maryland. Days later, on March 30, Kushner’s company filed a collection lawsuit against another man in the same complex.
The previous week, on March 19, Oxford Arms, a Kushner-owned apartment complex in Edison, New Jersey, filed six lawsuits against tenants. Other lawsuits have been filed in recent weeks against tenants by legal entities tied to the Whispering Woods complex in Middle River, Maryland; the Cove Village complex in Essex, Maryland; and the Pier Village building in Long Branch, New Jersey — all of which are owned by Kushner.
They didn’t get where they are by not being ruthless.
Kushner, whose estimated net worth is around $800 million, has said in the past that he has stepped away from day-to-day management of the real estate firm, though he has not relinquished his ownership stake. Ethics disclosures show that he still receives millions of dollars a year in income from rent collected by his assorted real estate portfolio, including the chain of apartment buildings.
At the same time as he meddles in government activities, because his psychopath daddy-in-law lets him.
Kushner Companies owns a vast array of commercial and residential real estate units around the country. The firm, founded by Kushner’s father, has come under fire for predatory business practices. Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, in a lawsuit filed last year, accused the company of failing to address rodent infestations while forcing tenants to pay illegitimate fees.
The real estate firm’s debt collection practices, which involve hundreds of lawsuits pursuing tenants often for small amounts of debt, have been detailed in reporting in ProPublica and the Baltimore Sun. In the past, Kushner’s attorneys have gone so far as to pursue civil arrest warrants for at least 105 tenants over unpaid fees and rent.
Even if you justify all that by saying landlords need their income like anyone else, it’s still not a good fit with government work, especially not government work in the White House.
Last month, Netflix released “Slumlord Millionaire,” a mini-documentary about the abusive practices of Kushner’s real estate companies. The feature describes Kushner as a “tier one predator,” who has used harassment tactics to drive tenants out of rent-stabilized apartments in New York, while systematically imposing hefty fees on tenants in Maryland. The feature shows tenants dealing with debt collection letters, eviction notices, water damage, mold, fire code violations and shoddy maintenance.
Wow. Trump unloads on a reporter who dared to ask him about Kushner saying on Thursday that the federal ventilator stockpile is "our" stockpile & not the states'.
"When he says 'our,' he's talking about our country … it's such a basic, simple question. You oughta be ashamed." pic.twitter.com/HWWkTWs00e
Yeah the banks. Let’s talk up the banks. They’re the real heroes here.
Also: no we’re not. We’re going to be in a deep deep hole that will take years to climb out of, assuming conditions then allow us to climb.
Trump continuing to ad-lib vague optimism: "Stay at home. This is ending. This will end. You'll see some bad things…and some really good things. It's not going to be too long."
This is not ending. It will not end for a long time. It for sure won’t end until there’s a vaccine, and that’s projected to take 12 to 18 months. You won’t see any really good things out of this pandemic. Some good things despite it, maybe, but don’t count on it. Trump’s musings are not worth a roll of toilet paper.
Asked why he won't wear a covering, Trump: "I just don't want to wear one myself…I'm feeling good…I just don't want to…somehow sitting in the Oval Office…the great Resolute Desk…I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents…dictators…I dunno, I don't see it."
Well he is very handsome, wouldn’t want to cover that up.
Asked if every state should have a stay at home order, Trump says he's leaving it to governors, governors know what they're doing, and the states in question here are "not in jeopardy." (Every state has cases; others in the admin have emphasized every state is at risk.)
Asked what Kushner meant by "our stockpile," Trump says, "You know what our means: United States of America…our. Our. It means the United States of America…and then we take that our and we distribute it to the states…we need it for the federal government."
No, because then Kushner wouldn’t have contrasted “our” with “the states.”
Trump tells a reporter she "oughtta be ashamed" of herself, and her "nasty tone," for asking for clarity about Kushner's comments about the stockpile, since it's so "simple."
His answer did not clarify things and her tone was entirely normal.
